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She put her hand to his face, to his rough whiskers. “You need to forget that.”
He frowned. Impossible. After a night and a day with her he wanted to track that bastard down and torture him to breaking point then condemn him to a living hell because death would be too easy.
“Who do you run from, Cinta?”
She let go a sob. It wasn’t a sound he’d ever heard a woman make before. It was a torn thing, wrenched from her like true grief. He didn’t understand it, and he felt responsible for unleashing it. He hauled her into his lap and she wrapped herself around him. He rocked her while her breaths shuddered through her slender frame.
When she quieted he lifted her face and kissed her. Not to stir her, but because he needed it. Needed the closeness of her breath, her mouth, to know he hadn’t somehow broken her with his clumsy insistence on getting in her business.
She pulled away and he watched her regroup. Her spine straightened. She took the pin from her hair, finger combed it out, then twisted it up and pinned it tighter. She gave him a clear-eyed look.
“People died in the fire yesterday. People died outside my front door today. Nothing is as certain as you think it is. My mother gave up what made her truly special to the world and she died too young to change her mind about it. I worry sometimes I’m making the wrong sacrifices. I’m tired. I didn’t expect you to be so...” She flapped her hands. “I thought I was the one in control.”
He’d upset her. He really needed to leave her be. “I’ll go.”
“I want you to stay. I want to help you get your funding. Jay will come for breakfast. We’ll talk to him then. If what you’ve got interests him, he’ll be straight with you. If he agrees to fund you, you won’t need to work at Wentworth anymore.”
She stood up and smoothed her dress over her hips.
He followed her to his feet. She was giving him the opportunity to make his life’s work happen, to realise his ambition. He made a move towards the paintings to put them back the way he’d found them. She deserved that much, and more, from him.
“Leave them. They don’t matter.” She was by the door, her hand over the light switch. He’d invaded her privacy and he expected her to want it back.
“Take me to bed, Mace.”
He was halfway to her side and stopped. He shouldn’t want that so much. He shouldn’t need to feel her body cleave to his. This was way more than he’d bargained for, but for now he was ready to pay for it with every heated, heart-stopped breath.
10: Jealous
Mace fought against sleep’s drowsy weight. He wanted to watch Jacinta even as she was drifting into its grasp. What they’d done in her big tousled bed wasn’t the one night stand of I want you material, it was something else entirely.
He had experience of how I want you played out, and found it mostly to be about ego and mindless animal need, satisfying enough when it wasn’t pathetically drunken and fumbled.
What they’d done was the opposite; it was slow and gentle, careful and considered and it rocked his world. They’d caressed and flowed and rippled together, the boiling and melting so evenly shared, so exquisitely paced, it left him alive to the notion he’d been screwing women for more than decade and had never known what it was to make love.
Because that’s what’d gone down.
It filled him with both awe and regret. Regret that he’d wasted a lot of time being satisfied with good enough. Awe at having found that incredible tension and rhythm with a woman he’d never imagined trying for. Regret that it was only through divine circumstance it’d happened at all and wouldn’t happen again after tonight.
Because as beautiful as it had been, it was also goodbye. Jacinta had used her body to tell him to go, tell him he’d gotten too close and didn’t fit well; was too big and silent and clumsy, too intense and stubborn and quick to misunderstand, to be part of her well ordered existence that didn’t include a personal life by choice.
He watched her breathing deepen, her body soften. Her face was so pale, her body so slight, her hair so dark and messed up fr
om his hands. She was physically delicate, yet she could face down the tornado that was Malcolm without a flinch. She didn’t look severe to him anymore. She wasn’t starched and she hadn’t needed alcohol to rub away the armour. It was a skin she shrugged off when she felt safe enough to.
He’d made her feel safe enough, but without trying, he’d threatened her too. She’d ricocheted between military and malleable in her reaction to him all day, but she’d wanted him to stay, and now he didn’t want the last moments of being with her to pass.
She stirred, her eyes opened, closed, then blinked to focus on him. She lifted her hand to his face and he moved his head so he could kiss her palm.
“How are you still awake?” She pulled her hand away. “Don’t be nervous about Jay.”
He’d not spared a thought for Jay. Insanity, when nothing he or Dillon could have deliberately done would’ve led to it.
“Sleep, Mace. You’ll need your wits about you. You’ll need to articulate exactly what it is you’ve got.”
He pushed out a breath. He was code, not words. Words were Dillon’s black magic. He was the wrong man for this job and no amount of debugging would ever make him right for it.
She smiled. “He won’t laugh at you.”
