Wicked Pleasures (28 page)

"I'm never going to get this job finished, at this rate," she muttered. "I have to work sometime, you two, not just when your testosterone allows it."

She slung her purse over her shoulder and moved from the desk. She strode to Cam, laid her hand on his arm, and stared into his face.

"Are you going to fight, or what? Not that a lot of testosterone and blood would do anything to turn me on right now. It really wouldn't. But all this posturing has to be for something, right?"

His gaze finally slid from Chase's and Jaci found her knees weakening. She wanted to go to the floor and wail, to cry for the bleak sorrow, the agony and rage she saw in his eyes.

She felt her breath catch in her throat, and had to forcibly still her lips from trembling. How did he bear whatever raged inside him? How did he contain the pain, the desperation she could see tearing him apart?

He turned back to Chase. "If I see ever you handle her again like I saw on that monitor, I'll take you apart," he told his brother. "And I'll make certain you never so much as breathe the same air she does."

Chase's lips curled in sarcastic anger. "Will you now? And tell me, brother, who will you share her with?" He glanced at Jaci again. "I don't think she's going to allow just any man to take that beautiful ass of hers, just because it's what you need."

Jaci nearly blanched at the dare in his voice. Fury raced over her.

"Enough!" Her voice cracked into the sudden tense stillness of the room. Her nails dug into Cam's arm as he tensed to pull away from her. "The first one of you to raise your fists to the other will deal with me."

They turned the combined power of their furious gazes on her.

"I mean it, Cameron Falladay." She stared into his eyes, the twisting pain, the rage, the obvious disbelief that she would threaten either one of them. "And you"—she turned to Chase—"if you want to antagonize your brother, I'll be damned if you'll use me to do it."

"And he's not using you?" he growled furiously. "Come on, Jaci, get a grip here. What is it, if he's not using you to forget something he doesn't want to remember? Too bad it's not working, is it, Cam?"

At that, Jaci loosened her hold on Cam. She looked from one brother to the other and realized she was only adding fuel to the fire Chase was attempting to feed.

"When you two are finished acting like children, could you let me know? I'll be upstairs with Courtney and a bottle of wine." She stepped away from Cam.

He caught her arm, halting her before she could move an inch. "No, you'll be with me. Chase can play his games with someone else."

He turned and pulled her from the room.

"Running away, Cam?" Chase snapped. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"

Cam stopped in the doorway as Jaci glanced up in time to see the regret, the loss that flashed across his face.

"It shouldn't surprise you in the least," he finally said, his voice bleak. "After all, I think I've gotten damned good at it in the past years. Almost as good as you have."

Jaci managed to hold onto her temper, barely, as Cam drove back to the apartment. She kept her lips pressed tightly together and warned herself repeatedly that this wasn't any of her business. Not yet. Not until her and Cam's relationship was more established. She didn't have the right to make certain demands, she reminded herself. She didn't have the right to tell him what unacceptable assholes both of them were being.

And perhaps that was the point where she lost control of the temper she swore she wouldn't lose. Because it
was
her business.

It seemed as though she had waited all her life to be with one man. She had pushed herself away from him, she had fought her battles on her own, and she was still doing so. And she still managed to find a way to love. Cam refused to risk himself that far, even for his own brother. If he wouldn't risk brotherly love, what the hell made her think he was going to risk loving her?

"This situation between me and Chase has nothing to do with you." Cam finally spoke as he drove, his body rigid and corded with tension. "This won't happen again, I promise."

"Then it's a promise you'll break," she forced out, staring out the window of the Jaguar. "He's your brother; he'll do whatever it takes to find out what happened."

She could feel the tension thicken in the car.

"Nothing happened." Hard, cold, his voice had the bite of winter, freezing to the bone.

She turned to him then. Slowly. That last thread of anger was fraying, and God knows, she didn't want to lose her grip on it.

"You couldn't convince a five-year-old of that, so don't lie to me."

His hands tightened on the steering wheel and the gear shift, his knuckles turning white from the force.

"This is none of his business," he said quietly when she clamped her lips shut and turned away from him again.

She couldn't stand to see that ragged sorrow on his face. He was hurting inside, and sometimes she wondered if she didn't make the pain worse. Because whatever drove him was eating into him now, tearing at him, and she could see it, feel it.

"I have to disagree with you, Cam. He's your brother, your twin."

"That doesn't make him my keeper," he snapped out. "I've dealt with my life and my own mistakes, and he's going to have to deal with the fact that he doesn't need to know every corner of my life."

She turned back to him, that pain-filled anger building inside her as she watched his jaw tighten in fury. "No, he just has to watch that demon inside you, twisting you in agony, whenever he stares into your eyes. Excuse me, Cam, but it does make it his business. His and mine. Because whatever tears at you is going to rip us apart."

He stared back at her in disbelief before jerking his eyes back to the road, then shifting the gears with a rough hand.

"No one asked him to stick the fuck around," he bit out.

"No, but you asked me to," she reminded him, her voice almost breaking. "I sleep at the bottom of that couch, rather than against you, and I accept it, because at least I'm with you. And I keep praying that need I see and feel burning inside you will ease, but it never does."

"Son of a bitch! I'm not a kid, Jaci." He cast her a confused, incredulous look. "Fine, I hate beds. I know men who are terrified of frogs. What the hell does that matter?"

"If it doesn't matter, then why are you so pissed off?" Jaci shot back. "For God's sake, Cam, something happened! Chase knows it. I know it. Don't you think it hurts us worse to have to continually guess at it?"

"Guessing doesn't hurt you near as bad as knowing the truth would hurt me." The car screamed into the underground garage, tires locked, the vehicle sliding until it rocked to a stop. His fist struck the steering wheel. "Let it fucking go."

Cam slammed out of the vehicle as Jaci followed more slowly, watching as he paced around the car for long minutes before he breathed out roughly and leaned against the side of the car.

"I can't let it go," she finally whispered, moving alongside the car, her hand running over the cooling hood of the car.

Cam wiped his hand over his face and bit back the curses that hovered at his lips. Damn the two of them. Chase for waiting until he was weak, when his need for Jaci was driving him crazy, to start digging. And Jaci . . . He looked at her, her pale face, her worried eyes. Damn her for being the one woman he couldn't walk away from.

"I can't," she whispered.

"Why? For God's sake it doesn't concern or affect you, Jaci."

She smiled, a sad, bittersweet smile that ripped at the fragments of his heart. A brutal reminder that she could affect him as no other woman could.

"But it does," she said softly. "I love you, Cam. And I can't understand or accept the things you want from me, not like this. Not without the truth between us."

"And you're being so honest with me? What about your honesty Jaci? You and Congressman Roberts?"

She shook her head. "Richard and Annalee have nothing to do with us. I need to stand on my own two feet, Cam, and that's what I'm doing with them. It's that simple. Whatever's going on inside you does affect us, though. It affects us because you hold yourself back; there's always something between us."

"It doesn't affect us, and there's nothing between us but too many clothes."

She stared back at him silently for long moments, forcing him to turn his head to look at her, to hold back the growl of rage at the pain in her eyes.

"You don't even hold me, Cam," she said then. "You leave me as fast as you can, and the closest you come to holding me is keeping my feet warm at night on that damned couch. Do you realize that? Do you realize that unless you're fucking me, your arms aren't around me? You hold yourself so distant from me that it hurts. And I allow it. Because leaving you now would hurt worse."

"I hold you." He knew he did. His arms were always aching to surround her, he was always forcing himself to hold back, to pull back, because he didn't want to smother her with that need, with that overwhelming urge to pull her to him and never let her go. To shelter her. To protect her. To make certain nothing or no one could ever hurt her again.

"When do you hold me?" A sheen of moisture filled her eyes. "Other than during sex, Cam, when do you hold me?"

His head jerked in an instinctively negative movement. That wasn't true. As bad as he wanted to hold her, as much as he ached to hold her—she was right. He hadn't held her.

"Holding you is all I think about sometimes," he admitted, his voice hoarse. "I hold back Jaci, because I don't want to hold too hard. I don't want to frighten you away before I even have you, sweetheart."

He pushed his fingers through his hair and grimaced at the impossibility of what he was trying to do. The very thin line he was trying to walk.

He turned and moved back to the Jaguar, bracing his hands on the hood before turning back to her. She watched him, as she always did, those eyes breaking his heart, so filled with life, with a purity of spirit, that sometimes she terrified him.

"I love you, too." He watched the shock that filled her face. "I've always loved you, Jaci. And I always let you go when you needed to, because I was always afraid of holding you too tight. If I held you too tight, if I wrapped myself around you the way I wanted to, then you might leave forever. And where would I be if you left forever?"

She took a step forward, then stopped. She stared back at him as a single tear slipped from her eyes, and he ached that he had caused it. He would have killed any other man that made her cry, but how did he punish himself for it?

"Why?" she whispered, her voice low and rough with emotion.

"Why would you even think of it like that, Cam? I want to hold you, as often as I can. I want you wrapped around me however you can bear it as I sleep. I want every memory we can fill our lives with so that if you're ever gone, if you ever walk away, or God forbid something should happen to you, then I'll have something of you to hold onto."

He tightened his jaw and turned away from her again. He remembered being a boy, so young, so determined to enjoy every memory he made. Then he remembered the destruction. His parents deaths, the father that had been so strong, so filled with laughter. His petite mother, always hugging and always loving. A woman far different from her sister. Davinda had nearly destroyed him. In a way, she
had
destroyed him.

He inhaled roughly and shook his head. Jaci didn't need to know the horror of what he had endured. Neither did Chase. It was bad enough that he knew, that he remembered.

"I need time." He turned back to her, steeling himself against the need to give her anything, everything she wanted.

"You've had seven years," she stated.

"And if I need seven more?" He glared back at her now. He'd be damned if he was going to spill his shame to her. Enduring it had been bad enough. Going to Sheriff Bridges had torn a part of his soul free of his body. He would always,
always
remember the shame of telling the other man what had happened and why he needed to get that bitch away from him and Chase.

The sheriff, despite his attempts to get Cam to file charges, had seemed to understand that rage and shame, though. He had gotten the pictures, the negatives. He had made certain Davinda didn't leave the house with anything but the clothes on her back, and he had made certain she left town. And he had used his connections to block every investigation Chase had attempted in the past years to find out what had happened to his brother.

Jaci's lips parted, but then the pouty curves pursed in anger and she stared back at him with all the fire and passion he'd always loved about her.

"I can't make you talk," she snapped. "But I'll be damned if I have to like your silence. And I'll warn you right now, Cam, this macho bullshit you're pulling, on not just me but your brother as well, is going to get really old."

"Bullshit to you," he growled back. "It's not bullshit to me, Jaci. And trust me, what you want to know has nothing to do with what we have together."

"There's where you're wrong," she yelled back, that fury igniting inside her, and though he knew the response was completely incongruous to the situation, it made him as hard as hell. "It has everything to do with us, Cam. And everything to do with a relationship developing between us."

"If that's true, then you can tell me about the Robertses," he demanded. "You can tell me where you got that fucking whip scar from."

Her smile was pure sarcasm. "You're repeating yourself, Cam."

"Fine, then let's repeat this."

The argument, the anger, the pure lust she inspired inside him rolled through him like a tidal wave. He had never felt so hot, so in need of one woman's touch.

Before she could move to evade him, his arm went around her waist and a second later he was laying her over the hood of the Jaguar and bending over her.

God, she was meant to be touched, to be taken with lusty hunger as she took in return. And she was taking. Her hands latched on to his neck, jerked his head to her, and before he could evade her or take her kiss, her teeth nipped, rather hard, at his lower lip.

Cam jerked back, his eyes narrowing on her, his lips pulling back as he fought to breathe through the lust and tasted blood.

"You bit me, Jaci." Blood was suddenly thundering through his veins, filling his cock until he was certain the hard length was going to rip through his jeans.

"Let me kiss it better." Her voice was witchy, husky, threaded with anger and arousal as her fingers threaded through his hair, and she pulled him back to her. "Unless you're scared."

He kicked her legs ruthlessly apart as his lips slanted over hers. Lowering himself against her, he pressed his cock into the notch of her thighs and ground himself against her, feeling her heat even through the layers of clothing between them.

"I'm going to take you. Here. Now." He pulled back, ignoring her hands in his hair long enough to jerk her shirt over her breasts. "Let me take it off, or I tear it from you."

The blood rushing through his veins was like lava, burning him, searing his nerve endings as she narrowed her eyes and her expression became seductive, challenging. And she pulled his lips to her again.

He was barely aware of ripping the delicate cloth. He had no idea how many shreds were left of it, all he knew was that the light cotton no longer covered her, no longer hid her body from him.

He didn't ask the same question of the delicate lace of her bra. He pushed the cups beneath her swollen breasts and palmed the heated flesh. His fingers plucked at her nipples. Sweet, tight little nipples that puckered and hardened further for him as his lips consumed hers.

He was on fire for her, there was no doubt. Hell, he had always been on fire for her. There had always been something about Jaci that defied his determination to remain cold and aloof.

She could break through his defenses like no other woman, leaving him burning and wanting. As he was burning now.

He tore at the fastening and zipper to her jeans, loosening them before pushing his hand beneath the material and finding the sweet, soft silk and wet heat between her thighs.

This is where he longed to be. He needed to be inside her. He needed to lose himself inside her, because it was the only place he had ever been that the tormented memories didn't consume him.