One Woman Read online

  “I stayed up all night trying to keep you safe, and you just risked your life,” he snaps, “so, yes, asshole.” He reaches in the bag at his hip and pulls out a plastic bag he holds open. “Stick it in there. It needs to be tested for toxins and prints.”

  “It doesn’t have toxins.”

  “And your brother wasn’t murdered?”

  I curse and drop the envelope inside the bag. “Don’t open it,” I order.

  He gives me a belligerent look. “I have to know if it’s a threat. I have a job to do and that’s to keep you alive.”

  “Then clear the damn toxins and come back here before you open it.”

  He arches an arrogant brow. “You sure about that?”

  “I have nothing to hide,” I say. “I’ve been painfully honest with Emma.”

  “Has she been honest with you?” he challenges.

  “You know her now. Do you really think that’s who or what this is?”

  “She seems like she’s a cool chick, on the up and up and all that shit, but my job isn’t to trust her. It’s to protect you.”

  My jaw clenches. “It’s to protect her above me,” I insist. “Consider that a financial directive.”

  His eyes narrow on me. “This won’t take long. I’ll be back.” His lips thin. “We all need to know what kind of love note this is. Wash your damn hands. Use soap.” He starts to turn and then pauses. “You have an hour to come to your senses and let me read the message first.”

  “I’m not keeping this from Emma.”

  “One hour,” he repeats, and with that, he walks away.

  Bastard.

  He really is a damn bastard, but I also have a strong sense that he’s good at his job. I shut the door and press my hands to it, lowering my head. I want to listen to him. I don’t want Emma upset any more than she already is. My brother has to be behind that envelope, somehow, someway. After what he did last night, I don’t even want to know what he put in that envelope. I scrub my jaw and push off the door. I don’t want Emma to run. I don’t want her alone in San Francisco either. I’ve hired an army of protection that will be here today. I need to think. I need to wash my damn hands.

  I head up the stairs and walk into the kitchen to find Emma standing on the opposite side of the island, her hair sexy and wild, mascara smudged under her eyes. All the bad between our families fades at that moment and how can it not? What I feel seeing her here, in this castle, in my home, is inexplicably right. Right in a way I didn’t think I’d ever feel with a woman. I need to protect her. I need to consider Savage’s advice.

  And then, Emma asks, “What aren’t you going to keep from me, Jax?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Emma…

  Jax doesn’t answer my question. He doesn’t tell me what Savage wanted him to cover up, to hide from me. It’s not the response I expect from him.

  He stands there, just inside the kitchen, more the stone of the castle than the man who owns the manor. He’s unreadable, his jaw set hard, the air between us and around him crackling with tension. His fingers flex and then curl into his palms, a man of control who seems to be battling to maintain it. He doesn’t want to tell me what’s going on. He told Savage he had to tell me, but it seems that he said one thing to Savage and when he walked up the stairs, he intended to do another. Considering how upfront he’s been about his intentions, I’m not sure what to do with that information. What pulls him back now and not previously?

  A million possibilities burn a path through my mind, taunting me, and I focus on his brother’s death and my family’s potential involvement. “Jax,” I prod, going crazy in my own head right now.

  As if my voice snapped him back to the present, as if he was locked in his own mental hell, he takes a deep breath. But still, he doesn’t speak. His spine straightens, and he starts walking, deceptively casual, slow steps that I think will lead him to me, but he cuts toward the sink, steps to it and turns on the water. I blanch, confused at this response. He’s literally washing his hands and even his forearms, his shoulders bunched, instead of speaking to me. Jax isn’t someone to do such a random thing. No. No, that is something I’ve admired about him. He knows who he is and what he wants. He dares to be who he is, to own his place and his actions.

  What the hell is this?

  “What the hell is this?” I demand voicing my thought, feeling like this is a time bomb about to go off, my heart racing, my adrenaline surging.

  I step to the space behind him, at his back as the island is at mine, determined to get answers, but I don’t yell or shout nor does he immediately turn to face me. Nor do I demand that he turn right now and give me an answer despite wanting to do just that. I force calm because that’s what I do. I’m calm. I’m rational and that has nothing to do with my preaching to myself about never making assumptions because assumptions make you look stupid. My mother was always afraid of my father’s contempt for all things stupid. I’m not her, and Jax is not my father, but I recognize that the effects of last night’s events still linger. I recognize that the idea of my family doing bad things is messing with my head.

  Jax turns off the water, grabbing a towel to dry his hands, his chin lowering to his chest, an obvious struggle inside him and that calm evaporates. “I can’t take it,” I say. “What’s going on, Jax? What is—”

  He tosses the towel and turns around. The next thing I know, he’s pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it. I blink, and he’s leaning forward, planting his hands on the island on either side of me. “Do you know why I just took my shirt off after washing up?”

  “You want to have sex?” I ask cautiously, confused right now, my brow furrowing. “Though I’m not sure why you would wash your hands to have sex.”

  His expression tightens. “If only we could just have sex and forget the rest of this hell.” He pauses a beat and then adds, “There was an envelope left by the door with your name on it,” he says. “And Savage insisted he test it for toxins. I washed up because I touched the package. I didn’t want to expose you if I’d been exposed. Savage didn’t want me to tell you. He knew I didn’t want you upset.”

  I can feel the blood run from my face, demons, my family’s demons, attacking me left and right. They just won’t stop attacking. And this is about my family. It’s clearly all about my family. “What’s in the envelope?”

  “Savage is testing it now before we look inside.”

  “Before we look?” I ask, worried about the secrets between our families, the possibility of murder in the air. “Did he look?”

  “He wanted to. I told him no.”

  Heat rushes across my chest and up my neck. “He’s going to look.” I shove against him and slide under his arm, giving myself space, forcing myself to calm my breathing, but my heart is another story. It won’t stop racing. What if my father committed murder? What if my brother knew? What if there’s evidence inside that envelope that proves that? And what does that do to me and Jax?

  We face each other, and I point to his phone where it’s resting on the counter. “Call him. I need to see what’s in that envelope. Me. Just me.”

  His eyes light, the blue burning amber. “Just you? What happened to us being in this together?”

  “Exactly,” I snap back. “Don’t tell me you didn’t plan to hide this from me. Jax, I haven’t known you long, I get that. But I know you well enough to read you now. You want to know what’s in the envelope before I know.”

  His jaw tenses, he cuts his stare, and that says all I need to know. “What are we doing Jax?” I demand. “We’re poison to each other.” I turn away and charge toward the bedroom, and I don’t stop at the door. I already found my suitcase and took it to the bathroom. I had to brush my teeth because I imagined myself kissing Jax. I imagined all these wonderful things with him, but that can’t happen now. All I’m doing is setting my brother up for a fall. God, I need to get home to my brother.

  I hurry through the room, and I’
ve made it halfway to the bathroom, just past the bed, when Jax catches my arm. Heat rushes up my arm, and it’s not all about anger. It’s about this man touching me. It’s about this man and how much I want him, how much I even feel as if want has transformed to need. I whirl around, intent to confront him, but I fail. He drags me against him, all those hard muscles absorbing all the softer parts of me, and the words linger on my tongue, but never leave my mouth.

  “What are we doing?” he demands, and he doesn’t give me time to reply. “This.” His mouth closes down on mine, and I try to fight, no, I tell myself to fight, to push back, to save myself before I go down and never find my way back up. But I don’t fight. I don’t even try to save myself.

  His mouth closes down on mine, and the taste of him, all man and demand, undoes me. I sink into his big, powerful body, as my tongue meets his. I’m all in, kissing him like there is no tomorrow, and maybe there isn’t, maybe there can’t be, but right now, right now, I reject that idea. I drink him in the way he’s drinking me in until his mouth is gone, his breath a warm whisper, as he says, “That. Over and over again, with no end I want to imagine. We’re not bad for each other. We’re not poison. Say it. We’re not poison.”

  But I can’t say it.

  How can I say what I’m not sure I believe?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Emma…

  “Damn it, woman,” Jax says, when I don’t give him the answer he wants, his fingers twisting in my hair, a rough pull that is far more erotic than painful. “I don’t want anything the way I want you. I’m not walking away.”

  He doesn’t want anything the way he wants me? That declaration, spoken low and guttural, undoes me. I’m an outsider, invisible, but for my family and name, except with him. And I want him to want me. So much so that it’s terrifying. “What if—”

  “I’m not going to let you finish that sentence,” he says, and then he’s kissing me all over again. And I’m kissing him and nothing else matters. That’s what he does to me. That’s what he keeps doing to me, but I don’t even care right now. I don’t want to think about what comes next if it’s not him, if it’s not with him. I don’t want to think about never touching him or kissing him again, but I touch him and kiss him like this is it, like this is the last time there is a me and him.

  I wrap myself around him in every way possible. My arms. One of my legs around his leg. I don’t even know how his shirt comes over my head, but I’m suddenly on my back, and he’s on top of me. His pants are gone, and the thick ridge of his erection is between my legs. I’m wet. I’m arching into him, and when he parts our mouths, I’m panting.

  “Stop kissing me like this is the last time we’ll do this,” he demands. “Because it isn’t. It will never be the last time.” He presses inside me, stretching me, filling me, and it’s like I can finally breathe when I couldn’t breathe moments before. Any objection to his words I might have found are gone, so very gone. He drives deep, and his mouth comes down on mine, and now, he’s kissing me like this is our last kiss. His hand slides underneath my backside, and he lifts me inside him, thrusting as he does, pressing deep. He’s not just kissing me like this is it for us. He’s fucking me like this is it for us.

  The contradiction drives me crazy. It infuriates me. It cuts me. I tear my mouth from his. “Now who’s kissing who like this is the end, Jax?”

  “Only you, baby, only you.” He doesn’t wait for my objection. His fingers flex on my backside, and he rolls slightly, entangling our legs, our tongues, molding every possible part of us closer, tighter. I can’t get close enough to him. We can’t get close enough to each other. We can’t kiss deep enough. We can’t fuck hard enough. No, it’s not fucking. It’s more, so much more. I want to crawl under this man’s skin. I want him like I didn’t know I could want. I moan. He lets out this low, rough sound, his teeth scraping my shoulder, his hand sliding over my breast, my body.

  And I swear it feels too soon, but it happens. I shatter without warning, my sex clenching around him. Pleasure rips through me, emanating from deep inside me and blasting through my entire body. It’s hard and fast, and the minute I’m back in this world, Jax rolls me fully to my back again and drives into me, a low, guttural sound sliding from his mouth, the animalistic need on his face mesmerizing me. I did that to him, that’s all for me, and that’s a powerful, sexy feeling. He shudders, his head tilting back from the intensity of his release, before he all but collapses on top of me, catching his weight on his elbows. Even at this moment, sated, out of his head and in his body, he protected me, from well, himself.

  For a full minute, we lay there, him on top of me, us breathing together, until his lips brush my ear, and he raises his head. “We aren’t going to keep doing this.”

  As if I’ve been hit, I suck in air, a stab in my heart. “I know.”

  “No,” he says. “You don’t know, because, right now, you think I mean us. I mean them, Emma. The next time someone who isn’t you or me or us together throws knives at us, we will not fuck our way out of goodbye. No goodbyes.”

  Relief, too much relief to believe I’m not already in the deep, dark waters over my head with this man, washes over me. I swallow the cotton in my throat. “Jax—”

  “Do you want to say goodbye to me? Answer now, no thinking. Say what comes to your mind.”

  I’m confused. I’m so very confused. I need to protect my family. I need to protect him from my family. I need to protect myself from the moment he realizes I really am poison with a special kind of Knight flavoring. But I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t know what to do. “You’re inside me right now, Jax. I can’t exactly be objective.”

  His jaw flexes, and his eyes flash with something I can’t identify and then he’s gone, no longer inside me, leaving me cold and stunned. I push to my hands, and he’s sitting up on the edge of the bed, his shoulders tense. “Jax?”

  “I’ll get you a towel.” He stands up and starts walking.

  I scoot to the side of the bed and watch him walk away, tension radiating along the lean lines of his impressively muscular body. With every step he takes, the fireplace that still flickers with orange and blue on the nearby wall warms me less and less. I’m cold because he’s walking away. That’s what really hits me. He’s walking away. He wasn’t, and now, he is. He’s not hunting down a towel. He’s withdrawing. He’s putting space between us. My gaze flicks to the box of tissues on the stone nightstand. It’s a gorgeous nightstand. This castle is gorgeous. I want to explore it with the gorgeous man who owns it. Decision made to chase him the way he just chased me, I grab a few tissues and quickly clean up before I race after him. The door shuts right when I reach the bathroom, and it does so with him on the other side. I’m right. He’s shutting me out. I was about to leave, I was shutting him out, and apparently, regardless of what just happened between us, I did. It worked.

  I press my hands to the heavy wooden surface that now divides me from him, only it’s not the door that divides us. It’s so much more. I was leaving when we ended up naked. I felt like I had to leave. My forehead settles on the wood, and I replay everything that just happened, I walk myself through why I was in that place, why I pushed him until he shut me out. This is what I wanted, and yet, I’m not running to get dressed. I’m naked, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. I’m willingly naked, but he doesn’t know that.

  He keeps saying “us.” He keeps fighting for us, and I’ve established over and over that I believe in Jax. I believe that he has no agenda that isn’t honest and real with me. Bottom line: I’m not being honest and real with him. Instead, I’m running, and if I’m honest with myself and him, I’m the one with the agenda. One I need to be honest about. One he deserves to hear. He knows it, too, and if I want us to have a chance, he needs to hear me confess everything.

  I inhale and dare to open the door and shove past the barrier it’s created between me and Jax. A barrier, that I created, albeit with the help of our families, b
ut I did plenty myself, which means it’s on me to tear it down. I have to make this my confessional. I need Jax to know that I’m willing to be naked in all ways with him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Emma…

  I catch a glimpse of Jax naked and perfectly male as he steps into the shower, almost the same moment that I enter the bathroom.

  My chest pinches with the confirmation that he had no intention of returning to the bedroom. I replay the moments we’d had in the bedroom, in his bedroom, in his bed where he’d invited me, where he says he invites no one. I think of the emotions we shared, of how much I love and feared every moment we’d shared. I’m afraid of falling in love and getting hurt, and instead, I hurt him. I think I really did hurt him. I have to fix this.

  I shut the door with me inside with Jax.

  I have no idea why I shut the door behind me, but I do. It’s symbolic, I decide. I’m here to stay. I’m in here with him. Certain I have one shot to make this up to him, I lean on the wooden surface and listen as the water comes on, steeling myself for deserved rejection, contemplating where Jax and I are emotionally right now, no, where I want us to be. And that leads me to one place: all in. That means being vulnerable, at all costs. I push off the door and move toward the shower. Real and honest, rawly honest, is my plan. This very idea doesn’t slow my steps but speeds them up. I close the space between me and the shower, between me and Jax. Suddenly, I have so much to say to him and the idea that he won’t listen undoes me in a way only he can undo me. I’ve known men who pretended to want just me, but they didn’t. I knew they didn’t. I’m all but running naked through a castle by the time I’m at the door to the shower.

  I pull it open, and Jax is standing under the water, his face down. His gaze jerks up, and before he can even turn to face me, I’m standing in front of him. I’m wrapping my arms around him. “I’m sorry. I got spooked. That’s all. I reacted and—”