“They won’t mix,” Jared agreed. “The business is yours. The pleasure will be ours.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and dropped it onto his empty plate. “Have you known real pleasure, Mara? Has any man ever made you come until you were so sated you couldn’t move?”
Her eyes still on her plate, she answered, “I’m not a virgin, if that’s what you’re asking.” She could feel the heat of his gaze caressing her, but she couldn’t look up. “I had a steady boyfriend when I went away to college.”
“What happened?” he grunted, his tone careful and wary.
“He dumped me as soon as he found out I was dropping out of college to take care of my sick mother,” Mara told him informatively. She really didn’t think about her one sexual relationship anymore. She’d still been a teenager, and she could barely remember what he looked like.
“Bastard,” Jared hissed.
Mara shrugged. “It was college. We were young. Honestly, I didn’t miss him all that much. I was too busy with my mom. Obviously, it wasn’t real love.” It hadn’t even really been lust. Mara was pretty sure she’d hooked up with a boy in college just because she’d been lonely, and it hadn’t helped.
“Is there any such thing as real love?” Jared mused skeptically.
Her head finally snapped up to look at him. “How can you ask that when you see Grady and Emily together every day? And Dante and Sarah. I also don’t doubt that your sister loves her husband just as much as Grady and Dante love their wives. You have some wonderful examples of love, yet you don’t believe in it?”
He was digging his wallet out of his back pocket as he replied blackly, “I think all of them are crazy. But it works for them, I guess.” Jared dropped some bills on the table and took the check the waiter had left while they’d been talking.
“You pay at the register here,” she directed him, distracted. “So you’ve never been in love?”
His beautiful eyes pinned her with a dark look. “Just like you . . . I thought maybe I was once. If you must know, I also thought I had a best friend back then, too.”
“What happened?” she asked him breathlessly.
“I found my supposed best friend fucking my supposed girlfriend.” Jared’s expression grew darker, his green eyes swirling with emotion.
Oh, dear God. No wonder he was so cynical, so disbelieving. She couldn’t imagine the pain of seeing two people you cared about so much betraying you together, finding both of them untrustworthy. Obviously, nobody had ever done right by him since, taught him anything different than the betrayal he’d experienced. Maybe it was because he’d never let anyone in again.
“What did you do?” Mara’s heart was breaking as she asked the question anxiously.
“I killed both of them,” he told her flatly, breaking eye contact with her abruptly and getting up to make his way to the cash register to pay the bill without another word.
CHAPTER 6
He was almost numb at the funeral, standing back from the crowd of mourners who surrounded the casket about to be lowered into the ground. Since he was the one responsible for the death of the woman about to be buried, he wasn’t sure he even needed to be here. For some reason, he had needed to be present, the compulsion to be here too strong to ignore.
It was the second funeral he’d attended in the last two days.
He could hear the keening wail of sorrow coming from the young woman’s mother, and he clenched his fists restlessly when the casket disappeared into the ground as a clergyman blessed the female who had died just days before.
Flowers were dropped on top of the casket, and he heaved a sigh of relief that it was over.
“I’m sorry.” He whispered the same husky words he’d spoken at the funeral the day before. And he meant them, even though he’d been responsible for her demise.
Barely able to process the fact that she was gone, that she’d never again take another breath on this earth, he turned away from the grave site, ready to make his escape. A lone tear escaped from his eyes, and he brushed it away angrily. He couldn’t show any emotions. Not here. Not now.
“You!”
He stopped, immobilized as he heard the voice of the deceased woman’s mother. Unmoving, he let the older woman beat at his back as she wailed, “You killed my daughter. I hope you rot in hell for what you did.”
Turning slowly, he let her slam her fists into his chest. It didn’t hurt. Nothing she could dish out would match the anguish he’d suffered emotionally the last few days. “I’m sorry,” he said to the grief-crazed woman right before she let her hand fly and slapped him across the face so hard that it jerked his head to the right.
“Sorry doesn’t bring my daughter back. You killed her. You killed her. You selfish bastard.” Her voice rose with every word she screamed hysterically.
The words rang through his head, the truth undeniable. His chest heaved with remorse as he let her take her anger out on him. He deserved it. Darkness started to blur his vision as he panted, unable to breathe, imagining the young woman in her casket beneath the ground.
“I killed both of them,” he admitted brokenly, his voice filled with horror as he clawed at empty space to stay upright and conscious.
Jared woke sitting up, his hands clawing at the sheets on the bed, sucking in huge gulps of air. Shuddering, he tried to slow down his breathing as he swiped at the sweat on his forehead.
Not again!
Christ! He thought he’d gotten over his nightmares. It had been a few years since he’d had the one about the funerals, and he’d thought he was finally going to get a permanent reprieve from the fucked-up shit that tortured him while he slept.