He couldn’t make sense of it, of this, of her. There was too much he didn’t understand. Why he was gripping the doorframe as if he wanted to take it apart—or as if it was the only anchor he had, keeping him at a distance from her, keeping this as barely professional as it had been so far. Where she came from way out there on the Great Plains, or why she hated it so much she was still hiding from it all these years later. Why she was so driven, or why she looked at him sometimes with a light in her dark gaze that made the air feel perilous and beautiful around them. He refused to give that up.
Jonah wasn’t the emotional one. He wasn’t emotional.
He’d spent this whole week trying to convince himself that all these feelings were nothing more than leftover family stuff. Leftover Flint Brothers’ stuff.
But he knew better here, now, all alone in the moonlight. It was her.
It was all her.
So he let go of the door frame. He cut the anchor and he started toward her, his pulse like a drumbeat. His eyes on her face. Her beautiful face, the one that haunted him asleep and awake, and he hadn’t even kissed her yet.
It was long past time, he thought when he stopped in front of her. When she tilted her head back to look him in the eye. When she mouthed something that sounded like his name, her voice too insubstantial over the riot inside of him.
He didn’t touch her. Not yet. He knew he wouldn’t stop if he did.
“What if it’s not fake any longer?” he asked, his voice like gravel. “What happens then?”
Chapter Five
‡
Everything stopped.
The world. Her heart.
Gracelyn tipped her head back and fell into those dark gold eyes of his, and she was sure, then, that whatever happened in the next breath, in the next few moments, she wouldn’t survive it. She couldn’t possibly.
And she’d spent the whole of her life surviving anything that was thrown at her. She’d prided herself on her ability to do it. But she couldn’t seem to care that Jonah Flint was the thing that was going to finally take her down. Instead, she welcomed it.
Though she didn’t want to think about the ramifications of that, not here in the moody dark with nothing but moonlight and that sweet, bright heat between them.
“I told you,” she said in a very precise, very prim voice that she hardly recognized as her own, and that couldn’t disguise the playful heat beneath it. “I refuse to get involved with someone I work for. That’s begging for trouble.”
He was like something out of a dream, standing there before her with his gaze so bright and his mouth so hard, and she couldn’t think of a single thing she’d ever wanted more than this. Than him.
Especially when his eyes gleamed a bright, brilliant shade of gold she’d never seen before, and that perfect mouth of his broke into a smile. Wide. Genuine. Hers, she understood. All hers. And yet it was etched with the same need that swirled through her, making her forget all the reasons this was a bad idea.
“You’re fired,” he told her softly, the way other men might have whispered words of love, of sex, of terrible need. “Does that help?”
He shifted closer, so much closer. She wished she wasn’t wearing the western-style shawl she’d thought was so cute earlier this evening. She wished that when he leaned close, his chest brushed hers instead of the soft cashmere. She wished so many things, all of them carnal and wicked and comprising her own destruction in each act. And even though she knew it, all she wanted was this. Him.
Jonah. Here. Now.
“That strikes me as a solution that doesn’t help me at all,” she murmured.
She found it hard to breathe as his hands moved to her face, as his fingers brushed over her cheekbones and then moved to her hair. He cupped her head in one hard palm as he tugged on her ponytail and it took her a moment to realize he was pulling her hair out of its elastic.
Then he was raking his fingers through the length of it as it tumbled down to her shoulders, making a low sound she couldn’t quite place. But then she did. If he’d been a cat, it would have been a purr.
“I have an in with the boss,” he assured her, his mouth almost severe, but she knew it was the same stark need that moved in her. “I’m pretty confident he’ll hire you again in the morning. Every morning.”
“How sweet,” Gracelyn whispered, and though she tried to keep that tartness in her voice, her expression, she melted into a smile instead. “It’s like our own little corporate fairy tale.”
Jonah’s fingers sunk deep into her hair, pulling her head back as if he wanted better access, and Gracelyn’s heart kicked at her, hard, as every other feeling in her body streaked into a brilliant fire and pooled between her legs.
“Once upon a time,” he whispered, leaning in close, so she could taste the words against her lips. She brought her hands up to brace them against his chest, and felt the heat of him like a furnace. Like a roar. “There was a beautiful princess and a terrible ogre trapped in a hotel suite far, far away. And he had absolutely no intention of letting her go.”
“This is already the best story I’ve ever heard.”
“Then you better prepare yourself, darlin’,” he told her, right there against her lips with the moon between them and too much Texas in his voice. It made her shudder with need. With rich longing. “Because I know how it ends.”
And then Jonah bent his head that last little bit and finally, finally, took her mouth with his.
*
Everything simply ignited.
He didn’t tease. He didn’t play. He took—and Gracelyn loved it.
He was like gasoline poured on a dancing flame and oh, how she burned. They burst into a wildfire together. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to be closer. She wanted. And he simply held her head where he wanted it, angled his jaw, and claimed her.
As if she’d always been his. As if she’d never be anything but his.
As if this was only the beginning.
Jonah kissed her again and again. He tasted her deeply and carnally, stroking into her and driving her wild, until she realized she was making low, greedy little noises against his mouth.
He pulled back then, his hazel gaze a bright gleam in the dark, and she didn’t know which one of them was breathing harder. He reached down and pulled her shawl up and over her head, making a sound of deep male approval when he saw the camisole she wore beneath it with no bra.
“You’re going to kill me,” he muttered, but Gracelyn was pretty sure she was the one dying.
He urged her back until she felt the windowsill behind her, and then he simply bent down and pulled one of her nipples deep into his mouth, camisole and all.
Gracelyn heard the sound, a high moan filled with sex and lust and overwhelming desire—and it was only when he increased the pressure and she heard it again that she realized she was the one making it.
Time seemed to blur and slow at the same time. Jonah’s mouth was a torment and a joy. He teased her through the silken camisole, making her writhe against him, moving from one breast to the other. Up the length of her neck, then back again, before he stripped the flimsy garment from her and bared her to his view.
His smile then was a dark thing, edgy and irrevocably male, and it made her hips buck as if he’d pressed it deep into her.
Then he bent his head to the flesh he’d bared and he started all over again.
He used his teeth this time, his hands and his mouth and his remarkable voice, until Gracelyn was sobbing against him, begging for things she couldn’t even name.
“Not yet, darlin’,” he told her. “Not just yet.”
And then, he pinched one nipple while he feasted on the other and just like that, he tossed her right over that edge. Into pure sensation.
Into joy.
When she could think again, or try, he’d lifted her into his arms and was striding through the darkened rooms of the suite. She hadn’t been in his bedroom before and something about entering it now made her shudder all ov
er again. He pressed his lips to her temple as he shouldered his way inside and then he set her down at the side of his bed.
She thought she should say something, that she should address the storms that still raced through her, that she should make it all funny somehow. More palatable, more easily dismissed. But there was something too powerful in the room with them, and she couldn’t bring herself to break the hush that had fallen between them. She could feel the weight of it like a taut rope looped around the both of them, pulling them together, knitting them into one where they stood.
It was only a ghost, Gracelyn told herself. A hazard of an old hotel like this one. A trick of the moonlight, nothing more.
But she knew better.
And she couldn’t handle the way he was looking at her. That bright, gold thing in his gaze that reminded her of sunlight, that transformed his face and made him almost too beautiful to look at directly. She felt something huge shift inside of her, then expand, and she was terrified she might do something terrible right there as he helped her step out of her boots and peel off her jeans—like burst into tears.
She didn’t want that. God, but she didn’t want that. If she didn’t protect herself here, what would be left of her?
So when she was finally naked, when his hard, impatient hands had finally moved from kicking up flame and longing all over her skin to unbutton his own jeans, she slipped down onto her knees and knelt there before him.
Jonah let out a curse, somewhere up above her, but Gracelyn ignored it. She remembered their first day here, when he’d appeared in her doorway half dressed and had pulled his t-shirt on in front of her, giving her that stunning glimpse of the sheer male perfection of his body. She hadn’t been able to do anything about it then, but tonight she could do as she liked, at last. She could kiss her way down that arrow of dark hair that dipped down toward the hardest part of him, reveling in his taste, his scent, the heat of his skin beneath the press of her lips. And she could pull him out when she found him, and measure his need in her hands.
But when she bent to take him in her mouth, he laughed, a dark sort of sound that moved in the room like magic. And then his hands were on her again. He pulled her to her feet and then tossed her backward onto the soft bed with an easy strength that made her stomach swoop down to her toes.
“Unless you want to rush straight to the happy ending, that’s not happening,” Jonah told her in a dark, strained sort of tone. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t talking about a fairy tale. He meant this act, this night, right here.
And Gracelyn sprawled across his soft coverlet, as he rid himself of the rest of his clothes and dealt with the condom, and wondered how the hell she was ever going to make it out of this in one piece.
But then he was right there, that magnificent body of his hot and hard and finally stretched out above her, and she stopped caring about pieces. She stopped caring about anything but the slide of skin against skin. Heat and lust, fire and need.
This. Him. Jonah.
And they rolled. They tangled.
She didn’t know who was tasting who, or where. There was only the bliss of the touch, the rush of it, the sheer and intoxicating sensation, as if she’d been waiting for this forever. She was sure she had been.
But eventually, they were both stretched taut, strung out on their hunger. She found herself on top of him, her knees on either side of his hips. He sat up himself, his hands sinking deep into her hair again, his mouth the same slick joy and the same wild torment as it plundered hers.
Gracelyn knelt up, then reached down between them. He reared back slightly to watch her with narrow-eyed intensity as she lowered herself onto him, inch by perfect inch, until they both groaned at the slick fit.
His laughter was a breath against her neck. “You taking charge, darlin’?”
“Why not?” She didn’t know when she’d started to like being called darlin’—she only knew she did. But then, there was very little she didn’t like about this man. She teased them both with a roll of her hips, and Jonah’s expression shifted; turned dangerous. “I don’t work for you at the moment.”
“No,” he agreed, his voice a dark promise. “You don’t.”
His hands were streaks of fire down the length of her. He gripped her hips, and when he was holding her where he wanted her, she began to move.
It was a sleek dance. It was fire and longing.
It was perfect.
This time, when she shattered all around him, he rolled her beneath him and came over her, taking charge in a sleek twist. He set a new, wild rhythm as she shook around him that made her cry out and shake harder, until she was flung straight into another burst of light.
And he whispered her name like it was a mantra as he followed her into oblivion.
It can’t last, she told herself when she woke later on to find herself curled into him, her face tucked into the crook of his neck like it fit there.
It couldn’t. It wouldn’t. She couldn’t let herself start thinking about fitting with him.
He was Jonah Flint and when this strange Marietta interlude was over, he would go straight back to his three piece suits and his corporate retreats on the ranch he reportedly accessed only via helicopter. And she would still be the same old Custer County sow’s ear, who’d spent her whole life trying to look as much like a silk purse as possible.
She would never see him again when they got back to Dallas. In the dark, in his bed and in his arms, she told herself she accepted it.
With her mouth, with her hands, with her body.
She accepted it, she reveled in it, and she vowed that she would steep herself in whatever time they had left. That she wouldn’t worry about what came next or what they were doing here. That she would stop tearing herself apart about the things that wouldn’t change.
They had a week left. Gracelyn promised herself she would use every last moment of it.
In the morning, later than usual thanks to the long, hot night they’d shared, she ran down a winding road headed into a sweet blue morning, crisp with possibilities she already knew came stamped with an expiration date.
But almost as if he knew how little time they had, too, and wanted every last second of it to be real, Jonah came with her.
*
“You might as well just get to the point,” Jasper said out of nowhere.
They stood in a relatively quiet spot near the bar in FlintWorks, sampling one of Jasper’s new ales, while the early dinner crowd spread out at the tables and a local band played on the small stage.
Jasper’s gaze was hard. “I’m proposing in two days and the suspense is killing me.”
“What point is that?” Jonah asked carefully.
Yesterday, once Chelsea had finished with school, they’d all gone on a leisurely hike, deep into Copper Canyon and back. And now that he considered it, his brother’s girlfriend had seemed unduly quiet at their dinner afterward in the Italian restaurant in town. Was it all finally coming to a head?
Jonah ignored the part of him that whispered he wasn’t ready. That he wanted to live in these last few, bright days with Gracelyn forever—
“You’ve been my brother a long time,” Jasper said in that lazy way of his that meant he was pissed. Really, truly pissed. “Give me a little bit of credit. You didn’t come all the way here to take in a country rodeo and congratulate me over some kettle corn at the barrel racing finals. I’m not an idiot.”
It was Thursday night and the entire town of Marietta was in a happy sort of uproar. The rodeo was in town at last, with a slate of events set to start the following night. That meant there was hardly a square foot of real estate within the town limits that wasn’t decked out in banners or otherwise showing as much enthusiastic support for the annual festivities as possible. There was a real, live country singer coming in from Nashville on Saturday to add a little star power to the proceedings and if the singer in question wasn’t one of Jonah’s favorites—give him a Blake Shelton or a Landry Bell any d
ay—Jake Kohl was certainly a big enough star to raise the profile of the whole enterprise.
And if Jonah hadn’t spent the last few days in a delicious, delirious haze that had Gracelyn’s name written all over it, he might have been a little more prepared for this moment with Jasper. After all, this was the reason he was here.
“Did you expect my support?” he asked coolly. “With or without kettle corn?”
“I don’t care one way or the other,” Jasper said. He didn’t bother to throw out one of his big, bullshit grins, which told Jonah that exactly how angry he was. “And you can sulk about it all you want. You’ve gotten pretty good at that over the past couple of years.”
“I assume that by ‘sulking’ you’re referring to me picking up the pieces you left behind when you stormed off in a huff,” Jonah replied, his own voice much too smooth, like that might cover the sting of Jasper’s words. “You didn’t walk out on a family dinner one night, Jasper. You walked out on a multi-million dollar business. I apologize if my reaction to having to sort out all the details was a little less happy-go-lucky than you’d like.”
Something like guilt moved over his brother’s face then, but Jonah felt no particular sense of victory at the sight. What the hell was the matter with him? He’d been so sure this long overdue conversation would have made him feel vindicated at the very least. Instead, he felt something a whole lot more like sad.
“Just call off your attack dog,” Jasper gritted out after a moment, moving to let a group of laughing tourists surge past him. “Chelsea’s had enough.”
“Let me guess. In Jasper-speak, that means my girlfriend, is that right?”
Jasper let out a taut little bark of laughter.
“Your girlfriend,” he repeated, like the words were in a foreign language, and then he shook his head. “You can’t think that’s serious, Jonah. She’s basically just you in female form. All ice and spleen, and I’ve been dealing with that charming combination my whole life.” His gaze was as hard as nails then. “No one can put up with it forever, Jonah. No one would want to put up with it. Not even you.”