Pursuit (38 page)

She and Courtney had been inseparable.

“I don’t ever even think about it anymore. It was a long time ago.”

“You were five, weren’t you? That’s a tough age to lose people you love.”

She remembered that he’d said his father had died when he was four.

“Were you close to your father?” she asked, barely breathing. It felt as if there was an iron band around her chest limiting the amount of air she could take in.

“Not really. From what I’ve been told, he was gone all the time, working.” His hand tightened on her arm and he pulled her more firmly against his side. Jess refused to allow herself to relax against him. She was too intent on keeping the pain away. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember him at all. He ’s just somebody standing there with my mother and me in old pictures.”

It wasn’t so much sadness in his voice but regret, she realized. As if he wanted to remember and was sorry he couldn’t. Jess took a careful breath.

“I can’t really remember my father, either. My parents had split up, and he wasn’t around a lot, so I guess that’s why. But I can remember my sister.”

“She was younger, right? Three, wasn’t it?”

Jess nodded, surprised he remembered the details so well. He must have been watching the program closely, and the knowledge both touched and comforted her. What had he said? That watching had just about torn his heart out?

The thought made her dizzy. Some of the stiffness left her body. Hardly aware of her own softening, she let herself rest against him.

“Want to tell me about it?” His voice was almost unbearably gentle.

Her automatic answer, the answer she’d always given to anybody who had ever tried to probe her memories of the tragedy, was “no.” But this was Mark. And, well, suddenly she just wanted him to know. For whatever reason.

She took another, deeper breath, and this time her lungs actually expanded to let in sufficient air.

“We were wading in the surf. My dad and his girlfriend were lying on towels on the sand, and I was supposed to be watching Courtney. She had those little floaty things on her arms, and she kept sitting down in the water and letting the waves carry her in. Only one of them pulled her out. She was laughing; she thought it was great because she was riding the wave. I was trying to catch her—I could swim a little—and I couldn’t. Then one of her floaty things came off. I can still see it; it was clear with yellow-and-white fish on it, bobbing toward me. She went under, and I started screaming for help and dog-paddling toward her as fast as I could, only I couldn’t see her anymore. Then she popped up right beside me and I caught her, caught her hands, and we both got dragged under again, and then she got pulled away from me. I came up and I saw her come up, too far away for me to grab her this time, but I saw her looking at me. She ’d lost her other floaty thing by then and her eyes—she had blue eyes, like Mom, and dark hair like me—were big and wide and scared, and she was opening her mouth—I always thought it was to call to me, but I don’t know for sure—when another wave broke over her. I think my dad went rushing past me about that time, but I don’t really remember that. What I remember is Courtney’s eyes, and then a wave breaking over her and over me and me somehow winding up near the beach where somebody pulled me to shore.” She broke off and closed her eyes. “The next time I saw her, she was lying in a little white coffin at the front of our church. I touched her—I thought if I touched her she would wake up—and she was cold. And still. And she didn’t wake up.”

The pain that engulfed her as she finished was so intense that it made her shudder. Bracing against it, refusing to cry, she did what she had learned to do over the years: endure it until it ebbed.

“Jess.” Both Mark’s arms were around her now. He must have felt her violent quiver because he shifted his grip on her, lifting her onto his lap, holding her close. She felt something brush the top of her head, and thought it might have been his lips. “That’s a hell of a thing. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

Jess took a moment to just breathe. Sure enough, the sharpness of the pain, the hard edges of it that cut like knives, went away. What was left was a dull ache that would recede, too, if left alone, burying itself deep within her subconscious until something called it forth again.

“It was a long time before I would babysit any of the others. My mom used to get so mad at me.” She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work. Judy’s steely determination not to let grief disable either of them had been hard on her until she had gotten old enough to recognize it for the courage it was.

“Baby, it wasn’t your fault. You were five years old.”

It was twenty-three years in the past, and the guilt was still there. Buried under layers of time and reason but still there. He’d gone right to the heart of what had tormented her most over all the intervening years.

“I know.” Silently she added,
but still.
“I actually don’t ever think about it anymore. Unless something reminds me.”

“Like seeing an article about it in the damned paper.” His hand rubbed up and down her arm in rough comfort. Relaxing as the pain slipped away just as she had known it would, Jess rested her head against his shoulder. “Jesus, I wish you hadn’t gotten caught up in this.”

That almost made her smile. She slanted a look up at him. “You and me both, believe me.”

“ ’ Course, we wouldn’t have met.”

Her brows twitched together. Her head came up again. Straightening her glasses, she gave him a severe look. “For the record, we met months ago. When you brought the First Lady to Mr. Davenport’s office. You smiled at me. We talked. We talked several times after that, too.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s not exactly flattering, you know.”

The look he gave her was almost surprised. Then he smiled.

“When I’m working I don’t see anything except my principal and threats to my principal. Angelina Jolie could dance naked in front of me and I wouldn’t notice.”

Jess suddenly found herself looking at the history of their acquaintance in a whole new light.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“That ’s good to know.”

“Is it?”

She nodded thoughtfully. “You didn’t see me—which is what I thought—but it was for a reason. That makes it much better.”

“I’m not following you.”

Jess smiled. “Never mind. It ’s not important.”

She was suddenly acutely aware that she was sitting on his lap with his arms around her, and all he was wearing was a pair of boxers. Unbelievable that she’d registered the broad strokes of it but missed all the tiny details until now. The shirt she was wearing had ridden up, and her new panties were on the substantial side, but still she could feel the heat of him burning through them, and the solid muscularity of his thighs. Her bare legs lay on top of his so that the silkiness of her skin slid over the hair-roughened firmness of his every time one of them moved. Her shoulder butted into naked male chest. It was wide and buff and, she noticed with interest now that she was capable of noticing such things, sported a wedge of ash-brown hair that stretched from one flat male nipple to the other and tapered down over a trim abdomen and out of sight.

She glanced up to discover that he was looking at her. Looking at her looking at him, to be precise. There was something in his expression, a sudden sensuous glint to his eyes, a curve to his mouth that made her heart beat faster. His thighs felt harder, his arms around her more tense.

I want you so much.
That ’s the thought that ran through her head as their eyes met, just as it had once before. Only this time, his eyes widened and blazed in response, and Jess realized to her horror that she hadn’t just thought it but
said it aloud.

It was all she could do not to clap a hand over her own mouth.

Her dismay must have been apparent in her face, because he smiled, a slow sexy curve of his mouth that made her stomach clench and her blood heat and her heart turn over.

“Good to know,” he said.

Then he bent his head and touched his lips to hers.

I
t was a gentle kiss, not hard or demanding at all, but the heat and thoroughness of it made her dizzy. Her lips parted. Her eyes closed. Her hands found his chest as her heart began to pound—and then he lifted his head.

“Mmm.”
She made an involuntary sound of protest. Her lids rose to find that he was studying her face, his eyes dark and hot, his mouth almost tender.

“Talk about your coincidences.” His face was still so close she could feel his breath on her lips. Her parted, damp, yearning lips. Her hands splayed over his rib cage in silent supplication.
Kiss me again. . . .
But this time she didn’t say it out loud; she did have, she was thankful to discover, some control. “See, here I was thinking pretty much the same thing: I want you like hell.”

“That
is
a coincidence,” she managed, trying to keep some perspective, trying to keep from totally losing her head, and he smiled that sexy smile again.

Then he kissed her again, tilting her so that her head was tipped back against his hard-muscled upper arm, brushing his lips over hers, licking between them, tantalizing her until she shivered and closed her eyes and surged against him and put a stop to the teasing. Her mouth clung to his, greedily prolonging the contact, deepening it with a building urgency that sent fire shooting through her veins and melted her bones and made her pulse go crazy.

She knew it, recognized the future pain she was almost certainly storing up for herself, and she didn’t care. Her hands slid up over his chest, luxuriating in the freedom to touch him, taking sudden intense pleasure in the warmth of his skin, the firmness of his muscles. His shoulders were broad and thickly muscled, and she loved touching them, too, loved sliding her hands along the brawny smoothness of them before surrendering to the need to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him like she burned for him—which she did.

His arms around her tightened as he kissed her back with a torrid eroticism that sent her senses spinning. He was holding her so close now that she could feel every taut muscle and sinew of his chest and arms, feel the heat of him radiating through her shirt, feel the racing of his heart. Her breasts swelled and tightened and tingled at the contact. With a tiny, pleasure-filled sound, she undulated instinctively against him as the hot, rhythmic quickening in her loins intensified and spread, making her go almost mindless with anticipation, with need. Pressing her breasts harder against him, she squirmed deliberately in his lap, feeling his instant response with an upsurge of desire that made her shake.

“Jess.” His mouth slid across her cheek to plant hot kisses down the side of her neck. His hand found her breast, fondling her, warm and strong as he tested the size and weight of the tender globe through the soft cotton before his thumb searched out her nipple, rubbing over it, pressing and playing.

Her lids lifted. Her gaze focused on how big and unmistakably masculine his hand looked against the white T-shirt as it covered her breast. The sight was unbelievably sexy. Her tongue came out to wet her lips because her mouth went suddenly dry.

“That ’s . . . so good.”

“Is it?” His voice was thick.

He didn’t stop, rubbing her nipples and caressing her breasts and tracing a burning path around the loose neckline of the too-big shirt with his mouth all at the same time. She clung to him, dizzy with wanting, pressing hungry, distracted kisses of her own along his bristly jaw, nibbling at the soft lobe of his ear. Then his mouth slid down the front of her shirt to close over the tip of her breast, suck at it, the sensation hot and wet and so unbelievably erotic that she moaned and tightened her grip on him and forgot all about his ear as her heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest. His tongue found her nipple through the cloth and played with it, teasing it until she was gasping and arching her back and basically doing everything except begging him to make love to her, which she was damned if she was going to do. Then he moved to the other one and did the same.

“Mark.” When he lifted his head at last, though, she couldn’t regain control quick enough to keep herself from clutching at his shoulders and breathing that small, instinctive protest.

“Hmm?”

More
was what she wanted to say but she didn’t; she bit it back even as it trembled on her lips. She didn’t need more; what she needed, as any smart woman would surely recognize even at this, the eleventh hour, was less.

“Maybe this . . .”

Isn’t such a good idea
were the words that the tiny sliver of her brain that was still moderately cool and dispassionate tried to force her to say. But the rest of her rebelled. This was what she wanted.
He
was what she wanted.

“What?”

She was lying back in his arms, woozy with pleasure, breathing hard, flushed and quaking and dying to feel his mouth on her again, his hands on her again. She could feel him looking at her, feel the heat of his gaze touching her everywhere, she thought, so she opened her eyes to find that she was right, his eyes were all over her, taking in the slender length of her bare legs that were curled now toward the back of the couch, the curve of her body as she lay across his lap, the jut of her nipples against the T-shirt, the wet circles where his mouth had recently been.

He must have felt her looking at him, too, because suddenly their eyes met. His were dark and intent. His face was hard with desire.

“Kiss me,” she said. Because it was just exactly what she wanted to say.

His eyes blazed. “How about we get you naked first?”

The hoarse undertone to his voice was enough by itself to make her heart lurch. The idea of getting naked for him—
for Mark—
sent a thousand fiery tremors racing over her skin
.
Her breathing got ragged and her pulse raced and the delicious throbbing that he had brought to life deep inside her body suddenly got a whole lot hotter and more intense.