The Private Serials Box Set (9 page)

   “Preston—” I started to object to his body pressing so deliciously into mine, but I felt his finger press into my lips, effectively shushing me. Something about his finger on my mouth sent my body into overdrive, and I squirmed against him, my traitorous body searching for more contact.

   “No talking, sweetheart,” he said, so quietly I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it. But I felt his breath and the way his chest moved when he said ‘sweetheart.’ If I wasn’t completely paralyzed already, I then heard Derrek’s voice ringing through the house.

   “Jessica, it’s not a big deal. Just grab your purse and let’s go.”

   Then I heard
her
voice.

  “I’m sorry. I thought I had everything, but Elise threw the biggest fit when I was trying to leave the house and I must have just forgotten.”

   “It’s really fine. I’m not mad. But if we don’t leave soon, we’ll actually be late instead of fashionably late.”

   Their voices were getting closer and closer until I realized they were in the bedroom and the only thing separating us was a row of neatly hung blouses and a closet door. At the realization of their nearness, Preston pressed into me further and my eyes fluttered closed when I felt his lips just barely touch mine. He didn’t kiss me. He wasn’t kissing me. Our lips only just barely grazed against one another, allowing our breaths to intermingle. When I realized he wasn’t
going
to kiss me, I opened my eyes. His hands were over my head, pressed up against the wall I was leaning into. My hands were still on his chest, and one of his thighs had parted my knees and was pressed against me.

   “Here it is, honey,” I heard the woman,
Jessica
, say brightly.

   “Great,” Derrek replied. “I’m just going to change my tie. Sadie had some sort of muck on her hands when she grabbed it earlier.”

   My eyes grew wide when I realized Derrek was heading into the closet. When the door opened, a dim light spread across the large closet, coming from the bedroom. I gasped silently and then, even though I would have bet it not possible, Preston moved even closer to me. His hands slid further up the wall and he dipped his face down to rest in the crook of my neck, his front pressing against me even harder, and my hands slid around his back and up to grip his shoulders.

   The sound of the closet door closing again came very quickly, as if Derrek had grabbed a tie and left almost immediately. Preston made no move to back away as we listened to the voices drift away down the hall and then, finally, we heard the front door open and close again. Only after we heard the deadbolt lock again did Preston move. But he didn’t move away fully, just far enough so that we were back to the kissing-but-not-kissing stance.

   “Lena,” he whispered against my lips. I melted instantly. Simply liquefied. His hands came away from the wall, but only came to cup the sides of my face, but he was still not kissing me. I let him hold me like that for a few moments, let the feeling of his hands on my skin wash over me. I hadn’t been touched by a man in months, and being touched by Preston was proving to be the most heavenly experience of my life, even if it was just his hands on my cheeks. I reveled in it, soaked it in.

   Then, reluctantly, I let reality back in and pressed my hands against his chest again, urging him away from me.

   “Preston, we can’t do this,” I said, no longer worried about the level of my voice, but still speaking quietly. He made no move to let me go, didn’t move back even a centimeter. “Please, let me go,” I begged quietly. I heard him inhale deeply, then he stepped away and all of a sudden, I was free of him, and I tried not to notice how cold I instantly was. I didn’t say anything, just pressed past him and made my way back to the front door to keep watch. I figured Derrek and Jessica probably wouldn’t be returning, but I needed an excuse to get away from him.

   A few minutes later, he came out of the darkness and appeared by the door.

   “Anyone else come by?” he asked coolly, as if he wasn’t just pressed up against me in a dark closet.

   “No.”

   “Let’s go, then.” He reached out, unlocked the door and walked out into the night.

   I followed him out of necessity. “Aren’t you going to relock the door?”

   “Nope.”

   “But they’ll know someone was here.”

   He shrugged. “Or they’ll just think they forgot to lock it. Either way, I don’t care.”

   “Hey,” I nearly shouted. “You might not care what they think, or if they know someone was here, but I do, and last I checked, I wasn’t paying you to cause problems.”

   “Last I checked, you haven’t paid me
anything
.”

   I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know what I mean. If you cause suspicion, Derrek could catch on to everything.” Preston, with his hands planted on his hips, looked down at the ground, and even from fifteen feet away, I could tell he was angry. I wasn’t the resident lock picker; there was no way I could make it look like no one had been there. I needed him to snap out of it. “Please, Preston. Don’t jeopardize me this way.”

   He sighed but walked toward the door again. I turned, watching him crouch and fiddle with the lock. I heard it click into place and he stood, walking back to his car without a glance at me. When he reached his car, he coldly said as he slid into the driver’s seat, “Get in.” It wasn’t a request; it was a demand.

   The part of me that had liquefied before heated again at his words, and I tried to keep my breathing even. He was obviously being a jerk, but again, my body didn’t care.

   I spent the car ride back to Portland trying to dissect my attraction to him. I wasn’t even sure attraction was the right word. I wasn’t attracted to him. I was pulled to him. Drawn to him. It didn’t make any sense, not to me, anyway. He was almost the exact polar opposite of everything I’d ever told myself I wanted. Well, as far as I knew. I realized I didn’t know much about him. All I really knew was he wore that black leather jacket like a second skin, he never looked bad in a pair of jeans, and his brown eyes were mesmerizing. Oh, and my body craved the proximity of his.

   We said absolutely no words all the way back into the city, and when he pulled into my driveway, I opened the door and climbed out without breaking the silence. I drew in a sharp breath when I heard his door open and his footsteps coming in my direction. I did not, however, give him the satisfaction of turning around. I continued up the path to the door, only stopping to input the code in the keypad on the door.

   “Lena.” Just my name falling from his lips turned my stomach inside out. I shook it off, literally shaking my head from side to side, trying to give him a clear indication that I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Not surprisingly, he didn’t listen. Instead, his hand wrapped around my elbow and he turned me, and then pulled me into his front, our faces only inches from one another again. One of his hands found its way to my cheek again and I resisted the urge to lean into it, to let myself
feel
something from a man again.

   Everything I was trying to accomplish, Preston was single handedly and slowly going to ruin. I had only one goal at that moment and that was to prove my husband was a cheating, lying bastard, get what was owed to me, and move on with my life. Preston Reid was threatening to me in more ways than one.

   “We need to talk,” he tried again.

   “No,” I said immediately. “You need to go home and finish this job on your own. Get me my proof and then we can just go our separate ways.” I remembered that his money was on my kitchen table. “I’ll go inside and get your money. Give me one moment.”

   “I don’t want your money.”

   I halted at his words and turned to him, trying to be brave and act like I wasn’t affected by him.

   “I hired you to do a job, so you’ll take the money. Unless you think I should hire someone else?” My eyes found his and even in the dim light from the streetlamps, I could still see the dark brown irises looking back at me. I thought, for just an instant, I saw panic flash through them, but just as quickly as the emotion flitted across them, it was gone.

   “No. You don’t need to hire anyone else. I’ll get you your proof.”

   “Okay,” I whispered. I opened the door and walked in, heading into the kitchen to find the envelope Sam had brought me with the two thousand dollars cash inside. I grabbed it from the counter and turned to walk back outside, only to find Preston inside my house, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen. “Here,” I said softly as I held the envelope out toward him.

   He took the few steps toward me and when his eyes met mine, I was a little surprised to see sadness there. He took the money and tucked it into his back pocket. His chin tipped up in a nod that said ‘Thanks.’ I found manners winning out and I couldn’t stop myself before I offered, “Would you like something to drink? Scotch, perhaps?”

   “Neat,” was his short response, and it rolled through me like a wave, his dark voice deep and gravelly.

   I nodded and said, “I’ll be right back.” When I made it to the liquor cabinet in the formal living room, I leaned against the bar, gripping the edge tightly, trying to rein in the heat coursing through my body. This was ridiculous. The very last thing I needed right then was some wild, gravitational pull to a man who wasn’t my husband. I didn’t even want my husband. But what I really didn’t need was some seriously sexy man tempting me into wagering my future life away. But I’d offered him scotch, so I’d get him scotch. Then I’d make him leave.

   I set the tumbler down in front of him, noticing he’d made himself comfortable at the head of my dining room table. I sat in the chair to his right and sipped from my tumbler.

   “You spend a lot of time in this big house all by yourself?” His question caught me off guard, but also offended me a little. I didn’t like him insinuating that I was often alone. I could have many friends I spent time with, or a ton of hobbies that kept me out. Zumba. Pottery. Cooking class. Then I remembered I was the jilted wife who hired him to tail her husband and his mistress. I wasn’t the poster child for happy, satisfied women.

   “I have things I do. I jog sometimes. I see Sam often. I’m not a shut-in.”

   He looked at me over the rim of his glass as he sipped his scotch. After a beat, he pulled the glass from his mouth and placed it slowly on the tabletop. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, his voice low again.

   “Well, then please, elaborate.”

   “I meant does your husband leave you here alone often?”

   His question threw me again, and I didn’t know how to answer it. I suspected if I told him the truth, it might elicit a reaction from him I didn’t want to deal with. Then again, I suspected if I lied to him, he’d know. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought he already knew the answer to his question.

   “Sometimes,” was the answer I settled on.

   “Sometimes?”

   I shrugged, offering him nothing else.

   “I don’t like the idea of you being here alone.”

   His words cut right through the pretense I had been trying to build for the last hour and a half. Sliced right through the wall I’d put up. It had been years since a man had shown any kind of concern for me. I’d been on my own for so long, I couldn’t have anticipated what it would feel like when a man, whom I apparently desired, showed concern for me. For whatever reason, Preston cared.

   Before, in the closet, I could have written the whole ordeal off as physical – no, sexual – chemistry, but when he said things like that, basically telling me he cared about my well-being, there was no going back.

   “I have an alarm,” was my brilliant response.

   “A man shouldn’t leave his wife in a bed, alone, by herself, for any reason.” He paused, perhaps waiting for me to interject, but I had no argument. I agreed with him. “Why do you put up with it?”

   “I don’t anymore.”

   “Hmm.” His voice rumbled, even though he didn’t really speak any words. “If you were mine, you’d never get a chance to even feel the sheets getting cold.”

   As if he’d reached inside, grabbed my breath, and dragged it from my body, I gasped.

   “There wouldn’t be a thing in this world that could keep me from my bed, were you in it.”

   He’d slayed me twice. A combo hit. TKO.

   “Preston,” I whispered, simply unable to piece any more words together than that. He didn’t say another word, just slammed the rest of his scotch, got up, and walked out my door. I gaped after him, not sure what I was supposed to do. How does one recover from words like that?

   Eventually I stood up, bringing both our empty glasses to the kitchen, placing the tumblers in the dishwasher. I walked to the foyer and punched in the passcode on the security panel, activating the alarm. I went upstairs and decided to take a long and very hot shower.

   I spent most of my time in the shower replaying the entire evening, wondering how I’d gotten myself into such a strange situation. It might have been the longest shower I’d ever taken, and it took all the self-control I had not to slide my hand between my legs and replay the words he’d said to me over and over in my mind. I wasn’t stupid enough to deny the fact my body wanted him – badly. But when everything else was said and done, I was still a married woman, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to be a married woman who crossed those lines. And touching myself while thinking about another man wasn’t something I thought was right to do, even if I desperately wanted to.

   When I finally made it to bed, I pulled the covers back, bracing myself for cold sheets, then went to the window to close the curtains. Right before they closed all the way, I noticed the black Lotus sitting on the street just a few houses down.

Chapter Eight

   When I woke up the next morning, Preston’s car was gone. I tried not to think about him sitting in the Lotus all night keeping watch over my house because he cared about me. Nothing good could come from the warmth I felt in my chest when I thought about it, so I tried not to. It wasn’t easy, especially because he came back every night for the rest of the week and kept watch over me.