Project Virgin (18 page)

While Jesse had proceeded to watch back to back episodes of deeply stupid sitcoms, as if he’d been placed on this earth purely to torture her with tinny laugh tracks and the inescapable fact of his perfect, goddamned
body sprawled out so lazily only a few inches away from her tense, angry one.

Eventually, he’d turned off the TV and climbed under the covers, seemingly unaware that Michaela was still lying there beside him as stiff as a plank of hardwood. But he didn’t do anything but switch off the light, and then there was nothing but the dark of the room and the slap and howl of the wind outside. The wheezing
and periodic clanks of the ancient radiator and, slowly, the heat from Jesse himself warming up the bed they shared until it become unbearable.

Soon, Michaela told herself, he would start snoring or drooling or something—
anything—
unattractive, so she could find him hideous at last. Then, and maybe only then, she was sure she’d fall asleep.

But the minutes dragged on by and that never happened.
Jesse simply slept. He didn’t encroach on her space, and he didn’t make any kind of advances and he didn’t even snore, for God’s sake. He simply sprawled there beside her, as unreasonably perfect asleep as he was awake.

She thought she’d never hated anyone more in her entire life.

“Stress any louder and you’ll wake the neighbors,” he said, in that low voice of his, all rough and tumble and much
too close for her peace of mind. “It’s like a fire alarm.”

They might as well have been sharing a pillow. His voice was all over her, and from close by. It was terrible. It made every part of her shiver into taut, pointed awareness and stay there.

“I’m not stressing,” she told him, trying to sound anything but
taut
or
aware
. “I, uh, had a bad dream. I just woke up. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

She heard him shift around in the bed and didn’t want to think about how close he really was. How easily she could roll toward him, or even slide her foot across the space between them and touch him. All of him. She reminded herself this was a king-sized bed, no matter how tiny it had seemed the more she’d looked at it all night, and it had more than enough space for two people to sleep comfortably
without bothering each other at all. But she still entertained a fantasy or two of making a bed on the floor instead.

Only the fact he’d know he got under her skin if she did that—and that it would amuse the hell out of him—kept her from it.

“I’m going to share a little secret with you.” His voice was a rumble in the dark, and it wound inside of her like a hot rope of light and heat, making
her shut her eyes as if she could block him out that way. “I’m what’s commonly known as a self-made man. Mostly people say that as a code to let other people know that I don’t fit the usual profile. Guys like me who work construction jobs to help put themselves through college don’t usually end up running the construction sites afterward. If they do, that’s where they stop, but I didn’t stop. I turned
my after school job into an empire.”

“This is all fascinating, I’m sure,” she said. She wanted him to think he was boring her. She didn’t understand why he wasn’t. Why she wasn’t drifting off to sleep right that second. “You have my congratulations, I guess? Are you telling me this because you want me to call you Emperor?”

She felt the bed move beneath her with the suggestion of his laughter,
though he didn’t make a sound. The sheer, dizzying intimacy of that struck at her, so hard it left her ears ringing and that same bell tolling in her limbs, over her skin, knotted low in her belly.

“I’m telling you this because it was quite an experience to go from the pure, physical straightforwardness of a job site to an intellectual classroom on the U-Dub campus,” he said quietly. “My father
was a salesman, so I already knew how to pick out a liar at ten paces, but shifting back and forth between two such different worlds really made it into something of an art.”

She understood the sudden autobiography now. “I’m not lying.”

“Not in any real sense of the term, no, because you’re so bad at it.”

“I have no idea what you think I’m lying about or more to the point, why you think I’d
bother to lie to you at all,” Michaela said, still with her eyes shut tight because any minute, surely, that would make him disappear. “I’m glad you think highly of yourself. Confidence is great and probably really useful in your line of work. But I don’t think about you at all.”

She felt a shift in the bed and then a dip, and then he was right there beside her, that long body of his making hers
slide toward him in a sudden, alarming way, and her eyes snapped open to find him propped up on one arm.

Right.

There
.

That time, she heard as well as felt the little laugh he let out. “Liar.”

He sounded very male and entirely too satisfied, and Michaela had to battle herself to keep from either venting her spleen all over him or worse, flinging herself backward to get out of his range. Either
one would prove his point for him.

She held herself still. Very, very still, sort of on her side and sort of still on her back, and afraid to move at all lest she accidentally roll right into him. But not immediately springing into action to get away from him had its own issues. Like the fact her heart was beating too hard against the inside of her chest. Much too hard. She was terrified he could
hear it.

“What would I have to stress out about, anyway?” she asked him, all of that tension in her voice. “It’s the middle of the night and we could be waiting out the snowstorm in a whole lot less comfort than this. Like in a car by the side of the road, risking hypothermia. Since we’re not, I couldn’t possibly be more relaxed if I tried.”

But he didn’t answer. And tragically, Michaela’s eyes
adjusted to what little light there was and she could see him again. That gorgeous face of his and those decadent eyes, so intent on what he was doing. On her. So narrowly focused. He reached over with his free hand and he did it so slowly she could have moved out of the way at any point. She could have batted his finger away. She could have stopped him with a single word.

She didn’t do anything.
She only watched in a kind of awe as his hand moved closer to her.

Awe and something else that curled deep inside her like a thick, black smoke.

He didn’t speak. He moved his hand to her shoulder where it poked out from beneath the comforter and she didn’t understand what he was doing. What that faint touch was. Almost like a tickle, if smoother, and she shuddered. There was no chance to hide
it or repress it, and only once she realized he could see her shudder did Michaela realize her tank top strap had migrated down her arm and he was smoothing it back into place.

He was concentrating on his task with a ferocity that made that first shudder kick over into another, and still he took his time. He moved the strap into position and then he ran his fingers down the front of it, just
an unobjectionable inch or so then back again, to make it lie flat.

If it had been her mother, her cousin, someone she worked with, anyone else, she wouldn’t have cared. If it had been anywhere else but in this bed, where she couldn’t make herself forget he was completely naked, she doubted she’d even have noticed so innocuous a touch. If he was even slightly less beautiful, less…
Jesse,
maybe
it really would have been innocuous. There were a thousand ways this could be a perfectly nonchalant, unmemorable moment between two people who felt nothing for each other, and Michaela was sure every last one of them shot through her in that instant.

But there was nothing the least bit nonchalant about that hard, hungry look on his face when he raised it, at last, to hers. Michaela forgot how
to breathe. She forgot how to function. Her shoulder had taken on a bright red, burning pulse of its own and she was fairly sure she’d forgotten her own name.

Hers. His. Everything but the tension that crackled between them and seemed to set the dark on fire.

“Tell me, Michaela.” And his voice. That
voice
. Like he was buried deep inside of her already, God help her. “Exactly how open is this
liberal relationship of yours?”

‡

“N
o,” she said
abruptly. And then again, and far rougher, “
no
. I can’t.”

Michaela didn’t know who was more surprised. Her or Jesse.

She moved, then. She pulled herself away from him, from the hunger she could see on his face as easily as she could taste it inside of her and from the echoing pull of it deep within.
She hurled herself away until she was sitting up with her back to the headboard and a nice, healthy space between her and this man who tempted her more than she’d realized she could ever be tempted.

By anyone or anything.

Jesse didn’t say a word. He didn’t come after her. He simply stayed where he was, propped up on his side with the better part of his impossibly beautiful and, she was all too
aware, completely naked body tucked away beneath the covers. The radiator cranked out heat in hisses and clanks from the corner, or maybe that was Michaela’s own pulse, making that mighty racket.

It took her much, much longer than she thought it should to get her breathing under control. She gave up on regulating her body temperature. It was a lost cause, clearly, unless she wanted to strip off
all her layers and… she didn’t. She really didn’t want to do that. She had no idea what would be left of her if she did.

“So maybe the relationship is not so open, then,” Jesse murmured after what could easily have been hours. Days. The judgment she searched his face and couldn’t find was there in his voice, and it made her tense. “Shocker.”

“I get that you have a burning need to make me into
a liar here,” she threw at him, with maybe a little more aggression than necessary. Or maybe not.
She
wasn’t the naked person in the room.
She
hadn’t done the touching. “But that’s your personal stuff coming out, I think. I’m not a liar and incidentally? Having someone call you one repeatedly isn’t exactly the most charming thing in the world.”

“I didn’t realize I was trying to be charming.”

“Probably because pigs would fly first.”

“Michaela.” He waited until her gaze inched to his. “I don’t understand the problem.”

And she felt as if there was something wrapped tight around her throat, cutting off her words. Her air.

“There’s no problem.” Because she was a grown woman or she was supposed to be one. An adult. Not an immature child, prostrate to the whim of any feeling that stampeded
through her. She’d always believed that. “Just because my relationship is open, that doesn’t mean I’m required to mess around with every man I meet who isn’t my fiancé.”

“Of course not.” But that didn’t sound like a concession and sure enough, his hard gaze didn’t shift from hers at all. “How many men have you messed around with, would you say? Just give me a ballpark estimate. Five? Ten? Fifteen
or more?”

She felt her mouth fall open slightly, just slightly, and that told her any number of things she’d prefer not to know about herself. Things that until this very moment, she’d thought were outdated vestiges of the person she’d been told she ought to be as a child. Little ghosts of someone else, amusing in their way, but nothing at all to do with who she really was.

Here, now, she saw
that she’d been kidding herself. They weren’t ghosts at all. And they didn’t belong to someone else, they were hers. And the very idea of
messing around
with five, ten,
any
men while she and Terrence were together made her feel faintly sick to her stomach.

And that meant she had no idea who the hell she was, after all.

“I don’t think I’m going to answer that,” she told Jesse with every inch
of that calm she’d worked years to perfect. “It’s absolutely none of your business.”

Neither was the chaos inside of her.

“Maybe it was none of my business before,” he agreed. “But now? It’s critical.”

“And why is that?” She heard the kick of temper in her voice and could have reined it in, but she didn’t. “Because you have a hard-on and no place to put it?”

“I have hands, thank you,” he said
reprovingly, which was not a visual Michaela needed just then. “And, also, I’m not twelve.”

“And it still has nothing to do with you.”

“Let me tell you what I think.”

“I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Jesse. I don’t care what you think.”

“Right. That’s why you’re staring at me like that, haunted and wide-eyed. That’s why you shudder every time I touch you. That’s why your voice
keeps cracking every time you say something to me.” He smiled, and it was the fact of that soft smile on such a hard mouth that did her head in. It made something seem to fall apart inside of her, like a building simply crumbling from the inside out, there one minute and the next, only dust. “What I don’t understand is why a woman in a wide-open relationship would pretend she’s not feeling an attraction
like this, that’s so fucking obvious it could light up the whole of Western Montana. Even in the middle of a blizzard.”