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Isabelle bit her lip. Maybe he really was going to lose his job.
His phone rang, but he only glanced at it. “My boss,” he murmured.
“Does he know what you’re doing?”
“I’ll call him as soon as I have the gun.”
She didn’t want to ask, but she did. “Will that be okay?”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. She didn’t press for the truth.
She stared out the window at the mountains she passed every day and still felt humbled by. It was cloudy today, and she wa
s thankful for that. The typical azure Jackson sky would’ve been too much to take when she felt like a mass of open gray wounds.
“Why did you sleep with me?” she asked, her breath fogging the window. “After you found out who I was.”
He didn’t answer. After a dozen heartbeats of silence, she looked up to see him watching her in the rearview mirror.
“Why did you sleep with me?” he asked. “When you knew I was the last person you should be around?”
She turned her head to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. She hoped he couldn’t see, because she couldn’t stop them this time. She’d slept with him because it had made her so happy. His body, his mouth, his need. Because it had felt so right, and she hadn’t known that he was gathering information about her with every touch.
It had felt real.
She didn’t say anything else. Instead, she used the last ten minutes of the drive to numb herself again and make sure her eyes were dry by the time they pulled onto her lonely little road.
It hadn’t been real.
Reaching for the door before Tom could open it for her, she got out and walked toward her porch without a word. He followed her into her house and down the hallway to her bedroom. She didn’t look at the twisted covers and rumpled sheets of her bed as she moved to the bathroom and her closet beyond.
She tossed her coat on the floor and pulled the attic door down, then got the ladder secured just as Tom was reaching to help. She didn’t need help; she just needed him to do his job. “There’s not enough room for both of us,” she muttered before heading up the ladder. It wasn’t strictly true, but there wasn’t enough room to be in the tiny space without bumping into each other with every movement. She couldn’t touch him that way.
She climbed up to the small finished area of the attic, but within ten steps, she was walking on beams. She passed the chimney and carefully put her foot onto one of the joists that angled up from the floor, then grabbed a rafter above her head and pulled herself up. Eight feet up, where the chimney was flush with a rafter, sat the bundle she’d put there on the day she’d moved in.
Dust clouded around her as she pulled the awkward package down. She tucked it under her arm, then reached blindly back with one foot to find the wood beneath her. Hands circled her waist. She didn’t even jump in surprise. Of course he’d come up to help. He couldn’t keep away from her secrets.
“Try not to step through my ceiling,” she muttered as she turned and shooed him away, but her skin still tingled from his grip. How could she want him when she hated him so much?
He descended the ladder first then reached for her again. She couldn’t scream at him not to, because she didn’t want him to know how much it affected her, so she gritted her teeth at the way his hands framed her hips before they slid up her waist in a torturous imitation of lust. In that moment, she wanted him to push for more. She wanted him to press her to the ladder and push his cock against her ass to show that she’d made him hard. She wanted his mouth on her neck, kissing her even as she cursed and screamed for him to get his hands off her. She wanted him to ignore all her hatred and force her to do what she really wanted. Because she did want it. And she despised herself for it.
She’d never understood angry sex. She’d never been able to fathom how you could want someone you were pissed at. But she got it now, because with some people it was about the animal that lurked beneath the civilized being you showed the rest of the world.
She never wanted to speak to him again, but she’d fuck him at the drop of a hat.
His hands had left her, and she was standing with her forehead pressed to one of the rough wooden rungs of the sliding ladder. He took the package from her and set it aside.
“Isabelle? Are you okay?” She felt his body heat hovering so near. He wanted to touch her. She wanted him to.
She shook her head, feeling the wood press into her skin as a tear dropped straight from her eye and landed on her wrist. “No,” she whispered.
His fingers brushed her neck. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. She tipped her head, wanting him to touch more, and then his mouth was there, warm and whispering, “I’m sorry,” against her skin, and she sobbed.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Please.” But he didn’t stop kissing her neck, and his hands were at her waist again, and this time they kept sliding up to cup her breasts as she pressed her ass to his hips.
He was hard for her and she groaned, pain and need all mixed up in her chest, the tendrils of it brushing between her legs.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, but his cock didn’t regret anything. His cock was thick and long and eager against her ass as she rubbed into him.
