He was standing where she’d left him, watching her retreat with an expression on his face she could only describe as…bleak. Her chest tightened, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Hot juice gushed from her core into the already wet crotch of her pink lace panties. She closed her eyes, helpless against the tide of arousal swamping her. What was there about this man that destroyed her so? That made her go from despising him one minute to wanting him the next? To needing him with a hunger so ferocious it vaporized all her resistance and left her a mindless wreck?
She hated her body’s response to him. He left you, she reminded herself ruthlessly. He took your father’s money to stay away from you. He didn’t want you then, he doesn’t want you now. Otherwise, why would he have stayed away for eight years? Why would his first interaction with you be so cold and unfeeling? Why would he have given you a goddamn ticket?
Letting out a low, guttural growl of impotent frustration, Sarah turned onto the main highway. In spite of the car’s air-conditioning, she was sweating as if she’d just completed the Death Valley marathon. And she was aroused as hell. Her breasts were swollen and heavy, her nipples tight, aching knots. Her skin sizzled, as if being brushed by Fourth of July sparklers. Her pussy was leaking all over the crotch of her panties. The entire car reeked of her scent, sharp and pungent.
No one but Jesse had ever gotten her this hot, this turned on. Not even her ex-fiancé, Phillip Nugent, had affected her like this. No. No! She shook her head, clamping down on her unwelcome thoughts. She was so not going there. Phillip Nugent was over with. Done. Past. He would never harm her again.
As for Jesse…
Her lips thinned. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t let it matter, because Jesse didn’t want her. “Damn it, he doesn’t want you!” she shouted into the silence of the vehicle, as if saying the words out loud would make them more real. He would never belong to her. Not as she needed him to, body, heart, and soul. Not as she, already, belonged to him. As she had belonged to him for the last eight years. As she would still belong to him eight years from now.
Because no matter what had happened between them, no matter how cruelly he’d treated her, no matter how long he’d stayed away, she loved him to the bottom of her soul. And she’d never be whole without him. She knew it now, with a certainty that made her want to howl in anguish. She hated it, but she could no longer deny it. Her heart, her love, her very soul belonged to a man who, if today were any judge, wanted nothing to do with her.
No, she concluded miserably, she was better off with no man at all than with the wrong man. Her disastrous engagement to Phillip Nugent had proven that. When she’d finally come to her senses and dumped him, after months of escalating abuse, she’d sworn off men entirely. A decision which, up ’til now, she’d had no cause to regret.
She was content with her life exactly the way it was, thank you very much. No men. No sex. No—who needed sex anyway? It was wet, noisy, and messy. To say nothing of vastly overrated, even though she’d only actually experienced it with one man. Phillip Nugent. And that had been a fiasco from the start.
Oh, she knew what it should be like. What she wanted it to be like. An act of complete and utter passion and lustful abandon that ended in mind-blowing pleasure for both parties. She also knew instinctively that sex with Jesse Colter would be exactly like that. Because on that last day, before his final betrayal of her, she’d had a tiny glimpse of his sexual prowess. Near-sex with Jesse eight years ago had spoiled her for actual sex with anyone else.
Including Phillip Nugent. Because it hadn’t been Phillip’s face she’d conjured up, lying there in the dark night after night, alone and unfulfilled after he’d emptied himself and rolled off of her with a satisfied grunt. It had been Jesse’s. Jesse smiling. Jesse laughing. Jesse looking at her the way he’d looked that day eight years ago, his expression wrought with hunger and need, lust and love.
Pulling in a deep breath, she let it out slowly as she wound her way up the long, curving driveway to Marshall’s Hill, the sprawling, antebellum plantation house that was her ancestral home. Her insides felt bruised, battered by the rawness of her response to a man she’d truly never expected to see again. A man she should rightfully hate.
Aching all over, she circled the massive central fountain surrounded by flower beds and pulled into her usual parking space in front of the five-car garage. She walked to the back door, her movements stiff and ungainly. God, what was wrong with her? Had she been run over by a truck? Fumbling with the keys, she dropped them twice before finally managing to force her nerveless fingers around the correct one and insert it into the lock.
Dropping her purse and laptop on the granite-topped island, she went to the refrigerator to retrieve the grilled chicken Caesar salad she’d made that morning. She poured some dressing over the greens, got a fork from the silverware drawer, and sat down at the counter to eat her lonely meal.
She’d been living alone in this white elephant of a house for the past year, although, initially, she’d only planned to stay a couple of months—just long enough to put it and the five-hundred acres of prime farm land that accompanied it on the market. As an Honors graduate of Harvard Law, she had a new job waiting for her in Boston, at one of that city’s most prestigious law firms. Staying in Marshall’s Creek had simply never occurred to her—until members of the Town Council had approached her. The current Marshall County Attorney had just been indicted for hiring a hit man to kill his wife. Would she be interested in taking on the role of Acting County Attorney? It would be temporary, a year at most. Just until they had a chance to search for a permanent replacement. After all, her father would be so proud of her.
Yeah, right. Her father had never been proud of her. In fact, after a lifetime of being controlled and manipulated by Judge Arthur Chamberlain Marshall, she’d felt nothing but a profound sense of relief at his death thirteen months ago. She hadn’t even come home for his funeral, fully expecting to hear from his lawyers that she’d been disinherited and the entire estate had been left to various charities. After all, hadn’t he threatened to do exactly that the day she’d discovered that he’d paid Phillip Nugent a million dollars to marry her? The day she’d finally come to her senses and severed all ties with both of them.
Suddenly losing her appetite, she pushed the uneaten salad away. Phillip Nugent was over, done with. But Jesse…That was another story altogether. Propping her elbows on the countertop, she lowered her head into her hands with a groan, still shaken from her disturbing encounter with Jesse Colter. Her shoulders slumped as all the energy drained from her in a whoosh! Struggling against the tears threatening to overwhelm her, she shook her head back and forth slowly. Damn it, what was he doing here in Marshall’s Creek? Why had he come back to a place he’d obviously hated? Why—Damn it, stop thinking about Jesse! You’re not a hormonal teenager anymore, you’re a mature woman. Get over him, already. Go upstairs, take a nice hot shower, curl up in bed, and read that book you’ve been putting off reading for the past six weeks.
Appetite gone, she stood abruptly. Dumping the unfinished salad in the garbage can, she put the dishes in the dishwasher and went upstairs to her bedroom. Kicking off her shoes and shedding clothes as she went, she walked through the cozy sitting area into the en suite bathroom.
Turning on the water, she stepped under the hot, soothing spray. She stood there rolling her neck and shoulders, feeling the stiffness gradually ease beneath the heat and massaging action of the water. Clouds of steam roiled around her, stirring up unbidden memories. Memories so vivid, she could swear she saw Jesse’s face reflecting off all the shiny, wet surfaces surrounding her.
Jesse…The way he’d looked that long-ago summer, before life and her father had conspired to rip them apart.
Jesse…Her savage warrior. Her knight in shining armor. Her hero.
Jesse…Who’d brought everything magical and wonderful into her lonely, isolated world. Who’d brought fairy tales to vivid and fanciful life and had made happi
ly ever after seem possible.
Gulping back the tears, she put up her arms as if trying to stop the devastating memories that were barreling toward her like a gigantic mudslide. But they were unstoppable, so she just sank down onto the marble shower bench, dropped her head in her hands, and let them slam into her.
* * * *
Thirteen years ago
“Help!” The startled shriek burst from her as the dead branch she was sitting on split from the trunk with a deafening cr-r-rack!, crashing down onto the branch below. Grappling frantically for something to hold on to, she swung her legs around the secure branch just as the broken one rolled across her knees, gouging her flesh painfully. “Oww—w-w! He-e-e-lp!”
“Hang on, Princess, I’m comin’!”
Heart in her throat, she watched a young man flying toward her across the grass. “Hurry, please hurry! I‘m going to fall!”
“No, you’re not, baby, just stay real still, okay? I’m comin’ to get you.” Muscles straining, the young man grabbed the lowest limb of the forty-foot sycamore and pulled himself up, clambering swiftly from limb to limb until he was sitting astride the very branch she was hanging from, a good thirty feet above the ground.
“Oh, God, please hurry!”
The young man scooted forward and grabbed the broken branch, lifting it up off her legs and giving it a sharp push. For a long minute, it just hung there, held in place by its dead limbs and twigs, all gnarled and tangled with the living ones of the branch they were on. Swiftly lowering his upper body, he extended his right arm down through the tangled maze of interwoven limbs. “Hurry, Princess, grab my hand.”
She reached up blindly just as the broken branch jackknifed sharply, ripping her hands out of his reach. She screamed.
“Jesus!” With a last-ditch, superhuman effort, he slid his hips sideways, extending his reach just far enough to grab her wrist. She gasped in pain as he yanked her up through the whippy limbs, just as the dead branch finally managed to free itself. In slow motion, it arced away from the tree and toppled end over end to the ground below, landing with an earth-shaking thud. As if released by the sound, Sarah began to cry, huge, gulping sobs that shook her entire body.
The young man pulled her against him and held her tight. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he murmured soothingly, rubbing his hand up and down her back. “You’re safe now, baby, I’ve got you.”
Sarah threw her arms around him, pressing her face against his chest as sobs continued to wrack her slender frame. When she finally quieted, he moved his hands to her upper arms and pushed her back. She was literally covered with blood from scratches and deep gouges all over her face, legs and arms. Quickly removing his shirt, he wadded it up and gently began dabbing at her wounds. When he was finished, he looked up to find her staring at him unblinkingly, her face streaked with blood and tears.
“Hi,” he said with a disarmingly crooked smile. “I’m Jesse.”
Nothing in Sarah’s life had prepared her for Jesse Colter. Motherless since the age of eight, the only child of a distant, controlling, mostly absent father, she’d had very little contact with the world beyond the gates of Marshall’s Hill, her family’s estate. Raised mainly by tutors and nannies, she’d had no idea people like Jesse Colter even existed outside the world of fiction. Everything about him called to the deeply romantic nature of her soul. He was every brooding, enigmatic hero in every book she’d ever read. He was her Heathcliff. Her Ivanhoe. Her Aragorn.
Rough and raw, even at the age of nineteen, Jesse Colter was tall, broad shouldered and arrestingly handsome, with straight, shoulder-length black hair and killer cheekbones that hinted at some exotic DNA in his background, full, sensual lips, and eyes so dark they were almost black.
Newly hired as a part-time gardener’s assistant, he became her entire world that summer. She became his shadow, following him everywhere. She helped him with his yard work, read aloud to him from her current favorite book, Watership Down. She chattered ceaselessly, asking his opinion on everything, from global warming to politics to ghosts and UFOs.
Every day he smuggled in some innocuous pop culture item that had been forbidden by her stern, unloving father—nail polish, eye shadow, Slime, bubble gum, the latest teen magazines, flavored lip gloss—which she’d promptly applied to both her lips and his. He gave her an old deck of cards and taught her to play Gin Rummy and Texas Hold ’Em. She taught him how to play tennis. They fished, frolicked in the pool, hunted for salamanders down by the creek, and caught fireflies.
They’d made an odd twosome that long-ago summer, she being thirteen going on forty, he being nineteen going on eleven. It had been a summer filled with laughter and discovery. A summer shimmering with magic and endless possibilities. A carefree summer that had allowed both of them to be something neither had ever been before—children. And to have something neither had ever had before—a friend.
That fall, at the urging of her tutor, her father had allowed her to enroll in public school. Marshall’s Creek Junior High was an environment so incomprehensible to her, she felt like she’d been dropped on an alien planet. But she eventually adapted, acquiring a new, breezy maturity and an edge of brittle insouciance, losing her reserved, formal way of speaking and peppering her speech with all the latest slang.
For the first few days of work the next summer, Jesse had simply stared at her as if she were the alien who’d been dropped on this planet. And when she’d asked him what he was staring at, he’d just smiled and muttered, “Who are you and what have you done with my friend Sarah?” Her response had been to roll her eyes and say in a world-weary tone, “Whatever.”
At age fourteen, she had finally entered puberty, dramatically altering the dynamic between them. His raw, smoldering sexuality confounded her awakening hormones, even as it called to them, making her painfully shy and tongue-tied in his presence. Although she still helped him with the yard work, she mostly just found herself staring at him hungrily when she thought he wasn’t looking, her mouth watering at his broad, hairless chest, at the way his muscles bunched and flexed beneath the bronze satin of his skin as he maneuvered heavy bags of mulch and fertilizer. Gone was the easy camaraderie, the laughter, the carefree feeling that they were buddies, rather than separate individuals from two unique and very different backgrounds.
By the next summer, she had developed curves in all the right places, including breasts and hips that could only be described as voluptuous. Eager to explore her newly awakened sensuality, she waited on pins and needles for Jesse to show up for work. Mouth dry, stomach churning, palms sweating, she waited. Until long after dark, she waited. Through the next day, she waited.
She wanted to ask their gardener where Jesse was, but didn’t want him to know she was interested. She couldn’t bear it if he teased her. Or, even worse, told her father. Somehow, she knew instinctively that Judge Marshall would not be pleased with her interest in Jesse Colter.
By the end of the week, she was finally able to admit to herself that he was never coming back and she was devastated. She cried for days, eating little, sleeping less. Withdrawing into herself, she spent the entire lonely summer nursing her bruised and aching heart.
She didn’t see him again until that November. Cheerleading practice had just let out and she was sitting on a swing in the playground, twisting the chains back and forth as she waited for Sykes, the family chauffeur, to come pick her up. He was late, as usual, and she was pissed. There was a nip in the air that hadn’t been there that morning and her skimpy cheerleading outfit was no match for the biting assault of the wind. She was shivering so hard her teeth were chattering. When three young men entered the playground, bouncing a basketball back and forth between them, she stilled, unsure what to do. She didn’t actually know them, but she knew of them—Ryder Malone, Tucker Blanchard, and Jacob Rendell, sons of three of the town’s leading citizens.
They had a reputation for being punks. At first, when they approached her, she ignored them. But they laughed and t
eased, and just goofed off in general, which made her laugh. And when Malone offered her his jacket, she took it, grateful for its warmth. Before she knew what was happening, they had closed in around her and were taking turns touching her in increasingly intimate places.
She slapped at their hands, backing away from them, yelling at them to stop and leave her alone. To no avail. What had started out as innocuous teasing quickly deteriorated into something much more sinister as they pinned her against the fence, insisting on giving her a ride home. She tried to push them away, but there were three of them, each one easily outweighing her by a good fifty pounds or more. Then, at an unseen signal from Ryder Malone, they grabbed her arms, force-marching her across the playground toward the gate. Malone’s old, battered pickup truck was parked at the curb. They’d just opened the passenger door, getting ready to push her in, when out of nowhere, a motorcycle came roaring up the sidewalk straight toward them.
Like an avenging angel, the helmeted rider grabbed Sarah’s arm and yanked her unceremoniously onto the bitch seat behind him. Jesse! Oh, my God, it was Jesse! With a muffled sob of relief, she threw her arms around his waist and held on tight as they roared off down the street. Taking her to the nearest park, he practically pushed her off the back of the Harley, giving her an excoriating lecture for even thinking about going off with three strange men. Telling her to forget about him—he never wanted to see her again. Then he’d just ridden off, leaving her standing there, shaking and sobbing and alone.
She should have hated him after that. But she hadn’t.
She should have forgotten him after that. But she couldn’t.
Jesse Colter had invaded the very fabric of her existence and neither his reprehensible behavior that day nor his ultimate betrayal three years later had been enough to drive him out of her mind and heart.
Loving Sarah (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 2
