Project Virgin

  “That doesn’t sound like adulthood,” Jesse told her, though what she saw was that perfect abdomen of his, that magnificent chest, burned deep into her brain. Maybe forever more, like the kind of brand she’d always been so sure she didn’t want. And he wasn’t laughing anymore. “That sounds like bullshit. A whole lot of rationalization to explain away not wanting to actually settle down and make a real promise with real consequences if it’s broken. Fuck that, Michaela. If you choose to spend the rest of your life with one person, that’s the whole goddamned point. That person. Only them. Forever. Or you might as well not bother.”

  And it wasn’t until he’d slammed the bathroom door behind him that she realized he’d stalked off at all. She heard the shower come on, and Michaela sat there in her pleather armchair for a very long time without moving. Without breathing.

  Without admitting to herself she was more concerned about the fact Jesse was naked right this minute on the other side of the flimsy door than she was about the fact he’d just delivered what felt like a body blow. He’d echoed things she hadn’t ever wanted to admit she’d felt, down deep in the darkest recesses of her soul, and she didn’t know how to shove them back where they belonged.

  It was the storm, she told herself then, still frozen in place.

  It was only the storm and when it passed, the way all storms eventually did, she’d look back on this strange night with a strange man she’d probably never see again and find it hilarious that he’d managed to make her so emotional. She and Terrence would laugh and laugh, and then they’d go right ahead and have the exact life they’d decided they wanted, open and rational and free. Because that was the point. What the two of them wanted their life to look like, not what some too pretty and too rich bad boy with a chip on his shoulder thought about it when he didn’t know a damned thing about either one of them.

  Michaela told herself she’d never been more certain of anything in her life.

  Chapter Four

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  Getting naked was maybe not the best plan, Jesse conceded, leaning his head against the tiled wall of the motel bathroom and letting the hot water punish him. His body viewed that as a logical extension of the conversation he’d just almost been having about sex, and that was impossible. There would be no such extensions.

  Jesse didn’t poach. Ever. He was religious about it.

  There were millions of women out there without men—no need to tangle himself up, even momentarily, with one who was taken. Even if the man in question was Terrence Polk, who was wholly unworthy of the term “man.” And especially when the woman claimed her existing relationship was “open”—because if there was one thing Jesse knew about relationships, it was that they were always more complicated than they appeared, even to the people inside them.

  He’d found that out the hard way, hadn’t he?

  Years had gone by, and he still didn’t know who he was more pissed at: his loser father for doing what he always did, or Angelique, his once-upon-a-time girlfriend, for letting Billy do it to her. He didn’t care that they were married now, with little twin girls he’d never met. He didn’t care how many of his relatives assured him Billy was a changed man, that Angelique and the girls had proved to be a good influence on him—the good influence his previous two wives, three grown children, and innumerable mistresses had failed to provide, apparently.

  “Your father feels awful about the whole thing,” his cousin Luce had told him as they conducted their Grey Family Pity Party in the corner of the saloon his first night in Marietta, before she’d succumbed to the urge to sing along, far too loudly and pointedly, to angsty Miranda Lambert break up songs on the jukebox. Which was when Jesse had decided to bunk down in his uncle’s office, because he had no desire to live out any more country songs. “Or so I hear.”

  Jesse had shrugged. Barely. “Good.”

  “Popular family opinion is that you’re turning into Uncle Jason,” Luce had continued, smirking. “I hope that doesn’t mean you end up slinging drinks to beat up cowboys, never to smile again, Jesse. That would be a waste. Besides, I think Reese Kendrick has the Being Jason’s Sparkly Apprentice thing covered.”

  Jesse hadn’t spared a glance for Reese there behind the bar, who nobody would dare call “sparkly” to his face. Not if they wanted to keep their own in one piece. The slightly older man was probably more of a favored child to Jason than any of his uncle’s long absent and possibly estranged daughters were, at this point. And Jesse had been well aware Luce had been poking at him to avoid talking about her own bad romantic choices, in the time-honored fashion of every single member of his family since the dawn of time. Still.

  “Here’s the thing,” he’d said, and he hadn’t bothered to ratchet back the threat in his voice or the look he knew was probably all over his face. Luce was family. She could take it. “I brought my girlfriend home for Christmas three years ago and when I left on New Year’s Day, she was hooking up with my father. I’m thrilled they’ve carved out some kind of happily ever after from such an auspicious beginning. I salute them, I do. But no amount of secondhand reporting about how sad they are is going to change the sordid little facts, is it?”

  “Your heart is a stone, Jesse,” Luce had said, grinning. “We’ll be spinsters together forever. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?”

  Jesse had rolled his eyes. “I’d rather prop up the bar in this tiny little town. With my face.”

  But that was the thing, he thought now, using up all the hot water in the middle of a blizzard, somewhere in Montana. Being sorry about things was great, but it didn’t change anything. It certainly didn’t fix anything. And if people couldn’t handle the consequences of their choices, well, maybe they should have made better ones.

  “Not my problem,” he muttered as he wrenched off the faucets and reached for one of the thin, scratchy towels over the toilet. He exfoliated himself with the damned thing for a while, then hooked it around his hips.

  Michaela Townsend was another problem, also not his. Her ridiculous life with that liar Terrence Polk was none of Jesse’s concern and that “open relationship” nonsense had nothing to do with him. Nothing. The myth of the truly open relationship was right up there with unicorns and happily ever after, as far as Jesse was concerned, but that didn’t mean he had to dive into that mess. Or stray anywhere near it.

  So he had no particular explanation for why he threw open the bathroom door and swaggered out into the room, like a cowboy in a treacherously small towel, like he was daring her to put her money where her mouth was. Jesse didn’t know what that would look like, anyway.

  Michaela had moved from her chair while he’d been banging his head against unpleasant old memories in the shower stall. She was perched on the edge of the bed now, wearing thick, wool socks, oversized pajama bottoms, and a tank top. She hadn’t removed her bra, and he found himself smiling a little. Did she really think the mere knowledge her breasts were unrestrained yet still covered might send him over the edge?

  Then again, thinking about her breasts at all dragged him a whole lot closer to the edge than he’d been before, and the fact he was standing there, naked but for his towel, suggested he’d been dancing around on that particular cliff already.

  “Getting ready for bed?” he asked. He didn’t mean that to come out the way it did. But he couldn’t regret it much when the husky rasp of it made her sit up straighter, those hazel eyes of hers widening and the hair she’d let fall around her shoulders bouncing a little bit, which would have been mesmerizing if he was allowing himself to think about her like that.

  “Yes,” she said, and then she cleared her throat, but that only called more attention to how hoarse she’d sounded in the first place. “I mean, yes, I thought I’d turn in.”

  “It’s all of seven p.m.”

  She yawned. A big, long, high-pitched, fake-ass yawn, complete with a bullshit stretch to go with it. It was the worst acting he’d ever seen in his life, and she met his gaze like she knew it and didn?
??t particularly care if he did.

  There was no reason on earth he should find that kind of delightful.

  “I’m extraordinarily tired,” she told him, a hint of piety in her voice.

  Jesse eyed her. “After all that napping in the car? Are you sure you don’t have a medical condition?”

  She smiled. “I didn’t ask for your input, Jesse. How or when or how much I sleep is a topic I can’t imagine should concern you at all.”

  “Yet here I am. Concerned.”

  “No need,” she shot back. “Watch TV or whatever you want. It won’t bother me.” That smile of hers widened, though he thought it was significantly edgier than it seemed. “I’m going to pull the covers up over my head and what you do on your side of the bed won’t affect me one way or the other. Unless you plan to treat it like a trampoline, I guess.”

  Until that moment, Jesse had planned to sleep on the floor. Because she might think she was in an open relationship, but he couldn’t trust himself to act all blasé and unaffected when a pretty woman was tucked up next to him. Especially in the middle of the night when, if his past exploits and regrets were any guide, he’d wake up horny and lonely and more than happy to investigate any warm body cuddled there beside him before he woke up entirely. Why take the chance? He had no desire to accidentally find himself a part of the lies she was telling herself.

  But the idea that she could tune him out and sleep right through a night in bed with him—when there were, literally, dozens of women clamoring for the chance and that wasn’t arrogance talking, it was simple fact—burned through him like a long, ill-conceived pour of really good whiskey.

  It lit him up.

  It pissed him off so deeply it very nearly hurt, and he didn’t stop to examine why.

  “No trampoline,” he assured her, moving toward the bed. He’d bet she didn’t know that he could see the way she dug her toes into the carpet at her feet, as if she was ordering herself to stay still while he approached. He liked that a whole lot more than a good man should. He stopped when he was maybe a foot away from her, and kept his gaze trained on hers as he reached down, unwrapped the towel from his hips, and let it drop to floor beneath him. “But I sleep naked. That’s cool, right?”

  *

  It was sometime after midnight when Michaela finally gave up the charade and shifted over onto her back to glare up at the ceiling from the depths of her now much too hot cocoon of blankets.

  She hadn’t slept at all. Not in the damned car and not in this torture device of a bed, and certainly not after Jesse had displayed his entire naked body like that, so close to where she’d been sitting that she could have easily simply tipped forward and—

  Michaela cut off that train of thought. Harshly.

  That was what she’d spent the past few hours doing. Playing whack-a-mole with the host of terrible ideas and beguiling fantasies that coursed through her in an endless stream, one picking up where the other had left off, all of them featuring Jesse Grey and that mouthwateringly perfect body of his, without flaw, she now knew, from the top of his eternally mussed-up head of hair to his big, bare feet.

  And all the acres and acres of pure masculine perfection in between.

  She had obviously turned into a pillar of salt as his towel hit the floor, and to her eternal shame, she was fairly certain her mouth had dropped open at the sight. So that she’d been gaping at Jesse—at all of Jesse—like a slack-jawed yokel who had never seen a man’s penis before.

  You never have, a smitten little voice inside of her had whispered, as if in a church. A terrible shrine to the beauty that was Jesse Grey’s naked body, which was something she could never unsee. You never really have, until now.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected then. Jesse to stand there until she applauded or laughed or, far more likely, threw herself at all that male perfection? Or perhaps she’d thought he’d take his bachelor auction experience to the next level and put on a little show for her—a little bump and grind, maybe, until she found a few dollar bills to toss his way? Or make some kind of unambiguous move on her—not that sudden and unnecessary nudity was in any way subtle—so she could deal with that out in the open, once and for all?

  ‘Deal with that’ meaning decline, of course, she’d snapped at herself, more than once, and sharper each time. You’re not touching this man. No way in hell.

  Why not? She had thrown right back at herself. Also more than once, and gaining in internal volume with each rendition. Are you in an open relationship or not? If you are, the whole point is that you can touch this man or any man as much as you want, whenever you want.

  She’d cut that nonsense off, too, because it didn’t bear thinking about.

  And naturally, Jesse had done none of those things.

  Michaela had sat there on the edge of the bed, frozen into place while her entire body burst into a tower of flame, which she’d been certain he could see right there on her burning cheeks. But even if he had, Jesse had ignored her.

  Completely.

  As if nudity was so normal—his nudity in front of other people, that was, and for all she knew that was his favorite party trick—that it hardly impressed itself on him at all. And certainly caused him no shame.

  He’d gone over to his duffel bag and rummaged around in it, as if unaware he was giving her an eyeful as he leaned down and fished out what looked like a leather toiletry bag. He’d vanished back into the bathroom for a while and when he’d come back out, had slapped off the light and the fan, leaving only Michaela’s heightened awareness of him humming there in the room between them. Then he’d sauntered—sauntered—back to the bed as if he didn’t care if it took him all night to get there, and had sprawled out on the far side of the bed with the TV remote in one hand and the other behind his head like a makeshift pillow.

  On top of the comforter, with the suggestion of steam rising from his naked skin, though Michaela couldn’t be sure she hadn’t added that detail in, retroactively, as a part of the hysteria in her own fevered brain.

  “Sleep tight,” he’d rumbled, in what had been the jauntiest, most cheerful tone she’d heard from him yet. He’d even smiled. “Let me know if the TV is too loud for you, once you’re in that little cocoon you mentioned. I wouldn’t want to bug you.”

  And he hadn’t even glanced at her again after that.

  Which meant Michaela had no choice but to do exactly what she’d told him she would. She’d crawled into the bed, despite the fact his big, long, naked body took up more than his share of the mattress’s square footage and had been weighing down the sheets and covers beside. She hadn’t wanted to address anything involving his body, not its placement and certainly not its current state of undress, so she’d simply made do. She’d burrowed down as far as she could on the very edge of the bed, wrapping herself in the part of the comforter she could reasonably claim as hers and burying herself there, like an incensed burrito.

  While Jesse had proceeded to watch back to back episodes of deeply stupid sitcoms, as if he’d been placed on this earth purely to torture her with tinny laugh tracks and the inescapable fact of his perfect, goddamned body sprawled out so lazily only a few inches away from her tense, angry one.

  Eventually, he’d turned off the TV and climbed under the covers, seemingly unaware that Michaela was still lying there beside him as stiff as a plank of hardwood. But he didn’t do anything but switch off the light, and then there was nothing but the dark of the room and the slap and howl of the wind outside. The wheezing and periodic clanks of the ancient radiator and, slowly, the heat from Jesse himself warming up the bed they shared until it become unbearable.

  Soon, Michaela told herself, he would start snoring or drooling or something—anything—unattractive, so she could find him hideous at last. Then, and maybe only then, she was sure she’d fall asleep.

  But the minutes dragged on by and that never happened. Jesse simply slept. He didn’t encroach on her space, and he didn’t make any kind of advances and he d
idn’t even snore, for God’s sake. He simply sprawled there beside her, as unreasonably perfect asleep as he was awake.

  She thought she’d never hated anyone more in her entire life.

  “Stress any louder and you’ll wake the neighbors,” he said, in that low voice of his, all rough and tumble and much too close for her peace of mind. “It’s like a fire alarm.”

  They might as well have been sharing a pillow. His voice was all over her, and from close by. It was terrible. It made every part of her shiver into taut, pointed awareness and stay there.

  “I’m not stressing,” she told him, trying to sound anything but taut or aware. “I, uh, had a bad dream. I just woke up. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

  She heard him shift around in the bed and didn’t want to think about how close he really was. How easily she could roll toward him, or even slide her foot across the space between them and touch him. All of him. She reminded herself this was a king-sized bed, no matter how tiny it had seemed the more she’d looked at it all night, and it had more than enough space for two people to sleep comfortably without bothering each other at all. But she still entertained a fantasy or two of making a bed on the floor instead.

  Only the fact he’d know he got under her skin if she did that—and that it would amuse the hell out of him—kept her from it.

  “I’m going to share a little secret with you.” His voice was a rumble in the dark, and it wound inside of her like a hot rope of light and heat, making her shut her eyes as if she could block him out that way. “I’m what’s commonly known as a self-made man. Mostly people say that as a code to let other people know that I don’t fit the usual profile. Guys like me who work construction jobs to help put themselves through college don’t usually end up running the construction sites afterward. If they do, that’s where they stop, but I didn’t stop. I turned my after school job into an empire.”