Meant for Love (13 page)

Fittingly, Evan and Owen were playing “Let Her Go” by Passenger. Jenny was a nice girl who had a nice guy interested in her. He would leave well enough alone, but damn, he wished he had the balls…

***

After witnessing angry Alex, Jenny was more attracted than ever and devastated to learn his mother was suffering from dementia. With sons in their mid-thirties, Mrs. Martinez couldn’t be that old. Jenny’s grandmother had had dementia as an older woman, so she was familiar with how difficult it could be to manage and how devastating it was to family members.

She was proud of him for standing up to his rude employee and firing her on the spot, even if Jenny had noticed the hint of panic in his eyes when he’d calmly told the woman off.
 

As she rejoined Linc at the table, Jenny’s brain whirled with everything she’d learned about Alex during the brief confrontation with his employee. He was loyal—fiercely so—to his family, willing to stand up on their behalf, unwilling to tolerate anyone making fun of his mother’s infirmity and sexy as all hell when he was pissed.

But the agonizing pain she’d sensed in him overrode all the other thoughts that filed through her busy mind.

“Everything okay?” Linc asked.

Jenny started to assure him that she was fine, but she wasn’t. Her skin was prickling with awareness and the need to do something,
anything
to ease the pain of a man she barely knew. “My stomach is a bit upset. Would you mind terribly if we called it a night?” She hated herself for lying to him, but she needed to get out of there. Immediately. Before she gave in to the urge to run after Alex.

“Not at all.” Linc handed a twenty to Mac to cover their portion of the tab and stood.

“See you all,” Jenny said.

Tiffany winked and gave her a thumbs-up.

Jenny rolled her eyes at her mischievous friend.
 

Linc placed a proprietary hand on the small of her back that made Jenny feel uncomfortable. She didn’t belong to him and didn’t want anyone to think she did, especially a certain dark-eyed man who’d turned her whole life upside down in the span of two days.
 

He was just outside the marina gates, talking intently to his brother, when Jenny and Linc walked past on the other side of the street.
 

She glanced at him, and his gaze smacked into hers, nearly making her gasp with the yearning she felt coming from him. Like shards of metal drawn to a high-powered magnet, Jenny felt the pull from twenty feet away and had to fight her way through it when all she wanted was to run to him.

“Are you okay?” Linc asked, thankfully oblivious to the sizzling connection with Alex that she finally broke when she looked away.

“Yes, thank you.” No, she wasn’t okay. While on a date with one man, her mind was full of thoughts about another. That was certainly unprecedented. “Sorry to cut our evening short.”

“It’s okay. I have PT at zero-six-thirty anyway.”

After a silent ride through town, they arrived at the lighthouse. Jenny hadn’t locked the gate for the night yet, so Linc headed down the long, dark driveway. “It’s kind of creepy out here at night. Are you ever afraid?”

“Not really. I usually lock the gate before sunset, so I have the place to myself.” Except, she thought, when men on motorcycles drove around the gate.
 

“I had a really nice time tonight, Jenny. I’d like to see you again.”

How to say this diplomatically? “I had a nice time, too.” That much was true. “Things are a bit…unsettled in my life right now.”

“Is that a polite way of saying you don’t want to go out again?”

Jenny winced, thankful for the cover of darkness. “That’s a polite way of saying my life is unsettled, and this isn’t the best time.”

He pondered that for a minute. “All right, then. How about I call you in a week or two to see if things have settled down?”

“That’d be great,” she said with a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to push her to commit to a second date.

Leaning toward her, he spared her further embarrassment and awkwardness by kissing her cheek.
 

“Thank you for dinner,” Jenny said.

“Thank you for the pleasure of your company.”

Jenny got out of the car and appreciated that he waited until she was inside before he drove off. She ran up the stairs to the kitchen as she tried to figure out what to do. Should she go to Alex? And do what, exactly? Push him to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about?
 

In the drawer under the microwave, she found the phone book the previous lighthouse keeper had left behind and thumbed through it, looking for the address of Martinez Lawn & Garden. She found the address and even knew where it was. But how did she know if he lived there?

Below the listing for the business, she found separate listings for George & Marion Martinez and Paul Martinez, all at the same address as the business. So they lived on the grounds.

Jenny still didn’t know what she was going to do with this information when she went up one more level to her bedroom and changed into shorts and a tank top, tossing the dress she’d worn on her date across the foot of her bed. She slid her feet into comfortable flip-flops and went back downstairs, grabbing her purse and keys in the kitchen and running for the stairs to the mudroom.

She threw open the door and screamed with fright at the sight of a large person standing in the dark outside her door.

“It’s me,” Alex said. “I knocked.”

“I…I was upstairs. I didn’t hear you.”

“I hear keys. Going somewhere?”

“I…um, I was going to find you.”

“Were you now?” He took a step forward and then another.

Out of self-preservation, Jenny backed away from him until her backside bumped against the far wall of the mudroom, right where one of their previous encounters had taken place. Her purse and keys dropped to the floor with a clatter.

“What happened to pretty boy?”

“Who?”

“The pink shirt you were with earlier.”

“He went home.”

“Did you send him home with a smile on his face?”

A bead of sweat slid between her breasts, and she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or his nearness that had caused it. Probably both. “How is that any of your business?”

His hands found her hips in the darkness. “I’m making it my business.”
 

He nuzzled her neck and made her melt. How did he do that so easily? She wanted to object to what he’d said, but her brain cells were as fried as her nerve endings.
 

“Did you send him away smiling?” he asked, more insistently this time.

“I sent him away confused about where exactly our great date went wrong.”

“Where exactly did it go wrong?” His lips and breath against her neck made her nipples tighten.
 

“You know exactly where it went wrong.”

“I want you to tell me.”

“It went wrong the minute you walked into the Tiki Bar.”

“Why’s that?”

As her frustration with the conversation mounted, so did the throbbing need between her legs. “You know why!”

“If I knew for sure, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“Yes, you would, because you enjoy tormenting me.”

His rough chuckle against her neck gave her goose bumps on her arms. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“How did you get here anyway? I didn’t hear the bike.”

“My brother dropped me off.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“Nope. I told him I was going for a walk in one of my favorite places. I’ve always loved it out here.” His hands slid from her hips to cup her breasts. “Now I love it even more than I used to.”
 

Jenny arched into his hands, needing to get closer.
 

“So what happened when I walked into the Tiki Bar?”

She’d hoped he had forgotten that she’d never answered his question. “I thought about what happened last night.”

“I thought about it, too. All damned day.” He pushed his erection into her belly. “I walked around like this all day, which is your fault.”

“How is that my fault?”

“Because all I could think about is how damned sexy you are, and how badly I want another taste of you.”

His words made her lips burn for another taste of him.

“Alex?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you want to talk about what happened earlier with your mom?”

“Fuck no.”

His adamant reply made her sorry she’d asked.
 

“This is what I need.” His hands were big and rough against her face as he held her still for his almost violent possession of her mouth. Lips and tongue and teeth and needy moans combined in an explosive wave of desire. “Take me upstairs.”

Chapter 8

Jenny was moving toward the stairs before the words were fully out of his mouth. With her hand wrapped around his, she led him up two flights of stairs to her bedroom.

“This is awesome,” he said reverently as he went to the window to check out the glow of the moon over the water.

Jenny took advantage of the opportunity to stash the picture of Toby in her bedside drawer. Before the guilt could set in, Alex held out a hand.

She went to him.
 

“I’m sorry I was rude downstairs when you asked about my mom. It was nice of you to ask, but it’s the last thing I want to talk about.”

“I understand.” And she did. How could she not? She had her own list of things she’d rather not talk about.
 

He looked at her, seeming to see all the way inside her. “Somehow I think you do.” Glancing at the bed and then at her again, he said, “Is this what you want?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. For the first time since she lost Toby, she felt like she was exactly where she belonged, and even if nothing came of the intense attraction between them, she was determined to enjoy it while it lasted.

“I don’t share. If we’re doing this, and I hope we’ll be doing a lot of it, you’re not doing it with anyone else at the same time.”

“Neither are you.”

“Done. I haven’t been with anyone in the year since I moved back here. I’m healthy, and I can prove it. Do we need protection?”

After she’d made the decision to start dating again, she’d seen Victoria, the island’s midwife, about birth control. “No.”

“Jesus, I think I just died for a second there.”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Figuratively speaking.” He drew the tank top up and over her head.
 

Jenny’s heart beat so hard she could feel it in her temples and between her legs and the bottoms of her feet in a steady drumbeat of desire and adrenaline. She stood perfectly still while he unbuttoned and unzipped her shorts, inserting his hands into the back to push them down. The heat of his hands branded her bottom through the silk of her panties.

She fumbled with the button to his shorts and nearly wept with relief when it broke free. The zipper followed, and she imitated his move when she used her hands on his finely shaped ass to push his shorts down. Only he wore nothing underneath them. “Commando?”

“Is there any other way to go in this blistering heat?” He raised his hand and pulled the rumpled white cotton button-down she’d admired earlier over his head, leaving him naked before her. In the faint moonlight, she could see the fine contours of his muscles, his dark tan, the paler skin below his waist, dark chest hair and the trail of hair that led to a darker patch around the erection that hung long and thick between his legs. “See anything you like?”

Since all the saliva in Jenny’s mouth had dried up as she looked at him, she could only nod.
 

“Me, too. I see all kinds of things I like. Starting right here.” He twisted his fingers against her back and freed her breasts from the tight constraint of her bra.

She whimpered in relief as he peeled the lace from her body and rubbed his chest hair over her tight nipples. Something inside her snapped at the rush of desire that came with the friction. Fisting his hair, she dragged him into a deep, searching kiss. She couldn’t wait for the second taste he’d promised her downstairs.
 

When the backs of her legs bumped against the bed, she realized he’d been walking them backward. He came down on top of her, arms and legs entangled, his erection hard and hot against her belly as his tongue thrust into her mouth.
 

“As sweet as your kisses are, that’s not the taste I’ve been yearning for since last night.” He kissed a path from her throat to her chest, teasing her nipples on the way to her belly button.

Jenny was burning up from the inside. After not having a man do this to her in a dozen years, to have Alex do it twice in two days was overwhelming, to say the least.
 

He slid down on the bed, pushed her legs apart and opened her to his tongue. “Mmm, that’s what I was thinking about all day.” The flutter of his breath against her sensitive tissue and the scrape of his whiskers over her inner thighs drove her crazy as she arched her back, trying to get closer to the heat of his mouth. “Easy.” His arm across her abdomen kept her anchored to the bed as he kept up the sensual torture. He licked and sucked and teased, making her scream from the pleasure. And then he added his fingers, driving two of them into her as he rolled her clit between his lips. He kept it up until she was on the verge of climax, then backed off, slowing the strokes of his tongue and fingers.