Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance (34 page)

“Quit fussing with the flowers. I want to go to bed with you.” Elise set her fists on her hips, a rather martial stance for seduction.

Jack came around the island, turning off the kitchen light on his way. He put his hands on her shoulders. He bent to kiss her, a teasing nibbly kiss that circled around her lips without digging right in. He pulled back, looking at her intently.

“There’s no rush, is there?” His whisper tickled her face.

He was making her nervous. She put her arms around his neck.

There was a rush, there was, but Elise couldn’t pinpoint what was causing it. It just felt like they were about to have a very bad conversation if they kept talking. And anyway, she didn’t want to keep talking.

She needed sex to clear out all the fog in her head. Peggy, Oregon, Jack, his house—her house, for that matter—they all represented something large and a little scary. Sex? That she was good at. She wanted to get back to something she was good at.

“C’mon, Jack. Stop teasing. I’m incredibly hot for you, right now. So either you drag me upstairs to that massive bed of yours, or I’m going to start stripping right here.”

His eyes opened a bit at that. Had she come on too strong? No way. He’d been the one with the randy inner teenager.

She kissed him—hard, deep, insistent kisses that were barely denting the surface of her desire. With one hand, she unbuttoned his shirt, slipping her fingers in to stroke the pulse leaping above his collarbone. Her other hand tugged the shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, dove underneath and slid up his back. His skin was warm and a little damp but still velvety.

“I want to kiss every inch of you,” she murmured. “I don’t care how long it takes.”

Jack’s eyes were shadowy with desire. “Okay, you win. Let’s go upstairs.”

Thank God. Elise didn’t understand the tsunami of relief swamping her body. She just knew a crisis had been averted.

In the bedroom, Jack tugged down the bedding and then got undressed. Elise was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that read “A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.” She ripped it off, figuring Jack could laugh at it in the morning. She kicked off the jeans, whipped off her bra and panties, double-checked that there were condoms on the bedside table, then jumped onto the bed. Jack was there a moment later.

When he put his hands on her, it felt like she’d come home at last. Without wondering at the sensation, she hooked her right leg over his hip and cozied up to all that hot, hot skin. She couldn’t possibly kiss all of it, but she was willing to give it a go, starting with his neck and shoulders, around to his biceps, and over to his nipples.

“Elise,” he said.

She ignored him.

“Sweetheart, slow down.”

“I can’t,” she panted. Then she amended that. “I don’t want to.”

“Darling, it’s okay. You can relax.” He was using that judicial tone on her and damned if it wasn’t working. She kissed a few more square inches of his midriff before she ran out of steam.

She unhooked herself and flopped over onto her back, panting, her arms over her head. Jack’s face loomed above her. His hair was rumpled and silky. She reached up to finger it, rubbing the strands between her thumb and fingers.

“Elise, I love you.”

“I know.”

“I want to make love to you. I want you to feel that.”

She didn’t respond. She knew what he was trying to say. A frenzied joining was just sex, but they were past that stage. She nodded.

“Me, Elise. I want you to kiss
me
.”

Elise felt small and delicate with Jack’s body almost entirely above her. He had a way of making her seem exquisite, a prize to be treasured. She could feel it in her throat. It made it hard to swallow. She chalked the misty feeling up to jet lag.

He took control, kissing her slowly and thoroughly, her mouth, her cheeks, her chin, her hairline. He whispered things to her skin, words of love and adoration, words that slipped inside her without waiting for permission.

Even while her head was confused, her body suddenly got the idea. Her hands, her breasts, her hips all lifted toward Jack, pressing up into his body and his touch. Her head arched back as he worked his way down her torso, kissing, fondling, loving her, savoring her like she was the rarest delicacy.

A giant shudder went through her, and she instinctively stretched, hard, from her toes to the top of her head. The tension, her fears, any resistance to Jack’s love melted away and she let herself feel him worshipping her.

That’s why they call it making love
was her last rational thought before the orgasms started.

When it was her turn and she flipped him on his back to reverse their roles, Elise was shy. She’d never tried to express her feelings for another person in the bedroom, unless she counted enthusiasm as an emotion. Then she looked at his face, his love and affection shining in his eyes and smile. She smiled back instinctively. This was Jack, her Jack, who loved her and flew across the continent to be there for her, and who had charmed her mother, and, well, was just Jack.

It wasn’t hard after that to use her body to speak directly to his body. She loved him the best way she could. This “making love” stuff was new to her, sure, but she could learn new tricks.

Based on his reaction, she seemed to have gotten the point across.

Elise flopped onto her back, staring up at the ceiling as her breathing calmed and her skin dried in the pleasantly cool air-conditioning. Jack had a clock on his bedside table with a large digital readout constructed of oblong red shapes—the numerals looked like those diabolical toothpick math puzzles she could never solve as a kid. Nearly two a.m. Of course her body was still on West Coast time, so it wasn’t even ready for bed, let alone sleep.

Add to that, she was still wired from the push to get back to Jack. This was the first time a flight back to Philly had been all about the man she was returning to. Even her opting to come straight to his house seemed off, a choice some other woman might make. The old Elise would have thanked him for the ride but insisted on getting back to home base where the mail was stacked up and her few houseplants needed life support.

“Elise?” he whispered.

“Mmm?”

“Figures you weren’t asleep.” She could feel the faint vibration from his chuckle more than she could hear it.

“At least I have an excuse. It’s only eleven for my body. What’s up with you?” she whispered back.

He hitched himself up on one elbow. “I have my reasons.” His voice was low and resonant but at least he’d stopped whispering. Silly in an empty house to sound like teenagers trying to keep from waking the household.

Elise looked at his body, which was a black void in the dimness. She reached out a hand to stroke his shoulder and hit his ear instead. She adjusted and managed to curve her palm along his upper arm, down to his elbow, his wrist, his hand. She was toying with his fingers when he spoke again.

“Elise.”

“Mm-hmm.” She followed the line of his hand to his hip, across the upper thigh to his groin. He was soft, but that could change. She ran the pad of her thumb along all the spots he was most sensitive.

His hand caught hers, stilling her efforts to arouse him. “Sweetheart, stop. I want to talk to you.”

Elise pouted like a spoiled child deprived of a favorite toy. Didn’t matter—he couldn’t see her expression. If he was awake enough for conversation, for sure he’d be ready for round two. Or was it three?

She pulled herself up to lean against the pillows and reached over to turn on the light. “Okay. What’s up?”

Jack sat up and swiveled around so he was facing her. Elise had one of those weird moments when he suddenly looked like Blackjack McIntyre, legendary prosecutor, and not her Jack. Considering that he was buck naked, and well satisfied sexually, his transformation into his larger-than-life Boy-Scout-of-Steel persona was impressive.

“This wasn’t quite how I’d planned this,” he murmured. “But there’s something fitting about doing this in the nude and not after a five-course dinner.”

“Oh, God. You’re breaking up with me,” she blurted. Her own words shocked her, leaving her mouth open in a comical O of surprise. Where the hell had that come from?

Jack grabbed her hands and squeezed, hard. “Elise, darling, of course not. You’re everything to me, you know that. You have been since that first day, in court. I know we got off on the wrong foot. I’d have vastly preferred to ask you out the normal way, whatever that is, but it seems you and I don’t do ‘normal.’”

He held her hands lightly in his left, petting them absently with his right. He seemed completely focused on this activity, his tanned fingers against her paler skin. It was vaguely hypnotic to watch him gazing at their hands.

“When I looked at you that day, I saw a beautiful woman—no—” He stopped her mumble of protest. He looked up, his face calm and serious. “You
are
beautiful. Certainly you are to me, beautiful in ways that transcend looks and time. You’ll be beautiful in fifty years. I hope…” His voice trailed off.

He sat up a bit taller and started again. “It wasn’t just your beauty. It was you, something about you. I don’t know, your intensity perhaps, or your obvious intelligence. Whatever it was, whatever I saw, I loved you immediately and irrevocably.”

He smiled at her, that same Blackjack smile he used in his chambers, the smile with the crinkly eyes and flashing teeth. Still made her melt like ice cream, drat it all. She grinned back at him.

He placed her hands carefully on her thighs and leaned back a bit. Even nude he looked increasingly like the successful prosecutor, midway through an important argument to the court.

“I understand why you couldn’t believe that I was serious at first. And then I messed things up with that business with Mather. I’m sorry I didn’t handle that better, or let you handle it. You were generous to forgive me.”

The knot in her stomach tightened a little more with each word of this speech. If she were clever, she’d know how to stop him. It was like a slow-motion disaster. All she could do was stare at him, her “obvious intelligence,” as he called it, lost in a growing fog of anxiety.

“So I needed to go a lot slower, and that’s worked better, hasn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You only saw our differences at first—you know, the beer-versus-wine thing—but you have to admit we actually fit together well. We get along, we’re compatible in bed and out, you seem to like my family, I like your mother and I’m sure I’ll like your Ohio family.”

“Jack,” Elise started. He didn’t seem to hear her.

“And you love me. You know you do. I know you do. Not because of anything superficial, but because of that connection between us. Maybe I didn’t see it the first day, maybe love at first sight is a myth, I don’t know. But it’s real now. We love each other
now
.”

He took a deep breath, swelling his torso. Time had slowed to a painful crawl. Elise couldn’t think how to prevent the inevitable train wreck.

His voice deepened even further. “Elise, will you marry me?”

She stared at him, chilled by the horror of what he was asking. Her heart was pounding, like someone trying to escape a burning building. What could she say, except the truth?

“I can’t.”

“You can’t,” Jack repeated. He considered her expression of mingled regret, sympathy and a touch of adolescent mulishness.

What did that mean, she couldn’t marry him?

He tried again. “You can’t marry me legally because it would be bigamy, or you can’t because it would violate your principles?” Not that her answer mattered. It was pretty clear that she
could
marry him but that she didn’t want to.

She must have guessed what he was thinking because she grabbed at his arm. “Jack, it’s not like that. I’m telling you, I don’t know how.”

“It’s not hard. We get a marriage license, we discuss whether we want a big wedding, a small wedding, an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, or a twenty-minute ceremony in Anita King’s chambers with my clerks as witnesses, and then we go get married.” He remembered part of his carefully thought-out argument that he’d botched so badly. “Or we don’t get married. Move in with me, or if you love your house so much, we can live there.”

Elise looked physically ill, her face waxy and pale, blue eyes nearly black with pain. She didn’t say anything. Venue, ceremony, and residence were clearly not the issues.

He yanked his arm back. “Well, then what the hell
is
the issue, dammit? You can’t pull some ‘it’s not you it’s me’ crap at this stage. You love me, you know you do. And you know I love you. So what the
fuck
is going on?”

Great. Now, on top of all the other times this woman had managed to get him to behave differently—Dave & Buster’s, sex on the floor of his office, even flying out to Oregon because he thought she needed his support—he could add to that list swearing like a sailor.

When she didn’t say anything right away, Jack got up, put on some boxers and headed downstairs.

“Jack?” she called after him. He could hear her moving around in the bedroom. He turned on the lights in the living room, and then got a highball glass and took it over to the liquor cabinet. He glanced over his shoulder as Elise came down the stairs. She’d put on that asinine “knows a judge” T-shirt, which was pretty damned ironic under the circumstances. It skimmed the tops of her thighs. The sight of her pretty legs, soft and pale, made him crazy. He turned away and poured his drink.