by Megan Crane
He didn’t know what to do about it—aside from the obvious, of course, which it appeared was off the table tonight. And he knew, in some distant part of his brain where he was still a fully functioning person and not simply the caveman who would take her however he could get her, that this was a good thing.
Michaela Townsend was a complication he didn’t need and shouldn’t want, and so what if he didn’t like the fact she’d been the one to say so? To call him complicated? That was pride, nothing more. Or it shouldn’t have been anything more.
He told himself it wasn’t.
“No, Michaela,” he said then, holding himself by a thread and letting all of that hunger pound through him. Letting her see it. “It’s not going to be like a goddamned Swedish massage. It’s going to be hard and dirty. It’s going to make you scream. It’s going to wreck your life and you’re going to love every second of it. Believe me.”
“That,” she said, after another one of those taut moments where he thought the look in her hazel eyes, haunted and longing and cool at once, might kill him, “is exactly why it’s not going to happen.”
He made himself shrug as if he didn’t care either way. “If you say so.”
“I do say so.” Her voice had gone sharp again.
Jesse shoved his other hand through his hair and then he blew out a breath, and then the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation welled up in him and he laughed. And laughed a little bit harder when she looked startled.
“Did you expect me to burst into tears?” he asked, laughter still in his voice. “I think you’re full of shit, let’s be clear. I think your relationship is a disaster at best and a complete fraud either way.”
Her chin rose. “Your opinion is completely irrelevant to me.”
“Right. Noted. But we both know that you’re lying to yourself, Michaela. And you’re absolutely right, that’s none of my business.” He stalked back over to the bed and climbed in again, and then made a big show of pulling the covers up to his chin. “And the truth is, I don’t care either way.”
He heard her huff out a little breath, but he’d shut his eyes by then in a theatrical pretense of sleep, and he didn’t open them again. He heard her shift, and felt the bed move a bit beneath her, and he thanked all the stars up above the blizzard somewhere that this was a king-sized mattress because he knew his ability to resist her—tenuous as it was—was entirely predicated on his not touching her. Not even by accident. Not even the slightest little bit.
Jesse would rather she not know that.
He heard the light switch off again, and then there was nothing but the intermittent enthusiasm of the radiator across the room. He might have imagined she’d drifted off to sleep, but he knew better. He could feel it.
As if they were connected in a thousand complicated ways that just pissed him off that much more to contemplate.
“Of course you don’t care either way,” Michaela said softly, into the strained, thick quiet. Straight into him, whether he liked it or not. “Now who’s the liar?”
*
Jesse woke up with an armful of warm, sweet woman and significantly less willpower than the night before. Neither of those things were good.
Or they’re both really fucking good, the wild thing in him argued.
Michaela was sprawled over his chest, her face tucked against his shoulder, one knee bent high to hook her leg over his thigh. Jesse swallowed hard, ordered the most headstrong part of him to settle down, and took a moment to simply enjoy it.
To soak her in, like the freaking massage he was apparently not going to be enjoying on this accidental road trip.
She fit him easily and perfectly, like a key to a lock he hadn’t known existed, and he’d have been a whole lot better off without knowing that.
Jesse knew he should shift her off of him. A nice man would do exactly that. He imagined she’d tell him she’d thought it was the loathsome Terrence, that she’d cuddled up to him out of habit, and Jesse would prefer to maintain the glorious fiction that this was all him. All them. Like they were magnets.
You’re an idiot, he snarled at himself.
But then a phone started ringing, loud and obnoxious. Jesse had only just started scowling in the direction of the noise when Michaela’s eyes snapped open. He watched her look at him—blank and sleepy—then had the distinct, if sharp, pleasure of watching her gaze fill with that awareness he thought might be the death of him.
She moved, then. She rolled over and slid off the bed, rushing to the phone that shrilled from a plug located in the center of the motel room’s wall, convenient to absolutely nothing.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she said, by way of greeting, when she got it to her ear. And then, “no, still in Montana. Good morning to you, too.”
And Jesse indulged himself. He could have gotten up. He could have checked the weather situation outside, hit the bathroom. Given her the illusion of privacy in this tiny little room. Instead, he admired the way her pajama bottoms clung to her butt, and allowed his mind to drift into a fantasy of how the morning might have gone, waking up in that position with no clothes between them and certainly no phone call—
“You insisted that I take a few days off, and I listened to you,” Michaela was saying calmly into the phone. Very, very calmly, which made him realize she’d used that same voice on him last night. Interesting. “Which is a good thing, because I got caught in a blizzard.” She pulled the phone off its charger and turned, frowning at Jesse as if she could read his filthy mind. Although if she really could, he figured her face would have gotten a whole lot redder. “Yes. A blizzard. Though this is Montana, so they pretty much just call that snow.”
She moved over to the big window that looked out over the motel’s back parking lot and pulled back the curtains. There wasn’t much to see. It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the morning sky was that same gunmetal color and the drifts were blowing enough fallen snow around that it would probably feel pretty much the same.
“It still looks terrible out there,” Michaela said into her phone, “so I’d be very surprised if I’m going anywhere today.” She looked over her shoulder at Jesse and raised her brows in silent question. He shook his head in equally silent agreement. They weren’t going anywhere. “I have no idea, Amos. I can’t control the weather.” She laughed then, and it rolled through the room, through Jesse, a lot like touching her had done the night before. It felt like light. “I know. You might have to dock my pay for a failure of this magnitude.”
She listened for another moment, then started listing off what appeared to be a set of appointments, from memory. She asked for another person to be patched in and then laid out what needed to happen over the next few days whether she was available or not, and by the time she’d finished her call Jesse understood that whatever job she had, it wasn’t an office manager, and that she was obviously very, very good at it.
“You’re not an office manager,” he said when she faced him, crossing her arms beneath her breasts in a way he certainly wasn’t going to point out only called attention to them.
“In a very real sense, that’s exactly what I am.” He waited, and she sighed slightly. “My last official title was Chief Administrative Officer. That means I tend to a lot of the nitty-gritty details of the organization, which isn’t all that different from being an office manager.”
“But you probably don’t order office supplies and tend to the coffee.”
“I have really, really strong feelings about coffee.”
“You realize that the more cagey and evasive you are, the more I think you’re hiding something, right?” Jesse asked. “Is that the goal?”
“Not at all.” He couldn’t read the look she gave him then, but he could see the way she squared her shoulders. “It’s called Burkeville. It’s an organization that manages the fortune and interests of Amos Burke.”
Jesse knew that name. Everybody knew that name. He blinked. “The computer guy?”
“His initia
l success was in apps, not precisely computers, but yes,” she said, in the kind of even tone of voice that indicated she’d said this a thousand times before. “He left Silicon Valley five years ago because he hated what the Bay Area was becoming with too many guys too much like him, taking over San Francisco and treating it like it was part of their extended office. He prefers Seattle. People are used to random billionaires wandering around. They hardly pay him any mind. He has a few acres on Bainbridge Island where he lives and works, and it was a good move. He’s much, much happier.”
He considered that. “You were with him before he moved?”
“I’ve been with him since the beginning,” she said, matter-of-factly, and her chin etched its way a little bit higher, which Jesse found fascinating. “I was his first intern while I was in my senior year of college. Then I was his personal assistant once I graduated, but really, that was because there were only two other employees and both of them were his roommates. They refused to get him coffee, on principle.”
Jesse studied her for moment and then he laughed.
“Are you trying really hard to avoid telling me that you got in on the ground floor with Amos Burke and you’re rich?”
Her eyes glittered in the gloomy light. “I wouldn’t use that word.”
Her phone beeped and she uncrossed her arms to look down at it, before typing something out in a blur and hitting SEND. Then she looked at him again, and he could see she was bracing for something. Waiting for some or other shoe to drop.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s Monday and I made them promise not to interrupt family time, so I’m sure they’ve been saving up.”
Jesse took his time rolling out of the bed, and his stretch and yawn were real. When he dropped his arms back down, he saw heightened color high on her cheeks and a far more hectic sparkle in her gaze. It made him wish he hadn’t pulled on his sweats last night, so he could have given her a real show.
“You look like you think you just confessed some deep, dark secret,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re used to—” But he did, of course. He knew Terrence. He’d been a part of that hotel deal ten months ago that Terrence’s bullshit had tanked. “—but I like rich women.”
“I hear that’s a thing.”
“Michaela,” he said patiently. “If you have your own money, you won’t want me for mine.”
That should have come out jokey and lighthearted, like everything else this morning, but it didn’t. It seemed to sit there between them, rough and stark, like a declaration.
“Not that you want me, of course,” he gritted out. “I’m not the massage parlor you’re looking for.”
She eyed him for a moment. “I would have thought that your whole growly, alpha male thing would rise up in protest at the idea that a woman didn’t need you in all possible ways. Especially economic. I’d have thought that your whole purpose in life was to lord it over the little ladies and bend them to your will.”
Jesse laughed again. “That sounds like a whole lot of obligation and pressure on my part. There are a lot of ways to need another person, Michaela. Not all of them come with the patriarchy and a power imbalance.”
She didn’t back down as he roamed toward her, and he liked that way too much, even though she was looking at him as if she thought he might try to take a bite out of her.
Well, she wasn’t wrong. He just might.
“You were a lot less giggly last night,” she said, as if she’d uncovered a deception. Her phone beeped again but this time, she didn’t answer it. She didn’t shift her gaze from his. He had no idea why that felt like a decisive victory.
“I have a constitutional aversion to bullshit,” he told her. “I can’t help it.”
“I thought we agreed to stop lying,” she said softly, but he didn’t mistake the sharpness in it. “Or was it that you thought I should stop lying because I’d said something you didn’t like, while you’d prefer to keep on merrily lying your head off? I can’t keep track.”
There was that wild thing in him that wanted out. It was part temper, part lust, and a whole lot of very dark and complicated things he had no desire to identify. Jesse stopped moving when he was a little too close to her for his peace of mind, but still far enough away that he thought he could keep himself from hauling her to him.
He’d managed to sleep with her last night without waking up deep inside of her, for which he deserved a freaking medal. He could stand in front of her and keep his hands to himself, too.
Or, at least, he thought he could.
“Hey, Michaela?” He didn’t bother to hide the edge in his voice, because there was only so much he was capable of at one time. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink away from him, and he was going to have to take matters into his own hands—literally—if she didn’t stop doing these things that made him so goddamned hard. His jaw tightened. “I’m not your fiancé or your boss. I’m the guy you actually said no to. I’m guessing that makes me the anomaly in your life. And guess what? I’m not the one you’re mad at.”
She jerked at that, and something indefinable sparked in her gaze before she blinked it away.
“I’m not mad at anyone.”
“Sure you are.” He wanted his hands on her more than he could remember wanting anything, ever, so he made himself step back. He made himself shrug, as if he felt nothing but lazy. The way he’d been about pretty much everything for the past three years. And definitely wasn’t here in this motel room in the middle of nowhere. With her. “But I think we both know it’s not me. It’s you.”
Michaela’s lips pressed flat, and her phone beeped again. Then again. She glared down at it, then shifted that glare to Jesse.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, very distinctly. Almost politely. “And incidentally, I’m running out of ways to tell you how wrong you are about absolutely everything without dying of boredom.”
“You do that,” Jesse drawled out. “But while you’re in there adjusting your attitude, you should also probably try not to take too long. We should get out there and see if there’s any food to be had around here before it starts snowing again.” He nodded at her. “Unless, of course, you think you want another round or three at the vending machine.”
She was standing much too straight, every inch of her brittle and crisp, and he was in all kinds of trouble, because he found that just as fascinating as the rest. He wanted to reach over and trace the pissy set to her jaw, that unsmiling press of her lips. He wanted to lick the annoyed straight from her skin.
“I do not,” she said after a moment and another beep from her phone, “Want to eat another package of peanut butter crackers. Ever.”
“Then you should probably get your ass in the shower.”
Michaela looked as if she wanted to throw something at him instead, maybe even the phone she held clutched in her hand. But she didn’t. She tossed it on the bed, and then stalked over to her bag. Instead of pawing through it, she simply picked up the whole thing and carried it into the bathroom, shoving it down on the counter.
She didn’t meet his eyes as she slammed the door, and there was no particular reason that should have made him grin. But it did.
“Oh, and you can buy me breakfast,” he called through the door. “Since you’re so filthy rich.”
Chapter Six
‡
What should have been no more than a two-minute walk in good weather stretched out into something more like fifteen. They’d stepped out into the sucker punch of the cold morning, both of them breathing hard and sharp as the reality of the chilly temperature made itself known. Like a full frontal assault. Michaela’s eyes had watered instantly, the exposed skin on her cheeks ached in that cold, dry way, and she tugged her warm scarf tighter around her neck.
Jesse, by contrast, let out a sound that could only be construed as pure, male joy, and set off toward the motel office as if he found the weather exhilarating. He probably did, Michaela thought as she trudged after him, her boots—which wer
e really more rain boots than snow boots, but were all she had with her—sinking through the icy crust of the snow and then down. And she tried not to think about how that sound he’d made was still reverberating inside of her, as if joy really was contagious.
“Walk where I walk,” he called back over his shoulder, and she didn’t want to think about the way his voice moved in her, or the warmth that seemed to spread out from deep inside her at that evidence that he was watching out for her—
Stop it, she hissed. Maybe even out loud, she realized when she saw the evidence like smoke in the air in front of her face. She concentrated instead on making his much-longer strides, and placing her feet in the holes he’d made in the snow that was packed several feet high in the motel parking lot.
It took some doing to climb over the massive snowdrifts and skid across the still expanse of the icy road to the only restaurant that was open for miles around, according to the same laconic gentleman in the motel office who’d been there the night before.
“Restaurant is a strong word,” the man had said when they’d slammed their way inside, stamping off their boots and shaking off the snow and cold that clung to their faces. “They serve food, though.”
“Do they serve food that can’t be found in the vending machines?” Michaela had asked, and she’d felt more than seen the amused look Jesse had slanted toward her, as if he could see the orange cracker powder still stuck on her fingers. The man behind the counter had nodded, having apparently expended all his daily words already. “Then it’s the right word.”
The whole world seemed to be conspiring against her when they’d gotten back outside, hushed and magnificently draped in white, making it impossible to think about anything but the surprisingly multi-layered man she was with. The way he’d touched her last night, so carefully—what was wrong with her that such an innocuous little thing should have taken over her head? She’d dreamed of heat and longing and woken up in a rush to find herself draped over his extraordinary chest. Thank God her phone had gone off, announcing the start to a new work week in its usual demanding way, and that she’d had an excuse to catapult herself away from Jesse Grey, his half-naked body, and that look in his decadent eyes. Thank God.
