by Misty Dietz
“Let’s go back inside and have a drink.”
He didn’t reply for the longest time, but pulled her to him abruptly when a group of drunken revelers stumbled by, then immediately set her an arm’s length away again when they passed.
“…so you can torture me some more?”
“What?” He’d said something. Holy buckets, he smelled gooooood.
Felt even better.
Her eyes focused on the buttons of his shirt. Eight of them. Wouldn’t take long to open that yummy package.
He grabbed her upper arms, bending down to replace the view of his buttons with his gorgeous eyes.
“Your buttons are a mad temptation,” she said, forestalling anything he’d planned to say. His eyebrows pulled down sharply. He was so sexy when he was irritated.
“Are you inebriated?” Not waiting for her answer, he began pulling her down the street. She could see the new black truck he’d bought yesterday parked half a block away.
She giggled, knowing that she was most definitely not drunk—she’d only had one drink since she’d arrived at Catwalk—but her professor had said inebriated. “Have I ever told you I love your brain?”
“Let’s go, Mya. Time for bed.”
“Oh, hell, we finally agree!” She started running to his truck, but stopped suddenly and turned to him. “Wait! I can’t leave Jazz.”
Forty minutes and sixty-nine naughty fantasies later, she and Jack had Jasmine dropped off at her apartment and were pulling into Rosie’s garage. Mya’s skin vibrated all along her left side where she’d been pressed up against Jack while Jazzy had rode shotgun with them. Mya had reluctantly scooted over after they’d dropped her off, but the tension in the truck during the ride back home had been over the top. Now, they were both sitting in the truck, the garage door already shut, but neither one of them seemed to want to be the first to move.
When she opened her mouth to speak, Jack opened his door, got out, slammed the door, and walked into Rosie’s without a backwards glance.
Are you kidding me? Mya scrambled out of the truck and raced inside, blood pumping hard like she was being dumped off on the frontlines of a war. He was already in the only bathroom in the house. She pounded on the door so hard it rattled the pictures on the hallway wall. “We’ve got to get a few things ironed out, Whiteside. This is driving me crazy! You hear me in there? First you’re all hot, alpha he-man protecting the little woman from big bad wolves, then you’re so goddamn cold I’m getting frostbite and whiplash simultaneously. Why are you doing this?”
He whipped the door open, and Oh. My. God.
He was shirtless.
And the top button of his jeans was undone.
Her lips parted. Her thoughts scattered.
He groaned, railroading her back against the opposite wall with his whole frame. “Fuck, Mya, when you look at me like that…”
His hands framed her jaw, tilting her head back to receive his open mouthed kiss. His lower body leaned into her, stance widening, pinning her against the wall. She was ready. Her arms came around him, her hands grasping at his warm skin, the robust muscles of his back, pulling him closer, tighter against her.
His mouth skated down the side of her face, his stubble prickling, so raw and honest. Made her feel alive. He always did that. How? He leaned down further, raked her bra straps down her arms. Whispered something at the juncture of her neck and clavicle. At the upper swell of her breasts. Goosebumps ran circles around her arms. She pressed his dark head closer, raking her nails lightly, then harder across the broad flare of his shoulders. One of his legs slid between hers. He straightened, bringing his thigh in contact with her center. Pressing. Watching with hungry eyes as she shifted to fit against him better. Watching her as her lips parted on a swelling moan.
His eyes glittering in the shadows until once more his mouth slanted across hers in a claiming she’d never known.
Her body tightened, her hips grinding against his leg. She was so…so—
Cool air. Shoulders suddenly in a painful grip, pinned against the wall so her lower body wouldn’t sag at the loss of his support. She opened her eyes. A savage look on Jack’s face, his chest pumping, his hair wild, so very loved by her hands.
She tried to put a finger to his lips. Don’t speak. Please Jack. Things always fell apart with words.
He pushed her fingers away, his eyes sharp with anger and something else that made her throat ache. “We’re only good at this part, aren’t we? I won’t do this again. I can’t. Don’t you see? God, Mya.”
His hands released her, and his long legs put space between them until he’d reentered the garage. As his truck roared off into the night she slid down the wall in his grandmother’s house, her tears trickling onto the beat-up oak floor where she’d first fallen in love with the boy who knew how to mine the secrets of her heart more effortlessly than the layers of earth that so fascinated him.
Chapter Ten
A blinding shaft of sunlight seared Jack’s eyes when they snapped open. He hissed and shot up, banging his head on the swing-arm lamp hanging over the ancient sofa in the corner of his office. He swore foully as the polite knocking on his door continued. Couldn’t be Mya because there was no such thing as a locked door to her. She would have either sweet-talked a maintenance man to unlock it for her, or more likely, would have picked the lock herself by now.
He swung his legs to the edge of the navy blue plaid sofa and reached for his glasses. “Coming. I’m coming,” he muttered, glancing at his watch, then blanching at the time. Nine-forty-nine. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so late.
Couldn’t be because he’d been up half the night with a raging hard on, berating himself for walking away from Mya’s passionate embrace, now could it? His head pounded, but that was apropos with his relentless dick. Might as well have a matching set.
He rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms to the ceiling, then opened his office door. Short and choppy black hair, black winging brows, green eyes heavily outlined with black pencil, and a narrow nose on a young lady who looked no older than a high school sophomore. She wore a red flannel shirt, a large black backpack slung over one shoulder. He’d never seen her before. “Can I help you?”
A full-on smile curved her lips, scrunching her eyes and making her seem much older somehow. “Sorry to bother you, Dr. Whiteside. I’m Timber Hollows,” she extended a hand, “second year graduate geosciences fellow studying under Dr. Erickson. I’ve followed your work since your presentation on the confluence of lines along the frankincense trade route in the Arabian Desert that led to the discovery of the lost city of Ubar. And let me just say, wow, I was floored! You and Dr. Erickson are rockstars in the field, and I can’t believe you’re both here now.”
“That’s flattering, thank you. I look forward to reviewing your projects this coming semester.” He smiled slightly, waiting to see if there was another reason she was stopping by on a July weekend morning when the rest of the campus was silent as a stone. She continued to stare at him for a moment, then seemed to recall herself. “So anyway, I pulled an all-nighter in Dr. Erickson’s lab, and I saw you come in last night. I was getting ready to head out, and thought I’d stop by to introduce myself if you were still here.”
Lilith hadn’t mentioned any time-sensitive project that required working all night. But then, what did he know about academia anymore? He’d been out in the field for so long, he wondered briefly if he was making a mistake coming back to teach.
In more ways than one.
“Well, it’s nice to meet someone so committed to the cause. Now, go get some sleep. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how exacting Dr. Erickson is.” He stepped back, intending to close the door, but Timber put her hand up.
“No kidding. Uh, she mentioned that a woman might show up around here from time to time. Something about needing protection because of an ongoing police investigation? Do you want me to keep our office open to her as well? I would have asked Dr. E, but I got t
he feeling she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Odd. He’d never told Lilith why Mya was staying at Rosie’s, and she’d never asked. It was nobody’s business. Certainly not Lilith’s, much less a graduate student’s. “Why would she tell you that?”
“I don’t know, really. Maybe because we’re all pretty tight up here, and she didn’t want me to be concerned if I saw a stranger walking around here after hours?”
Made sense. “Her name is Mya, and there’s no need to concern yourself. I can assure you, she’ll only be here under duress. She pretty much…” Hates me—especially after how I left her last night— “does what she wants to do. And that doesn’t include twiddling her thumbs in any science department.”
His cell phone rang on the small table beside the sofa. Timber gave him a thumbs-up sign, then waved and walked away. He didn’t know what to make of Lilith sharing his living arrangements with her student. How many others had she told? This gossip, or lack of privacy, or whatever it was, was definitely one of the drawbacks of working inside a university research facility instead of the open air, where everyone pretty much left each other alone except to share their data.
He walked to his phone and picked it up, not recognizing the number. Five minutes later he hung up, his nerves taut, his pulse beating in his neck as he locked up his office and ran down the hallway.
He hurried to his truck, thinking about the call from Officer Ramos who’d reached out because the police department had been unable to contact Mya. Where the hell was she? He tried her number, swearing out loud when it went to voicemail.
According to Ramos, three days ago, the remediation crew cleaning Mya’s HVAC system had found a nearly empty packet of matches advertising a local extended-stay hotel. Not sure if the police had missed it in their original sweep of Mya’s house, they’d turned it over to the FCPD. Over the last couple of days, Ramos and his partner had done room-by-room wellness checks at the hotel, speaking to both guests and staff. When one of the housekeepers said she’d been repeatedly turned away from one of the rooms and another admitted finding a small, silver canister beside one of the guest washers that she later threw away, the police had secured a warrant. In the suspicious room, they found a folder containing pictures of Mya taken with a zoom-lens camera, a spreadsheet laying out her weekly schedule, and printouts of homemade bomb instructions.
Bombs.
Someone was stalking her with the intent to hurt her.
The thought of it made him want to rip someone apart and dig a grave so deep in the earth, the body would never be found.
He’d know how to do it, too.
He ground his teeth as he drove. He felt trapped. Trapped by his messed up feelings for her. Trapped by the compulsive need to protect her, the gut-wrenching desire to hurt anybody who even contemplated hurting her. Trapped by how out of control she made him feel. She made him crazy and unorganized and emotional. He hated that.
Feared it.
By the time he skidded into Rosie’s driveway, he felt like a caveman, incapable of intelligent thought. Operating on emotion. Instinct.
The garage door leading into the mudroom banged against the wall as he charged into the house. “Mya!” He ran through the kitchen, down the hall, grasping at the door jam of the bathroom, then Rosie’s room, until finally, he came to his bedroom, and found her there, curled on her side on his bed, her hands tucked beneath her cheek. The sunlight filtered gauzily through the plantation shutters and softened the angles of her face that were so strongly animated while she was awake. She’d always slept like the dead. Like her body had no other choice but to completely shut down after exerting such fierce biological vibrancy during her waking hours.
He crossed the room and went to his knees beside the bed, his throat closing off, the dizzy relief that she was truly safe warring with despair over his complex, deeply layered feelings for her. “I don’t want to love you,” he whispered. Unable to stop himself, he reached out a hand to run his fingers across her hair—God, he’d always adored her hair—spilling across his pillow. Looking at her like this, her restless body for once quiet, he didn’t understand how this thing between them could be so complicated.
He loved her. Always had, always would.
Knew, too, that her love for him was just as consuming. He saw it in her expressive eyes, felt it every time she’d touched him these last fourteen days.
And Rosie had said so. Gramma never lied.
But sometimes love wasn’t enough, was it?
Love shouldn’t have to be so hard. Except it wasn’t like a mathematical equation or a scientific method that could be systematically figured out. Emotions were messy, and sex, a terrible, magnificent complication that tumbled two people even further down a rabbit hole.
He shouldn’t go there with her.
Shouldn’t.
He hadn’t ever wanted anything more in his entire life.
“Fuck, fuck, fucking, fuuuck.”
He unlaced his boots slowly, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, his head raging against his heart.
He set his boots by the chair. His trembling fingers rose to the buttons on his shirt. Still, the woman whose very essence was imprinted on his soul slept on, unaware of the epic battle he fought against her siren call.
His head was losing.
After he placed the shirt carefully, deliberately—just so—on the chair, he rose above her, staring down at her.
She had utterly ruined him.
Anguish backdrafted through him as he eased onto the bed and stretched out, facing her. She slept on, her pink lips slightly parted. He admired her ability to sleep so deeply, even while it worried him. Would she wake if there was ever a fire? He propped his head on his hand to study the curve of her cheek, the tiny bow of her upper lip, the graceful arc of her eyebrows she had religiously plucked from the angst-filled age of fifteen.
The slight purple tint under her lush fan of black eyelashes. Like colored sediment layers of the earth, that atypical hue told him a story, and he was sorry for it.
So sorry.
“I always leave, don’t I? Leave when all you need is for me to stay,” he breathed between them before closing the distance, flexing his fingers before sliding them down the beautiful lines of her body. Shoulder, tricep, waist, hip, thigh…
She woke when his palm cupped her ass to pull her toward his warmth. He felt her awareness rise even before her hand came up to make the skin on his chest ignite.
“Jack?” Her voice was thick with sleep and something more. Spent tears?
He couldn’t speak.
He leaned over to press her back into the mattress, rubbing his lips across hers, his chest filling, filling, filling with air and wonder and the trembling edges of hope. She sighed and her body softened in surrender beneath him. He slid down her frame, mouth at her ear, sucking her lobe, tongue tasting the salt of her neck. His hands pulled at her shirt. He leaned up, supporting her body with one hand to remove the red satin, and then unfasten her bra, and there she lay, her nipples rosy and pinched, as delicate and impossibly erotic as he remembered.
Hunger rode him. He shook with it, but he slowed his hands. They kneaded her breasts, brought them to his mouth, into his mouth, never enough, until she squirmed and moaned and he drifted down, drunk on her, to her tight belly where he’d long imagined planting babies. A laughing household full of children he could take into fields with shovels and compasses and a picnic and a radio and his beautiful, dancing Mya…
“Jack.”
He slid her tight pants off her legs, replying to her plea by scraping his teeth against her pubic bone. She shook and it made him feel invincible. He removed her thong as her hands twisted in the coverlet. He scooted off the end of the bed, hooked his arms beneath her thighs and slid her and the entire bedding down to his open mouth.
The first taste of her made him groan, his lips vibrating against her flesh.
“Oh. Oh, Jaaack. That’s…so…perfect.”
>
I know, baby. I know.
He tongued her. Slow, broad strokes, the quaking of her muscles, the pebbling of her dusky skin better than any lottery, any professional accolade. He nuzzled her, the stubble on his cheeks and chin a wicked contrast to the exquisite softness of her groin. He rocked his face against her, sucked at her, licking, pulling, drawing, demanding, his hands, one crawling up her belly, one gripping her thigh.
Until she gave him what he craved.
Her release, her cries bouncing off the ceiling as her neck arched, head pressing back into the pillow, her hands reaching for him. He released her thigh, threading their fingers together as the storm broke across her body, the sun’s rays painting gold strokes across her breasts, tipping her black hair with magic. He hung on every thread of her passion, staying with her, loving her with his mouth until she pushed up, came to her knees, chest flushed, breasts bouncing, fusing her breath with his.
And he was a man lost.
There was a great rushing in her ears. A fullness inside that soothed as well as excited. She framed Jackson’s face with her hands, terrified this was all a dream. That she’d once again laid down on his bed after he’d fled, and was imagining all this.
But his haunting blue-gray eyes stared back at her, bloodshot and so naked with desire they stole her breath.
“You came back,” she whispered.
“I was wrong to leave.”
A man of few words. My man. She pressed her lips to the corners of his eyes, pressing her thumb into his mouth. He sucked at it, creating a deep urgency within her. Her mouth replaced her thumb, relearning the shape and texture of his tongue as her fingers traced the lines and contours of his chest. The rounding of his pectorals, the peaks of his nipples, the ridges of his abs, indentation of his belly button, and the spear of fine, dark hair that crept down into his jeans.
She made him stand as she scooted to the edge of the bed. Held his gaze as she unbuttoned his jeans, slid them down his legs, and freed his erection. She spread her knees, beckoning him closer toward the edge of the bed where she sat. Then she took him in her hands, pressing kisses along the yoke of his hips. His stance widened, his strong capable hands going to her hair as she closed her eyes and took him in her mouth. Wanted to give him what he’d given her. More than simple, primal pleasure…
