her before. The night they’d first met.
She hadn’t answered him then. And she had never asked herself the question again.
“J.T., I don’t think this is such a good idea. Sami’s waiting for me to get home. I’m glad to see you, happy you’re doing well…”
“Kiss me, Leah.”
The words were so simple, so straightforward. And had the effect of a bulldozer on all her good intentions.
She crossed the mere inches separating them and did as he requested.
Oh God, oh God, oh God…
He tasted so good. Better than she remembered. Like butterscotch candy and hot, hot man. His lips were soft and malleable. His tongue like a lick of fire as it entered her mouth.
Leah’s breath quickened, her blood flowed through her veins enticing her limbs to action. Her fingers found their way to J.T.’s damp hair. Her chest found a way to crush against his across the narrow console. Her mouth slipped and bit and devoured his lips until she was afraid that the fire of his tongue would ignite her entire body.
He caught her chin in his hand and held her steady for long, silent moments, staring into her eyes. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked.
Yes.
No!
Leah didn’t know what she wanted. She just wanted what she was feeling never to stop.
Her silence appeared all the answer he needed as he hauled her across the console until her bottom rested in his lap and her legs dangled over into the driver’s seat. She became instantly aware of his erection, long and hard against her bottom. She moaned and melded her mouth to his, afraid of what might happen if they continued, afraid of what might happen if they didn’t. Her fingers found their way to his jacket and pushed open the leather, then shoved up the soft cotton of his T-shirt. She remembered that he was rock-hard everywhere and she quickly discovered that hadn’t changed. Except that he seemed to be even more solidly muscular. Leaner. A dangerous energy emanated from him that caught her up in its conflicting current.
She didn’t realize he’d opened her blouse until she felt his tongue against the upper swell of her right breast. Leah stretched her neck and gritted her teeth together, shivers traveling down her back then up again, making her tremble from head to foot. J.T. cupped her breast, then squeezed, forcing the flesh upward from the lacy demi cup. He fastened his mouth over her painfully distended nipple and she cried out, digging her fingers deeply into the flesh of his shoulders. She knew a need so powerful it rocked her to the core.
She fumbled for and found his zipper, tugging it down and sliding her fingers inside the cotton of his boxers until she held the very essence of him. His turgid flesh was so long. So thick. So hard. Her mouth watered with the desire to taste him. To coax out his bittersweet semen. To hear him call out her name, his fingers entwined in her hair, tightly holding her to him.
With some awkwardness, she helped him rid her of her slacks and then straddled him, her right knee hitting the console, her left wedged tightly against the door. But she didn’t care. All she could concentrate on was how badly she wanted this one man. How hot she was, how hot he was, and how she knew that only he could put out the fire twisting and turning inside her.
She reached to position him against her hungry flesh. She gasped when he grabbed her wrist in a viselike grip.
“No,” he ground out.
The air disappeared from Leah’s lungs.
“Not like this. Not in a car. Not so soon.”
Leah blinked at him, incapable of speech.
J.T. stared at her for a long moment then deposited her back onto the driver’s seat. She watched, dumbstruck, as he adjusted his clothing with the same control he did everything else, then he sat back and looked at her, his eyes full of question and mystery.
“It was good seeing you, Leah,” he murmured.
Then he climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
J.T. STOOD ALONE in the parking lot, the cool spring rain washing over him as he watched Leah’s taillights disappear into the damp night. She had turned toward the big, warm house waiting for her a few miles to the west. The house that over the past twelve years she’d made a home. A place not unlike the hulking house she’d grown up in. He’d visited both places only once and had known instantly that he didn’t belong in either. Just as he’d known that Leah hadn’t belonged in either his father’s rusty trailer or the shabby, no-star motels he’d recently called home.
But if there was one thing he’d come to understand during his thirty-two years—and especially in the past year and a half—it was that outer trappings had very little to do with basic human wants and needs. And if the past thirty minutes were any indication, he wanted…needed Leah on a level he couldn’t begin to understand. All he knew was that he had to explore what it was. If for no other reason than to tuck her and whatever existed between them neatly into the past, where so far it had refused to rest.
Water dripped down over his face, soaking his T-shirt, running over his jacket, but still he couldn’t bring himself to move. What he’d experienced with Leah before had been profound. But what had passed between them a few minutes ago had shaken him to the bone. He hadn’t had sex in a car since he was eighteen. And, curiously enough, it had been with Leah. He’d been a hairbreadth away from taking what Leah had just so generously, hungrily offered. Had known such a ferocious desire to bury himself in her sweet, hot flesh that in that one moment everything else had emerged irrelevant.
Even his freedom.
His gaze cut to a car entering the parking lot from the opposite direction. A white and blue cruiser emblazoned with the words Toledo City Police Department. J.T. shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, then turned and made his way toward his bike. He heard the cruiser slowly pass by him, then continue on as he put on his helmet. He watched as the officers turned at the end of the lane then he straddled the wet Harley. He was less than a mile away from the city line. The cruiser exited the parking lot onto Secor Road, then disappeared from site. But the significance of his reaction to it lingered on, pounding against J.T. much like the rain.
If he’d needed a reminder of how much he was putting on the line by coming back to Toledo, by staying in one place for longer than he knew to be safe, the innocuous drive-by was it. While the cruiser and the officers in it hadn’t been looking for him, they might be tomorrow. Or the day after that. Which didn’t leave him much time to accomplish what he needed to.
The powerful bike started up with a quiet roar, echoing the emotions pulsing through him. So much at stake. With no guarantees. But he needed to find out if she was a bored middle-upper class housewife seeking a bit of fun with a bad boy from her younger days. Or if Leah Dubois Burger loved him. And he wasn’t leaving until he found out.
3
“I NEED THAT PERMISSION SLIP for the class trip today. And I can’t find my blue volleyball shorts.”
Leah squinted against the early-morning sun slanting in through the French doors as she stacked thinly sliced pieces of turkey breast onto a whole-wheat slice of bread. Bread that she had picked up at the market the night before last. Bread that had been the cause of long, restless nights filled
