Jack turned to Candice, who knew he could not be serious. This was a scheme to free her—it had to be. She took his arm and gave him a tremulous smile. There was no warmth to greet her in his eyes. “Let’s go—whore.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
He dragged her down the corridor, despite the fact that she kept stumbling in her high heels, and threw her into the room, slamming the door behind her. “All right, whore,” he began.
Candice bit her knuckle and shrank away from him.
Jack leaned against the door and hated himself, hated her, hated the way he felt. He closed his eyes, knowing he couldn’t take her in violent anger even though a part of him primitively wanted to.
Then the last thing he’d expected happened. She catapulted herself at him with a small sob. Clinging, pressing against him, crying out his name, again and again. “Jack, God, Jack, oh, Jack …”
And then there were the hundred questions racing through his mind, and the damning evidence of his own eyes. He wrenched her hands away from his neck and threw her backward. She landed on the bed and stared at him, wide-eyed, propping herself up.
“I came here to find a whore,” he said hoarsely. “And it looks like I found one.”
“No,” she whimpered. “It’s not true.”
“A whore who’s also my wife,” he said, and the pain almost knocked him over.
She stared, her eyes huge, her mouth open, breathing just as hard as he was. “Jack—”
“God,” he cried, an anguished, wrenching sound. He turned his back to her and leaned panting against the door.“Usen.”
Candice flung her arms around him from behind, and he went stiff and rigid. Her breasts were soft against his back. He heard her sobbing his name. And he felt her shaking against him with the force of her weeping.
He turned.
It wasn’t premeditated. It was the most natural thing in the world to turn and open his arms and close them around her, pressing her face in his chest and burying his mouth in her hair. She moaned, lifting her face, and he stared for an instant at her navy eyes, laced with pain and hope, at the tears tracking her cheeks, and he was lost. His mouth brushed hers. She clung and opened. Their tongues touched. He groaned in complete capitulation and kissed her hotly, deeply—frantic and demanding. “Candice,” he cried, “Candice,” and he was pressing her as close as he could, rejoicing in the perfect fit of her body, throbbing with a wild, explosive need for her, kissing her uncontrollably.
They were falling onto the bed.
Jack wrapped his hands in her hair and held her face still so his mouth could plunder hers, everything forgotten, all the anger and hate. She arched frantically against him, her long legs going around his waist, drawing his bulging manhood into the warm valley between her legs. An electric desire coursed between them.
He couldn’t stand it. Never had his need been so uncontrollable and so frenzied. He tore off her scandalously short drawers and yanked open his fly, his mouth still plundering with a savage desperation. He could feel her body shuddering beneath his, and he raised himself briefly and plunged violently into her.
The union took his senses up and away.
Right now, this instant, she was his and no one else’s.
He moved hard and fast, in that frantic, steady, wild climb toward ecstasy, and she moved with him, insistent, demanding, her nails clawing his back, shredding his shirt. Her tremors began first, and he felt them immediately, the tight, sharp spasming of her sheath, and then another contraction followed, and another.… Candice gasped, wrenching her mouth away from his. In that one instant, Jack saw her face in the throes of release, and then he felt his own explosion as he surged even deeper within her, deeper, harder, exploding again and again.
He lay on top of her, in her, panting, his heart beating wildly. Remembrance and reality returned. Candice. Candice, who had betrayed him. Candice, who had chosen Kincaid over him. Candice here, a whore in a whorehouse. Without moving his body, he raised his head and looked down at her.
She was so damn beautiful. He watched as she breathed unsteadily through parted, swollen lips, black lashes fluttering against her golden skin. Her eyes opened, and she looked right into his. Tears shimmered. “I love you, Jack.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Candice lay beneath him and held him tightly, closing her eyes, her cheek pressed in the smooth joining of his neck and shoulder. She wondered if he had heard her; he was so very still. Her heart was still racing, and an exultant joy was coursing through her. How could she have ever given this man up? She turned her head to press her mouth against his flesh, which was musk-scented and wet from exertion. She inhaled his scent deeply, listening to his heartbeat.
He slipped to her side, onto his back, placing a small breath of space between them. Candice felt his withdrawal on an emotional level. She immediately curled against him, her arms going around him, refusing to allow him to pull away, either physically or emotionally. “Oh, Jack,” she said, her voice unsteady. “God, I’ve missed you.” Tears threatened to overwhelm her but she fought them back.
“Right.” He sat up, pulling away from her.
Candice sat too, grasping his arm. His eyes were ice cold, like the desert frozen with a dusting of frost in winter, and the glitter in their depths was dangerous. “Jack? Wait. You don’t understand.”
He laughed again. She hated the sound of this laugh. It was full of contempt. “You’re right. I don’t understand.”
“Let me explain.”
