He’d wasted more time than he cared to think about proving the old man wrong.
The home he brought Chelsea to was a far cry from that monstrosity.
He pushed his way inside the old, ornate door and slapped at the wall switch, aware as the vast space blazed with the sudden light that he hadn’t really thought this through. He didn’t know what this cavernous loft he’d only just started pulling together looked like to anyone else. He only knew what it represented to him.
His dreams, not his father’s. His taste, not the outlandishly expensive opinions of his ex-wife via Dallas’s snootiest interior decorator, who’d made such a point of sniffing over every last hint that Jasper was as uncouth and untutored as suspected. He’d ended up feeling like a bull in a china shop house, unwelcome in his own damned home, and he’d vowed when he left that he’d never subject himself to that again. He’d decided to live up on the top floor of the train depot mostly because of the light. It poured in from all sides, and there were mountains in every direction. It made his heart feel too big for his chest. It felt right.
But that didn’t mean Chelsea would like it.
Jasper really didn’t want to think about how important it was to him that she did.
He stayed quiet as she walked inside. That deliciously frilly shirt of hers was untucked now and her wavy blonde hair scraped at her shoulders, hanging in a tousled mess around her head, and he was lost for a breath or two in the rhythm of her hips, sensual and enticing, as she moved further into the great room.
She stopped, her heels loud against the old floors, and turned in a slow circle.
He wondered how it looked through those Big Sky eyes of hers. The remnants of his old life he’d only just unloaded into the room, having made only a few gestures toward separating it all into a makeshift bedroom, dining area, living room. The standing lamps that stood here and there, making the light more of a golden glow. The big brass bed on the far wall, and the gigantic mirror that he’d bought over the objections of his ex-wife, and had taken when he’d left her that monster of a house and all the fussy, asinine things she’d filled it with. Including a new oil man, he’d heard through the grapevine, which was all she’d ever wanted.
Good riddance, he thought, without the slightest shred of bitterness or rancor, which was one among the many ways he knew he never should have married Marlene in the first place. She could keep her monument to tackiness and the nouveau riche lifestyle she loved so much. Jasper didn’t want any part of it.
What was here in this space was what mattered to him. It was excruciating to discover that Chelsea did, too, this woman who’d shown up out of nowhere this morning and tilted his world in a whole new direction. It was an uncomfortable sensation, but he let it wash through him, and he waited for her verdict.
“I feel like I’m standing in the attic of a very old, very eclectic palace,” she said, her voice a lovely thread of sound in the great space, and when she turned to him, her whole face was lit up and her blue eyes sparkled. “Or some kind of eccentric museum.”
Jasper decided, then and there, that he would keep her.
But first, he thought he might die if he didn’t find a way to taste her. To discover every inch of that body of hers that she hid away in those hideous clothes—but he’d held her in his arms, felt her pressed tight to his back, and he knew better. He knew that what she hid away was far better than what she showed.
If he didn’t get inside her soon, he thought he might rip apart, from the inside out.
He prowled toward her, taking a deep satisfaction in the way her eyes widened in a kind of sensual alarm that told him everything he needed to know about her supposed career as a bad girl. She was backing up, moving away from him, and he bet she didn’t even know it—a bet he won when she backed right into the side of his bed and let out a startled little yelp.
“Oh,” she said.
Breathless and wide-eyed and his, he thought. Utterly his, every delectable inch of her.
“Oh?” He was teasing her as he closed the distance between them, mocking her gently, and he had the pleasure of watching her shiver.
But she only swallowed, hard and loud, her eyes on him as if she was the one who was mesmerized. God, the things he wanted to do to her.
“I wasn’t kidding about the jeans,” he told her, when he could reach over and start to work on that shirt of hers, those silly ruffles that wound down over the swell of her breasts and her belly beneath.
“I’m not buying something that shows my ass just because you think I should,” she snapped at him, but there was no heat in it, and he knew that was because he was tugging open the shirt and baring her perfect breasts to his view, enough to fill his palms and swelling against a lovely bra in a pale blue shade that made him want, desperately, to know every last one of her secrets.
“I hate your clothes, Triple C,” he whispered, leaning in to deliver each word against the softness of her skin, to feel that exquisite shiver of hers himself.
He pushed the shirt off her shoulders and let her deal with it while he made short work of her belt. He shoved the ill-fitting black mess down from her hips and then sucked in a breath, because she was even better than he’d imagined. He helped her step out of the pants as they pooled around her ankles, and then he kept holding her hand while he eased back so he could look at her.
He was a goner. She was perfect.
All those curves, lovingly held in those scraps of pale blue lace. Her long legs, sweet hips, gently rounded belly. That messy, just-out-of-bed hair that he could still feel slide through his fingers like a rough silk, scented like almonds and cream, all around her lovely face. And that mouth of hers that had made him uncomfortably hard when she’d been dressed like a dour old matron and now, wearing nothing but lingerie and very high heels that were made for his favorite kind of dirty, imaginative sinning—
He hurt.
“Get on the bed,” he ordered her, his voice almost angry with the violence of the need in him, the pounding, relentless grip of it.
“You’re looking at me like I’m a ghost,” she whispered, and he could see everything she felt on her face.
Reserve, uncertainty. Lust and desire. Need. Fear.
“I’m looking at you like I’m about to eat you alive,” he retorted, unable to keep the tension from his voice, the need. “Because I am.”
He watched her shake even as he felt it in her fingers, and then she tugged her hand from his and obeyed him, sliding all of that soft, feminine deliciousness into the center of his brand new, ridiculously large and pretentious bed, that no one had been in but him. Twice.
And then he stripped off his own clothes with laughable speed and all the grace of a very, very lucky teenage boy, before he crawled up and joined her.
He could see her pulse rocket against the delicate skin of her neck. He thought that if her eyes got any wider he might fall in, and he’d never in his life wanted anything more than he wanted to please this woman, so much and so deep she’d be as addicted to him as he was very much afraid he was to her.
He stretched out over her, every sharp intake of breath she took like music to his ears, every restless twist of her hips and shiver that traveled the length of her body, and he was grinning by the time he took her hands and stretched them out above her, wrapping them around the brass rails that formed his headboard.
“Hold on, darlin’,” he murmured, a dark promise he had every intention of keeping. “I expect this is going to get a little bit crazy.”
He wasn’t kidding.
Chelsea’s hands dug into the brass headboard while Jasper settled that powerful body of his over hers. Then she gripped it even harder, because he leaned in close, and used his mouth.
That mouth.
He spread a raging, impossible fire everywhere he touched, and he took his sweet time doing it. He tasted the line of her neck, the ridge of her collarbone. He held her breasts in his hands, then licked his way into the hollow between them, making her mo
an and thrash, yet he made no move to take her bra off. He tested every inch of the belly she’d previously thought was her worst feature, growling out his intensely male approval directly into her skin, so she could feel the curve of his smile pressed there below her navel.
Then he moved even lower, holding her hips in his hands and exploring every inch of what lay between, using his mouth, his jaw, the whole of him, like he really was a wild animal and he was scent-marking her. Tasting her and changing her. Then he learned her thighs, her calves, all the way down to those damned shoes, which he tugged off her feet and admired before tossing them aside.
Crouched down at her feet, his hands on her skin and that dark heat making his hazel eyes gleam gold, she thought he looked like a panther. Something as sleek and menacing and deliciously dangerous as that bike he rode so well.
“Do I get to touch you?” she asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all. It came from that lick of fire, that dancing need, that coiled in her and became her. Took her over until there was nothing in the whole world but this man. This bed.
This.
“You’ll get your turn,” he said, sounding amused, and that, too, was like a blaze inside of her, making her stomach twist and her breasts seem to swell against the lace of her bra. Making her feel slippery and swollen and needier, somehow, than she’d known was possible.
But then, this man was revelation upon revelation. Every moment, every touch.
He prowled back up over her the way he’d stalked her across the grand stretch of this floor he’d made his home, and Chelsea gripped the bedrails and watched, her breath loud and unmistakable between them as he dispensed with her panties. Then she released her hold when he moved to her bra.
And then there was nothing between them except all of that wild heat.
She didn’t think, she just reached for him.
Finally, she traced those mouthwatering ridges on his steel-hewn torso that had stunned her this morning, that she’d felt move beneath her palms on that long ride tonight. Finally, she leaned forward and lost herself in all his heat, his hardness, all those fascinating planes and muscles that made him something like steel wrapped in velvet.
“You’re not built like an executive,” she murmured, and felt his laughter move inside his hard chest even as she heard it above her, around her.
“We Flints are more laborers than liege lords,” he said. “Can’t help it. Not one of us does too well behind a desk.”
She filed that away, and then gasped when he tossed her back down on the bed, his easy expression gone like it had never been. He was all heat and dark intent, and even while she trembled, she wanted him in ways she didn’t understand. She watched as he reached over to a box beside the bed, rummaged around in it, then came back with a condom. She wanted to do something while he rolled it on that long, hard length of his that made her mouth go dry, but she felt pinned in place as surely as if he’d held her down. He didn’t have to; his gaze did it—too bright, too intense, making her feel as if he’d wrapped those steel arms around her chest and squeezed.
And then he was settling himself between her legs, and the hardest part of him was nudging against her molten center.
Chelsea had never felt like this. Lit up, made new.
“I thought I was promised carousing,” she said, daring and reckless and it felt good, like flying down the side of Copper Mountain on the back of his motorcycle, like laughing while his hazel eyes held hers. Like him. “This appears to be textbook missionary position.”
“This is called taking the edge off,” he replied, dropping down, his head next to hers, his arms holding her tight against him. “I think you can suffer through it.”
“I guess,” she said, and sighed as if it was a stretch for her, but even as she did, he thrust himself into her.
And everything splintered. Changed forever.
Caught fire.
It was slick, hard, perfect. It was unbelievable.
She thought she said his name. Maybe he said hers. Maybe there was nothing at all anymore but that searing fusion, so deep inside of her she didn’t think she’d ever be the same again. She didn’t want to be the same.
And then he began to move, and everything shattered again.
Then again.
He set a wild pace, a glorious rhythm, and Chelsea met him as if she’d done this a thousand times, as if she’d been put on this earth to dance like this, with this man. As if her previous experiences didn’t seem black and white and pointless with each expert surge, each rock of his hips, each utterly insane movement.
And all the while, his mouth was at her neck, her lips. Urging her on, making her gasp. He muttered filthy and beautiful words, like a thread of darkest poetry straight into her ears, her sex. He called her carnal and amazing and all manner of things she’d never imagined she could be, and she believed him.
She was all those things, when he touched her. When he moved over her, in her, dark and graceful, sleek and perfect, as if he’d been crafted by some benevolent god for exactly this purpose.
She felt her back arch, her hips reach for his of their own accord. Felt a wildness like a panic, a wave, crash over her.
“Yes,” he said, his voice something like harsh, and then he issued a series of dark commands, one after the next, and she obeyed.
She burst into a thousand fiery pieces. She screamed. And she held him tight when he followed her, whispering her name like a prayer.
6.
Jasper took her home when the night was starting to edge over into the start of another deep blue morning, in a Range Rover that purred quietly up the long and twisting drive that branched off of Black Bart Road and led up the hill to Crawford House.
“Black Bart?” Jasper asked when he saw the street sign. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of name people generally bestow upon the more revered members of society.”
“I mentioned he was an ass.” Chelsea laughed. “It was only when his descendants wanted to lord it over everyone else in this valley that they started making noise about social classes. Barton Crawford liked being rich, period.”
It seemed to her that Jasper went very still beside her, or the air changed.
“I know the type,” he said after a moment, in a low voice that made Chelsea frown—but then they were turning off the road onto the unpaved drive that looked exactly the same as it did it all those ancient pictures Mama had framed and hanging in the house, with the forest pressing in on all sides and quick glimpses of clearings and pastures as they wound their way toward the historic front door.
Where Chelsea’s mother was probably sitting up waiting, simmering in outrage and wrapped in her years of disappointment like a woolen throw against the night’s chill.
She knew she should feel something about that—anxiety, even panic—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Not yet.
Not while they were still cocooned together in the quiet warmth of the Range Rover’s front seat that smelled of leather and pine, his large hand so easy on her leg, like they’d done all of this a trillion times before. Like they belonged.
He felt like fate, and she knew better than that. But she soaked in it even so, while he took the curves of the long drive with the quiet competence he’d showed in everything else he did, and she pretended that she was fated to be someone other than who she’d always been—until tonight.
Jasper had been as good as his word. He’d “taken the edge off,” and then he’d taken her again. And again. He’d feasted on her, let her return the favor, and then he’d done things to her she’d never imagined she’d do at all, much less like as much as she had. And she’d gloried in every moment. In every stroke of his bold possession, in every heated whisper, in all of that wild, intense passion that she could still feel simmering inside of her, a flickering flame she didn’t think would ever go out again.
She hadn’t wanted to leave. She didn’t want this night to end, to have to force herself back into her tiny and safe little life. Not now
that she knew how it could be, if things were different. If she was different.
Jasper was talented and imaginative, demanding and sure, and even thinking about the things that had happened in that gigantic bed of his made her core throb and then ache all over again. It made her wonder how she’d never known that she had all of that inside of her—that wantonness, that abandon. That shuddering need that she’d explored again and again beneath his hands, his mouth, that knowing gaze of his.
Like he knew exactly what was inside of her. Like he could see it.
“Thank you,” she said softly when he pulled up to the house. Mama hadn’t left the lights on, which could be either a good or bad sign. Chelsea didn’t know which, though she supposed she’d find out soon enough. “I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never had a night quite like this one.”
“Marietta men must be damned fools.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t have nights that were similar in many respects. No need to get quite such a big head.”
“You know that every single thing you think shows on your face, don’t you?” He reached over and brushed a lazy finger over one cheek, then the other, and that current between them sizzled all over again, sparking like it was new. He grinned when her breath caught, like he felt it move in him, too. “You’re like a billboard. I can read every thought and feeling you have. Right here.”
She shouldn’t find that charming; she should be horrified. Alarmed, certainly. But for some reason, she smiled.
“You can’t.”
“Which is only one of the many ways I know I rocked your world, Triple C. Aside from being there, doing the rocking, I mean.”
“You’re an insufferably conceited man.” But she was still smiling, even wider now, like these were love words. Incidental poetry in that low growl of a voice.
He shook his head, his gaze intent on hers, then dropping down to her lips.