Strict Confidence

by Skye Warren

  Jane blushes scarlet. “Did you decide on pancakes after all?”

  “Yes.” I stride into the kitchen, toss the folder on the other side of the island, and take the seat next to Paige. “If you’re still making them. Or maybe you want some.”

  She bites her lip. “I do, but I’ll make them at the same time as yours.”

  “Beau,” says Mateo. His words mean, Calm the fuck down.

  “What about you?” I look him in the eye and try to get this bristling, snapping feeling under control. I don’t like the way he looked at Jane. I don’t like the way he spoke to her. And I have no right to say a damn thing. “Are you here to eat pancakes?”

  “Yeah,” says Paige. “Are you?”

  He’s standing there in a towel, and I’m obviously pissed and trying to hide it. The whole thing is so ridiculous I could laugh. Except what I want to do is pin Jane to the counter and kiss her in front of him so it’s clear who she should belong to.

  “Of course,” says Mateo. “As long as it’s fine with everybody.”

  “By all means.” I say it too loud, and Jane looks between Mateo and me. It’s like she can’t decide whether to smile or frown. I can’t decide whether this is the most awkward moment of my life or just par for the course.

  Mateo glances over the scene in front of him. Paige, with her fork in her fist. Me, with both hands on the table, trying not to punch him. “Let me go change, and I’ll be back for pancakes.”

  “Great.”

  He leaves, and the tension decreases in the room. Jane turns back to the stove and flips three more pancakes onto a plate. She slides it in front of me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Everything’s great. The house burned down and Mateo’s walking around here naked.”

  “He had a towel on.”

  “He was flirting with you wearing it.” Paige is absorbed in her pancakes, cutting them up into tiny pieces and dunking them farther into the syrup, humming a song under her breath.

  “And?” Jane arches an eyebrow, her cheeks turning pink. “It doesn’t mean anything. That’s how how he is. And besides, he’s single.”

  “He’s always single. He’s always just single enough to go after the nearest available woman.”

  Her dark gaze dares me to say it. I’m frozen with my fork halfway to the pancakes. I want my mouth on hers. I want her body against mine. I don’t want anything else.

  “That would be me,” she says. Her shyness is chipping away bit by bit. I can’t help but be proud of her, even though it breaks my sense of control. “The nearest available woman.”

  “You think you’re available for him?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me, Mr. Rochester.”

  Paige lifts a bite of pancake on her fork and holds it up to the light. Ten more seconds of Jane looking at me this way and I’ll end this, here and now, damn the consequences. I’ll tell her the truth, which is that she’s mine, and Mateo Garza, the Oscar-award-winning actor and national heartthrob, in a goddamn towel will never change that. Even if I’m wrong for her. My love is dangerous, but it’s fucking real.

  “Don’t think for an instant, Jane, that you’re—”

  “I’m back,” Mateo announces, having pulled a T-shirt on without drying off. The web fabric molds to his muscles. He slides onto the stool next to mine.

  I force myself to relax. This tension wasn’t between him and Paige. It’s between the two of us. That’s what I feel in this room.

  “How are the pancakes?” he asks.

  I swallow the rest of the sentence. “Delicious,” I tell him, keeping my gaze on Jane. “Tastes better than anything I’ve ever had.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Beau Rochester

  The ocean rolls forward, forward, forward, ever moving over the shore but never quite reaching it. Moonlight winks across the surface. I’m sitting in the armchair again—waiting for Jane, if I’m honest. I heard the sounds of water in the pipes. Footsteps on the floorboard.

  And then the entire inn quieted.

  An hour passed.

  Then two.

  She’s not coming to visit me again, not to berate me and certainly, certainly not to have sex with me. I only have myself to blame, but it doesn’t stop the frustration. Now I have to imagine her knocking on Mateo’s door instead. It doesn’t make my cock any less hard. It’s throbbing, hungry, wanting inside a certain woman only a few yards away.

  The ocean provides the rhythmic soundtrack to my desire.

  Perhaps I drift to sleep. I’m woken by the sound of a cry from the hallway. My joints have stiffened in the cool night air, my leg screams in protest, but I stride across the room. There’s only one thought: Paige. She had nightmares when her parents died.

  Maybe the fire started them up again.

  The hallway is a startling black, like plunging into the ocean. No windows. No moonlight. I move by sense and feel. I find the paneled wood grain of her door beneath my palm. I fumble along the wallpaper until I reach the switch.

  The lamp casts a yellow glow across the room.

  A small form sleeps beneath the covers, very still. I step closer. Pale lashes rest against her cheek. Blonde curls sprawl across her pillow. A small hand lies half-open, unguarded in this moment. I feel a pang of protectiveness. A certainty that I would throw myself in front of a train for this child. That I would pull down the moon if she needed it.

  She looks sweet, but also deeply asleep. Peaceful, even.

  Did her nightmare end? Did I imagine it?

  Kitten looks up from her slumber, cat eyes glowing yellow in the dark. She’s tucked against Paige’s side. The kitten looks drowsy, too. As if I’m the one who disturbed her. She would already be awake if Paige had been tossing and turning.

  The cry comes again, this time louder and clearer. It wasn’t coming from this room at all. It’s from the room next door, and through the wall, I can feel the urgency. The fear. I move out of the room, careful to turn the light off and slide the door closed. Quiet, quiet.

  I pause right outside Jane’s door, wondering whether I should knock, debating the appropriateness of going inside. Of course there is no debate. It’s not appropriate. I’m her boss. I have no right to enter her bedroom.

  The knob turns in my hand. I push open the door, coming face-to-face with pitch black. Someone’s closed the curtains in this room. Moonlight barely penetrates the fabric. This time I don’t bother with the light. That’s not what she needs.

  Instead I move across the room, letting my eyes adjust to the moonlight.

  Shadows drape across the large bed. She looks larger than Paige but not by much. She’s still small and vulnerable. Jane brings out the protective instinct in me, though it’s very different with this grown woman. It feels darker. Possessive. Sexual. Except, of course, I can’t have sex with her. For her own sake. For mine. For the safety of this small, dysfunctional family.

  A soft cry comes from the bed, and I drop a knee onto the mattress. It rolls her toward me. I grasp her arm and shake.

  She thrashes in the bed, fighting the sheets, fighting me. Fighting invisible demons.

  “Jane,” I say, shaking her harder. “Wake up.”

  A fist lands on my chest. My jaw. I grunt as she manages to knee me in the stomach.

  I catch her hands and pin them to the bed. “Goddamn it, wake up.”

  A gasp. Then she opens her eyes wide. I can see the whites in the inky dark, the stark fear that vibrates through her body. I stare at her, holding her, willing her to know she’s safe. Relief crashes over her in a tidal wave. Her eyes flutter closed. Her body goes boneless in my arms. “Beau,” she says, her voice hoarse and intimate. It’s the sound of a woman who’s just woken up in the same bed. The sound of a woman with her lover.

  My cock hardens. The sweet sleepy scent of her, the warm softness—all of it makes hunger tighten in my body. I want to kiss every dark thought. I want to fuck away her nightmares. I settle for pulling back with a businesslike nod. “You were having a
bad dream.”

  She reaches for me. Her hand pauses in the air, halted by every barrier between us. She’s so much younger than me. Far too innocent for the images flashing through my mind. She wants comfort, not sex, but she’s too naive to know the difference.

  Maybe I’m naive, too.

  A heavy beat runs through my veins. Take her. Mark her. Make her mine. I’ve walked away from million dollar deals, but it feels impossible to walk away from her. She’s a siren. I’ll throw myself against the jagged cliffs, turning the ocean pink with my blood.

  Her hand hovers in the air. Indecision. Uncertainty.

  I’m holding my breath. Holding it as she reaches for me. Her knuckles brush my cheek. There’s a faint rasp against the bristles. “I know you don’t want to have sex,” she says.

  And I have to hold back the laugh. The hysterical laugh. The howl of denial. I don’t want to have sex with her? It’s the only thing I can think about. I need it more than I need air.

  A breath whooshes out of her. “Can you hold me?”

  Can I hold her without fucking her? I’m not sure. It’s a request of purity, but there’s nothing pure about my thoughts. Walk away while you still can. Too late for that. I press my face into her hand, breathing in the salt scent of her skin, pressing a kiss to the fluttery pulse at her wrist. How can I turn away from her when she needs something, anything?

  This has nothing to do with Beau Rochester. That’s what I tell myself. I’m a warm body. A temporary cure for the loneliness and the fear. So I slide beneath the floral coverlet. Her body curls into my arms as if she was made to be held by me.

  I rest my chin on the top of her head, my eyes wide open in the dark. How the hell am I going to walk away? How can I live without holding her every second of every goddamn day?

  “I’ll hold you until you fall asleep,” I mutter, knowing that I’ll have to leave.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, her breath hot against my chest.

  Dread unfurls in my stomach. This was how the fire started. I lost myself in her and let my guard down. If I gave in and touched her, or worse, slept the night with her in my arms, we’d be in danger again. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow night, but it would only be a matter of time.

  When did I learn that love meant danger?

  Before the fire. Before Paige’s parents drowned. No, I learned it as a child, when I was getting my ass kicked behind the elementary school. When I coughed up my own tooth, when I fought so hard even Joe Causey, the bully two years older and a good fifty pounds heavier, backed down, my brother watching in dark fascination.

  Jane moves in my arms, restless. She’s seeking something. Comfort? Safety? My primitive brain thinks she’s seeking pleasure, and I’m damned well ready to give it to her.

  “What was your nightmare about?” I ask. It’s a cruel question. A trick question, because there’s nothing guaranteed to splash cold water on my lust more than hearing her fear.

  “You,” she whispers, and I go still in shock.

  There’s true tragedy in her past. Abuse and hardship. We barely made it out of a goddamn inferno, but it’s not those things she dreams about. “Me?”

  “You were angry at me.”

  Angry because she almost died in the fire. Angry because I couldn’t save her. There’s no air in my lungs. It feels like I’ve been punched in the stomach. It hurts worse than anything Joe Causey could ever do to me. “Sweetheart.”

  “I couldn’t leave you.”

  A shudder runs through my body. “God, sweetheart. Of course you couldn’t. It was too much to ask of you, living with that knowledge. And it was too much to ask of me, watching you burn. It was a goddamned unholy night, both of us ruined. Forgive me, forgive me.”

  “Yes,” she says in a broken whisper. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” She should be terrified of my guilt-drenched ramblings, but she seems to understand. She moves as if to get closer, though it hardly feels possible. She’ll climb inside me. She’ll burrow under my skin.

  I hold her as tight as I did in the fire, my fingers probably leaving bruises. There are no flames. No falling ash. Only the bone-deep certainty that if I don’t hold on, I’ll lose her. “Let me,” I tell her, running a hand over her hip and between her thighs. I’m breaking my own damn rule, but I don’t care. “Let me make it better. I’ll touch you until you cream on my palm, until you’re slick and messy. I’ll touch you until you forget all about the nightmare.”

  Her hips rock away from my questing hands. And then back. She’s skittish, this woman, this goddess. I made her this way. I cup her sex in apology. In reassurance. I might be a coldhearted bastard, but her body trusts me. She’s already wet. Was she slick when she dreamed about me? When she writhed in her nightmare? Did she know, even then, that I would kiss her better? I run my middle finger through the slickness. My cock flexes in my jeans, wanting that wetness, wanting this heat. No. This isn’t about me. It’s about Jane.

  The pad of my middle finger makes circles around her clit. Once. Twice. Three times and she bucks her hips. She’s so hungry for it. Maybe this is the medicine she needs. Not the orange pill bottles the hospital sent home. Not the butterfly bandages or the salve. She needs this pussy fucked—by my fingers, my tongue. My cock. Anything will work.

  “Beau,” she says, the word ending in a whine. “I need… I need…”

  “Say it for me, sweetheart. Tell me what this little pussy needs.”

  Her hands grasp at me—my shirt, my hair. She’s drowning in sensation, and I’m the current, dragging her to the bottom. “You,” she breathes.

  My breath hitches at the admission. There’s only a small pause, a split second where I wonder what the hell I’m doing here, where I sail over the cliff, on my way down. Then I’m on top of her, around her, kissing her like this is the last chance I’ll ever get. I push two fingers inside her sweet cunt. Her inner muscles pull me deeper, and I groan at the sweet sensation. I want to feel her around my cock, but I know I don’t deserve that. Not yet.

  I move down her body, spreading her legs wide. She squirms, sensing where I’m going, what I’m doing. I’ve tasted her before, but she was tipsy then. Now she’s sober. And shy. It makes me harder, of course. Everything she does makes me harder. I’m determined to do this, to show her my apology this way. My palms push her thighs apart, revealing her to me—all dark, musky surrender. I press my face into her sex and nuzzle into her curls, reveling in the salt scent of her. God, she’s delicious. Woman and desire. I find the slick, dark center of her. I slide my tongue from the bottom to the top, feeling her smoothness, her secret skin. At the top I lash her clit, the place I touched with my middle finger, I circle with my tongue. She moans.

  Her hips rock in little desperate movements. I have no desire to rush her to the finish line. Not when my cock throbs against the sheets of the bed, leaking precum onto the sheets. I want to draw this out—for her pleasure and my pain.

  I write her a message on her clit, the most sensitive place on her body with the most tactile part of mine, drawing each letter with a lash. I L O V E Y O U.

  And then I continue, D A M N Y O U.

  She’s making little sobbing sounds by the end. I have to hold down her hips to keep her steady. Her body undulates against the mattress. She’s damn near begging me to fuck her, and my cock wants to do it, but something holds me back. Guilt. Dread. Some sense that if I fuck her, if I sleep in her bed, we’ll wake up in a raging fire again.

  I attack her clit with focus, with the intensity I can’t give her. I spell out the words I can’t say, until she breaks apart in my arms, her cunt wet against my mouth, her desire sweet as I lick it up. She collapses on the bed, her body boneless. I move to lie down next to her. Yes, my cock hurts like a motherfucker. So does my leg, for that matter. It’s pain that I’ve earned. Pain that I deserve. I’m not sure when my crimes started. Was it when I risked Jane’s life in the fire? Or was it earlier, when I walked away from Emily when she needed me? I can’t be what a woman needs. I’ll
only hurt her. It’s inevitable.

  She curves herself over my body, her legs straddling me, a goddess rising from the water, all bronze skin and dark hair, her hands uncertain on my cock. I grunt against the sudden pleasure, the urge to come right there and then. I watch from beneath slitted eyes as she lifts her body.

  “Is this right?” she asks, breathless, fitting the head of my cock against her slick core.

  If I were a better man, a good man, I’d take her hips in my hands. I’d fuck her from underneath, make this easy, but instead I watch her struggle. I relish each brush of her soft, clumsy fingers against my hardness. I enjoy the awkward angle of her body as she rides a man for the very first time. For a moment it seems like it won’t happen, like we’ll be poised on this precipice forever, the wrong angle, the slightest bite of pain—and then all at once she slides down. We’re connected completely, effortlessly, her body completely enveloping mine, her hips resting on me.

  “Oh,” she says, her eyes wide with wonder.

  “Yes,” I grunt. “Like that.”

  There is no steady rhythm. She doesn’t know it yet, and that hint of innocence makes my chest ache. I let her ride me in abrupt, eager starts. My cock doesn’t know the difference. It just wants inside her. Inside her sweet heat. Her hands rest on my chest, taking strength from me. It’s how I want her to be, always leaning on me, always needing me.

  I put my thumb against her clit—lightly, lightly. Only enough that she can brush against me every time she rocks forward. Her breath catches. Now that she has the right incentive, she finds the rhythm, pushing her clit against my thumb, again and again, her smooth pearl against my callused pad, becoming slicker and slicker around my cock. Her eyes drift shut as she loses herself in pleasure, but I can’t do the same. I can’t close my eyes. I can’t look away from the goddess that rides me, her breasts moving with erotic grace, her face gorgeous as she climaxes. Her pussy clamps down hard, dragging an orgasm from me, milking my cock as I shudder and ache beneath her.