One Wild Texas Night, page 13
“I’m sure you have,” she said, smiling at him. “Maybe it’ll be better from now on.”
* * *
They saw pictures of the new arena, the box seats on the ground floor where spectators could be close to the action, the plush suites with walls of glass at the top, plus a cantina with a seating capacity of two hundred that had food service, bars and elegant, comfortable seats with wide screens to also view the action. She saw pictures of the horse stalls and then more shots of another large area outside with seats around an adjoining outdoor arena.
The arena board chairman, John Smith, was master of ceremonies and stood to talk about the arena. He was obviously proud of the strides they’d already made. They were booked solid with horse shows, rodeo events and bull riding.
Finally, in closing, the speaker thanked all the people attending the dinner who had contributed to building the arena and in particular thanked the three of the largest monetary contributors: Wade, Jake and Luke. As they read more names, Jake became antsy, thinking of how badly he wanted to get Claire out of here and into his arms.
It seemed like hours but was actually only half past ten when they arrived at Jake’s Dallas condo. Claire’s heart drummed with eagerness, because all evening she had been looking at Jake and imagining herself here with him, away from prying eyes. But she knew what this was. Jake always had moved on from the previous women he’d dated, and she didn’t expect him to change. But she wanted this night with him.
“Jake, this is marvelous,” she said, stepping into his entryway and seeing the big living room with two walls of glass that offered a spectacular view of the lights of Dallas at night. “Oh my word, what a view.”
“I heartily agree,” he said. His voice was deep with that rasp he got when he was aroused, and she turned to see him watching her as he unbuttoned his shirt. He had already shed his coat and tie, and her pulse jumped, her heartbeat racing because it was clear what he wanted.
Watching her, he crossed the room to her, tossing his shirt and then undershirt on a chair.
“My, that was fast,” she said, thinking about his handsome looks. Then she sighed under her breath and whispered only to herself, “Ahh, Jake. You’re going to have my heart.” She slipped her arm around his waist as he reached out to slide his hand to her collar.
“I knew this would zip down the front. I do like your dress,” he said, watching her as he pulled the zipper down slowly.
“Oh, darlin’, are you gorgeous,” he said, his gaze going to her breasts in a bra that was only a bit of white lace. “So incredibly beautiful,” he added, letting her dress come open. She wore white lace panties that were as skimpy as her bra.
In seconds the silk dress fell around her ankles, and she stepped out of it, removing her bra and panties as he watched. He shed the rest of his clothes while he watched her.
He slipped his arms around her and drew her against his warm, naked body as he leaned down to kiss her. “You’re fantastic,” he whispered, and then his mouth was on hers and she clung tightly to him.
“I can’t wait this time. Next time will be for you,” he said after a moment and picked her up. “Put your legs around me.”
When she did, he lowered her on his hard manhood and she closed her eyes, gasping with pleasure as he eased into her slowly.
“Ahh, Jake,” she whispered, clinging to him and moving with him, each thrust sending waves of intense pleasure that rocked her.
As she clung tightly to him, he began to pump faster. Sensations spread in her, desire hot and intense as she rode him and tension built. She felt her first climax burst with a fantastic surge, ecstasy enveloping her. He continued pumping faster, and in minutes she clutched him, clinging with her arms and legs tight around him as her second climax washed over her while he climaxed at the same time. She cried out while spasms racked her, and then she fell on him, kissing him and holding him tightly until she finally slid down to stand on the floor again while they still kissed.
He picked her up to carry her to bed, stretching out on his side and holding her close as she faced him. “Jake, I can’t move now. You’re fantastic.”
“I guarantee you, that’s my line. You looked beautiful tonight, in your clothes and out of them. Absolutely stunning.”
She smiled at him, running her fingers over his whiskers, along his ear, up into his hair. “I think when I move out of your house, my heart may just be left behind with you. Probably another trophy for you.”
“I don’t have trophies like that or women like that in my life,” he said as he looked deeply into her eyes. “I don’t know about the future, but I know that right now, I’m in paradise because of you.”
“I could say the same thing.”
He held her close against him. “This is good.”
She clung tightly to him, happy, refusing to think beyond the current moment. She’d had a fabulous evening, and Jake’s response to her new clothes, her new haircut and style, had been more than she had hoped for. She knew some rough times lay ahead, because it was inevitable that she would move out of his house and into her new one, but right now, tonight, she wasn’t going to think again about anything beyond the moment. And at the moment, she was euphoric. They’d shared hot lovemaking. She was being held tightly against his naked body and in due time he would kiss her again and they would make love again. It was paradise now while she was naked in his arms. She wouldn’t look beyond the immediate moment.
With a sigh, she hugged him tightly and put her head on his chest to listen to his heartbeat.
“This is the perfect end to a perfect day,” he said, his voice a deep rumble. She could feel vibrations in his chest when he talked. She ran her fingers over his flat, hard stomach, sliding them up over his chest. “You’re incredible, so sexy, so handsome, so exciting,” she whispered, wondering if she was already deeply in love with him and if he was going to break her heart when they said goodbye. She had a feeling she would never again know a man who was as sexy and exciting as he.
* * *
Claire spent the next week making arrangements with all sorts of people, and by the beginning of March, her land had been cleared and a foundation laid for her new home. She went back and forth from Jake’s cabin each day in one of his pickups and then usually stayed at Jake’s in the afternoon. She spent every night and some days and afternoons in his bed in his arms, and she refused to think about the future unless she had to, and then only regarding her property.
Late in the day on a Thursday, she knew Jake was working on something in his office. She had been on the phone with her insurance agent and had an appointment set. She had spent the morning selecting tile and wallpaper and flooring for her new kitchen on the ranch.
After three in the afternoon, she was ready for a break and went to Jake’s library. Wearing new jeans, new sneakers and a new blue T-shirt her own size, she was thankful to have some new clothes. Idly, she roamed around the room, looking at a large collection of books of all genres.
She glanced down on a lower shelf and saw a small scrapbook. She pulled it off the shelf and saw it was Jake’s baby book. Smiling, she sat on the floor to look at it. When she finished, she replaced it and looked at the other books.
On the bottom shelf, she noticed what looked like another scrapbook pushed back where it was almost hidden by books. She pulled it out to look at pictures of Jake when he was in high school. As she closed it to put it back where she found it, a couple of pictures fell out.
She picked them up and looked at a picture of a family—a tall, slender, balding man, a woman who had short, straight brown hair and a big smile. There were four kids, two girls and two boys. The tallest boy looked anywhere from sixteen to eighteen. The others ranged in ages from that to the youngest girl, who looked five or six. Claire wondered who they were. Probably relatives of Jake’s, she assumed. More Reeds who didn’t live in this area.
She put the picture back and started to move on to the next thing, but she stopped. Something had looked vaguely familiar about the woman. She picked up the picture again to stare at it intently while her heart beat faster. She placed her finger over the woman’s hair to just look at her face only.
Claire suddenly felt frozen, as if she was in ice water.
Ten
She stared at the picture, and the chill she felt deepened, making her shake. And then her icy feelings began to change, her temperature climbing as shock changed to fury.
She was certain she was looking at a picture of her sister. Her hair was different, and she was heavier and older, but it had to be Regina. Regina and Jake’s brother, Sam, and their family.
As she held the picture and stood, Claire shook with anger. The scrapbook fell from her lap, hitting the floor with a clatter, but she didn’t even notice.
She stared at the picture in her hand again. It couldn’t have been more than a year or two old for Regina to have a son taller than she was and looking at least sixteen or older. Jake had contact with Regina and his brother. He had a picture of them and their family, so he had to have been in contact. And not that long ago.
She thought of the intimacy she had shared with Jake, sharing her feelings, her body, her hopes, her fears, even her heart. And all the time he had known where his brother and her sister were. He had known about their family. He had to have known and had to have been in touch with them to get this picture.
Regina and Sam had four kids and Jake had known this—how long?
Had he known about them since they left Texas?
In her memory, Claire always thought of Regina just as she had been the night she left. The woman in the picture bore little resemblance to the sister Claire remembered, but everyone changed with time.
Regina had dyed her blond hair brown, or maybe it had just turned brown, because there were a lot of gray streaks now. Her naturally curly hair had been straightened and cut very short—a style she’d never worn before she left home. That was the biggest change, plus the glasses, but those could easily be fake. Or by this time, they might be real. It was difficult to recognize her but not impossible, and Claire hurt again. She had loved Regina, always missed her and thought about her and hoped she was happy.
Claire looked at the picture again. “Regina,” she said, running her finger over her sister’s picture.
Sam had his arm across her shoulders. He had changed as much as Regina. The hair loss was why she just glanced at him. Sam had had thick brown hair and wore it long. Now it was thinning, leaving a bald spot on the top of his head. His hair was short, with streaks of gray. How old was the picture? It couldn’t be very old.
“I’ve missed you so,” she whispered, looking again at Regina’s picture. For Regina and Sam to stay away all these years, they must have felt terribly threatened by her brothers and her dad. At the time they disappeared, they probably were right about the reaction of the men in the Blake family. She didn’t want to think about what they might have done to Sam. But she knew they would have just barged in and brought Regina home.
And Jake knew where they were, had contact with them and hadn’t said one word to her. Anger shook her and was as strong as the hurt she felt that he would do such a thing. He hadn’t trusted her at all.
Clenching her fists, Claire trembled with rage, feeling betrayed. She had made clear to Jake how much Regina had meant to her. And he had just listened and never said a word, keeping quiet when she talked about how much she had loved her sister, how much she longed to know Regina was happy and well.
How could he have been so deceitful? How could he have held back and not shared that he knew Regina had a family?
At that moment she was so angry that she was glad he wasn’t present so that she had time to pull herself together and think before she told him how she felt. It was probably something like this—some huge deceitful thing—that snowballed into the old feud they were all locked into.
She wanted to get away from Jake, away from his cabin. She couldn’t go home to her ranch, because there was still no place to stay on it. She found the website for the hotel in Persimmon and booked a room.
She looked at the picture again. At the four children. Then she realized she was an aunt. Aunt Claire. She turned the picture and saw Regina’s neat cursive writing: Sam Jr., Claire Lynn, Becky and Charles. Their grandfather’s middle name.
“Claire Lynn,” she read aloud, looking at a picture of a teenage girl with curly brown hair. “Claire Lynn,” Claire repeated, certain Regina had named their first girl for her. “Aunt Claire,” she said aloud, still stunned to discover the picture.
How could Jake have kept this from her? The question tore at her repeatedly as she thought about how she had poured out her heart to him about her pain and overwhelming sense of loss when Regina and Sam eloped.
She shook with anger and pain. She yanked up her phone again to make arrangements to be picked up and driven to Persimmon, where she already had a suite. She didn’t want to spend one more minute with Jake than she had to.
She heard boots in the hall and looked up to see Jake standing in the doorway.
Eleven
Jake had walked down the hall looking for Claire. She could slip away from him and she was quiet, even in boots. As he’d reached the open door to the study, he’d almost walked past it, but he’d seen her seated and turned back, smiling as he’d stepped into the doorway. Now he looked at her and at an open book on her lap and a picture in her hand, and his heart sank. He had forgotten about the damn picture of her sister and her family.
“Claire—”
She shook her head. “Don’t start, Jake. There isn’t an explanation of any sort that will make up for you not telling me that you know where my sister is. And you’ve known all along.” Her voice was low, tight with anger, and he felt his hurt deepen.
“I promised them I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said as he entered the room and started to approach her. When she held up her hand, he paused.
“Stop. Don’t you come near me,” she said.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he repeated with an emphasis on the last word. “If I had told you, I would have broken my promise to my brother and to her. I couldn’t. I had to keep my promise to them.”
A tear spilled down Claire’s cheek, and she hastily wiped it away with the back of her hand, and he felt worse. He could see the anger blazing in her green eyes.
“There’s nothing you can ever say to make keeping this from me right. I’ve given you my body. Unfortunately, I probably gave you part of my heart, too, but I will get over that if I haven’t already. Your promise is no excuse at all. We’re intimate. If you had told me, don’t you think I could have kept quiet about it?”
“I don’t know. Would you have kept quiet? Or would you want to contact Regina? I think you’d want to talk to her and maybe go see her. I don’t see them. They severed relations with everyone here except me. My brother has kept in touch. He makes the contact—I don’t. He’s never come to see me.”
“Have you gone to see him?”
“Yes, four times, after the birth of each of their kids. They invited me to come, so I went. He doesn’t come back here. It’s your family that drove them away. Mine is bad, but your dad and your brothers are worse. I know Regina wanted to contact you, but your two older brothers and your dad kept her away. She was afraid they would find out. She was afraid of what they might do.”
“Jake, there’s nothing you’ll ever be able to say to make it right or for me to forgive you,” she said.
“This is tearing me up. I don’t want to hurt you even the tiniest bit.”
“Oh, please. Stop, Jake. You kept Regina’s whereabouts, information about her and her family, secret from me while we were intimate. When I leave here, I never want to see you again.”
“Look, give me a chance here—”
“When I gave you my body, I also gave you my trust. And I expected it to be mutual. Well, it quite obviously was not.” She shook her straight red hair back from her face.
“Look, I’m sorry. I did what I thought was best for them.”
“Just stop. I’ve already called for a driver to come here and pick me up. I said I would be by the gate because I know you value your privacy.”
“Cancel that and let me take you to Dallas or wherever you want to go,” he said, hurting, wishing he could undo what had happened. “I forgot that damn picture—”
“How long ago was it taken?”
“A year ago. They’re all a year older now. Claire, they’re not coming back. They don’t communicate except my brother has let me know when a baby is born.”
“How close were you with your brother?”
“Close enough,” he answered. “They’re scared of your dad and your brothers. And probably rightfully so at first. By now, your dad is older, your brothers are scattered and have other interests. All of them are accustomed to Regina’s disappearance, and if she returned, none of you would live under the same roof again, so it’s all different now. When Sam and Regina left, they had justification for secrecy.”
“I know they did, but it’s years later now, as you just said. You could have told me without any repercussions to them. I wouldn’t have jumped on a plane and gone to see her or even called her. It just hurts to know that you have no trust in me. It hurts that you kept something so important from me. At least you made it quite clear where I stand with you and how deep your feelings go for me and how much you trust me. I’m leaving, and I don’t want to see you again ever.”
“I know you have appointments about your house, and you’ll need to be out here where you can meet with people and look at the damage, so just stay here and I’ll keep out of your way.”
“Thank you, but no. I got a suite at the hotel in Persimmon. They had one available, and I can drive back and forth from there, so I don’t need to stay here. And I don’t want to stay with you one minute longer than I have to. I do not want to see you again,” she said slowly and firmly.
