Project Virgin

  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 h
ad 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.

  He didn’t know why it felt as if he had.

  She looked at him for a long time, her hazel eyes level on his. She reached over and took the handle of her bag from him, and he let her.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said, in her even, professional voice he decided he deeply loathed. He wasn’t Amos Burke, known eccentric, who required careful handling. He wasn’t even that loser fiancé of hers.

  You aren’t anything to her, a voice reminded him, and he hated that, too.

  “Michaela.”

  “That was the most educational snowstorm I’ve ever been trapped in.” Her lips curved, but it wasn’t a smile. And it didn’t go near her eyes. “It’s also the only snowstorm I’ve ever been trapped in.”

  “Don’t.”

  That curve faded away, and still she looked at him as if she could see all kinds of things in him he’d hide if he could, and Jesse would have given anything to do this differently. To be someone else. To forget about all the promises he’d made to himself and all the fury he’d carted around inside of him for the past three years.

  But he couldn’t do it.

  She wasn’t free and he wasn’t that guy, and no amount of standing around on a sidewalk in downtown Seattle was going to change that. She’d betrayed her fiancé and he’d betrayed himself, and that was the only truth that mattered.

  It was the only truth he could accept.

  “Thank you,” she said again, softer this time, and Jesse had the sense she knew exactly what was going through his head. That she could read all those twisted things in him as easily as a street sign. That she knew him inside and out, which was as silly as the rest of what had happened between them.

  There was no wild fire. There was no knowing a stranger like that.

  There were only excuses. Sex and lies and rationalizations to make sense of it all, to make people think they’d had no choice when choices were exactly what they’d had, and they’d made bad ones.

  And if there was one thing Jesse refused to tolerate, it was excuses. From himself or anyone else.

  He didn’t say goodbye.

  He walked away from Michaela like the total stranger he was to her and would remain, no matter that tightness in his chest. He climbed into the SUV and he drove away and he didn’t let himself look back.

  No matter how it scraped at him—no matter that it felt like a whole lot more than a simple scrape, like it might take him to his knees if he let it—Jesse didn’t look back at all.

  Chapter Nine

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  The drive back to Marietta sucked.

  Jesse had sorted out the problem at his job site with the usual mix of threats and promises and a few good beers, threw a different set of t-shirts and jeans into his duffel, and then headed back out toward Montana early on Thursday morning.

  He told himself he was fine. Great. He’d been telling himself that for two days. Because why shouldn’t he be great?

  But there was no denying the fact he grew edgier when he hit his beloved Rockies. He was tense when he crossed the Montana state line. He moved into what could only be called a black mood when he sped past Missoula and then he found himself driving by that damned motel that didn’t even appear on the map, and he didn’t know what the hell he was at that point.

  Lost, he thought a while later, though he knew exactly where he was. He knew these enduring mountains, this wide-open sky, as well as he knew his own hands and the things they could do. He knew the curve of the Interstate as it dipped toward Bozeman. He knew Montana like the native he was.

  Geographically, he really was fine. He was a Grey and that meant he had the map of his ancestors imprinted on his body at the genetic level. His people had walked across the top of this young country, those endless forests and rolling plains, to set themselves up at the foot of a mountain that never did produce the copper they’d dreamed about. They’d settled there instead of returning to their limited prospects in Boston and they were there still. Jesse had told himself he was just carrying out the same old Grey family tradition when he’d left Billings at eighteen to set off for college with no intention whatsoever of returning, to his hometown or his father.

  But the thing about most pioneers was that if things had been okay where they’d started—if they’d had decent fathers of their own, as an example—they probably would have stayed put. Jesse knew he was no exception. And then it occurred to him, as the sun was setting and he passed the turn off for Big Sky and his grandparents’ place nestled there in the hills of the famous ski resort that had grown around it, that he’d let his father define every last thing he did. Why he’d left home for Seattle. Why he’d never returned, not even to a different part of Montana. Why he’d been determined to build his own company, just like Billy had, but having nothing to do with the business he knew Billy had wanted to keep in the family and would have loved to one day pass on to his son.

  Hadn’t Jesse chosen Angelique in part because he’d figured she was exactly t
he kind of woman two-bit Billy dreamed he could get, yet couldn’t? It had never occurred to Jesse that Billy could steal his girlfriend. Had he been heartbroken all this time? Or was that just his pride, still smarting all these years later?

  And all of that crap had gone down over Christmas three years back, but Billy had still ruled everything Jesse did. From how Jesse spent his holidays to how he’d handled his personal life ever since. And worst of all, to Jesse’s way of thinking, Billy had invaded his head in that motel room with Michaela two days ago, too, making Jesse stop when all he’d wanted was to keep going.

  Had he really thought he was betraying a sacred trust with himself by touching her?

  Or had he been more worried that if he surrendered to a woman he couldn’t refuse, no matter what her relationship status, he would be forced to cede the moral high ground when it came to his stance against his father?

  Jesse didn’t know what he hated more. That he had to ask himself the question at all—or that even when he did, he didn’t know how to answer it.

  Though when he kept driving, straight past Marietta and headed east toward Billings, he suspected that deep down, he had a pretty good idea about the answer, after all.

  It only took another couple of hours to reach the city he’d grown up in. Jesse turned off the Interstate and drove through his hometown with the usual sense of disbelief he’d ever lived here mixed with amazement at how little it seemed to have changed in his absence. But this time, that peculiar homecoming feeling was tempered with something else he couldn’t quite define.

  The city lights spread out before him as he headed toward his father’s house, obscuring the practical city’s more industrial aspects or at least blurring them in the dark and giving them a ghostly, desolate beauty. It was quieter than he remembered it, this late on a weekday winter’s night. The refineries blew smoke against the hardscrabble city buildings, gleaming gold against the cold, while the snow-packed Rim rocks sat like solid and inevitable sentries, crowned with red-lit radio towers.