But even as he pounds into me—even as euphoria spins me higher and higher and I know that this is a coming together that we so desperately need—there’s something counterbalancing it all. Drawing me down. “Jackson.” I gasp out his name. “Jackson, stop. I have to—oh, god.”
He has shifted, and now he pushes me back onto the table. As he does, he lifts one of my knees up toward my waist so that I am even more open to him and he is even deeper inside me. He bends over me, shifting the angle from which he is entering me, so that his pelvis rubs my clit with each thrust, leaving his hand free to cup my ass and hold me steady as he drives into me over and over, so hard and so fast that whatever foolish notion I’d had of making him stop is very soundly knocked out of my head.
“Come with me,” he growls. “Dammit, Sylvia, I want you to come with me.”
I arch up, one hand clawing his shoulder as I clutch the edge of the drafting table with the other. He pounds into me, his body going rigid with release. But it is his face, open and savage with undisguised need, that pushes me over the edge, and I cry out as the orgasm crashes over me again and again like a battering sea in a storm.
I am still breathing hard, still trembling from the aftershocks of passion, when he falls on top of me, his face buried against my breasts. I hook my legs more tightly around his waist so that I don’t slide down, but the truth is that I want to move. I am antsy now. Guilty.
I’ve taken this moment—this pleasure—under false pretenses, and I don’t know what to do now or how to make it right. All I know is that I have to move. That I have to get him off me, because our position is too intimate and far too fragile to support the weight of my guilt.
“Jackson.” I lift his head. “I need to get up. My back.” The lie comes easily, and I feel another twinge of guilt when his brow furrows with concern and he helps me off the table, and even tugs my tattered shirt closed for me as I yank my skirt back down.
“I’m glad you didn’t give up,” he says. “I’m glad you came looking for me.”
“I—” The words seem to catch in my throat, but I have to go on. I have to get this out. “There’s something I should have told you before. I should have told you the moment I found you. But I didn’t,” I say as I look down at the floor. “I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”
I’m rambling. And as I rattle off these meaningless words, I realize that Jackson and I are in the same predicament. I should have delivered the blow at the first opportunity. And he should have done the same with his revelation about Damien.
“What?” He takes my chin and gently tilts my face to his so that I must either look at him or deliberately avoid his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Damien,” I say, then watch as his expression hardens in front of me. “And it’s the resort.”
He says nothing, and for some reason that makes it harder. But I have to do this and so I press on, taking a deep breath for courage, and then just blurting it out. “You’re fired, Jackson. Damien said I have to fire you from the project.”
The bastard.
The goddamn, fucking, holier-than-thou bastard.
“Fired?” Jackson repeated, even though he knew damn good and well that he’d heard her exactly right. “And, what? The great Damien Stark didn’t have the balls to do it himself? He has to put that on you?”
She took a step toward him, her hand outstretched. “Jackson, he—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t even want to hear it.”
For Jackson’s whole life, everything that Damien wanted, Damien got. And more often than not, he got it at Jackson’s expense.
Damien wanted a father? Fine, he took Jackson’s.
He wanted time? No problem there, either. Because Jeremiah sure as hell couldn’t stick around when little Damien needed him.
Opportunity? Why not just play grab-ass with whatever came along, just like he did in Atlanta, and why the hell should he give a flying fuck if his underhanded manipulations screwed over anyone else?
And now Damien wanted him gone, because god forbid Jackson’s revelation caused him even the slightest bit of inconvenience.