It was a friendly kiss. Like his bear hug had been. Not like their first kiss in the Winton after her driving lesson.
Just friendly. At first.
Then, by mysterious mutual consent, his lips sought hers anew and despite a warning voice in her head, she leaned another few inches across the desk and responded in kind. By the time he’d finished and settled back on his side of the desk, Amelia was in a combined state of shock and arousal.
“It’s just the wine, J.D. That’s all it is,” she insisted loftily, settling back into her chair across from him. “I haven’t had a glass in a year and a half. And this is champagne. It always has a curious effect on me.”
“How lucky for me.” He sought her left hand resting on his desk and held it, his callused thumb lightly grazing her palm. “Though I must beg to differ.”
“About what?” She pursed her lips to keep from smiling idiotically. It had been a lovely kiss, really. Better even than Monsieur Lamballe at his most ardent.
“It’s not just the wine,” J.D. declared. “It’s something else. What that is, I haven’t quite determined.” He smiled at her. “Old-fashioned lust, perhaps?”
Amelia burst out laughing. “You say that to all the girls.” She marveled at how deliciously light-headed she was beginning to feel.
“No. I do not say that indiscriminately.” He lifted the bottle from the desk and topped off both glasses.
“Any more of this champagne will get us into serious trouble,” she insisted, and then found that she was giggling. “I lived in France, so I’m an expert on the subject.”
“Really? How so?”
“Veuve Clicquot,” she said solemnly, taking a delicious sip. “A lethal brand of champagne. One minute I was a declared spinster. Three glasses later, I was affianced to First Officer Etienne Lamballe of the
S.S. France
.”
“That sounds rather romantic.”
“Romantic? If I’d drunk anymore Veuve Clicquot that last month in Paris, my French husband would have gained control of my entire life and
that
would have been a disaster!”
“You are…
Madame
Lamballe?”
She laughed at his expression of consternation. “Almost.
Mais non… non!
I saved myself from the jaws of matrimony at the eleventh hour. You see, I didn’t drink that last, fatal glass. I realized one night at dinner after we’d—well—after we’d lived together in Paris when Etienne had shore leave, that Monsieur Lamballe had only been
pretending
to support my desire to be an architect.”
“Pretending? So he could…?”
“Exactly, the cad!” She held up her glass to gaze at the bubbles floating to the top of the rim. “Any fool knows that the quickest way to an architect’s heart is to make believe you love her T square—and in Monsieur Lamballe’s case, it worked.”
J.D. exploded with laughter.
“Ah… I amuse you,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “But luckily I was just sober enough to keep my wits. You see, that night,” she continued, mesmerized by the golden liquid’s bubbles rising to the surface of her glass, “Etienne drank the lion’s share of the Veuve Clicquot and fortunately, it loosened his lips. His true ideas about women practicing architecture became only too clear, the mercenary little grubber.”
“Perhaps he believed that marriage would spare you the kind of problems you’ve faced here with—”
“‘Spare’
me?” she scoffed. “He simply planned to
relieve
me of my inheritance when the time came!” She pushed her glass away from her. “Wouldn’t he have gotten a surprise if we’d married and come back to San Francisco? What do you think he’d have said the morning after your poker game with my father when my family didn’t own the hotel anymore? And just how do you think he’d have enjoyed our little earthquake?”
And then she dissolved into another uncontrollable burst of mirth.
J.D. pointed to their glasses. “Does this mean you don’t want any more champagne?”
She shifted her eyes from the remains of her sparkling wine to the bottle he held in his hand. “Oh bother! You and I have done nothing but work for weeks on end and finding a trunk full of gold, silver, and jewels doesn’t just happen every day, does it? I’m not engaged to
you,
so there’s no danger, is there?
Alors, mon ami…
let’s live a little!” she declared, polishing off what was left in her glass and demanding a fill-up.
“Good girl!”
She thought of Etienne’s constant admonishments that all work and no play made Amelia a dull
mademoiselle
, indeed. Of course, Etienne’s philosophy that first year at L’École had also been a devilish way of persuading her to join him in bed—and he’d succeeded, masterfully.
So what? She’d enjoyed that part… and his French letters had prevented pregnancy, just as he’d promised. She returned home with most of her pride intact, though not her virtue.
“Cheers,” J.D. declared, gesturing with his glass. “I knew you had a spark of fun in you, despite those prim shirtwaists you’re always wearing.”
“Not like the dance hall girls, eh? You should see the wenches who do the can-can in Paris! Scandalously little clothing they wear.” She narrowed her eyes and again wagged her finger at him. “And speaking of scandalous behavior—drunk or sober—you needn’t go gambling anymore, Mr. Thayer. As of tonight, you’ve probably got all the money we need to finish this place, and so I’m expecting you to behave yourself, for once.” She burst out laughing again, thinking that she was the most amusing person she knew.
“Amelia…” J.D.’s tone of voice brought her up short. “I give you fair warning. Drunk or sober, I have
no
intention of behaving myself tonight.”
J.D. rose from his leather chair and came to stand by her side. Then, after a second’s hesitation, he reached down and put one hand lightly on her shoulder.
“I can see your intentions all right,” she murmured.
“And I can see yours.”
Amelia remained very still in her chair, exquisitely conscious of his touch. The weight of his palm felt solid, yet his strong fingers kneaded the tired muscles in her back with strokes that were slow, rhythmic, and calculated to send her either flying from the room or sink deeper into her chair. After a full minute of silence while J.D. continued his wayward ministrations, she finally rose from her seat to her full height—which came only to J.D.’s shoulder—and set her champagne glass on the desk.
“No more wine,” she said firmly. “I want to do this with a clear head.”
She reached to cup his face between her hands, his black sideburns silky to the touch. With the pads of her fingers, she lightly traced the year-old scars that slanted across his forehead, raised white welts that cut into the darker skin around them. Then, slowly and with great deliberation, she stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the lips—knowing full well that she was definitely shaking hands with the devil once again.
She allowed herself the luxury of time, of sinking deeply into his embrace, imagining that J.D. found it startling for a woman in mannish shirtwaists and work boots to be so bold as to want a kiss to last forever.
Finally, murmuring against his lips, she said, “I wanted to do exactly that on the scaffolding that day. I always feel so free when I go up there, and there you were, climbing to the very top with me. I liked that.” She leaned back in his arms and found herself staring into pools of darkness pulling her into the depths of the unknown.
“I wanted to kiss you too, that day.”
“You did?” She felt as if she were a flirtatious stranger gazing provocatively at him through her eyelashes.
“You knew that I did.” He leaned toward her, kissing her again, and now he wasn’t teasing or flip. When, finally, he released her, he whispered close to her ear. “And did you have anything else in mind when we were at the top of the scaffold?”
She shook her head. “Certainly not! As I said, I haven’t misbehaved like this since I lived in Paris.” If he thought her a hussy because she’d already been with a man—so be it.
“No? Then why are you willing to misbehave tonight?”
“I haven’t said I would.”
“Oh yes… I think you have.”
He pulled her closer so she could feel the strength of his arousal. She allowed the shock of it, the pure pleasure of it, to travel up her spine. “I suppose I’m rather tired of being such a paragon of virtue.” She blinked gravely and announced, “And it isn’t just the champagne. I very much enjoyed that kiss just now.”
“As did I. And you’re definitely
some
sort of paragon,” he said, his playful tone underscored by nuzzling her neck in a fashion guaranteed to lead her into even deeper waters. “I’m delighted to hear you were a naughty girl in Paris. I would have been so disappointed to learn otherwise.”
“Believe me, I’m no girl, and if I’m
not
a paragon of virtue,” she replied with a deepening frown, “what kind of paragon do you suppose I
am
?”
“Perhaps you’re a paragon of truth. You have no idea how rare that is.” He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. “With your permission, I intend to discover who you truly are this evening, Miss Bradshaw.”
“So, we’re back to last names, are we, Mr. Thayer?”
“No, indeed.” Smiling, he seized her hand and led her toward his sleeping quarters down the hallway from his office. “I rather doubt we’ll use such formality this night.”
Chapter 27
At the door to J.D.’s bedroom, Amelia hesitated, halting any forward progress past the threshold. “I’ve just had some dreadful second thoughts, J.D.
Think
about it! This is a terrible idea. One that we’ll both regret in the morning.”
“What if I guarantee you won’t regret it one bit?”
He leaned down and kissed her so thoroughly, she knew right then he was a man to deliver on his promises. Of course, there were plenty of pressing reasons not to embark on an intimate relationship with James Diaz Thayer, but all she could think was what Julia Morgan would say if she knew her former employee was about to be seduced by Morgan’s former client.
The next minute, she could hardly think at all because J.D. pulled her hard against the length of his body. He eased her back against the concrete hallway wall and pushed his pelvis gently against her hips. Soon, his thumb was strafing the tip of her breast through her shirtwaist, a reminder that their clothing was the only barrier between them.
“You’re a woman who deals well with the facts, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Well, what we’re both feeling right now is
real
, wouldn’t you agree?”
They stood entwined, surrounded by the rough, unfinished cement that she had helped to construct. She was mesmerized by his challenging stare and astonished by the raft of sensations radiating down her limbs.
“It’s also foolhardy, reckless, and insane. The unvarnished truth is, I’ve never really trusted you, J.D. And I’m not sure I do even now.”
“Never trusted me about what?” he murmured into her ear.
His breath was warm and soothing. All thoughts of her father’s last poker game and the fate of women like poor Ling Lee flew out of her head. Amelia grasped for some shred of sanity while attempting unsuccessfully to ignore J.D.’s hand continuing to massage her right breast.
She heaved a small sigh and pushed her hips ever so gently against the swelling between his legs. “What we’re doing right now is also appallingly unprofessional. But it’s definitely real.”
“And you’re woman enough to admit it, aren’t you, because we both know the pleasure that’s in store.”
Oh yes,
indeed
… the pleasure
, Amelia thought, while little charges of electricity surged through her limbs. For several delicious minutes, she surrendered to the pure sensation of J.D. kissing her on each eyelid, her earlobes, and a spot at the base of her neck where the spurts of current shifted to bolts of lightning.
“Yes… oh yes,
please
,” she sighed again as he began the task of freeing the top buttons on her shirtwaist. When his warm palm invaded her blouse and smoothed across her skin, she lost all sense of time or place, her heightened sensibilities blotting out everything except the astonishing feel of his hand cupping her flesh.
Finally, he stepped back and then led her through the doorway. Once inside his private rooms, he sat her on the bed, knelt, and slowly, deliberately removed her boots, stockings, and garters in turn. For a few moments, he massaged her calves and the soles of her feet.
Then he asked, “Stand for a moment, will you please?” He lifted her skirts and unfastened the button on the pair of man’s trouser she habitually wore on site. “Now, this is a first,” he said with a roguish smile as he pushed the cloth down the length of her slender legs. “Step out from them, please,” he ordered.
“Oh Lord…” Amelia said with a sigh as J.D. began to pay rapt attention to the small, silk-covered buttons that marched down the front of her shirtwaist. As he unhooked each fastening, he pressed his lips on the patch of skin thereby uncovered.
“So warm…” he murmured.
In the way the memory of her first night with Etienne drifted through her mind, she was now wondering if J.D. thought at all of Ling Lee. In the next instant, all rational thoughts of the past were banished by the simple act of his fingers undoing the solitary button on the waist of her workday skirt.
“There,” he said, the fabric falling to the floor. “That was easy.”
“In Paris, I abandoned my corsets, so the next part’s easy too.”
J.D. chuckled. “Such a woman of the twentieth century you are.” By this time, he had smoothed her petticoat over her hips and they both watched the garment pool at her feet next to her skirt and her father’s trousers. “And such lovely architecture, Amelia,” he whispered. His languid glance swept from her bare feet to her face. “So beautiful.” He lightly settled a hand on each breast, still covered by her thin chemise.
She could have stilled his kneading fingers, but she realized with some surprise that she wouldn’t dream of it. J.D. had been right a few minutes earlier. For better or for worse, she wanted exactly what he wanted and she watched him call forth sensations from her with a rising sense of anticipation and impatience. She helped him remove her remaining piece of clothing and then reached for his waistband.
“Here,” she murmured. “Let me do that. And while we’re on the subject of architecture, I’m longing to see…”
And then there were no more barriers of clothing or embarrassment or shyness, but merely a driving need to fall onto the mattress covering J.D.’s big brass bed. The room was chilly, as the hour approached midnight, but from somewhere, J.D. had secured a feather duvet that felt soft and welcoming when he gently eased her onto her back.
“The bed’s just like the one you had before the second hotel blew up.”
“Sears and Roebuck’s best, darling,” he said, bending forward to brush his lips against a sensitive spot below her breastbone. “When I like something, I never change my tastes.”
A faint aroma of verbena teased her nostrils as J.D. lowered himself beside her on the duvet. The lemony tang mixed with his masculine scent and a whiff of sea air seeping through window frames scheduled to be caulked the following week.
Amelia reached her arms over her head and grabbed the headboard’s bars, stretching contentedly, the champagne she’d consumed keeping her warm. “Remember the night of China Alley, when I sat next to you on the bed and gave you a cup of tea?”
“I don’t remember the tea. I just remember you. Sitting on my bed.”
How different tonight was from that time Angus and she had laid J.D.’s unclothed, beaten body on the bed. This night, she gazed boldly at his long, lean form, a man of thirty-six, in vibrant health—though his skin was scored by war and natural disaster. He lay beside her, hovering close with all his strength and power. She ran her fingertips along the scars on his rib cage and reached above his shoulders to touch the marks on his forehead for a second time. Then she allowed her right hand to drift downward, past his waist to his thigh where she found a patch of raised skin, the place a bullet entered his leg during the battle on San Juan Hill.
“You’ve lived a dangerous life, J.D. Thayer,” she murmured, and slid down his body to kiss the wound.
She felt his hands lightly touch the back of her head and then press her firmly against him. The fire that had destroyed that other bed, that mattress, that hotel, was now forgotten in the urgency of a newly kindled flame. He allowed her the freedom to explore, to stoke the flames until a moment of near crisis, when he reached down and lifted her toward the pillows at their head so he could gaze into her eyes.
“Amelia… Amelia. Such a kind and generous lady…”
She only had time to gasp before his fingers gently slipped into the warmth between her legs. “Do they do this in Paris, I wonder?” he murmured into her neck.
Amelia, of course, was powerless to offer him an answer, for he’d begun to coax, to tease, to torment her into a state of rampant desire that had only dimmest echoes of Paris or anywhere else.
She had no doubt that what they were doing was utter folly, fraught with future complications she could not, in her present state of unbridled thirst, even imagine. But J.D. easily drove those last, sensible thoughts clear out of her head and smothered any reservations she might weakly summon at this late state by pressing the length of his body against her own.
The consummate gambler, tonight J.D. played card trick after card trick in a high-stakes game calculated to provoke in her an avalanche of sensation as he marked every inch of her as his own. When, finally, he entered her with a sureness of his welcome and a dazzling display of skill, he repeatedly invoked her name, telling her of his unbounded pleasure and delight. In the end, she simply surrendered to the inevitability that she too had not changed her tastes for passion and risk-taking, nor would she decline this brazen invitation to feel fully and exquisitely human.
The earthquake and fire had nearly destroyed them, she thought, pulling him closer still, but fate obviously had another plan. Suddenly, Amelia couldn’t care less what Julia Morgan or anyone else might think of her. She was
alive
when she could easily have been dead
.
She could touch and taste and smell and virtually see the very essence of this fellow survivor. She was in
this
bed, with
this
man. In this most precious place where, strangely, she sensed her grandfather’s loving presence.
She luxuriated in the piercing feel of J.D. exhorting her to take the journey with him, and she knew, without a doubt, that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle—and might not ever be put back.
***
The next day dawned with the kind of harsh reality that Amelia had fully anticipated the previous evening.
“Does your head hurt as much as mine?” J.D. inquired of the prone form that lay buried beneath the bedcovers. Amelia’s unbound hair was completely covered by a pillow.
“It’s my brain that’s on a death march,” replied a muffled voice. “Don’t… even… whisper.”
“Sorry, Amelia, but it’s just come on daylight.” He lifted the pillow and gently pressed his lips against her shoulder blade. “If you don’t want your reputation as a straw boss shattered forever, you’d best make your way back to your own room.”
“Oh…
Lord
, J.D. We are such bad actors…”
Amelia painfully pulled herself into a sitting position and leaned her naked back against the headboard’s cold brass bars. She struggled to tuck the rumpled sheet under her arms. J.D.’s sparsely furnished sleeping quarters, filled only with his bed and a few discarded packing crates serving for furniture, made it seem in the cold light of dawn as if they’d made love in a deserted warehouse.
“Not exactly in the pink, are we?”
“No. No, we are not,” she mumbled. “And we are truly appalling people.”
“We are not appalling.”
“Well, reckless and foolhardy might be a more apt description… though I thoroughly enjoyed myself, Mr. Thayer.”
“I’m mighty flattered to hear that, Miss Bradshaw. So did I. Although, now I’m a bit concerned that I didn’t protect—”
“That’s very considerate of you,” intervened Amelia, “but in one regard, our timing was impeccable. I’m just about to have my—” She paused and vowed she would sound far more worldly than she felt. “There is no danger I’ll conceive.”
She swung her bare legs to the side of the bed and stared at the mound of clothing heaped in the middle of the cement floor as an avalanche of pleasurable moments with J.D. flashed through her mind. “Stay right where you are, will you, while I get dressed.”
He reached out and firmly took hold of her arm. “No,
you
stay where you are for just a moment.” He leaned over and lazily kissed her on the mouth. “That’s just a little reminder of what got us into this fix.”
For a few seconds, she allowed herself to luxuriate in the sheer masculinity of his naked chest pressed against her bare breasts. Then, reluctantly, she pushed against his shoulders and stood beside the bed. Aware of his avid scrutiny, she speedily donned her shift, tucked it and her wrinkled shirtwaist into her father’s trousers, and fumbled with the fastenings up to her neck.
“I’m
so
thirsty,” she said, and sank into a chair to hook the closures on her ankle boots.
“Sad to say, there’s not a drop of champagne left,” J.D. announced. He laid on his back, smiling broadly, hands behind his head, the sheet now chastely covering his mid-section.
Amelia’s fingers stilled, her bootlaces ignored. She raised her glance to meet the gaze of a man whom she now knew intimately, yet not in the manner that really counted. She did not yet know much more than before of J.D. Thayer’s true character—except that he was a skilled and generous lover—and amazingly enough, he hadn’t asked another word about Etienne.
She’d realized long before last night that she’d thoroughly recovered from her love affair with the wily Frenchman, chalking it up to part of her education abroad. J.D., on the other hand, hadn’t volunteered a single sentence about Ling Lee, a woman he had lived with for several years—or his feelings about five-year-old Wing. What could she assume except that he probably hadn’t completely recovered from his loss?
Interrupting thoughts intent on their death spiral, she said, “Please don’t purchase any more sparkling wine, J.D. We can’t afford it, and besides… we can’t afford it.”