“I want you, Jillian,” he murmured.
She reached out tentatively and traced her fingertips down his belly. Gil’s breath hissed in and the muscles of his belly tightened into fascinating bricks. Emboldened, she drew her fingers down lower, to where the trail of dark hair started. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
“You’re doing fine,” he said, his voice strained.
She bit her lip in concentration, staring at him. Curiosity warred with nerves and won. And she reached for him. Shock, arousal, surprise. Amazement. Who knew that a man’s body could have something so smooth yet startlingly solid, like silk over granite?
Gil groaned. Need began to build in Jillian again. She could give him pleasure, not just take it. It was a heady feeling.
Swiftly, Gil fused his mouth to hers. This wasn’t lazy seduction any more but hard urgency, naked demand. He bit at her lips, took the kiss deep as she caressed him. The tension, the scent of arousal rose.
And then he made a noise of impatience. This was it, she thought as he pressed her onto her back. Amid the wanting was a flutter of nerves but mostly she felt impatience. She wanted to unveil the mystery. She wanted to know. She wanted it all.
Gil moved between her legs. The feel of his bare skin against her entire body was outrageously erotic, extravagantly seductive. Jillian stared up into his eyes. They were so black, so intense that they felt like inky pools that spread out to encompass her, to encompass her world. Nothing else mattered. All that mattered was here, this moment, this man.
And then she jolted and gasped as she felt him rub the velvety soft tip of himself through the slick folds between her legs.
It was happening, she realized. She fought to take in a breath with lungs that felt robbed of oxygen. Her heart hammered as if it was trying to batter its way out of her chest.
Gil’s face was drawn taut with the effort of control. He poised himself at her entrance, she could feel it with nerves that were hypersensitive. When he eased himself inside a fraction, she tightened her fingers on his back. All of her was focused on that spot as he moved in just another fraction of an inch. Then he stopped. Jillian felt a pressure inside her. She knew that this was it.
He slipped his hand between them and stroked her, making her shiver. The sharp, immediate surface thrill of his caresses on the hard bud of her sex was somehow dwarfed by the sensation of him partly inside her. He was moving just a little, in and out of her entrance, rubbing her, teasing her, maddening her, making her wait in unbearable tension.
“Please,” she gasped.
And with a quick pump of his hips, he was inside her. Her breath hissed in at the quick, slicing pain and the surprising sensation of being completely filled.
“Are you all right?” he ground out.
They were twined together, connected utterly. It was extraordinary, the heat, the intimacy of being so completely fused with another. Jillian could feel him everywhere around her, on her, within her. “Better than all right,” she said breathlessly.
Some instinct had her raising her hips to meet his. Some instinct had her raising her legs to wrap around him to bring him closer. “Show me,” she whispered.
And he began to stroke.
He was slow and careful at first, moving the hard length of himself in and out of her. And the pain disappeared, replaced by a gradually growing excitement. Each stroke caressed her inside and out. Each stroke, her arousal built afresh.
And each slow, powerful thrust made her shiver with a deeper arousal than she’d ever felt before, a thrumming intensity that had her transfixed. Gradually, his cadence increased. Gradually, his breath came faster. Jillian clasped her hands against his back, feeling the slippery bunch and flow of his muscles, feeling the weight of him against her, feeling the rhythm of his thrusts. And all the sensations melded into one, an almost overwhelming mix that had her gasping. She didn’t think she could stand it. She didn’t think her body could encompass so much pleasure without simply burning up. She stared up into his face, his beautiful face, drawn tight and pure as he watched her, waiting for her as he dragged her closer and closer and closer to the ultimate release.
And then she was climaxing as abruptly as if she’d been flung over some invisible edge, crying out and jolting against him for long, endless, shuddering minutes.
Even as she quaked, Gil stroked once, twice, three times and then he was groaning and spilling himself into her as she still clenched around him.
He’d move, Gil thought. In a moment he’d move, as soon as he got over being stunned from what surely had to be the most cataclysmic sex of his entire life. He sucked in a breath and raised himself up enough to roll off and lie beside her.
Jillian lay against him, not moving.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She hadn’t seemed to react much to the pain so much as pleasure, but maybe he’d been wrong. He wanted it to have been good for her. Hell, forget good, he wanted it to have been amazing. Her life had changed profoundly in the past hour.
And maybe his had, as well.
Jillian made a throaty, satisfied sound. “I’m fabulous. I had absolutely no idea.” She turned to her side and traced a pattern on his chest with her fingertip. “Is it always like that?”
“Like that? I can pretty confidently say no.” He’d had sex plenty of times. But he’d never had those moments of complete mental and physical connection. They’d become one in more than just the physical sense. When he’d climaxed, he’d felt as though some part of his soul was pouring into her at the same time.
And in that moment, everything had changed. Or, rather, all the changes that had been happening since he’d met her had piled up, one on another, coalescing into one shivering, blinding revelation: he was in love with her.
She gave him an amused look. “Are you all right?”
“Who, me? Yeah.” Outside of the fact that the pieces of his world had just realigned themselves in a new and startling pattern, sure.
“You just had an odd look on your face.”
It was a bit of an odd feeling. But not bad, he realized. Actually, it felt pretty damned good. He pulled her close for a kiss. “You’re amazing.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
“It’s just the truth.”
“No. I mean, thank you for this. For showing me what it was about.”
He snorted. “It wasn’t a charity effort, Jillian. I did it because I wanted you and I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“But you were kind and patient. You made it good for me. Better than good. Incredible. I’d never imagined it could be like that.” She gave him an impish smile. “Although, I’m pretty sure there are a few other aspects of the process that we could explore.”
“Now? Come on, woman, give me a couple of hours at least. I’m thirty-eight, not eighteen.”
She rolled over to prop herself on his chest. “I suppose if we can’t have sex again yet, lying together naked is a close second.”
He slid his hands down her back and over the rise of her ass. “There’s a lot to be said for lying together naked.”
“I think you’re right.” She sighed. “And in the meantime, since you’re such an old, decrepit specimen, you can tell me whatever it was you wanted to say earlier. Unless present activities took care of it.”
And all the lazy happiness went away. This was the moment he’d dreaded, the moment he’d known was coming. And now he had to figure out how to handle it, now that he was in deeper than ever.
“There’s something you should know about.”
“I think you just got done showing me what I really needed to know.” She kissed him, her mouth open and warm and eager enough that he felt himself starting to harden.
“No,” he said edgily. “This is important.”
Slowly, subtly, she came to attention. “What’s important?”
“It’s the Gazette, tomorrow’s edition.”
She moved away from him then, pulling th
e sheet around her, her eyes huge and dark.
“We’re running a story.” He took a breath. “On Robbie.”
And her face went sheet-white. “On Robbie?” Her voice was barely audible.
“One of our reporters says he’s disappeared. The reporter is getting final confirmation. It’ll run tomorrow.”
“You’re running a story that he’s disappeared?” Her voice sounded as though she’d swallowed razor blades.
And in her eyes, he saw the answer.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said sharply.
“Where is he, Jillian?”
“Don’t you dare pump me,” she hissed.
“If he doesn’t get back, the law will come down on him like a ton of bricks.”
“Don’t you think we know that?” she snapped. “We’ve been doing everything we could to get him back. And now you’re going to blow it all out of the water so you can sell a few thousand extra papers.”
“Unfortunately, it’s news. If he hadn’t run, there’d have been nothing to print.”
“Let me get this straight. We live in a city of a million and a half people and you’re telling me the only thing you could put in your paper is a story that’s going to destroy my family?”
“It’s not aimed at you. Don’t make this about us.” He reached out to touch her cheek but she jerked away from him, rising off the bed and dragging the sheet with her.
“You’re running a story that’s going to tell the entire world, including his P.O., that my brother’s violated his probation, which will very likely get him thrown in jail, and you’re trying to tell me it has nothing to do with us?” Her voice rose in incredulous fury.
“Don’t do this, Jillian,” Gil pleaded. “It tore me up to give the okay because I knew how you’d feel, but I had to. At least, this way I can control the shape of it, make sure it’s as accurate as possible.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? ‘Jillian, I’d never intentionally hurt you,’” she mocked savagely, picking her clothing up garment by garment. “My God.”
He whitened as though she’d slapped him. “We’re Portland’s biggest daily. When something happens in the community, we have to cover it. That’s what we do.”
“No you don’t.” Her voice was ripe with contempt. “What you do is make money by tearing people’s lives apart.”
The betrayal sliced through her like a knife. She’d opened herself to him utterly in the most fundamental of ways and all the while he’d carried the explosive secret of the damning story. And now she was here, naked, her clothes strewn all around the room, her body still smelling of his.
Her throat closed up.
“It would have wound up in the paper sooner or later,” he said quietly. “If nothing else, we always publish the crime sheet. He shouldn’t have run.”
“He ran because the media was hounding him to death.” She struggled to pull on her underwear beneath the sheet, wishing to God she didn’t feel so hideously exposed. “Your newspaper started it, dredging up the past for no reason. You keep telling me it’s about the news. That wasn’t news. It wasn’t fraud in the new streetcar line, it wasn’t pollution. It’s one man’s life. Since when did that become public property?”
“When the man in question has gone from helping kidnap children to running a day care center,” Gil retorted, dragging on his jeans. “You couldn’t possibly think that it wasn’t going to cause a scandal when people heard.”
“Why didn’t you get our side? Why did you use the most condemning quotes from every city and state politician you could find, from psychologists who knew nothing about the case? They had a political ax to grind and you let them use Robbie to grind it.” Impatiently, she dropped the sheet. It didn’t matter if she was exposed and humiliated. She’d already been stripped as naked as she could be. “He was making a new life. He was building something and you took him down.”
“What about the parents who didn’t know and accept Robbie’s past? It was in the public’s interest that it be reported.”
“And you know as well as I do that things can be slanted by the choice of an adjective. And brother, did they get slanted.” She pulled her camisole on.
“We can’t control what the tabloids and the TV stations do.”
“No, you just shout ‘fire’ in a crowded room and walk out.” She dragged on her trousers and buttoned them. “You can’t keep pretending that the subjects of your stories aren’t people, Gil. You have to take responsibility.”
“Responsibility? Can you honestly tell me that if this weren’t your family, if you didn’t work at the Children’s Connection, you’d think a baby kidnapper running a day care center was fine?” he challenged.
“If he were the monster that the papers made him out to be, yes. But he’s not, he’s a human being trying his best to do the right thing.”
“Including violating probation?”
She ignored him. “When does a man get a chance to redeem himself? When does he get to be taken on the strength of the present, not the past? The police got Charlie Prescott because of Robbie. He’d tried to fix the damage. But you don’t care about that, do you? All you care about is selling newspapers.”
She saw the fury leap into his eyes. “I don’t give a damn about selling newspapers. I care about telling the truth. I care about serving this community. And the only thing that made me think twice about this story was knowing what it would do to you. If it had been any other person, I’d have run it in a heartbeat.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “I have an obligation as an editor to see that the paper reports the news, Jillian. I can’t let the fact that I’m involved with you cloud that.”
“Involved with me?” she repeated incredulously. “Are you out of your mind? After all this, you think we’re involved? You can’t separate one from the other. You can’t attack my people, my life and say it’s your sacred profession and it shouldn’t bother me.” She snatched up her jacket and turned to the stairs.
“And if I put aside my ethics, violate my principles and pull the story to protect Robbie, that would be okay?” he demanded, hot on her heels. “It’s a public trust, Jillian.”
“It’s too bad you’re too busy worrying about your public trust you can’t take care of personal trust,” she hurled back.
“What do you know about personal trust? All you’ve done from the beginning is block me out.”
“Block you out?” She turned at the bottom of the stairs. “How can you say that?”
“Because of tonight? Oh, sure, you opened up a little but you didn’t tell me everything, not even a fraction. Do you think I don’t see those mile-high walls when they go up? Everything I’ve ever gotten from you I’ve had to fight you tooth and nail for. Except tonight.”
“And look what I got in return,” she flung back at him. “I’m so glad I opened up to you. I mean, if you were going to screw me, you might as well do it all the way.”
“Jesus.” The word exploded out of him. “What happened here tonight was one of the most amazing experiences in my life. Don’t you for one minute try to turn it into something else. We connected, you and I, and if it weren’t for the outside world, everything would have all been great. But we live in the outside world and we live with your family and my paper and this goddamned, stupid conflict. And I am not going to turn myself into someone neither of us can respect to protect your lawbreaking brother.”
“That’s right, you have a public trust.” She headed for the door.
“Don’t start with the trust thing. You’ve never trusted me once since this whole thing began.”
“For good reason.”
“Not for good reason. Because you’re scared. Because something happened to you a long time ago and instead of having the guts to face it and get past it, you’d rather hide away from the whole world. That’s not what relationships are supposed to be about,” he raged. “And you, of all people, should know that.
”
“You’re upset that I wouldn’t open up? That I wouldn’t tell you about my childhood?” She rounded on him. “What do you want to hear? That I’m not really a Logan? That my real mother was a crackhead? That she was the one I saw having bondage sex with a boyfriend? Or maybe a john. It’s hard to know when you’re only three or four.” She delivered the lines as though they were blows, heedless in her fury. “We lived in filthy rat holes, Gil. When she needed to go score drugs, she’d lock us up and sometimes forget to let us out for days. And then she got tired of it and dumped us on my grandmother, except she’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak. We had to work out our own language. We barely spoke English. And she kept having ministrokes, as near as I can tell, because after a while she couldn’t even take care of herself, let alone us, so we were starving and running around filthy, like animals.
“We were freaks, Gil.” Tears began to slip down her cheeks. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that what you need for your profile?”
“God, Jillian,” he said helplessly. “I didn’t know.”
And she turned away so that she wouldn’t have to see the one thing she couldn’t bear from him.
Pity.
Escape, she thought, focusing on the door. She had to get out.
“Wait a minute,” Gil said. “You can’t walk away now, not after that.”
“Oh, yes, I can. You just watch me.” She snatched up her purse.
“You don’t have to keep doing this alone, Jillian. Remember what you told Alison? You’ve got people who care about you. I care about you.”
She wasn’t going to listen, wasn’t going to let herself feel. “You? The guy who’s running a smear campaign on my brother?”
“No. The guy who’s fallen in love with you.”
The words rang in the sudden silence. “No—” she shook her head blindly “—that’s not fair, Gil. Don’t play games with me.”
“I’m not. Don’t go, Jillian. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can make it work.”
Always A Bridesmaid (Logan's Legacy Revisited) Page 17
