Chapter FIVE
DARCY DIDN’T CARE if it was a bad idea. She didn’t care if everything blew up in her face tomorrow. All she cared about was getting Jake naked. Now.
The shirt was easy and she practically purred running her hands over his bare chest. Then she leaned forward and ran her tongue up his breastbone to his Adam’s apple. He moaned, one hand clenching in her hair while the other pushed down on her hip, grinding her against him.
“I’ve missed you,” she said before yanking off her shirt.
“I’ve been right here.”
“I’ve missed this. Us.” She undid the button on his jeans, loving the way his stomach muscles tensed when she brushed them with her knuckles.
Very slowly, she worked his zipper down and then she rose onto her knees to give him room to shove his jeans and boxer briefs down past his hips.
When she took him in hand, stroking him with the same slow deliberation he’d teased her with, he groaned and dropped his head back against the couch cushion.
“Don’t do that too long if you have plans that include you,” he warned.
“I’ve waited too long to let you have all the fun.”
She had to stand to step out of her clothes while Jake fished a condom out from under the couch cushion.
“Do you have those hidden around the apartment?”
He grinned and tore open the foil. “Yes, I do. Strategically placed for almost any opportunity.”
She laughed and straddled him again, this time relishing the heat of naked flesh. With her hands on his shoulders and their gazes locked, she lowered herself onto him. As she rocked her hips, slowly taking him all in, he fisted his hand in her hair and pulled her mouth to his.
His kiss was savage, devouring her as he cupped her breast, pinching her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. She squirmed, her hips circling, and he groaned.
“No more games,” he said in a low, rough voice. “From now on, I’ll touch you when I damn well feel like touching you.”
She threw back her head as he gripped her hips and forced her to ride him faster and harder. Her fingertips dug into his biceps as his hips jerked to meet her thrusts.
“Come for me, Darcy.”
The orgasm hit her hard, and when it was over, she collapsed against Jake. His chest heaved with every ragged breath and he tightened his arms around her.
“I needed that,” she whispered when she could talk again.
“Give me a couple of minutes. I’m not done with you yet.”
“I think the hideous fabric on this couch wore half the skin off my knees.”
His chuckle reverberated through her body. “How do you think my ass feels?”
“It was worth it.”
“Yes.” His hand stroked up and down her back, making her shiver. “But bed next.”
“My bed’s closer.”
It was another five minutes before they’d recovered enough to make it there and quite a bit longer before either of them slept.
* * *
KEVIN DIDN’T ARRIVE until almost noon. Usually Jake would be annoyed at having half the day blown waiting for him, but since he and Darcy didn’t roll out of bed and into the shower until ten o’clock, it was probably for the best. And they didn’t get out of the shower until the water started running cold.
That wasn’t the way Jake wanted Kevin to find out he’d done the one thing he’d specifically told him not to do.
“Everything looks great,” Kevin said after Jake and Darcy had given him the grand tour. “I knew you two would be good together.”
Jack managed to keep a straight face, but through the corner of his eye he saw Darcy take a deep and sudden interest in her shoelaces. “Everything’s right on track.”
“How about the Valentine’s Day thing?”
“I’ve got a rough draft of the ad upstairs,” Jake said. “We can look it over later.”
“There’s an ad?” Darcy jabbed him with her elbow. “You haven’t even told me what the thing is yet.”
“You’ll find out.”
“She’ll be back at the bar by then,” Kevin said. “Once the doors open, the front end will be the wait staff’s responsibility and Darcy can come home where she belongs. God knows, we need her. Courtney, the temp girl we hired to cover for you, is driving Paulie nuts. She flirts to drive up the tips, but guys start vying for attention and it goes downhill from there.”
Jake laughed with the other two, but he wasn’t feeling the humor. He didn’t want to think about Darcy leaving. He couldn’t imagine wandering around their ugly brown apartment alone. Not seeing her every day. He didn’t want to imagine it. “Unless she decides to move up here and manage the pub. She’s got a lot invested in it.”
“Yeah, right.” The two words were like a blade through his heart. “I couldn’t wait to move to the city after school, and this is even smaller than the town I grew up in.”
Jake wasn’t stupid. He’d known the time both of them were doing the same thing and working toward the same goal was limited. Eventually they’d have some decisions to make about how their relationship would go forward after Jasper’s Pub opened for business.
He hadn’t realized how closed she was to the possibility of staying where they were, and that was a problem. He really liked it. He liked the quiet and the snow and the people and he really liked the restaurant they’d built. A three-hour drive each way didn’t preclude them seeing each other, but it was enough to put a crimp in a relationship.
Kevin and Darcy were chatting about the wait staff applications and how she felt about Karen Sikes, who was probably going to be their senior server and manage the other wait staff.
Jake didn’t care. And he didn’t care about the menu and he tuned out the dinner conversation about why Darcy had chosen one coffee supplier over another. And he was aware Kevin kept shooting him questioning glances, but he didn’t care about that, either.
He cared about whether or not he and the woman he was pretty sure he was in love with had a future together.
The next morning Jake was up early, disentangling himself from Darcy’s arms and leaving her bedroom as quietly as he could. He dressed in layers and downed a cup of coffee before driving up the road to the motel to meet Kevin. Since the motel had a small café that served breakfast, they ate there before donning their snowmobile gear.
Kevin was pretty quiet, Jake thought as he pulled on the bibs and coat that belonged to Kevin’s brother, Joe. He’d be riding Joe’s snowmobile, too, since Jake’s was still in Connecticut. Maybe the motel mattress had sucked and he’d had a rough night. Maybe the stress was getting to him. Or maybe he was just missing his wife and daughter.
They’d put on almost fifty miles before Kevin parked on the side of the trail and took his helmet off. Jake did the same, then rummaged through the tank bag for one of the candy bars he’d stashed there.
“I asked you not to get involved with whoever I sent up here,” Kevin said without introduction. “That was the only thing I asked of you.”
There was no sense in denying it. One, he wouldn’t lie about it and, two, if Kevin picked up on it, they weren’t doing a very good job of hiding it. “Remember the pretty, fun and wicked-smart woman I spent the night with before I came up here?”
“Yeah.”
“That was Darcy.”
“No.” Kevin threw up his hands. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?”
“We didn’t know. Her number got wet and I couldn’t read it to call her. I tried everything I could think of to get her number and couldn’t. Drove around and couldn’t find her place. And you always call me J.P., so...I don’t know. And we’d talked about you sending somebody up to help, but you weren’t sure who and you must never have told me her name because all of a sudden, there she was.”
“How serious is it? She’s supposed to come home soon.”
“And it sounds like she’s not only going to, but she’s looking forward to it, so don’t worry about it.” Jake heard the edge in his voice, but it was too late to temper it.
“You don’t want her to leave.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then make her want to stay.”
Jake laughed, his breath hanging in the cold air. “That easy, huh?”
“No, it’s not easy. It took me a year to convince Beth I was the guy for her. A damn year. It’s not easy at all.”
“Maybe we can do the long-distance thing until the pub’s in the black enough to hire a manager.”
Kevin shook his head. “I hate to say it, but that might be a while.”
“I know. And I want to run it myself. And I want to wake up with Darcy every day. I want it all.”
“If it’s meant to be, you’ll find a way.” When Jake looked sideways at him, Kevin winced. “Yeah, that might have been stitched on my grandmother’s pillow.”
“Or in a fortune cookie.”
“Just don’t screw things up with her before the pub opens or I’ll have to kill you.”
“You’re a good friend, Kevin. Really.”
“You know it, J.P. Let’s rack up some miles.”
* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, Darcy was curled up on the couch, going over the final menu proofs, when the phone rang. Because they didn’t have internet, she’d had to drive forty minutes to the “local” printer they’d chosen and back in the snow to get the PDF files, and she was tempted to let the answering machine pick up. She’d just started to relax.
But odds were it was Jake, Kevin or a contractor calling, so she threw back the lap blanket and went to answer it.
“Hey, Darcy.”
It was Jake, and as always, her heart did a little happy dance at the sound of his voice. She purposely kept her voice all-business, though. “What’s up?”
“I’m at the supply house and I need the number for the guys who installed the walk-in freezer. The business card is...somewhere in the apartment. Can you find it and call me right back? It’s urgent.”
“You’re sure it’s not in your wallet? Or in your truck?” He liked to tuck business cards in the strap on the back of the sun visor.
“I double-checked both before I called. It’s probably on the counter. Or the coffee table. Probably. It’s there somewhere.”
“I’ll call you right back.” Maybe. Somewhere wasn’t a lot to go on.
There was no business card on the counter. Nor on the coffee table. It wasn’t in the spot he usually threw his keys or near the coffee mug where he tossed the coins he accumulated in his pockets. Maybe it was on his nightstand or dresser.
She hadn’t been in his bedroom. Maybe it was a subconscious effort at separation, but they’d always kept their doors closed. He’d been in hers, of course, but she still hadn’t been in his.
He’d said it was urgent, though, so she turned the handle and poked her head in.
The room was pretty much identical to hers. Beige. Brown. Blah. His bed was bigger and there was a straight-back chair next to his dresser, but that was it. He was surprisingly neat for a guy, and she didn’t have to wade through balled-up socks to get to the pile of scrap paper she saw on his dresser.
He might not throw his dirty socks on the floor, but the man would jot a note on just about anything. A reminder to check sprinkler system laws on the back of a gas receipt. A guy’s name and a number on the corner of a napkin. The deeper in the debris pile she sifted, the further back in renovations the notes referred to.
One crumpled piece of paper had the intriguing title of “Google searches.” Under that, in his slanted chicken scratch: trivia Concord, NH; bars trivia Concord, NH; Concord Tuesday trivia. In the margins were bar names and phone numbers. All had a line scratched through them. The next sheet of paper had the name of an auto garage. Then the Concord library’s number. And at the bottom of the pile was a small piece of paper that had obviously gotten very, very wet. She could make out the pattern across the top as that of her fridge memo pad, but her name and number were just a black smudge bleeding out into nothing.
He hadn’t been playing her, after all. He’d tried to call her. The evidence that he’d invested a lot of time and energy into trying to get in touch with her was spread across the dresser, and she felt the sting of tears in her eyes. Why hadn’t she listened to her heart instead of her stupid head and believed him when he told her that? Repeatedly.
It didn’t matter now. They’d moved past that, but seeing how hard he’d tried to find her after just one night together squeezed her heart.
She loved him. Maybe it had been love at first sight or maybe it had crept up on her, but she knew it was real and she knew it was twisting her up inside. She couldn’t imagine what life would be like without him—other than painful—but it was almost time to go home.
She had a home. And she missed Jasper’s Bar & Grille and Paulie and everybody else. Her friends. Movie theaters. Takeout.
Jake loved the life he was making here. She could see it in him. He thrived on it and there was more than pride in his eyes when he stood in the pub and looked at what they’d done together. There was affection. He’d made this his home.
His home and her home were three hours apart as the highway rolled, but worlds apart in reality. And she wasn’t quite sure how he felt about her. She knew he cared about her and enjoyed the sex and her company, but it would take the forever kind of love to work through the obstacles in their path. Anything less would crumble under the weight of logistics and distance and absences.
* * *
A WEEK LATER, Jake looked over the dining room of Jasper’s Pub and felt the warm glow of satisfaction. It was finally opening night and they weren’t packed, but there had been a steady enough stream of diners to call it good.
They’d done the advertising and radio spots. Kevin had handled getting the website and Facebook page up. Now it was up to word of mouth and, judging by the comments he’d overheard here and there over the course of the night, it would all be good.
Karen kept the wait staff on their toes while keeping a perfect balance with the customers. Her natural warmth and friendliness was a draw, but she didn’t cross over into too casual and chummy with them. Every dish was coming through the window perfectly cooked to order, and there was nothing for him to do but soak it in.
He spotted Darcy, who was acting as an unofficial hostess, coming toward him and smiled. She was wearing the same mulberry-colored Jasper’s Pub polo as the wait staff, which he thought was a lot nicer than the ones they wore at Jasper’s Bar & Grille.
“It’s going even better than I’d hoped,” she said a little breathlessly, keeping her voice low.
“And every single table has ordered at least one Jasper’s Big-Ass Steak.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ve not giving you a hundred dollars.”
“I’m sure we can come to some other kind of arrangement.”
“Stop it. We’re working.” But she gave him a look that assured him they’d come to terms. “I’m really proud of this place.”
“You should be.” He hooked his pinky finger with hers, keeping their hands behind her hip to hide the contact from the dining room. “It was a lot of work and a lot of decision-making and you pulled it off.”
“We pulled it off.”
He liked the sound of that. Hopefully that we would be long term. “I think we’ll be ready for Valentine’s Day.”
They were running meal specials for couples, with packages that included dessert and a bottle of champagne. All the lodging establishments in the area had coupons on display, offering discounts at the pub. Kevin had launched an advertising blitz that ensured that practically every guy in New England who had a snowmobile knew Jasper’s Pub was the place to be on Valentine’s Day.
There would be flowers and a few special treats not available on the regular menu. They’d considered having a live band, but not only was space an issue, but sometimes people felt awkward having conversations while a band was playing, and that wasn’t the atmosphere they were going for.
He also had a diamond ring in his sock drawer. He’d bought it two days ago, when Darcy thought he’d had to go down to the city to handle a fictional problem with their liquor license.
“I hope I’ll be able to get back for that,” Darcy said, snapping him out of his happy thoughts.
“You have to come back. It’s what you’ve been working for.”
“No, tonight’s what I was working for. Everything’s set. Everybody knows their jobs. From here on out, it’s you and Karen.”
The glow dissipated and he stepped around her. “Come out back with me.”
She followed him through the kitchen and into his office. He took a deep breath as he closed the door, trying to figure out what he needed to say not to ruin everything.
“What’s the matter with you?”
He turned to face her, leaning back against the door. “That’s not the first time you’ve made reference to maybe not being here for Valentine’s Day. I don’t get it. Why would you work so hard and then not be here with me?”
“I have to go home. I’ve been gone over a month and I have a life there. I have a job and I have bills that need to be paid and plants to water. I have no idea how crazy it’s going to be.”
“What about us?” He kept his voice low, but the words were a deafening shout in his head. “Is there going to be time for me anywhere in there?”
He saw the temper rising in her face. “What is it you want from me? I’ve been here over a month and when I got home I’ll barely be unpacked before I have to leave everything again and come back. I’ll try. That’s all I can do.”
It wasn’t enough. He straightened up and opened the door. “All right. Maybe I’ll see you then. Maybe not.”
“What did you expect?”
“I expected you to come spend Valentine’s Day with me. Then I expected to take a trip south to see you. I expected we’d figure it out as we went along. And I expected to be more of a priority than watering your f*cking flowers.”
“Jake.”
“It’s been a pleasure working with you. Thanks for the help.”