Project Virgin (14 page)

“I’m not packed,” she said, like the idiot she was in this man’s presence and nowhere else.

And that marvelous mouth of his curved then, as something that might have been humor, if much harder, moved through his gaze.

“You have five minutes.”

Michaela took more like twenty-five. She confirmed her flight out of Bozeman that evening really was likely to be cancelled, she
texted Amos to inform him the weather might keep her away from the office longer than she’d planned and he should try not to freak out, and she threw her things into her small, carry-on roller bag. Then she paused to make the usual series of mild death threats to her meddling, irritating, cackling relatives, gathered around her aunt’s kitchen table, until her mother cut her off midstream. Bonnie Townsend
sipped at her coffee in that delicate way of hers that made Michaela feel like some kind of lumbering wildebeest in comparison, the perfectly-shaped eyebrows Michaela had been envious of all her life high on her forehead.

“My goodness, Michaela,” she murmured in repressive tones. The same way she’d chastised Michaela for her impatience with her family’s inability to understand every last one
of her life choices only last night.
They want to know these things because they love you, not because they want to annoy you. I don’t think it would hurt you to try to remember that
. “If you’re not interested in having a favor done for you, I’m certain there are more gracious ways to say so.”

Feeling suitably chastened and about an inch tall, as ever, Michaela buttoned her lip and wheeled her
suitcase out into the hall, where Jesse Grey was making like a column of granite. Except less approachable and far less sunny of disposition.

“Okay!” she chirped like some kind of psychotic kindergarten teacher, as if that might soften him up. “I’m ready!”

He exuded grittiness without seeming to do anything but stand there, and she felt that tugging thing low in her belly again, even more insistent
today than it had been the night before.

There was
human
, she thought then, and then there was straight up
destructive
, and she wasn’t sure she could tell the difference. It had never been an issue before.

“Are you sure?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice. “Maybe you want to say goodbye to everyone down on Main Street, too? The outlying ranches? The whole of Montana while you’re at it?”

“What’s interesting about you, Jesse,” she said, and it was a bit of a fight to keep hold of her not-entirely-polite smile, “is that you’re possibly the most unfriendly man I’ve ever met. Why did anyone think you’d make a good bachelor auction item?”

“Must be you,” he replied, with an almost-smile that didn’t ease the bite of his words at all. “This is the friendliest I’ve been in years. To anyone.”

“Childhood trauma?”

His mouth went lethal then. “Something like that.”

“What fun,” she said, and beamed at him like she meant it. “And we have hours upon hours trapped in a car together! Hooray!”

He moved then, which was something a little more than surprising, or at least that was how she interpreted that liquid thing that washed through her and that jolt that catapulted from her heart to
her feet and back up again.

“Be nice,” he growled. “Or I’ll make you carry your own damned bag.”

She couldn’t breathe. Or process that.

“I always carry my own bag,” she informed him, on autopilot. “I’m a liberated woman, thank you. My partner isn’t a bellhop. What does that even mean?”

He muttered something that sounded filthy, which Michaela told herself was further evidence he was terrible
in every way, but that wasn’t what the swirling, heated thing inside her felt about any of this. Definitely not.

“It means your man is a douche,” he growled at her.

He reached over and hefted up her heavy, rolling suitcase as if it weighed about as much as a feather pillow, then turned and stalked out of the house, leaving Michaela no choice but to follow after him.

The air outside was razor
sharp and viciously cold, a far cry from the softer wet of the Pacific Northwest winters Michaela had grown up with and even loved. She shuddered out a breath but kept going, following Jesse down her aunt’s carefully shoveled front path and out to where one of those Range Rover-type half-jeep/half-truck vehicles sat at the curb, gleaming black and powerful and as irritating as its driver. Jesse
threw her bag in the far back, slammed the door shut, and then jerked his head toward the passenger side.

“Let’s go.” It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. Another order. He clearly liked issuing them.

“Did you just call my—” She couldn’t call Terrence her
man.
That made her sound… something. A possessive, jealous hoarder, to start. “Did you call Terrence a douche?”

Jesse managed to give
the distinct impression of rolling his eyes skyward and sighing heavily without actually doing either of those things. He rounded the side of the SUV and opened the passenger door for her in a stark, annoyed manner that stripped the act of any possible chivalric content even as he did it.

“In the car,” he said. “Now.”

“Terrence is not a douche,” Michaela said stoutly, crossing her arms over
her chest and wishing she were wearing several more layers beneath her winter jacket as the Marietta wind slapped at her. “And even if he was, I’m engaged to him, so your default assumption should be that I’m into that. So why would you go out of your way to insult someone’s fiancé?”

“Michaela.”

He gritted out her name and there was nothing the least bit sweet or appealing about it. It was about
the furthest thing from
nice
she’d ever heard. And yet for a moment her legs felt as if they might go out from under her, toppling her sideways into the nearest snow bank.

Ice,
she told herself sagely.
Nothing but ice.

Definitely not the sound of her name, all sandpaper and whiskey, sliding over her and abrading her skin as it went—

“Look up.”

She did as he commanded because that was far preferable
to policing her own distressingly wayward thoughts just then. She tipped her head back and looked up at the Montana sky, which was clouded over and swollen with portent.

“It’s going to snow,” Jesse said, very distinctly, as if he was beginning to suspect she was not very bright. She couldn’t help but agree with that assessment. He made her feel like a fool. “Soon and at great length. You can
either get in the goddamned truck and try to beat the storm with me, or you can sit here for however long it takes them to dig out. Your choice, but you need to make it now.”

She felt like Little Red Riding Hood, peering at a set of sharp, gleaming fangs, telling herself it wasn’t a wolf when she knew very well that he was. Of course he was. But her other alternative was more time away from work,
which was always a headache, and more time with her family meant it would really be more like a migraine. Michaela loved her family. She did. But none of them seemed to understand that she was no longer thirteen and that she was, in fact, capable of making her own decisions. She was tired of explaining what she did for Amos, just as she was tired of defending Terrence to them. Jesse Grey might
be a jerk, but he was the fastest way home to her actual life, where she was highly-valued in both her professional and private arenas and no one required her to defend anything.

Michaela got in the SUV and sat there questioning her life choices while he shut her door behind her, like some dangerous remnant of an old school gentleman. She told herself she found that infantilizing and offensive—but
the warmth that twisted around in her belly suggested otherwise.

Something restless and worrying snaked through her, making her shiver, as Jesse loped around the front bumper, still scowling. She thought his face might actually be stuck that way—that it might in fact be medical. And she didn’t understand why that failed to make him the slightest bit less attractive.

That restless thing kicked
at her, swelling up like a high tide about to break and swallow the shoreline—

Michaela pulled out her cell phone with a hand that was
absolutely not
shaking, and, if it was, it was obviously because of the wind chill and nothing else, and called Terrence.

It went straight to his voicemail. Again.

“Hi sweetheart, it’s me!” she all but sang into the phone, and she could hear her voice was much
too high and certainly too loud as Jesse swung into the driver’s seat next to her. It got worse when he slammed his door shut, because then they were trapped there. The two of them. In the muted quiet of the SUV’s interior.

This time, Michaela knew exactly what it was that danced over her skin, making her stiffen. Pure, unadulterated panic.

“So the strangest thing happened,” she continued, talking
into the phone even as Jesse turned that scowl of his on her again, except this time he was much, much closer and she could
smell
him, soap and snow and man, while their eyes locked. “There’s a gigantic snowstorm coming in and everything’s shutting down, which means I could be stuck here for days if I don’t drive out now. And luckily, there’s this guy—”

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to your
fiancé,” Jesse muttered, still holding her gaze with his, even as he swiped that hat off of his head and let his dark-blonde hair do what it would. “As it would be to anyone. Some random guy.”

“—this friend of the family—”

“I grew up in Billings. I’m not from Marietta. Your aunt knows my relatives but she doesn’t know me, personally, from a can of paint.”

“—this weird, socially awkward guy
who might or might not be some kind of questionable painter,” she said tartly, and had to remind herself she was leaving a message, especially when Jesse’s hard mouth kicked up a little bit in one corner. Just the littlest bit, and yet her heart soared as if she’d won some kind of Olympic event. “He and I are going to drive home. That sounds insane but really, it’s only about ten hours or so.” Jesse’s
brows lifted as if that was funny. “I looked it up,” she told Terrence. She was definitely talking to Terrence. “So I’ll see you in ten hours! Yay!”

Michaela ended the call, and she should have turned away then, clearly. She had no idea why she just sat there, practically nose to nose with this man, as if neither one of them had anything better to do. As if this was at all safe, this
thing
she
refused to acknowledge was swirling around in what little space was between them.

“You just said ‘yay,’” he pointed out, maybe five or six thousand years later. “It was like a verbal emoticon, except scarier.”

She lifted one shoulder and dropped it in a manner someone else might have called slightly belligerent, had they been nearby. But no one was. It was only the two of them, tucked away inside
this SUV while the weather turned dangerous on the other side of the dashboard and the far savvier citizens of Marietta, Montana, stayed locked away inside their warm and cozy homes.

“I’m excited.”

“You were leaving a voicemail message. At least, I hope that’s what you were doing. Or that was a pretty spectacularly lame conversation you were having.”

“Is the issue here that I said the word
‘yay’ or that you feel qualified to judge the level of my excitement, for some reason?” Michaela asked, and she could feel how edgy her smile had become. “Because guess what? You’re a guy I bought in a bar. You don’t have the slightest idea what excites me.”

Jesse Grey stopped scowling then.

Right about the time her heart stopped beating, then kicked in again, like a gong.

A loud, low gong
that made the whole world seem to dance and shimmer for a moment there, as if the threat of a Montana snowstorm was the least of its problems.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, in that low, faintly rough voice of his, as if he knew. Every too hot, too liquid, too damning part of her that was still dancing, still lost in that shimmer. That low, insistent tug that was beginning to worry her just
the littlest bit. That dark bloom of pure fire that was consuming her alive, right there where she sat. Every last dream she’d had about him over the course of her very long, very restless night in her aunt’s spare bedroom with her mother in the twin bed across the pink carpet. As if he could see it all like stains, marking her up and making her that obvious, that ridiculous.

That doomed.

“You
can do that while you drive,” she threw back at him because if she didn’t speak, she was afraid something much, much worse would happen than the breathlessness that stole through her and threatened…
everything.
She couldn’t allow herself to think about it. Nothing inside of her made any sense. “I’m going to take a nap.”

‡

“I
know you’re
not asleep,” Jesse growled an hour or so later, when traffic ground to a halt yet again on the stretch of I-90 that skated along the thrust of the Rockies, rising up off in the west past Bozeman, and then sloping down on the other side of the Continental Divide. It was getting dark and icy—or more of
each, really—and they still had a ways to go before making it to Missoula, the nearest city of any size. The driving snow and bitter wind that rocked the SUV made that goal seem more precarious by the minute, even to Jesse, who’d been raised in this kind of weather. “I hate to break this to you, but it’s harder to fake it than you might think. Men can usually tell. Consider that a public service
announcement from me to you.”