CHAPTER SIX
Maggie’s heart hammered wildly as Jake leaned closer. It felt as though every part of her body had come alive. She’d been asleep, waiting for the kiss that never came, the kiss that would change everything and awaken her. Now, a surge of desire boiled through her veins, drowning all thoughts except one: this or die.
If kissing Jake did make her die a death of pure raw need, it was still better than the other death, the one she’d been experiencing slowly, the one she tried to stave off by working and doing things for others. It had been her penance for trusting that love would save her when it didn’t.
Now here she was basking in the secret knowledge that Jake was safe because he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to stick around. He wasn’t the sticking-around type. She’d finally figured out the great secret of life and relationships—risk your body, but never your heart.
His lips devoured hers, slow and hot and drugging, and she moaned against them. Who kissed like that? Who smelled as though he were the embodiment of everything male?
She barely felt the bench against her back as he eased her back and unbound her hair. Everything he did seemed to free her by degrees, first from sexual hibernation, and now from the notion of who she was supposed to be. Maggie is the steady one. Maggie would never. Maggie’s such a hard worker.
No man had kissed her with such intensity before. His hand slid behind her head, angling it so he could plunder. She felt fragile in his arms, exquisitely feminine.
There was no point in wondering if Jake kissed all women this way. She didn’t care. She just wanted more and more until everything inside her that was blood and flesh and bone came roaring back to life.
Their tongues met, danced, retreated and met again. Her need escalated. It made everything between her legs swell and throb and cry out to her that the only way to make this painful needing stop was to give herself to him. His tongue. His touch. His body.
All she had to do was say yes.
Jake changed angles, sliding her lower lip between his teeth. Then he fused with her again, hungrily, yet with expert control. And even though she basked in the heat of his attention, she wanted to know the Jake that existed beyond his own control. She wanted to feel him between her thighs, convulsing inside her. That craving ate at her. It would never leave her alone. Not after this.
Her fingers trembled against his face. They dug into his hair. She was going mad. Desire would kill her at this rate and the sheer speed he drove her at sparked sudden fear. He was pushing her toward a cliff and maybe she wasn’t ready to fly.
You didn’t just walk away from sensations like these. She was playing with fire.
Jake brushed his hand against her breast and then cupped it. With strength she didn’t know she had, she pushed him away and staggered to her feet.
For once, Jake wasn’t suave or mocking. He looked as disheveled as she felt.
First surprise and then annoyance flashed in his eyes. “What are you doing?” he asked.
She had trouble forming words. They wouldn’t arrange themselves into sentences. “I’m saying no.”
“But you already said yes just a minute ago.”
“I’m saying no now.”
Jake winced. He had what appeared to be an enormous, painful-looking erection. “May I ask why?”
“Because this is crazy, that’s why,” she said, struggling to smooth her dress. “I thought we were going to kiss.”
His face darkened. “What do you call that then?”
“That wasn’t a kiss. It was…” She cast around for the right word. “Sex with tongues.”
He let his head drop against the back of the bench. “It’s just not my day.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, annoyed by his obvious self-pity. “Oh, I’m sorry. Was I supposed to service you?”
“Come on, Maggie. You know how this works. We could have enjoyed an incredible evening together.” His gaze burned right through her dress—or it felt like it did. “You are a damned desirable woman.”
“So you were going to have sex with me right here on the bench like we’re a couple of teenagers?” It seemed as good an excuse as any to blame him. The truth was, if her knees hadn’t gone weak with panic, she probably would have said yes to a bench, a table or a washing machine.
“Would you have preferred the plane?” he said. “We could fly to the nearest Hilton. It’s not too late.”
He came here in a plane. No, he didn’t. Wait. Jake had a plane?
“I’m going.” She turned around, her legs almost giving way on the stairs. She could feel his eyes boring holes in her back. How was she even doing this? How was she in command of her limbs, walking away, saying no to something she wanted so badly that there were tears in her eyes? Her stomach felt as though it had been hollowed out with a shovel.
What woman said no to Jake Sutton?
* * * *
Jake leaned his head back against the gazebo bench and stared at the ceiling. His breath sawed in and out of his chest, heart pumping. What the holy fuck just happened?
He could feel his body pulling at him to finish what he’d started, but with Maggie practically running in the opposite direction, that wasn’t in the cards. Of course, there was the actress—she’d been throwing longing looks at him all night—but seriously, after a kiss like that?
His blood was surging underneath the skin…and other places. What was it with some women? The second you got close to them physically, it was absolute combustion. Yet he’d never felt anything like this before. She left him… Jesus. He wiped one hand across his forehead. Dazed was one word for it. Another was juiced.
Finding ways to make sure his dick got the kind of attention it deserved had never taken much effort. Women were everywhere. Beautiful women who sought him out, women whose eyes were glowing with seduction the minute they knew who he was: Forbes billionaire, Jake Sutton.
Maggie’s voice lingered in his ears. It was low-pitched and a little husky. He wanted to hear her say his name when he made her come, but thinking about that made him ache to the point of near agony. If you play with fire long enough, his uncle used to tell him, eventually, you’re gonna get burned.
The problem was, maybe he wanted to get burned.
No, this was crazy. The minute you started thinking one woman was going to do it for you, you were already in dangerous territory. Jake stood, grimacing. He stared at the path she’d taken. At the end of it were lights and people and laughter.
Funny how he was here alone in the dark. Again. But wasn’t that simply how life worked? In the end, you were always alone.
Shake it off, he told himself. He’d get over it. So what if she didn’t sleep with him? He’d survived worse disappointments.
Jake started down the path toward the party. Maybe he’d been chumming the wrong waters. Maybe it wasn’t models and actresses who could light him up like that. Instead of sleek, glamorous women, he should have been looking for something a little more homespun.
He saw Richard Glasgow hurrying toward him. Three hours into this thing and Richard still had his signature red power tie snugged up next to his Adam’s apple. Richard may have tended toward the anal-retentive, but he was a top-notch locations manager.
“I may have found a site for the nerd—the tech incubator,” Richard said. He carried a plate of cheese cubes speared with toothpicks and seemed to be polishing them off with his usual appetite for anything tasty.
“You can call it a nerdery, Richard.” Being a nerd was something to be proud of. Jake should know. In the tech community, he almost had nerd status because he could code.
“Well, I think it might be worth looking at. Just outside of town, close to a major hub like San Antonio, but not too close.” He popped another piece of cheese into his mouth and chewed rapidly. “Oh, sorry, do you want one?”
Jake shook his head. He saw Maggie talking to people sitting at a table. She glanced up at him, eyes flickering, and then she returned to her conversation. But he knew she wasn’t listening.
They were connected now, he and Maggie. They were connected by the knowledge of what happened when they stepped in the ring together.
A knock out.
Something glowed warmly inside him. He recognized it at once: determination to have her. To never take no for an answer. No was merely a roadblock that had to be pushed aside to get where you wanted. Who you wanted. Which was her.
“I’m pretty sure we can get it at a rock-bottom price, too,” Richard was saying. “It’s a huge lot. Good road access. You can go crazy building your nerd habitat and I can act all smug about finding the place. Way I figure, it’s a win-win.”
But Jake couldn’t take his eyes off Maggie, the way she moved, the way she held herself. She was pretending to ignore him now. There was something irresistible about a woman acting all ladylike when just minutes ago she’d been panting with the same dark, raw need that ate at him right now.
“I’ve also decided to start wearing women’s panties,” Richard said.
Jake snapped around. “What?”
“Knew that would get your attention.”
“You’re a sick bastard, Richard.”
“Well, I was getting all lonely, talking to myself. She’s worth staring at though, I’ll give you that.”
Jake stole a cheese cube off Richard’s plate and chewed absently. “It’s like trying to crack open a bank vault. I want to, but I just haven’t figured out the right code, I guess.”
Richard snagged a beer from a passing waiter. “Well, it’s a nice bank vault. Ah, I remember my single days. They were one long swing and a miss.”
“You’re married,” Jake said. “You got no worries.” Felicia, Richard’s wife, was expecting their fifth child. Jake had been over to their house. It looked like a goat had exploded. No wonder Richard worked all the time.
“Married for life,” Richard replied. “I’m happy with it. If I ever left Felicia, she’d kill me anyway.”
Jake flicked his gaze in Maggie’s direction. Some asshole wearing a sports jacket and jeans was flirting with her. It bothered him more than he liked to admit.
If he hated jealousy in women, he sure as hell hated it in himself. So when Maggie smiled up at the guy, Jake got a pain in his jaw from clenching his teeth.
No, this had to stop.
“Wait. Your site for the nerd incubator,” Jake said. “How soon can I see it?”
* * * *
Maggie collapsed on her bed while Gus frantically licked her face. She was never moving from this spot again. Thank God she’d scheduled Coralee to open the bakery in the morning.
“Enough,” she told Gus, covering her face with her hands. She peeked at him and he barked, his silly curly-cue tail going a million miles an hour. Gus was all the man she needed. “Isn’t that right, buddy?” she murmured, trying to stay away from his tongue.
She wanted to get out of her Maid-of-Honor dress and into something less annoying. She also needed to take Gus for a walk before bed. But every muscle in her body ached and throbbed. And she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d done tonight. With him.
With Jake.
No one had ever taken her over like that, hijacking every system. Something blisteringly hot moved over her when she remembered the way he’d kissed her, slow and consuming and…personal. That was it. Jake made it seem as though there was no one in the whole world he wanted except her.
And that made him terribly dangerous.
A man like Jake, a man who rode planes to weddings, who wore a tux with the debonair sophistication of 007, would eat her alive. Little country girl Magdalene Roby with her country girl bakery and her country girl dreams about faraway places like Rome, Paris, Monte Carlo.
How many times had Jake been to Paris? He’d probably had lunch there last week.
Jake had kissed her the way he no doubt did everything, with ease and skill and an intensity that made her feel as though she’d been pounding whiskey shots at a bar. She had his scent on her even now and kept gulping it before it disappeared. Now she felt a little lightheaded. Maybe she still wasn’t sure what hit her. And a tiny treacherous wormhole of regret at not giving her body what it wanted had slowly opened.
She got to her feet and yanked the rest of the bobby pins out of her hair. Gus, who knew everything because he was a Wonder Dog with psychic powers, guessed there might be a walk in his future. He made a mad dash around the bed and then barked at her, head between his outstretched paws, hindquarters up, tail swishing.
“We’re going, we’re going. Give me half a minute.” Maggie peeled off her gown, hung it up and then slipped into sweatpants and a bulky sweater. She avoided looking at her body in the mirrored doors of her armoire. She felt as though it had betrayed her by wanting things she could never give it—not without paying an impossible price.
Gus practically vibrated with excitement when she lifted him off the bed and attached his leash. He bounded down the stairs and then happily lifted his leg on his favorite tuft of grass at the bottom. Gus was nothing if not predictable.
But Jake wasn’t. The only thing you could predict about Jake was that he would take you over like a fever. And then you would be too delirious to remember the things that mattered to you the most, like your carefully reconstructed post-divorce self-esteem—the self-esteem you used to have before the pre-divorce version got ripped in half.
Maggie headed across the street with Gus trotting beside her. Cuervo Municipal Park had a dog walk where Gus could sniff to his heart’s content. She was too keyed-up and restless to sleep anyway. And even though the moon had sunk low, she could see enough to know it was just her and Gus under the night sky.
As always, the best thing to do was to keep walking.
* * * *
One of the things Jake enjoyed the most about his H155 Airbus helicopter was the legroom. He also loved the speed. As the fastest civilian helicopter on the market, it flew him from Dallas to Cuervo in just over an hour, with no commute time from the airport like with his plane. It seemed longer than two weeks since he’d been there. But if this new property location was what he hoped it was, he’d be flying to Cuervo plenty.
The intercom clicked on. “Two minutes until landing, sir,” Liam said from the cockpit.
“Set us down in that open field,” Jake told him.
Across the aisle, Richard Glasgow already had beads of sweat on his forehead. It was no secret that he hated flying. Jake’s favorite architect, Carmen de Boers, sat next to Richard, looking cool and composed. But then nothing ever got to Carmen. Jake had seen her smooth a client’s ruffled feathers, talk an airline into a seat upgrade and convince an employee not to sue her over a “wrongful” termination, all without breaking a sweat. He teased her regularly about being the Fred Astaire of business negotiations but wasn’t sure she actually got the compliment.
Jake gazed out the window, watching the scenery fly by. Rolling hills of wildflowers made patches of color below. Roofs gleamed silver in the noon sun. He rarely indulged in daydreams, but it was hard not to be excited about finally finding a location. He’d wanted to build this techpark for ten years now—a multi-use incubator for the finest tech minds in the country. And all within easy access of San Antonio.
Of course, every time he thought of Cuervo now, he also thought about Maggie.
Don’t be ridiculous. Women were like restaurants, he told himself. Only a fool contented himself with the taste of just one.
But when she’d walked away from him that night in the gazebo, he’d had no clue this craving for her would eat him alive. He was a man used to getting his own way. Was that the reason he couldn’t shake her off?
He glanced across the aisle at Carmen de Boers in her spiked heels and then at Richard Glasgow in his signature red power tie. Neither of them had experienced a kiss like the one he’d shared with Maggie, he was sure of it. Carmen was married to her job. Richard was married, period. And nothing killed passion faster than domesticity, unless of course you counted children.
“We’re preparing to land, sir,” Liam said over the intercom.
Jake latched his seatbelt and grinned at Richard. “Your favorite part.”
Richard’s knuckles showed white on the arm rests of his seat. “I don’t even like standing at the top of the stairs.”
“Relax and take a deep breath,” Jake said. “The drop is fun. No worse than an elevator.”
They set down just outside of Cuervo and got out under the powerful downwash of the helicopter’s rotor blades. Jake headed toward the center of the field with Carmen and Richard in tow. There were no trees, which pleased him since he hated cutting them down. And they were maybe half a mile from the main road. But all in all, plenty of space to build a multi-use facility—offices, restaurants, lofts, retail. Offhand, he could think of half a dozen tech firms that would gobble up leases here. He’d taken meetings with literally hundreds, earning himself the nickname of “Geek Adjacent.” But what could possibly be more exciting than 3D printers, video tattoos that turned your forearm into a computer display or even just the fun of solar-powered electronics?
“I like it,” Carmen said, scribbling notes on a clipboard. “Not too close to the mouth breathers, but still within walking distance.”
Jake grinned. He grabbed his cell phone and reeled off a stream of photos. Carmen had a city girl’s contempt for locals, most of whom she referred to as mouth breathers, knuckle draggers and Deliverance extras. He wondered what Maggie would have to say about that.
While Carmen picked her way over the dried grass and the gopher holes, still making notes, Richard said, “Pretty sweet location, isn’t it? Farm land, originally. They used to graze cattle here.”
Jake thumbed through the photos he’d taken, already calculating how to push through the environmental impact studies, the traffic overviews, the permits. Hold up there, buddy, he told himself. Never let yourself build things in your mind until you have the papers in your hand. “Where’s this other place you wanted to show me?” he asked Richard.
“It’s in town,” Richard replied. “Do we mind walking?”
They headed out, crossing the field and then following the road into Cuervo. Richard talked nonstop about the project. Carmen was clearly busy with her own thoughts. The sky was a pale blue shell dotted with puffy clouds. The air smelled of sunbaked dirt and road tar. A soft spring wind feathered through the wild grass. In the distance, Jake heard someone cranking the gears on a tractor.
“Are you going to try and see that woman you met here a few weeks ago?” Richard asked him. “What’s her name? Madeleine, Margery—”
“Maggie,” Jake said. He wasn’t ashamed of it. Why should he be?
Carmen gave him an eye roll. “So it’s farmer’s daughters now? Does she wear bib overalls and walk around with a piece of straw hanging out of her mouth?”
Richard laughed. “She runs a bakery.”
“Who can keep up?” she said. “One day it’s yoga instructors. Now it’s raspberry scones.”
“I’d eat the hell out of a scone right now,” Richard muttered. He gave Jake a quick look of apology. “I don’t mean that way, of course.”
When they turned onto Main Street, Jake took a look around. There was something charming and unpretentious about Cuervo that strongly appealed to him. The sidewalks were swept and the fire hydrants freshly painted. Some storefronts had striped awnings over their doors. Others were crammed with flowerboxes full of daisies and purple coneflowers. Two old men played checkers in front of a place called Fred’s Hardware.
The street ended at an intersection. One of those old hooded traffic lights hung suspended from wire. Just past it was a water tower with the word Cuervo painted on it. Maggie’s bakery was around that corner. He found himself a little impatient to see her.
Richard gestured toward a building across the street. “Well, what do you think? You said you wanted someplace big enough to turn into residential lofts.”
Jake looked up and went a little lightheaded.
It was an old Art Deco movie theater, probably built in the early thirties, but boarded up now, a grande dame past her prime and sadly neglected. The Regal, it said in broken, unlit neon.
For most of his thirty-one years, Jake had dreamed about renovating an Art Deco building.
Uncle Marty had taken him to see The Adventures of Robin Hood in a lushly romantic Art Deco theater when he was a kid. The city bulldozed it ten years later and built a parking garage. But ever since, Jake had vacuumed up every scrap of knowledge, lore, history and hearsay he could find about the period. Something about its extravagance and naïveté strongly appealed to him.
Now here he was standing in front of what could be a lifelong dream come true. He could easily imagine there were cartoon Valentine hearts floating out of his eyeballs.
“Nice to meet you,” a slightly pudgy man with horn-rim glasses said to them. “I’m Chuck, the owner of this old popcorn palace.” He pushed open an old-fashioned grate and then unlocked the front doors. “It’s going to be dusty in there. No one’s set foot in the place in ages. My dad—he’s in assisted living now—says the last regular weekday movie they showed at the Regal before going to weekends was Hooper in—”
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Jake said.
Chuck looked surprised. “You’re a movie buff.”
Jake followed Chuck inside a lobby every bit as dusty as promised. His heart couldn’t have been beating any harder if he’d run a marathon. It was like finding Ali Baba’s cave or Atlantis or the lost library of Alexandria.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he had to keep himself from spinning in circles and trying to see everything at once. The vaulted ceilings were high and heavily embellished in the sleek, angular Art Deco style—Hollywood starlets in cloche hats and drop-waist dresses smoking cigarettes in elegant filters. Men in spats and tux tails. The light fixtures may have been from an even earlier part of the last century.
Chuck went on about the theater’s history, but Jake had trouble keeping up. He still couldn’t believe he’d discovered something that he’d pretty much given up trying to find. The theater was built in 1928, Chuck told him. Registered as a historic landmark, but vacant all these years because no one wanted to stake the money for a proper restoration. There was a photo upstairs of what the Regal looked like in its heyday with the soaring neon marquee and mosaic archways.
Jake drifted into the vast auditorium and just stood there, basking. He looked at the dirty wall sconces, the ruined red velvet theater seats, the cratered floor.
All he saw was beauty.
Richard came up beside him, followed by Carmen with her clipboard.
“What an absolute nightmare,” she muttered. “A money pit if ever I saw one.”
“Buy it,” Jake said. “Whatever it takes. I won’t accept no for an answer.”