Underneath her gaze, his semi-hard cock twitched and started to throb. “Keep that up you little hussy, and you won’t even get a few more seconds.”
She laughed and pushed up on her elbow, peering down at him. “You’ve got a face on you, you know that?”
His eyes flew open and he stared up at her, before a wry grin curved his mouth. He reached up, trailed one finger along her jaw line, and said, “So do you. You aren’t into faceless, are you?”
She laughed and sat up, swinging one leg over his hips and straddling him before cupping his face in her hands. “That’s not how I meant it. Your face is beautiful.”
“Aw, shit ,” he muttered, trying to dislodge her hands.
She giggled as a red flush stained his lean cheeks. “You’re embarrassed.”
“And you’re sitting buck naked on top of me, telling me my face is beautiful.” With a twist and a neat little tuck of his body, he reversed their positions, looking down into her laughing face. “Usually, it’s the other way around.”
“I can’t help it that you have a beautiful face,” she said, her eyes dancing as his discomfort grew. “And your body is pretty excellent, too.”
A grin tugged his mouth before he replaced it with a deliberate scowl. “You’re going to ruin my image, if you keep this up.”
“How is admiring your beautiful face and excellent body going to ruin you?”
He sighed patiently, shaking his head as he lowered his weight, pinning her squirming, laughing body beneath his. “Because I’m supposed to charm you, seduce you, tell you how beautiful you are.” The words how much I love you sprang to his lips but he caught them before they came out.
Even if she had invited him into her bed, he doubted she was ready to hear that.
Instead, he looped his wrists under her shoulders, cradling her head between his hands. “You’re beautiful,” he said softly. “But in a quiet sort of way. You have to really look, at first, especially since you seem determined to hide it. But the longer I look at you, and the more I see you, the more beautiful you get.” Lowering his head, he brushed his mouth against hers. “You’ve got the kind of beauty that doesn’t fade.”
Fisting his hands in her hair, he gently tugged, arching her face upward and baring her neck. Lightly, he scraped his teeth along the side before lifting his head again, staring once more into her eyes. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a woman with hair like this,” he murmured, combing his hand through the thick, heavy mass. Then, with a lightening quick change of mood, he waggled his eyebrows at her and said, “And I know it’s real, too.”
Now she blushed. “Gee, thanks.”
He leaned down, kissed her pink cheek and whispered, “You’re welcome.”
“Remind me never to compliment your body in bed again.”
“Compliment the body all you want,” he offered. With a wince, he said, “Just leave my face out of it.”
She reached up and cupped his face. “I like your face,” she said simply.
Lowering his head, he covered her grinning mouth with his. “Let’s see if we can find something else you like.”
Chapter Seven
She could feel each slow, heavy beat of her heart. It was bizarre. Maybe she was dreaming. She had to be dreaming. She was cornered again, in the locker room, and she couldn’t see the face of the man advancing on her. Just like the last time.
It was dark and she darted around him. She could hide. She was fast.
But every time she got away and hid, he found her again. Could he hear her heart beating?
Cruel hands closed over her arms and jerked her out from behind the row of chairs where she had hidden, then pinned her body between his and the concrete column behind her. Concrete column? Since when were there concrete columns in the locker room? Her brain shut down—none of the moves she had spent hours practicing came to mind and she couldn’t escape.
God, it was her worst nightmare, all over again, she was trapped and she was helpless.
Whimpering in fear, she swung her arm. The keys were in her hand. Swiping them down his face, she shoved him back and stumbled out of the dojo, blood staining her hands. Then, before she could so much as blink, she was barreling down the Gene Snyder again and he was on the motorcycle behind her.
“Help me,” she whispered. There was nobody close enough to hear, even if there were, would anybody help? They hadn’t last time.
The powerful roar of the bike blasted in her ears and she looked over. Only she knew this face. Jeff. The bloody scrapes below his muddy brown eyes seemed to grow larger and bloodier as she stared into Jeff’s angry eyes.
“Jeff?” she whispered. But he was dead.
Wasn’t he?
He aimed his bike for her, and she panicked, slamming on the brakes. He did the same, following her every move in an eerie shadow dance.
“Go away,” she pleaded.
His bike seemed to grow larger and she screamed when he rammed into her a second time.
Her car started to spin but she jerked it under control, searching for an escape route.
She didn’t recognize the exit that loomed in front of her. It should have been Stonestreet, but it wasn’t. It didn’t matter. She had to get away. Just as she started to veer her car away, Jeff appeared on her other side, blocking her. “Jeff,” she whimpered.
She cursed under her breath but her whisper turned into a scream when the motorcycle spun out of control.
She sat straight up in bed, whimpering, the image of Jeff’s bloodied, battered face still crowding her vision.
“Andi.” The voice was familiar, but rough and angry.
She cowered away from the hands that reached for her, confused, in the dark again. Back at the dojo? Had she ever gotten away?
“Andi!”
Hard hands gripped her arms and shook her.
And then, as suddenly as it came, the dream left her and she sat staring up into Jamie’s shadowed, bewildered face.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. Then she collapsed against his chest, sobbing.
Her whispers had brought him out of a sound sleep.
She was talking to him.
Then he realized she wasn’t talking to him. She was dreaming.
“No.”
“Go away.”
His jaw clenched when she whispered, her voice soft and confused, another man’s name. Before he could stop it, he growled out her name, tension tightening his body. Jealousy and rage churned in his gut and his hands closed into fists, as the name came again, a second time, louder. He was about to jackknife out of the bed when she said the name again. And then she screamed it. “No, Jeff, don’t!”
As he sat up, the fear in her voice had his eyes narrowing. Any hint of jealousy forgotten, Jamie rolled to his knees and reached down, shaking her gently. “Wake up, Andi. You’re dreaming,” he said gruffly, nausea roiling in his gut. Whispering another man’s name while he slept with his arms around her, then screaming—hell, wouldn’t that make any guy sick?
She didn’t respond. After nearly five minutes of trying to wake her, he gave up, lay down next to her, and held her tightly. God, what was going on in her mind?
Jeff. He knew that name. The accident. The guy who had been following her. He had known her from the karate school and had been hounding her for reasons not mentioned in the report. He had died instantly.
And Andi was still having nightmares. Shit, it had only been a month, what in the fuck did he expect? She lay shaking and struggling in his arms, whimpering and sobbing alternately. Then she started to jerk and fight.
With a strength that was uncanny, she ripped free from his arms, screaming, her eyes wide open as she stared at something only she could see.
“Andi!”
“Damn it, Andi, wake up!” he shouted, fear settling low in his own belly as she continued to just sit there shaking and screaming.
He drew his hand back, cursing himself, but before he coul
d force himself to slap her out of the fear-induced hysteria, the screaming stopped and the fear left her eyes. “Jamie?” she whispered, her voice hoarse and shaking.
“Jamie.” And then she fell against him, sobbing her heart out.
He had no idea how much time passed before she finally calmed. Her voice rough, she whispered, “Hell of an impression to make on a guy, huh?”
Rolling onto his side, he stared at her in the dim light. Reaching out, he lay his finger across her mouth. “Don’t,” he told her, shaking his head.
Her tortured, swollen eyes closed and she sighed, a broken weary little sound that damn near ripped his heart out.
“Can you tell me what you were dreaming about?”
Slowly, she started to shake her head, but then she bit her lip. God, the dreams weren’t going away like she had hoped they would. And the sick fear still lingered in her belly.
The silvery light from the moon poured in through the skylight above her bed, painting her features with a soft white light. “Different things,” she finally said, her voice, faint, quiet.
“I graduated a year early from high school, when I was sixteen. I was a ward of the state, always in foster homes. I never made many friends, so I spent all my time studying.”
“I wanted to be a nurse and being a child of special circumstances, as they had called it, I’d gotten several scholarships. Not enough to go to a great school, but enough to go to a technical one. My counselor had arranged for me to get a car to drive to the clinicals at the hospital. I paid it off working at a deli during the summer.
“I started at the Health Institute a few months before I turned seventeen. One day, I was leaving the hospital and some guy grabbed me. It was in broad daylight. There were other people in the garage and they heard me screaming. Several of them even looked over at me before taking off. He was dragging me to the stairwell.”
A sick feeling was spreading through his gut and he clenched the hand that was behind his head into a tight fist.
Her damp eyes drifted off to a point beyond his shoulder as she brought one hand up in front of her face. “He was going to rape me. And probably kill me. He had a gun, and his eyes, they weren’t right. I found out later he had been mixing all sorts of drugs with alcohol. He was also a diagnosed schizophrenic. He hit me.” She raised her hand to her face, as if it still hurt. “I fell down and my head hit the wall. I think I blacked out for a minute. When I opened my eyes, he was shoving his pants down. He fell down on me, shoving my skirt up.”
She stopped, her throat working convulsively, as if trying not to vomit. Her voice was shaking now as she continued, “I…I had my keys. And I hit him in the face with them. Just once, and I tried to run away. He grabbed my ankle and pulled me down again, screaming he was going to kill me. So I hit him again. He still wouldn’t let me go.”
Closing her eyes, she whispered, “The last time I hit him, before he finally let go of me, I hit him again, this time in the neck. It…it cut him. Wide open. He bled to death, right on top of me, and I was too damn weak and out of it to move. I had a concussion.”
“Jesus,” Jamie whispered. God, no wonder her eyes looked haunted every time he managed to catch a glimpse of them before the mask came back up.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and looked at him. “I can live with that. I learned the hard way, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And if I hadn’t stopped him, I wouldn’t be here now. I can’t say it doesn’t bother me, knowing that I took a life, but if I hadn’t, he would have killed me. But I didn’t ever want to be that helpless again. Nobody tried to help me, not one of them,” she whispered viciously, her mouth twisting in an angry snarl. “Damn it, he was trying to hurt me. But he was sick. And I had to kill him to get away. If somebody had tried to help me, maybe he wouldn’t have had to die.
“I’ve been taking karate ever since. It took a little while before I could stand to have people touching me, before I could work up the nerve to learn how to actually defend myself should somebody try it again.”
He listened as she told him about Jake’s school, the testing, the training, and the competitions. “The wreck I was in, the guy who died, I knew him from the school.”
Jamie’s body stilled and the hand stroking her arm froze. “I know that. I read the report, remember? I’m sorry.” There was more to it—was she going to tell him?
She laughed—an empty, hollow sound. “His name was Jeff.” Rolling onto her back, she stared up at the star-studded sky. One small, slim hand rose to cover her left side. “He had a bad rep—liked to use a little too much force. Especially on people who weren’t as strong as he was. It ended up that he was only allowed to spar upper ranks. I was the highest rank there that night and I got stuck with him. First he split my lip and then he kicked me in the ribs, bruised them. Jake was on the other side and didn’t notice. Jeff had been called on the carpet before, and it never did any good. So when Jake called a break, I didn’t say anything, but when he had us start back, I lit into Jeff, broke his nose, and socked him in the ribs.
“He started yelling and raising cane and Jake came over to see what the fuss was. I told him and when Jeff started lying about it, I jerked up my shirt. My ribs were already starting to discolor and my lip was split wide open.”
“So that didn’t happen in the wreck,” Jamie said slowly, rage burning a hole inside his gut. The care she had taken with her bruised ribs and that swollen, bruised face, not all of that had happened in the wreck. A man had done that, somebody who probably towered over her, outweighed her. And Jamie wanted to kill him. “He did that to you.” He couldn’t though. He remembered the bastard had been killed instantly.
“Yeah.” With a sigh, she rolled to her knees, lifting her face to the sky and stared through the glass. “Jake took him in his office, stripped him of his rank and told him he wasn’t welcome there anymore. I didn’t learn all of that until a few weeks later.”
“Jeff was furious. Followed me out the Gene Snyder, riding my bumper. Cut me off a few times. I was calling 911 on my cell phone. There’s always a ton of cops out there and I dunno, I guess I figured they’d scare him off. I never finished the call. Just as they answered, he lost control and spun out. I don’t think he meant to hit me—Jeff wouldn’t have done something that involved hurting himself. He loved himself too much. I hit the bike and he got pinned between it and my hood.”
Turning her head towards Jamie, tears streaming out of her eyes, she whispered, “The last thing I remember seeing is his face. The nightmares started right away.” She dragged her wrist across her damp eyes before she took a deep breath. “They’ve gotten better, don’t come as often. But tonight I was dreaming that somebody in the dojo was trying to grab me. And when I got away, it was Jeff, and I started reliving that whole night again.”
Strong arms closed around her and lifted her. Supported against his chest, cradled in his lap, Andi sighed and snuggled closer. “I know it wasn’t my fault. But it haunts me.”
Jamie rubbed his chin over the soft cloud of her hair, stroking her back. “I’m sorry,” he said, hating the useless words. “And you come back from that to find me poking around in your office.”
“Finding you poking around in my office was the highlight of that whole month, maybe this whole year,” she said, lifting her head and staring up at him. “After all, look where we ended up.”
She shifted in his lap, straddling him. Staring down at him, Andi stroked her hands restlessly over his shoulders. “I don’t want to think about that anymore. Not about any of it.” Lowering her head, she pressed her mouth to his and whispered, “Make love to me. Help me forget about it.”
Gathering her hair in his hands, he tugged her head closer, caught her lip between his. “Did I tell you that after I finished making you scream, I planned on making you sigh?” he whispered, forcing his turbulent thoughts aside, wanting only to push that anguished look from her eyes. “Make you whimper and moan?”
R
olling onto her side, Andi frowned. The space next to her was empty. Well, not empty. There was a note on the pillow.
Gone out for breakfast. Don’t you move until I get back.
With a smile, she held the note to her mouth, then feeling foolish, she tucked it in the bedside table before rolling out of bed.
Much as she would like to lie around, she had things to do.
A trip to the bathroom being first on the list.
When Jamie used her key to unlock the door nearly an hour later, Andi lay on the weight bench, lowering the bar, raising it, and lowering it again. Glancing over, she saw Jamie standing in the door, watching her with a cocked brow. Maybe he’d been taking lessons from Jake, she thought. He’s got the eyebrow thing down pat.
Focusing her eyes back on the barbell, Andi mentally counted twelve before she released and sat up. Her sweat dampened face turned to his and she lifted her shoulders and grinned. “Sorry. The bed seemed a little too empty once I woke up.”
Jamie’s eyes trailed over the body revealed by her skimpy workout clothes, a sports bra and extremely short spandex shorts, the brief kind of shorts that barely covered the curve of her ass. How in the hell did she manage to hide a body like that? Her flesh was damp and slick from sweat and his eyes darkened as he moved closer. He slid one finger down her bicep and said, “Did I ever tell you that I love the way you look when you’re working out?”
One brow arched and she said, “You’ve never seen me work out.”
With a negligent shrug, he said, “I always love the way you look, so why wouldn’t I love the way you look when you work out?”
He dropped to his knees beside her, pressed his lips to her damp, salty flesh. “Are you done?”
“Yes.”
Running one hand across her belly, he smiled as the muscles there quivered and leaped. “This is what dragged you out of bed? I was going to make you breakfast.”
“Sorry,” she said, biting her lip as those clever fingers flirted with the low cut neck of her sports bra. “I…I’ve got an, uh…damn it, I can’t think when you touch me. There’s a competition in a few months and I have to keep my strength up. It’s going to be hard to get back into the swing once I go back to class next month.”
Coming In Last Page 11
