Project Virgin

by Megan Crane

  Or worst of all, subject himself to his grandmother’s sharp tongue, because Elly Grey had never met a member of her family who didn’t disappoint her deeply and Jesse was certainly no exception. More Calamity Jane than Mrs. Butterworth, that one, the cousins always muttered amongst themselves. He hadn’t wanted to give her the opportunity to expand on her reasons for thinking less of him by the day. His grandmother was a woman best loved from a minimum safe distance, but Jesse was getting too old and too soft to bunk down on couches while avoiding the fallout from her version of a loving chat.

  That was what the matter was, he assured himself—not enough sleep and none of it at all comfortable. Because he refused to allow it be anything else.

  Next to him, Michaela had to shove against the wind to get the SUV’s door open, and then she was dashing out into the sullen fist of the winter storm, bent nearly in half as she made her way to the neon-lighted motel office where the VACANCY sign still glowed and briefly lit up the side of her face.

  And she was just as pretty in that purple glow, damn her.

  Jesse took the opportunity to get a hold of himself. He decided it was because it had been a long time since he’d been out in a serious Montana snowstorm and maybe the soft rain of a Seattle winter had softened him up too much. It took getting used to, the full-throated howl of a Montana winter. But a few minutes later Michaela appeared again, looking slight and easily swept away, as she charged out of the motel’s office door and through the driving snow back to the SUV. And he thought it was a little bit more than winter when he had to order himself to stay still.

  She laughed as she threw herself back into the passenger seat and then wrestled her door closed, and he wasn’t prepared for that. Or for that flush on her cheeks. Or the wild, gleaming sparkle in her bright, hazel eyes when they met his.

  He didn’t know what expression he had on his face then. He didn’t have the slightest idea how he was looking at her, but he suspected the spiral of sensation he could feel working its way through him was hunger, pure and sharp and deep. And that it was stamped there across his face like a mask.

  Her smile toppled from that ruinous mouth of hers, and the sparkling thing in her gaze changed, but what replaced it wasn’t any better. Awareness, feminine and hot. It made the snow and the wind fade. It made the scent of cold that came off of her jacket and the melting snow against her cheeks seem to echo in him, making him want things he refused to acknowledge, here in a motel parking lot somewhere on the wrong side of Missoula.

  “I have good news and bad news.” Her voice was husky again, and this time, Jesse knew it had nothing at all to do with any nap, pretend or otherwise. He only watched her, aware of the way that hunger in him sat there on his mouth, in his face, deep inside of him, like a great weight. “The good news is that they have a room. The bad news is that they only have the one.”

  The fifteen-year-old in him turned an exultant cartwheel. It was humiliating. The grown up version of Jesse, the one who could have any woman he liked and often did, gazed back at her. Calmly. Cartwheels be damned.

  “Are you worried?” he asked her, and he couldn’t seem to keep himself from leaning closer to her. Though he was wise enough to keep his damned traitorous hands to himself. “Think you might lose your mind and jump me in my sleep?”

  She looked as if she almost smiled, but thought better of it. “Does that happen a lot?”

  His mouth curved and he saw the way she swallowed. Hard. “You can’t be that surprised. Can you?”

  “You can rest easy, Jesse,” Michaela told him, and he imagined she meant that to come out easy and light. Funny and maybe a bit charming. But it didn’t, and something dark and distinctly aware moved through her hazel eyes, and then through him, too. “Your virtue is safe with me.”

  *

  It was one thing to decide to share a single motel room containing what had to be the smallest, most claustrophobic king-sized bed in the entire universe with a man who practically reeked of sex and dark, needy things, because it was utterly irrational to do anything else and they were adults who made choices, not animals.

  It was something else, Michaela was finding out fast, to actually do it.

  “Are you saving yourself for your June wedding?” Jesse asked in that voice of his that sounded insulting even when the question itself was mostly innocuous. Or maybe that was the look in his sinful eyes. “All dressed in white and accompanied by an entire defensive line of bridesmaids and some Snow White-type doves cartwheeling around your head?”

  This was all Michaela’s fault, she was aware. She’d started the discussion of virtue, out there in the cold. She’d understood that was a mistake pretty much as she’d said it, which was why she’d also been the one who’d ended that odd, endlessly fraught moment that had swelled between them in the SUV by announcing they needed to hurry up and get inside before they froze to death where they’d sat.

  “They’re expecting another ten to fifteen inches overnight,” she’d said, admiring how cool and unbothered she’d sounded, despite the heat she could feel stomping through her, all temper and fire. But then, she’d long ago learned how to appear calm and cool under pressure, no matter how she might have felt inside. It was one of the major benefits of her job. “The storm is only getting worse.”

  “No kidding,” Jesse had muttered.

  And Michaela had assured herself there was absolutely no underlying meaning to their exchange. No confusing, dangerous metaphors. None whatsoever.

  Then they’d driven across the howling tundra of the parking lot and around the back of the modest two-story building to park in front of their room. Jesse had curtly ordered her inside while he’d wrestled with the luggage—and ‘wrestled’ in the Jesse Grey sense meant he’d simply scooped it all up and brought it in with a minimum of fuss—and she’d obeyed him because she hadn’t known what else to do and she hadn’t much liked the hard, glittering look in his dark eyes anyway. And he’d kicked the door shut behind him when he’d come in with all the weather around him like a force field and then… there they’d been. Here they were. In a motel room in the middle of nowhere, in what appeared to Michaela to be a terrifying blizzard, but which the man behind the counter in the motel office had laconically called ‘some winter weather.’

  It was getting to her, she thought now, as Jesse waited for her answer with a darkly expectant look on his face, as if he could wait as long as it took if he had to. This single room thing was messing with her and she hated herself for it. It seemed so beneath her—so insulting, somehow, to Terrence and to herself and even to Jesse, even if she rather doubted he’d appreciate her concern—that she was treating this as if she really was some kind of latter-day Victorian miss. It all seemed so suburban minivan-ish, as Terrence would have said, that proximity to another man was making her hands shake and her knees feel weak, and worse, that her reaction to that was to clutch at her proverbial pearls and keep some distance between them rather than explore this strange reaction the way Terrence would have done.

  Who makes all these silly rules? he would have asked in his languid way. Who says we have to follow them? Sex is only love when we cage it and ration it. Sex is supposed to be fun. Why put all that baggage on it?

  Michaela had always agreed completely. In theory.

  And she was letting Terrence down, Michaela knew she was, by allowing the fact she had to share a bed with this man—or maybe just the room itself, if he slept on the floor as she wouldn’t suggest he do, though the tiny little part of her that was far more conservative than she liked to admit hoped he’d do anyway—affect her like this. Or at all.

  The truth was, for all the thousands of conversations she and Terrence had had over the years about the elasticity of relationships and what love meant and how to stay committed and yet simultaneously free—Michaela had never put it to the test. She was always working too hard, or too tired, or she’d never met anyone worth bothering, or… something.

  Jesse Grey she thought, shoul
d never be a girl’s training wheels. He was more like a kamikaze ride on a stripped-down motorcycle, straight off the side of the nearest Rocky Mountain cliff.

  Outside, the February storm howled and battered at the windows. The ancient radiator put up a valiant fight against all that commotion, but their little room was a collection of various drafts, questionable smells, and the supposedly king-sized bed that sat in the center, covered in a brown and orange bedspread that made Michaela think of fast food restaurants.

  Or maybe she was just hungry. There was no food to be had, unless it came from the vending machine out in the frigid hallway, and she had already eaten three packets of faintly stale peanut butter sandwiched between bright orange cheese crackers. She thought she’d dream of real meals all night long.

  Unless, of course, her subconscious preferred to explore the bounty that was Jesse Grey, stretched out across the bottom of the king-sized bed as if he lounged about eating Doritos while snowbound all the time. Hell, maybe he did. Maybe that absurd body of his was purely genetic.

  It would have taken a far stronger woman than Michaela had ever pretended to be to overlook how this man looked in a tight-fitting, white Henley and those damned jeans. Even the fact he’d kicked his boots off by the door and was wearing nothing but a pair of socks on his long feet did her head in. She was losing it.

  That was only one of the many reasons she was sitting in the uncomfortable pleather armchair near the window. And none of the other reasons made her feel anything but small and teenaged and embarrassing.

  “Have you drifted off into a wedding coma?” Jesse asked, and she realized she hadn’t answered him. Instead, she’d been staring at him for God knew how long, bright orange cracker dust all over her fingers and who only knew what expression on her face. “I hear that happens. Someone says the word wedding and you hear organ music in your head, think about a white dress that looks like a giant wedding cake, and lapse into a dissociative state. Right?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’d morphed from pearl-clutching Victorian to starchy schoolmarm and that, too, was humiliating. She felt a heat like tears prick at the backs of her eyes, and thought she’d actually rather throw herself out into the grip of the storm than weep in front of this man. “Terrence and I are getting married at the courthouse, by ourselves. No white gowns or organs, no fleets of bridesmaids in tacky matching dresses, and certainly no dissociative states. We’re not even having a party, because why have a party to celebrate a shift in tax status?”

  “How romantic.”

  “The point is the marriage, not the wedding,” she snapped. She couldn’t count how many times she’d said that since she and Terrence had announced their plans to marry. At least nine million times this past weekend alone, while her cousins and her aunts and her mother all stared back at her in varying degrees of dismay. “It’s a practical exercise that doesn’t need to involve anyone else.”

  “A wedding doesn’t have to be a spectacle,” said this man who, she was quite sure, likely broke out in hives whenever the W word was mentioned by anyone he might be dating, or even in his general bachelor vicinity. “It’s about demonstrating commitment in front of people who matter to you. Otherwise you might as well treat it like a visit to the DMV.”

  “In your vast experience with weddings.”

  He shrugged, and how he could look dangerous while he did that, still sprawled out on the bed, lazy and unselfconscious and with a packet of Doritos in his hands, Michaela would never know.

  “So that’s a no on the saving yourself, then?” he asked, sounding something a little bit edgier than amused. “Given that you’re so practical and all.”

  No good could possibly come of answering a question like that. And yet her mouth opened and words came right on out, as if she couldn’t control herself at all. “I thought it was your virtue we were concerned about tonight, not mine.”

  “I’m a vestal virgin, obviously,” he rumbled at her in that low voice that was all sex and longing and bad decisions made real. “My purity is of paramount importance to me and I like to advertise it, too. Hence the white shirt.”

  He was kidding, of course. He was even smirking a little bit as he said it. And that restless thing inside of her shifted, then. Flipped over and lodged itself hard against her sternum.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, you know,” she said, frowning at the cracker dust she’d transferred from her fingers to her thighs. “Just because we live in an age where you can sleep with whoever you want, whenever you want, with no consequences, that doesn’t mean that people who don’t should be treated like weirdoes.”

  She felt his gaze move over her face and told herself the radiator was finally doing its job and that was why her cheeks were hot.

  “Did you just confess to something, Michaela?” he asked, lightly enough. But when she looked over at him, she could see that bright, gleaming thing in his dark gaze. It moved inside of her like need. “Is that the kind of night this is going to be? I thought that sort of thing usually took a few too many shots of tequila and ended up in the usual ill-advised round of strip poker, but I’m game if you are.”

  “Of course not,” she said dismissively, and she refused to let herself think about strip poker with this man, ill-advised or otherwise. Even for a second. “But don’t you think it’s absurd how much weight and power people give to something that really isn’t anything more than a simple bodily function?”

  She was lecturing herself, of course. She was directly addressing all that strange tension that still had her belly in knots, the heat and the longing that pulsed in her far lower, the tiny bed he was already taking up too much of, and all the rest. And the way he looked at her, she suspected he knew it.

  “Are you talking me into bed or out of it?” he asked mildly. “As seduction techniques go, this one is fairly robotic and depressing. Just FYI.”

  “It shouldn’t matter,” she said, and maybe it was that mild tone of his that got to her and made her voice sharper than it should have been. Which didn’t help anything. “It’s ridiculous how much we tell ourselves it matters.”

  “I’m not going to have sex with you tonight, Michaela,” Jesse said quietly, deliberately, and she told herself there was no resonance to it. That it didn’t ricochet inside of her, then seem to swell and take over everything. “But don’t kid yourself. If I did, it would matter.”

  She felt the sizzle of that, the deliberate burn, but she only shook her head as she stared at him across the room. She pulled her legs up onto the chair beneath her and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  “No one who looks like you has sex that matters. Not all the time, anyway. It’s statistically impossible.”

  “How cynical.” He tossed the empty snack pack of Doritos aside and sat up, in one of those rolling sorts of moves that looked like water and yet made her mouth go dry. “And insulting, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “I’m not trying to insult you.” She shrugged, and took a sip of her Coke, and it was silly how needling him made her feel less off-balance. Telling him the truth isn’t needling him, she told herself sternly, and hugged her knees to her chest again. “But it’s silly to think that two grown adults can’t share a hotel bedroom without it turning into some sexual scenario straight out of a low-budget movie. We’re not animals.”

  “If you say so.”

  She counted herself lucky once again that she and Terrence had a relationship that had evolved past this nonsense.

  “I thought maybe we could clear the air, that’s all,” she said loftily, and she shifted in her pleather armchair, even smiling at him. Not quite with pity. “I’m sorry if that offends you. Terrence and I have a fairly liberal view of these things.”

  “I bet you do.” He stood then, and stretched, and that was a whole symphony of unfair. That long, lean body. The wedge of his lower abdomen that showed when he raised his arms, packed tight with muscle and dusted with dark hair on its way beneath the low waistband of his jea
ns. The amused expression on his face when he caught her looking. “Let me guess. You have an open relationship that you both agreed to because that’s the kind of liberal people you are, but it turns out only he ever takes advantage of it.”

  “There’s nothing stopping either one of us from ‘taking advantage of it,’ though that’s an unnecessarily dim view of things. That’s the point.”

  “So that’s a yes?”

  She shook her head, and she told herself she really did pity him, this beautiful man she hardly knew and didn’t want to know. “Labels aren’t helpful. We don’t try to own each other, that’s all.”

  And Jesse laughed. He threw his head back and let it pour out, and it was like he cast aside the entire winter that easily. Then he looked at her again, still laughing. “Then what’s the point?”

  Michaela blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Why bother?” He tugged his Henley up and over his head, sweeping it off and tossing it on the bed, and the world shimmered all around that remarkable chest of his, sculpted to hard male perfection. “The world is filled with casual people and casual relationships. Fair weather friends and easy betrayals. Why bother marrying the guy who’s just another disposable piece of merchandise, indistinguishable from the rest?”

  “Because we’re adults who don’t need to stamp brands on each other like we’re cattle, for one thing.”

  “That’s why you’re not wearing an engagement ring?”

  Michaela curled her bare left hand into a fist and hated that she did it, as if it told him too much about the darkest, most hidden things in her she refused to admit were there. She’d excised them, damn it. Or she’d tried.

  “I don’t need an archaic display of ownership to make other people feel comfortable about my private, personal commitments,” she gritted out. “Also, I’m not a cow.”