by Megan Crane
“This is all fascinating, I’m sure,” she said. She wanted him to think he was boring her. She didn’t understand why he wasn’t. Why she wasn’t drifting off to sleep right that second. “You have my congratulations, I guess? Are you telling me this because you want me to call you Emperor?”
She felt the bed move beneath her with the suggestion of his laughter, though he didn’t make a sound. The sheer, dizzying intimacy of that struck at her, so hard it left her ears ringing and that same bell tolling in her limbs, over her skin, knotted low in her belly.
“I’m telling you this because it was quite an experience to go from the pure, physical straightforwardness of a job site to an intellectual classroom on the U-Dub campus,” he said quietly. “My father was a salesman, so I already knew how to pick out a liar at ten paces, but shifting back and forth between two such different worlds really made it into something of an art.”
She understood the sudden autobiography now. “I’m not lying.”
“Not in any real sense of the term, no, because you’re so bad at it.”
“I have no idea what you think I’m lying about or more to the point, why you think I’d bother to lie to you at all,” Michaela said, still with her eyes shut tight because any minute, surely, that would make him disappear. “I’m glad you think highly of yourself. Confidence is great and probably really useful in your line of work. But I don’t think about you at all.”
She felt a shift in the bed and then a dip, and then he was right there beside her, that long body of his making hers slide toward him in a sudden, alarming way, and her eyes snapped open to find him propped up on one arm.
Right.
There.
That time, she heard as well as felt the little laugh he let out. “Liar.”
He sounded very male and entirely too satisfied, and Michaela had to battle herself to keep from either venting her spleen all over him or worse, flinging herself backward to get out of his range. Either one would prove his point for him.
She held herself still. Very, very still, sort of on her side and sort of still on her back, and afraid to move at all lest she accidentally roll right into him. But not immediately springing into action to get away from him had its own issues. Like the fact her heart was beating too hard against the inside of her chest. Much too hard. She was terrified he could hear it.
“What would I have to stress out about, anyway?” she asked him, all of that tension in her voice. “It’s the middle of the night and we could be waiting out the snowstorm in a whole lot less comfort than this. Like in a car by the side of the road, risking hypothermia. Since we’re not, I couldn’t possibly be more relaxed if I tried.”
But he didn’t answer. And tragically, Michaela’s eyes adjusted to what little light there was and she could see him again. That gorgeous face of his and those decadent eyes, so intent on what he was doing. On her. So narrowly focused. He reached over with his free hand and he did it so slowly she could have moved out of the way at any point. She could have batted his finger away. She could have stopped him with a single word.
She didn’t do anything. She only watched in a kind of awe as his hand moved closer to her.
Awe and something else that curled deep inside her like a thick, black smoke.
He didn’t speak. He moved his hand to her shoulder where it poked out from beneath the comforter and she didn’t understand what he was doing. What that faint touch was. Almost like a tickle, if smoother, and she shuddered. There was no chance to hide it or repress it, and only once she realized he could see her shudder did Michaela realize her tank top strap had migrated down her arm and he was smoothing it back into place.
He was concentrating on his task with a ferocity that made that first shudder kick over into another, and still he took his time. He moved the strap into position and then he ran his fingers down the front of it, just an unobjectionable inch or so then back again, to make it lie flat.
If it had been her mother, her cousin, someone she worked with, anyone else, she wouldn’t have cared. If it had been anywhere else but in this bed, where she couldn’t make herself forget he was completely naked, she doubted she’d even have noticed so innocuous a touch. If he was even slightly less beautiful, less… Jesse, maybe it really would have been innocuous. There were a thousand ways this could be a perfectly nonchalant, unmemorable moment between two people who felt nothing for each other, and Michaela was sure every last one of them shot through her in that instant.
But there was nothing the least bit nonchalant about that hard, hungry look on his face when he raised it, at last, to hers. Michaela forgot how to breathe. She forgot how to function. Her shoulder had taken on a bright red, burning pulse of its own and she was fairly sure she’d forgotten her own name.
Hers. His. Everything but the tension that crackled between them and seemed to set the dark on fire.
“Tell me, Michaela.” And his voice. That voice. Like he was buried deep inside of her already, God help her. “Exactly how open is this liberal relationship of yours?”
Chapter Five
‡
“No,” she said abruptly. And then again, and far rougher, “no. I can’t.”
Michaela didn’t know who was more surprised. Her or Jesse.
She moved, then. She pulled herself away from him, from the hunger she could see on his face as easily as she could taste it inside of her and from the echoing pull of it deep within. She hurled herself away until she was sitting up with her back to the headboard and a nice, healthy space between her and this man who tempted her more than she’d realized she could ever be tempted.
By anyone or anything.
Jesse didn’t say a word. He didn’t come after her. He simply stayed where he was, propped up on his side with the better part of his impossibly beautiful and, she was all too aware, completely naked body tucked away beneath the covers. The radiator cranked out heat in hisses and clanks from the corner, or maybe that was Michaela’s own pulse, making that mighty racket.
It took her much, much longer than she thought it should to get her breathing under control. She gave up on regulating her body temperature. It was a lost cause, clearly, unless she wanted to strip off all her layers and… she didn’t. She really didn’t want to do that. She had no idea what would be left of her if she did.
“So maybe the relationship is not so open, then,” Jesse murmured after what could easily have been hours. Days. The judgment she searched his face and couldn’t find was there in his voice, and it made her tense. “Shocker.”
“I get that you have a burning need to make me into a liar here,” she threw at him, with maybe a little more aggression than necessary. Or maybe not. She wasn’t the naked person in the room. She hadn’t done the touching. “But that’s your personal stuff coming out, I think. I’m not a liar and incidentally? Having someone call you one repeatedly isn’t exactly the most charming thing in the world.”
“I didn’t realize I was trying to be charming.”
“Probably because pigs would fly first.”
“Michaela.” He waited until her gaze inched to his. “I don’t understand the problem.”
And she felt as if there was something wrapped tight around her throat, cutting off her words. Her air.
“There’s no problem.” Because she was a grown woman or she was supposed to be one. An adult. Not an immature child, prostrate to the whim of any feeling that stampeded through her. She’d always believed that. “Just because my relationship is open, that doesn’t mean I’m required to mess around with every man I meet who isn’t my fiancé.”
“Of course not.” But that didn’t sound like a concession and sure enough, his hard gaze didn’t shift from hers at all. “How many men have you messed around with, would you say? Just give me a ballpark estimate. Five? Ten? Fifteen or more?”
She felt her mouth fall open slightly, just slightly, and that told her any number of things she’d prefer not to know about herself. Things that until this very mom
ent, she’d thought were outdated vestiges of the person she’d been told she ought to be as a child. Little ghosts of someone else, amusing in their way, but nothing at all to do with who she really was.
Here, now, she saw that she’d been kidding herself. They weren’t ghosts at all. And they didn’t belong to someone else, they were hers. And the very idea of messing around with five, ten, any men while she and Terrence were together made her feel faintly sick to her stomach.
And that meant she had no idea who the hell she was, after all.
“I don’t think I’m going to answer that,” she told Jesse with every inch of that calm she’d worked years to perfect. “It’s absolutely none of your business.”
Neither was the chaos inside of her.
“Maybe it was none of my business before,” he agreed. “But now? It’s critical.”
“And why is that?” She heard the kick of temper in her voice and could have reined it in, but she didn’t. “Because you have a hard-on and no place to put it?”
“I have hands, thank you,” he said reprovingly, which was not a visual Michaela needed just then. “And, also, I’m not twelve.”
“And it still has nothing to do with you.”
“Let me tell you what I think.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Jesse. I don’t care what you think.”
“Right. That’s why you’re staring at me like that, haunted and wide-eyed. That’s why you shudder every time I touch you. That’s why your voice keeps cracking every time you say something to me.” He smiled, and it was the fact of that soft smile on such a hard mouth that did her head in. It made something seem to fall apart inside of her, like a building simply crumbling from the inside out, there one minute and the next, only dust. “What I don’t understand is why a woman in a wide-open relationship would pretend she’s not feeling an attraction like this, that’s so fucking obvious it could light up the whole of Western Montana. Even in the middle of a blizzard.”
Michaela pulled in a shaky breath, then let it out again. But the mess inside of her didn’t go away. The clawing thing at her throat didn’t ease. And she was either honest with herself or she wasn’t.
“Fine,” she said, because she wasn’t a liar, damn it. No matter how much easier it would have been to lie just then—to both of them. “You’re right.”
He didn’t smile. But the gleam in his eyes was so potent it almost hurt to look at him. “I’m right about a lot of things, generally. But you might want to narrow that down.”
She lifted her hands up and then dropped them, letting her palms smack against the legs she’d drawn up against her—and she was perfectly well aware that she was basically barring herself off from him. That it was a defensive posture that told him more of the things he already seemed to know.
But there was no helping that, either.
“You said we weren’t going to sleep together tonight,” she reminded him. “Did you forget?”
“If I have to explain to you the long and varied and straight up fascinating stretch of road between not touching at all and actually having intercourse with someone,” he practically drawled, and potent shifted into something so greedy and so hot it felt like a kick between her legs, “it’s going to make me cast a lot of aspersions on the state of your sex life, Michaela. Is that what you’re going for?”
Michaela decided, right then and there, to stop pretending she had any idea what she was doing here. Jesse was right. She’d never taken advantage of the loose boundaries in her relationship before. She’d never had the time and, honestly, she’d never been tempted. It had been awfully easy to sit around talking about how she’d act in the abstract, with no idea that it could feel like this, but there was no use beating herself up for that now. Just as there was no point succumbing to the heavy thing a whole lot like guilt or maybe shame that sloshed around inside of her. This was the first time she’d navigated this situation. Of course it was rocky.
“Terrence and I believe that no one is really monogamous, not naturally anyway, and that it’s pointless to break up great relationships over things as silly as meaningless sex,” she managed to say, feeling desperate and unhinged, ashamed and guilty, and she didn’t even know why. But the fact they were sitting there in the soft, intimate dark didn’t help. She reached over and switched on her bedside lamp, and if she were a better person, maybe she wouldn’t have enjoyed the way he cursed at the sudden light. She certainly wouldn’t have felt it leveled the playing ground, somehow. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”
He grunted. “That sounds convenient.”
“It’s practical,” she insisted, though she’d never felt anything less like practical than she did at the moment. “Some people see betrayals wherever they look. How is that healthy?”
“Betrayal is betrayal.” His voice was flat. Unequivocal.
“Betrayal is what happens when someone breaks a promise or the rules they previously agreed to follow,” Michaela said. “But casual sex with other people isn’t a broken promise or rule in my relationship. It’s no different than going out for dinner or a drink, as far as we’re concerned. What does it matter? It’s not dramatic, it just happens sometimes.”
“If it’s like dinner or a drink for you, maybe it doesn’t matter,” Jesse said in that dark way of his. Judgy and snide, in her opinion.
“Right,” she said, her voice arid. “Because you only make sweet, soulful, tender love. You connect on a higher emotional level, complete with poetry and promises, or not at all.”
His dark gaze hit hers. Hard. “I’m not engaged.”
There was no reason she should feel winded.
“Sometimes sex is just sex,” she told him. “And Terrence and I have decided that our entire life together doesn’t have to be predicated on making judgments about sex, that’s all.”
“But I’m getting the impression that sex isn’t just sex to you. That it doesn’t just happen sometimes when you’re out and about.”
“It hasn’t as of yet,” she agreed, because she was trying to be honest here, which was about her, she reminded herself sternly. Not him. Not what he thought of her. There was absolutely no reason she should feel as if she was losing ground—wholly surrendering, in fact. “But different people have different drives, different needs. That’s perfectly healthy.”
“Translation. Terrence Polk can’t keep it in his pants but he’s managed to convince you that he needs that.”
She gritted her teeth. “It’s possible, you know, that people who aren’t you can think and feel things that make sense to them, without it ever having to make sense to you.”
“I know Terrence,” Jesse said, abruptly.
And there was even less reason her blood should seem to ice over, that it should thud through her as if one of the icicles on the back of her aunt’s house had pierced her through the gut. She forced herself to look straight at him, calm and cool, and she didn’t want to ask herself why that was one of the hardest things she’d ever done to date.
“Do you?” she asked. Mildly. “Then nothing I’m saying should come as a surprise to you.”
“I was trying to figure out a way to tell you that your beloved fiancé is widely renowned as being completely incapable of keeping himself zipped,” Jesse said, something flinty in his gaze and in the cast of his mouth. “You seem like a nice girl. But hey, no harm, no foul, if you already know. If you support it.”
“I don’t require that Terrence treat me like his confessional,” she told him icily. “He doesn’t need my permission to decide how and where he spends his time.”
That was too much for Jesse, apparently. He muttered something and then he jackknifed up, tossing off the bedclothes and stalking over to his duffel. She had too few moments of staring at his astonishingly sculpted backside again, and then he hauled on a loose pair of grey athletic trousers.
He took his time turning back to face her, which gave Michaela a few moments to breathe again. When he f
inally wheeled around, he raked back his unruly hair with one hand as he settled that faintly grim gaze of his on her. He was beautiful and obviously pissed off, at her, and her body reacted to all of that as if he’d sung her a set of poignant love songs and topped it off with roses and a box of chocolates.
She’d never felt anything like this in her life.
It was terrifying and exhilarating, a physical longing that felt almost like some kind of quick onset virus, and it was one hundred percent wrong. She didn’t care why. She didn’t care what Terrence would do in her place.
Jesse Grey was not a trifle. He would leave marks.
“Go on,” he growled at her. “I feel pretty sure you’re meandering around to the real bullshit right about now.”
“I have no idea what you mean. I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
“It means whatever convoluted reason you have in your head that it’s great if your boy Terrence bones every last bimbo in the Pacific Northwest but absolutely unacceptable if you touch anyone. Especially me.” He let that sink in, and then he crossed his arms. “I’m all ears.”
Michaela realized she was breathing too heavily, as if she was flat-out running, when she still hadn’t moved a single inch. Not one. As if she really was frozen into place where she sat.
“Sex that’s just sex would be fine,” she told him, and it was amazing how hard this was. But that was the point, wasn’t it? If it was easy, she wouldn’t have stopped things. If it was easy, that voice inside of her whispered, you would be a completely different person. She didn’t want to think about that. “This doesn’t feel like that. You told me yourself it would mean something,” she went on hurriedly when his eyes went unreadably dark. “That’s too intense for me. Stress relief is one thing, but this feels a little more complicated than your average Swedish massage. Which would be great, I love massages, but complicated sex is something I can’t do.”
*
Jesse had never been so furious and so turned on at the same time.
