by Meg Maguire
“Mercer.” She raked her nails down his scalp.
In her head she replayed the visual of him taking her just minutes before. This strong, fearless man coming apart at the seams. She remembered how he’d been the last time they’d made love, beneath her, eyes recording her movements. Nothing in any logical questionnaire could ever have brought them together, but now she worried that if this didn’t last, she might never find the same connection with anyone, ever again.
His soft grunts drew her out of the sad thoughts and back into the pleasure he was giving her. He slid two fingers inside, making her miss his cock with a startling ferocity.
“Mercer?”
He freed his mouth and met her gaze. “Yeah?”
“Is there any chance you’ve got a round two in you?”
“No guarantees, but we can find out.” He left her to fetch a fresh condom and climbed back into bed beside her. He slid a hand to his cock, stroking himself.
“Not that what you were doing wasn’t wonderful,” she said. “It was just so wonderful it made me want more.”
“You’re dangerously good for my ego.”
She watched his hand, saw him growing hard for her again. “Here,” she said, reaching out.
He let her take over and she reveled in his response to her touch.
They kissed as she stroked him, then she felt his hand at her thigh, coaxing it wider. They broke apart, and when he grabbed the condom she took it from him, rolling it down his length. He slid his thigh between hers, holding her hip as he pushed inside. Forehead to forehead, they found their pace and angles. He reached between their bodies to tease her clit, making her gasp. Her palm stroked his backside and she admired the flex there as he took her deeply.
“You feel so good,” she muttered.
He kissed her in perfect rhythm with their undulating bodies. When she came it was from everything, equally—his mouth and cock and fingers, from the comfort of his proximity and strength. As she fell back to earth, he rolled her onto her back and got both knees between hers, thrusting fast and frantic for half a minute before he groaned, back arching into his own release. With a disbelieving noise, he flopped onto his back next to her. She rolled to her side and laid her cheek against his shoulder.
“Wow,” he said, wide eyes aimed at the ceiling. “I didn’t know I was capable of that. Not since I was about twenty.”
“A good coach will always push you beyond your limits,” she teased, patting his chest.
“This going to be a regular thing, you ambushing me in my bed? Because I’ll be honest, it’s not exactly motivating me to move out any quicker.”
She laughed. “I’m not feeling especially eager to see you go, myself.”
He closed his hand around hers.
After a long silence she asked, “What will you tell Delante, about where you disappeared to?”
“I’ll tell him the truth—I had to come home to tend to an emergency.”
“I wouldn’t exactly classify my emotional breakdown as an emergency.”
“It was enough to bring me back, wasn’t it?”
An unsettling sensation filled Jenna. She found the courage to ask him, point-blank, “What exactly do you feel for me?”
“Hell if I know.”
“No, really. I don’t want to sound clingy, but if this keeps happening, I am one of those girls who gets attached. I know this is all just for now, for however long it lasts. But if I found out in a week that you hooked up with another girl...I won’t lie. It’d hurt. I’m wondering where we stand, I guess.”
“Where we stand is that we’re lying in my bed together,” Mercer said. “I don’t know exactly what you think my love life’s about, but this doesn’t happen to me that often. And if it does, there’s almost always at least been a date involved. Really, you’re the most casual fling I’ve had in ages.”
“Oh.”
“So if you’re worried I might wind up doing something with some other woman next week, it’s not going to happen. Nothing good ever came of multitasking, sex- or romance-wise.”
“True.” Still, she wished he’d say something more...reassuring. Something more personal, to let her know she had more than mere dibs on him. That maybe she had just a little piece of his heart.
“Plus I’ve never...” He trailed off with a sigh.
“Never what?” Tell me tell me tell me.
“Whatever we are...I’ve never been this bent out of shape over a woman before. I can’t tell you if it’s the sex or if it’s the bad-idea factor, or what. But seriously, you’ve got me all screwed up in the head. A busload of naked women could unload at the curb and I doubt I’d notice. You’re in here,” he said, tapping his temple. “Like a splinter or something.”
Jenna would have preferred if he’d tapped his chest, but she’d take whatever he gave. She relaxed against his shoulder. “I promise I’m not gunning to be your girlfriend or anything.”
“You’re just into commitment, even with your flings.” He smoothed her hair back, voice dropping to a near-whisper. “Wouldn’t run screaming if you were, though. Gunning to be my girlfriend, I mean.”
Thump, thump, thump from her heart. “Really?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
He smirked. “Though I’d question your taste.”
She laughed.
“But we can keep it simple. Just know that my bed and my body are yours to do with as you see fit.”
She smiled. He was, without a doubt, the most reasonable man she’d ever met.
But another thought was still hovering, regarding another man who’d called this place home. Who’d called himself her father, when she’d never seen fit to return the favor. There was more to Monty Wilinski than she could learn from old newspaper articles. And until she understood what, she was never going to feel right holding the fate of his legacy—and Mercer’s future—in her hands.
* * *
MERCER GOT UP EARLY the next morning. He slipped out of Jenna’s arms and took a shower, sneaked quietly out the door and jogged to the corner store for eggs.
Jenna shuffled into the kitchen just as he found the whisk.
“Good morning,” she said, finger-combing her hair. “Breakfast of champions? I thought you were supposed to just eat those raw.”
“I’m making us French toast before I hit the road.”
She smiled. “Are you?”
“It’s the only thing I know how to cook from scratch. My mom used to make it every Sunday, when she wasn’t working.”
“Well, I better shower fast, then.” Jenna came around the counter to lay a hand on his chest and kiss his cheek.
Mercer caught her fingers, holding them against his heart. “You look beautiful.”
She pulled away with an embarrassed smile. “I look like a mess. But thank you.”
He let her escape to the bathroom, stealing a peek ten minutes later as she passed by in only a towel. He whistled.
“Shush, pervert.”
Mercer smiled, going back to breakfast duties. Not long after, he heard Jenna’s voice from her room, unmistakable alarm. “Oh my.”
He hurried to her threshold.
She’d dressed for work, hair still twirled up in her towel. Beside her on the bed was the big bin full of photos and keepsakes, and Jenna had a letter unfolded in her hands.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was just organizing some of the mess I made last night, trying to get these in order, so I don’t miss any....”
“But?”
“I found some other letters, in a paper shopping bag. I started reading one, assuming it was for me. Except the envelope had been slit open already.”
“Who was it to?”
She looked up from the page. “It was to my dad. It looks like a Dear John letter, almost. From some woman named...” She checked the envelope. “Lorraine Temple. Did he ever mention her?”
A chill tensed Mercer’s back. “I remember Lorraine.”
�
��Did my father date her?”
Her pursed his lips. “They were friends.” Or possibly more? It hurt Mercer’s heart to imagine it. “Lorraine was... She was his best friend’s wife.”
He put his hand out and Jenna gave him the letter, standing and crossing her arms. He skimmed it with a thumping heart.
Monty,
You agreed to what I did, that this correspondence has to stop. It’s not fair to Frank, and it’s not fair to us, either. I’ll never forget what you did for him, but you and I... We’re over. I’m forever in your debt, and you’re forever in my heart. But we can’t stay in each other’s lives, and you know that as well as I do. The day you won your appeal was one of the happiest of my life, but it’s time to leave all that in the past, and start again with clean slates. I owe you my eternal gratitude, but that’s all I have to give. I can’t keep sharing my heart this way...
“Did you know this Frank guy?” Jenna asked.
“Kind of. He was around the gym all the time doing pro bono work, accounting or legal stuff. I never paid any attention to the business side of things back then. I can’t believe he...” Mercer folded the letter, feeling sad to his very bones. He’d put a lot of faith in Monty, turned him into the father figure he’d missed out on for his first fifteen years. It hurt like hell to imagine him capable of having an affair with his best friend’s wife.
“Maybe there’s more to it.” Jenna sounded more curious than upset, and why shouldn’t she be? Monty had never been her father, not the way he’d been Mercer’s.
“Maybe.” He wanted to hope so, but something in his gut told him not to hold his breath.
“There are more letters in the bag. I’m tempted to read them, to try to understand...but it feels too personal. I don’t understand if he left those with my letters because he wanted me to find them, too, or if it was a mix-up.”
“I have no clue.” Felt as though he didn’t have the first clue about anything anymore.
If Monty had been capable of that, what about all those other things? The drug-running and money laundering?
What else had his mentor packed up in boxes, hoping to forget, or needing to confess?
And another thing nagged at him. He’d always thought Monty had been somehow above romantic relationships, smart to opt out of them after his disastrous marriage to Jenna’s mom. Mercer had even thought Monty had been lucky in a way, able to spare himself all the heartbreak love could bring. Too strong to fall victim to that bull.
But love wasn’t like drowning, a danger you could dodge simply by avoiding the ocean. It found you. It had found Monty, after all. No man was safe.
For the past three years, training had been Mercer’s priority, the thing he put before sleep, before leisure...miles ahead of his love life, and probably not accidentally.
Then Jenna had turned up and flipped his world inside out. He’d just put his trainee’s needs on hold, driven two hours in the dead of night to dry this woman’s tears.
Lust or love or whatever this was, he had been right. It was the death of focus, worse than booze. But once you were drunk... Goddamn if bad ideas didn’t feel good.
9
JENNA PUT THE LETTER out of her mind as best she could. She had too many letters of her own to process before she tried to make sense of those her father had received from Lorraine Temple. Too much to learn about what he’d felt for her before she could begin to understand something as complicated as an affair.
Plus she didn’t want to think about infidelity, not when her own new romance was just blossoming. Mercer had seemed more troubled than her by the letter from Lorraine. His feelings about Monty were more personal than Jenna’s, and the revelation surely more upsetting. But by the time he returned from Connecticut, he too seemed to have let the issue go.
She had called her mother on Tuesday evening, prepared to have it out over the way she’d withheld those letters from Jenna. But her anger had fizzled when she heard her mom’s side. She’d held on to those envelopes for years, unsure what to do. Admittedly, she’d also been bitter, and she thought she’d wait until Jenna seemed mature enough to handle whatever they held. Then the news of the gym’s scandal had broken and she panicked. For all she’d known, Monty Wilinski might’ve been a dangerous criminal in addition to a bad husband. So she’d made a decision to shut him out for good, and began mailing the letters back. She’d been a scared young mother, only doing her best. Jenna let her resentment go, feeling lighter in its wake.
And for the next week, life was pretty great. Full of hope, excitement, passion...fabric swatches.
The morning of the first Monday in September found Jenna tidying up all the samples the decorator had dropped off, and wishing the office didn’t look like such a den of chaos. Mercer had gotten half the filing cabinets moved downstairs, but there were still dusty boxes holding the gym’s records from the past three decades stacked in the corners, and old fight posters they’d unearthed from the closet draped over the bookshelves. Then again, Jenna was interviewing prospective assistants all day. Probably best they see exactly what they were signing up for.
She left the office, excited butterflies swirling in her stomach. Down in the gym she found Mercer at work with Delante, showing him some kind of grappling move on one of the mats. She waited patiently until they spotted her and got to their feet.
Mercer grinned. “Hey, boss.”
“Hey, Jenna,” Delante added. He’d been helping her with random heavy-lifting tasks for Spark, and they’d become friends, of a sort. The sort who had nothing in common, age- or background-wise, professionally... Still, he was helpful and reliable, and the money was keeping his mood level, Mercer said.
“Hi, guys. You can keep going, I wasn’t trying to interrupt.”
“You nervous?” Mercer asked, knowing full well she was.
Her initial candidate was due at nine-fifteen—the first of six she’d be meeting that day. With the franchise’s kickoff mixer less than three weeks away, she needed help, and fast.
Rich swept past, tugging on his sparring gloves. “Hire someone cute.”
“That would be a bonus,” she said. “Unless she distracts my male clients from the women in the database. Plus I might hire a guy—I have two coming in to interview. Might be nice to have the male perspective on hand.”
“You got a whole sweaty basement full of male perspective,” Rich offered, and began throwing shadow-boxing jabs in Delante’s direction. The two got drawn into a friendly tussle, leaving Jenna and Mercer with a bit of privacy. Well, not that this place was especially discreet. Who could’ve guessed what shameless gossips professional fighters were? Still, she and Mercer kept it low-key—no “real” kissing in public, just the odd smooch when he swung by the first floor. As for up in the apartment—no holds barred.
“I am nervous,” she admitted.
“You’ll pick the right person. You’ve got good intuition. I mean you must—look who you keep choosing to hook up with.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “I’m scared that there just won’t be a right person. They all look great on paper, but I need that chemistry. And if I don’t find it today or tomorrow from the short-list... I’m running out of time.”
He rubbed her arm, then pulled his hand away. “Oops, sorry. Just marked you with my territorial musk.”
She laughed. “I forgive you.”
“You’ll be great. Come down at lunchtime and let me know how it’s going.”
“I will.”
He glanced around before planting a peck beside her lips. “Knock ’em dead, Jenna.”
* * *
BY QUARTER TO TWELVE, she’d had three appointments—two, actually, since the third hadn’t bothered to turn up. And the ones that had... She rubbed her temples and poured herself a fresh cup of coffee. Their résumés had looked so promising. The first had been an etiquette coach, of all intriguing things, but in person she came off incredibly fussy, not the sort of woman a client could relax and be him- or herself arou
nd. And being one’s self was the key to finding Mr. or Miss Right, in Jenna’s opinion.
The second candidate was a younger guy, with a master’s in psychology. But something about him was...off. Too intense, didn’t blink often enough, nodded too vigorously in agreement with everything she’d said. They sounded like niggling complaints, but when someone didn’t feel right, they likely weren’t right.
Her twelve o’clock appointment turned up five minutes early, knocking on the threshold of the open door and not giving Jenna time to hide the packet of peanut butter crackers she’d been mauling.
“Oh, hello.” She brushed the cracker flecks from her lap and glanced at her calendar. “Lindsey?”
“Yes. Lindsey Tuttle.” The young woman smiled, glancing around the war zone known as Jenna’s office.
“Excuse the crumbs. And the mess—we’re transitioning. Come in.” She leaned over the desk to shake Lindsey’s hand. Nice. Firm and confident. “I’m Jenna Wilinski.”
“Nice to meet you.” Lindsey took a seat in the visitors’ chair while Jenna shut the door. She looked to be a couple years younger than Jenna, with wide lips and pale blue eyes, natural dark blond hair pulled into a ponytail. Gray sweater over a dress shirt, pressed slacks. She was cute, with a wry smile, and not such a bombshell that Jenna would need to worry about her male clients losing focus. This could work.
Jenna scanned her notes. “So you’re currently employed with a wedding planner?”
She nodded. “I just moved here a few months ago, and I’ve been working for a woman based on Newbury Street.”
Jenna had perused the business’s website, and the design had been so slick, she knew only the choosiest, sky’s-the-limit brides would be able to afford their services. “Do you like it?”
