Anytime Darlin' (18 page)

“Jake!” exclaimed Devlin, punching him in the arm, her face turning a pretty pink with embarrassment. “Mike, you look wonderful.” She gave him a hug.

“So do you, babe.” He tugged on her short curls. “I like the hair.”

“Thanks. Where’s Beth?”

“At the house with her folks.” Mike turned to Jake. “Hey, buddy, we need to go over the rehearsal schedule and talk about the dinner tomorrow. You got an hour or so? Maybe Devlin could check in and meet up with us later, at the party.”

“No,” said Jake.

“What do you mean no? You’re my best man. We need to get this right.”

“It’s fine,” said Devlin. “I can check in and meet you later.”

Jake glowered at both of them.

“You’re already checked in,” he told her, ignoring Mike’s telltale grin.

“No, obviously I’m not,” insisted Devlin. “Give me my bags, and I’ll go take care of it. You two can go do whatever it is you need to do.” She looked at her watch. “No hurry, it’s early. I don’t need to get ready ’til late this afternoon. I can kill some time shopping or something.”

Jake glared at her, then at Mike. Mike’s shoulders shook with suppressed laughter.

“Really, Jake, it’s okay. I’m fine on my own.” Devlin attempted to reassure him with a half smile.

“You’re already checked in,” Jake repeated, daring Mike to interfere. He tucked his hand under Devlin’s elbow and escorted her to the elevator.

Mike threw his hands up and called after him, “Well, okay then. I can always get me a new best man.”

Dev started to protest, and she turned around, but Mike shot her a mischievous grin and mouthed the words,
Have fun.

Mike watched the two of them get into the elevator, Devlin trying to discuss the situation with Jake while Jake did his best to avoid conversation. He waved to them cheerfully as the door closed. Mike stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked in the direction they’d gone.

“It’s about time,” he commented aloud. “About damn time.”

* * * *

As the elevator doors closed behind them, Devlin turned to argue with Jake.

“You know as well as I do that I haven’t checked in.” She put her hands on her hips.

“Yes, you have. I checked in for you.”

“Yeah?” she asked. “Then what room am I in?”

Devlin burst into incredulous laughter. “Yours?”

“Mine,” Jake repeated with a straight face. “Room 708.”

“Jake McKenna, you don’t own me. You could have asked.”

Jake leaned forward and hit the emergency stop button.

“You’re right,” he said, “I should have asked. But I didn’t want to give you the opportunity to say no. Especially not now, after what just happened between us.”

Devlin blushed, but she said nothing, her eyes glued to his intense face, issuing a challenge.

“I stayed away for over four years. Four years of wet dreams about you. Hoping that someday I’d have you, that we’d have an opportunity to be together. Like this. Like we can be right now. But if you want your own room, we can go back down to the lobby, and you can get your own room. You’re right, I don’t own you.”

Devlin saw the pain in his eyes, his worry that she might reject him. But she had to ask a question before she gave him her answer.

“Why the fuck didn’t you call me on my eighteenth birthday?”

“I did. You just didn’t get the message. Ken forgot.”

After a moment of utter silence, she said his name, and Jake was there, holding her, kissing her. He picked her up off the floor, and she wrapped her long legs tight around his lean waist, touching him, his face, his neck, his chest. Devlin struggled to get as close as possible to this big, hard, intelligent, passionate, gentle man who’d haunted her since she’d opened her fever-clouded eyes on a gurney in the back of Kmart. She didn’t care that the elevator alarm was blaring. She didn’t care that the elevator door might open and someone might find them. She didn’t care what her future held in store for her, as long as her present, as long as this very moment, held Jake.

“God, I want you.” His voice sounded raw with desire.

“Then take me.”

“Not here,” he panted. “Not in an elevator.”

“Why not?” Devlin reached down and unbuttoned his jeans. She lowered the zipper, freeing him. Pressing her hand against his erection, running her fingers along his length, Devlin gasped at her first real touch of Jake. He was hot silk over thick steel. She wanted to feel him push inside her. Now.

* * * *

Jake groaned. He was at her mercy. If he didn’t get inside her, he would explode in her hand. He realized Devlin had lowered her legs. She began to remove her shirt. He stood there, watching, unable to catch his breath, his cock free and painfully erect, arching toward her. She kicked her sandals into a corner and pulled off the rest of her clothes. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Jake drew her toward him, leaned her over his extended arm, and closed his mouth on one of those nipples he wanted so bad. He sucked hard at the tender rose-colored tip. She trembled against him, moaning appreciatively.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, mouth against her breast. “I can’t be gentle. Not this time.”

“Who’s asking you to be gentle?” Dev threaded her hands in his hair. “Just fuck me, Jake. Please.”

She didn’t have to say another word. Jake pulled her back into his arms and lifted her legs around his waist, the entrance to her body poised above his straining cock. He rubbed himself back and forth in her moist heat while she clung to his shoulders, crying out his name. She was wet. She was hot against him. He knew she would be tight. So tight, he doubted he could hold on for long.

He wrapped his hand around the base of his cock and thrust into her, seating himself to the hilt.

Devlin gasped, “Oh God! Yes!” She came the instant he entered her. Her body contracted around him over and over again, milking him. Damn, he’d never felt anything like her. She was so incredibly responsive to his touch, his every movement. Before her orgasm ended, he began to move his hips, thrusting in and out, backing her against the elevator wall to get more leverage. He heard Devlin whimper, and for a brief instant, he was afraid he’d hurt her, but one look at her and he realized she whimpered in ecstasy. She looked right back at him, her aquamarine eyes wild, sparking gold, half closed with pleasure.

He heard Devlin murmur, “Yes, Jake. Yes. Oh my God,” and Jake knew she was coming again.

He crushed his mouth on hers, and he pumped his hips harder. He felt her second orgasm begin, and as her slick, silky body grabbed his cock, he thrust hard into her, joining them as close as was humanly possible. There wasn’t a single thought in his head. Everything about Jake, his entire consciousness, was buried deep inside Devlin. At that moment, his seed exploded from him into her very core, hot and vital, four years of dreaming about this moment ending in one indescribable, world-shattering orgasm. He groaned low in his throat, his lips pressed against hers, while she thrust her tongue into his mouth, gentle now. Jake leaned both hands against the elevator wall, legs shaking, cock still twitching, deep inside the woman he loved.

* * * *

Conscious thought returned by degrees. Devlin recognized that she still had her legs wrapped around Jake’s waist. He was still seated deep inside her. She didn’t want to let him go. Somehow, she had known that if they ever managed to get together, the two of them would be incendiary, but imagining something and actually doing it were very, very different. She had underestimated the earth-shattering power of making love to Jake McKenna. She thought of how he looked just before he came. Like a wild stallion, eyes on fire, primitive, violent, possessive, virile, yet protective all at the same time. She shivered as she pictured him making love to her from behind. Devlin wondered if she’d lost her mind. How fast could someone go from zero to sixty? Because when she walked off that plane, she was at zero velocity. Now it felt more like she was moving at terminal velocity, and damn, but she didn’t want to stop. Ever.

Jake ran his hands over her breasts, down her sides. He withdrew from Devlin, taking care not to hurt her, lowering her legs to the floor. She sucked in a breath as he did so, groaning out her disagreement. Jake smiled. He adjusted himself and zipped up his jeans.

“There’s more where that came from, baby,” he whispered in her ear. “But right now, I think we better get you dressed and out of this elevator before they send the cops. I just realized that someone has been buzzing us on the intercom. Probably listening to every single word we didn’t say.”

Devlin laughed.

* * * *

Jake helped her on with her clothes, running his fingers up the inside of her thighs as he pulled on her panties, feeling for himself the wetness they’d created between her legs. Devlin responded to his touch immediately. He thought about making her come again, but he forced himself to stop. They needed to get to the hotel room before somebody really did call the police. He loved her body. Her legs were long and leanly muscled, still coltish, as they’d been when she was younger. Though he knew Dev was self-conscious, he’d never minded the scars she carried on her thighs from the accident, when they’d had to screw together both her shattered femurs.

She had a neat patch of dark amber curls at her woman’s mound. They glistened now with his semen, and he could feel himself growing hard again at the sight. Her hips were narrow, but still just rounded enough not to be boyish. He loved her flat stomach, the muscles tight, her skin pure velvet. He could see the tan lines left from what was obviously her bikini, and he hoped she’d brought it with her. He touched the slight blemish over her rib cage where her uncle had battered her and broken three ribs. He followed his fingers with his mouth, wishing he could take the mark away, the memory away, but if he did, he would never have met Dev in the first place.

Devlin had perfect breasts, Jake thought, as he helped her on with her shirt. His brother used to say when they were growing up,
“More than a handful is a waste.”
She had two lovely, sensitive handfuls, tipped by ripe, rosy nipples that, as far as he could tell, were constantly erect, and he rubbed his palms over them one more time before her tee shirt covered them. Like her legs, her arms were lean, and he could feel the muscles ripple beneath her skin. She was scarred there too, with a large scar on her left shoulder and another on her right forearm, slicing from her wrist all the way to her elbow. Though he couldn’t see it now, he knew about the worst scar of all on her lower back, where the surgeons had fused three vertebrae. The bone grafts had left her with thin scars on both hips. He knew because he’d seen every one of them when he examined her years ago on the floor in the stock room of the Kmart. They were seared into his memory.

He reached a big, rough hand to Devlin’s neck, caressing the tiny butterfly scar in the hollow of her throat. Her hands fluttered up to cover his, her eyes searching his, questioning. In answer, he leaned down and kissed her there. Then he punched the emergency stop button again, and the elevator moved upward. Devlin retrieved her sandals in silence while Jake grabbed her bags.

“We have four hours,” Jake said with a wink. “What would you like to do?”

Devlin grinned wickedly. “Talk? We’ve got four years of catching up to do.”

“Not on your life,” replied Jake, challenging her with an equally wolfish grin. “Talk is the last thing on my mind.”

Janice was irritated. Even from her office in the corner of the ICU, she could hear Dr. Workman chatting with Amy. Apparently Mike Jones was getting married this weekend, to that mouse he met four years ago during the William Franz episode. The incident that put her mother in prison. Dr. Workman and his wife and Amy and her husband were invited. That meant Jake would be back in town. Probably that Devlin girl too. Janice knew that it shouldn’t bother her anymore, but it did. It bothered her a lot.

Janice still considered herself an attractive woman. She was only thirty-one. Her pregnancy hadn’t changed her figure much at all. She worked hard to keep herself in good shape. It was just that one year when everything happened that she fell apart. She hadn’t had a drink since before Trevor was born. She’d kicked herself for a while, for endangering her child like that, but she was lucky. He turned out to be a good-natured, healthy little boy.

He meant the world to her. In fact, he was her one constant. Two years ago, at her father’s urging and with his financial backing, the hospital had opened an on-site daycare center. After her promotion to ICU charge nurse, and her switch to day shift, she took advantage of it. Whenever she had a break, she could spend time with her son.

It was almost funny. Janice was able to enroll her son in an on-site daycare center because her father had remarried three years ago. Her stepmother, Cindy, was a surgical nurse only a year older than Janice. They’d gone to nursing school together. Now Janice had a half brother younger than her own son. The one good thing about the arrangement was that her father seemed happy, he adored his little son, and to her surprise, he adored Trevor.

Yes, Janice thought, it was almost funny. Janice had Cindy to thank for her father’s change of heart. He’d disowned her when he learned she was pregnant and had no clue who the father was. But when Cindy began dating him, she convinced him that Janice had been through a difficult time and deserved a chance to pull herself together. He’d taken her in and for the first time in a long time, behaved like a father. Once Janice was back on her feet, he helped her get her old job back at the hospital, and last year she’d gotten the promotion.

There was no question about it. Things were improving. But now she had to listen to Ken Workman and Amy Connor extol the virtues of Mike Jones and that mousy little teacher. Every single word they said reminded her of Jake McKenna, the man she had wanted to marry, and that stupid runaway Devlin Barre. The two people who’d put her mother in prison. Janice found it hard to get beyond that fact.

Her mother was due to be released soon. Her sentence had been shortened for good behavior. When she was last there, Janice tried to discuss plans for the release day. She was supposed to come stay with her and Trevor, but her mother’s response had been vague. She seemed distant and preoccupied, even a little divorced from reality. Janice, of all people, understood. Everyone, her former husband, her two sisters, all her friends and acquaintances, had abandoned her. Janice’s father had never been to the prison. Not once. Janice was her only visitor. At first, after Trevor was born, her mother seemed to look forward to their visits. Lately, she appeared withdrawn. Janice planned to see her next week. She’d made an appointment with the prison psychiatrist to ask if he’d evaluate her mother and make some recommendations.