Chapter 6
Carla found a note wedged between the door and the frame when she got to her room. Turns out, Lola wasn’t just gone for the day. She’d decided to go on a short trip to Santiago de Cuba in order to give Carla and Jonah some “space and privacy.”
She didn’t need space and privacy; she needed tender loving care from her family. What she definitely didn’t need was to be stuck in Cuba with a guy—who, granted, had rescued her from sitting in an alley today and giving up—she didn’t even really like.
She’d figured out what bothered her so much about him when he’d said, “I never hurt women.” She felt like he was always condescending to her. It was almost enough to extinguish her attraction to him. And, to be honest, it was one of the reasons that she’d been relieved when Geoff broke up with her. Her ex always treated her like she was dumb. And—although she wasn’t as good at math and business as her older siblings—she wasn’t stupid. She was quite smart.
He’d always looked at her like she was some kind of project. And she’d shaped herself into who he wanted her to be. And she still hadn’t been enough.
Well, fuck that. Jonah might have been nice to her today, but that didn’t mean she owed him anything. His kindness toward her was just basic human decency. Whatever he wanted in a woman, she was the opposite.
If he thought she was a pampered, rich girl, she’d show him exactly what that looked like.
A knock sounded through her bedroom. He didn’t even ask to come in before stepping into her room and sucking all the air out with him.
He put a tiny, steaming cup on the dresser. Since he’d been nice enough to carry her home and make her coffee, she resisted the urge to ask him if he’d ever heard of a coaster. “Storm’s coming.”
“What the fuck are you? An old-timey pirate?”
He laughed, so her aim of annoying him was failing miserably. “No. Do I look like a pirate?”
“Kind of.” He totally looked like a pirate. And not one of those effete ones with bad teeth. He looked like a pirate on the cover of a romance novel. Like a present she wanted to unwrap. She could definitely picture herself draped over his arm in something diaphanous and entirely unsuitable for the time period.
“You into pirates?”
No wonder he was a photojournalist; he was certainly sparing with the whole words thing.
“No.” She pursed her lips around the lie. Though she’d slipped earlier in the day, when she’d still be feeling ragged from the incident in the alley, she didn’t want him to know how he affected her. She felt an inexplicable need to keep the upper hand in their interactions.
Jonah shrugged one huge shoulder. She imagined that such a minor movement in his body could dislodge a building from its foundations. She certainly felt moved by him despite her efforts to the contrary.
“There’s actually a storm coming. A tropical storm that could turn into a hurricane.” Jonah paused and pushed her coffee toward her, like he hadn’t just announced that they could die in the next couple of days. “It wasn’t supposed to hit Cuba, but it changed course last night.”
“How did you find out? The Internet’s for shit down here.”
“Charlie called me on my satellite phone to ask me if I wanted to get on his private jet with him.”
“And you didn’t take him up on it?”
He just grunted and lifted a shoulder again. He was definitely staying because of Lola. If he was worried enough about Lola not to leave the island, this must be really bad.
Panic seized her immature thoughts about needling Jonah and threw them to the wayside. She could give him shit later, if they were even alive to deal with it.
“We have to find Lola.”
“She’ll come home soon enough. I’m sure she’s just out somewhere getting supplies.”
So maybe he hadn’t been worried about Lola. Maybe he was worried about her. She pushed that thought away, too.
“No!” Carla couldn’t keep the yell down. To think she’d been resenting her great aunt for leaving her here with Jonah when Lola could be off somewhere in danger. “She went to Santiago. For a vacation! In a hurricane!”
“Fuck.” Jonah’s face creased into a tableau of worry, which she could tell was genuine.
“She doesn’t have a cell phone.”
“Wouldn’t work down here if she did.” Carla had heard there were improvements in infrastructure happening, but those hadn’t born themselves out in improved cell service to the island in the past few years. Still, she looked to Jonah for a likely impossible solution. “She’s smart, though. She’ll know to find shelter.”
His words belied the same worry that Carla felt. On top of that, guilt crept in. If Carla hadn’t been so limp and despondent over her stupid breakup, Lola wouldn’t have felt the need to cheer her up. She wouldn’t have left her here with a designated rebound guy—Jonah. And she wouldn’t be in mortal peril right now.
Carla looked down at the sheet of paper; just a few words, but words that damned her. She was always causing her family grief, and this was just the worst example yet. She thought about telling her father that his favorite aunt, a woman who had survived six decades of communism, some of them quite austere, and a woman who had spied for the United States and not gotten caught or killed by the regime, was going to drown because Carla had a sad about a loser accountant breaking up with her.
Her breaths got shallow again, and she sank onto the edge of the bed. She wrapped her arms around her own waist and bent over in half, trying to get a grip. There had to be a way to save Lola.
“Why did she leave?” She didn’t want to answer. One good way to make Jonah hate her would be to tell him that it was her fault that his benefactor likely wouldn’t survive the next few days. And she didn’t want Jonah to hate her.
“She wanted to give us ‘space and privacy.’”
To her shock, he didn’t recoil and call her out. He laughed and knelt down at her feet. She let him pry the note from her hand as though he needed proof of Lola’s preposterous plan. Once he read the terse words, he simply said, “Fuck.”
“That seems to be a recurring theme.”
He put the note down next to her on the bed. Then he cupped her knees with his hands. Her breath caught, and her skin heated, burning through some of her distress. “She’s going to be okay.”
“How do you know that?” Tears stung the back of Carla’s eyes. “This is all my fault.”
“That’s just fucking crazy.”
“I thought we established that I’m not crazy.” Given the fact that she was about to have her second panic attack, she was sensitive about people calling her crazy right now.
“I’m not saying that you are.” Despite counterevidence, she filled in for him in the pause that followed. “I’m saying that blaming yourself for another person’s actions sounds crazy.”
That was better, but she knew she didn’t exactly sound sane. She couldn’t suppress the need to explain herself. “If I wasn’t so broken up about my ex, she wouldn’t have thought I needed to rebound, and she wouldn’t have tried to push us together like this.” She gestured toward him, and his hands tightened on her knees. Being this close to him was going to make her actually crazy if she wasn’t careful. “She would be safe and sound at home instead of on the roads somewhere. She’ll probably die in a mudslide, and it will be all my fault.”
“She’s headed to Santiago, right?” His careful tone walked the line between reassuring and condescending. She nodded. “The storm isn’t tracking over that part of the island. So, we’re in more danger here than she is traveling.”
Oddly, the idea of being in mortal danger herself was more comforting than the nightmare of her aunt being hurt. “You’re sure?”
“You can’t ever be sure with the weather, but I called a meteorologist I know in New York, who gave me details.”
“A girl meteorologist, right?” Carla scrunched up her nose at the idea of Jonah railing some ditzy weather girl.
One end of Jonah’s mouth quirked up. “Jealous?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m just concerned that she might not have any incentive to give you accurate information. She might want you dead.” Carla turned up her nose. “Depending on how you ended things.”
Jonah leaned toward her. His face came so close to hers that his smell enveloped her. Her heart raced, and increasingly familiar heat spread through her lower belly. His half-smile was deadly. Her self-control—shaky at the best of times—was crumbling. If he stayed close to her for too much longer, it would snap like an old rubber band stored next to a hot oven. She should be able to withstand him, but she was currently in a state. Everything about her life was in flux, and she couldn’t be expected to not kiss him at this point.
Her eyelids drifted to half-mast, and she leaned in until their lips were almost touching.
“Believe me, princess.” His lips barely brushed hers as he growled at her. “No one I’ve ever been with wants me dead. They want more.”
“Cocky.” She knew that word sounded like less of an insult and more of a breathy tease, but she couldn’t help it. He was intoxicating, and she was helpless against the power of her own lust. Lust that had swept away her anxiety of Lola’s safety in a split second.
He was going to close the distance between their mouths. He had to. But the longer he stayed still the more she worried that he was going to make her pull the trigger. She’d never made the first move because she’d never had to. This was entirely new territory. Both feeling like she did for him and wanting to take control were new.
Hell, maybe Lola was right, and she needed to get under Jonah to get over getting dumped. She stretched up just slightly and sealed their mouths together. Still, he didn’t take the lead like she’d expected him to. Instead, he held still, his hands on her knees as she brushed against his lips with hers. She ran her teeth against his criminally soft lower lip.
He made a huff sound, but he still didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t want to kiss her at all. Maybe he was letting her kiss him so she wouldn’t fall apart again. The last thing he needed was her balled up in a corner in the middle of a natural disaster. Perhaps he was just humoring her for a few seconds?
She started to pull away, disappointed and embarrassed. But he tightened his grip on her thighs and ran his hands up, up, and nearly to her panties. Her body convulsed against the sudden stimulation. She opened her eyes and found him staring at her.
“Okay?”
His thumbs were pressed into her skin just right, which seemed to have a direct dial connection to her clit. Okay? This was so much more than okay, and he hadn’t even kissed her back.
She didn’t answer; she just went back in for another kiss. This time, he gave her what she’d wanted the first time. He took over—teasing and taunting. There were teeth and tongues, and she melted against his hardness. She reached up and buried her fingers in his hair, pulling it until his mouth opened and the kiss went deeper. It was like the first few minutes that they’d met. That touch of hatred that made the chemistry between them so much hotter.
She’d never had hate sex before, but she’d never really hated anyone on sight either. She couldn’t explain how their alchemy worked if someone asked, but she didn’t care. All she knew was that she had to have him. If his kiss was this satisfying, then fucking him would probably kill her.
And that’s how she wanted to die, not gasping for air in a dirty alley, paralyzed by her own panic.
* * * *
Carla was sweeter than he’d ever imagined. Her petal-pink mouth had driven him crazy from the moment they met. The only reason he hadn’t laid her out the second she pressed that sweetness to his mouth was shock.
He’d been pretty sure that his desire for her was one-sided. He’d tried to be careful, making sure it was okay to touch her during her panic attack. He was so sure that contact with him wasn’t something she wanted that he wasn’t able to compute when she’d touched him.
His scalp stung where her long, manicured nails dug in and pulled against his hair, as though she was steering him around her mouth. Fuck that. If she was going to spring a kiss on him, knocking him off his game, he was going to have some fun.
When he moved one hand off her thigh, gripping the back of her head, she let out a frustrated moan. When he stopped kissing her mouth, angled her head back, and ran his tongue up the cord of her throat, she stopped breathing.
He’d come in here to warn her about the storm and to start making plans to secure the house, but one kiss and he couldn’t care less if the whole thing crumbled into a pile around them. He had to get inside her. No longer caring that she was trouble, he maneuvered both of them so that she was flat on her back on the bed, and he held himself over her. He’d thought she was soft and fragile, especially after this morning, until she’d taken it upon herself to kiss him and then pull his hair.
But that might have been her coming down off the adrenaline high of a panic attack. He didn’t know her well enough to guess.
He’d gone along with the kiss and taken it further because she had tapped into something elemental about him. Something that had led him to carry her home like a caveman and press her into the mattress as though he intended to fuck her until the storm ended instead of just keeping her safe. His cock was doing all the thinking because it was so full that he was going to come all over her pretty soft skin if he didn’t slow this down.
He pulled back. Carla’s skin was flushed, and her chest heaved like she’d just run a marathon. “Do you want this?”
She shocked him again by pinching his side. “Would I be doing it otherwise?”
“Ow.”
“Don’t be a baby.” She pushed at him until he sat down next to her. Then, she got up off the bed. “I was kissing you because I wanted to. I might be having some issues right now because I’ve been thrown a curveball, but I’m not stupid or reckless or anything like that. I’m stronger than I look.”
Jonah was getting that impression the more time he spent with her. “I don’t think that.”
“Yes, you do. Why else would you not have kissed me back until I practically forced you? You’re going to make me feel like a real creep.”
She had him there. Truth was, he was always careful when it came to sex. He didn’t want there to be any miscommunication. And he never wanted anyone to feel like he had taken advantage of them. He’d always been proactive about making people comfortable around him. His sheer size scared some people off, so he always tried to make it clear that he wasn’t a threat. Although some people would always see him that way because he trusted the wrong person once.
“You just had a big morning, and I wasn’t sure what you were trying to do.” He was getting the impression that she was, in fact, stronger than she looked. She was a lot more than she put forward when she showed up at the door. Seeing her vulnerable like this morning and angry like now made him realize that he might have been too quick to judge her. One corner of her mouth kicked up. “Do you want to try again?”
“We should probably be battening down hatches, or some such, don’t you think?”
Oh, yeah. He’d almost let himself forget about that. “You have your coffee to drink.”
She walked over to the dresser and picked up the cup. Given how intent she’d been on getting coffee this morning—so much so that she’d risked leaving the house—he expected her to chug it. Instead, she took a dainty sip and sighed with pleasure. Everything below his waist tightened when she parted her lips. It made him think of her parting them for his cock. It made him want to see how she would sigh when he sank into her.
Maybe he was the crazy one, thinking about all the ways he’d like to fuck her after one kiss. One kiss that she probably regretted about now.
He forced himself to stop looking at her.
“Thank you.”
“For what?” He wanted to know if she was more grateful for the ride home in his arms, the coffee, or the kiss.
“Everything.” One word gave him hope that he might get more of the kissing. After all, they’d be stuck together for a couple of days at least.