Selena knew it was horrible of her to tease Jayden, but it wasn’t like she’d intended to do it. All she’d done was dim the lights in the living room, then get the cheesecake from the fridge and move over to sit beside him on the couch. It wasn’t until she leaned back and crossed her legs that she realized how much thigh she’d exposed in the process. If the heat in his blue-gray eyes, not to mention the mouthwatering bulge in his jeans, was any indication, it seemed like her heroic SWAT cop would rather have her for dessert than the dulce de leche cheesecake she’d made.
Not that she would have complained.
Tonight had been the most amazing evening she’d ever spent with a man. Jayden was charming, funny, easy to talk to, easy to look at, and smelled like heaven in a pair of blue jeans. And that voice? Holy cheese and crackers, it didn’t even matter what he was said. Merely listening to his deep, rumbling tones turned her into one big, gooey puddle of contentment. Seriously. She’d gotten aroused listening to him tell her about blowing out his knee in college. Was that whack or what?
Selena dated now and then, when her commitment to her students gave her time, but to say she’d never been this crazy for a guy was an understatement. If it wasn’t for that fact that she’d felt like this from the second Jayden had walked in the door, she would have thought it was the wine talking.
No way. There wasn’t enough wine in the whole world to make her feel this good. This was sexual chemistry like she’d never experienced in her life.
Jayden leaned over and filled her wineglass before doing the same to his. Okay, it was official. He was absolutely perfect. At this rate, she’d be marrying him before the end of the week.
Though he tried to be casual about it, Selena noticed he had to adjust his jeans a little to get more comfortable as he leaned back on the couch. She didn’t mean to stare, but her attention was naturally drawn to the bulge in his pants. The sight of it—and everything her overactive imagination did with it—made her breath hitch. She might have been exaggerating about that whole marriage by the weekend thing, but getting Jayden naked by then might be a very real possibility.
She didn’t normally jump into things with a guy that quickly, but in this man’s case, she’d make an exception. Then again, there was something about Jayden that made her think he was going to have her doing all kinds of things she normally wouldn’t.
Selena picked up one of the plates and held it out to him.
“Cheesecake?” she asked, trying to distract herself by thinking of something other than Jayden sitting on her couch with no clothes on.
He took the plate, then loaded some of the rich, creamy dessert on his fork and tasted it. A moment later, she was treated to a moan similar to the one he’d let out at the SWAT compound when he’d eaten the brownies.
“Did you make this?” he asked.
She smiled. “I did.”
“Wow.” He ate another forkful. “You’re an amazing cook. Did your mom teach you?”
Selena supposed her mother did have something to do with her learning to cook, just not in the way Jayden was implying.
“Not really.” She took a bite of cheesecake. “I’m pretty much self-taught.”
Jayden regarded her expectantly, like he was waiting for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he frowned. “I hope this doesn’t come off like I’m trying to interrogate you or anything, but is there a reason you don’t like talking about yourself? I kind of noticed that I’m the one doing most of the sharing here. Not that I don’t like talking about myself, but I’d like to learn a little about you, too.”
Selena ran her fork over the fluffy sides of the cheesecake, making ridges there. She didn’t know why she was being her normal cagey self. It wasn’t like he couldn’t learn anything about her past he wanted. He was a cop after all.
“I don’t mind sharing,” she murmured. “I just usually don’t talk about my family. There’s not a lot of good stuff to say, especially to someone in law enforcement.”
Jayden seemed to somehow understand what she was saying and didn’t take offense. But she hadn’t expected that he would.
“My dad was into all kinds of drugs and gang crap before I was even born.” She ate another forkful of cheesecake. “He was in and out of prison when I was little, and by the time I was eight, he took off. Or he got murdered. Or Mom threw him out. I never really knew for sure, and my mom never told me. Regardless, she hung around for a while after that, but her heart just wasn’t in it.” Selena shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t a horrible mother. She simply wasn’t worried about trivial stuff like cooking, cleaning, paying the bills, or taking care of a little kid. Then one day, she went out to the store for cigarettes and didn’t come back. My grandma was around, but she was too old to take care of a kid full time, so my older brother—Geraldo—kind of picked up the slack. He was only six years older than me, but he pretty much raised me. He kept me fed and out of trouble, made sure I washed behind my ears, and helped with my homework, even though he was lousy in school. Grandma made sure I went to church, and Geraldo took care of everything else.”
Jayden placed his empty plate on the coffee table. “Your brother sounds like a great guy.”
She smiled, feeling warm all over at the flood of memories. “Yeah, he was the best. Sort of a brother, best friend, mom, and dad, all rolled into one.”
“Was?” Jayden prodded gently.
Her smile faded as the good memories of Geraldo were replaced with ones that weren’t so good. “I loved my brother like crazy, but our parents were gone, and our grandma was older, and we needed money.”
“So he joined a gang,” Jayden surmised.
She nodded, taking another bite of cheesecake. It was creamy and sweet and her favorite thing to make. She’d made it for Geraldo all the time, even before she’d gotten the hang of baking, when she was never quite sure how it was going to turn out. He’d never complained, though.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think about where all the money was coming from,” she said, focusing on the texture of the cake and not the words coming out of her mouth. Even now, after all these years, thinking about it could make her cry. And she seriously didn’t want to cry in front of Jayden. “But as I got older, I realized what the tattoos meant and who the people he talked to outside the apartment on the curb in the middle of the night were.”
“How old was he when he joined the gang?” Jayden asked.
“Sixteen,” she said. “He was big enough that most people wouldn’t mess with him. It also helped that he and Ernesto were best friends. Gangs talk a lot about loyalty, but what they usually mean is loyalty to the gang, not to each other. Ernesto and my brother were different. Nobody ever came between them, and they always had each other’s backs. They were senior lieutenants by the time I was seventeen and pretty much running things.” She looked at Jayden. “Please don’t think I approved of what he was doing. I didn’t. But I loved my brother. I begged him to walk away from the gang. He never got the chance.”
