Worth The Battle (Heaven Hill Series) (31 page)

“I don’t want to wait, Layne,” she begged. “Don’t make me wait anymore.”

He clasped their fingers together as he rose over her, pressing their hands into the mattress. “You’re sure?”

“Don’t ask me again.” She turned her face away from his. “Neither one of us have has been perfect, but never think that I don’t want this between us.”

That was all he needed to hear. Entering her body for the first time in so long made him want to cry. In every memory he’d ever had of home when he was overseas, this had been it. Layne stopped for a few seconds and actually had to collect himself.

“You’re it,” she whispered when he breathed heavily against her cheek. “You’ve always been it, no matter what’s happened. Know that, no matter what happens, you’re it,” she repeated again. When he didn’t move against her, she planted her feet and pushed against his body.

He had to touch more of her than her hand. Unclasping one of them, he trailed his fingers down her side, down to where her lower back met her ass, and grasped. It might have felt like he was bracing her for the impact of his thrusts, but really he was hanging on to her—making sure that she wouldn’t leave him. Making sure that he knew exactly where he was and what was going on. As long as he held onto her, he knew this wasn’t a dream.

The only sound in the room was that of their bodies meeting and their heavy breathing. All too soon, he felt her thighs tighten around his. She held on so tight to him that he thought he would die. The way she gave herself up to him made him want to whisper prayers of forgiveness and make promises that he knew he would probably in this life never be able to keep. She thrust hard against him one more time before she threw her head back and dug her fingernails into the skin of his back. Only then did he let himself go.

As the two of them lay there, breathing heavily against one another, Layne knew there was no turning back. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t even want to.

Chapter Thirty-One

“W
hat are you thinking?” Jessica asked as she lifted herself up off the mattress onto an elbow. Her red hair fell into her face, but she didn’t bother to push it away. She liked the way it rested against the tattoos on Layne’s chest.

He cleared his throat and turned his head so that they faced one another. His eyes moved past her, taking in that daytime had changed to evening and onto night as the two of them had been in their own little world. Outside, he could see the world light up as a storm raged over Bowling Green, the lightening giving him enough time to see her face. He’d taken her three more times since they’d made their way into this hotel room, and he felt as if each time he re-gained a part of himself. “That I don’t want to go back to the clubhouse tonight.” He lifted his hand up to cup the back of her neck with his warm fingers.

“Mmm, I don’t either.” She let her head fall against his shoulder, snuggling up beside him.

“But I’m thinking we need to. I could feel some tension earlier, and we’re waiting on someone to get back to us about a few important things.”

She closed her eyes against the warmth of his chest, running her fingers over where his heart beat heavily. Here, in this place, they were protected. No one could bother them. The outside forces that caused his anxiety to ride high and hers to respond to his weren’t here. “If you think we have to, then I guess we need to.”

“It’s not that I really want to, but I have responsibilities that I have to deal with there.”

Jessica nodded. “I do understand.”

“Before we make a decision though,” he sat up, pulling her with him as he lay against the headboard, “I have a question, and I want you to be completely honest with me.”

That sounded foreboding if she’d ever heard anything in her life that sounded foreboding. “Okay.”

“How do you know Jackson Wright?”

The name knocked the wind out of her sails. She opened her mouth once, closed it, and then opened it again. “How do you know that name?”

“Let’s just say, it came up in one of my travels. Obviously, you know who he is.”

“Unfortunately.” This made her uncomfortable. He hadn’t ever wanted to tell her much when it came to his time overseas, and now she was going to have to lay the biggest mistake of her life out on the line for him.

“Be honest with me, please. I can’t protect you if you aren’t honest with me.”

She pulled away from the warmth of his body, physically setting herself apart from him. When she was at what she deemed to be a far enough distance, she tucked her legs underneath her chin and began to talk. “He’s an up-and-coming actor in Hollywood. At least he was when we first met. He needed me to help him get a foothold there; I needed him to help me get over you.”

That cut him like a knife.

“For a while we each served a purpose for the other, but then I started to rebel. I’m not even sure how, why, or when it happened. I think it was around the time you stopped answering my emails and letters in Iraq. It hurt so much—that you could just throw me away like that. I knew I wasn’t a part of your everyday life, and there was no way I could understand what you were going through, but I wanted to, I wanted to be there for you so bad, and you didn’t want me to.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want you to,” he interrupted.

“I know that now, I truly do. But back then, it just hurt so bad, I wanted to hurt you. Neither one of us had ever talked about feelings, but I knew how I felt about you,” she told him, tears coming to her eyes and her voice growing thick. “I knew that if you felt two percent of what I felt for you, then you loved me, I just knew it. Because I was so totally in love with you.” She stopped and bit her bottom lip. “Completely and totally. I didn’t give a shit that you came from a different background than me. I didn’t give a shit that you were a soldier. I was so damn proud of you for getting on that plane and going to fight in a war, I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

Layne didn’t know what to say. “I did some stupid things.”

“I did too,” she interrupted him this time. “Number one on that list was getting involved with Jackson Wright. He ended up being an asshole. One night we got drunk together and went and got tattoos. He got my name on his wrist, and I got this,” she turned so that he could see the side of her hip.

“I can’t believe I’ve never noticed that,” he breathed as he saw the little yellow ribbon there. Words were inscribed inside the ribbon, and he leaned closer to get a better look. They read PFC. Layne O’Connor. “Didn’t sit well with him, huh?”

She laughed. “No, not at all. It was then that he started to ask me questions about you, and he wanted to know just what in the hell I was doing with him. He would get me drunk and then ask me questions, but you have to realize…I was so lonely. You were the only one who knew the real me, and you were gone. I couldn’t get to you. I couldn’t get you to call me back or answer my mail—nothing. Then I got the call that you had been injured.”

He breathed heavily, for the first time realizing what he had done to her. He’d hurt her much worse than he’d hurt himself by trying to protect her from his temper.

“Apparently, I was listed on your notification paperwork. A military spokesperson came to the set where I was and informed me that you had been injured and they were flying you to Germany and then back home. I took off, pissing off my agent and everyone else. That’s really when all this started. They began calling in favors on contracts I had signed. Of course Jackson hated it. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to be with you. He started to become harder to deal with, and one night I got mad and told him that all he was—was a distraction. He was a distraction for me from the hurt that you’d caused me, and every time I was in bed with him, I dreamed it was you.”

That threw him. “You actually told another man that?”

She put her hands over her face, embarrassment burning it hot. “I did,” she nodded. “But at the time I was so pissed. You wouldn’t let me see you in the hospital, and then I found out that you had gone somewhere else to do your rehab, I couldn’t find you…for months. Then I got a call from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and you told me you’d joined an MC and you wanted to see me. I was so mad, and that’s when he started making demands. It wasn’t my best hour. Of course, I left to come see you. Do you remember that?”

He did remember that day; it had been the only day she’d ever seen him in Bowling Green before he’d come to get her in Nashville. “That day was painful,” he admitted.

“It was. I realized that day that you weren’t Layne anymore. You were a shell of Layne. So when I came home, I did something incredibly dumb. I spent the weekend with Jackson and then told him that we couldn’t be together anymore. That weekend, he moved his shit out of my house. A year and a half later, it was burglarized, and I truly believe it was him. I think he’s run out of money, completely run out of money, and he knows that I would run to you, but I think he’s scared of you.”

“Wait a second, you’ve had an idea of who did this to you the whole time?”

Looking straight into his eyes was one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. “I had my suspicions, and now that you’ve said his name, I’m pretty sure he did. He’s always known my contract stipulations. If the holder of my largest contract has seen those nude pictures and those erotic writings—I’m toast. I’m done and I’m gonna have to buy myself out of my contract.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“Nope,” she shook her head. “Those things are iron clad, but we sign them—like idiots. Money looks awesome when you don’t have any.”

The things she’d told him swam around in his head. He still wasn’t sure what this had to do with the Vojnik, but figured that would come as they dug deeper into everyone’s financials. “About Iraq,” he started.

She put her finger over his lips. “Layne, it doesn’t even matter. You had to do what you had to do to survive. If those things haunt you today, then that hurts me, but you don’t have to give voice to what you did. I trust you enough to know that whatever you did wasn’t easy.”

“Even if I was with another woman while I was in love with you?” he questioned, running a hand over his head.

Jessica smiled sadly. “I just told you what I did. We’ve both made mistakes. It’s what we do now that we’ve been honest that counts. Don’t shut me out.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he countered.

“I deserved that,” she told him.

He clasped their hands together. “How are we going to make this work, Hollywood?”

“Hollywood can be a little small town when she wants to be,” she grinned.

“But can Hollywood be small town all the time? What I do puts a target on your back. Would you be willing to give it all up?” he asked, scared to hear what she had to say. There was a fifty-fifty chance that she was going to tell him to put his clothes on and drive her back down to Nashville.

“I think Hollywood can be small town for the rest of her life. I love it here,” she grinned, launching herself into his arms.

He caught her and adjusted her so that she straddled his stomach. “There are still things to work out,” he warned her. “I’m not healed yet and I might never be. You might still wake up again with my hand at your throat. Are you prepared for that?”

“Any life we have together is better than a life apart. I’ve been going through the motions for a long time, Layne. You’re the only person that brings the real me out. I want to write these books and live here in this small town, drive the back roads with Bianca—even though I think she might kill me one day, and I would really like to find out if that mug that Tyler drinks out of is cursed.”

“Don’t touch it,” he whispered against her lips. “We don’t need any more bad luck.”

“We make our own luck,” she whispered back at him.

“It’s not going to be perfect,” he warned her again.

“Perfect is boring,” she answered back.

He laughed. “Okay, if you’re sure.”

“I am.” She pulled at the hair on his head. “Stop trying to talk me out of it.”

“I’m not, I swear, I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

She pulled him so that their lips met again, forcefully. “I know exactly what I’m getting into.” She turned her grin saucy. “In fact, why don’t you get into me one more time?”