Project Virgin (22 page)

Jesse blinked. Then grinned. “You obviously never spent any time trolling the local Seattle bar scene on a given Friday night.”

“The answer is
no,” she said, resentfully. Why was she resentful? She put down her fork with a certain savagery. “Amos and I have not only never hooked up, it’s never been even the tiniest glimmer of a possibility between us.”

“No worries if it was, though, right?” Jesse’s low voice was too dark to qualify as
teasing
then. And that gaze of his had gone unreadable. Moody, but unreadable. “You have an open relationship.
You could theoretically have Amos at work and Terrence at home seven days a week.” His lips crooked. “But you don’t do that.”

That danced down the back of her neck like a touch, light and worrisome, then pooled at the base of her spine. It took her a moment to pull herself back to the table, back from that little trip to their bed last night and all the things she shouldn’t have let herself say
or do or feel.

“Sometimes,” she said in a voice that sounded too obvious, too raw, “I have whole thoughts that aren’t about any man at all. Much less any kind of sex with any of them. At home or at work.”

That crook of his lips went lethal. “Like now?”

“Getting back to the point,” she said crisply, ignoring her competing urges to throw something at him or maybe throw
herself
at him, “Amos is
the stereotypical geek who never spoke to a girl in his life, until he made all this money and they fell all over
him
.”

“So you seem like you’d be exactly his type. Female.”

“Amos’s tastes run to nine foot tall, one hundred pound gazelles who giggle at everything he says, do exactly what he tells them, and never, ever talk back. I’m like the annoying little sister who is and does absolutely
none of those things.” She smoothed a hand over her hair, feeling the static reaction that reminded her there was a whole winter outside, and beyond that, an entire world that had nothing to do with the things this man stirred up inside of her. “Plus, he likes it when I run his company and his life and that would be tough to do if there was romantic drama between us. We’re purely platonic. We always
have been.”

Jesse eyed her. “But?”

“But what?”

“It sounded like there was a ‘but’ coming.”

“Not from me,” Michaela said and it was possible, she realized, that it all came out a little bit defensive.

Yet Jesse looked like he could listen to her forever, no matter how defensive she might or might not sound. “I’m guessing Terrence doesn’t buy that?”

She knew she should shut this conversation
down. It had never occurred to her before today how fluid and confusing betrayal was. She’d identified that having sex with Jesse Grey, while seemingly perfectly okay according to the promises Terrence and she had made each other, would actually involve a whole lot more than what she’d always imagined “casual sex” might entail. And there was no way that was good for her relationship. She might
have talked around the subject last night, but that was the heart of it, wasn’t it? Terrence and she had agreed on that a long time ago—nothing that threatened their bond was allowed, but everything else was fine.

Michaela had simply never considered how much ground
everything else
covered. Or how slippery the slopes were, how uneven the ground, between what was fine and what was dangerous. She
hadn’t had sex with Jesse because she’d known in her heart that if she did, it would ruin her. It would ruin more than just her. It would be like a sledgehammer against all she’d held dear these last two years and the future she’d hoped to build.

But conversations like this were water damage, there was no pretending otherwise. Drip by drip, while Jesse watched her with those unfathomably beautiful
eyes of his. While she said things about her life, about Terrence, knowing full well what his take was likely to be. This wasn’t a safe space. Jesse wasn’t a safe man. Not for her. Certainly not for her engagement.

She should stop this right now.

“Terrence doesn’t like the demands on my time,” she said instead. “I don’t think he believes there’s anything going on between me and Amos, really,
but he certainly doesn’t like how much of my life Amos takes up. Terrence thinks that if I’m merely an employee, I should have more time to myself.”

Jesse shifted in his chair. “I want to take a moment to enjoy the irony here. The guy who doesn’t believe in jealousy is jealous of how you spend your time?”

Michaela waved a hand in the air. What she did not do was mount a defense, which she normally
would have. Which she should have. And she knew that later, when she was out of this confusing little space the blizzard had carved out of her life and away from this man, she would judge her failure. Harshly. She knew and she still didn’t rein herself in.

“I think it’s that he feels that I prioritize Amos over him,” she said instead. She shrugged. “Which, of course, I do. Amos pays the bills.”

“I would have thought the stock options you almost certainly have do that.”

She didn’t quite smile at him, but Michaela saw that bright thing in his gaze, mirroring back the look in her own eyes. She didn’t want to think about what that look might tell him. What he might see.

“It’s not as if I’m a wage slave,” she conceded, after a moment. And then she continued, straying into territory she’d
thought was locked up tight and hidden away forever. “Though it’s possible that I might have given Terrence that impression.”

“Did you, now.”

“I didn’t mean to lie to him,” she hurried to tell him. “He made a few assumptions early on and I never corrected him. That’s not lying. That’s merely failing to clarify a few points.”

“Or maybe,” Jesse suggested, his voice as light as that look in his
eyes was not, “there’s a reason you don’t trust him.”

Michaela felt a kind of pressure in her head and a tightness in her throat, matching that constricted feeling banded around her chest, and still, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She couldn’t seem to keep herself from talking. She couldn’t even manage to break eye contact with Jesse, though he’d said something she knew she should disagree
with. Forcefully.

Maybe,
that same traitorous something murmured,
it’s because you don’t disagree with him at all.

“The reality is that I love my job,” she told him instead. “I don’t want to argue about it, so I let Terrence think whatever he wants.” That was the truth. It wasn’t the whole of the truth, but it was still the truth. She pushed on past the tightness that was making her feel shaky.
“Amos and I made it up as we went along. It’s not as if I could slide over and do the same thing somewhere else. It’s a position that was tailor made for me. By me.”

“Is that what Terrence wants you to do?” Jesse asked mildly. Too mildly, maybe. “Go work somewhere else? Like, maybe for him in one of these unnamed ventures that you’re sure will work out eventually?”

“Working together might be
an eventual goal, sure,” she replied, evasive even to her own ears.

“Has it occurred to you that Terrence knows exactly what you do for Amos Burke and exactly how much you’re worth, Michaela?” His voice was still so light, so easy, but there was a ferocity in set of that jaw of his. In that look in his dark eyes. “I understand that to accept that, you might also have to consider the possibility
that he’s a little more of a con man than he is marriage material.”

Michaela couldn’t process any of that. She
refused
to process any of that. She needed to stomp on the brakes before she toppled over a cliff here and couldn’t climb back out. She knew it.

Jesse looked at her across the table that had seemed roomy when they’d sat down, but had shrunk since. And Michaela was so
aware
of him. She
knew him, now. Not the person he was, maybe, after less than twenty-four hours in his company, but the shape of him. The physical reality of him, how he took up space. How the crook of his neck smelled after a night’s sleep. The slide of his hard thigh against the tender skin of hers. The indulgence of his laughter, of his gruff scowl. There were so many different kinds of intimacies, she thought
in something like a panic. So many competing complications.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Terrence to want me to consider him the most important man in my life,” she said carefully. So very carefully, as if everything hung in the balance. As if there wasn’t a little prickle of awareness deep inside of her, telling her she’d gone too far and it was already much too late.

And Jesse didn’t
shift that gaze of his from hers for an instant, dark and hot and unflinching, as if he knew it, too. As if they’d been headed here all along.

“Is he?” he asked.

‡

W
hat little daylight
there was disappeared entirely around midafternoon, and Jesse’s cabin fever set in with a vengeance.

It had been a long, strange day. No surprise, after where they’d ended up in the conversation he should have known better than to have in the first place. Their breakfast had wrapped up in a significantly
more subdued mood than it had begun. Michaela had tried to pay the check, Jesse had employed a little bit of sleight of hand to prevent it and pay it himself for reasons he didn’t care to examine, and there had been far too much time over the last of their coffee to sit there and simmer in the mess he’d made with all those freaking questions to begin with.

And of course, Michaela hadn’t answered
the most important question. It hung between them, expanding and taking on weight and mass with every second she didn’t address it.

Which was answer in itself. Jesse imagined they both knew that.

Just as he knew he had no answer for why he’d put her on the spot. Or no answer he liked, anyway.

They’d made their way back across the snowy road not long after that, then settled into their snow
day as new flakes began to swirl down outside. They’d each taken calls, pulled out their laptops, acted as if they happened to be sharing a work cubicle there in their little room. Michaela had made up the bed, as if that might divert attention away from the fact it was
a bed.
Jesse made surprisingly decent coffee in the doll-sized coffeemaker, which sat next to the TV. Sometimes, when they were
both on the phone with their offices, one of them would step into the bathroom or out the front door for a little shred of privacy. They didn’t talk to each other much.

You talked more than enough this morning,
he’d reminded himself.
And since when do you want to
talk
, anyway?

But that was another question he didn’t have any intention of answering.

Jesse couldn’t have said he got a lot done,
especially when he’d expected he’d be back in Seattle and working on his problem job site today, but it was certainly a shift to spend some time with a woman who didn’t give him shit for always being on his phone when he was away from the office.

You are messed up,
he told himself then, glaring out at the cold, snowy parking lot as he ended another call to one of his project managers. Because
the thought was insane and he knew it. He wasn’t in any kind of relationship with Michaela. They were snowbound together, nothing more, and he thought maybe he should hold off on going back inside the motel room until he got that a little straighter in his head.

The last woman he’d spent any time with outside of a bed and therefore gotten to know at all was Angelique. Treacherous, two-faced,
purposefully useless Angelique, who would have gone out of her mind in a situation like this. No spa, no magazines, no shopping. She’d have hated Jesse spending time on the phone when he could have been entertaining her instead. She would have complained the entire way to and from the restaurant, until Jesse had done something like pick her up and carry her, which would have been her goal from the
start.

Angelique would have pretended to be mad at him for causing this delay, this incredible inconvenience to a woman who barely worked and thus had very little to do with herself whether snowbound or not, and he’d have had to cajole her into a better mood. Usually in a way that had involved sex. Eventually. If she’d felt he’d earned it. And of course, he would have thought all of that was
fun, because it had been.
She
had been. Angelique had been crazy in the way some women were, when they thought beauty and sex were their only currency, and they wanted to make sure a man was invested. Hell, Jesse had been invested. He’d thought he was in love with her.

But handling Angelique would have been what he’d spent the day doing. He wouldn’t have taken all of these calls, or if he’d absolutely
had to take them, he’d have been stressed out the whole time and then she’d have made him pay. He let out a long breath now, watching the cloud of it hang before him in the air, and tucked his hands beneath his armpits so he could take a few more minutes out here in the cold. A few more minutes without Michaela’s efficient, professional voice in his ears, or the sight of her sitting in the
armchair, typing furiously on her laptop while wrapped in a scarf and a bulky sweatshirt—about as far away from Angelique’s seductive, throaty whisper and deliberately provocative presentation as it was possible to get.