The Darkest Embrace Read online

  She cried out again, louder this time, and gave up to the pleasure overtaking her. She shook with it. Twisting, she found his mouth, the darting sweetness of his tongue. She breathed in as he breathed out, and she took him deep inside her in every place she could.

  Sated and shivering with delicious aftershocks, Jessie became aware of the roughness of the couch cushions on her bare skin, how perilously close to the edge she was hovering, and worse, of a sudden chill that raised gooseflesh all over her. They were both a little clumsy in the aftermath, Max doing his best to make sure she didn’t roll off and hit the floor, Jessie being careful not to nudge or knee him in soft places. What might have been awkward only made her laugh, though, because everything with Max always felt so natural, even this.

  She stood to look for her pajama pants, which she must have kicked farther than she’d thought. Max rolled upright on the couch, his sweatpants tangled around his ankles. It was not an idyllic picture like in the movies, and no romance novel she’d ever read had ever described the postcoital dance of trying to get dressed and cleaned up at the same time. It was not a movie or a book, Jessie thought as she found her pants and started pulling them on, this was life. And it was better than fiction.

  “It’s so cold all of a sudden,” she said, just as Max shot off the couch and pushed her to the side so fiercely that she stumbled.

  The pain in her ankle flared again, another sharp pain from the edge of the coffee table biting into her calf compounding it. Jessie pinwheeled her arms, confused. As she caught her balance, she realized Max wasn’t shoving her out of the way; he was pushing her behind him to protect her.

  The front door was wide open, the cold night wind and rain blowing inside.

  * * *

  “Maybe the wind blew it open,” Jessie said from behind him.

  “It wasn’t the wind. I saw her.” Max checked the front door lock again, but couldn’t shake the chill. “It was my ex, Jessie. I know it.”

  Jessie poured them both mugs of hot cocoa she’d made on the stove. She added a plate of cheese and crackers Max had imagined them eating on a picnic blanket with a bottle of wine, not at three in the morning off chipped plates while a storm raged outside. He wasn’t hungry, but he sat when she gestured and sipped from the warm mug.

  Jessie stood behind him, her arms around him and her cheek pressed to his. She said nothing, which he appreciated. He could feel the rise and fall of her breath against his back.

  “All I wanted,” Max said miserably, “was to have this great weekend away with you.”

  She nuzzled him. “Parts of this have been a great weekend, honey.”

  The pet name warmed him more than the hot cocoa. Jessie had always been affectionate with him. Kind since the beginning. Open, that’s how he thought of her. A hugger, a kisser, the kind of woman who’d squeeze your shoulder if she thought you needed a little boost.

  He turned his face to kiss her. “Stalked by some weird thing and my batshit crazy ex? Doesn’t sound so great.”

  Jessie’s low laugh tickled his ear. “How could it be her, all the way out here?”

  “It’s her,” he said grimly. “And I wouldn’t put it past her to have done all of it.”

  Jessie kissed his cheek and sat at the table, still close enough to nudge his knee with hers. “You think she’s the one who slashed the tires?”

  “She’s done it before.”

  “Wow.” Jessie frowned and pulled her mug closer, warming her hands on it.

  Max swallowed the sour taste of memories. “Her name’s Patrice. She was intense. I liked it at first, but after a while, she got out of hand. I know she had issues that had nothing to do with me, but I didn’t when I got together with her. I shouldn’t have slept with her because that escalated everything.”

  Jessie didn’t make a joke of anything, didn’t laugh. Her dark eyes wide with sympathy, she covered his hand with hers and linked fingers with him. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles, one by one, before pressing his palm to her mouth. She closed his fingers over the kiss and smiled at him.

  “You’re so beautiful,” Max blurted. “You know that?”

  Jessie pretended to preen. “Oh, yeah, I know.”

  He kissed her mouth, holding her close, breathing in her scent and taking her warmth. He’d kept everything inside him locked up for so long he wasn’t sure he could let go. But he knew that if he didn’t tell Jessie everything about what had happened with Patty, he’d never be able to.

  “It could’ve been worse,” he said. “The thing with my sister. The pictures were blurry, and we found them and got them taken down really fast. What made it so bad wasn’t that she’d conned Tina into taking pictures like that and sending them to a stranger, but that Patty had taken the pictures herself. She’d stalked her, peeking through the windows, following her into the changing room at the lake when Tina went swimming with her friends. That sort of thing. She tried to make my sister’s life hell because I broke up with her.”

  Jessie’s lip curled, but she kept her hand linked tight with his. “What a bitch.”

  “Yeah. I had no idea. I mean, I knew she was a little...off, but not like that.”

  “When did she try to run you over with her car?”

  “The day I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore. I didn’t break up with her the best way, I know that.” Max swallowed another rush of bitterness at the admission. “I could’ve been nicer about it.”

  “Oh, Max, there’s no good way to break up with someone.” Jessie kissed his hand again, pressing it to her smile as she shook her head. “And I can’t imagine you ever being anything but nice.”

  “I told her I thought she needed to get help. And I did think that,” Max added. “I mean, I really thought she needed like, serious psychiatric care. I should’ve helped her. Taken her to a doctor maybe....”

  “Did she want to go?”

  Startled by the question, he blinked. “What?”

  “Did she want to go for help?”

  “No. She said she was fine, that I was the crazy one. I hadn’t called her crazy, not to her face,” Max said. Shame heated him at the memory. “But she might’ve overheard me saying it about her.”

  Jessie nodded but said nothing.

  “That’s when she tried to run me over with the car. I jumped out of the way in plenty of time. There wasn’t a chance she could actually have hit me.”

  “But she tried.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, she tried.”

  “After I found out what she’d done to my sister, I went to her house to confront her. She lived in this big old place that had been her grandparents’ house. Even when we were together, I never went over there. She always came to my place. Or—” he paused, remembering, feeling sick “—hotels. Places like that.”

  He sneaked a peek at Jessie’s face, expecting her to look angry or annoyed or at the very least, carefully neutral in the way he’d learned over the years usually meant a woman was actually pissed-off. She only looked concerned. Still, he hated saying this to her. Hated having her know.

  “I’d never been inside, but once I got in, I could see why she’d never invited me over. It was trashed on the inside. Papers and garbage everywhere, furniture overturned. It stunk like cat pee, though I didn’t see any cats, and she’d never mentioned having any pets. I was pissed off, and I went into the kitchen, calling out her name, trying to get her to come out. That’s when she hit me with the frying pan.”

  “Oh. Ouch. Oh, God, your poor face.” She touched it gently as though that could take away the pain.

  “She missed, mostly.” Somehow, Max found a grin for her. “Glanced off my head and hit my shoulder and back. I was lucky. She definitely might’ve killed me. Good thing she had such bad aim.”

  “Good thing.” Jessie kissed him soft