41. Chapter 41
Theresa read the papers carefully and asked a few questions he couldn’t answer without knowing anything about the people whose names had been hacked out on a typewriter.
On the last page, a handwritten letter from Stanley Woodridge Jason hadn’t read yet, tears filled her eyes and dripped onto the paper.
“This is…” She lowered the letter, drying her cheeks with the back of her hand. “This is one-chance-in-a-million stuff here.”
“One chance in ten million.” He smirked.
“You just found this out today. How can you just sit there?”
“What do you want me to do? Jump up and down? Clap and cheer? What?”
He’d taken off his jacket while she read and sweat still dripped down his back. Hotter than hot? More like hotter than hell. The Vacancy sign at the motel wasn’t glowing, so it wouldn’t be any cooler in his room without power if he could get her there.
Which, she’d made clear, he would not.
“Do you believe in fate?” she asked.
“You mean destiny and all that?” Jason asked.
“In things happening for a reason.”
“No. And you know what? Things like this”—he held up the envelope with the check inside—“happen all the time.”
“You become a millionaire all the time?”
“Three days ago I was two thousand miles away, and my bike ran fine, and I had a job offer, and everything was good. Then yesterday I’m clunking into town on a smoking bike, and some lawyer representing some old bastard I’ve never heard of says we need to meet.
Yesterday I couldn’t afford to fix my bike and today I’m a millionaire thanks to a father I didn’t even know. ”
“That doesn’t sound like fate to you?”
He narrowed his eyes. “This morning you wouldn’t talk to me, and tonight we’re sitting here alone in this booth, and you officially know more about me than my own mother, and it wouldn’t have happened if a storm hadn’t messed with your head and taken out the lights.
Life is always changing. It’s always throwing something different in front of you.
It’s why I live on the road, to keep the ground moving. It’s not fate. It’s just another day.”
Just another day. How could anyone actually believe that? He took a drink to put a period at the end of the lie.
“You know, just because the corner of the sky through the motel window changes, the bed changes, and the woman changes, doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the trap,” Theresa said.
“You’re living the same day over and over again, same as the rest of us.
But today isn’t that day. If you think it is, then you should’ve been the one playing chicken with the storm. ”
“Maybe I should have.”
He raised his glass and saluted her with another drink.
“So, what’s next?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to find some place to put this—open a bank account or something. Probably drop in on my ma, see if I can shake the truth out of her.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have any family. And I meant, what’s next tonight?”
Those brown eyes suddenly said bedroom, and he almost missed it. Jason stuck his chin out.
“Well, I can’t go back to the motel.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t go with me.”
“You’re impossible,” she said into the bottom of her glass to hide her smile. “You really left ten million dollars on the table to rescue me?”
Was that what he’d done? He wasn’t much for knight-in-shining-armor stuff, and it wasn’t his plan at the time—not that he’d had one—but he’d say anything to keep her looking at him through her eyelashes over the rim of her drink.
“It’s a good thing I did,” he said. “Otherwise you probably would’ve gotten sucked up into the sky, and I would’ve—”
Her whiskey-sweet tongue in his mouth stopped him. The kiss was quick. With her lips close enough to graze the wetness she left behind on his mouth, she said, “There, now we’re even.”
His lips followed her. She was already out of the booth.
“Where are you going?” he called after her, scrambling behind her pink-striped uniform down the dark row of empty booths.
“I need some air,” she called back without slowing her stride.
“Even, huh?” he asked. “Talk about playing games.”
“I like you, Jason. I really do.” She burst through the front door where the air she needed wasn’t any cooler with another storm brewing. “If you were any other man…”
“If you were any other woman, I wouldn’t be sitting here, sweating my ass off in the dark for the chance to tell you—”
She spun on him. “Tell me what? Huh? How much you want to screw me? Another easy waitress to nail?”
“No.” Jason clenched his fists to contain his brutish need to take her by the wrists and plant another kiss on her mouth. “To tell you the moment I saw you climbing out of that Trans Am, all I could think was that’s one hell of a woman.”
She chortled like she didn’t believe him, or he’d said the stupidest thing in the goddamn world, and he couldn’t stop himself from grabbing a wrist and hauling her against him.
“And that gearhead’s one hell of an idiot for letting her go.”
She didn’t pull back—not right away.
“What would you know about it?” she asked. The savage gleam in her eyes actually dared him to say another stupid fucking thing she wouldn’t believe.
So he did.
“I know only an idiot would leave you in their dust.”
Theresa’s laugh was dark and full of all the shit she’d taken from other men who sweet-talked their way up her skirt. He couldn’t blame her. He really wasn’t any different, except he meant every word and was irritated that she needed so much damn convincing.
She snapped her wrist from his fist and turned away from him.
Winds beginning to swirl blew her hair in his face, and he picked up a whiff of something sweet that wasn’t her perfume.
Her shampoo? It was faint, under layers of fry grease that coated everyone and everything that spent five minutes in the Springfield Sip.
“I bet he was a selfish lover too,” Jason said. “Did he always get himself off first?”
“You’ve got an awfully smart mouth.”
He caught her with his hand on her neck before she took another step away from him. Her chest lifted under his arm with a gasp he barely heard over the rolling thunder.
“You wondering what else I can do with it?” he challenged in her ear.
His fingers holding her neck, however gentle, might’ve been too much for the woman who had already stared down a violent death in a storm. She clutched his arm; if she pulled his hand away, he’d go willingly. But if she didn’t…
He felt her swallow on his palm.
“No, just starting to see how you work,” she said.
Fucking Christ. The vibration of her voice through her throat traveled up his arm.
“Honey, you talk about experience as if it’s a bad thing.”
Her back trembled in conflict against his chest, her body pitted against her mind for what he knew she wanted—and wanted bad, judging by the nails digging into his arm.
“Have you ever been with someone who put you first? I don’t want to be inside you until I’ve made you moan my name.”
“Jason—”
“Just like that, only louder.”
“You don’t know me,” she said staunchly, as if she needed to make it clear. “I’m not one of those women.”
“No. You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.” Her pulse drummed against his fingertips. He brushed his thumb over her bottom lip. “Especially without a trace of makeup, and your hair all wild, looking like you just climbed out of bed.”
“Does that line ever work?”
“Don’t know. This is the first time I said it,” he told her. Inspired by the lightning flashing in the dark clouds that were moving in fast, he asked, “How about when you surrendered to that tornado? Your chest was heaving, your head flung back, begging the storm to take you?”
Those pink nails were going to draw blood from his forearm. He wrapped his other arm around her waist and held her tight to his front, grinding his erection into her lower back. This woman, these storms, and ten million bucks had him charged and ready to burst out of his fucking skin.
“I want to take you right here. Right now,” he growled in her ear. The first raindrops of the new storm speckled his cheek. “I want to be the one making you beg.”
Theresa’s chest dipped under his hand as it slid over cold rain and warm skin below the first button of her uniform.
“I want to bury my face in your neck to smell the perfume you wear that I’ve never smelled before.”
“Sweet magnolia,” she said, her breath hitching at the pop of the top button.
“I want to feel your body in my hands. I want to get on my knees and worship you the way that selfish fucking gearhead didn’t know how.”
Her heart hammered on his palm for a few beats before he closed his hand around her breast. It took every ounce of restraint quickly being whipped out of him by the wind not to rip the whole front of her uniform open.
“I want to be the one to make you feel alive.”
He squeezed her nipple, and she gasped and spun in his arms.
“Stop talking,” she said.
Then she kissed him. Hard.