Persuasion Skills (6 page)

Gathering her in his arms, he nuzzled her
chest with his nose before pulling back. He caught her gaze and raised his
hands to cup both her cheeks.

“God, you’re so fucking sweet,” he said,
his breath coming out in panted bursts. “You can’t deny we’re good together,
Pep. What makes more sense than marrying your best friend?”

And just like that, the fog of desire his
kisses had dragged her under cleared.

She hissed in a breath and pushed herself
away from him. The drag of her clit against his hard length had her pussy
clenching in dissent, but Pepper didn’t care.

“Hey—”

She ignored his protest at the loss of
contact and began scrounging around the room in search of her sweater.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” She
growled the words to herself.

Finding the wayward garment clinging to a
lamp across the room, she quickly shrugged into it before doing the same with
her coat and hat.

Feeling a little better-equipped with
wearing an armor of thick wool, she marched back to the kitchen island and
began packing up her the laptop and files.

“Do you want to clue me in on something
here?”

She glanced up to see him leaning back in
his chair, clasping his hands behind his back. Despite the hard bulge in his
pants being still very visible and apparent, he had a disgustingly smug smile
on his face.

Arrogant, clueless jerk.

She took a deep breath and counted to
ten.

“You don’t want to get married,” she told
him slowly in the most patient voice she could muster. “This is just some of
kind of delayed grief reaction to your mom’s death.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve examined
the situation from all angles, and she was right. I can’t just spend my life
wrapped up in some project. I want to come home at night to a warm body in my
bed. Maybe even produce a few kids, show ’em how to play basketball, and teach ’em
how to build their first computer application.”

Horror filled her as his face took on an
almost dreamy expression. She was going to throw up. She just knew it. Her only
recourse to salvage what was left of their friendship was to leave. As quickly
as humanly possible. She turned back to her rolling case and snapped the flap shut.

“You don’t just decide you’re going to
get married, like you decide it’s time to buy a new car.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I weigh the pros
and cons of marriage just as I would a car? You have to admit, Pep. We’re good
together. I
know
you, and you know
me. We’ve already proved that we’re sexually compatible. Sleeping together
proved that.”

“That was a mistake.”

“You can’t really deny we have chemistry,
not after that kiss.”

“Chemistry doesn’t make a marriage,” she
said as she made her way to the front door.

She heard his chair scrape back and his
footsteps as she sprinted out of the cabin.

“Maybe not, but friendship and history
do,” he said, grabbing her arm and stopping her progress down the steps.

She turned to him and smiled sadly.

“And so does love, Jax. You can’t just
decide on wedded bliss and leave out love.”

“I already love you, Pep. You know that,”
he said.

His earnest reply pierced her heart.
Knowing he loved her as a friend just wasn’t enough, not anymore.

“Not the way you need to. Not the way
it’s supposed to be for people to actually be married to each other.”

His lips hardened into a sharp line.

“I knew you were going to be difficult,”
he said.

“Excuse me?”

She felt a spark of anger work its way up
her spine. If anyone should be angry it should be her. She was the one getting
the worst marriage proposal ever spoken.

“I knew it was going to take a lot to
convince you that this would work. You just need some time to see reason. Stay
with me for the next week. Let me prove to you that we have what it takes.”

She just shook her head at him and
shrugged out of his grasp, marching towards the rental car.

“Listen, Jax. Trust me when I say in a
few days you’ll see this is just the early signs of a mid-life crisis and residual
grief. We can laugh about it over mojitos on your birthday,” she called out
over her shoulder as she threw her case in the cab and climbed into the
driver’s seat.

She reached down to turn the key and
grasped at air. Her brows furrowed as she leaned back to check the floor of the
car. Perhaps she had dropped them when she first arrived.

The jingling sound of metal clinking
against metal stopped her search. She looked up to find Jax standing near the
front of the car, holding up her keys and quirking an eyebrow at her.

She merely smiled back and began digging
through her purse. She always asked for an extra set of keys with rentals. She
pulled the spare set out and waved them triumphantly at him.
The sneak
.

Grinning, she pushed the key in and
turned the ignition and … nothing. Silence greeted her as the engine refused to
turn over. The damn thing didn’t sputter. It didn’t cough. It just sat there
silent and unmoving.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she
yelled as she dropped her head to the steering wheel.

What were the odds that the stupid car
would break? She inhaled a sharp breath.
He
wouldn’t
. She lifted her head slowly to peer out of the windshield.

Jax was still there waiting, still
smiling, but this time dangling a mesh of wires in the air, a look of pure
mischief on his face.

She plopped her head back down to the
wheel. Sometimes, it just didn’t pay to have a sadistic genius as a best
friend.

Chapter Five

Jax couldn’t hold back his grin at
Pepper’s form slumped over the car steering wheel. Admittedly, he’d veered a
little from his initial plan back in the cabin, but he was gradually getting
back on track. His current objective was to get Pepper to stay.

He had the good grace to flinch at his
maniacal thoughts, but he was still going to follow through on his plan. Pepper
had already proven that even if he told her the truth, she wouldn’t believe
him.

She always preferred to analyze her
decisions from different angles; it was one of the things they had in common.
So the best way to convince her he really did love her was to show her how good
they could be together and that his emotions weren’t brought on by some
misplaced sense of grief or guilt.

She finally straightened from the wheel.
Knowing how prepared she always was for any eventuality, he dug into his back
pocket and pulled out a small digital device that fit into the center of his
palm. He pressed a few buttons, entering his password and watched the screen on
the gadget register his commands.

He looked up to see her step out of the
car with her cell phone held out in front of her, obviously searching for a
signal.

He cleared his throat loudly.

“You won’t get cell service here,” he
called out.

She turned toward him and gave him a
gleefully evil grin as she waved the phone in front of him.

“Satellite phone, asshole! I’m calling a
car service, and when you eventually get off your Crazytown mountain of a
breakdown, I might consider forgiving you and letting you live,” she said
angrily before turning back to concentrate on her phone.

Damn, she was hot when she got angry.

“Your phone isn’t going to work up here.”

She stiffened and turned back to face
him.

“Why wouldn’t it work? The laptop worked
just fine, and we had no problem with a connection,” she said, taking slow and
deliberate steps toward him.

Jax held his ground, not retreating from
her approaching form, despite the angry flames flicking out from her gaze.

He waved the small digital remote in the
air, before placing it back in his pocket.

“Because I’m jamming the frequency,” he
said simply.

The look of disbelief coupled with her
slackened jaw almost caused him to laugh out loud. She would most probably not
want him to laugh at her predicament, and the chances of not receiving another
well-placed punch were slim.

Wait for it
, he thought as she snapped
her mouth shut and her face flushed with fury.

“Have you lost your mind?” she whispered.
“Of course you have.” She began to step around, pacing in front of him. “No
sane person decides to get married on a whim!”

“Just hear me out—”

“No sane person decides it’s perfectly
acceptable to trap their friend on top of a freaking mountain!”

“All I’m asking for is one week—”

She paused in her plodding trek and gave
him a baleful stare.

“No
sane
,
logical
person is crazy enough to
think if he traps
me
here that when
he falls asleep tonight I won’t rip him a new one and leave his rotting carcass
for the damn bears!”

He didn’t back down from her tirade.
Admittedly, he was most likely—probably—breaking a few laws, but desperate
times called for desperate measures.

“Well, this totally
sane
and
logical
person
knows you well enough to understand that you’re so stubborn, I’d have no other
choice but to force you to stay and listen to reason,” he said calmly.

She ignored him and continued on with her
rant, pacing away from him again. The diatribe consisted of some pretty
interesting assumptions she had about his mental state as well as a few
descriptions of what she would do to him if murder weren’t a federal offense.

He winced at a few of her more graphic
and violent depictions of revenge to come. She always did have a somewhat
sadistic streak.

His balls should be shrunken in fear, but
the sight of Pepper in a full-on snit had his cock at full attention.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes
bright with anger, and the air around her practically hissed like a whip.

Any sane man would want to stay far, far
away, but all he could think of was pressing her down into the snow and
channeling all of that crackling energy into more pleasurable pursuits.

“You know that you’re officially only one
step away from re-enacting
Misery
,
don’t you?” She flicked the question out at him, standing before him once
again.

He let a full grin spread across his
face.

“Oh, but I have every intention of tying
you down to my bed, Pep, and I seriously doubt you’ll be begging me to let you
go.”

His comment landed like a gauntlet
between them, and the resulting silence pulsed as her eyes grew wide, her pouty
mouth falling open in a look of shock, her breaths panting roughly into the
void.

If she was a sadist, then he was most
definitely a masochist because his dick swelled and throbbed in the resonating
hush. She was the only woman who could get him this hard no matter the
situation or consequences.

He bit back a groan just as her war cry
filled the air, and he barely had time to squint before she hurtled herself at
him.

This time, he had the presence of mind to
duck, sure that she would attempt another blow.

He remembered too late that Pepper was
ever the strategist, and before he could adjust his stance, his knees buckled
from her sweeping leg.

He landed flat on his back, blinking up
into the clear
Colorado
sky. Her booted foot pressed onto his torso before her face leaned into view.

She looked like an avenging Valkyrie,
ready to split him in two.

God, he couldn’t wait to fuck her again.

“One week.”

She spit out the words, while grinding
her heel into his chest.

“I’ll give you one week to come to your
senses. One week, and you better hope our friendship survives this, or I’ll
kick your ass all the way back to
Miami
,”
she said before lifting her foot and stomping away, her declaration lingering
in her wake.

He stayed down in the snow, grinning up
to the sky as he heard the cabin door bang open and slam shut.

Things were going even smoother than he
planned.

Chapter Six

Pepper trod back and forth in the cabin,
making her way from one end to the other and back again in an effort to rein in
her panic.

One week alone with Jax.

This can’t be
happening.

It wasn’t as if they hadn’t spent time
together before. They were regular fixtures in each other’s homes, but that was
before she had seen him naked, before she had felt him grinding away inside
her, before she knew just how deliciously commanding he was in bed.