“Go on,” I said. I could actually be in a TV show right now. Here I was looking at Jack Eversea, a face the world knew so well. That I knew so well. A collection of features that were so familiar, yet buzzed in and out of focus from my personal recognition and that of tabloid pictures and movie parts.
“I—” He swallowed, loudly. “I don’t think you hate me right now, but you may hate me when I get done telling you.” He looked up.
His eyes were deep, mossy green pools of emotion and it walloped me straight in the chest.
I held my breath.
“I feel like I just climbed out of a river of shit. I can’t … I won’t risk you hating me right now.”
“Just freaking tell me, Jack.” My voice was hard and bitter. “Tell me the truth, tell me all of it. Do me the courtesy of not deciding which parts you think I should hear.”
“That’s not—”
“Otherwise what’s the point of this? Why are you here? If I end up hating you, it would be easier for us all. Please. Please make me hate you. Why don’t you just finish the job so I can get on with my life!”
Oh my God.
My heart pounded and my breathing was choppy. Shame and humiliation poured through every fiber of my being as my words reverberated in the silence. Me admitting that I couldn’t get on with my life, that I wasn’t over him.
Way. To. Go.
Seven long months to get over him, and I threw away my pride in seven seconds. My skin flashed hot.
Jack stared.
I couldn’t look away.
And then he moved, his body lunging out of the chair, the sound scraping across the floor in a loud screech as he came at me. His arm was around my body lifting me against his chest, crushing the air out of me.
I gasped to get my air back, and breathed Jack in, just as his mouth crashed onto mine.
His lips were hard and demanding, and then they parted, his tongue licking into my mouth.
I felt wounded, open, and … consumed. The feel of his mouth on mine was a shock of sensation. I’d been reliving his kiss every day since the moment I’d first felt it. I craved it. I craved him.
His taste was exotic, extravagant, like something I shouldn’t have. The silky slide of his tongue. I parried against it, even though I could barely move with the way his hand held my head just so and the hard press of his chest that rumbled with a suppressed groan. I was madly clutching his soft hair, fisting long tufts of it, trying to hold him, to taste him. Inhaling him. When did my hands get up there?
The tornado of long denied emotions and latent sexual frustration spun and tumbled and then touched down throughout my body. I was dizzy, like we were simply sensation and emotion and had lost our bodies.
Jack’s arm tightened, his chest heaving, his desperation intoxicating me. Then his hands were holding my face, his lips gentling and molding to mine. As his tongue slowed and stroked, the pace became agonizingly sweet and infinitely more dangerous.
I suddenly let out a half-sob that slapped me in the face.
No! Oh my God, no! I couldn’t do this.
With everything I had, I pulled away, pulled my lips from his, struggling not to sink back into him.
His arms gave a little as he felt my resistance.
I tilted my face up as I shook my head and saw his eyes flicker open to meet mine. His breath sawed in and out, fanning across my skin.
Confusion morphed into something indiscernible as his fathomless green eyes focused on me. And then he was cupping my face.
I tried to turn my face away.
Jack closed his eyes tight once more, his brow creasing up, his mouth grim, like he was in pain.
I dropped my arms.
“No,” he said harshly, through gritted teeth. Pulling me in, his hands wrapping around my body, gathering me close, and holding me tight against him. “Don’t let go.”
But I didn’t hold him back. My arms fell limply to my sides, and I willed the beat of desire to slowly ebb from my body. It wasn’t difficult now that the shame was winning out. Inhaling deeply, taking a last hit of Jack’s scent as my cheek pressed against his soft t-shirt, I steeled myself to push him away. I didn’t want to be held like some baby who needed comfort. I couldn’t stand his pity a moment longer.
And then everything shifted. His shoulders sagged, and his back curved out as his head slid down to my shoulder. He turned his face into my neck and … clung to me.
Jack clung to me like he’d never let me go. He inhaled the scent from my neck and held me tighter, his fingers curling in to my back like a drowning man.
Unsure of what to do, I hesitated, then gave in to my instinct and brought my arms up and tentatively slid them around him, trying to ignore the terrain of his well-muscled back.
He tensed for a moment then relaxed into our embrace, breathing in deeply.
We stayed like that for several long minutes. They were too long and not long enough.
“I don’t know how to go back,” he whispered, shifting slightly, his hand running up to my hair and his mouth moving to my ear.
My skin chilled at the feeling, a rush of a tingle across my nerve endings as his breath fanned out with his words.
“I don’t know how to go back to where we were, to what we had,” he breathed softly, “to what we were supposed to be.” He paused again. “What we are meant to be.”
“Jack—”
“Shhh. Please,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Please, just listen.”
I closed my eyes and focused on his voice as it danced over my skin and my fears as if they were nothing. Melodious, but rough. Whispered but heavy with emotion.
“I know I’m probably too late, and I know you are probably better off with him, and I know you probably don’t want me to fight for you. I have no right to. But I want to. I want to. I have been fighting for you. It’s taken me seven months to get back to you, to try and do it the only way I knew how, to protect you.”
I stiffened, my stomach rolling. What did that mean? I shook my head. “No, Jack, don’t—”
“Listen,” he said harshly, keeping my head still so I couldn’t look at him. “Listen. Not by looking at me, not by remembering who I am and why you don’t believe me. Don’t look at me and see the guy in the media. The guy you think I am after what I did. Listen to me.”
I stilled and after a few moments nodded. I’d told myself I wanted to get through all of this tonight, so I would listen even if it killed me. I may not believe it, but I’d listen. He could tell me any excuse or reason under the sun, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I had neither the temperament nor the inclination to be the casual girlfriend of a Hollywood superstar like Jack Eversea. I wasn’t going to pick this up where we left off like nothing ever happened.
He breathed out in my ear.
I shivered. This was torture. Pure and simple.
“I can tell you everything that happened whenever you want or need to hear it, but none of it matters. I can’t change it. I can’t go back and do anything differently. But there are some things you don’t know that you need to know.” Jack’s hand on my hair burrowed in, loosening the bun that was already coming unbound, and massaged my scalp. His other roamed up and down my spine.
I took a calming breath, trying to keep my head while I rode this out. I could so do this.
Jack moved his lips closer to my ear lobe, and my pulse hiked up another level. He swallowed, audibly. “Let’s start with something I never told you before. I, Jack Eversea, am … utterly in … love … with you, Keri Ann Butler.”