Give Me Fever (21 page)

Kaeden banged his fist against the steering wheel. “I have every right to get to the bottom of this. I’m not trying to let you play me out, Jade.”

Jade eyed him sarcastically even as one angry and hurt tear raced down her cheek. “So you think I’m a ho, Kaeden?” she asked him coldly as she roughly swiped away the tear with the side of her hand. “You think I’m banging you and somebody else? Huh? You think I’m some insecure, insipid, foolish little girl who finds her self-esteem between a man’s thighs? Huh? Kaeden. That’s what you
think
of me.”

Kaeden shifted down deeper into his seat. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, guess what, Kaeden. You should.”

“So you saying you can’t even fathom why I would have trust issues with you?” Kaeden asked.

Jade laughed bitterly. “I think you forgot you were right there with me enjoying that night in the woods, Kaeden. So what assumptions should I make about you?”

“Did you sleep with Darren or not?”

Jade turned her head and squared her eyes with his. “Why be with a slut you don’t trust?” she asked him.

“I didn’t call you a slut.”

“I sure don’t hear you calling me an angel.” Jade shook her head in disbelief. “I think we both need a little space right now. Take me home.”

“Jade—”

“Take. Me. Home.”

Kaeden checked for oncoming traffic before he pulled out of the lot and back onto Highway 17. And they rode in the worst possible silence.

As he neared her cottage, Jade slid her hand on the door, ready to get the hell away from him as soon as the car stopped in her yard. “Hurry up and get me home,” she told him in a tight and angry voice as tears threatened to fall.

When he did pull into her yard, he shut off the car.

Jade eyed him like he was straight crazy. “I don’t know what you shutting off for, Kaeden. Go get comfy with your accusations and your insecurities—”

“Insecurities?”

“That’s right. Your insecurities.” Jade climbed out of the car and then slammed the door before she walked over to her car.

She felt insulted.

She felt betrayed.

She felt disrespected.

She felt hurt.

She never thought Kaeden would bring all of that into her world. Never.

“Jade, let’s talk.”

She shook her head. “No, Kaeden. Go to hell, or better yet, go talk some to Darren and let him fill your gullible ass up with more lies,” she told him over her shoulder before she climbed into her Jeep.

He climbed out of his car and walked over to stand at her door. “Where are you going?”

Jade licked her lips before she turned and looked at him. “What? Scared I’m going to get my back blown out?” she asked snidely.

“That’s uncalled for, Jade.”

“
That’s
uncalled for?” Jade eyed Kaeden. “I can’t help the way I look or how men react to it, but I can help the way I conduct myself and I can help the people I let into my life and into my bed.”

“Why do you act like you don’t at least understand where I’m coming from on this?”

“I’m lost, Kaeden. What do you want from me? Do you think if you keep asking me the same question the answer will change? Do you want to argue this out and sex this out…until something else I do strikes up your jealousy? I don’t do the make-up break-up cycle.”

Jade cranked up her Jeep.

Kaeden eyed her. “It’s funny how you’ve flipped this whole thing to make me the bad guy.”

Sadness and disappointment weighed Jade’s shoulders down. “Because of the way we began and because you’re so ready to believe the worst of me, you’re forever going to be wondering if I’m lying to you or if I’m cheating on you,” she said sadly. “Doesn’t sound like a fun relationship for either of us. I can’t. I won’t. I refuse.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this relationship is over, Kaeden. I want you to move your vehicle so that I can leave. I’m saying you should work on building your view of yourself up so that there is no room to tear your woman down.”

Kaeden stepped back from her vehicle. “This is how you want it?”

Jade shrugged even as her heart broke. “This is how it is,” she told him as she circled the front yard and drove between Kaeden’s rear bumper and the road.

She stopped.

He turned to watch her.

“Why is it so hard for you to believe that you
were
enough man for me?” she called out to him before she accelerated down the road, wanting to be free of his presence before the tears fell.

Kaeden’s feelings were taking him on an emotional roller coaster and he could definitely blame some of it on the alcohol. As soon as he left Jade’s cottage he headed back to his office and fell right into the bottle of cognac he kept in his mini-bar. “Shit,” he swore, realizing that Jade might be out of his life for good.

That didn’t sit well with him, but neither did the idea of Jade lying to him. Not once had she answered how Darren knew about something so intimate as the flat mole on the inside of the lips of her femininity.

Images of Darren and Jade, naked and thrusting, plagued him.

Maybe their breakup was for the best.

Sitting at his desk, he poured another drink and tossed it back, wincing as it burned a hot trail against the back of his throat before settling like liquid fire in his stomach.

“Hi, Kaeden.”

He looked up over the rim of his glass at Felecia standing in the doorway of his office. He held out his hand. “Give me my office keys, Felecia,” he said in a bored and tired voice before he tipped his head back to take another sip.

Something dropped in his extended hand, but he frowned at the soft and silky texture. He knew it before he looked and he sighed heavily. Sure enough, Felecia stood before him naked as the day she was born with her dress draped over his hand.

“Make love to me, Kaeden,” she said in a mock-sultry voice that came off like she had a horrible cold.

Sitting his glass down on his desk, Kaeden rose and walked over to her, his eyes giving her a slow once over. “Not bad, by the way,” he began before he shook out her dress and wrapped it around her. “But you know this is not what you want to do.”

“Yes, I do,” she told him emphatically as she flung the dress away and jumped up on him to wrap her arms and legs around him.

Kaeden just stood there and wiped his mouth with his hand. When she moaned loudly and planted wet kisses on his neck, he grabbed her arms and pried her off his body. “Enough, Felecia,” he said roughly.

She stumbled back from him and covered her face with her hands.

Kaeden bent down, picked up her dress, and covered her nudity…again. “Sit down, Felecia,” he ordered her before he turned, grabbed another snifter, and poured her a drink.

“I don’t drink,” she told him as she put the wrap dress back on correctly and tied it securely.

“You don’t have sex either, but tonight you were in for a change…so drink up.” Kaeden dropped back down in his seat behind his desk. “Enough is enough, Felecia.”

She smoothed her mussed hair as she took the seat and the offered drink. “What?”

“I have a lot going on right now and not much time to spare,” Kaeden began. “There is more to you than being someone’s wife. You are a smart and attractive woman, but your demeanor comes off desperate and clingy at times, and I’m here to tell you that it scares men away.”

Felecia crossed her legs and stiffened her back in a dignified manner—like she hadn’t just jumped butt naked onto him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.” Kaeden eyed her as he placed his head in his hands atop the desk.

“You’re drunk.”

“Yes, I am. And you’re desperate.”

Felecia looked offended.

“When you have no reason to be,” he added. “You were willing to throw away all of your convictions to sleep with me to try and get me to get back with you. And I could have hit it and still quit it, Felecia. You setting yourself up to be used. Think about what I just said.”

Felecia shifted her eyes away from him and took a sip of the drink. She frowned and gagged comically at the taste.

“Burn that wedding trunk thing you have. Sell that wedding dress and go focus on living life. I bet the man of your dreams—the one that’s meant for you—will come along, but you can’t just pick somebody and try to make them love you or want you or marry you.

“Felecia, you and I will never get back together. I will never marry you. You are not the one for me and I am not the one for you. Don’t call me and I won’t call you. I promise.”

She slammed the glass down on the desk and rose to her feet to walk out of the office. She returned moments later to drop his office keys onto his desk. “It’s your loss, Kaeden Strong,” she told him.

Kaeden nodded as he leaned back in his chair and poured another drink. He thought about the drama swirling in his relationship with Jade and nodded solemnly. “You’re probably right.”

Felecia gave him one last long look before she turned and walked out of his office—and Kaeden hoped out of his life for good.

Jade was lucky she didn’t get a speeding ticket when she made her way back to Walterboro. She parked and stormed into the Wild-n-Out office. She slammed the door behind her and it quivered on its hinges.

Darren walked out of his office and looked at her in surprise. “Something wrong, Jade?” he asked smugly.

And she saw red.

“You jealous hearted, evil, soulless, nutless, horny, lying son of a no good bitch,” she spat in her anger, her eyes blazing with the angry fire burning in her belly.

And he laughed. He laughed in her face.

“You think my life is a joke?” she asked him as she advanced on him.

“You didn’t take my feeling serious, so why should I give a damn about yours?” he told her coldly, his face suddenly etched in stone.

Jade poked her finger into his chest. “You know damn well I never slept with you.”

Darren said nothing and continued to look at her with a smugness that made her want to grab his head and then knee his groin so hard that she made his privates into a vagina.

“You’re pathetic,” she said, pushing past him to walk into her office, grab a box, and chuck her laptop and personal items into it.

Darren just stood there watching her like he was enjoying the show.

Jade had enough. Darren with his revenge and Kaeden with his jealousy could both to hell. It took two trips to load her things, and each time she had to brush past Darren standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her as if she was going to steal something. Well, she had a detailed inventory list complete with serial numbers if he tried it with her.

Standing at the door, Jade turned and gave Darren a withering look, pointedly stopping at his crotch. “All of this because I wouldn’t give you any? A business and friendship ruined because you wanting to get five
little
inches wet. Sad. So sad.”

“To hell with you,” he screamed.

It was Jade’s turn to have the last laugh as she walked out on Darren and their business.

Kaeden winced as the telephone on his desk rang loudly. Groaning from the awful hangover he was trying to live through, he reached for the phone. “Strong Accountings,” he said, in as clear a voice as he could muster.

“Kaeden, it’s me…it’s Jade.”

He sat up straighter in the chair, and that caused the pounding in his head to intensify.

Last night had felt so awkward without speaking to or seeing Jade. Spending the night in a drunken stupor upstairs in a sheetless bed hadn’t helped either.

“Just listen,” she ordered softly. “Darren knows about my mole because I told him and a few other people about it during a stupid game of Truth or Dare.”

Kaeden removed his glasses as his eyes squinted in thought.

“I was dating Darren when you and I slept together. We were not in a relationship and I had every right as a grown woman to date and to sleep with whomever I want.”

“Jade—”

“No, let me finish.”

Kaeden leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as he gripped the phone tightly while he pressed it to his face.

“I’m telling you this because I don’t want this to end with you thinking that I did you wrong—because I
didn’t
. We had this amazing thing. This connection. It was special, Kaeden, and I hope it wasn’t one of a kind because I want to feel that way again with someone who loves and appreciates me. I want you to know that you messed up a good thing, Kaeden Strong, over not just a lie by a man filled with revenge but because of your own issues.”

He heard the tears in her voice and his heart literally ached.

“I want it clear that we are through because I refuse to be with a man that doesn’t trust me. I refuse to be in a relationship clouded with doubt and filled with foolishness. I am way too together for that. So this is good-bye, Kaeden.”

Long after Jade hung up the phone, Kaeden sat there with the phone still pressed to his face. His mind was filled with a million different things.

“I’m not trying to let you play me out, Jade.”

“We had this amazing thing. This connection. It was special, Kaeden…”

He leaned forward to hang up the receiver and replaced his glasses before he turned in his chair to look out at the traffic whizzing past.

“You think I’m some insecure, insipid, foolish little girl who finds her self-esteem between a man’s thighs? Huh? Kaeden.
That’s
what you think of me.”

He frowned.

“I think you forgot you were right there with me enjoying that night in the woods, Kaeden. So what assumptions should I make about you?”

His frown deepened.

“Go get comfy with your accusations and your insecurities—”

“Why is it so hard for you to believe that you were enough man for me?”

Kaeden shook his head in disbelief at that one.

“I’m saying that this relationship is over, Kaeden.”

And that one? Well it seemed like it echoed inside his head and his heart for infinity.

Felecia sat in the middle of her bed with her legs crossed looking at the wedding gown she
would
wear one day. She was meant to be a bride—a wife. She was meant to have the happily ever after. And she would have it.

Since it wouldn’t be Kaeden, she was more than capable of setting her sights on someone else…and she had someone in mind.

Felecia picked up her cordless phone and dialed the cell phone number he gave her. She smiled when she thought of the handsome fair-skinned man who made her pulse race every time she laid eyes on him.

“Hello.”

Felecia smiled. “Just checking up on you.”

“I’m fine. They’re broken up just the way I wanted. How ’bout you?”

She shrugged. “Darren, I just decided not to go through with it,” she lied.

No need for him or anyone else to know Kaeden turned down her goodies served up to him on a platter.

“To hell with that clown, anyway,” Darren told her.

“To hell with that Jezebel, right?”

“Right.”

Felecia climbed down off her bed and lifted her wedding dress from the door hanger. “Actually, I was thinking that maybe you and I could grab a bite to eat…and console each other for being done wrong by our lousy exes,” she told him as she held the dress up to her body and twisted and turned to study her reflection.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“And, Darren, what was your last name again?” she asked as she held the dress to her body with her forearm and twirled around the room.

“Jon. Why?”

Mrs. Felecia Jon
, she thought with satisfaction. “Um, no reason,” she said.

Jade used a tablespoon to dig out a big scoop of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Macadamia ice cream. The entire pint was ninety grams of fat and she knew it meant plenty of extra miles on the treadmill, but so be it. She needed it.

Just as she was settling in with the idea that she could love Kaeden—really love him—now they were over.

Jade eased another creamy spoonful into her mouth. She was resolved to the fact that her first instincts about Kaeden Strong had been right. They were too different to work, and incredible sex or not, she wished she hadn’t even brought Kaeden into her life. Because now that he was out of her life, she knew it was going to take some time to get over him.

Lots of time.