Chapter Twenty-Seven
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Jake walked up the front walkway to his house. Tessa opened the front door before he reached the welcome mat.
“Hi,” she said softly.
“Hi,” he repeated as he stepped into the house, a bundle of pent-up nerves. He felt stretched tight and on the verge of snapping.
He and Tessa had not said one word to each other during the entire event, so he had no idea what she was feeling—but he knew that he was about to explode with a complicated mix of emotions that he could not even begin to unravel. He’d dropped off his date and drove straight here.
Watching her dancing with Levi was absolute torture, plain and simple. It had made an instinct well up in him to protect her, although he knew that was silly. Levi was one of his good friends and he knew, intellectually, that he posed no threat to Tessa. Still, his base instincts were not clued into his intellectual thought process, apparently. It also gave him a powerful urge to claim her as his possession, his territory.
He realized the idiocy of the jealousy he had felt because he had been watching her dance with Levi while he himself had been on the dance floor with another woman in his arms. The fact that he had been roped into being there with that woman and that she was the absolute last person he’d wanted to be dancing with notwithstanding—hell, the fact that he still didn’t even know that woman’s name—the truth was that he had been jealous of Tessa dancing with another man at the exact moment that he had been dancing with another woman.
Ridiculous.
That didn’t change the facts though. His emotions were running high and he felt as if they were about to boil over. He could feel the tension in the pit of his stomach. He usually only felt this kind of adrenaline buildup when he was about to go battle a fire. Hell, maybe that was actually a good analogy. His jealousy was like a metaphorical fire. The trick was that he needed to actually put it out or—just like the real thing—it would consume him.
Jealousy aside, he still did have his wits about him enough to realize that he didn’t want to say something to her that he would regret. Words can hurt, and sometimes words were something a person—or a relationship—could not come back from. He didn’t want to say anything to Tessa that would be impossible to come back from in the heat of anger—especially an anger he’d realized even in the midst of was unjustified. She had done absolutely nothing wrong.
He recognized that he needed to take a moment to cool off before engaging with her. He began to walk up the stairs towards his bedroom as he loosened his tie, not looking back at her. He knew that if he looked at her, it would all be over. He would not be able to keep himself from engaging, whether it was by touching her or talking to her, and he wasn’t in a frame of mind to be able to do either one of those things rationally at the moment.
“Where are you going?” He heard Tessa’s tight voice behind him.
“Shower,” was his clipped reply.
His stride didn’t stop until he reached his bathroom. He turned on the water in the shower, setting the temperature to as high as he could stand it. He then peeled off the layers of his formal clothing, dropping them onto the floor and not caring about the disarray or the condition of the clothes. He just needed to get his body underneath that steaming stream of water and let the physical sensation bring his head back down to earth. He instinctively knew that it was exactly what he needed to come back to himself. Even the simple act of breathing the steam the water had already generated as he’d undressed was beginning to calm him just a bit.
Jake climbed underneath the red-hot spray, letting the sting of the water penetrate his skin, breathing the steamy air deep into his lungs, and attempting to let it clear his mind.
Jake ducked his head under the stream coming from the showerhead, letting it drench his head and body. He did his best to lose himself in the pounding rhythm of the water hitting the ceramic floor and the pulsing needles where it landed on his skin.
He became so lost in the sound and sensation of the shower, in fact, that it was a complete surprise to him when he heard Tessa’s voice, less than an inch from his ear as she hissed, “Wow, you really like it hot, don’t you?”
Then, without giving him time to turn around, she pressed herself against his back. He felt the soft pillows of her breasts against the hard, rippling muscles of his back and felt the beads of her hard nipples as they slipped along his wet skin. She snaked her arms around his waist, sliding her hand down to grasp his engorged erection in her slick palm.
Every ounce of anger and jealousy dissolved and was replaced with desire and arousal. Tessa was magic like that. With her, he had absolutely no control. He saw her body, heard her voice, or felt her touch and sprang to life. Every single time, without fail.