Everything You Need: Everything For You Trilogy Book 1 (16 page)

I glance down the length of my naked body to the living strength of his, following the dark pathway of hair down his stomach for real this time. When my eyes lock onto his tightly held erection he surges wildly. My tongue moves of its own volition greedily wanting to taste and explore its savage beauty. He handles himself cautiously clearly not wanting to over-stimulate a weapon that’s locked, loaded and poised on a hair-pin trigger.

I writhe edgily, impatient before him. “Jack, please.”

Every muscle in his body holds rigid. He turns to stone. Something, unknown to me, stops him completely.

“It’s okay,” I rasp. “I’m using contraception.”

He shakes his head angrily. “Not like this.” His voice is tight, constricted, sandpaper rough. A muscle tics in his throat, furiously. “Get up.”

I’m confused. Half crazed. “Jack?” Ten more seconds and I’m going to implode with or without his involvement.

He grabs at his trousers, starting to yank them back up his legs, hardly masking the evidence of his body’s former intentions. The zipper grates a harsh sound of finality.

“Jack, please. I want to. I need…”

He gives a snarl of hard-fought restraint. What the hell is he doing? He wants this as much as I do. The groove of painful frustration etched between his eyebrows, is right where it always is.

“I know,” he growls. “And it would be so easy…”

Easy? I push up onto my elbows, bring my knees defensively together. I categorically withdraw what I’d been desperate to offer moments before. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t want you ever to remember this as our first time. You came to me as a transaction. I never meant…”

“What?” I struggle upright, ashamed, covering my naked body with arms crossed in front, embarrassed at revealing anything of myself to him now. “We’re about to… I was just… Transaction?” My eyes sting. I stare at him as if he’s gone crazy.

“I should know better.” Jack rights his clothing, breathing heavily. “A good lesson. In negotiation, you have to concede things you want in order to gain things you want a whole lot more.”

“You’re teaching me a lesson?” I look around for something to cover my nudity. Unease flickers across my skin. My nerves are lit up, on fire. How the hell can he do this to me?

I feel horribly exposed. My eyes fall on the sopping scrap of fabric that used to be a thong but it would be humiliating beyond measure, attempting to cover myself with that. It’s simply more evidence of how quickly Jack can subject me to his monstrous ego. Proof of how quickly he can reject me. I relive the past all over again.

“Give me something to wear,” I snap.

Jack hesitates for a heartbeat then turns on his heel, striding off towards the bedroom leaving me to die of mortification. I hug my knees, crossing my ankles in front of me, scrunching my toes painfully into the tight weave of wool beneath my feet. I won’t cry. I won’t.

And I’ll never forgive him for this. Never. I feel like letting rip with a blood-curdling roar of pain. Instead I stand up, frozen: a park statue on a December morning, arms curved around me to conceal myself as much as possible. To hold myself together.

Jack returns carrying two shirts; his own and a freshly laundered one which he shakes out from its folds, popping open the two top buttons to hand to me first. “Put this on for now.”

I avoid his eyes as I face away from him and deftly pull the whole thing over my head. At least it doesn’t smell of him. It smells of summer mornings in an Italian garden filled with lemons and cypress and new mown hay. And why the hell am I doing an advertising job on the fabric conditioner his housekeeper uses?

Because anything is better than thinking of the position I’m in. The stupid mistake I’d been about to make, trusting Jack all over again, feeling as if I’m stuck in a perpetual loop of self-destruction.

I’m aware of Jack swirling his own shirt about his muscled shoulders like a matador’s cape and feel wounded enough to have been struck through by the barbed banderillas designed to savagely torment the sacrificial bull. I might be bleeding but I’ll be damned if I’ll wait around for him to deliver the fatal sword blow. I turn and walk away.

His hand flashes out to grasp my arm. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“You can’t go home.”

“I’m not your prisoner.” I can’t look at him.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice him flinch. I can’t face him. I won’t. I just want to crawl off somewhere to lick my open wounds.

“Of course you’re not my prisoner. For Christ’s sake, Tabitha, I meant you can’t go home like that. Feeling this way. God only knows what you’d do.”

My righteous anger flares. “My feelings? You’re worried about my feelings? You’re not the first guy I met who can’t get it up.” This is so far from the truth, I almost laugh. “Ask your driver to take me home.” The thought of enduring the ride of shame is humiliation enough but I can’t stand to be around Jack any longer than I have to be.

“He’s been dismissed for the night.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. You don’t see at all. I don’t want things to be like this.”

“Things are the way you make them, Jack.” I feel cold. Purposefully emotionless.

Even in my worst moments, I never thought he would deliver another low blow like this one. A rejection so complete in its simplicity. Now I know better. Macho guys play power games, just like he said. Anyone challenging Jack Keogh’s authority will be severely dealt with. I challenged his right to place his advertising business wherever he chose; I challenged his right to be the one to decide which female he chooses to invite to his bed and I’ve been made to pay the price. I get that now.

He’s never going to let me push him into changing his mind. Jack doesn’t change his mind. When he’s through with you, he’s through. I’m living proof. Twice over.

A glint of something shimmering in the glow of the firelight, down on the floor where my eyes are stubbornly centred, bothers me. It’s one of the little gold cuff-links I’d thrown across the room earlier. It must have caught against the edge of something in the distance and rebounded back into the room. The eternal knot engraving mocks me with its inescapable karmic consequences.

My destiny is never to be with Jack and the sooner I accept that, the better for my sanity.

“We’ll talk about it.” Jack manoeuvres my weak, unresisting body down onto the sofa.

I’m numb. He tries to raise my feet but I pluck at his sleeve to avoid his touch on my skin but what’s the point of resisting his will? He resolutely removes my hand from his arm and stubbornly settles my legs where he wants them to be.

He recovers easily, speaks lightly. “Will you be okay for a moment? I’m going to make some strong coffee.”

I give a curt nod. I’m still not ready to look at him directly, scared of the expression of contempt I might see on his face. He examines me for a second, possibly weighing up whether he can trust me to stay put, then turns and heads for the kitchen.

How foolish I’ve been coming here.

I clench and unclench my fists in the sides of his shirt. When restless fingers find a label, I glance down. Turnbull and Asser. Another faultless example of a world which caters to the whims of a wealthy man. Jack Keogh being mine was a fantasy before and remains an illusion now.

The reality crashes back through the door carrying a tray loaded with a half-filled cafetiere and coffee cups, a bag of Amaretto biscuits and two plates of dessert. I stare at it like it’s some Mad Hatter’s tea party as he places it on a low table close by.

“I brought food. We didn’t exactly eat dinner and you said you hadn’t eaten earlier. You must be starving.”

“How
nice
of you,” I say, being deliberately provocative. “I’m not hungry.”

Any way you look at it my appetites have disappeared. Does he think I’m so desperate he can use me? Except he didn’t use me. He rejected me. Again. My head can’t take in everything that’s happened.

Jack settles himself on the sofa, close.

His un-tucked shirt, casually hanging open to reveal the taut muscles of his torso makes him look entirely too desirable. Dark hair falls towards those intense blue eyes and I prickle to smooth away his perplexed little frown with the pads of my thumbs. Bitterly I realise in spite of everything that’s happened, I still want him. It’s the weakness of my own desire I have to fight, not his and I’m ashamed of myself for being so pathetic.

I take the cup of coffee he carefully hands me. My body’s hyper-sensitive and thrumming. Nothing short of a hard, fast orgasm is going to make that go away but it isn’t going to happen. I’m resigned to the fact.

“Something stronger would be good.” My voice is a whisper. I think I’m talking about alcohol. If I can’t get laid, I can still get drunk. My favourite cure-all. Jack never cared about me and it’s high time that message sunk in.

He throws a frown in my direction. “It’s safe enough, with me,” he decides.

Jack walks to his liquor cabinet and I observe the lithe grace with which he moves. He pulls out an unopened bottle and returns with it and two cut glasses held between his fingers. I can’t stop myself thinking about where those fingers have recently been. My body won’t let me.

All my senses are brittle and heightened. I hear the sound of the sealed cap snapping with a metallic crack, the rich burble of fluid as it glugs from the bottle and the tinkle of the quality glass when the liquid hits, pale as rainwater drained through sweet meadow hay. I swear I hear Jack’s breathing, slow and heavy but perhaps it’s my own.

“I don’t want you to drink too much more on an empty stomach.”

“Concern for my sobriety?” I’m snippy and frustrated.

He raises an alert eyebrow. “What just happened changes nothing.”

“What did just happen?”

“My fault. We need to establish ground rules.”

Just what in hell does he mean by that? I ignore him. I’m not going to beg the man to have sex with me. I’ve practically done that already and he still walked away. Who says lightening doesn’t strike twice?

I knock back a large mouthful of whisky and clutch my chest in alarm as it burns its way down my throat but I feel the colour and warmth return to my skin. Jack is more refined in the way he takes his spirits. He settles on the floor beside me, twirling the glass before his eyes watching firelight dance though each facet of crystal.

“Talisker,” he says. “Scotch whisky distilled on the Isle of Skye.”

“Strong.” My voice is hoarsened by the fiery fluid still scorching the back of my throat.

Jack laughs but with a detectable note of sympathy. “Robust,” he corrects, teaches. “Smoky.”

It’s only one of a number of lessons I’m learning tonight. “Like drinking liquid fire.” My voice is raw so I sip at it more cautiously. The scald feels good. It sears more painful thoughts from my mind. “It still burns.”

“Warms.” Jack turns to me. I keep my eyes focused exclusively on my glass but can tell his are resting on me. “Fifty-four point six percent ABV.” He doesn’t need to read the label.

He remembers every detail. The whisky. His business. My past. “A quantifiable certainty,” I agree in a roughened voice as I take another swallow.

Jack chuckles deep in his throat. It makes such a dark unnerving sound I glance up to watch him sip and savour. The quality single malt, the firelight and Jack’s closeness are a heady combination that makes my sense of loss feel so much more acute.

“They bottled three thousand and ninety of this particular one. It’s thirty-two years old.”

“Same as you.” My eyes suddenly lock with his and fly away again. I wish I hadn’t spoken when his lips curve in a satisfied manner. I don’t want to please Jack. I don’t want him to know that I know his birth to the very day, the hour. Or that, even now, I automatically read his horoscope alongside mine if I come across one in a magazine. I like to torture myself that way. “How many did you buy?”

“All of them.”

“That’s a lot of whisky, even for you.” I’m babbling. “How much did that cost?” I stick to business. He understands business and it’s infinitely preferable to draw both our minds from foolishness.

“Somewhere between a lot of money and an awful lot of money.” His look is an entreaty. The call for a ceasefire.

I can’t help hearing the Irish humour and shake my head at his casual disregard for what I expect is more like a cosmic amount of money.

He drinks my features in. “It’s no secret. I paid five hundred pounds a bottle, last year,” he explains.

He doesn’t seem bothered by the astronomical cost but he wouldn’t be. I do the mental calculation and whistle. “That’s an incredible sum of money to spend on whisky.”

“They’re worth a lot more already,” he counters. “It’s an investment, for the future.”

“Then why are you drinking away your future?”

“We.”

One simple word which means so much. Or might have done. I have to remind myself it’s an illusion. Another punishment to make my fall harder. If I allow myself to fall, to hurt. He’s simply pointing out I’m plundering one of his five hundred pound bottles too.

“Why are we drinking away your future?”