The Bride Means Business. Anne Marie Winston
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for it. He’d noticed yesterday that the expression he’d once used with tenderness got her back up like a threatened cat’s. “It’s only natural that I want to see how my former fiancée is living. After all, if we’d married, I’d have been saddled with your taste in furnishings for life.” He put his hands on her waist and set her aside, striding into the foyer of her condo, where he made a show of looking around. But his body was doing its Jillian-thing again, and he had to take a few deep breaths to calm the shaky feeling that touching her had produced in his gut. His fingers tingled and his blood felt as if it was racing through his veins. And unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot he could do about the heavy stirring in the part of his body that hadn’t listened when he told himself it was over with her.
This really sucked. He’d met dozens—no, hundreds of beautiful, sexy women over the years. And not one of them could arouse even a fraction of the desire that rode him when he so much as thought about Jillian.
“I’d really like to get this over with. I have to work tomorrow.”
“At your store.” Leisurely, he strolled through a stark, white kitchen that looked as if it didn’t get much use. The only personal touches were a couple of pictures of children—Manna’s? —held on the refrigerator with magnets, and a clumsily painted clay bowl that looked like it had been made by a child. The other items on display looked like they’d been placed there by a decorator for effect. He ran a finger over a blue glazed bowl with apples in it, mildly surprised when he realized the apples were real.
He inspected the dining room, with its smoked glass table and chrome-and-leather chairs. The room was dominated by a huge painting of... “What is that?”
She’d been trailing after him, looking distinctly pouty and disgruntled. At his words, a small smile curled the edges of her lips up in amusement. “It’s a painting.”
He gave her a narrow-eyed look.
She raised both palms and shrugged. “I don’t know what it is. Some days, it looks like a tiger wearing green socks, other days it resembles a garden of orange lilies. Vaguely. It was a gift from an artist and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“His?” He mentally kicked himself the moment the word came out. It certainly wasn’t what he’d intended to say. What had he intended to say, anyway?
Jillian crossed her arms and leaned back against the door frame. “Yes, his, as in male, man, masculine gender. Believe it or not, Dax, I’ve had a life of my own since your exit, complete with a few—gasp!—relationships along the way.”
He ignored the sarcasm, heading into the next room, which must be her formal living room. An enormous baby grand occupied the alcove in the corner, and sheet music for a complicated arrangement of the love theme from Titanic was open above the keys. Jillian had loved to play, he remembered. Apparently, at least that hadn’t changed. He wandered past the piano to where a tasteful grouping of white love seats and chairs were set before a brassscreened fireplace with white marble columns.
Who did she share that love seat with now? Rationally, he knew she had had no reason to suspend her life after he’d left, but when he thought about Jillian with another man, his irrational side wanted to smash a few pieces of her Lladro collection against the far wall.
A group of brass-framed photos displayed on the mantel caught his eye, and he went closer. Her sister’s family smiled contentedly into the camera in the first one. There was a dark-haired little girl cradled in Ben Bradshaw’s arm and an obviously pregnant Marina glowed with happiness. Regret rose at the cozy family scene, and he swallowed it, moving on to the next image. Slightly behind the first, a second photo showed Marina snuggled against a big blond guy.
Before he could voice a question, Jillian said, “That was her first husband. He was killed in the accident.” There was a soft, sad note in her voice that made him want to reach out and cuddle her, comfort her, but he resisted such a stupid impulse.
The third photo arrested his attention, as did two others following it. The photographer apparently had been waiting for the shot, because the three photos were a sequence. In the first, taken near someone’s pool on a bright, sunny day, an enormous hulk of a guy in nothing but a pair of blue denim cutoffs that bared bulging biceps and thighs like tree trunks was sneaking up behind Jillian. Meanwhile, another broad-shouldered dark-haired man in swim trunks stood with his arm around her naked waist. She was wearing what had to be the skimpiest bikini on the East Coast and even though the man’s hand was only splayed against her back, Dax’s blood pressure rose.
In the second photo, the Hulk had snatched her off her feet and was holding her cradled against his chest as he stood on the edge of the pool. He was grinning like the Cheshire cat. Jillian had his ears in her hands, tugging, her head thrown back and her mouth open in a scream. The third was a marvelous action shot of the pair in midair, free-falling into the pool as sprays of water froze forever for the camera’s lens.
Jillian had moved up beside him. She reached up to trace a delicate finger over the glass, sliding around the outline of the big man. She heaved an exaggerated sigh.
He couldn’t take it, even though he knew she was baiting him. “Someone special?”
“Two someones,” she corrected, smiling fondly at the photo. “Other than my brother-in-law, Jack and Ronan are the men I love most in the world. Even when they conspire to throw me into the pool.”
He gritted his teeth, aware that if he moved right now, it only would be far enough to get his hands around her unfaithful throat. “You never were satisfied with just one of anything.” He hadn’t meant the words in an intimate sense, but as he glanced at her, he suddenly realized they applied to their shared past in another way.
And in the sudden aura of awareness that the words dropped over them, he saw in her eyes that she was thinking the same thing he was. Their lovemaking had always been intense and primitive, and they’d both been young, healthy, in love with lust when they’d been together. A single episode of sex had never been enough for her. As if she were speaking, he could hear her husky voice urging him on and on, begging him for more and more, and protesting that she really couldn’t without meaning it when he moved over her, giving her a second satisfaction only moments after the first.
He looked at her lips. They were slightly parted, the edges of her perfect teeth—courtesy of the braces he still remembered—showing. She was breathing in quick, shallow gulps. He could practically smell the scent of her arousal, and the erection that had been teasing him since she opened the door roared to full, throbbing life. His hand reached for hers, their gazes locking in a desperate, wordless exchange. Taking her small hand in his, he carried it to his chest.
She sucked in a strangled breath, her eyes darting to their hands—
And the tidal wave of sudden, rigid-muscled, bodyshaking rage that possessed him when he thought about her running straight from his arms into those of his brother blasted through him without warning, knocking down any fragile barriers he’d sandbagged against it.
“How many men have those hands touched?” he demanded, as he flung her hand from him.
For an instant, he thought he saw anguish pass over her features. Then, if it had ever been there at all, the desperate emotion in her eyes vanished. Tossing her head to throw back her hair, she smiled. “Dozens. And every single one of them tells me I’m the best thing he’s ever known.”
He could kill her. He really could kill her.
Reading his eyes correctly, she hastily stepped back. But she just couldn’t shut that smart mouth of hers. “You asked for that, Dax. You know you did.” She paused, and weariness drew at her pretty face; again, for a moment, she looked so sad that a little part of his heart almost reached out for her before he shoved it back into hiding. “If I told you the truth, you’d think I was lying, anyway.”
“You aren’t capable of telling the truth,” he snarled. Truth? What truth?
In self-preservation, he transferred his attention to the last photo.
And