Summer Kisses (317 page)

She felt like she’d just been told Romeo really hadn’t been that into Juliet after all. She wasn’t sure whether to be excited that Romeo still had room in his heart for someone else, or depressed at having her illusions of the perfect love affair shattered.

A question burned at the back of her throat. She had to ask it now. Who knew if this mood of comfortable confession would ever arise again?

“So you and Gillian weren’t… happy?”

“I don’t know,” he answered sincerely. “Sometimes we were. Sometimes we were euphoric, but on the whole… I don’t know. I loved her like crazy, but Gillian wasn’t exactly the easiest person to live with. You know how she was. The dramatics, the temper tantrums… Gillian was a force of nature, but compromise wasn’t exactly her strong suit, and she had almost no patience for kids, even when TJ was a baby. She got frustrated so easily.” Jack shook his head. “I don’t know how things would have turned out if not for… you know.”

If she hadn’t died. Yes, Lou knew.

She didn’t say anything, but it felt amazing to hear Jack talking about Gillian like she really was—not as the saint everyone had made up in their minds the second she passed away. She’d been vivacious and wild and fun, but she’d also been a royal pain in the ass. Everyone just carefully chose to forget that. It always made Lou feel guilty for remembering.

Tears pricked the back of Lou’s eyes and she blinked them furiously away. She and Gillian had never really been close, but somehow hearing Jack acknowledging Gillian’s faults made her death seem more real and Lou’s throat closed. She was Emma and TJ’s mother—and she’d never really gotten a chance to know them.

“The producers all want me to talk about Gillian. They think I’m looking for someone exactly like her. The truth is, even though Gillian was all passion and fire and energy, she was a demanding wife and completely unwilling to compromise. The day-to-day was always a challenge, but with you…”

Lou held her breath. With her?

“I think, on the whole, I’ve been happier these last four years. Through every crisis, I always know you’re going to be my rock. Steady and calm through it all.”

Lou’s hands stilled. She should be ecstatic to hear him say that. Why did she feel like she’d just been kicked in the gut? Didn’t she want to be his rock?

She pulled her hands off his shoulders.

“Thanks.” Jack glanced over his shoulder, his blue eyes piercing at close range and seemed to realize she hadn’t just finished the massage. “Lou?”

Champagne fizzled through her blood, giving her courage she didn’t know she had. “I don’t want to be a rock. I’m a person, Jack. I have feelings and…”
Do it. Say it.
She tipped her chin back to meet his eyes squarely. “And needs.”

He turned to face her fully, never taking his eyes off hers. “I know you have feelings, Lou. I hope you never thought I took you for granted.”

She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I’ve been too undemanding.”

He nodded, frowning slightly. “And I’ve taken advantage of that, but I’m not going to do it anymore. You just tell me what you need, Lou. I respect—”

“Not respect. I don’t want respect.” No, that wasn’t right. The champagne was getting ahead of her. “I want more than respect.” Yeah, that sounded more like it. “I require passion,” she informed him.

~~~

“Boss? We might have a situation.”

Miranda glanced up from the prospective travel schedules she’d been reviewing for next week’s Meet-the-In-Laws dates. They’d sent advance teams to all six hometowns, but only four of the girls would make it through tomorrow’s ceremony. Marcy was a lock and Katya seemed likely. She’d marked Natalie as a probably, but she had no idea which of the other three he was going to keep—and it was making scheduling a pain in the ass. If only Jack were slightly more obvious about his feelings—without being too obvious about his feelings, of course. Suspense was paramount.

“Is one of the girls trying to sneak over the wall for some nookie?” she asked Todd as he hovered nervously in the doorway of the room she’d claimed as a temporary office in the basement of the Mister Perfect Mansion. “We still have one roving crew hanging around, right? Just get good footage on her attempt and send her back over the wall. We can’t have any stowaways while the kids are here.”

“It isn’t that,” Todd said. “It’s Lou.”

Miranda frowned. “Is she okay?”

“I think you’d better see this.” Todd hesitated—since he was not a hesitant person, Miranda immediately stood, tucking her tablet under her arm.

He led the way to the room that held the live feeds from all the surveillance cameras around the estate. Avery, the story producer who’d drawn the short straw and stayed behind when everyone else took the night off, sat monitoring the feeds, a shot of the Jacuzzi dominating the main screen.

The angle was bad, but the picture was crystal clear. “Is that Lou and Jack?”

Avery grinned. “Yep.”

“Do you want me to break it up?” Todd asked.

There wasn’t technically anything to break up. They were sitting very close to one another—intimately close. Close enough to get in trouble, but they seemed to just be talking. Very, very intently. “Did anything else happen?”

“She was giving him a massage a second ago,” Avery answered. “And they killed that entire bottle of champagne.”

Oh Lou. Never mix alcohol and a hot tub.
Miranda studied the pair of them, an idea taking form.

“Boss?” Todd prompted.

“Do we have audio?”

“Just the directionals from the surveillance cameras. Neither of them are mic’ed. We can get most of it, but we’ll have to subtitle the whole things for the home audience.”

“Can you get me more angles?”

“Nothing closer.” Avery flipped through a couple other shots. None of them perfect, but clear enough.

Miranda nodded, watching. “Keep rolling.”

“Passion,” Jack rumbled.

Had Lou just said she required
passion
?

It was the champagne. It had to be the champagne. God knew it felt like it had gone straight to his head. And his cock. But he couldn’t entirely blame the champagne for that. He’d been half-hard since she stepped onto the patio in that little red scrap of sin.

But all this talk of needs and passion. That wasn’t Lou. That was the champagne talking.

And the champagne wasn’t done. “I need heat and lust and chemistry,” the words were throaty and raw and his body reacted to the sound like a touch. She angled toward him, her eyes huge and hypnotically dark. “I want excitement and ertos--eroticism.” She stumbled a bit over the word and again he remembered the champagne.

Don’t take advantage of the champagne, dumbass.

But she was practically on top of him. She swayed and braced her hands on his shoulders. They felt cool against his overheated skin and he shuddered at the contact.

“I demand a man who can’t keep his hands off me. Who sees me and has to have me no matter what logic or reason say. I want
sex
and—”

Fuck
. His resistance evaporated and his mouth captured hers, silencing her demands.

The first touch of her lips was like taking a sledgehammer to the forehead. All the confusion of the last few weeks. All the frustration and the emotional tug-o-wars and the doubt, it all coalesced into an explosion inside him that rocked him down to his
soul
.

It was Lou.

How had he never seen that it was Lou he needed, Lou he—God, did he love her?

It sure as hell felt like it as he wrapped his arms tight around her, pulling her into his lap. Lou came willingly, her long, sleek legs straddling his as her arms wound around his shoulders. She held on, kissing him for all she was worth.

She tasted of champagne and sin. And he wanted more. He wanted all of her. “Lou.”

~~~

Jack was kissing her. Sweet Holy Hot Tubs, Jack was
kissing her
.

This was no tentative, accidental brush of lips. This was a declaration of possession, a spiraling vortex of lust that sucked her straight into its center and spun her senses. She may not be a swimsuit model, but she could be a sex goddess too.

Through the champagne filter, Lou’s world narrowed down until it was only Jack. Jack’s hands. Jack’s lips. Jack’s—oh my he was quite interested, wasn’t he?

She couldn’t seem to hold onto more than one thought at a time—and that was fine because she only needed one, replaying itself:
Yes.

This was it. This was Jack.

It was the fantasy and more. He wasn’t just passively accepting her kiss, he was demanding more, his tongue tangling with hers, his hands pressing her closer. Fire kindled between them, fueled by friction and need, her every nerve-ending aflame.

“Jack,” she gasped, when he finally released her mouth to press a line of kisses along her jaw. He rumbled her name. She felt his fingers brush her back and realized he was tugging at the ties of her bikini. Another dizzy wave of heat swept through her.
This is really happening
.

The ties gave way under his fingers, freeing her breasts. He slid both hands beneath the fabric of her top, cupping her breasts and flicking her nipples with his thumbs. Lou sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes falling closed. She rocked against him, feeling the hard evidence that he was right there with her, the pressure hitting exactly where she needed it and shoving her into mindlessness. It had been too long. She had been wanting this for too long. Every glance over the last four years had been foreplay. Now that history intensified every touch, sending electric pulses to her core. His mouth captured hers again, consuming. She couldn’t take much more.
Please, just a little
—

“Aunt Lou?”

Lou yelped and threw herself off Jack, ducking into the water up to her shoulders to cover herself. She fished frantically for her missing top.

Jack frowned into the darkness of the pool patio, seeming utterly unfazed, as if she hadn’t just been astride him with his hands in places they most certainly should not have been. “Emma?”

Lou’s fingers closed over the trailing strings of her top in the water. She yanked it toward her and hurriedly went about retying it as Jack rose to stand in the center of the hot tub—though he stayed in waist deep water to cover the incriminating bits.

“Emma? Is that you, hon?” he called.

They heard the slap of tiny feet on the tiles and then Emma appeared out of the shadows, Fluff Muffin dangling against her leg with her thumb corked in her mouth. “I had a bad dream,” she mumbled around the obstruction.

“Oh, sweetie.” Her swimsuit situated, Lou climbed out of the Jacuzzi, whipped a towel around herself and crouched in front of Emma, somehow managing not to tip to the ground as the blood rushed from her head with all the sudden movement—
damn champagne
—and all without looking once in Jack’s direction.
Do not look.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”

She stared into Emma’s wide blue eyes, so like her father’s, and tried desperately to think of anything other than what she’d just been doing with Emma’s father. Dear God, had she actually jumped Jack? In a
Jacuzzi
of all places? What had she been thinking?

Oh right. She hadn’t. Her head still swam.

“I was a baby monkey,” Emma explained and it took Lou a moment to remember she was supposed to be making Em’s bad dream all better. “Bad men took me away from my mommy monkey and put me in a zoo and were gonna feed me to the croc’dile.”

Damn
Peter Pan
. Emma had been having nightmares starring crocodiles ever since she saw that movie. Lou had tried to steer them away from alligators and crocodiles at the zoo today, but Emma must have sensed them with her scary-reptile radar.

“There are no crocodiles here,” she soothed, rubbing Emma’s arms in a slow, comforting motion.

Emma had taken her thumb out to explain her dream, but now it popped back into her mouth. “Can I sleep in your bed?” she mumbled around it.

For a second, the urge to glance over her shoulder at Jack nearly overwhelmed her. Only minutes ago she’d been certain the only person sharing her bed tonight was going to be a lot bigger than Emma. They’d gotten carried away so quickly. One second they’re sipping champagne, the next they’re kissing, and a heartbeat later she’d sell her soul for one night with him. How could things have gotten out of hand so fast?

Her brain had gone walking—or rather spinning like a Tilt-a-Whirl, thanks to the champagne. How could she think she could sleep with Jack? Especially when he was still tangled up in the show. For all she knew he was halfway in love with one of these women he’d met here. They very carefully hadn’t talked about the other women today.

Water splashed in the Jacuzzi behind her. “Emma, baby, wouldn’t you rather keep TJ company?”

Jack’s deep voice made Lou shiver. They’d gotten carried away. Things had gotten out of hand. So far out of hand. She’d thrown herself at Jack and the show had primed him to catch women who threw themselves at him and
go with the moment.
How many times had she heard Miranda coaching him to do just that?

How had Lou let it go so far?

Emma thrust out her quivering lower lip. “Aunt Lou?”

She wasn’t above using the four-year-old as a shield. “Of course you can sleep in my bed, sweetie. Let’s go get you tucked in.”

“Lou.” That deep voice.

“You’ll stay with me?”

“Of course I’ll stay with you, baby.”

“Lou.” Closer now. She wouldn’t look.

“G’night, Jack. Sleep well.”

Lou padded across the patio with Emma’s hand tucked trustingly into hers.

She didn’t look back.

~~~

Jack watched Lou drip her way across the patio, holding her towel with one hand and Emma’s little fist with the other.

Cock-blocked by his four-year-old daughter.

Maybe it was for the best. Maybe they had been rushing things, but frustration made his entire body tight—especially one particularly painful part.

He growled and raked a hand through his hair as the most important females in his life disappeared inside. Champagne still swirled in his bloodstream, making the urge to charge after her and pick up where they left off seem perfectly rational. But Emma needed her.