The man was gorgeous. Even when he looked as though he could bite through a steel bar.
When he reached the table she stood behind, he stopped directly opposite her and shook the newspaper again in one tight fist. “When you told me about your little meeting with Pierre,” he growled. “You neglected to tell me just how cozy it was.”
“It wasn’t cozy,” she argued, making a grab for the paper. He snatched it back and she stared directly into his eyes, giving back as good as she got. Fine, he was mad. Well, join the club. She was more than tired of being dragged through public scrutiny by a scandal-hungry press. And defending herself to the one man who should have a little faith in her was getting to be just as irritating. “If you think I would willingly kiss that little worm, you’re nuts.”
“A picture’s worth ten thousand words,” he said, and held the paper up in front of him, showing her the front page.
“Oh, God.”
There it was. In startlingly clear black and white. A picture of the moment when Jean Claude had bent down to touch his thin, nasty lips to hers. Apparently, he had had a photographer stationed somewhere nearby. She never should have tried reasoning with a man who had no morals. This was her fault. All of it.
“He was probably hiding in the trees,” she muttered.
“Who?”
“The photographer, of course!” She grabbed at the paper again, but Travis shook his head, turned it in his hands and read the words beneath the photo aloud instead.
“Clandestine lovers?”
Shock had her jaw dropping. “Cland—”
“Jean Claude Doucette and Julie O’Hara Doucette King—”
Appalled, Julie screwed up her mouth as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “I don’t still have his name, do I?”
“Meet secretly at a lookout on Highway One.”
“That sounds horrible….”
His gaze lifted to hers and in those dark brown depths, she could have sworn she saw actual flames. “Oh, it gets better,” he assured her. “The story that accompanies the picture wonders if Travis King knows that his wife is still in love with the man she never bothered to divorce before moving on to another marriage.”
Now his eyes were dark, unfathomable. His jaw was clenched and his mouth was hardly more than a slash across his face. Even though he was standing directly opposite her, she felt as closed off from him as if she’d been in a sealed room.
And still, she had to say, “Travis, you can’t believe that.”
“What do you expect me to believe,” he whispered angrily. “You set up a meeting with him.”
“Yes,” she said, lifting her index finger to make the point. “But I told you about it afterward.”
His eyes fixed on hers and Julie felt the hard slam of his silent accusation just seconds before he said it aloud.
“You should have told me before you did it, so there would have been time to stop you.”
She sighed a little, anger blending with frustration and sorrow. “That’s why I didn’t.”
“Why the hell did you go to see him? What was so damned important you had to go behind my back and meet up with your ex-husband?”
“I explained this yesterday, Travis,” she said, forcing patience into her being, though she actually felt like jumping up and down and tearing at her hair. He had to have the hardest head she’d ever come up against. “It was something I had to do. I had to try to reason with Jean Claude myself.”
“I’ve got lawyers I’m paying to stop him. My brothers are looking in to it.”
Frustration bubbled into a froth inside her, swamping her sorrow, drowning even the anger. “You just don’t get it, Travis. I’m not the stay-at-home, wait-for-the-big-brave-man-to-take-care-of-things kind of woman.” She pushed her hands through her hair then let them drop to her sides again. “Don’t you see? Jean Claude is bothering you because of me. He’s only giving you this much trouble because I was once stupid enough to marry him. It was up to me to face him.”
“Damn it, Julie.” He crumpled the paper in his fist and squeezed.
“I had to do something, Travis,” she said, her voice getting stronger with every word. “I take care of myself. I always have. I don’t know how to do anything else and frankly, I wouldn’t want to. This whole mess was, at the heart of it, my fault. So it was up to me to fix it.”
“You did a hell of a job,” he said, shaking the wadded-up newspaper again.
“Yeah, well…” Her frustration bubbled a little hotter, a little thicker. “I gave it a shot. Something I had to do. I just should have remembered that I was dealing with a snake. No,” she corrected herself quickly. “Something that crawls under snakes. Or maybe something that snakes ooze through.”
“He kissed you.” The words were soft, barely audible, and she watched as an emotion she’d never seen before shot across his eyes and disappeared again a moment later.
What was it? What was he feeling? Was it only anger? Or was there something more? Something deeper?
Grumbling, she admitted, “He moves pretty fast for a snake.”
Travis came around the table, smoothed her hair back from her face, then cupped the back of her neck with his big palm. “I didn’t like seeing him touching you.”
Her heartbeat quickened and her blood felt hot and thick in her veins. One touch from this man and she was butter on a stove. “Trust me, I didn’t like it much, either.”
“I want to,” he said.
“What?” God, she could hardly think with his hand on her.
“Trust you. I want to trust you, Julie.”
Everything in her went still as glass. She looked up into his eyes and felt the threads of connection stretching between them. Could he feel it? Did he ache for her touch as she did for his? Did his skin sizzle from the contact of hers? Did he feel more than he’d wanted or expected to?
Could he see in her eyes that she loved him?
She loved him.
Julie swayed a little as that acknowledgement sank in. She had loved him almost from the start, she knew that now. Or maybe she’d always loved him and had somehow buried that knowledge deep inside. All she could be sure of was that since their wedding night, her heart had been his.
If only he wanted it.
“You can trust me, Travis.”
He smiled a little, no more than a slight curving of his mouth, but it briefly lightened the darkness of his eyes. Then he moved his hand, stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers and dropped his palm to her bare shoulder. Where their flesh met, there was heat. Electricity. And a sense of pulse-pounding urgency that told her she wanted him now. Wanted his body covering hers. Wanted to feel that intimate slide of bodies meshing, becoming one. Wanted to luxuriate in the sensations that she could only find with Travis.