“I’ve got to go now.” Connor started to flip a U-turn.
“Are you kidding? It’s two a.m.!”
“If that fucking bastard lays a hand on her body, I’m going to kill him!”
“This isn’t the time for territorial bullshit, Connor. You’re going to have to do some groveling tomorrow, and you need to calm down.”
“Groveling?”
“Did you ever get around to telling her about your past?”
Connor groaned. “Tonight, at the station.”
“What did she say?”
His heart was ripping in two. “She accepted it, no questions asked.”
“Then I suggest you start getting your apology ready, mate.”
Chapter Twenty
“Jessa, baby, open your legs for me. I want you.”
The voice didn’t sound right. Where was Connor’s velvet rasp? And the scent was all wrong. Connor’s musky sandalwood smell had been replaced by a vaguely familiar soap with unpleasant memories attached to it.
Jessa’s eyes flew open. Will was dry humping her prone body. He had one knee wedged between her legs and was trying to scrape her pajama bottoms away from her waist.
“God, you’re gorgeous, doll. Have you lost weight?”
Did women actually go for those kinds of lines? Jessa vaguely wondered how desperate Ginny had been to buy Will’s particular brand of bullshit.
She struggled a little with his invasion. He was nowhere near Connor’s size but he was deadweight. Where Connor’s delicious weight was all muscle and control, Will flopped around like a fish.
The thought of Connor gave Jessa strength. She grunted and applied more force. “Get. Off!”
Will bounced, but actually mistook it for some bizarre kind of foreplay. He murmured nonsense and wetly nuzzled her neck. Jessa wriggled violently and managed to get one leg free. Raising it as high as she could under the circumstances, Jessa buried her heel in his thigh. The resulting charley horse made him squeal like a little girl and roll away from her.
“Oww! What the hell?” he whined as he held his leg and tried desperately to massage the cramp.
“Get off! Could I be clearer, Will?”
“You’re my wife! If I want to make love to you, I will!”
“And I can say no! It’s this neat little trick I learned while you were out screwing around!”
Will was stunned to silence.
“And by the way, I’m not your doll!”
God, if felt so good to voice an opinion once in awhile. Jessa swung her legs over the side of the bed and launched into the bathroom where she immersed herself in scalding hot water to wash the stench of Will away from her skin.
Connor had to forgive her. She couldn’t live like this anymore.
Jessa had played dead for the nineteen years she was married to Will. She’d gone through the motions of a productive life but she hadn’t lived. She hadn’t lived until Connor’s abrupt entrance into her life. Until he’d forced Jessa out of her narrow-minded comfort zone and into the sexual awareness she’d unknowingly longed for her whole life.
From the moment he’d forced her to admit that she loved to watch Alex and Isabel fuck to his blatant exploration of her body on top of the bar, Jessa had started waking up. And she wasn’t in any hurry to go back to her old life. Not without a fight.
Jessa wasn’t an idiot. She knew that Connor had loved a woman named Melanie who’d royally screwed him over. He was stubborn and tenacious and arrogant as sin. But somehow, Jessa was going to make him understand that her heart belonged to him and only him.
What if she couldn’t convince him, couldn’t make him listen?
Jessa rested her forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall and turned the water off. What would happen to her if Connor refused to believe her? What if he turned his back and walked away?
Living under an overpass would be better than Will’s luxury prison.
Jessa emerged from the bathroom ready to do battle. But the only one in the bedroom was Marissa.
“Mr. Will has gone down to breakfast, Ms. Jessa,” Marissa said, plumping a pillow on the bed.
Jessa went to the closet and dug around for the stash of clothes she’d left behind the day before. Before Anne’s visit when everything had seemed so cut and dried. They were some of the racier ensembles Morgan had put together. Jessa figured the racier the better. She was about to show Will one hundred and one reasons he didn’t want to be married to her.
Reason number one, Jessa refused to keep quiet anymore.
Jessa clomped across the marble floor in her combat boots. It was difficult to keep a straight face when Will caught sight of her from the dining room. The short pleated camouflage skirt barely covered the tops of her silk stockings. Little black bows peeked out with every step she took. Connor’s favorite black corset top was semi covered with a second skin olive green knit top that did nothing to hide the enormous amount of cleavage spilling over the top of the corset. The outfit was more daring than Jessa would’ve normally gone for. But at this point, more was good, and shock-and-awe was better.