“Nobody would break up with Jason Sutherland.” Hope snorted with disbelief. “She must have been insane.”
“Am I such a prize, Hope? You’re planning on divorcing me.” He secretly relished her indignation that some woman had actually dumped him years ago.
“We can annul the marriage. We weren’t exactly of sound mind. And this is different. We have an agreement,” she answered hesitantly. “She was really your girlfriend. She had no excuse to hurt you.”
Jason looked at the ring on her finger possessively.
She’s mine. No divorce. No annulment.
Jason’s lips twitched as he tried not to smile at her fiery, irritated expression. She was annoyed for him, pissed off for him. “It was a long time ago.” He snagged her around the waist, needing to hold her in his arms again. He settled her back in his lap. “Besides, if she hadn’t given me my walking papers, I might not be here right now.”
He would be here, and he knew it. Since she was eighteen and he was twenty-three, there had never been anyone else for him except Hope. Maybe he had been biding his time, waiting, but his post-college relationship would have ended anyway. Hope had always been there, in the back of his mind, subconsciously not allowing him to get that serious with anyone else because he could never feel the same way about another woman as he did about Hope. He was exactly where he was supposed to be right now. Finally. He could feel the rightness of it in his gut. The nightmare that Hope had gone through would haunt him forever. His conscience made him wonder whether it might not have happened if he had pursued her before she graduated from college or soon after. No way she would have been running around the world without protection if he had been in her life. And he should have been in her life.
“I don’t like to think of anyone hurting you,” Hope told him softly as she stroked her soft palm over his cheek.
“Now you know how I feel. What happened to you is killing me,” he rasped. “I can’t take it away, make it go away. I wish I could. But you don’t have anything to prove to anyone now. Especially not a dead man.”
“I know.” She tilted her head and looked at him. “I don’t want to be with you for anyone but myself. You’re the first man who’s ever made me feel alive this way.”
Mine.
God help him, but he felt exactly the same way. The problem was, he wasn’t certain how to rein things in with Hope. She made him need. Want. Desperately. So primitively and elementally that he wasn’t sure he could give her what she needed. “This won’t be easy for me,” he admitted huskily. “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing control when I’m with you. And I like to have control in the bedroom. With you, I’m almost crazy with the need to hold you down and make you submit to me. I’m obsessed with wanting you.”
Hope brushed an errant lock of hair from his forehead. “It’s not you. It’s me. My body responds to every part of you, especially the alpha, possessive way you take control of my body. It’s my mind that’s having a problem.”
“Then I’m going to need you to stay with me, body and mind, sweetheart. Don’t slip away.” His eyes roamed over her hungrily. “Respond to me and only to me. See me and only me. Feel me and only me.”
Jason saw the look of longing in her liquid emerald eyes and nearly snapped. His dick throbbed to be buried inside her heat.
She nodded and her arms wrapped around his neck. “I need you.”
It was the first time in his life he’d heard somebody say those words to him when it wasn’t associated with money. Hope wanted him, needed him.
“You have me.” He got to his feet with her in his arms, the most precious thing he’d ever had.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
Jason didn’t break his stride as he carried her to the bedroom. “It’s time for lesson number one, Peaches, before I go completely insane.”
“We have two weeks,” she answered, but her voice was low and smoky with desire.
“Not long enough,” Jason told her roughly as he lowered her feet to the floor.
Not nearly long enough.
Chapter 7
Hope watched and nearly drooled as Jason stripped the shirt from his body and lifted it over his head. All the muscles in his torso flexed from the action, before he dropped the garment to the floor.
Nimble fingers went to the button fly of his jeans and pulled them loose one by one. His wild, tumultuous eyes never left her face.
Hope gulped as he stripped off his jeans and briefs. They lay on the floor, and he stood before her, beautifully naked. He crawled onto the bed, pushed the sheets and comforter to the bottom. His hands crossed behind his head, and he continued his smoldering look. “You have me. Now what are you going to do with me?”
Oh. My. God.
Sweet baby Jesus, Hope had never seen anything like Jason, all golden skin and crazy f**k-me hair lying on the bed as he waited for her.
I’ve been intimate with him before. I don’t need to be nervous.
They had been together, locked lips and other parts of their bodies before, but she still nibbled on her bottom lip nervously. His strong, powerful body and spirit beckoned her, and her core clenched and flooded with liquid heat just from looking at him. His c**k was erect, ready, and obviously very anxious. “I was counting on you to tell me how to do it,” she admitted.
He shook his head slowly. “You strip. You make your own choices. You’re in control, Hope.”
It was a challenge, and it was a sacrifice for him. Hope saw his actions for exactly what they were, and it made her eyes moist with unshed tears. Jason was a man of action, a raw, alpha male who gave her control because he wanted her to feel as if she was the aggressor. This was against his very nature, yet he did it for her.
All right, then. I can do this.
She lifted her shirt over her head and dropped it into the growing pile of clothing on the floor. The front clasp on her bra came apart easily, and she let it drop, not even looking to see it land on the ground. She was too busy watching Jason’s face.
“Christ. You’re beautiful.” His voice sounded as if it had been scraped with sandpaper.
As Jason’s eyes unabashedly admired her br**sts, Hope felt beautiful, even though she knew she really wasn’t. Her looks were average at best, her curvy figure usually not what men drooled over. Still, her body came alive; her ni**les hardened as Jason stared at them as if he wanted to devour them.