He's the One (5 page)

My feet didn’t touch the ground all the way back to the Bronco.

Mom stood behind the bar, humming that Garth Brooks song about having friends in low
places and polishing glasses. The place was empty, except for the two of us, since
it was only about nine thirty, and the place didn’t open until ten.

I waved the letter, almost incoherent with excitement. I was going to college!

Mom had looked up, smiling, when I banged through the door from the apartment, but
as she caught on, the smile fell away. She went a little pale, under her perfect makeup,
and as I handed her the letter, I noticed that her lower lip wobbled.

She read it. “You can’t go,” she said.

“But there’s a scholarship—and I can work—”

Best of all, I’d be near Tristan. He’d been accepted weeks ago, courted by the coach
of the rodeo team. For him, it was a full ride, in more ways than one.

Mom shook her head, and her eyes gleamed suspiciously. I’d never seen her cry before,
so I discounted the possibility. “Even with the scholarship and a minimum-wage job,
there wouldn’t be enough money.”

For years, she’d been telling me to study, so I could get into college. She’d even
hinted that my dad, a man I didn’t remember, would help out when the time came. Granted,
he hadn’t paid child support, but he usually sent a card at Christmas, with a twenty-dollar
bill inside. Back then, that was my idea of fatherly devotion, I guess.

“Maybe Dad—”

“He’s got another family, Gayle. Two kids in college.”

“You never said—”

“He was married,” Mom told me, for the first time. “I was the other woman. He made
a lot of promises, but he wasn’t interested in keeping them, and I doubt if that’s
changed. Twenty dollars at Christmas is one thing, and four years of college are another.
It would be a tough thing to explain to the wife.”

The disappointment ran deep, and it was more than not being able to go to college.
“You led me to believe he was going to help,” I whispered, stricken.

“I thought I could come up with the money, between then and now,” Mom said. She looked
worse than I felt, but I can’t say I was sympathetic. “I wanted you to think he cared.”

I turned on my heel and fled.

“Gayle!” Mom called after me. “Come back!” But I didn’t go back. I needed to find
Tristan. Tell him what had happened. And I’d found him, all right. He was standing
in front of the feed and grain, with his arms around Miss Wild West Montana of 1995.

I came back to the here and now with a soul-jarring crash, glaring up at Tristan,
who was watching me curiously. He’d probably guessed that I’d just had an out-of-body
experience. “You were making out with a rodeo queen!” I cried.

Tristan looked startled. “What the hell—?”

“The day I left Parable,” I burst out. “I came looking for you, to tell you I couldn’t
go to college like we planned, and there you were, climbing all over some other girl
in broad daylight!”

“
That’s
why you left? Your letter said you met somebody else—”

“I lied, okay? I wanted to get back at you for cheating on me!”

“I
wasn’t
cheating on you.”

“I
saw
you with Miss Rodeo!”

“You
saw
me with an old friend. Cindy Robbins. We went to kindergarten together. The vet had
just put her horse down, and she was pretty shook up.”

It was just ridiculous enough to be true.

I
really
got mad then. Mad at myself, not Tristan. I’d been upset, that long ago day, because
I’d just learned my dad was a married man and my mother was his lover, and because
I wasn’t going to college. I hadn’t stopped to think, or to ask questions. Instead,
I’d gone to the bank, withdrawn my paltry savings, dashed off a brief, vengeful letter
to Tristan, explaining my passion for a made-up guy, and caught the four o’clock bus
out of town, without so much as packing a suitcase, let alone saying good-bye to my
mother.

Rash, yes. But I was only seventeen, and once I’d made my dramatic exit, my pride
wouldn’t let me go home.

“Hey,” Tristan said, with a gruff tenderness that undid me even further. “You okay?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m
not
okay.”

“There wasn’t any other guy, was there?”

I shook my head.

He grinned. I was falling apart, on the street, and he
grinned.

“Bob’s not a guy, either,” I said.

“What?” Tristan did the thumb thing again, wiping away my tears.

“He’s a vibrator.”

Tristan threw back his head and laughed, then he pulled me close, right there in front
of God and everybody. “Hallelujah,” he whispered, and squeezed me even more tightly.

He walked me back to the Lakeside Motel, and I might have invited him in, if the minivan
family hadn’t been there, swimming again. They smiled and waved, like we were old
friends.

“Later,” Tristan said, and kissed me lightly.

With that, he walked away, leaving me standing there with my room key in one hand,
feeling like a fool.

I finally let myself in, locked the door, and took a cold shower.

When I got out, I wrapped myself in a towel, turned on my cell phone, and dialed my
mother’s number. I was expecting the usual redial marathon, but she answered on the
second ring. I heard a motorcycle engine purring in the background.

“Hello?”

“Mom? It’s me. Gayle.”

She chuckled. “I remember you,” she said. “Are you in Parable?”

“Yes, and you set me up.”

“Sure did,” she replied, without a glimmer of guilt. “The meeting’s tomorrow, at Tristan’s
office. Ten o’clock.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“If you’d bothered to read the documents, you would have known from the first.”

“It was a sneaky thing to do!”

“I’m a mother. I get to do sneaky things. It’s in the contract.”

I paused. My mother is no June Cleaver, but I love her.

“How are you?” I asked, after a couple of breaths. My voice had gone soft.

“Happy. How about you?”

“Beginning to think it’s possible.”

“That’s progress,” Mom said, and I knew she was smiling.

The Harley engine began to rev. Biker impatience.

“Gotta go,” Mom told me. “I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you, too,” I said, but she had already disconnected.

I shut off the phone, curled up in a fetal position in the middle of the bed, and
dropped off to sleep.

When I woke up, it was dark and somebody was rapping on my door.

I dragged myself up from a drugged slumber, rubbing my eyes. “Who is it?”

“Guess.” Tristan’s voice.

I hesitated, then padded over and opened the door. “What do you want?”

He grinned. “Hot, slick, sweaty sex—among other things.” His eyes drifted over my
towel-draped body, and something sparked in them. He let out a low whistle. “Lake’s
all ours,” he drawled. “Wanna go skinny-dipping?”

My nipples hardened, and my skin went all goose-bumpy.

“Yep,” I said.

He scooped me up, just like that, and headed for the lake, leaving my room door wide
open. I scanned the windows of the motel as he carried me along the dock, glad to
see they were all dark.

I’m all for hot, slick, sweaty sex, but I’m no exhibitionist.

The lake was black velvet, and splashed with starlight, but the moon was in hiding.
Tristan set me on my feet, pulled off the towel, and admired me for a few moments
before shedding his own clothes.

Then he took my hand, and we jumped into the water together.

When we both surfaced, we kissed. The whole lake rose to a simmer.

He led me deeper into the shadows, where the water was shallow, over smooth sand,
and laid me down.

We kissed again, and Tristan parted my legs, let me feel his erection. This time,
there was no condom. He slid down far enough to taste my breasts, slick with lake
water, and I squirmed with anticipation.

I knew he’d make me wait, and I was right.

He turned onto his back, half on the beach and half in the water, and arranged me
for the first of several mustache rides. Each time I came, I came harder, and he put
a hand over my mouth so the whole world wouldn’t know what we were doing.

Finally, weak with satisfaction, I went down on him in earnest.

He gave himself up to me, but at the edge of climax, he stopped me, hauled me back
up onto his chest, rolled me under him. He entered me, but only partially, and the
muscles in his shoulders and back quivered under my hands as he strained to hold himself
in check.

I lifted my head and caught his right earlobe between my teeth, and he broke. The
thrust was so deep and so powerful that it took my breath away.

I’d thought I was exhausted, spent, with nothing more to give, but he soon proved
me wrong. Half a dozen strokes, each one harder than the last, and I was coming apart
again. That was when he let himself go.

I don’t know how long we laid there, with the lake tide splashing over us, but we
finally got out of the water, as new and naked as if we’d just been created. Tristan
tossed me the towel, and pulled on his jeans. We slipped into my room without a word,
made love again under a hot shower, and banged the headboard against the wall twice
more before we both fell asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, he was gone, but there was a note on his pillow.

“My office. Ten o’clock sharp. After the meeting, expect another mustache ride.”

Heat washed through me. The man certainly had style.

I skipped breakfast, too excited to eat, and at ten straight up, I was knocking on
Tristan’s office door. The buyers and other owners had already arrived, and were seated
around the conference table. Tristan looked downright edible in his slick three-piece
suit, and even though he was all business, his eyes promised sweet mayhem the moment
we were alone.

The crotch of my panty hose felt damp.

The negotiations went smoothly, and when the deposit checks were passed around, I
glanced down and noticed my own name on the pay line, instead of Mom’s.

“There’s been a mistake,” I told Tristan, in a baffled whisper.

“No mistake,” he whispered back. “Josie signed the whole shooting match over to you.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

The meeting concluded amiably, and in good time. Everybody shook hands and left. Everybody
but Tristan and me, that is.

Tristan loosened his tie.

I quivered in some very vulnerable places.

“Ever made love on a conference table?” he asked. He locked the door and pulled the
shades.

“Not recently,” I admitted.

“Not even with Bob?”

I laughed. “Not even with Bob.”

Tristan took the check out of my hand, damp from my clutching it, and drew me close.
He felt so strong, and so warm. “If you plan on having your way with me,” he said,
“you’re going to have to make a concession first.”

“What kind of concession?”

“Agree to stay in Parable.”

I loosened his tie further, undid the top button of his shirt. “What’s in it for me?”
I teased. I thought I knew what his answer would be—after all, it was burning against
my abdomen, practically scorching through our clothes—but he surprised me.

“A wedding ring,” he said.

I tried to step back, but he pulled me close again.

“It seems a little soon—” I protested, but my heart felt like it was trying to beat
its way out from behind my Wonder bra.

“I’ve been waiting ten years,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s all that soon.” He
caught my face in his hands. “I loved you then, I love you now, and I’ve loved you
every day in between. The engagement can be as long or as short as you want, but I’m
not letting you go.”

My vision blurred. My throat was so constricted that I had to squeeze out my “Yes.”

“Yes, you’ll marry me?”

I nodded. The words still felt like a major risk, but they were true, so I said them.
“I love you, Tristan.”

He gave me a leisurely, knee-melting kiss. “Time we celebrated,” he said.

I took the lead. Forget foreplay. I wanted him inside me.

I unfastened his belt and opened his pants and took his shaft, already hot and hard,
in my hand. And suddenly, I laughed.

Tristan blinked. Laughter and penises don’t mix, I guess.

“I was just thinking of Bob,” I explained.

He groaned as I began to work him with long, slow strokes. “Great,” he growled. “I’ve
got a hard-on like a concrete post, and you’re comparing me to a vibrator.”

I teased him a little more, making a circle with the pad of my thumb. “Ummm,” I said,
easing him into one of the fancy leather chairs surrounding the conference table and
kneeling between his legs.

“Oh, God,” he rasped.

“Payback time,” I said.

He moaned my name.

I got down to business, so to speak.

Tristan took it as long as he dared, then pulled me astraddle of his lap, hiked up
my skirt, ripped my panty hose apart, and slammed into me. I was coming before the
second thrust.

That’s the thing about a flesh-and-blood man.

They never need batteries.

C
APTIVATED

Jill Shalvis

Chapter One

S
he’d really screwed up this time, even more so than usual, and that was saying something.
Ella Scott shifted to swipe the hair out of her eyes, but her right wrist caught on
the handcuff, rattling the steel, jerking on the tile towel rod that she was cuffed
to. With a sigh, she used her left hand, then lifted her head and surveyed the situation.

Having worked the past straight month without a day off, she’d come to her Baja cottage
for a desperately needed weekend to herself. But thanks to her surprise goons, she
now stood between the shower and the toilet, handcuffed at chest level to the towel
rack, wearing only the towel she’d managed to wrap around herself one-handed, with
no key to get free, nothing at all within reach that could help her.

Such was the life of the incurably curious. She’d actually managed to parlay that
lifelong curiosity into a career, not as a criminal, as her mother had feared, but
as an insurance investigator. Except that now, for the umpteenth time, she’d dipped
her nosy nose in where it hadn’t been welcome, and here she stood in her least favorite
position—that being completely helpless.

She’d been cautioned. Threatened, actually. Told time and time again that if she kept
at this case, she wouldn’t like the consequences. Having been warned too many times
to remember by other, more unsavory types before, she hadn’t given it a single thought.

Seems maybe she’d been a little premature in that.

But damn, it should have been so easy, a few days off. Some R and R. She’d arrived
via plane, then rental car, and had taken a nice swim in the warm Mexican Pacific
waves until her muscles quivered before hopping into the shower.

After that she’d planned to lie on the deck and watch the sun set over the ocean and
contemplate why, when she’d finally found a job she enjoyed, it didn’t satisfy her
the way she’d thought it would.

But it’d all been interrupted by two beefy morons who’d hauled her naked and slippery
and screaming out of the shower. Luckily for her, they hadn’t been interested in her
body, hadn’t been interested in anything other than handcuffing her to the shower
rod, still dripping wet. And even then, they’d only cuffed the one hand, promising
her to send someone in a few days to free her.

And that’s when she’d known. They weren’t rapists or murderers, but
thieves
. They’d been from the yacht company she’d been investigating for suspicious loss
of property. Two separate multimillion-dollar boats had been sunk in the past sixteen
months. Her company had found nothing suspicious with the first downed ship, and the
insurance company had been forced to pay out. Just two weeks ago, in fact.

Then the second boat had gone down for the count in Santa Barbara, and now Ella was
closing in on why. Bad drug deals, and a greedy yacht owner wanting it all. She’d
been watching their third yacht, the
Valeska
, all week, but had been unable to get aboard because there’d been activity on it.

Now she was due to present her suspicions to the D.A.’s office, soon as she made one
more trip to Santa Barbara, where she was going to get on the
Valeska
come hell or high water.

Clearly, the suspects didn’t want her to get to the D.A.’s office, at least not before
they skipped town with the money from the insurance from the first boat and any physical
evidence. Chances were that had already happened, and they were long gone.

Ella shook her head. She should have taken that job at Target out of college like
her mother had wanted. Sure, she looked awful in red, but she’d be willing to bet
no one would bother to break and enter her place because of
that
job, or handcuff her naked to her own towel rack.

Unless she wanted them to.

A slight breeze blew in the open window, breaking the brutal summer heat as the sun
sank. Oh, God, the sun was sinking, and the severity of her situation sank in. It
was Saturday evening. Next week was a long time away. God knew she wouldn’t starve,
not with the five extra pounds she’d been carrying around since puberty—okay,
ten
, damn it. Still, the amount of time looming ahead felt long, and never having been
big on self-discipline, she was already hungry.

She could reach the shower and the toilet. The sink was across from her, a leg’s length
away. Above it was the mirror that assured her she was as frightening-looking as she’d
imagined, her hair air-dried and a complete frizz bomb, her face not wearing a lick
of makeup.
Ack
. She decided not to look at herself again.

Beneath the toilet was a cabinet which, if she stretched, she could just toe open.
A box of tampons, two extra rolls of toilet paper, and a tube of toothpaste. Gee,
yum
.

She looked out the window. The cottage was isolated, down a long, sinuous stretch
of highway surrounded by bush-lined high desert hills, punctuated by dense groves
of date palms and citrus trees and little else.

The sun sank away, the daylight faded, and Ella felt anxiety pit in her stomach. But
even stretching her leg out to bionic contortions, she couldn’t reach the light switch.

And the dark came.

She’d spent a good amount of her childhood chasing after her three older brothers,
and feeling invincible because of them. She’d wear her blankie as a cape and pretend
she was a superhero who could fly through wind and sleet and snow, who could do anything.

She didn’t feel so invincible now.

Then came a noise. The front door closing.
When had it opened?
Heart in her throat, she froze. Or rather her body froze. Her towel did not. It slipped
yet again. She grabbed it with her left hand and hastily tucked the corner back between
her breasts, her heart tattooing a crazy beat against her ribs.

No other sound, but she could
feel
someone on the other side of the door.

Listening.

Breathing.

Oh, God. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t even draw air into her lungs.

The handle on the bathroom door began to turn.

Ella stared at it, her life flashing before her eyes. She hadn’t watered her plants.
She hadn’t tried skydiving. She hadn’t reconciled her checking account!

The door creaked open.

She stuffed her uncuffed hand against her mouth to hold back her panicked whimper
at what was about to happen to her. What would they tell her family? No one had even
known she was coming here, not her parents, her brothers, not even—

“Ella?”

At that low, husky, almost unbearably familiar voice, she squinted into the shadows
of the opened door, thinking,
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no.

But indeed, the form was tall, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hip, the body
built like the long-distance swimmer he used to be. “
James?
”

The shadow stepped into the bathroom and came to an abrupt halt. Not a shadow at all
but the one man she hadn’t wanted to see her like this, the one man she hadn’t wanted
to see, period.

Her mouthwateringly sexy, break-her-heart-and-stomp-on-it husband.

Make that almost ex-husband.