by Amy Andrews
Chapter Seven
Ethan watched as JJ’s head fell back against the arm of the couch, exposing the long stretch of her neck and thrusting her breasts ever so slightly upwards. He swallowed. Bra. She was definitely wearing a bra.
Perhaps offering JJ a foot massage hadn’t been a particularly bright move …
It had seemed a pretty natural thing to do at the time. She’d had a long day on her feet and he gave a pretty mean foot massage. It made perfect sense.
And it was just JJ, right?
But then he hadn’t taken into account how close her foot was going to be to a piece of his anatomy that didn’t give two shits about the decades-old friendship between him and the owner of the foot.
Or how damn appreciative she was going to be.
He could hear her breathing growing rougher, see the uneven rise and fall of her chest. And the way her teeth dug into her bottom lip was really very distracting.
The skirt too was something he hadn’t bargained on. It was a rare event to see JJ in anything but jeans. And, okay, it was long and flowing and tiered—nothing remotely provocative about it—but jeans would really have helped right now.
Helped him to remember this was JJ for a start. Helped access-wise too. No point indulging the images running through his head with tight denim blocking his path. But a skirt was a different proposition. Even now the slippery material fell back a little more with each knead of his thumbs, riding back millimetre by millimetre, slowly exposing one bare toned calf.
He tried not to look but his eyes, like his dick, seemed to have a mind of their own and greedily followed the agonisingly slow reveal. His palms burned to leave the arch of her foot and slide to her ankle then on further taking the inside track to her calf, lingering a second or two, before travelling higher, watching as the skirt inched up, little by little.
He heard his own breath roughen as he wondered how far she’d let him go? Would she arch her back a little further if he went higher, revealing more and more of her leg? Would she moan if he did? Would she stop him if he pushed her skirt all the way to the top, till he could see the colour of her underwear?
Would she let him touch her there?
Let him strip away whatever scrap of lace she was wearing and bury his head between her legs like he should have the other night, but he’d been too liquored up and damn self-involved to think beyond his own needs?
Ethan shut his eyes against the images, struggling to remember that it was JJ he was thinking these things about. JJ. He didn’t think those kind of things about JJ.
Or he hadn’t anyway.
He’d been so adamant that they mustn’t let what happened the other night happen again, but here he was having a fantasy about her while she sat less than two feet from him.
While her foot was in his lap.
He swallowed hard and tried to get his head back in the game. “I was out at the Dowling’s today,” he said, remembering why he’d wanted her to sit on the lounge with him in the first place.
Of course it would have sounded much more conversational had his voice not cracked like a teenage boy’s.
She opened her eyes and bought her head up off the couch arm. “Oh?”
Ethan cleared his throat, but it was difficult to keep his brain on track when her hazel eyes had gone all smoky and her voice sounded as thick and loaded as his.
He sat up a little more, desperate to clear the fog, her heel retracting with the movement to a much safer distance down his thigh. “That’s where the shearing crew is at the moment.”
He watched as the news seemed to break through the loaded atmosphere of a moment ago with its harsh realism. JJ sat up a little too. She looked at where his hand kneaded her foot and pulled it away. “You spoke to him?”
“No,” Ethan said as he automatically reached for her other foot and continued the massage. The urge to tuck it into his lap, push it against his granite-hard cock cried out to be fulfilled, but he was back in control of his actions again.
“I just wanted him to know that I’m watching his every move. And that wherever he is that’s where I’m going to be. Watching him.”
“So, you’re hoping intimidation is going to drive him away?”
Ethan smiled at her accurate assessment. “Something like that. And between that and you and I keeping up the façade of being together, I reckon he’ll get the message and move on.”
“Hence the rather inappropriate kiss behind the bar earlier?”
He grinned. “Excuse me, but I think it was a very appropriate kiss for a newly engaged man to give to his fiancée.”
She avoided his gaze as she said, “Well, the entire district is going to know about this tomorrow.”
“Which was kind of the point,” he said. Although he may have enjoyed it a tad more than was appropriate for a kiss that was all about putting on a show. “Now we’ll just let the gossips do their worst.”
“Marcus mentioned that you told them,” JJ said, closing her eyes, and Ethan worked his fingers a little harder as a soft sigh escaped her mouth.
“Of course,” he said, stroking his hands up towards her ankle, his gaze drifting higher, lingering on her breasts, small but perky. “We need them on the same page.”
Her eyelids fluttered open and, caught out, he quickly pulled his gaze up to meet hers. There was a smoulder in her hazel eyes that reached right inside his pants and stroked.
“If this custody thing eventuates, we may need to keep this going for a while. Are you up for that?”
His dick, which suddenly got a whole lot harder, was definitely up for that. “I’ll do anything to keep Connie with me,” he said, as he tried not to think about up at all.
“As will I,” she said. “But what are we going to do when Connie comes home in just under two weeks?”
Ethan shrugged, his brain not wanting to go there, his fingers working faster, deeper, as ankle bones gave away to smooth warm flesh. “I don’t know. I guess if Shane’s gone we’ll be one of those old-fashioned couples who doesn’t live together for as long as this thing with Delia takes. If he’s still around, I guess you’ll just have to move in with us, because I’m not leaving you here alone while he’s still around.”
His pulse beat a little harder at the suggestion, his thumbs stroking in time. Here, at her place, they could be a couple in private and no-one knew he was sleeping on the couch. But at his house, they’d have Connie to consider. She may only be a teenager but she was smart, aware and observant. She’d want to know why they weren’t sleeping together. Could even accidentally let slip that they weren’t to Delia.
Which would mean no separate beds.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” JJ said, a strange little hitch in her voice.
Ethan couldn’t have agreed more. It was possibly the worst idea in the history of the world. He wanted nothing more than to get their relationship back to the way it had been. The way it had always been.
Where he didn’t notice her bra. Or rub her feet.
But, he didn’t want to get ahead of himself.
“Let’s not worry about that now,” he said, her skin smooth under his hand, kneading it in long reassuring strokes. “Let’s just cross that bridge when—if—we get to it.”
JJ nodded. “Sure …” her gaze dropped to her leg. “Of course,” she said, her voice husky again as her eyes tracked the movement of his hands.
Ethan looked down too, surprised to find his hands had moved up her leg completely of their own volition. Her skirt was pushed up to her knee and her calf was warm and supple in his palm. The earlier image of her fully exposed leg, her underwear on display, revisited him and he dropped his hands from her calf as if it had spontaneously combusted.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
JJ cleared her throat. “It’s fine,” she said, withdrawing her feet from the vicinity of his lap, planting them safely on the floor. “I’m beat anyway. Thanks for the … foot rub. Think I’ll hit the sack.”
Ethan nodded. “Sure,” he said as she stood. “Night then.”
“Night.”
Ethan buried his face in his hands as soon as JJ had gone. Jesus—what the hell was the matter with him? This was JJ. He’d kept his hands off her for thirty-odd years—why was it so bloody hard to do so now?
Yes, they’d slept together, but it wasn’t like that had been anything more than a sexual release valve. An unwise one, for sure, but still something that should be easy to categorise, catalogue and forget.
They were only pretending for crying out loud.
He’d do well to remember that next time by keeping his damn hands to himself. No more foot massages. No more touching other than what was absolutely required to convince Shane and Delia they were a force to be reckoned with.
JJ lay in bed an hour later, tossing and turning, the throb between her legs refusing to abate, demanding she do something about it. She considered Dennis. In fact she’d almost reached for him twice already, but there was something so damn depressing about a hot-pink vibrator after the real-live touch of Ethan’s hands on her leg.
The conversation had gotten more and more difficult to follow as his hand had strayed from her foot to her ankle and then to her calf and she’d found herself hoping he’d go higher. That his fingers would brush the skin at the back of her knee and the inside of her thigh. That they’d keep going to where her thighs met at the top and stroke her there.
She’d have spread her legs for him for sure. There would have been no protest. No false modesty. She’d have welcomed his touch, raised her hips and silently invited him inside her. God knew it wouldn’t have taken very much to push her over the edge. Just a stroke or two from his long fingers and she’d have been a goner.
Her sex throbbed in agreement and she rolled onto her side, stuffing a hand between her legs to ease the vicious ache, refusing to do anything about it. Ethan had been sound asleep when she went out to get a drink after her shower. And if he could be unaffected by it all then she sure as hell could.
Of course, he’d had a little relief not that long ago …
She squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to think about relief. Refusing to succumb when the man who was causing all her frustration was sleeping one wall and a few metres away.
That would just be a new low.
She didn’t need it. She didn’t need Ethan. Or Dennis. She was a fully grown woman who was totally in control of her sexual urges. And abstinence never killed anyone.
She was sure she’d read that somewhere.
Still, this voracious sexual yearning for him was something new. Loving him for years, and pretending not to, was just a part of her life. A fact she’d become accustomed to a long time ago. So familiar to her it had lost its acuteness and ability to wound too deeply.
But this … ache, this … overriding urge to be with him sexually, was vicious. It was urgent and all freaking consuming and she wasn’t sure if it would ever lose its edge.
But it had to. It just had to. Or she was going to go mad.
Could a person’s libido drive them crazy?
She shut her eyes against the possibility of being a batty old lady roaming the streets of Jumbuck Springs, still drooling after the police chief. She just needed to get through the night that was all. It was worse at night. With him sleeping nearby. It would be better tomorrow.
Tomorrow is another day.
Full of things to keep her busy and people to distract her and Ethan being at the other end of town in his office—far from her sight and her thoughts.
Except it just didn’t work out that way. Thanks to Ethan’s daring public kiss the night before, almost every single customer wanted to talk about Ethan. And her.
Together.
Every time she turned around Ethan was on someone’s lips. Someone telling her how lucky she was, or how fabulous he was or how handsome he was. Or how happy they were that poor Ethan was finally settling down with someone good and sensible, someone who’d make him a good wife and Connie a good mother.
Yeah, that one made her feel real special.
Even Mrs Durrum, who lived next door to the Westons and was Jarrod’s wife’s grandmother, had commented how she’d overheard on the grapevine that Ethan was supposed to be an exceptional kisser and that, given the evidence of her own eyes just yesterday in this very pub, she had to concur that the gossip about his prowess was right.
JJ only just held back from telling Selena’s granny that Ethan Weston could fuck pretty damn good too.
Suffice to say, Ethan’s kiss had achieved its purpose, but all day with nothing but Ethan, Ethan, Ethan did not help with the tomorrow is another day thing.
It did not help with the images.
It did not help with the horniness.
It did not help with the throb.
Nor did the nights. After three in a row of Ethan walking around in nothing but his boxers JJ was about ready to erupt. If she’d been prone to sleepwalking her deprived body would have already made a beeline for the couch and jumped his bones for sure.
By the fifth night of their cohabitation JJ was barely hanging on by a thread. Ethan had been standing at the sink making a coffee, in nothing but a towel, his hair damp from the shower, when she’d come home from work and it had taken all her willpower to return his cheery hello with one of her own and head for her room. Instead of doing what she’d wanted to do—whip his towel off, sink to her knees in front of him and blow his mind.
So after hours of her libido keeping her awake, staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, she was pretty damn annoyed to be woken by a noise at two am when she’d not long drifted off to sleep.
For a moment or two she couldn’t figure out what the noise was in the now-silent room and she strained in the still and quiet around her, wondering if she’d heard anything at all. But then it came again. A metallic scraping and she turned her head towards the locked French doors that opened onto the veranda. The ambient light from the main street silhouetted a large human-shaped shadow through the lacy curtains.
Someone was trying to break in.
Shane!
Adrenaline flooded into her system and her heart raced, beating a frantic tattoo in her chest. JJ leapt out of the bed and headed straight out to Ethan, pleased for the first time in five nights to have him so close.
Had he not been here, she’d have defended herself to the death. God knew she’d fought tooth and nail last time Shane had attacked her, but JJ was far from foolhardy. She had a six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, muscly cop at her disposal and she sure as hell was going to use him!
“Ethan!” she hissed as she hurried towards him, flight and fright carrying her legs faster than they’d ever moved.
This time she barely noticed his chest, his abs or the long stretch of mostly naked solid thighs as she rounded the couch. All she noticed was that he was still sound asleep.
“Ethan,” she hissed again, giving his arm a tug for good measure.
At another time JJ would have admired the fluid symmetry of muscles as Ethan came instantly awake. The way his abs crunched and his biceps bulged and his quads lengthened then contracted as he vaulted upright, his feet hitting the floor, instantly alert. “What’s wrong?”
His whisper was harsh in the silence, loud enough to be heard above the boom of her pulse in her ears. “There’s someone trying to get in my French doors,” she said uncaring that her voice trembled.
Ethan swore, rising to his feet, all six-foot-four of tense, angry man. “Stay here,” he commanded. “Don’t move.”
JJ nodded as she sank to the couch, her legs starting to shake now. She doubted very much whether she was capable of anything else. Ten years ago Shane had busted down her bedroom door—the one she’d never bothered to replace—and assaulted her because she’d refused to go back to him.
She had good reason to fear him.
It was with relief that she watched Ethan stalk to her room, tall and strong, a half-naked warrior. She was frightened, e
very muscle screwed tight but the residual warmth of his body held in the fabric beneath her thighs was comforting and she lay down along the length of the couch to absorb it all.
Ethan’s adrenaline-sharpened gaze cut straight through the night to the looming shadow on the other side of the door a second or two before he heard the noise of what sounded like a lock being picked. Anger, white and hot, seared right through his gut. Memories of the beating JJ’s ex had meted out all those years ago scalded like bile in the back of his throat and pure rage drove him towards the door.
How dare that piece-of-trash asshole come back for seconds.
Ethan’s hands curled into fists as he reached for the door handle. His badge may prevent him from being able to beat Shane Gallagher to within an inch of his life, but he sure as hell was going to push reasonable force to its absolute limit.
He yanked the door open, pulling the startled intruder inside. Then he grabbed the other man by the throat and rammed him hard against the unopened side of the French doors, holding him in place by brute strength and the horror of a ten-year-old memory.
“Son of a bitch,” Ethan snarled as his prisoner struggled, flailing his arms and legs, his scruffy hair flying all round, obscuring his face.
A waft of alcohol hit Ethan square in the face as his prisoner protested. “Blimey mate, what the feck?”
Ethan frowned at the thick Irish accent. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded as his prisoner stopped struggling and it became even more obvious it wasn’t Shane. He let up the pressure on his neck slightly as the guy wheezed rum all over his face. “And why the fuck are you breaking in to JJ’s room?”
“Breaking in?” the guy said indignantly. “Don’t be an eejit. This is my room. I couldn’t get my key to work!”
The overhead light suddenly came on. “Shamus?” JJ said.
Ethan turned his head as JJ entered the room, his pupils protesting the sudden brightness. “You know him?” he barked.
“Yes, let him go,” she said hurrying towards him. “He’s the Irish backpacker that checked in this afternoon. He’s a guest,” she said as she pulled at his hands.
Ethan resisted for a moment before easing up a little more, but refusing to let go entirely. “That still doesn’t explain why he was trying to break into your room at two o’clock in the morning,” Ethan growled.
“I wasn’t breaking in,” Shamus reiterated holding up a key. “The key wouldn’t fit in the lock.”
JJ folded her arms. “That’s because this isn’t your room, you wally.” She snatched the key off him and held it up to show him the number one written in large print on the tag. “This is number four.”
Shamus did his best to focus on the swinging tag through rum goggles. “Oh … so my room is …”
JJ nodded. “The other end of the veranda.” She turned to Ethan and said, “Let him go.”
Ethan did so begrudgingly and the Irishmen staggered a little from his sudden release and the effects of alcohol. “I’m sorry,” he said slurring his words as Ethan held out an arm to steady him a little. “I really thought this was my room.”
“It’s fine,” JJ assured and Ethan could hear the relief in her voice. “You want me to help you to your room?”
Ethan all but rolled his eyes. “I’ll do that,” he snapped. The woman was in nothing but a T-shirt that barely covered her ass and it was the middle of the freaking night. For all they knew Shane was behind this drunken fool’s confusion.
And right now he was so charged on adrenaline, he wasn’t sure what he’d do once he was alone with her.