fire in her all over again. And she knew she’d been wrong. Her passion for him hadn’t been satisfied. Not really. Not completely.
I will never get enough of this man, she realized with a sense of wonder.
He remained there, looking into her eyes, his hard features softened with feeling. And she realized something else.
He wasn’t ready to pull away, either.
“This is crazy,” he said again, his voice hoarse with feeling.
“I know,” she whispered, sheer joy soaring through her. He wasn’t talking about what they’d just done or the depth of the attraction that had led to it. He meant this, this indefinable connection between them that went beyond simple desire, that she now knew he felt, too. The sense that they were bound together. The urge to hold on and not let go.
A slow grin curved the corner of his lips. Of astonishment. Of happiness. Of acceptance.
And he lowered his mouth to hers once more.
Chapter Thirteen
“We should get dressed.”
Lying next to him on the rug beside his desk, Jillian sighed against his chest. “I know.”
She made no move to do so. Neither did Adam. It felt too good lying there, touching her, feeling her body against his, basking in the feeling of what they’d just shared. He’d known they should get dressed when he’d pushed away from her on the desk, had almost said it then. Instead he’d found himself lowering her to the floor, stretching out beside her, kissing her again, unable to let her go. Just as he couldn’t now.
She ran her hand idly over his chest, the sensation of her soft fingers distracting him anew.
They lay in a comfortable silence for a few moments before Jillian finally spoke. “Meredith told me you blame yourself for what happened with her husband,” she said softly.
Familiar anger swelled in his gut at the thought of that bastard, killing some of the pleasure of her nearness. “For good reason. I should have realized what was happening. We always spoke at least every week. Suddenly she stopped calling or messaging. I was so caught up in work I didn’t even notice. I went weeks, even a couple months, without talking to my sister without even realizing it. That’s on me.” He’d been traveling so much, working a minimum of sixty hours a week, and for what? He’d turned into his father—something he’d never wanted to do—and only realized it when it was too late.
“Did you have any reason to believe her husband was capable of that before then?”
“I never liked him. He was too cocky, too full of himself. I thought he was all wrong for her. I just didn’t recognize the meanness beneath the arrogance. That part he hid well, at least from the outside.” Meredith was the one who’d had to deal with it firsthand. Alone. “He seemed to make her happy, so I tried to put my misgivings aside and didn’t say anything.” But he should have stayed on his guard, should have still paid attention.
“But you did help her. You managed to get her out of there.”
“Only after he broke her jaw.” The memory sent a hard lump to his throat, the horror of it still overwhelming his anger. “I called and tried to speak with her. The bastard tried putting me off, made excuses, and I immediately knew something was wrong. I took the first flight to Chicago—that’s where they lived—and that’s when I found out she was in the hospital. One of the neighbors had to tell me, a lady who drove her to the hospital when she couldn’t. She—” He swallowed hard. “It wasn’t just her jaw. He gave her a black eye and she had bruises all over. He damn near broke her shoulder—” The words caught, the images still vivid in his memory more than a year later. Just as it did every time he remembered, the guilt struck, raw and agonizing, square in his gut.
Jillian reached out and took his hand, squeezing tightly. From the way her body had tensed, he could tell she was picturing it. “Why wasn’t he in jail?”
“She refused to say anything to the police or social workers when they tried to talk to her. Everyone knew who had done it—her neighbor told me it wasn’t the first time, though it was the worst—but without Meredith’s cooperation they couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Why didn’t she want to tell them what happened?”
Because that was Meredith. Meredith, his shy, quiet little sister, who always tried to make people happy, who