Project Virgin (15 page)

That right there was the problem with all of this. With this stupid drive. With Michaela Townsend herself. He opened his mouth to be appropriately dour and matter-of-fact and what came out sounded more like flirting. If he was a fifteen-year-old boy with absolutely no skills or game of any kind, that was. And meanwhile, this SUV that belonged to his uncle was filled
with the scent she carried in her dark brown hair, of grapefruit and soft spice, the suggestion of the vanilla-scented warmth of her skin, and entirely too much of her tempting body within easy reach.

She shifted then, sitting up straight and thrusting her legs out in front of her as she rubbed her hands over her face. Jesse felt more than saw her toss a look his way, but she didn’t say anything.
She pulled her jacket tighter around her and blinked out at the deteriorating weather conditions all around them.

“I knew you weren’t asleep,” he muttered, because he was obviously insane.

“That must be why you’re so successful,” she said, in the way someone who really didn’t know what he did or how successful he really was might, and he liked that, too. That she lived in Seattle and didn’t
know who he was. That she wasn’t one of those women who came after him like so many bloodhounds on the hunt. “Your discernment.”

“What is it you do again?” he asked. “No one said. They just mentioned your man Terrence was unemployed. Has been for a while, I think your cousin told me, nine or ten times. What’s her name? The loud one.”

“Missy, who is not loud, she’s emphatic. And it’s none of
her business, or yours, what Terrence does or doesn’t do, thank you.” He thought she looked at him, though when he glanced at her, she was gazing out the window, a distinct line between her brows. “Terrence calls me a glorified office manager, which is close enough to my job title, I suppose.”

He opened his mouth to make some crack, but something in the way she’d said that pricked at him. Maybe
it was his deep, abiding certainty that Terrence Polk was more likely to undermine than glorify anyone. “What’s your actual job title?”

She sat up even straighter in her seat, and he knew she wasn’t going to answer him. “I solve problems,” she said.

“You can get a job doing that?”

“Apparently.”

She didn’t expand on that. And Jesse couldn’t have said why that very nearly ached, down in his
bones.

“This does not look good,” she said instead, after a moment or two, still with her gaze trained on the treacherous road outside the SUV. Her voice was huskier than before, and Jesse would have had to have been a saint not to respond to that—to feel it scrape over him in a hundred inappropriate ways it was far healthier not to think of in any detail.

And Jesse was a lot of things, but
a saint wasn’t one of them.

“No,” he agreed, keeping his attention on the road and the rapidly decreasing visibility. It was far safer than what was going on in this SUV. Or inside of him. “I think we’re going to have to stop for the night.”

He expected wailing, carrying on, or some passive-aggressive version of either. Hysterics, maybe. Some kind of attitude or fit, anyway, from a woman who
had pretended to be asleep for hours rather than interact with him. But the SUV was quiet, except for the rhythmic
thwack
and
swish
of the windshield wipers and the crunch of the tires against the increasingly snowy road. And beside him, he heard her shift in her seat. That was the extent of her outward reaction.

“By the side of the road?” she asked. Calmly, he was surprised to note.

“I think
we’re close enough to Missoula to make it,” he said gruffly. “It’s not great out there, but I don’t think it’s bad enough that we need to pull over. Yet.”

“We passed Butte already?”

He’d thought he should have stopped at the former mining town when they’d passed it. But she’d been “sleeping” and he’d been irritated beyond measure and had thought if he just kept going, he could outrun the storm
and have them halfway across Washington State before midnight. At the moment, that entire previous thought process seemed like nothing but hubris.

“About two hours back. Under normal conditions we would have made through Missoula already and be on our way into Idaho.”

“Then we must be close,” she said, in that same calmly enthusiastic voice she’d used on him in Grey’s the night before. Jesse
didn’t know why tonight, he found it something an awful lot like soothing.

She didn’t say much more as Jesse navigated the rest of the way into the outskirts of Missoula, the roads getting more slippery and dangerous by the mile. They skidded into the first motel parking lot they found with a VACANCY sign, and Jesse figured he wasn’t the only one fending off the rush of adrenaline that they’d
made it. In one piece. He shifted the SUV into PARK and blew out a long breath.

They grinned at each other then, over the kick of relief and danger narrowly averted, and Jesse was sure that was the only reason his chest felt tight. He rubbed at it, annoyed.

“I’ll go get us a couple of rooms,” she told him after a moment, as he let out another breath. She set about zipping up and pulling on her
scarf and her gloves, and he felt the loss of that expansive grin of hers like something physical.

What the hell was the matter with him? He needed a hot shower and a beer. And a good night’s sleep now that he wasn’t taking up residence on the couch in his uncle’s office in the back of Grey’s. That had been his best option as far as a peaceful sleep in Marietta went. It was that or deal with
his Uncle Ryan and Aunt Gracie, who were certain to ask entirely too many questions about Jesse’s relationship with his father.
No thank you.
Or his cousin Luce, their daughter, who was two years younger than him and possessed of three maniac kids and a deadbeat husband she’d just kicked to the curb, all of which made her way too maudlin when she’d had a few.

Or worst of all, subject himself
to his grandmother’s sharp tongue, because Elly Grey had never met a member of her family who didn’t disappoint her deeply and Jesse was certainly no exception. More Calamity Jane than Mrs. Butterworth, that one, the cousins always muttered amongst themselves. He hadn’t wanted to give her the opportunity to expand on her reasons for thinking less of him by the day. His grandmother was a woman best
loved from a minimum safe distance, but Jesse was getting too old and too soft to bunk down on couches while avoiding the fallout from her version of a loving chat.

That was what the matter was, he assured himself—not enough sleep and none of it at all comfortable. Because he refused to allow it be anything else.

Next to him, Michaela had to shove against the wind to get the SUV’s door open,
and then she was dashing out into the sullen fist of the winter storm, bent nearly in half as she made her way to the neon-lighted motel office where the VACANCY sign still glowed and briefly lit up the side of her face.

And she was just as pretty in that purple glow, damn her.

Jesse took the opportunity to get a hold of himself. He decided it was because it had been a long time since he’d been
out in a serious Montana snowstorm and maybe the soft rain of a Seattle winter had softened him up too much. It took getting used to, the full-throated howl of a Montana winter. But a few minutes later Michaela appeared again, looking slight and easily swept away, as she charged out of the motel’s office door and through the driving snow back to the SUV. And he thought it was a little bit more
than
winter
when he had to order himself to stay still.

She laughed as she threw herself back into the passenger seat and then wrestled her door closed, and he wasn’t prepared for that. Or for that flush on her cheeks. Or the wild, gleaming sparkle in her bright, hazel eyes when they met his.

He didn’t know what expression he had on his face then. He didn’t have the slightest idea how he was
looking at her, but he suspected the spiral of sensation he could feel working its way through him was hunger, pure and sharp and deep. And that it was stamped there across his face like a mask.

Her smile toppled from that ruinous mouth of hers, and the sparkling thing in her gaze changed, but what replaced it wasn’t any better. Awareness, feminine and hot. It made the snow and the wind fade.
It made the scent of cold that came off of her jacket and the melting snow against her cheeks seem to echo in him, making him want things he refused to acknowledge, here in a motel parking lot somewhere on the wrong side of Missoula.

“I have good news and bad news.” Her voice was husky again, and this time, Jesse knew it had nothing at all to do with any nap, pretend or otherwise. He only watched
her, aware of the way that hunger in him sat there on his mouth, in his face, deep inside of him, like a great weight. “The good news is that they have a room. The bad news is that they only have the one.”

The fifteen-year-old in him turned an exultant cartwheel. It was humiliating. The grown up version of Jesse, the one who could have any woman he liked and often did, gazed back at her. Calmly.
Cartwheels be damned.

“Are you worried?” he asked her, and he couldn’t seem to keep himself from leaning closer to her. Though he was wise enough to keep his damned traitorous hands to himself. “Think you might lose your mind and jump me in my sleep?”

She looked as if she almost smiled, but thought better of it. “Does that happen a lot?”

His mouth curved and he saw the way she swallowed. Hard.
“You can’t be that surprised. Can you?”

“You can rest easy, Jesse,” Michaela told him, and he imagined she meant that to come out easy and light. Funny and maybe a bit charming. But it didn’t, and something dark and distinctly aware moved through her hazel eyes, and then through him, too. “Your virtue is safe with me.”

*

It was one
thing to
decide
to share
a single motel room containing what had to be the smallest, most claustrophobic king-sized bed in the entire universe with a man who practically reeked of sex and dark, needy things, because it was utterly irrational to do anything else and they were adults who made choices, not animals.

It was something else, Michaela was finding out fast, to actually
do
it.

“Are you saving yourself for your
June wedding?” Jesse asked in that voice of his that sounded insulting even when the question itself was mostly innocuous. Or maybe that was the look in his sinful eyes. “All dressed in white and accompanied by an entire defensive line of bridesmaids and some Snow White-type doves cartwheeling around your head?”

This was all Michaela’s fault, she was aware. She’d started the discussion of virtue,
out there in the cold. She’d understood that was a mistake pretty much as she’d said it, which was why she’d also been the one who’d ended that odd, endlessly fraught moment that had swelled between them in the SUV by announcing they needed to hurry up and get inside before they froze to death where they’d sat.

“They’re expecting another ten to fifteen inches overnight,” she’d said, admiring
how cool and unbothered she’d sounded, despite the heat she could feel stomping through her, all temper and fire. But then, she’d long ago learned how to appear calm and cool under pressure, no matter how she might have felt inside. It was one of the major benefits of her job. “The storm is only getting worse.”

“No kidding,” Jesse had muttered.

And Michaela had assured herself there was absolutely
no underlying meaning to their exchange. No confusing, dangerous metaphors. None whatsoever.

Then they’d driven across the howling tundra of the parking lot and around the back of the modest two-story building to park in front of their room. Jesse had curtly ordered her inside while he’d wrestled with the luggage—and ‘wrestled’ in the Jesse Grey sense meant he’d simply scooped it all up and brought
it in with a minimum of fuss—and she’d obeyed him because she hadn’t known what else to do and she hadn’t much liked the hard, glittering look in his dark eyes anyway. And he’d kicked the door shut behind him when he’d come in with all the weather around him like a force field and then… there they’d been. Here they were. In a motel room in the middle of nowhere, in what appeared to Michaela
to be a terrifying blizzard, but which the man behind the counter in the motel office had laconically called ‘some winter weather.’

It was getting to her, she thought now, as Jesse waited for her answer with a darkly expectant look on his face, as if he could wait as long as it took if he had to. This single room thing was messing with her and she hated herself for it. It seemed so beneath her—so
insulting, somehow, to Terrence and to herself and even to Jesse, even if she rather doubted he’d appreciate her concern—that she was treating this as if she really was some kind of latter-day Victorian miss. It all seemed so suburban minivan-ish, as Terrence would have said, that
proximity
to another man was making her hands shake and her knees feel weak, and worse, that her reaction to that
was to clutch at her proverbial pearls and keep some distance between them rather than explore this strange reaction the way Terrence would have done.