My Double Life: Wild and Wicked (25 page)

This had gone far enough. And if Jesse had been able to breathe past his raging lust, he might have explained as much to her.

As it stood, he settled for roping her with his arms and hauling her back down to the couch alongside him.

He muted all potential protests by clamping his mouth to hers in a kiss designed to make her forget anything and everything but him. He slid the leather belt from her hands and flung it across the office. Then he dragged her jeans down her hips, over her soft thighs and past her feet.

The patience he had touted a few minutes ago was gone, but he was determined to get it back.

Not until Kyra was naked, however.

He slid her tank top up over her arms and tugged her bra off her shoulders until both garments were somewhere in the middle of the hardwood floor. She was left clad in nothing but a scrap of shimmering red silk, a scrap which he hooked with one finger to shift and maneuver against her skin in a teasing caress.

Only when she upgraded from incoherent sighs to breathy pleas for fulfillment did he pull the panties down her legs.

“Apparently you’re having a problem with the whole patience concept in all of this.” He confided the words into her left ear, the one that was closest to his mouth. He nipped her earlobe for good measure, still struggling with his own desire to explore their attraction at full speed ahead.

It galled him that he, of all people, had to be the responsible one in this.

“It’s never been my strong suit,” she admitted, arching her neck to give him better access.

“Since it doesn’t seem to impress you when I
tell
you that patience pays, I think I’d be better off proving it to you firsthand.”

* * *

K
YRA
HEARD
J
ESSE
’
S
words somewhere in the back of her passion-fogged brain and knew she was headed for the equivalent of sensual torture. How could the man be so cruel to make her wait?

As for her lessons—forget it! She didn’t have a chance of retaining any good provocative moves when she was so thoroughly engrossed by them. All in all, the man turned her on far too much to be of any use in her sexual education.

Then again, he turned her on far too much for her to ever consider stopping him.

Next time she’d pay closer attention. Next time she’d retain more of the nuances of his technique. For now, his fingers were finally creeping up her thigh and she thought she might come totally unglued.

She’d waited and waited for him to touch her and now—finally—he eased his hand around the wet heat of her, slid one finger deep inside of her.

And ohmigod. All the waiting had made her ready.

Her body clenched involuntarily around him, just one quick spasm she knew would be a precursor to so much more.

He must have felt it as plainly as she did because he released a stifled groan and lowered his mouth to her breast. His tongue laved her swollen flesh and nipped at the peaked center of her.

Heat radiated from the places he kissed to the most intimate places he touched as if the two were on an electric current traveling in both directions. Kyra ground her hips against his hand, but he withdrew his finger, teasing her slick folds until she thought she’d die of pleasure.

Once, she crested so high she could barely catch her breath and then he slid two fingers inside her, heavy and deep. The pressure inside her burst, exploding out in an orgasm that rocked her whole body. She dug her heels in the couch and pressed herself against him, greedy for every silken sensation Jesse could provide.

When the sensations finally slowed and then stopped, Kyra could barely scavenge a thought other than that she wanted Jesse even more than she had two hours ago and ten times more than she wanted him last week.

She experienced a twinge of fear that her plan to get over him by indulging in him completely was going to crash and burn in a big way. The man was seriously—frighteningly—addictive.

He walked his fingertips up her bare belly. “You ready to see why patience pays?”

“Very ready.” Her whole body burned with the truth of the sentiment.

Unfolding himself from his place on the couch, Jesse rose to pull his T-shirt over his head. He cast a molten glance in her direction before he retrieved a condom from his pocket and shoved his way out of his jeans.

Kyra practically purred at the sight of him as he sheathed himself for her. He was all bronze skin and hard muscle—emphasis on the word
hard.
The man should have been statuary in a world-class museum. Jesse was male perfection at its most devastating.

Any lingering strains of satisfaction from the orgasm he’d given her faded in a new surge of desire. Any nervousness she might have experienced about her first time had deserted her as soon as Jesse touched her. She couldn’t be in more experienced, or more talented, hands.

She glanced up at his eyes to gauge his expression. The answering heat she found there reassured her. Despite his qualms about sex complicating their friendship, he wanted this every bit as much as she did.

He lowered himself over her. Her legs inched farther apart seemingly of their own will.

The sleek male power of him gave her a secret thrill, a feminine rush of delight.

And then he was nudging his way inside her, slowly and carefully in spite of his bad-boy reputation. She was grateful for his gentleness as her body stretched to accommodate him. Muscles she’d never known she possessed protested the invasion.

A little spark of fear flared to life inside her. Not that she didn’t want this, but what if her body’s resistance tipped him off about her virginal status? Or worse yet—turned him off?

But as she met his gaze in the dimming illumination from the skylight from over his desk, Jesse’s eyes held no reproach, just a little concern and a lot of restraint.

Then he reached between their bodies to touch her and the rush of desire returned. Her body gave way to his, opening itself to a delight even better than all the other pleasure he had given her so far.

He continued to touch and tease until he could move inside her without hurting her. Until every move of his body added fuel to the fire that raged inside her all over again.

And once again, his patience paid off.

Kyra felt the sensual tide rising up, lifting her beyond the couch and into the realm of sublimely erotic. Only this time, when she thought she would explode with the sweet joy he gave her, Jesse found his release, too, and shouted his satisfaction to the rafters.

Afterward, as they lay quiet and still together on the curving sectional couch, Kyra wondered if he’d say anything to her about her lack of experience. Could men really tell? And if they could, would Jesse be upset with her for not telling him in advance?

She rather hoped he had no idea. Dealing with the fallout from tonight would be fraught with enough land mines without having the virgin issue thrown in the mix.

He’d touched places deep inside her on so many levels. Physically, he seemed to take over her whole body. Emotionally, she couldn’t begin to contemplate the effects of this new connection with him, but she knew she’d never walk away from tonight without some kind of indelible stamp on her heart.

10

J
ESSE
AWOKE
TO
a cold, empty couch and an even colder attack of conscience the next morning. Stretching the crick out of his neck, he wondered how he could have gotten such a good night’s sleep while twisted pretzel-like around Kyra on his office sectional. He’d held her while she fell asleep and it bugged him he wasn’t holding her now.

Somehow, she’d slipped out of his grasp early this morning before he could discuss a few things with her. He’d done a hell of a job staving off those irritating scruples last night while he’d been losing himself in Kyra. But this morning he couldn’t escape the bare facts.

He’d somehow managed not only to sleep with his best friend, but a virgin to boot. Firsts for him on both counts.

The crick in his neck throbbed back to life with a vengeance as he scrubbed a hand through his hair and tried to figure out how to handle this latest development in his shifting relationship with Kyra. He’d slept with more women than he cared to admit to, yet in all those encounters he’d never been with a virgin.

The fact that Kyra had never been with anyone else scared him. The fact that she’d deliberately chosen him for her first time demonstrated a level of trust she had no business bestowing upon him.

What if he’d messed up her first time?

A guy ought to be informed of those preexisting conditions, damn it.

Scooping his jeans off a purple Tampa Devil Rays hassock, Jesse decided to tell Kyra as much. And more. Just as soon as he located her, he would demand to know what it meant that she’d squandered her first time on someone like him.

Unless of course, she
hadn’t
squandered it in her mind.

What if her choice of an experienced stud had been very deliberate? A possibility which seemed all the more likely given how damn practical the woman had been her whole life.

He was surprised how much the idea stung. She wouldn’t have used him like that, would she?

Jesse jammed his arms through the sleeves of his T-shirt and shoved on his boots, determined to get some answers—and, God help him, a commitment—from his wild and wicked best friend.

* * *

K
YRA
HAD
HALF
hoped Jesse would find her and demand she come back to bed this morning. As she hung the grooming tools she’d used to brush out Sam’s Pride on the stable wall, she thought about how amazing her night with Jesse had been.

So amazing, in fact, she wondered if sex could be addictive. She couldn’t even ride her horse around the exercise arena without getting totally turned on by the rhythmic movement between her thighs, for crying out loud.

Obviously, she was a woman in need of a little extra sexual attention. And, in her defense, she had put off sex long enough in life where she felt like she deserved some making up for lost time anyhow.

But as she led Sam’s Pride into his paddock, Kyra heard the determined clomp of Jesse’s boots across the gravel driveway out front. The purposeful stride of a normally laid-back man gave her the sinking feeling
he
wasn’t daydreaming about making up for lost time today.

As he rounded the corner of the stables, Kyra noticed he still wore his jeans and T-shirt from yesterday. He was a little rumpled, but if anything, the tousled dark hair and wrinkled shirt only added to his sexy, bad-boy appeal.

Of course, Kyra had always known there was a lot more to Jesse Chandler than a charismatic aura and bedroom eyes. It was just tough not to get distracted by them. Especially when she had sex on the brain.

He closed the gate to the paddock behind Kyra with a bit more clang than usual. Turning to face her, he met her gaze head-on. “Leaving in the middle of the night is
my
M.O., you know.”

Unsure where he was headed with his comment, Kyra merely smiled. “Good morning to you, too.”

“So if you’re trying to send me a reminder that our relationship has definite boundaries, you’re singing to the choir.” He jerked a thumb toward his chest. “I wrote the book on boundaries.”

“Trust me, I wasn’t trying to send any message, I just woke up with a major cramp in my calf.” Sex in Kama Sutra positions was awesome, but falling asleep in those positions was definitely not relaxing. Kyra had been too enraptured after her second off-the-charts orgasm to move, however. “I figured I’d walk it off and check on Sam’s Pride before Clint arrived to work with him this morning.”

A little of the stiffness slid out of Jesse’s shoulders. Had he really been worried about her?

The notion caught her off guard.

“I shouldn’t be offended you fled the scene?” He reached to stroke Sam’s Pride’s nose as the horse moved toward the gate and involved himself in their conversation.

It surely soothed a woman’s ego to have a man be so concerned about her pleasure. Kyra couldn’t help the warmth unfurling in her chest as she carried a fallen bale of hay over to a neatly stacked pile that had been delivered to the ranch the day before. “Definitely not.”

“Good.” Giving the horse a final pat, Jesse turned the full force of his attention on her. “Then we can check that off my list and move right along to why you didn’t tell me ahead of time that you were a virgin.”

The bale of hay slipped from her fingers and fell to the ground with a thud.

“Excuse me?” The small voice that tripped along the morning air seemed to belong to someone else.

Jesse tossed the hay bale near the pile then maneuvered a few of the other rectangular packs into a makeshift seating area. He guided Kyra onto one stack of hay and then dropped down onto a similar heap in front of her.

“I want to know why you didn’t say one word about—” he peered around the yard one more time as if scouting for potential eavesdroppers “—last night being your first experience.”

Kyra sighed. Apparently men could tell about these things. “The first-time thing doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” The stubborn tilt of his chin suggested he probably wouldn’t let the matter rest anytime in the foreseeable future.

Embarrassment flustered her. Made her snappish. “Is this typical morning-after protocol?”

“I’ve never had a morning-after with a virgin before so I guess I don’t know. Honestly, Kyra, my mind is so freaking blown from last night I couldn’t think straight right now if my life depended on it.”

The warm swell of happiness she felt at his words unsettled her. When had it become important to her that she hold a special place in his memory? “You’ve never been with another first-timer? Ever?”

“Not even one.”

A small sense of satisfaction chased away some of her lingering embarrassment. Besides, she was outside among her horses, sitting right in a big pile of hay with a guy who’d taught her how to drive and still changed her oil. She ought to at least feel safe enough to tell him the truth about last night. Unfortunately, sharing her first time with Jesse had tangled her emotions in ways she’d never anticipated. “I couldn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d change your mind about going through with it if you knew.”

“Of course I would have changed my mind. You can’t just give a gift like that to a guy like me.” He plucked out a single blade of straw from the bundle and tucked it behind one ear.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I trusted you enough to go into business with you. Why wouldn’t I trust you with my body?”

He shook his head as he pulled another strand of hay from the bale and proceeded to tie it around her wrist. “That’s the most twisted bottom line I’ve ever heard.”

“But utterly practical.” Her eyes roved over his sexy male body sprawled back against a hay bale. “And now that I’ve answered your question, do you want to come back to my house and see if I can improve upon last night’s performance?” She fingered the collar of her white V-neck T-shirt, her wrist adorned with the bracelet made of hay. “I’d like to get a good grade from my teacher.”

She watched Jesse’s eyes dart to her fingertips and lower. He licked his lips...almost allowed her to divert him...and then cursed.

“Hell no, Kyra. I’m trying to have a meaningful conversation here. You can’t use sexual distraction to throw me off the course.”

“Don’t tell me—you wrote the book on sexual distraction too?”

“You damn well bet I did.” He reached for her hands, stopped them from fiddling with her neckline. “But I’m not going to lose sight of what I came here to get this morning.”

She waited.

And waited.

Until finally he nudged the words past his lips. “A commitment.”

She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d announced a desire to take up croquet. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m completely serious.” His steady brown eyes attested to the truth of that statement. Too bad he also looked like he’d just taken a bite of an exotic dish he was already regretting.

“You don’t have to do this, Jesse.” Hurt welled up inside her that he would think he needed to offer something after last night. “Moreover, I don’t want you to.”

His mouth dropped wide-open. “You wanted me enough to sleep with me but not enough for anything else?”

“Of course not. But—”

“Then it’s all settled.” His jaw muscles flexed—a surefire sign of stress. “We are going to date. You and me. Exclusively.”

And he looked about as happy about it as lancing a boil on a horse’s butt. As if following up last night with a dating invitation was a necessary evil to be dispensed with as quickly as possible.

Anger, far more comforting than the hurt, broke free. “The hell we are! Jesse, it was one night. You’ve had a zillion and one nights with other women and you’ve never grilled them about dates afterward.”

“Last night was different and you know it.” He glared at her in the warm February sunlight, his dark eyes illuminated to three different shades of brown by the Florida sun. “Last night was special.”

She felt some of her anger melting away at his words. Part of her wanted to believe him. But damn it, the man was known countywide for sweet-talking his way into just about anything. How could she really trust him on this?

“So special you’re going to force yourself to endure my repeated company?” She wouldn’t allow herself to get sucked in by all that charm. The hell of it was she would have been more than a little tempted by his invitation if it had been sincere. “Come on, Jesse. I’m sorry I didn’t own up to being a virgin.”

He shook his head as if her apology solved nothing. “If last night was special enough to you that you saved yourself for it, then it must have been special enough where you can be my girlfriend for a few weeks.”

That was his idea of commitment?

Kyra couldn’t believe he called a few weeks a commitment. She vowed to open her phonebook first thing this afternoon and find the man a Bad Boys Anonymous.

“Fine,” she agreed, relieved to have sidestepped a bigger obstacle with Jesse but just a little stung that he had already carved out a distinct time frame for their
commitment.
“But you’re being ridiculous.”

He nodded. Harrumphed. “We’re still doing a real date.”

“Great.” She stood, shuffled her bale of hay back into place, and wished she were back in bed with Jesse instead of agreeing to something he didn’t want. Back in bed where things were less complicated, where she didn’t have to face all the churning emotions over what should have been a simple, sensual encounter.

“You and me. Alone. Very romantic.” He shoved to his feet and tossed the bales of hay back onto the pile with so much force there was dried grass flying out of the stack in every direction.

“You’re terrified, aren’t you?”

His jaw flexed again. “I can’t wait.”

Yeah, right. She struggled not to roll her eyes as he walked back toward the barn where he parked his motorcycle. She struggled even harder not to feel the hurt welling up inside her.

As he reached the barn door he shouted the final instructions in this morning’s list of commitment demands. “I’ll pick you up tonight at seven.”

* * *

“S
EVEN
O
’
CLOCK
TONIGHT
?” Greta parroted back Clint Bowman’s dinner request as the tall, attractive-for-no-good-reason cowboy lounged against her doorjamb. She hadn’t seen him since he’d given her a ride and tried to coerce her into a date.

And although she hadn’t been expecting him this afternoon, she’d known even before she opened the front door who would be on the other side. The man had major chemistry even though he wasn’t classically handsome like Jesse. She could
feel
Clint Bowman even before she laid eyes on him and she didn’t like it one bit.

How could she be attracted to someone so rough around the edges?

Clint smoothed the brim of his hat with one hand while he held the Stetson in the other. “That’s the time I heard Jesse and Kyra agree on for dinner. I was pulling in with my truck just as Jesse jumped on his bike to leave.”

“And that was at nine o’clock this morning?” she prodded, hating to think Jesse had spent another night with his too-cute business partner and that she’d somehow misunderstood Clint’s story.

Then again, Greta was having more and more trouble even coming up with a mental image of Jesse lately so she had to question how much the news truly bothered her. The only man she ever seemed to see in her mind’s eye these days was the rugged male wrapped in muscles who stood on her doorstep.

Nodding, he stared at her hastily tied bathing suit cover-up as if he had a good idea what she was wearing underneath it.

Nothing.

“I get to the Crooked Branch right around nine every day to work with Kyra’s horse.” His knowing gray eyes fairly crackled with heat by the time he met her gaze again. “But what do you think about dinner? You still in the market to make Jesse sit up and take notice?”

Clint’s hot stare made her knees weak. Her breasts tightened beneath her cotton beach robe. Her body definitely wanted this man.

Fortunately her brain knew better. She’d always avoided men she couldn’t control. And she especially avoided men with whom she couldn’t control herself.