Project Virgin (25 page)

And still they kissed, trying this angle and that, as if there was no end. As if it was far more than lust or sex or even the sweet immolation that was wrecking Michaela from the inside out.

As if nothing between them could possibly fit into any of the things they knew,
and they could taste each other forever to prove it.

She couldn’t keep still. She couldn’t touch him to her satisfaction, learn him well enough. She tried to trace all those fascinating ridges with her fingers, even her mouth when she found herself astride him and close at last to that sculpted abdomen of his. And she was rocking against him, the thick length of him against the seam of her sex,
as if he’d be buried deep inside of her if they could only let go of each other long enough to strip off those last layers that held them apart.

It was a frenzy. It was magic. It was wild and ferocious and beautiful, too.

It was better than whole relationships Michaela had had with dim, shadowy other people whose names she couldn’t remember just then. But then, she wasn’t sure she could remember
her own.

He flipped them again and then he held her there, his hips pinning her to the bed and his mouth at her throat. He wasn’t particularly gentle, and that thrilled her too, as if it was evidence he was as wrecked by this thing as she was. He skated down her neck with his teeth, his lips, the scrape of his unshaved beard, and it made her shudder. Again and again.

Jesse moved to her collarbone,
learning its length before he moved lower still, bringing his head closer to where his hands waited, and then he wrapped his fingers around one breast and plumped it up. His gaze met hers, dark and far more sinful than any chocolate she could imagine, and then he sucked the nipple deep into his hot, possessive mouth.

Michaela arched off of the bed.

He was a devil or a god, and she didn’t know
how to handle either one. She could only surrender. He licked and he sucked and then he moved to her other breast, as if he’d been starving for the taste of her, as if he was getting off on this as much as she was, and she didn’t recognize the low moans that filled the room. The throaty gasps.

It took her a long while to understand it was her, that she was the one writhing beneath him, mindless
and noisy, each tug of his hard, hot mouth sending an echoing kick deep into her core, where she melted. She melted and she shuddered and he was everywhere, his mouth at her breasts and his hard length rocking inexorably against the center of her need, and she was out of control. She was over that edge and she was falling. It was inevitable.

And he knew it.

He muttered his encouragement against
her flushed skin, and everything inside of her wrenched tighter, burned hotter. She was turning inside out. She was utterly in his hands. It was bright white heat and it was rocketing straight for her, it was almost there—

And then Michaela simply exploded.

Heat and light, fire and
Jesse.

Jesse everywhere, and he wasn’t even inside her.

She shook forever, her legs wrapped around his hips and
her back in a hard bow. She lost her way in too many stars. She fell and she fell and she could have kept falling. And there was nothing but the sheer exultation of all that heat for a long, long time.

Her throat felt raw and she had no idea if she’d screamed. Her hands were flung above her head as if she’d truly exploded. And Jesse was still so hard and so hot between her legs that it licked
at her, a new flame when she should have been burnt out. She struggled to open her eyes, to find him in the moonlight.

His head was bent, and he was breathing hard. His arousal was pressed into her so hard it should have been painful, but then, she couldn’t recall ever being quite so soft and welcoming before.

And she wanted more. She wanted him inside her. So deep she’d forget not just her
name this time, but the difference between his body and hers. So deep, there would be nothing but that fire, burning higher and higher and higher.

“Jesse.”

She moved her hands to slide through the raw, masculine silk of his hair, luxuriating in the heat of him, even there. His jaw was against the soft skin of her neck and she could feel the faint scrape of it with every shuddering breath she
took.

And more than that, she could feel that same need, that impossible desire, in every tight muscle of that sleekly perfect body pressed so tight to hers.

“Jesse,” she said again, and this time, he lifted his head.

Michaela stopped breathing. His eyes were dark, raw. Tormented. His jaw was set. He looked furious and he looked hungry and it tore through her. It tore her up.

“I can’t do this,”
he said, with quiet ferocity. “I won’t do this.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

“I’m breaking up with him.”

She wasn’t sure she’d meant to say that, but it hung there between them anyway. Jesse muttered something that sounded like a curse and then he angled himself up and off of her. Michaela hated it. She mourned the loss of his body against hers like a sharp, deep grief.

He rolled
to the side and sat there for a moment, his hands raked into his hair.

“Good.”

Michaela wasn’t certain she’d heard him correctly. She rolled to her side, trying to come to some kind of terms with the clamor inside of her, jangling nerves and molten need, want and lust and an aching thing that felt like loss.

But no shame. No guilt. Only Jesse.

“What?” she asked.

“Good,” he said again, his
voice as intense as the look he gave her when he turned to glare at her over his shoulder. “You should break up with him. He’s a liar and a con man and a spectacular douche. But that doesn’t matter. Right here, right now, you’re still engaged to him.”

She frowned and started to argue the point, but something in his gaze stopped her.

“Technically.”

“You’re either engaged or you’re not, Michaela.
And if the person who thinks that he’s engaged to you has no idea that you’ve decided to end it, I don’t think it’s really ended at all. Do you?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, his scowl deepening. “I think a better word to describe the situation is ‘cheating,’ no matter what bullshit open relationship crap you’ve been spouting to convince yourself otherwise. That’s how you felt this morning
and nothing’s changed since then.”

She sat up then. Carefully. Aware that everything—absolutely everything—had changed, but there was no telling him that.

“I don’t disagree,” she said quietly. There was something moving in him, gripping him too tight, making him tense and grim. “That’s what I plan to tell Terrence when I get back to Seattle.”

He held her gaze for so long she thought she might
break apart inside.

“Great,” he gritted out. “I’m happy for you. But that doesn’t make me any less of a dirt bag for cheating along with you, does it?”

*

Jesse didn’t speak
again until they reached Spokane, some three hours west.

It took him about that long to unclench his jaw, and to be absolutely certain he wasn’t going to jerk the steering wheel over, aim
the SUV for the side of Route 90, and haul Michaela back into his lap to finish what they’d started.

Because for a long time, that was the only thing he wanted. It was a physical need, like thirst. And there was nothing to do but navigate the frosty roads in the dark and wait for it to recede a little bit. Wait for that wild thing in him to settle down again so he could
think.

He could still
taste her. The temptation of her mouth. Her gorgeous breasts that had made him a praying man in an instant. Her sweet legs wrapped around him and the sounds she’d made when she came.

He was still hard—and that made him twice as furious. At her, sure, for providing the temptation. But far more at himself for succumbing to it.

They’d stared at each other for much too long in that damned room,
each of them half-undressed and breathing heavily, and that hadn’t helped. It had only made the wildfire that raged between them that much more apparent. Jesse had understood this woman made him into a drowning man and he had one shot to save himself. Just one.

He’d stood up, jerky and stiff, and his body had not been happy with him.

“Pack,” he’d ordered.

As if she wasn’t gloriously bared to
her waist, magnificent in every respect. Her lips had been slightly puffy from his, her skin had been faintly pink from his stubble, and those sweet nipples of hers had still been standing up straight, like they were begging for his mouth. He knew exactly how much she wanted him. He’d felt her heat all over him, and he wasn’t letting the sensation go any time soon.

She was breathing too hard,
he hated that he’d made her pretty eyes go dark, and she’d swallowed as if she’d been casting around for the right words.

And he’d known if she found them, he was toast.

“Don’t speak,” he’d gritted at her. “I’m not kidding around here.”

Her eyes had narrowed and he’d cracked a little bit, just a little bit, and too much of the hurricane he’d been trying to keep stashed down deep inside of him
had rolled out. It had choked the room. Or maybe it had just choked him.

“Michaela. Please.”

She’d let her head drop forward and he’d taken that as assent. Thank God. He’d slammed into the bathroom to dunk himself in ice cold water that had done absolutely nothing but piss him off, and when he’d come back out she’d dressed and had been zipping up her bag.

It had taken very little time to throw
his crap together and then finally,
finally,
they were leaving that goddamned hotel room behind them.

He’d never been so happy to leave Montana, his favorite place on this earth, in his life. Not even when he’d been eighteen and thought escaping his life here was the only way he’d survive.

He snuck a glance at her now. The lazy winter sun was taking its time rising, poking tendrils of pale light
through the remains of the night and over the frigid earth, spreading pink and gold in his rearview mirror. Michaela was tucked up in the seat beside him, within reach but a world away, her attention trained out the window the way it had been for hours.

Jesse almost wished she’d pretended to nap again. He was sure that would have been easier. That he’d have been less
aware
of her, somehow, instead
of spending the last three hours telling himself she didn’t smell like that, some haunting mix of vanilla and what had taken him two hours to decide was melon,
at him.

“My last girlfriend’s name was Angelique,” he heard himself say gruffly, stamping on the gas as they cleared Spokane. He felt Michaela move beside him, could practically
hear
the sharp things she was biting back, but she didn’t
speak. After a moment, he continued. “Three years ago I took her home for the Christmas holidays to meet my family. I thought we were pretty serious. But by the time we headed back to Seattle after New Year’s she’d moved on. With my father.”

Beside him, Michaela sucked in a breath. He heard her let it out, slowly.

“Am I the Angelique in this scenario?”

He slid her a look, then returned his
attention to the road.

“I can’t be that guy,” he told her, and he hardly recognized his own voice. The ache in it. The old, harsh wounds that he’d thought had healed but perhaps had only scarred shut. “I’m either a guy who would poach another man’s woman like my father, or I’m not. And I need you to hear me when I tell you that I am
not
my father.”

“I’ve never met your father,” she pointed out,
when he’d started to think she wouldn’t respond. “I’ve only met you. If your father’s in the room, I didn’t invite him.”

“You say that like it’s easy. It’s not.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” she retorted, with a flare of temper that he shouldn’t feel like that, like a touch. “You drew a line in the sand. Fine. I respect that. But I don’t need you to sit here and lecture me on your version
of morality.”

“There’s either right and wrong or there’s chaos, Michaela,” he growled. “You have to pick one.”

They didn’t speak again beyond the basic
do you want something to drink
and
I need a bathroom
exchanges until he rolled up in front of her building in the Belltown neighborhood of downtown Seattle. She seemed to be as frozen as he was for a moment, but then she scrambled out of her
door as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough.

He hated it.

In ways he was not at all comfortable with, he hated all of it.

Jesse climbed out of the SUV and pulled her roller bag out of the far back. He wanted to insist on seeing her to her door, but he couldn’t trust himself. Would he leave her there the way he knew he should? Or would he follow her in and lose himself in her the way
he’d much prefer to do? How could he not know his own mind?

He set the bag down on the sidewalk and then there was nothing left to do but face each other. It was typical Seattle day, grey and damp. Michaela was bright against the muted colors of the city all around her and the threatening clouds above, and he wanted her in ways he didn’t know how to catalogue, and none of this mattered anyway.
It had been two days. Not even two days. The world hadn’t changed.