“One kiss?” she asked, taking a tentative step toward him.
Jackson would never admit how much his heart was thundering from that small step, her tiny concession. “Yep. One kiss.”
“And then you’ll go away?”
She was now only a couple of feet away, and her chest was already heaving. Good sign—she was having a hard time controlling her breathing. He was having just as difficult a time controlling his, and he hoped to hell that she didn’t notice.
“Yes. I go away . . . if there aren’t any sparks.”
She paused, only a foot away now. He could feel her hot breath on his face as she gazed up at him. One kiss. He had to keep his word. If he tried to push it beyond that, there’d be no chance she would trust him later. He’d have to sing some old church hymns to keep his word, but even if he died just a little, he would keep it.
“Fine,” she said, and she tipped back her head and closed her eyes tight while her fists were clenched at her sides.
Jackson found himself almost laughing. The image immediately brought to mind Missy Elwood from the second grade. They’d decided to kiss and she’d looked just like that, horrified that her lips were about to touch a boy’s.
He leaned forward and whispered in her ear: “Breathe.”
The shudder that passed through her body brought him immense satisfaction. He let his lips trail across her cheek in a soft caress before he reached her mouth. Taking his time, he ran his tongue along her cold lips, the taste of her going straight to his groin, lighting a fire unlike anything he’d ever felt. Oh, this was good.
Keep it light, he reminded himself, though his body screamed at him to pull her roughly into his arms. Cupping her neck and stroking her smooth skin with his thumbs, he tilted her head and nibbled gently on her bottom lip.
With a sigh, she opened her lips, and when he immediately deepened the kiss, invading the soft recesses of her mouth, heat shot through his body. But finding himself nearly at the point of no return, he pulled his head back, kissed her one more time on the corner of her mouth, and ran his thumbs across her cheeks. He waited for her eyes to open.
Her lashes fluttered, and then he was looking into the shadowed gaze of her soft blue eyes, smoky with the same passion he was feeling.
“I’d say that’s a hell of a lot of spark,” he murmured, pulling her against him for just a second so she could feel what that kiss had done to him.
Her eyes widened as she tried to catch her breath, but she didn’t say a word. After they shared a few moments of heavy breathing, she turned and walked to her car, unlocked it, and sat down.
“Drive carefully, Alyssa. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he called out as he leaned against his bumper and watched her start the car.
She wouldn’t even look at him. They both knew that he could easily prove how much power he wielded over her. She seemed defeated for a moment, which, to his surprise, caused him pain. When he was about to apologize, she turned her head and rolled down her window.
“I’ve had better, Jackson Whitman,” she told him coolly, and he couldn’t help the grin that flashed across his face.
There was the fighter he liked. “I’ll just have to keep on practicing,” he said before she drove off. Jackson liked having the last word.
“You can try,” she said, then peeled out of the parking lot.
Hot damn! She’d gotten the last word after all. Jackson was whistling when he jumped into his truck and drove away from the bar’s parking lot. Life had just gotten a heck of a lot more interesting.
“. . . and then he just grabs me in front of my customers and hauls me outside like he owns me!”
Alyssa was wearing tracks in her parents’ living room carpet as she paced back and forth. After getting home the night before, she hadn’t slept for more than a few hours, and of course those hours she had slept, she’d been tossing and turning because her dreams had been filled with Jackson.
Yes, she’d thought about him endlessly over the last four months. How could she not when he’d left her with a permanent reminder of their night together?
“What’s his name?” her mother asked calmly.
“That doesn’t matter. I met him once, a long time ago. We flew together,” she said, leaving out the night of hot sex after that flight. “We weren’t supposed to ever see each other again, and then, of all the places in the world, he comes strolling into the place I work. But that’s not bad enough—oh, no. He then has to manhandle me and try to force me to talk to him. Well, I didn’t want to talk to him.”
Teresa couldn’t hide her smile. “It sounds like you’re pretty riled up over this.”
“Wouldn’t you be riled up?” Alyssa asked, stopping with her hands on her hips.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re upset, darling. It sounds as if you might be mad because you like this man.”
“Mom! That is a horrible thing to say. I don’t like him. I don’t even know him. He’s . . . he’s . . . he’s just a pig,” she spit out.
“Okay, then don’t talk to him again.”
“Ugh, I hate when you try to make it sound so black-and-white. It’s not like I didn’t think of that. I told him I didn’t want to talk to him, and then . . . and then . . . well, what happened then doesn’t matter,” she said¸ barely stopping herself from telling her mom about the bone-melting kiss he’d tricked her into.
There was no way she was telling her mother she’d been foolish enough to fall for his kissing taunt. She’d wanted that kiss—badly—which meant she should have run as fast as she could have the other way.
It was just that she knew he wouldn’t go away if she didn’t kiss him. Well, to be fair, she knew he wouldn’t go away either way. So why had she kissed him? Had she really thought there would be no sparks? Of course not. The sparks from New Year’s were still rushing through her and it had been four months.
That kiss had awakened her in ways she had not wanted to be awakened. This man was danger, and she couldn’t have anything to do with him. She wanted desperately to place her hand on her stomach and barely managed to stop herself. It wasn’t time to tell her parents. She knew she didn’t have much longer, but she just didn’t have the courage to tell them yet.
Alyssa knew it was really wrong not to tell Jackson about the baby now that he was here, and her only excuse was fear. Yes, he wanted her. He’d made that more than clear, but she knew he’d been married and knew he didn’t want to go through that again.