The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass, page 34
His thighs were muscular, sexy. Indicative of all the hard work that he did on his ranch.
That was what the man did. He worked. Whether it was at the bar or on his land, and he wore the evidence of that in every hard, chiseled line on his body. And then there was... Well, him. That most masculine part of him, thick and proud and so much more than she had ever dared imagine.
If she were going to engage in comparisons again—and she was—Laz came out ahead there too. By a lot.
She swallowed hard.
And then she decided there was no point being a coward. Not about anything. Because this was what she wanted. Plain and simple. And she was going to take it.
She reached her hand down, wrapped it around his hard length, soft and hot and hard all at once. She squeezed him, watched as his face went pained. A tortured look there.
She moved her hand up and down his length, until he caught at her wrist with his hand. “Careful,” he bit out.
“Why? I’m tired of being careful. I’m tired of being what I’m supposed to be. I’m tired of being whatever he thinks I should be. All I have done for all these years is tried to... Tried to stop myself from turning into a monster. I almost committed myself to a life that was going to make me nothing but miserable. Because I was such a coward. Because I wasn’t brave. So now I want to be brave. I want to be brave as I can be. I want to do whatever I want.”
“Well, I am here for being your playground, Jordan, but I don’t want this to end too quickly.”
And that was how she found herself being picked up off the floor and deposited on the bed.
Flat on her back on the soft mattress. And he lifted her thighs, draping them over his shoulders and lowered his head to the heart of her. That part that was slick and wet with desire for him. And she gasped.
She grabbed the back of his head as he tormented her. Pleasuring her with his tongue and his hands.
She writhed against him, arching up off the bed as she found her release, shuddering out his name.
“That’s right,” he said, moving up her body, gazing down into her eyes. “Don’t forget who’s with you.”
“No chance,” she said, her voice weak and shaky.
He took a condom from his nightstand, and sheathed himself quickly as he positioned himself at the entrance of her body.
“Laz,” she whispered, bracketing his face with her hands. And then he thrust inside of her, and she lost her breath.
Because it was him. Finally.
He was something she hadn’t let herself want. This was something she hadn’t let herself want. And it wasn’t until she had stripped away all those other people in her life that had had so many expectations of her that she was free. Free to feel what she did. Free to want what she did.
And she wanted him.
And as he established a steady rhythm that drove them both to the heights, as he thrust into her body, over and over again, he forged in them a bond that she didn’t think could ever be broken.
She felt utterly devastated by it. By him.
And she was glad of it.
Him. And only him.
She broke open, right there with him, pleasure a torrent that poured over, and he growled out his own release too, trembling, this big, sexy man. Trembling because of her.
And the words that she had held back on her lips echoed inside of her, reverberated inside her soul, joining up with that mystical sense of fate, and it all made sense.
It was more than fate. It had felt like it in that first moment. But over a decade of friendship and conversations, of building something genuine and real, had transformed this.
She loved him.
She was certain.
It felt nothing like loving Dylan. Nothing at all. It was its own thing, unique and wild.
And she was terrified with it. But maybe... Maybe the thing about loving Laz was that she had to accept that her future would look different than the one she had imagined with Dylan. Because she had been married to an idea of domesticity. Of having what his parents had. Of having that magical, normal sort of thing that she had never gotten to see in her childhood.
But maybe loving Laz meant being his friend. Sharing his bed. And letting him have his own life. Would that be so bad? She could be herself with him. More herself than she had been all this time. And maybe that was good enough?
Maybe it would be good enough.
Maybe she could accept that. Because she couldn’t imagine going back to not having this. To not having him.
So maybe accepting what was on the table wasn’t a bad thing.
Maybe the problem was that what she wanted was never going to fit her.
And she could take more in terms of what she felt, but less...
Checks and balances. It was reasonable. And as she lay there in his arms, safe and sheltered, buzzing with pleasure after what had just occurred, she decided that it was okay.
More than okay.
Friends with benefits with Laz was better than the promise of marriage and forever had ever been with Dylan.
And for the first time she could remember, without pacing herself to exhaustion, driving across half a state or tossing and turning for hours, Jordan fell effortlessly, deeply asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN LAZ WOKE UP the next morning, he could smell bacon. And he still felt sated and satisfied after a night spent in Jordan’s arms. That sex... The woman had blown his head off.
And now she was cooking for him.
He shook his head.
Yeah, it was what she had been hired to do, but this felt different.
It just did.
He had to wonder why.
Guilt crept over him. Guilt at the speech he’d given her. At what he told her about how he intended to keep his life separate.
It was true, though.
It was all he had to give. All he had.
But he got up, and had breakfast with her, and instead of going out to his wood shop, he ended up taking her back to bed.
And when she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth, her blue eyes a wild spark as she looked up at him while she pleasured him, he figured it was all right that for now, this was all he wanted to do.
He called his bar manager and told her that he wouldn’t be in tonight.
Instead, he made dinner for himself and Jordan, and she baked a cake. Then they made love on the floor of his house in such a way that he almost felt like he needed to apologize to the portrait of his grandmother that hung at the end of the hallway.
And it went on like that. For days.
Because he felt like he’d found something in her that he never anticipated. She made him want to disrupt his schedule. She made him not care so much about being at the bar every night.
He didn’t feel quite so compelled to go out and check on the ranch personally every afternoon. He just let his foreman handle it.
What he wanted had been reduced to his little house. What he wanted had been reduced to Jordan’s arms.
And what surprised him was how okay that seemed.
He had consciously gone out of his way to never wind his life around another person’s.
To never need them. And he was skating perilously close to something he had always vowed he never would. He felt guilty about the things he’d said to Jordan when they’d first gone to bed together, but he stood by them too.
There were just some people that were better off solitary.
Some people who didn’t bend that well because they would just break.
And he was one of them.
He finally gave in and went to work after about a week of being at his place with Jordan, and it was a good thing. Because she was going to have to leave soon. She was going to have to go back to her job. Or maybe not. Maybe not. They hadn’t really talked about it.
But that will amount to her basically living with you.
He gritted his teeth. Sure. That wasn’t going to work. He did know that.
But one afternoon when he ventured down into town, he walked into the Western wear store and perused the stock. And inside he found a black suitcase.
Inside, the suitcase was lined with loud, retro cowboy art. Horses and men with six-shooters held high in the air. And it was funny. A little bit of hidden strangeness inside a sedate-looking bag. And it reminded him so much of Jordan he had to get it.
Which was how he found himself hauling a suitcase up to the house that night while he blew off his regular shift.
When he walked into the house, Jordan was standing at the stove, stirring a pot.
“Oh,” she said when he walked in. “I didn’t expect you for dinner. I have a cake in the oven but...”
A cake. She baked him a cake.
All over his house little touches of care were evident. All these things that she’d done for him.
You paid her to do them. Don’t go making it sentimental.
“I brought you this,” he said, shoving the bag toward her.
She blinked. “You... You brought me a suitcase.”
“Because the flowered one is all wrong. This is what you like. You don’t want anything as loud as that flowered thing.”
“You’re right,” she said, staring at him, wide-eyed. “I don’t.”
“It’s got... I mean it’s got cowboys inside of it.”
She blinked. “You shoved a couple cowboys in there for me? That was thoughtful of you, Laz, but you’re about the only cowboy I can handle.”
He unzipped it, and showed her the lining. “It’s just... It’s interesting inside. But you have to work hard to find that out. Like you.”
It was very strange, and he was pretty sure he was hovering around the edge of a romantic gesture, but having never actually done one before, he didn’t really know.
“Laz,” she said. “That is... The nicest thing. And... And you’re right. It is exactly what I want. It’s exactly what I would choose.” She let out a hard breath. “I love you. I just... I’m not expecting anything back. But I love you. And I needed to say it.”
Something went tight inside of him and twisted.
It was like the world had gone still and his heart along with it. Jordan. Beautiful Jordan who had turned his world upside down the first day she’d walked into his bar, loved him.
Not another man, but him.
And he had no response to it. There wasn’t one.
Not in the whole, dark well of pain inside of him.
“Right. Well. When do you start work back up again?”
She blinked, looking as if she’d been slapped. “I... Next week.”
“Are you any closer to finding yourself a place to stay?”
“No,” she said.
“How about above the bar. There’s a place up there you...you helped me use it one night. I can have it cleaned and it would be ready for you quickly.”
“You don’t... You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
And he realized that he was basically offering her a position as his kept woman. And he could have offered her that apartment from the beginning and he hadn’t. He had kept her close to him. Kept her with him, and now she was saying that she loved him.
And it didn’t escape him that he was keeping her close so that he could still access her. Because he was an absolute dick, and even while he realized that, he couldn’t stop himself from making the offer.
And he knew that she wouldn’t be able to refuse.
“I... All right,” she said. And she blinked furiously, trying to hide her hurt.
He would never reject Jordan’s love. He couldn’t do that. But he couldn’t have her living in his house and he couldn’t make her promises that he didn’t want to keep.
That he couldn’t keep.
Except he kept feeling like didn’t want to was closer to the truth, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise.
He didn’t want to hurt her. Not for anything.
But he wanted things to keep working the way that he wanted them to. “I’ll help you move in as soon as it’s clean.”
“Well, thanks. You gave me a suitcase.”
And he remembered the words from an old movie, twisted to suit the moment. She’d given him her heart and he’d given her a suitcase.
And he didn’t do anything to fix it.
“What kind of cake is it?”
“Chocolate,” she answered.
“Great. You need help with anything?”
“No. I’m fine.” She swallowed hard and nodded, and he felt a cloud of guilt. And he didn’t do anything about it.
And that was how things changed between them again. Not with shouting or screaming or anything like that. Just with a suitcase and the throat full of unspoken words.
And that was when Laz realized that he really was his parents.
And he knew there was no way that he could explain that to her. Because that wasn’t something he did. He wasn’t the one who shared.
He gave advice. And that was it. And he didn’t quite know what to do with being at a loss.
Except keep on down that road.
So that was what he did.
CHAPTER SIX
JORDAN HAD BEEN wrestling with feeling like she’d been gutted alive for the last few days. All the while that Laz had that apartment fixed up for her. And all the way up to moving day.
But she didn’t say anything. Even though she should have. Even though she wanted to. She didn’t say anything when she packed up that suitcase that he brought her, that brief, shining evidence of the fact that he knew her, followed by a devastating strange sort of half rejection.
It’s actually not unreasonable for him to not want to move in with you.
She knew that. But she had said that she loved him and he hadn’t said anything back. And she hadn’t said it again since.
And you were willing to accept something different, remember?
Except, it turned out that actually what she really wanted was for him to be in love with her.
But she would continue to see him. Of course she would.
Because their relationship was good in so many other ways, and it was grounding and...
She stood in the center of that apartment, frozen.
And what would happen if she was really alone? If she had to face the town, completely unprotected by her relationship with Dylan’s family, and even with their censure rolling through the community. If she had to go on without her friendship with Laz, without him sharing her bed.
If she was just a woman who lived alone, and had to cope with herself and any potential demons...
What was she?
And when Laz came up with the last box, she turned to face him. “We can’t keep sleeping together,” she said.
He stopped. “We can’t?”
“No. So if you moved me here to have easy access to me, bad news.”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because I love you. But I don’t need to be in a relationship with you to keep myself safe from heroin, or whatever it is I’ve been thinking all of my life about all of these relationships that I have. I denied my first instinct with you, because I didn’t trust my instincts at all. I was so sure that they were going to land me in a bad spot that I... That I denied them. And I denied myself. But Laz, I’m not doing that anymore. I love you. Like as more than a friend. But I don’t want to accept a half-life where we don’t have a future. I thought that I could. I thought that I could sleep with you and do the friends with benefits thing and that that would be enough.
“But it isn’t. And hanging on to that is just something I’m doing out of fear. Because I don’t know what my life looks like if you’re not in it. Because I’m afraid of who I’ll become, but I can’t stay with people for that reason. Not anymore. I’ve done too much of that. I’m not going to do it anymore. Not for you. And not for anyone.”
“Jordan...”
“No. I made a lot of mistakes with Dylan, not least of which was letting it get to our wedding day, and then running away rather than having a conversation with him. But I’m not doing that anymore. The one brave thing buried in all those cowardly decisions that I made was I was willing to change my life. Willing to dramatically change it. And I still am. But I need you to be willing to meet me halfway. I can’t do this. Because I’ve already done the relationship where I make all the compromises because I might be broken.”
“It’s not you who’s broken.”
“You’re not broken either. But you’re going to have to decide to be whole, I can’t decide that for you. Any more than Dylan could decide it for me, and you can’t make a relationship work with someone that dedicated to living in their pain. Believe me. I know.” She looked around the room. “So thank you for the apartment. I will pay rent on it. And I’ll still... Speak to you. And be your friend. But I can’t be in between. I just can’t. I love you too much to let either of us accept that.”
She blinked. “You didn’t want to ask me not to marry him because you were afraid you were being selfish. Well, I’m asking you to change. For me. And maybe I am being selfish, but maybe it needs to be said.”
“I can’t,” he said.
He looked tortured. He looked like he wanted to say yes, but couldn’t. And for the life of her, Jordan couldn’t understand that.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too,” she whispered.
Laz set the box down, turned and walked out of the apartment. And she somehow knew when he closed the door, he wouldn’t be opening it again.
Jordan stared blankly ahead. But she didn’t want French fries. And she didn’t want a milkshake. And she didn’t want to drive aimlessly for hours while she decided what to do.
