Chapter 20
Chapter 20
Scarlett was fixing to snatch a king off the chess board and lob it right into Jaime Croft’s forehead. She’d aim between those dark-brown eyes of his, right where the skin wrinkled when he was glowering at her, and let it fly. It’d make a satisfying thunk as it nailed him. Maybe he’d holler. All she wanted was one good angry Scarlett! and she could die a happy woman.
Because these days, where she was concerned, Jaime flitted between his stern professional routine, the one where he tried to ignore her or be glacial cold, and something more disconcerting, where he’d glare at her as if he were trying to figure her out. As if he could survey the crevices of her soul or perform an MRI on her moral fiber with his eyeballs.
Scarlett didn’t want to be known, thank you very much. She wanted to remain mysterious. Was it too late to become a hermit?
Yeah, probably. They were on the set of her biopic, after all.
The thing was, the man was an absolute machine on set. Twelve-hour days were nothing to Jaime. He’d do three more takes just to ensure someone’s fingers were pressed into the tabletop enough during a close-up.
Scarlett cared about details—her entire life was mostly concerned with what happened inside two-inch squares—but Jaime was on another level. He was pedantic and competent ... and that made him more than a little bit hot.
Except that when he stalked around being imperious and controlling and sexy, he kept either giving Scarlett the cold shoulder or scrutinizing her, seemingly unsure of what he wanted from her.
She didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Take now. They were finishing the opening and closing sequence of episode three, when Emily won her first international tournament in Tokyo—the very tournament Scarlett had left Musgrove and Jaime for—and he was vacillating.
“Don’t you think she needs to be triumphant?” Jaime asked Clara, regarding Emily’s reaction to her win.
Despite all Scarlett’s best efforts, the actress’s spine was still composed primarily of Jell-O. “Maybe.”
But lack of confidence might be contagious, because Jaime’s own spine seemed to be quavering. Shouldn’t they have a clearer direction here?
The way Scarlett saw it, Emily was glad she’d won, sure, but she was feeling a zillion other things too: exhaustion, relief, anxiety about the future. And that was without taking into account her recent breakup. Scarlett had broken up with Jaime and likely condemned his dad before she’d left town, but those things hadn’t made it into her book.
Except if Jaime wanted the scene to feel true , well then, this moment hadn’t felt jubilant when Scarlett had lived it.
“If Emily is just elated, it’d be too simple,” Scarlett said.
“Would it?” Jaime demanded—and it very much felt as if he were asking about something besides the script.
His eyes were probing her again, and Scarlett fought an impulse to fidget with her hair.
“ Yes ,” she said, hoping that it was the right answer for whatever Jaime was truly asking.
Jaime wasn’t convinced. “Can’t it be simple? She did what she needed to, and she got everything she worked for.”
He addressed that to Clara, but he was talking to Scarlett.
Oh, this befuddled dingleberry. Jaime clearly hadn’t understood what she’d tried to tell him nine months ago. He still didn’t appreciate why she’d acted the way she had. He couldn’t make a television show about her feelings—sorry, Emily’s feelings—if he didn’t grasp them.
Scarlett had spent weeks tiptoeing around his feelings because when he’d told her he was drowning, she knew he’d meant it. But she was done with the kid gloves. Scarlett wasn’t going to let this go.
“But she didn’t get everything. I just don’t think it’s as easy as her winning and hooray.” Victory wasn’t all this had been about for her. “Winning has always felt complicated to me. It’s a vindication in some ways, but at this tournament, Emily also realized how messed up the system is. She’s getting the Elo rating she wanted and some money, but it’s only on PAWN’s terms, and she knows how unfair those are to a lot of other people. The last shot of the episode needs to convey all of that.”
Jaime watched Scarlett intensely. His gaze was ... assessing, like a scientist contemplating a sample under a microscope. Scarlett would’ve rocked back on her heels if she hadn’t spent years learning how to hide her feelings from her opponents.
“But isn’t the impact bigger if we have her high here and then low later on?”
Jaime was asking about Scarlett , how she had felt after she’d left him. About what she’d really wanted. Because he still didn’t get it.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I was there, and it wasn’t all high.”
Part of why it hadn’t been was because Scarlett had been distracted about Jaime , about what she’d done before she’d left Musgrove. It was imperative for him to understand that, even if she wasn’t going to lay all that out for him while they had an audience.
Jaime and Scarlett were so focused on each other, they both startled when Clara asked, “Can we maybe try one take Scarlett’s way?”
Right: filming now, personal conversations later.
Scarlett turned toward the actress and grinned. If Clara’s interjection hadn’t been so darn tentative, she would’ve cheered too. All the time they’d been playing chess, Scarlett hadn’t simply been teaching Clara strategy and confidence so she could perform the moves to get to the Queen’s Kiss believably. She’d been teaching her so she could stand up for herself.
A good thirty seconds ticked by while they waited for Jaime’s response. Scarlett hoped he wasn’t going to disagree with his lead actress and his cowriter. She doubted she’d won him over—either at the script level or the level of their private war—but he was too polite, too professional, too respectful to pitch a fit.
Probably.
At last he nodded. “Right. We’ll give it a try. Play the emotional beat more mixed.”
Scarlett winked at Clara, who beamed.
The nonactors moved out of the shot, and there was a flurry of activity involving the lights and the camera and all that jazz.
“Camera set,” the AD called.
And with that, they were filming.
Unlike in the rehearsal, when they got to the key moment, Clara let fifty things flash across her eyes. Regret, anxiety, pride, hunger, and exhaustion were all there, along with more stuff Scarlett had experienced but couldn’t name. Fancy emotions you needed to have a graduate degree to describe. It was a gut punch, reliving that moment through Clara’s performance, and it made Scarlett’s own eyes heavy and watery.
Clara had a face like a movie screen. She could put any old feeling up there—or even an entire kaleidoscope of them, like she’d just done—and every beat of it read to the audience. Holy crap, she was amazing.
“Cut!” Jaime yelled.
His attention was glued to the monitor, and he was chewing on his bottom lip. Scarlett could feel the moment when he wanted to look at her, because he’d seen the truth in Clara’s acting. He’d taken a baby step toward understanding Scarlett’s stew of emotions in Tokyo. That didn’t mean he got why she’d called the police tip line—Scarlett didn’t want to get carried away—but something had clicked here.
This hadn’t been a gambit, honest. Scarlett hadn’t pushed a sacrificial poisoned rook toward Jaime, hoping that he’d snatch it and fall into a trap. But in the other game they were playing on set, the one entirely between Jaime and Scarlett, the personal one that was about the past and the future, she might just have won a point.
“It was—good,” he finally said. “I want to do one more, but Clara, deliver the line a little softer this time.”
“Okay.”
They did it again, and this take, Clara was even better.
“That’s the one,” Jaime said. “That’s a full lid for today. Thanks, everyone.”
As the crew began to pack things in for the night, Scarlett crossed over to him. “Do you see it now, why it had to be messier?” Why it was messier for me?
“Sure.”
Jaime sounded so tired, Scarlett knew that she ought to leave him alone. But part of why he was tired was because he refused to trust her or to listen to her side of things.
“You could’ve given my way a spin earlier,” she said.
“Sure. I could’ve,” he agreed.
“That’s why you want me to be here, right?” she pushed on. “To help with these moments. To make sure that things are reading right. That they’re good.”
That was what she thought she was doing here, anyhow.
Jaime finished packing up his bag. “I don’t know” was all he said as he latched it.
Didn’t know why she was there, or didn’t know what her role was? Scarlett set a hand on her cocked hip. “Isn’t that a loaded statement?”
He just shrugged.
“Jaime, we need to talk about this.” Because whatever he was struggling with, it wasn’t only about today’s scene.
“Later. Tomorrow, maybe.”
She knew he wanted to get some space from her in order to fashion a new mask for himself, one that covered all his wounds, but Scarlett wasn’t going to let him do it. They needed to have a conversation while his breakthrough was still fresh and they might be able to come to a new level of understanding.
“No, we need to talk about it now .”
Jaime ignored that. He handed his headset to a PA and started off down the hall. He had an office somewhere in the bowels of the soundstage, but Scarlett had never seen it. Whatever meetings they had were in one of the conference rooms.
Scarlett was wearing two-inch heels and not as practiced as he was at navigating the dark, narrow hallway. Plus, it took her a few seconds to get off her own gear. But after a brief and aggravating delay, she was after him.
When Jaime had said the cast and crew were done for the day, it seemed as if everyone else had vaporized. Seriously, a few minutes ago, fifty people had been in the building, but now, Scarlett and Jaime might as well have been the last humans left on earth.
The winding maze of the studio was vacant, and Scarlett’s heels echoed down the hall until she arrived at Jaime’s office door. He stood just inside, his back to her and his hands thrust into his hair. Every cell of his body was clearly humming, his taut posture overwhelmed.
“We need to talk,” she said.
Jaime didn’t turn toward her. “Please. I can’t do this right now with you.”
She ought to walk away. No, Scarlett ought to run away. It was very clear they were on the brink of something here, and if she had a single ounce of self-preservation in her body, Scarlett would scram.
She hadn’t gotten where she was by playing it safe, though. She might be an adrenaline junkie underneath her chess-playing exterior.
So she took another step into his office. The rug was probably left over from the Louis B. Mayer era. Scarlett’s heels sunk into it as if it were a soggy lawn.
“If we wait, you’ll get yourself all nice and composed. You’ll add up the columns and balance the checkbook.” He’d find those two-cent bank errors, she was certain, and report them, even if they were in his favor.
“So? What’s wrong with that?” he said, still safe in the cocoon of his arms.
“Life doesn’t work like that, Jaime. It isn’t neat. You must have seen that out there. It was better when you let Clara embrace the mess.” It was better when Jaime had realized Scarlett hadn’t had simple motives for what she’d done to him and his family, and she hadn’t felt simple things about it.
“I know.” His tone was so agonized that, for a moment, Scarlett almost retreated.
She hated causing him pain, but they had to cauterize this wound. If she ran away now, they would have to reopen it to get the job done.
“Talking about this is the way we balance our emotional checkbook.”
“Yeah, I know that too. But right now, I have a job to do . If we get into this, I’ll lose it.” Jaime finally twisted around. His eyes clashed with hers—and whoa. His gaze was dark and intense.
He might’ve wanted Clara to play that scene with a single emotion, but there were more things in his face than had been in the actress’s. If Jaime could summon all of this—this angry, sexy, lust-filled mix—on command, he would’ve had a good career ahead of him as an actor or a model. A million romance novel covers would’ve been calling his name.
But Scarlett suspected that the blame for his current emotional hurricane rested firmly on her own shoulders. “Talk to me, Jaime.”
“You make me doubt myself,” he finally said.
If Scarlett were as smart as she was sometimes accused of being, she would walk away now. But after months of careful exchanges from him, of polite distance and cool words, she wanted every ounce of his pain. The current flowing between them right now was real, and she was tired of anything that wasn’t real.
“Because I give you explanations for the past that don’t match those bedtime stories you tell yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re the one who told me that the truth matters,” she said mockingly.
“That was before I knew what it was.”
“So now you’re all about soothing lies?”
“Maybe.”
“Coward.”
“Probably,” he agreed.
Scarlett wanted to spit. “You are strong enough to deal with this.”
He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her. “When I look at you, I don’t know what I want.”
That was a much worse lie than any she’d ever told him. Than any lie she’d ever told anyone. The air in the room was heavy with what they both needed.
“I do. You want this.” Scarlett took two steps and pressed her lips to his.
It was a slap of a kiss, one that was going to bruise them both, but was all the sweeter for it.
Scarlett spent hours contemplating the moves she was going to make on the chess board. Trying to see and weigh every possibility and to imagine how her opponent would respond to each one.
Here, she hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t even really decided to do it until she was already doing it. An instinct as much as a kiss.
Shit. Shit shit shit—
But before she could even finish the thought and plan an escape, Jaime was kissing her back. Kissing her back with such ferocity and urgency it was as if he were trying to compress an entire love affair’s worth of kisses into one urgent encounter.
His tongue swept into her mouth and tangled with hers, while his pelvis forced her backward. Seconds later, Scarlett’s back slammed against the wall of his office, right next to the door.
One of his hands left her waist for a second. He slammed the door shut, and then he was groping her again. There wasn’t another word for how he was touching her. His hold had the right amount of force, but his fingers digging into her hip, that was entirely the wrong place. She moaned anyhow, in encouragement, anticipation.
This—this was what they’d been missing.
Jaime’s hand shifted and squeezed her ass, tugging her up and into him. Yup, that was the spot.
He freed a hand from Scarlett again to fumble with the lock on the door, which gave Scarlett a second to fuss with her skirt. She ought to be able to take it off somehow, right? She’d put it on this morning.
But with Jaime moaning into her mouth, she’d be damned if she could remember how it worked. So she just yanked the thing up around her waist. Then she was hooking her calf around him, pulling him into the center of her.
He managed to engage the lock just as his hips ground against hers. She was about ten seconds away from exploding here.
With the door secured, Jaime rubbed the skin of her upper thighs in a way that was almost an end in itself. Or maybe that was just the hungry noises he was making, as if the fact that he hadn’t touched her there in the better part of a year was a crime.
His fingers were pushing past the gusset of her panties and over her lips. Scarlett was already so wet she would’ve been mortified, except for how Jaime was humming in approval.
He swept her lips apart with his thumb. He lifted his mouth from hers while he skimmed over her clit so lightly she wanted to cry.
“Have you done this ... since?” he whispered.
Had she slept with someone else since that week they’d spent screwing each other’s brains out in Virginia? That was what he meant.
Time stopped. His hands on her stopped. Everything stopped.
“No,” she whispered back.
That earned her a firm push against her clit that had her panting. Scarlett lifted and rotated her hips. Not enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
“Have—have you?” she got out.
She tried to tell herself it wouldn’t matter, but she worried, if he said yes, it would very much matter.
“No.” His response was as swift and unyielding as how he was stroking her now.
“ Jaime. ”
His fingers thrust into her then. Just straight in and up and God . He was fucking her with his fingers, his rhythm fast and her body slick.
“I want,” she panted. “I want you.”
She didn’t want to think. Couldn’t think, really. Every time they’d done this, there had been good reasons not to. But in the end, not doing it hadn’t made anything hurt less. So they might as well do it.
If she’d been able to say words, that would’ve been what she would’ve said.
But apparently, he didn’t need to be convinced. His fingers were gone, and Jaime was pulling her down. Office-floor sex wasn’t exactly something Scarlett had on a bingo card or anything, but she couldn’t have cared less. All that mattered was this.
They were both fumbling with his zipper. Then Jaime was pulling her panties off—ah, that was how that worked—and then his cock was out and her knees were falling apart and he was positioning himself.
Sweet Lord, they were seconds away from this.
“Is this okay?” he asked.
Because Jaime didn’t have a condom, and they were barely talking to each other, and things between them were still as emotionally raw as a fresh amputation.
Those last two, they weren’t okay. But sex wasn’t going to make them worse, Scarlett knew that. And as they’d talked about back in Virginia, she was on the pill and she got tested regularly, as did Jaime. So there was no problem where the first item was concerned either.
Scarlett absolutely knew that if she said no, he would return to sanity. If she so much as hesitated, Jaime wouldn’t push it any further. But she wanted this. He wanted this. And things were already a mess.
Which was why she said, “God, yes.”
“Thank Christ.”
And then Jaime was there, pushing into her, and her hands were clenching on him, and her hips were rising to meet him, and his name was on her lips. Whatever came next, Scarlett wasn’t going to regret this. Because while it was probably a mistake, it was also vital, necessary, in a hundred ways she couldn’t name but couldn’t deny. The second Jaime rocked into her, some little fissure in her heart closed up.
It was the fastest, roughest, crudest sex she’d ever had. Jaime had never held back less with her than he did on the floor of his office. The way he moved over her, in her, made her feel as if every other time they’d ever been together had been censored.
And it turned out she loved being with him without the guardrails. Loved his lack of finesse. Loved the way he was pistoning into her. Loved the blunt way his fingers moved over where they were joined. Because even now, he still wanted things to be good for her.
Then Scarlett was coming, and she was begging him not to stop, and his knuckles were pressing right where she needed them, and he was promising her that he wouldn’t ever stop. It was the kind of lie you blurted out during sex and worried about at three in the morning, when things were over and your head was cooler.
Except Scarlett was going to worry that he didn’t mean it. Because the things she was saying to him, about how nobody made her feel this way and how good he was and how much she needed him, every one of those statements was absolutely true.
When the last contraction of her orgasm had passed, Jaime pulled out from Scarlett’s body. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, and he pushed his cock, still hard and wet, into her palm. Then he drove himself into her hand and into the softness of her lower belly until, with a grunt, he came across her skin.
It was the smuttiest, hottest thing she had ever seen. Bar none.
“Fuck,” she whispered, marveling at the evidence of his orgasm. Her core clenched, hard, at the sight. If they hadn’t just finished, she would’ve wanted to—
Jaime raised himself onto his forearms. He flipped his body and collapsed on his back next to Scarlett. His breaths were coming in great, whooshing gasps. In the quiet of his office, their breathing was like a twister, and their spent bodies were the wreckage left behind.
“You okay?” he managed after a few moments.
Because after that, all he could think about was whether she was all right.
“Terrific,” she deadpanned.
But for all that Scarlett was going to have rug burn on her back, and they were going to need to talk about what they’d done and to figure out how not to disrupt whatever equilibrium they’d established, she was legitimately terrific.
“I’m sorry for—”
“If you finish that apology, I will smother you. Feel free to fuck me on the floor of your office anytime.”
“Noted.”
And she could only hope he knew she meant it.