Reilly's Return (3 page)

“Pervert,” Alaina pronounced.

Jayne and Faith rolled the man onto his back, and Jayne’s eyes widened impossibly as she stared. The right side of his face had been lying in the water, and his hair on that side had turned blond, the dark color washing out of it to stain the wooden floor. His beard had slid down the side of his face, making him look distorted, like something from a cheap horror movie. Grimacing, she reached out and hesitantly plucked at the limp swatch of fake whiskers. The false beard peeled off and hung from her fingertips like a drowned muskrat.

“Eeeewwww!” she squealed, dropping the dripping mat of hair to the floor.

Alaina sat back and fanned herself with her hand. “Brother, this is getting weird.”

“It’s just like in
Dawn of the Double Damned,”
Jayne whispered, worried, twisting her suddenly silent bracelet. “That part where Emilio Gustave has turned into one of the pod creatures but Brigette Egbert doesn’t know it. And then she realizes it, but it’s too late, and he fries her with his eyes and eats her.”

“Thank you for sharing that with us,” Alaina said sardonically, fanning herself harder as her flawless complexion took on a decidedly green cast.

Jayne bit her lip. “I’m sorry. It was a rotten movie.”

Faith continued working with the baby wipes, swiping off a layer of makeup and fake eyebrow. She shrieked in horror when the man’s nose suddenly came off in her hand. “Oh, my God!”

“Holy Hannah!”

“AAAAHHHHH!”

“Hey! Wait a minute!” Alaina exclaimed, hauling herself off the crate to get a closer look. “Isn’t that? It is! That’s no pervert! That’s Pat Reilly!”

Reilly moaned again and shook his head in an attempt to clear the clanging bells out of it. Then he opened his eyes and looked directly into the face of Jayne Jordan.

Jayne stared down at him for a long moment, saying nothing. She wasn’t capable of speech. She wasn’t even aware her two best friends were looking at her expectantly. Reilly’s incredible eyes glowed up at her, so blue they were almost startling, so intense she was sure she felt her heart stop just looking at them. Reilly. Her head swam at the implications. He was back, just as he’d promised.

Reilly had returned.

She took one long, hard look at him, all the old hunger and fear rushing to the surface, and fainted dead away.

“W
HAT HAPPENED
?” J
AYNE
asked as she opened her eyes and stared up into Faith’s concerned face. “Did I fall asleep? I had the strangest dream. I hope it wasn’t an omen.”

“It wasn’t an o-men, it was
the
man,” Alaina whispered, leaning over Jayne’s prone form. “The Hunk from Down Under, himself.”

“Pat Reilly?” Jayne barely managed to whisper the name. A dozen different emotions all rushed to her throat to choke her. There was dread and traces of a guilt she thought she had rationalized away a long time ago. And underlying that mix of negative feelings was something else altogether. It was like excitement or anticipation or something more primal that she didn’t care to give a name to.

Reilly had returned.

“Hello, luv.”

The voice was unmistakable. The husky baritone strains reached out like fingers and caressed her skin. Shivers ran up and down the length of her like ribbons rippling in the breeze. Jayne sucked in a horrified breath. This was exactly the way she had reacted to the timbre of his voice the first time she’d met him, when she’d been a very happily married woman. It was a frighteningly automatic response, one she seemed to have no control over whatsoever. It had made her feel wicked at the time. She wasn’t the kind of Hollywood wife who bed hopped. She’d been so content with Mac, she had rarely looked at other men to appreciate their male beauty, let alone to contemplate their more hidden charms. So when her husband had brought home the great friend he’d met while on a photographic shoot in Australia, Jayne had been shocked by her reaction, dismayed and disappointed in herself.

She’d loved Joseph MacGregor with her whole being—or so she’d thought. Though Mac had been nearly twenty years her senior, he’d been her soul mate, her anchor and her mentor. She had worshiped and adored him. But on meeting Pat Reilly she’d learned a quick and disheartening lesson: there was a level of attraction she’d never experienced
before. To find that out with a man other than Mac had been a crushing blow. It had somehow tainted the love she had for Mac and rippled the surface of the peace she’d found with him.

Now Faith and Alaina leaned away from her, parting like double doors to admit Reilly’s countenance to her field of vision, and she was given a refresher course in that lesson. It didn’t matter that half his hair was black and half was blond. It didn’t matter that his rugged features were slightly irregular—his bold, hooked nose was a tad crooked, his cheekbones were a little too high. It didn’t matter that she’d never wanted to be attracted to him. Seeing him now sent her heart into overdrive.

“Bloody hell, I knew you’d be surprised to see me, Calamity Jayne, but I didn’t think you’d faint dead away,” he said. There was an utterly irresistible smile turning the corners of his mouth, but the bottomless depths of his blue eyes were shadowed with concern as he kneeled down beside her and tucked a finger beneath her chin. “You all right?”

What kind of darn fool question was that? Jayne frowned. Of course she wasn’t all right. Her heart was hammering like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. She was alternately
hot and cold all over, and her stomach was spinning like a pinwheel in a hurricane.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, sliding back and away from Reilly’s touch. “I’m fine.”

She was still denying the attraction that pulled between them, Reilly thought. He gave a sharp sigh. She’d always been damn good at that. After her initial unguarded response to him Jayne had more or less pretended he didn’t exist except on the silver screen. She had avoided and ignored him to the point that he had begun to wonder if he was the only one who had experienced that searing flame of desire when they’d met.

Just as well, he’d told himself at the time, and he had sought to follow her lead—to ignore his feelings, to direct them elsewhere. He’d even gone so far as to try to cultivate a dislike for Jayne Jordan, dubbing her Calamity Jayne for the havoc her reviews wreaked on movies she didn’t like. He’d sent her a pet tarantula as a token of his esteem when she’d panned
Deadly Weapon
. The movie had been a box office smash despite her less than glowing opinion, but still her review had irritated him. And the fact that it had irritated him had irritated him even more. Jayne had been the only movie critic whose opinion had mattered to him.

The attraction had never died. The artificial
dislike had never taken root. And he’d discovered after Mac’s death that the desire was still alive inside Jayne as well. She’d merely done a bang-up job of hiding it. She really should have been an actress.

“You could warn a person, you know,” Jayne said defensively. She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her clothes, avoiding a look at Reilly. “You could warn a person instead of just showing up out of the blue, disguised in some kind of weird get up.”

Reilly raised an eyebrow as his gaze swept over her from head to toe, lingering on the white socks that bagged around her ankles at the top of her low boots. “There’s the pot callin’ the kettle black. Anyhow, I did warn you.”

Jayne squared her shoulders and stuck her little chin out. “You never did.”

He stepped closer, his head bent, rooting Jayne to the spot with his beautiful, powerful eyes. She could not look away from him. Electricity charged the air as his aura invaded hers. It was a moment and a half, Jayne thought. If they’d been filming, this would have been a close up, an instant of silence so full of unspoken emotion, the viewers would have been on the edges of their seats.

“I warned you a year ago, Jaynie,” he said, his
voice a low rumble. “I said I’d be back and I’m a man of my word.”

“A year is long time,” she murmured. “Things change.”

“Nothin’s changed,” he whispered, leaning closer and closer still.

This wasn’t quite what he’d planned to do, Reilly thought briefly as he tangled a hand in the wild silk of Jayne’s hair. But then he seldom planned anything. He’d always acted on impulse and had never considered changing. He didn’t try to resist the force that drew his head down toward Jayne’s. And while he could see resistance in her eyes, Jayne succumbed to the force as well.

Her chin tilted upward in a combination of invitation and defiance. If she meant to voice a protest, she never had the chance. Reilly settled his mouth against hers, and Jayne found herself whirled into a vortex of passions that were frightening in their power.

The kiss they’d shared before had hinted at this, but the barrier of MacGregor’s spiritual presence between them had ended it. In the time that had passed, Mac’s presence had faded, the barrier had thinned, and now the other feelings tore through it like a raging bull through a curtain of silk.

Reilly kissed her deeply, possessively, as if he
had every right. His mouth moved on hers with an expertise that overwhelmed her senses, overpowered any resistance she might have offered. The taste of him was warm and utterly masculine and instantly addictive. She’d learned that a year ago. Kissing him now was like taking a first drink of wine after a year-long abstinence. It was intoxicating, drugging, sapping the strength from her limbs so that she sagged into his arms.

Reilly hauled her up against him with one brawny arm. His other hand remained tangled in her hair, exerting subtle pressure against her skull to alter the angle of the kiss so he would be allowed absolute possession of her mouth. She was every bit as sweet as he remembered. Her body was warm and pliant against his, petite but not without soft curves in all the right places.

If he had wondered over the course of the last year why he couldn’t get the taste of her out of his mind, his question was answered now. No other woman tasted quite the way Jayne did. No other woman expressed quite the same mix of emotions in her kiss. With Jayne there was no practiced seduction, no well thought out plot to woo him, no taste of premeditation whatsoever. There was simply pure, unadulterated emotion, and he drank it in greedily.

She reacted to him as automatically as he did to her. As his tongue slid against the warm velvet of hers he couldn’t help but wonder what it was going to be like when they finally made love. How could it be anything but explosive? Visions of tangled sheets and hot sweaty bodies wound through his brain. He groaned low in his throat and pulled her tighter against him so he could feel her small breasts flatten against his chest. They were going to be dynamite together—and the sooner the better.

“Well, I guess we’d better be going, huh, Faith?” Alaina said loudly.

Faith cleared her throat nervously. “Yep, I guess we’d better hit the road. We just dropped by to see how you were doing, Jayne.”

“And you appear to be doing very well indeed,” Alaina said dryly.

Their voices penetrated the sensual fog around Jayne, causing her brain to begin functioning again. Horrified, she pried her mouth from Reilly’s and wedged her arms between her body and his, trying to apply enough leverage to free herself from his embrace. He only grinned at her, effectively showing off the cleft in his chin and the boyish dimple in his right cheek.

“Let me go,” she demanded, ignoring the primitive thrill racing through her at being his captive.

“For the moment,” he said, standing her back from him with a big hand cupping each of her shoulders.

When he let her go, she swayed as if she might swoon again. His kiss had drained all her strength. She shuddered at the thought, then shuddered again as Reilly planted his hands on her shoulders and turned her so she was standing directly in front of him, facing her friends. She made no attempt to escape his hold, sure that if she tried to take even one step on her own, she’d be back down on the floor.

“Don’t rush off!” she blurted out, her big dark eyes pleading. The last thing she wanted was to be left alone with Reilly. It was painfully obvious she couldn’t trust herself around him, and she didn’t trust him any farther than she could throw him. Who knew what would happen if they were left unchaperoned? She got a hot flash just thinking about it.

Faith and Alaina exchanged a significant glance.

“I really have to go, Jayne,” Faith said apologetically. “I left Shane watching the baby so I could hit the supermarket. You know he’s wonderful with Nicholas, but he’s ill-equipped for breast feeding.”

Jayne’s gaze zoomed in on Alaina’s face.

Alaina looked both annoyed and sympathetic, a combination that was natural to her. She was much better at suppressing emotions than expressing them. “Sorry, pal. I’ve got a will to read at ten. Looks like your moon is in the wrong house.”

Not only was her moon in the wrong house, Jayne thought dismally, her planets were all out of alignment as well. Her whole sense of self had been thrown off its axis. She searched frantically for some excuse to get her friends to stay even just a few minutes longer. “You … haven’t met Reilly yet.”

They looked at her expectantly while her brain stalled out.

“Ummm … a … Alaina, Faith, meet Pat Reilly.” She tried to step out of the way, but Reilly held her firmly in place. She shot a glance over her shoulder. His face was unreadable, a polite mask. His hold told her to stay put.

“Reilly is an … um …” Lord, how did she describe her relationship with Reilly? They weren’t precisely old friends, and
acquaintance
seemed woefully thin. He was the man she had been wildly attracted to while she’d been married to one of the most wonderful, kind, understanding men on the face of the planet. Somehow, she
couldn’t quite bring herself to say that. The burden of guilt was still too heavy for her to confess her sins, even to her best friends. Besides, it would have been a tacky thing to say.

“Reilly is an … actor.”

Faith gave her a politely puzzled look.

Alaina wasn’t so kind. “Oh really? Gee, I thought he looked familiar.”