They were alike, he and Andrew, she thought, struggling to hold on to whatever composure she had left. Except that, somehow, hearing what Gabriel had to say hurt even more than anything she’d endured because of Andrew. She didn’t know why.
“He thinks so. He wanted to get together this weekend.”
He was right, John thought. He had walked in on her making plans for an assignation. And it sliced through him like a rapier, drawing blood instantly. “So, when are you going?”
She didn’t owe him an explanation. She didn’t owe him a damn thing except for a check.
“I’m not,” she retorted. Although maybe she should, she thought now. Maybe…no, that was crazy. She wasn’t about to do something self-destructive just because John had turned out to be a louse.
“Got something better lined up?” He hated himself for asking. Moreover, he didn’t even recognize himself. Even at the height of the arguments with Diane, he had never felt this torrent of emotion assaulting him, had never experienced this degree of betrayal.
“Yes, I do,” she snapped back. “I promised Katie I’d take her to the zoo.”
He hadn’t expected to hear his daughter’s name in this. John could only stare at Courtney and repeated dumbly, “The zoo?”
“Yes, the zoo, where they keep the four-legged animals.” She sucked air into her lungs. “We decided that while you were in line buying lunch this afternoon.” Courtney remembered the little girl’s gleeful reply when she’d asked Katie if she wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo. “We were going to ask you to come along if you were good. You blew it, mister.” She drew herself up, her eyes growing into blue flames. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”
With that, Courtney stormed from the room without a backward glance.
Seething, she ran up the stairs to her room. It would have done her a world of good to slam the door in her wake, but she couldn’t. The noise would wake Katie up.
Courtney covered her face with her hands. Her life had been turned completely upside down in less than a month. Now she couldn’t even have a decent tantrum in her own house without worrying about the repercussions.
She felt angry tears forming. Furious, she brushed them away. More came to take their place.
The bastard, who the hell did he think he was, taking that attitude with her? He had no right to sit in judgment of her. No right to make her feel this angry.
This miserable.
She couldn’t catch her breath. But she did catch a glimpse of her own reflection. A reflection that told her a great deal. More than she wanted to know.
She knew that face. Worse than that, she knew what it meant.
Oh, God, it wasn’t happening again. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t have feelings for him. Not real feelings. Tears were rising in her throat, making her breath hitch.
No!
She refused, absolutely refused, to feel anything for John Gabriel except contempt. He was a boor, an insufferable, manipulative, mercenary boor. How could she feel anything for him? She knew why he was here. For the money. He was doing it only for the money.
She was buying herself a two-year headache, that’s what she was doing.
No, she amended, now it was just one year, three hundred and—
Her head jerked up when she heard the knock on her door. Courtney froze, staring at it. Maybe Sloan had decided not to go out after all and had been drawn by the sound of raised voices. It couldn’t be Gabriel. He wouldn’t dare.
“Who is it?”
“John.” The anger had been completely siphoned from his voice, replaced by something she couldn’t recognize. Not that she cared. “Can I come in?
There was no way she was letting him in. One look at her face and he’d think she was crying over him instead of over the fact that justifiable homicide couldn’t be stretched to cover these circumstances.
Sniffling, she wiped the tear tracks from her cheeks with the back of her hand. It was a stupid trait, to cry when she was angry. Absolutely stupid.
“No,” she shouted. “Stay out.”
The door opened, anyway. John crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him quietly.
She stared at him incredulously. “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”
In reply, he raised his hands to fend off her words, and anything else she might have wanted to throw his way. “I just wanted to come in to apologize.”
She crossed her arms before her. If he thought he could erase what had happened with a single word, he was more deluded than she’d thought “Fine. You’ve done it Now go.”
John didn’t move. “I can’t That’s just the trouble.”
Courtney was in no mood for this. She didn’t want to see him, not in her room, not in her life. When she thought of what a fool she had been turning into because of him, she could just scream.
“Then I’ll just have to shove you out, won’t I?” Before he could answer, she was behind him, her hands on his back, as if she really would push him out of her room. But then her hands slid down to her sides. “Damn you, anyway!”
He heard the tears in her voice. John turned and took her hands in his. He had to explain it to her, and maybe, in so doing, he could explain it to himself, as well.
“Courtney, when I heard you on the phone with him—”
“You were eavesdropping—?” He had just added spying to the list of charges against him. How could he?
John shook his head. “I came down to thank you for making Katie so happy today.”
He had always thought that he was enough for Katie, that he could be all things to her. But seeing her with Courtney showed him that he’d been wrong. Katie needed a woman’s influence in her life. And as she grew, so would that need.
“By the time I realized you were on the phone, I was already listening to what you were saying.” It cost him to admit this, but the apology wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t “listening, and getting angry.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but he wouldn’t let her. If she interrupted, he’d never find the courage again to finish.
“Before you say anything, I know I don’t have any right to get angry, but emotions aren’t easily reined in by common sense.” The limb he had gone out on was incredibly thin and bending now under the added weight of his admission. But she had a right to know. “If they were, I wouldn’t be feeling what I am.”
“Angry,” she supplied. Any fool could see that.
“Yes,” he said tentatively.
That wasn’t all, she realized. The breath stopped in her throat. “And?”
Angry words he could say easily. But baring his soul was another matter. He lightly glided his palms along her bare arms. Even touching her like this stirred him.
“I want you, Courtney. I don’t want to want you, but I do.”
He was pulling her toward him and trying to push her away at the same time. She laughed softly and shook her head. “Well, no one can ever accuse you of having a silver tongue.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you…” That wasn’t entirely true and he’d promised himself to be honest. “Well, yeah, maybe I am. But what I’m really trying to do is explain to you why I acted like a jerk down there.” He had to hurry, before his courage flagged.
“Because suddenly I had a mental image of you going to someone else. Leaning into someone else the way you leaned into me when I kissed you.” He looked into her eyes, knowing he was admitting far too much. “I didn’t want you doing that. Didn’t want you kissing someone else. Didn’t want you making love with someone else when you can’t make love with me.”
She would have been able to walk away from any thing else but this. She searched his eyes and saw herself mirrored in them. Trapped there. “I can’t?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “No, you can’t. Shouldn’t.” Inch by inch, he felt himself weakening, giving in. Surrendering. As if his hands belonged to someone else, he watched them slip around her waist. “Just like I shouldn’t be holdi
ng you this way.” Unable to help himself, he buried his face in her hair, inhaling deeply. “Or smelling your hair.”
Struggling for some measure of control, John moved Courtney away from him to look into her eyes. “Or wanting you so much that I can’t even breathe.”
The smile on her lips began in her eyes. “Then how did you manage to smell my hair?”
The invitation was there, in her eyes. And he accepted, knowing this was a part of the bargain he should have never agreed to. He laughed, drawing her to him again. “Perverse to the end.”
“Not the end.” On automatic pilot now, Courtney rose on her toes and wound her arms around the back of his neck. “Not yet.” If she was lucky, the end was on the other side of tomorrow.
An eternity from now.
It was all the lead-in he needed.
He brought her to him, his mouth to hers. And with it, his soul.
Everything he couldn’t say aloud to her was there, in his kiss, in the way he held her. In the way he looked at her. The very touch of his mouth made love to her a thousand ways, ways she’d never experienced before or even dreamed of.
He made her feel like something precious, something desired. She could feel the passion that was there, locked away, just a step out of reach. And she knew that he was holding himself in check to give her what she needed. Tenderness.
Something within Courtney sobbed with joy.
Pressing herself to him more closely, she slanted her mouth against his, her desires multiplying at a prodigious rate.
He seemed to know what she was thinking even before she did. Knew just how to hold her to reduce her to a state that was somewhere between solid and vapor. It wasn’t something well rehearsed and polished, it was something that came from the heart
. She felt like heaven to him. Pure heaven. His hands worshipped her as they slid along the curves of her body, the enticing swell of her breasts. He schooled himself to take her slowly, inch by inch, even as his mind urged him to race, to take her before he woke up from this dream.
But if it was a dream, somehow he would find a way to make it last a little while longer.
They had the night and it stretched out before them, endless, with only their fire to give light to the darkness that lay beyond.
John framed Courtney’s face, kissing her over and over again, a starving man at a feast, savoring every individual morsel he discovered. He filled his hands with her hair, snapping the band that had held it in place. Streams of gold rained along his fingers.
Cupping the back of her head, he deepened the kiss and tasted the moan that came from deep in her throat.
Excitement roared in his ears. In his veins. In his loins.
His heart raced wildly in his chest as he felt her eager fingers fumbling at the buttons on his shirt. She was undressing him, her eyes on his. There was so much emotion there, it overwhelmed him.
Courtney dragged the shirt from his shoulders, wanting to press herself against him, but he held her back. As she looked at him in confusion, he undid the tie at the back of her neck. She shivered as the hot-pink halter split in half, each side slipping down her chest until there was only a bit of cloth lingering on the swell of her breasts.
She held her breath as she watched him. John moved the material slowly aside, wonder in his eyes. A child at Christmas, unwrapping the one gift he had wanted with all his might, the one gift he’d been so certain wouldn’t be his.
The halter pooled at her waist a moment before he tugged it from her. His eyes skimmed over her. She felt warm each place his eyes touched.
“You are perfect.”
“No,” she said, bringing her mouth back to his, “I’m not.” Because perfect people didn’t make mistakes, and she was making one. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she knew that. But for now, she didn’t care. For now, all she wanted was to feel him, to have him.
She pressed her breasts against his smooth skin, glorying in the heat she felt generated there.
Courtney moaned again, shivering in anticipation as she felt him easing the button on her shorts out of its hole. The zipper parted, a fraction of an inch at a time, fueling the fire in both their veins.
And then she was standing there before him, wearing the most enticing piece of white lace he’d ever seen. White lace trimming tiny red underwear.
His grin was slightly lopsided, and endearing for just that reason. “You look like a Valentine.”
Make love with me, now. Before I burst. “A little late in the season for that.”
He shook his head. “Never too late for Valentine’s Day.”
As he took her into his arms again, he could feel her struggling to undo his jeans. He was about to help her, then stopped. Feeling her fingers skimming along his abdomen caused such inexplicably delicious sensations to go through him. His stomach muscles quivered, but he couldn’t move. All he could do was feel.
In unison, their hands spreading on one another, they shed the last cloth barriers between them, movement for movement, as if they were holding their breath, anticipating the explosion that was just beyond.
Chapter Twelve
It was, Courtney supposed when she thought of it later, as close to an out-of-body experience as she would ever have. Because part of her was sure that she had died and gone to heaven.
Cradled in his arms, irrevocably lost in his kiss, she felt John lay her back on the bed. Beneath her, the soft, silken covers whispered along her skin. And against her body was the press of his, hard and urgent. Stirring her, making her want him with an intensity that was stunning.
The lovemaking was so slow, so languid, and yet so intense, that she felt she was both inside and outside the circle of participation at the same time. Courtney could see what was coming next, intuit it, but even knowing didn’t prepare her for the actual sensation, nor the impact that it had on her.
The impact he had on her.
She was drowning in him, in the tenderness that was there in every movement. In the desire she felt throbbing just below the surface.
It aroused a level of passion within her that she had no idea she was capable of. He made her wild, with needs that cried out to be fulfilled.
Aroused to almost a frenzy, she ran her hands along his body in response, in initiation. Courtney didn’t want to be the only one overwhelmed with these feelings. She wanted him to share them with her. They were too glorious to be kept to herself.
No matter what she did, John outdid her. And undid her.
How could she have ever thought of him as a rough, rude clod? His movements, so graceful, so lyrical, belonged to a prince, not a commoner. She was the commoner here, an awestruck peasant with her nose pressed against the window of a place she hadn’t even dreamed existed. She wanted to be part of it more than she had ever wanted anything else in her life.
John caressed her with his eyes, with his hands, with his lips. Her body burned as he anointed her. Parted where he touched her. Twisted in greedy hope of garnering more.
She felt radiant, beautiful, and was filled with such insatiable desire it took her breath away.
Courtney took his breath away. The attraction he had felt from the first moment he’d seen her exploded in his veins, hot and demanding the instant they came together in her room. It was everything he could do to keep himself in check, to give her what he felt she deserved.
What was to be could not be hurried, no matter what the urgency drumming through his body demanded.
He touched, he explored, he possessed. And in possessing, became completely possessed. Completely hers.
Whatever controls he prided himself on were stripped from him, not layer by layer, but in one huge sweep. He was drunk with wanting, and with the rush that anticipation brought.
For this small moment in time, he would have her. And she would have him. It was more than enough.
And then, when his body begged for release, when his ability to hang on was completely gone, he came to her. Hands linked to hers, he lowered himsel
f into her slowly, watching her eyes as they became one. Truly one for a tiny portion of time.
He watched her eyes and found his soul trapped there.
The rhythm that they moved to, first slowly and then more urgently, was theirs alone and bound them to each other forever as they took the last summit together.
Eventually, pulses slowed and breaths were caught and evened out. The euphoria receded, like an evening shadow merging into the darkness.
Rolling off, John gathered Courtney to him and was surprised at how comforting it felt to have her like this, against him, her heart beating in time with his.
But Surprise had a twin and its name was Worry. John suddenly feared that he could become accustomed to this feeling, to this situation. That perhaps, even now, he was already on that path. And he knew where that path would ultimately lead.
To disappointment. Disappointment so sharp, his very existence would be threatened.
This isolated incident, wonderful though it was, was only an aberration, he told himself. Just an anomaly born of such intense desire that it couldn’t be resisted. But once the passion cooled, they would go on being who they were, people born on opposite sides of a phantom class structure that would eventually tear them apart.
It had happened that way before. Why should anything have changed just because he was older?
He didn’t want to think about it, not now. Not while she still lay beside him, warm with his love. Sighing, he tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
Courtney looked spent, he thought. As was he. But, heaven help him, he wanted her again. Wanted to see her eyes darkening with desire, wanted to feel her lips racing along his skin. Wanted to feel her moving against him, a cry caught in her throat.
What had she done to him?
She stirred beside him and murmured something he didn’t quite make out. Maybe it was just as well. John smiled at her, sadness outlining his mouth, his heart.
“Sorry.”
Courtney turned toward him, her heart quickening. Was he sorry they had made love? Now that it was over, did he regret doing this? Was that what he was saying? She didn’t think she could bear it if it was.
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