That wasn’t a man regretting the loss of his sister.
“No.” She jerked, breathless. “Stop it. I don’t want to hear this!”
“All right.” Jay stopped breathing when he dusted his knuckles over the front of her shirt. “Then let’s talk about what you sent me at work.”
Her breasts tingled. She pushed against him and he tightened his arm. “I was drunk.”
“You know what I think, Jay?” He let his free hand fall to her lap, pressing hard enough that they could both feel how wet she was now. Jay lurched forward again, and he spread her through her shorts, putting pressure on her clit until she gasped. “I think it turns you on to fuck with me.”
“It doesn’t.”
He blew into her ear: “Liar.”
Heat shimmered over her skin in a rolling wave as he slid his fingers against the crotch of her pants, soaking her through both layers of cotton. God, this was familiar. The shame. Her fingertips throbbed. Everything throbbed. She grabbed the arm around her waist and tried unsuccessfully to remove it from her body. “Why are you being such a bastard?”
“Because I don’t know what’s going on in your head. You still look at me like I’m a monster. The only time I know when I’m making you feel anything is when I’m i—”
He broke off, and when he withdrew, it was like a slap. “Fuck,” he said, almost too quietly for her to hear. And then slightly louder, as he stepped back into view, facing the directionof her cardboard boxes, “Fuck.”
“Nicholas, don’t—”
“I don’t know what I—” His eyes scanned the boxes, an expression on his face that she would almost call trapped. Then he did a double-take. Jay, following the direction of his eyes, felt her heart sink as he walked towards the box that held all her rocks. “What is that?”
The worddon’trose to her lips again, but she wasn’t sure what it was that she wanted to tell him not to do.
He picked up the gypsum rose, and Jay nearly protested again, except that he held it as carefully in his large hands as he had the night he’d given it to her as a present.
Before everything had gone so terribly wrong.
“You told me you sold this.”
Jay looked away. His startled expression disappeared, and whatever vulnerable, desperate emotion she thought she’d glimpsed hardened before her eyes, just like stone.
“So, you really can be cruel.” He ran his thumbs over the florets before setting it carefully back into the box, in a way that made her throat ache. It wasn’t until she’d released the breath that she’d been holding that Jay could admit to her fear that he’d been going to throw it. “You must have hated me.”
“I did,” she agreed, her voice a broken whisper.
“Not enough to sell the rock, though.”
Jay looked at her hands, willing them to stop hurting. Willing everything to stop hurting. “How could I? It was the only proof I had that anyone in that house ever loved me.”
“I still do.” Nicholas hovered over the loveseat, impossibly tall, before swinging onto the cushions. She scrambled back as he crawled towards her on his hands and knees. The roughdenim of his jeans abraded her bare skin and the sensation of it pulsed like an electric shock between her thighs. “I tore myself apart when you left and I am notgoing to lose you again.”
The arm of the couch hit her back. She looked up at him, breathing so hard that she felt like she might choke on the sheer abundance of air in the room.
“Jay.” He leaned closer—she could see the stubble dotting his cheeks and chin, the bursts of color caught in his pale grey eyes. “We’ve wasted too much time trying to hurt each other.”
Jay shot him a trapped look, her fingers digging into the plush. The rasp of his breathing was all she could hear over the ringing in her ears. “No,” she said, denying them, denying this. Her heart was on the verge of implosion. “Nick, please—”
“Why won’t you love me?” he asked, his deep voice cracking.
Unable to put distance between their bodies, she turned her face away, bracing herself for the force she was sure was coming, the punishing grip on her wrists, but when it didn’t, and she glanced at his achingly familiar face, something inside of her cracked, and everything came pouring out.
“You want to control who I am,” she cried. “You want to . . . remake me. You’re always trying to put me into clothes I don’t want to wear or buy me things I don’t need, forcing me do things I don’t want. And I’ve tried to talk to you about it, but you don’t listen. It’s like you want me to be an accessory, like the watch you wear around your wrist—”
“That’s not what I want.” He ripped his shirt off impatiently and the graze of his bare shoulder against her bent knee sent another glittering jolt of desire racing through her. “I want the Jay who sits like a little princess at her desk and has everyone in her thrall, and this Jay—” He yanked at her shorts and underwear, causing her hips to buck involuntarily. “The Jay whoclaws my back up when I fuck her too hard and loves to call me Daddy.”
Jay looked at him—that was a mistake. Because the sight of Nicholas bare-chested and on his knees, looking at her body like a condemned man looking at his last meal, stole what little breath remained in her lungs.You’re the sweetest girl I know, he’d said, but sweet things got consumed until there was nothing left and she already felt like she was gone.
