As if she didn’t know, but she didn’t really know him then, with that odd, tender look and the soft touch against her skin. This wasn’t the dizzying fire she had come to expect when he touched her, nor the calculating distance even while kissing her that she knew he was capable of – this, she knew on some deep level, was much, much worse. This was quiet and awful and sweet. This could hurt her in ways she didn’t dare consider. This was everything she was afraid of, right there in front of her.
He didn’t speak. His mouth settled into a grim line and he searched her face for something in the passing lights of the busy Manhattan street, something she was afraid he wouldn’t find – or worse, that he would. Something tightened in her gut, something sharp and barbed and made of heat and fear and more.
‘Let’s go,’ he said in a quiet voice, and he took her hand. Jenna felt his fingers close over hers, and felt the calluses on his fingers from his guitar playing, hard and rough and perfect, somehow, against her skin.
He hesitated, and Jenna thought, I have to tell him, right now, that whatever he’s thinking can’t happen—
But she didn’t open her mouth at all. His hand tightened on hers when she failed to speak, and a very male sort of expression flashed across his face. Jenna felt a flash of answering heat deep in her belly.
And then he was moving, and she felt unable to do anything at all but follow him. She told herself she was tipsy, that she had no control over what she was feeling, but she knew she was lying to herself. The last of her tipsiness had vanished the moment the night air hit her, and everything she’d felt since then, she knew, was Tommy. Pure and simple.
The truth was, she was surrendering. She knew it.
She wanted it.
She couldn’t remember, any longer, why she’d fought him in the first place. She didn’t care if he was faking, or if he had an agenda. She could feel every nerve ending in her body standing at attention, thirsty for him, and she didn’t know how to deny that any more. She didn’t want to.
They didn’t speak on the taxi ride. Jenna felt his heat and his pulse through their linked hands, and watched the city slide by outside the windows, red tail lights and street lights gleaming, brightly lit bodegas on the corners and clumps of pedestrians walking along the cold sidewalks.
It was as if an electric current hummed inside of her. Desire pooled in her belly and spilled outward. She felt the urge to throw herself at him even in the back of the taxi, with the need to taste him, touch him, explore him. It was making her so dizzy she thought that if she let go of his hand, she might spin off into the darkness.
Then, finally, they were outside her apartment building. On some level that surprised Jenna, but she let him lead her inside and up the stairs, until they were standing in the little yellow studio and there was no more pretending this was a dream. This was happening, right now.
Her breath was coming in short bursts. She could feel the rapid thump of her heart against her chest, like it was fighting to get out.
‘Why here?’ she asked, her voice sounding to her as if it came from far away. ‘Why not one of the many rooms in your apartment?’
Tommy smiled, and looked around the yellow room, which Jenna thought was closing in on them. He seemed bigger somehow. Or maybe it was just that she had never experienced the studio with another body in it before. There was hardly enough room for one.
‘Why not here?’ he asked. ‘I like this place. It’s cute.’
‘Uh huh.’ She felt anger sear through her then. ‘The international superstar thinks my little studio is cute. That’s why you live in a palace on Central Park West.’
His head tilted slightly as he regarded her for a long, cool, moment, with her sarcasm hanging between them like a blanket. Thumpthumpthump went her heart, picking up its pace.
‘It’s okay,’ he said finally. ‘I get it.’
‘You get what?’ she demanded, and then sucked in a breath because he closed the distance between them, and she felt edgy and terrified and desperate, and were those tears pricking the backs of her eyelids?
‘We don’t have to fight or banter to mask it, you know,’ he murmured, too close now. ‘It’s intense, isn’t it? But it’s going to be okay.’ His grin was crooked, and his eyes were far too knowing. ‘I promise.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, but her voice was nothing more than a croak, and it was a lie anyway.
‘Yes, you do,’ he said, so softly, and then he settled his mouth over hers, his hands wrapping around her upper arms and anchoring her there, holding her still while the kiss went on and on and Jenna slowly lost her mind.
Tommy kissed the way he sang, she thought, with all of that heat and yearning and sweet, hot sex. Somehow they ended up sprawled across the futon, and it no longer mattered if the studio was big enough, because they were finally, finally touching each other with all the frustration of the weeks – years, in Jenna’s case – they hadn’t touched. His hands were everywhere – learning the shape of her curves, tracing them, and tasting them, too. He yanked off his shirt and Jenna kissed her way across the hard planes of his finely moulded chest, then gasped when he pulled her up and kissed her, hard. He stripped her clothes from her body, and laughed when their hands tangled trying to get his pants off. He grabbed a small package from the back pocket of his pants, sheathed himself in one quick movement, and then they were both naked and it was really, truly happening.
‘Relax,’ he said then. He reached over and smoothed away the frown between her eyes. ‘You look very serious all of a sudden.’
Because this is not a dream. Because this is happening. Right now.
‘I’m totally relaxed,’ she lied, which made him smile.
He swung over her, rolling her beneath him, and she could feel him all along the length of her body, head to toe. The crisp hair on his legs against her smooth ones, the breadth and strength of his shoulders above her, and between them, his erection pressed hard against her belly. She shivered, and he smiled.
She loved all of it, and it was too much at the same time. So much heat and contrast. So much skin. She tasted him. Salt and sweet.
She wondered if it would change her. Shouldn’t sleeping with such a huge crush change her somehow? What if, after all of this, it was terrible? What then? Was it possible for chemistry to just … fizzle out?
‘I can hear your mind going,’ he murmured then, amusement lurking in his voice. ‘What are you thinking about? So loudly?’
‘Oh … uh … nothing,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘I’m not thinking anything.’
‘You’re not mindless and begging, either,’ he said in that silky tone that made her shiver. ‘I don’t know where you went, Jenna.’
‘I’m right here—’
But her protest died when he claimed her mouth with his own. This time his kiss was hard, possessing. This time, he used his hands. They cupped her breasts, holding them while he moved down and took first one peak, then the other into his hot, demanding mouth.
Jenna tried to catch her breath but he kept moving, tasting her belly, licking his way down between her thighs, where he settled his mouth on the molten core of her. Jenna gasped, but he only held her hips in his strong arms, held her down, and ravished her with his mouth until she was sobbing out his name, begging him to stop – or finish – or something, she didn’t care what.
But he didn’t stop. He teased her and toyed with her, bringing her closer and closer, and then, just as she shimmered on the edge, he released her, and kissed his way back up her body.
‘What are you … ?’ She was out of her mind. Red-faced, panting, and she wanted to kill him, too. ‘Why would you … ?’
‘Much better,’ he murmured, and then he twisted his hips and drove into her.
Jenna shattered into a million pieces.
When she came back to herself, he was motionless above her, braced on his arms and watching her, determination and satisfaction written all over his face. She reached over and
touched that wicked mouth of his with her finger, astonished to see she was still shaking.
‘You better hold on, Jenna,’ Tommy told her, his voice rasping in the quiet room, and she could see how much his effort at patience was costing him. His eyes gleamed. ‘We’re just getting started.’
He was as good as his word.
Dawn was greying the dark outside the windows and just starting to light the room. Jenna disentangled herself from Tommy’s limbs and got to her feet. Her thighs felt like jelly beneath her. She pulled a shirt from the pile on the floor and tugged it on over her head. His, she realized belatedly. She guessed that her hair had redefined the word bedhead, and she had a feeling she would not want to see what that looked like.
In the soft light, Tommy lay sprawled across the futon that they’d finally pulled out to make into a full bed at some point. He looked like some kind of god lying there, his big body taking up most of the space. Fast asleep, that clever mouth relaxed and the too-knowing eyes hidden, he looked different. Softer.
Every muscle and bone in her body hurt. Her skin hummed with leftover electricity, and she desperately needed water. Her eyes burned from so little sleep and she was sore. Oh, so deliciously sore. Something in her thrilled at it, but there was no denying the twinges every time she shifted position.
Tommy, it turned out, was a creative and inventive man. That should not have surprised her as much as it did. On some level, she’d been expecting him to be selfish and inconsiderate, like the famous rock stars were always accused of being in memoirs. But not Tommy. He’d been the opposite of selfish. So unselfish, in fact, that she didn’t think there was a single spot on her body he hadn’t made his own. She wondered if that came from the legion of women he’d undoubtedly slept with, a subject she thought she should probably care about. But she couldn’t rustle up any outrage or insecurity. How could she?
He’d made her limbs do things she didn’t think they could do. He’d laughed and teased and practically made her go blind from the sheer, overwhelming pleasure of it all. And then he’d done it again, and again. And again. She’d lost track of how many times he’d reached for her, or she’d reached for him. One touch blended into another, and swirled in her head like some extended montage scene of sex and sighs and more.
And even grainy-eyed and exhausted, she wanted him. Even sore, and unsure how or if she could walk, she still wanted him. She had the disconcerting thought that if she could figure out how, she would burrow into his skin and lie there with him. Was that insane?
No, just incredibly creepy, she retorted silently, disgusted with herself. She would not be sharing that decidedly freaky thought with Tommy, that was for sure.
She turned away, and moved across the floor towards the tiny kitchen, aware of her body and all the new and various aches. It was a sin tax on dying from pleasure, she thought, feeling a little bit smug. She hadn’t had many nights like the one she’d just had with Tommy. In fact, if she was honest with herself, she’d never had anything that came close.
She poured herself a glass of water and gulped it down, imagining that she could feel it racing to soothe her poor, ravaged body. She put the glass down on the counter with a click, and when she turned back to the door, Tommy was lounging there, sleepy-eyed.
And also naked. Jenna’s gaze fell across that famously beautiful torso, then down towards his narrow hips. Then she remembered that she was sore, and jerked her attention back up to his face.
His dark hair stuck up at odd angles and his beard had grown in during the night, leaving him with rough stubble she’d felt along the smooth skin of her thighs long before she’d noticed it with her eyes. He rubbed a hand over his face and then blinked at her, looking drowsy.
It was hard to look at him. It was harder still to look away. Everything, Jenna knew with a bone-deep conviction, was different now. Especially her.
‘Water?’ she asked, even as she was handing him a glass.
He took it without comment and drained it, then put it on the counter.
‘Why are you out of bed?’ he asked, his voice rough with sleep. He reached over and pulled on one of her dark curls, tugging it straight and then winding it around his finger.
‘I needed a drink,’ she said, fascinated to hear the huskiness of her own voice.
‘You look good in my shirt.’ He slid his free hand around her waist, then let it drift down to squeeze her butt. ‘Very good, in fact.’
‘You can’t possibly …’ She trailed off when he kissed her. The sweetness and electricity of it hit her again. She thought she might never be able to get enough of his taste. Of him. He pulled back, and laughed at her expression.
‘God, no, woman,’ he said. ‘What am I, a machine?’
‘I have some concerns about that, to be honest.’
‘Get back in bed,’ he growled at her. ‘It’s too early to be awake.’
Jenna let him lead her back to the futon, and felt her heart clench when he wrapped her in his arms and settled back against the pillows, burying his face in her hair. She could hear the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, and smell the salty-sweet scent that was uniquely his.
She had loved him long before she met him, and then even more once she’d grown to know him, and she had known full well that sleeping with him – what a ridiculous euphemism, after such a sleepless night – would change her. And maybe she was exhausted; maybe that was why she was trembly and on the verge of tears, but that didn’t alter the way she felt.
Tommy – alive and well – was a necessity. She got that now, in every possible way.
She would save him. She had to. No matter what saving him entailed.
21
Tommy didn’t think anyone was trying to kill him, because unlike Jenna, apparently, he knew that shit happened. People drove like idiots on New York City streets. Steel cages that weren’t supposed to hang from ceilings in the first place sometimes fell. And sometimes, people were required to jump out of the way of these things. That didn’t make an accident a plot.
Along those lines, there were accidents in set dressing rooms all the time. Fires, even. People were always forgetting cigarettes, or whatever else they happened to be smoking, and racing off to film something. Sometimes cigarettes – or whatever, Tommy wasn’t into the harder stuff these days but he didn’t cast stones – burned out in ashtrays, and other times, they caused larger problems.
Had Tommy been napping the way he’d claimed he was, rather than trying to convince the delectable Jenna to while away the time with him between boring video takes in a far more interesting fashion, the fire in his dressing room might have caused some serious damage. But he hadn’t been napping, and he’d smelled the smoke long before it could do much more than singe the wall, and there was no harm done.
‘No harm done?’ Jenna hissed, when the crowd had dispersed, Richie had sauntered away with the fire extinguisher still dangling from his hand, and it was only the two of them in Tommy’s dressing room once more. ‘You could have been killed! Again!’
‘But I wasn’t.’ He closed the distance between them, ran his hands over her hair and nibbled his way along her neck. He loved the scent of her skin, something citrus and vanilla all at once, sharp and smooth. He loved how quickly her body melted against his, as if she couldn’t help herself. ‘Weren’t we doing something much more interesting?’ he asked. He slid a hand down and slipped it beneath the jacket she wore, seeking and finding the tight peak of her breast. ‘Like this?’
‘Be serious.’ She batted his hand away, and stepped back, that frown of hers clamped down between her eyes. He’d never had a woman frown so much around him. The models were afraid to change expressions too often because they might get lines – and, if he was fair, because they didn’t have the sort of thoughts that required a change of expression. Jenna, on the other hand, seemed hell-bent on lining her lovely face sooner rather than later.
‘I’ve never been more serious in my life,’ he assured her, and the crazy thi
ng was that he wasn’t kidding. He was focused on the sweet curve of her breast like he was a teenage boy and he thought it might be the only breast he’d ever see. Jenna Jenkins, it was turning out, was addictive.
‘I would ask you if you had to go to the hospital before you would take this seriously,’ she continued, ignoring where his attention was focused and moving away from him to lean against the arm of the couch. ‘But you’ve already been to the hospital, and you don’t seem to care.’
‘Of course I care.’ He didn’t, actually. He would, however, pretend to care if it would make her happy. And he could tell she knew that. The furrow between her brows deepened.
‘If you took the energy you put into sex and put it into self-preservation—’ she began.
‘And where would that leave you?’ he interrupted her, unable to keep the smile from his lips. He stalked her across the room, grabbing her hand and tumbling them both lengthwise on the couch. ‘You act like you’re not enjoying yourself.’
‘And that can’t possibly be true.’ Her voice was heavy with sarcasm, but her eyes were shining. ‘Not with your immense skill.’
‘And yet,’ he pointed out, his mouth moving over her neck as he positioned himself in the cradle of her thighs, ‘I can’t help noticing that your heart is beating very, very fast. And you’re holding your breath.’
‘I can put my attraction to you aside to focus on other things,’ Jenna said primly.
He took her mouth with his, and moved suggestively against her, making them both sigh.
He thought he might die if he couldn’t get inside her.
Again.
‘Sure you can,’ he agreed, his voice rough with need. ‘But why would you want to?’
‘I thought you were anti-groupie,’ Nick threw across the conference table in Duncan’s office with no warning whatsoever.
There were any number of places Nick could have broached the topic of Jenna, and none of them would have been as inappropriate as an official band meeting. They were supposed to be talking about the new album and their press tour and upcoming concert dates. Not Tommy’s personal business. Granted, he had been amusing himself by wishing Jenna into the room rather than off at Video TV appeasing her boss, but that was his prerogative.