by Jill Shalvis
With a small smile, she sat, mimicking his body language by slouching down a little so she could eye the sky. “You know, I never really realized what a great view we have here. You don’t know what you’ve got until you go anywhere else, where the smog and city lights minimize the stars. It’s amazing.”
“I know,” he said. “There’s no place like Colorado.”
“You’ve been all over the world,” she said.
“I know.” He tipped his head back and stretched out his arm. “This place does it for me.”
“I met your mom today,” Sophie told him, pressing her face into his throat. He smelled so good—he always did. “She’s…well, she’s pretty damn great, but you already know that.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly, turning his face to press it into her hair, like maybe he thought she smelled good too. “She tell you what a punk I was?”
“Was?” she teased.
He smiled into her hair and squeezed her. “Smart-ass.”
Laughing softly, she cuddled into him. “Hud was there too. For a minute I thought he was you. But then he smiled at me and I knew.”
“We smile differently?”
“Well, when you’re looking at me, you do.” She winced with embarrassment. “His smile is nice, but when you smile, it’s…”
“Not nice?”
She gave him a mock slug to the gut. “It’s just not the same kind of smile you give me, that’s all.”
“How’s it different?”
She bit her lower lip.
And he laughed.
She slugged him again, not so lightly this time. “You know!”
“You mean because I smile at you like I’m thinking about being buried deep inside you, so deep that you’re whimpering for more, begging me to ‘please, Jacob, please’ in my ear?”
“I don’t beg!” But she blushed because they both knew that she did.
Grinning wide, he caught her hand before she could hit him again. His reflexes were good. She knew that had been conditioned into him, a necessity with the life he’d lived. But it served him well.
Rising to his feet, he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and then turned as if to take her inside.
She hung over his back, giving her a great view of his spectacular ass, which she smacked.
“Remember,” he said, palming her ass in his big hand. “Paybacks are a bitch.”
That absolutely shouldn’t make her quiver in excitement. “What are we doing?” she demanded, ruining the effect by being breathless.
“Going to make you beg.”
Oh boy…
Chapter 21
The next morning Sophie awoke to find herself wrapped in Jacob’s arms. They were face-to-face and she’d used his biceps as a pillow and the rest of him as her personal heater.
She’d spent the night.
Panicked at the thought, she held herself perfectly still, faking sleep for a moment while her mind raced. It was just crazy chemistry, she told herself. They’d had great sex and, exhausted, she’d fallen asleep. It happened.
But it felt like more. And she didn’t want more. She couldn’t do more.
Could she?
When his alarm went off, she nearly fell off the bed, but she forced herself to stay still, not sure what she was doing. Was she really going to feign sleep?
Maybe.
Jacob stretched a little, and because he had a muscled thigh between hers, she nearly moaned at the movement.
He leaned across her to turn off the alarm, brushing a tender kiss across her temple as he did so, before rolling out of bed.
When she heard the shower go on, she debated—run out like the demons of hell were on her heels, or wait him out?
Since the shower went off, like, two seconds later, she had no choice. She felt him watching her while he dressed, but she was extremely motivated to avoid an awkward morning after because…
She’d spent the night.
The implied intimacy of that felt far more real than even their incredible sex, and she was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack by the time she heard his truck rumble to life and drive off.
She hurriedly rushed out of his bed and found a note propped up in front of a steaming cup of coffee.
Soph—
Help yourself to whatever you need. Clean towels in the bathroom.
—J
Help herself to whatever she needed. That felt intimate too. She walked into the bathroom and stared at his shower. She could imagine the steam of the hot water, see it sluicing off his incredible body, picture the soap suds caressing his skin. His towel was damp and smelled like him—which she knew because she pressed her face to it like a hormonal teenager.
She was such a goner.
This didn’t help her panic attack any. She couldn’t breathe. She literally couldn’t breathe, so she escaped to the boat, punishing herself with her trickle-of-ice-water shower.
Help yourself to whatever you need.
Was he crazy? He was letting her in. Didn’t he know they were now in the danger zone? He was leaving, and the more attached she got, the more it’d hurt when he was gone.
She barely made it to the job on time, which today was manning the front desk of the Cedar Ridge Inn—luckily not the hotel she’d been fired from. The day was unseasonably warm and brought in a homeless guy, who made himself at home in the lobby. He looked to be at least ninety, so there was no way she was kicking him to the curb. When she took a quick break, she brought him an iced tea, and he gave her a grin that was missing a few teeth.
“Thanks, chicky,” he said. “Marry me?”
“I would, but I’m off men.” Which wasn’t strictly true, since only hours before she’d been on Jacob. Literally. On him, over him, trying to crawl inside of him…
She was supposed to be answering phones and taking reservations, but she found herself having to be more of an all-around concierge service—ordering flowers, setting up cleaning services, arranging for upscale grocery shopping for people who didn’t have time but had too much money…Then the little coffee shop just off the lobby was short a waitress, so somehow she ended up throwing on an apron and running around to serve there as well as at the front desk.
By noon she’d logged more than ten thousand steps on the phone app she’d downloaded to make sure she didn’t get fat. That was when she realized she was better at the job she hadn’t even been hired to do than any job she’d had recently.
Concierge. “I’m really doing the wrong job,” she said to no one.
“True,” the old guy said from his perch on a lobby couch. “With those curves, you’d be making more money standing on the street corner, I can promise you that.”
“Hey,” she said. “You behave.”
He flashed her a gummy grin missing a front tooth. “Where’s the fun in that? And besides, have you seen your legs?”
She rolled her eyes and then froze as she caught sight of the man getting out of his car in front of the place.
Lucas.
She absorbed the shock of that just as her phone buzzed an incoming text from Jacob.
Picking something up for dinner. Wanna share?
With one eye on Lucas heading her way, she quickly texted back: Busy with a client right now.
Lucas was wearing some fancy-ass suit that made him look like he should be on the front of GQ, including the blonde hanging on his arm. Crap. What the hell was he doing here? She knew he owned part of the place, maybe twenty percent, but he owned part of a lot of Cedar Ridge.
Brain racing, she quickly yanked off her apron, and with nowhere else to hide, ran out from behind the counter and plopped down on the couch.
The old man waggled a bushy white brow at her. “Knew you couldn’t resist me.”
“Shh!” She nudged him. “Quick, sit up straight, no slouching. Don’t speak. And don’t smile either!” she hissed just as Lucas strode in the front door with his latest sidepiece.
He stoppe
d short at the sight of Sophie on the couch. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged with what she hoped was elegance and a casual air.
“She’s on a date with me,” the old guy said.
Sophie jabbed her elbow into his side, coughed to cover his “oomph,” and stood up. “What are you doing here?”
Lucas didn’t answer. His blonde did. “We have a room.” She ran a hand up Lucas’s chest. “For the whole night this time!”
Sophie slid Lucas a look that said, You’re scum, which Lucas ignored. He walked around her and headed to the front desk, the blonde in tow. Once there, he tapped twice on the bell.
“Where the hell is the help?” he demanded.
Sophie bit her lip. If he knew she was working here, he’d one, never let her hear the end of it, and two, have her fired.
Unfortunately for her, the manager of the place poked his head out of the back office, his beady eyes landing right on her.
With a sigh, she moved to the counter. “I’m the help,” she said.
Lucas narrowed his eyes. “You? You work here? In my hotel?”
Do not overreact, she told herself. Do not give him a thing. “It’s not all yours,” she said evenly. Lightly even. Look at her, being all mature and grown-up.
“That’s what you said about my boat, and who’s living on it?” he asked.
Annnnd…she snapped. “Oh, for God’s sake, get over the damn boat already! The bathroom’s too small, the water’s ice-cold, the single burner only works half the time, and even when it does, it’s either too hot or not hot enough, and the engine sputters and coughs like an old man!”
The old guy on the couch sat up straighter. “Hey.”
“No offense,” she said.
“The engine sputters?” Lucas asked incredulously. “What the hell have you done to it?”
“Nothing!”
“You have to baby it,” he said. “You have to let it warm up and use the choke. Are you using the choke?”
“Lucas,” the blonde said, tugging on his suit sleeve. “You promised me champagne and whipped cream.”
Sophie threw up in her mouth a little.
“If you’ve ruined the motor,” Lucas said tightly, “I’ll—”
“What?” she asked. “Get me fired from a job I love? Lock me out of my apartment? Take away my car? What, Lucas? What could you possibly do to me that you haven’t already done?”
“What about you?” he asked. “You’ve been telling women”—he broke off with a quick glance at the blonde—“people that I’m dead. Frigging dead, Sophie.”
“Dead to me,” she said. “People always forget that part.”
With a growl, he took a step toward her, and she had to force herself to hold her ground because, oh, hell no would she show him a single ounce of any emotion. Which meant she needed to get herself and her temper under control and fast.
“That was my apartment you lived in,” he said. “My car you drove. I took it all away because it was mine, not yours. You leeched off of me from day one, but that parade’s over, you little—”
That was it. The last straw, so to speak, and through the rushing of the blood in her ears, she ignored both the manager’s horrified gasp and the fact that the front door had opened again. Putting it all aside for the red fury she couldn’t see past, she grabbed the pitcher of water from the counter, the one filled with ice cubes and lemon slices for guests, and…dumped it over Lucas’s head.
The blonde gasped in horror.
“Oops,” Sophie said.
Dripping water from the tips of his ears and nose, Lucas lifted his head. “This was a two-thousand-dollar suit,” he ground out, and when he took a step toward her, she couldn’t stop her retreat. She backed up right into the counter just as a man appeared.
Jacob.
Blocking Lucas from making any forward progress, he turned his head and looked her over, checking for what exactly, she had no idea. His mouth curved slightly and his eyes warmed with what she thought might be…pride?
“What’s going on?” he asked casually, like How’s the weather.
“I’m on a date with the hot chick,” the old guy on the couch said. “The redhead, not the skank.”
The blonde blinked. “Hey.”
Lucas ignored Jacob. He ignored the old guy. He even ignored the blonde. He put a finger in Sophie’s face. “That was no accident, and this isn’t either—you’re fired. I’ll make sure of it.”
Well, that had been a foregone conclusion from the moment he’d stepped inside the hotel, so there was really no use crying over…spilled water.
Jacob pushed Lucas’s hand away from her face, added a long hard look at Lucas that would have had Sophie peeing her pants, and turned his back on the guy to face Sophie. “What do you want to do, babe?”
What do I want to do? He’d just wandered in for God knew what, waded through all the shit they’d been slinging, held off a furious Lucas—no mean feat—and then had handed her the reins, calm as you please. “I’d like to leave,” she said.
He offered her a hand—which she took—and they walked out of the hotel into the hot evening. He opened the passenger door of a truck that had her stopping in her tracks.
“This isn’t your new truck,” she said.
“Sold it. Bought this instead.”
It was still a nice truck, but it’d been around the block a few years. She turned to him. “Why?”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t Cedar Ridge.”
“And this truck is?” she asked, knowing damn well she was stalling with the small talk, but also knowing there was something she was missing here.
“Yes,” he said.
That’s when it came to her. Just about everyone knew that the Cedar Ridge Resort was in financial trouble and had a big balloon payment due this year.
Jacob was trying to do his share.
For some reason it was this act of loyalty, combined with the way he’d waded through the shitstorm of her life and temporarily rescued her from it, that had her eyes filling. “Dammit.” She wasn’t going to cry. She was absolutely not going to cry.
Ever.
Jacob silently helped her up into his truck, leaned over her and buckled her in. Still bent over her, one hand on the console, the other on the headrest of her seat so that his forearm brushed the side of her neck, he looked at her.
Really looked.
“I’m okay,” she whispered. Or she would be.
“Yeah, you are,” he said. “But you just had a bitch fight with your ex and probably lost your job. It’s okay to need a minute. Or ten.”
“You lost your friend and you didn’t need a minute.”
“Babe, I’m still taking a minute. And I’m not even close to being done taking it either.”
She paused and then set her hands on him. She could feel the heat and strength of him beneath his T-shirt. The quiet, steady thump of his heart was incredibly soothing. Her hands slid over him