Project Virgin (19 page)

Michaela pulled in a shaky breath, then let it out again. But the mess inside of her didn’t go away. The clawing thing at her throat didn’t ease. And she was either honest with herself or she wasn’t.

“Fine,” she said, because she wasn’t a liar, damn it. No matter how much easier
it would have been to lie just then—to both of them. “You’re right.”

He didn’t smile. But the gleam in his eyes was so potent it almost hurt to look at him. “I’m right about a lot of things, generally. But you might want to narrow that down.”

She lifted her hands up and then dropped them, letting her palms smack against the legs she’d drawn up against her—and she was perfectly well aware that
she was basically barring herself off from him. That it was a defensive posture that told him more of the things he already seemed to know.

But there was no helping that, either.

“You said we weren’t going to sleep together tonight,” she reminded him. “Did you forget?”

“If I have to explain to you the long and varied and straight up fascinating stretch of road between not touching at all and
actually having intercourse with someone,” he practically drawled, and
potent
shifted into something so greedy and so hot it felt like a kick between her legs, “it’s going to make me cast a lot of aspersions on the state of your sex life, Michaela. Is that what you’re going for?”

Michaela decided, right then and there, to stop pretending she had any idea what she was doing here. Jesse was right.
She’d never taken advantage of the loose boundaries in her relationship before. She’d never had the time and, honestly, she’d never been tempted. It had been awfully easy to sit around talking about how she’d act in the abstract, with no idea that it could
feel
like this, but there was no use beating herself up for that now. Just as there was no point succumbing to the heavy thing a whole lot
like guilt or maybe shame that sloshed around inside of her. This was the first time she’d navigated this situation. Of course it was rocky.

“Terrence and I believe that no one is really monogamous, not naturally anyway, and that it’s pointless to break up great relationships over things as silly as meaningless sex,” she managed to say, feeling desperate and unhinged, ashamed and guilty, and
she didn’t even know
why.
But the fact they were sitting there in the soft, intimate dark didn’t help. She reached over and switched on her bedside lamp, and if she were a better person, maybe she wouldn’t have enjoyed the way he cursed at the sudden light. She certainly wouldn’t have felt it leveled the playing ground, somehow. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”

He grunted. “That
sounds convenient.”

“It’s practical,” she insisted, though she’d never felt anything less like
practical
than she did at the moment. “Some people see betrayals wherever they look. How is that healthy?”

“Betrayal is betrayal.” His voice was flat. Unequivocal.

“Betrayal is what happens when someone breaks a promise or the rules they previously agreed to follow,” Michaela said. “But casual sex
with other people isn’t a broken promise or rule in my relationship. It’s no different than going out for dinner or a drink, as far as we’re concerned. What does it matter? It’s not dramatic, it just happens sometimes.”

“If it’s like dinner or a drink for you, maybe it doesn’t matter,” Jesse said in that dark way of his. Judgy and snide, in her opinion.

“Right,” she said, her voice arid. “Because
you only make sweet, soulful, tender love. You connect on a higher emotional level, complete with poetry and promises, or not at all.”

His dark gaze hit hers. Hard. “I’m not engaged.”

There was no reason she should feel winded.

“Sometimes sex is just sex,” she told him. “And Terrence and I have decided that our entire life together doesn’t have to be predicated on making judgments about sex,
that’s all.”

“But I’m getting the impression that sex isn’t just sex to you. That it doesn’t
just happen sometimes
when you’re out and about.”

“It hasn’t as of yet,” she agreed, because she was trying to be honest here, which was about
her,
she reminded herself sternly. Not him. Not what he thought of her. There was absolutely no reason she should feel as if she was losing ground—wholly surrendering,
in fact. “But different people have different drives, different needs. That’s perfectly healthy.”

“Translation. Terrence Polk can’t keep it in his pants but he’s managed to convince you that he
needs
that.”

She gritted her teeth. “It’s possible, you know, that people who aren’t you can think and feel things that make sense to them, without it ever having to make sense to you.”

“I know Terrence,”
Jesse said, abruptly.

And there was even less reason her blood should seem to ice over, that it should thud through her as if one of the icicles on the back of her aunt’s house had pierced her through the gut. She forced herself to look straight at him, calm and cool, and she didn’t want to ask herself why that was one of the hardest things she’d ever done to date.

“Do you?” she asked. Mildly.
“Then nothing I’m saying should come as a surprise to you.”

“I was trying to figure out a way to tell you that your beloved fiancé is widely renowned as being completely incapable of keeping himself zipped,” Jesse said, something flinty in his gaze and in the cast of his mouth. “You seem like a nice girl. But hey, no harm, no foul, if you already know. If you support it.”

“I don’t require that
Terrence treat me like his confessional,” she told him icily. “He doesn’t need my permission to decide how and where he spends his time.”

That was too much for Jesse, apparently. He muttered something and then he jackknifed up, tossing off the bedclothes and stalking over to his duffel. She had too few moments of staring at his astonishingly sculpted backside again, and then he hauled on a loose
pair of grey athletic trousers.

He took his time turning back to face her, which gave Michaela a few moments to breathe again. When he finally wheeled around, he raked back his unruly hair with one hand as he settled that faintly grim gaze of his on her. He was beautiful and obviously pissed off,
at her,
and her body reacted to all of that as if he’d sung her a set of poignant love songs and
topped it off with roses and a box of chocolates.

She’d never felt anything like this in her life.

It was terrifying and exhilarating, a physical longing that felt almost like some kind of quick onset virus, and it was one hundred percent
wrong
. She didn’t care why. She didn’t care what Terrence would do in her place.

Jesse Grey was not a trifle. He would leave marks.

“Go on,” he growled at
her. “I feel pretty sure you’re meandering around to the real bullshit right about now.”

“I have no idea what you mean. I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

“It means whatever convoluted reason you have in your head that it’s great if your boy Terrence bones every last bimbo in the Pacific Northwest but absolutely unacceptable if you touch anyone. Especially me.” He let that sink in, and then he
crossed his arms. “I’m all ears.”

Michaela realized she was breathing too heavily, as if she was flat-out running, when she still hadn’t moved a single inch. Not one. As if she really was frozen into place where she sat.

“Sex that’s just sex would be fine,” she told him, and it was amazing how hard this was. But that was the point, wasn’t it? If it was easy, she wouldn’t have stopped things.
If it was easy,
that voice inside of her whispered,
you would be a completely different person.
She didn’t want to think about that. “This doesn’t feel like that. You told me yourself it would mean something,” she went on hurriedly when his eyes went unreadably dark. “That’s too intense for me. Stress relief is one thing, but this feels a little more complicated than your average Swedish massage.
Which would be great, I love massages, but complicated sex is something I can’t do.”

*

Jesse had never
been so furious and so turned on at the same time.

He didn’t know what to do about it—aside from the obvious, of course, which it appeared was off the table tonight. And he knew, in some distant part of his brain where he was still a fully functioning person
and not simply the caveman who would take her however he could get her, that this was a good thing.

Michaela Townsend was a complication he didn’t need and shouldn’t want, and so what if he didn’t like the fact she’d been the one to say so? To call
him
complicated? That was pride, nothing more. Or it shouldn’t have been anything more.

He told himself it wasn’t.

“No, Michaela,” he said then,
holding himself by a thread and letting all of that hunger pound through him. Letting her see it. “It’s not going to be like a goddamned Swedish massage. It’s going to be hard and dirty. It’s going to make you scream. It’s going to wreck your life and you’re going to love every second of it. Believe me.”

“That,” she said, after another one of those taut moments where he thought the look in her
hazel eyes, haunted and longing and cool at once, might kill him, “is exactly why it’s not going to happen.”

He made himself shrug as if he didn’t care either way. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.” Her voice had gone sharp again.

Jesse shoved his other hand through his hair and then he blew out a breath, and then the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation welled up in him and he laughed.
And laughed a little bit harder when she looked startled.

“Did you expect me to burst into tears?” he asked, laughter still in his voice. “I think you’re full of shit, let’s be clear. I think your relationship is a disaster at best and a complete fraud either way.”

Her chin rose. “Your opinion is completely irrelevant to me.”

“Right. Noted. But we both know that you’re lying to yourself, Michaela.
And you’re absolutely right, that’s none of my business.” He stalked back over to the bed and climbed in again, and then made a big show of pulling the covers up to his chin. “And the truth is, I don’t care either way.”

He heard her huff out a little breath, but he’d shut his eyes by then in a theatrical pretense of sleep, and he didn’t open them again. He heard her shift, and felt the bed move
a bit beneath her, and he thanked all the stars up above the blizzard somewhere that this was a king-sized mattress because he knew his ability to resist her—tenuous as it was—was entirely predicated on his not touching her. Not even by accident. Not even the slightest little bit.

Jesse would rather she not know that.

He heard the light switch off again, and then there was nothing but the intermittent
enthusiasm of the radiator across the room. He might have imagined she’d drifted off to sleep, but he knew better. He could feel it.

As if they were connected in a thousand complicated ways that just pissed him off that much more to contemplate.

“Of course you don’t care either way,” Michaela said softly, into the strained, thick quiet. Straight into him, whether he liked it or not. “Now who’s
the liar?”

*

Jesse woke up
with an armful of warm, sweet woman and significantly less willpower than the night before. Neither of those things were good.

Or they’re both really fucking good,
the wild thing in him argued.

Michaela was sprawled over his chest, her face tucked against his shoulder, one knee bent high to hook her leg over his thigh. Jesse swallowed
hard, ordered the most headstrong part of him to settle down, and took a moment to simply enjoy it.

To soak her in, like the freaking massage he was apparently not going to be enjoying on this accidental road trip.

She fit him easily and perfectly, like a key to a lock he hadn’t known existed, and he’d have been a whole lot better off without knowing that.

Jesse knew he should shift her off
of him. A nice man would do exactly that. He imagined she’d tell him she’d thought it was the loathsome Terrence, that she’d cuddled up to him out of habit, and Jesse would prefer to maintain the glorious fiction that this was all him. All them. Like they were magnets.