Dropping Gloves Read online

  He brought mine over and set it down in front of me, then handed me a spoon. Our fingers brushed in the transfer—accidentally, I assumed, but before I could jerk my hand back, he closed his fingers around mine. They were warm and strong, not to mention familiar. I’d always felt safe in his hands, protected and cherished in his arms.

  Right now, I only felt vulnerable. “Jamie?”

  “You should be with people who love you,” he said, repeating his words from earlier, his voice as strong and sure as his touch. “People like your parents. People like Luke and Dani. People like your friends—your true friends, the ones who’ve stuck by you through everything, not the ones who just showed up when there was something they thought they could get from you.”

  I couldn’t look at him when he was talking like that, when I felt so open and raw and exposed. I’d laid it all out there for him when I’d asked him my crazy question, leaving no doubt as to where I stood on things between us. On the fact that I still loved him. If I dared to look in his eyes, I would be able to see whether it was the truth or not, no matter what he claimed about his feelings for me. I couldn’t bear to know the truth if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It would hurt so much worse than anything I’d ever been through, and I’d been through a hell of a lot.

  But he tipped my chin up with his other hand, and he waited until I looked up into his eyes. “And yes, people like me.”

  There was no dishonesty in his eyes. They were painfully clear, as pure and sharp as ever. My heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder it didn’t burst through my chest, but it was more because of the apologetic tone of his words.

  He loved me and he would never lie to me about that.

  But he didn’t want to love me.

  So while he might not ask me to cancel the offer I’d made on the house, and while he might be willing to spend an hour or two with me, cooking and talking and playing with his kitten, he didn’t want what I wanted. He didn’t want there to be an us. He didn’t want me. I knew better than to think that would have changed in such a short amount of time, whether I was sick again or not. But I’d still allowed myself to hope.

  I eased my chin from his grip, removed my hand from his, and passed his kitten over to him, pushing the chair back so I could stand.

  “Katie,” he started.

  I shook my head, fighting back tears and heading for the door.

  “Don’t leave. You don’t have to go.”

  “That’s just it. You don’t want me to leave, but you don’t want me to stay, either.” I needed him to want me to stay. Needed it more than I knew how to handle.

  I was already at the door, but I’d forgotten my purse. I turned around and grabbed it off the counter. Jamie put his hand on my upper arm, and that was when my tears started.

  “I want you to be okay,” he forced out.

  “I know.” I nodded, batting at my tears and backing toward the door. “I know you do.” There wasn’t a malicious bone in his body. No matter how badly I had hurt him—and I absolutely had—he would never hurt me in return. At least not intentionally. I reached behind me and placed my hand on the knob. “But do you know what I want? I want you to want me again. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but if it doesn’t, I don’t think I will ever be okay again.”

  He cursed beneath his breath and pressed his eyes closed.

  “I’m not telling you that to make you feel responsible for anything,” I said. “I just need you to know. I need you to understand exactly where I’m coming from and where I stand. I’m not going back to LA. I’m staying here, and I am as in love with you as I ever was. I want a chance. I want us to be like we were before.”

  Blackbeard squirmed out of Jamie’s grasp and climbed up to his shoulder perch.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Katie. We can’t go back in time.” His voice was rough, like Dad’s tended to get when he was all choked up. Jamie was as affected by all this as I was.

  “Not backward,” I said. “You’re right. We can’t go back to what we had before. We’ve both changed. We’ve been through a lot. We aren’t the same as we were before. But I want a chance to go forward. With you.” I turned the knob and headed outside. “Think about it,” I said, moving toward the house next door and my car. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be around.”

  I watched Katie get behind the wheel of her car, but the urge to stop her was one of the most intense internal battles I’d ever waged.

  I want you to want me again, she’d said. I’d never stopped wanting her, no matter how hard I’d tried. I am as in love with you as I ever was. I might be more in love with her now than I was before, something I had never thought possible. I want a chance. Even though I knew I shouldn’t, that it was absolutely the wrong choice for me to make, I wanted to give her that chance. I wanted it more than my next breath, but I forced my feet to stay where they were, forced my lips to remain closed so I wouldn’t call out.

  Blackbeard nipped my earlobe. I tried to jerk my head away from him, but he was having none of that. He put both his front paws up on my face and held me in position, making sure I didn’t move by digging in slightly with his claws, and then his rough sandpaper tongue rasped over my cheek repeatedly.

  Katie turned her head and watched for a moment. The ghost of a smile came to her lips, probably because of Blackbeard and his antics. Even that wasn’t enough to keep her here, though. She backed out to the street, and I tried to dislodge Blackbeard’s claws from my flesh without ending up bloody again. But she didn’t drive away; she turned in and parked behind my car. She climbed out with the engine still running and left the door open, and she came up my sidewalk like a woman on a mission.

  When she reached me, she plucked the kitten free and carried him through the door, setting him on the floor of my front entryway. I followed, bemused. When she straightened, she put her hands on either side of my face, pushed me back against the wall, and stretched up on her toes.

  And she kissed me.

  It wasn’t a sweet kiss, like the ones I’d given her in those months before she’d left to chase her dreams. It was hungry. Needy. Almost violent in intensity. Her lips surged against me. She angled her head, tugging on my hair. Her body fit with mine just like I remembered—breasts tight to my chest, hipbones bumping, my dick coming to life and pulsing against the softness of her belly.

  I tried to keep myself from responding, from kissing her back, but it was no use. Touching her again, holding her, was as close to heaven as I would ever be. Her arms went around my neck. I wrapped mine around her waist, picked her up, spun around so the wall could help support her, and I kissed her the way I’d wanted to for years.

  She drew her legs up and locked them around me. Her teeth nipped my lower lip. Hard. I sucked in a breath, and her tongue slipped inside to tangle with mine. She wriggled, edging closer, grinding herself against me in a way that felt so fucking good I wanted it to never end.

  I ran my hands up her sides, grazing my fingers over her ribs. With the tip of my thumb, I stroked the underside of her breast. She urged me on with a mewling sound coming from deep in her throat.

  An inch at a time, I shifted my hand higher, skimming that perfectly soft mound with my palm. Her nipple was a hard nub straining against the center of my palm. I wanted to close my hand over her. To squeeze and knead and mold her to fit my hand. To slip her shirt over her head and strip off her bra. To take her into my mouth.

  She arched her back, driving her breast into my palm until I did close my hand over it. She was a perfect fit, just like I’d imagined. I squeezed her softness and nearly lost it.

  “Jamie,” she said, her mouth by my ear. Just my name. Nothing more. Panting. Or was that me? She kissed my neck. Flicked her tongue along my jaw. Her hands went up under my shirt, and she splayed them over my abs. If she went lower, if the tip of her finger even so much as swept over my cock, I would lose it then and there. I was painfully hard, hard enough to cut diamonds.

  But her hand didn’
t slither any lower, and Blackbeard chose that moment to climb up the inside of my pant leg and sink a claw into my sac through the layers of my clothes. Then he squirmed to get free, which only made the claw go deeper somehow.

  “Fuck,” I shouted. I mean, there was pain, and there was pain. This definitely belonged in the latter category. I lowered Katie and reached down to disengage the kitten that was dangling from my balls by a claw.

  Katie looked dazed, at first, but then she glanced down and started giggling.

  “Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?” I finally worked Blackbeard’s claw free and pulled him up so we could see each other, eye to eye. “Not okay, dude,” I grumbled, but I couldn’t put much heat behind it. Not when Katie was still cackling so hard. The kitten let out an annoyed meow and swatted at my face, so I figured I’d better not let him stay so close to his target. I lowered him to my chest, and he curled up in the crook of my arm, apparently content for the moment to stay there if I measured his comfort by the volume of his purring. I sure as hell wasn’t content, though. That wasn’t exactly the direction I’d intended for that to go.

  “I guess I should say I’m sorry,” Katie said through her snickers. “At least for laughing, if nothing else. But I’m not. That was hilarious.”

  “I doubt you’d think it was so funny if he’d been dangling from your—” I cut myself off before I said something so rude my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap. Using a word like pussy was not something I had any business doing around Katie.

  She stopped laughing finally, but she was still grinning. “No, I don’t guess I would.” She leaned in, resting one hand on my chest, and kissed my jaw. “I should go. I just… I just needed to do that.”

  I reached for her hand as she retreated. I needed to hold on to her even if it was only for a moment longer, which just served to prove that I’d already allowed her back in to my life far more than I ever should have. I was a fucking wreck. She let me hold her fingers for a moment before withdrawing them. Her eyes were filled with just as much heat and lust as her kisses and touch had been, but she was still backing away.

  How the fuck could she do this to me all the time, and why in the hell was I letting her do it again? But I was, as sure as the sky was blue. I’d invited her into my house. I’d made her dinner and let her name my damn kitten and watched her play with him, all the while working her way back into my heart. I’d let her come in and kiss me like she meant it.

  And now she was walking away again.

  What kind of masochist must I be?

  She headed out the door again, glancing over her shoulder at me just before getting in her car.

  She wanted me to want her? Mission accomplished.

  This time, I closed the door and locked it. I didn’t know what kind of game she was playing, but at the moment, she was winning. She had me in check. I was pretty sure she wasn’t far from checkmate. If I was going to have any chance at coming out ahead, I needed to pay more attention to both her moves and my own.

  It didn’t take long at all before I got word that the seller had accepted my offer on the house. Sierra called to fill me in on my way back to Mom and Dad’s place after I left Jamie’s. The seller wanted to move quickly, and I was paying for it outright instead of taking out a mortgage, so the rest of the process was going to happen fast. “You can start furniture shopping whenever you want,” she told me.

  We didn’t talk long this time, as she needed to get some paperwork started to push the sale through. We were disconnecting the call by the time I parked in front of my parents’ house. They were in the living room when I came in, Dad with his feet up on the ottoman, looking as relaxed as could be, and Mom beside him, sitting straight as an arrow and already working on her wine. It was only about seven o’clock, so that probably meant she was seriously upset about something. Dr. Oliver’s office would only give my test results to me, not to her, so I had a feeling it was because I’d been out looking for a place of my own. Dad must have filled her in, which was what I’d wanted, but it still made me feel like a chicken coming home to find her like that.

  “So?” Dad said when I flopped down on the chair opposite them. He sounded downright chipper. “What did you think about that house in the Northwest District?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “How do you know I looked at a house over there?”

  “Because I suggested it. I knew the house next door to Babs was empty. I texted Sierra and tipped her off that there was a house you might be interested in. Gave her the address and the MLS listing number just so she wouldn’t misunderstand exactly which house I meant.”

  That had Mom leaning away and giving him an oh-no-you-didn’t look. I completely understood the sentiment behind her look. “Why would you do that?” Mom demanded, setting her wineglass on the coffee table. There was a lot of hurt in her voice. “She should stay here with us. So we can help her. And you’re trying to make it easier for her to leave us? What if she needs—”

  “I’m not leaving town or anything,” I argued. “You can still help me out.” I’d known she would be upset that I wasn’t going to stay here, in this house, where she could hover over me constantly, but it seemed to be hitting her even worse because of Dad’s involvement. Maybe I shouldn’t have filled him in on my plans this morning. I could have told both of them about it now, together, after the fact.

  Granted, I probably wouldn’t have looked at the house that was soon to be mine, seeing as how Sierra likely wouldn’t have thought to show it to me today if not for my father’s interference.

  “But that would be easier if you were here,” Mom insisted.

  “I did it because I thought they needed a bit of a nudge,” Dad said, totally deadpan, redirecting the conversation back to where he wanted it.

  “A nudge,” I repeated. And he’d said they needed a nudge. Not just me. This clearly was not about a house.

  “To get back together.”

  My father was matchmaking. Christ on a cracker, what the hell had gotten into him? “You never wanted us together before.”

  “Better the devil you know…” Dad let his voice trail off, as though that should be a sufficient answer for his complete about-face. “What I want,” he said emphatically after a long moment, “is for my little girl to live a happy, healthy, long life. I want you to have everything you want. I want you to love and be loved, and not just by your mom and me. I want you to know the love of a good man.”

  He was tearing up, and Mom and I were both openly crying, but he didn’t let any of that stop him. “Now we all know that no one can guarantee you the healthy, long life part of it. But you can damn well have love. You love him. And I know, whether he likes the idea of it or not, he loves you. I might not have liked the idea of him a few years ago, but you’re an adult now and can make your own decisions. Your heart decided on Babs. That happened a hell of a long time ago. There aren’t many men in this world better than him, and there are a lot of things I can overlook if it means you have a man like Jamie Babcock in your life.”

  I wasn’t so sure he’d still be singing that tune if he knew I’d basically just mauled Jamie in his front hall, but it was probably better if I didn’t mention things like that. What Dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Jamie, and I had no doubt Dad meant things of that nature when he mentioned the things he could overlook. He had threatened every guy I’d ever dated to within an inch of his life over things as simple as chaste kisses and holding hands. I knew it had been hard on my father when TMZ and the other paparazzi and gossip sites had followed me around with the guys I’d dated in Hollywood. Every time I’d come home to Portland, I’d gotten an earful of it myself, Dad griping about everything from the clothes I wore in public to why I would allow any man to objectify me in the ways that some of them had. He didn’t even know the worst of it, and it was best if it stayed that way.

  The fact was, Jamie couldn’t be more different from those guys. He was kind and sweet and thoughtful. When he’d touched me a wh
ile earlier, and I’d put my hands on his flesh, that had been the most intimate we had ever been together. Years ago, he’d never done more than kiss me, and even then, his kisses had often been of the tender and chaste variety. Everything had been aboveboard and proper. He never would have touched me like that before, putting his hand on my breast. Even today, he’d been cautious about it, at least in comparison to me. If Blackbeard hadn’t interrupted us like he had, I might have attempted to take things a whole lot further.

  At least I knew Dad and I were on the same page when it came to Jamie now. I got up for a tissue, and I brought the box back with me, passing it over to Mom. She took the box, but Dad plucked out a couple of tissues for himself and settled me against his side, the way he used to hold me when I was a little girl. I tucked my feet up alongside him, resting my head on his shoulder.

  Dad’s shoulders were safe, too—like Jamie’s—but they weren’t home. Not anymore. They were still a comfort, though.

  “Are you mad at me?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head, still crying too hard to speak.

  Mom didn’t let him off so easy. “David Weber, I have been underestimating you. That’s the kind of move I would expect to come up with myself. Not you.” She wasn’t kidding about doing things like that. Mom tended to use a heavy hand when it came to getting people to do her bidding, always sticking her nose in other people’s business and convincing them she was right. She usually was, but that was beside the point.

  I was still stuck on the fact that my father was butting in to things that he would normally steer clear of. I dried my eyes and blew my nose, and then I inched back enough that I could look him directly in the eye. “Did you know anything about that house other than Jamie lived next door?”

  “Not a thing, until after I’d looked up the listing,” he said, grinning like a proud papa, despite the tears still making his eyes glisten. “The pictures online are nice. That home office could be fun. Did you like it?”

  “Loved it,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “I put in an offer for it.”