Belle stared at his beautiful face as her mind finally caught on.
She knew.
She knew.
She knew anyone who would understand the hidden meaning behind her grandmother’s paintings was someone who would never hurt her.
Someone she could trust.
Someone who would keep her safe.
And she also knew what she had to do.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t terrified out of her skull.
But that didn’t stop her from walking to the oven, turning off the stove, flipping off the grill and then walking to Jack.
She again took his hand and guided him down the two steps to the landing then up the two steps to the hall.
“Belle,” he said behind her but she turned right to her bedroom.
She dropped his hand just inside the door but walked in further and turned.
Looking in his eyes, she flipped off her shoes and crossed her trembling hands in front of her, grabbing her dress.
“Belle,” he said her name again. It was deeper this time, husky and rough but she didn’t see him because she was pulling her dress up over her head and then off.
She’d barely got her arms free, she definitely didn’t get a chance to focus on him but he was right there, she felt his hands at her bottom and she was going up.
She dropped her dress, wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips and she was turned, moved and then falling backward to the bed.
It started wild and out-of-control and neither Belle nor Jack did anything to stop it.
He had her out of her underwear and him out of his clothes before she could whisper, “oh” (which she did).
Then she pushed him to his back, her mouth on him, lips brushing, tongue tasting, her body igniting as she worked her way down his broad chest, over his planes and angles of his belly and lower, her hand moving to wrap around his hardness, her thumb lightly rolling over the tip.
That was all she got.
He flipped her to the back and did the same thing down her chest and rounded belly, until his mouth was between her legs.
At the feel of him there, she arched her back and neck as he lifted her calves over his shoulders.
Calvin never did this to her. He hated it. He expected her to put her mouth on him but he didn’t return the favour.
Jack was good at it. So good she was writhing under his mouth, noises escaping her lips, her hands deep in his hair holding him to her and she felt it coming and it was going to be beautiful.
Then his mouth disappeared, Belle gave a soft cry of protest but his body came over her. He didn’t rest his weight on her but rolled them, her on top. Without delay, he jerked her knees to straddling him. He shifted his hand quickly between them and sat up, taking Belle with him, filling her as they went.
Her head dropped back with the delicious feel of him deep inside and her arms wrapped around his shoulders and held on tight.
His hands went to her hips and she tipped her head to look at him.
“I thought I remembered,” she whispered, her mouth against his. “How good you felt.”
“Belle,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, a hand sliding into her hair and fisting in it with gentle force.
“I thought I remembered,” she repeated, beginning to glide up. “But I didn’t remember you feeling half this good.”
She didn’t get the chance to slide back down.
She found herself on her back, Jack up on his forearms, his hips pounding into hers.
She loved it, every nanosecond of it.
Of which there weren’t many.
It built and exploded with raw, exquisite intensity.
So much, she almost missed his thrusts deepening and his breath catching against her neck before he sighed.
She took his weight for only a moment before he pulled her legs up his sides, hands behind her knees and, keeping them connected, he rolled to his back.
She rested her forehead against his jaw, trying to get her breathing back to normal. Jack stroked her spine as she felt his erratic breaths with the rise and fall of his chest.
Okay, so, she’d just taken a risk, she’d jumped in with both feet and found something hugely rich and rewarding.
Then her mind, never her best friend, took her back to the morning after their first night together, reminding her of what she said.
Then it reminded her how Jack responded. How he’d been stunned and insulted when he realised she actually believed he’d used her as a prize in a competition with his brother.
And she had believed that.
And she’d walked away and not looked back.
Then she’d gotten pregnant and didn’t intend to tell him.
Then she again threw his supposed behaviour with his brother in his face in the bathroom after she’d had All Freaking Day Long Sickness and again in the stables.
She’d done all this when (not including the time he was angry at her when she first came back into his life), he’d never been anything but that Jack of the first night.
Okay, maybe he had been something else but that something was his being much more of the Jack of that first night.
She was the idiot to end all idiots.
And she’d been right when she wasn’t able to non-think that evening on the cliffs.
What she’d done wasn’t rude.
It was unforgiveable.
“Oh my God,” she whispered right before her body froze solid.
Instantly, he stopped stroking her spine and his arms wrapped tight around her.
“Belle,” he called.
“Oh my God,” she repeated, pushing away from him, causing their bodies to disconnect but he held even tighter.
“Belle,” he called again, one arm moving up so he could wrap a hand in her hair.
“Let me go, Jack,” she whispered, her voice sounding ugly with fear.
He tugged gently at her hair but she resisted, keeping her forehead pressed against his jaw and pushing at his chest.
“Belle, damn it, look at me,” he bit out and when she didn’t, he rolled again so he was on top. She took a goodly amount of his weight at her hips, his legs tangled with hers but he twisted his torso away and rested his weight into his forearm in the mattress at her side.
His other hand came to her jaw and he turned her to face him.
When her eyes met his, he looked a mixture of concerned and irritated and asked in a curt voice, “What’s in that head of yours, poppet?”
She studied at him for a moment then two, all she could think was that he was criminally handsome even looking concerned and irritated.
Then she burst into tears.
She covered her face with her hands and tried to roll in the opposite direction but he caught her and pulled her to him, positioning them both on their sides, his legs still tangled heavily with hers, his arms tight around her.
“Jesus, Belle, what is it?”
She shook her head and his fingers wrapped around her wrist and pulled one of her hands from her face.
“Belle, talk to me,” he demanded.
She moved her other hand and looked at him, tears still streaming from her eyes.
“That morning after I met you, I walked down the hall to my room thanking my lucky stars that I met you,” she announced, her voice quiet and trembling and she felt his body go still but she ignored it. “Then I… then things…” she hesitated, “then everything happened. And I said the most awful things to you.” A sob surged up and tore free and she shoved her face in his chest. “And I just realised I was wrong. I was wrong!” she cried and then pressed her hand into his chest, not to get away but to let go some of the feeling she felt.
She tilted her head back and shouted, “I spit on my stars!”
Then she burst into another wave of tears and shoved her face in his chest again, the sobs rocking her body.
Jack let her cry, stroking her back with one hand, the other one gliding through her hair then up, his fingers sifti
ng in only to glide back through.
She got control of her tears (not much, but some) and tilted her head back again. “I’m not crazy and this isn’t hormones,” she declared hotly.
“All right, love,” he replied in a gentle voice.
“I’m just not good at being rude,” she explained. “Rude is the worst. And what I did was beyond rude. It was unforgiveable!” she ended on a near shout.
Jack stopped stroking her back and hair and leaned into her so she was on her back again and he was looming over her, legs still tangled with hers.
“I think that’s for me to decide, don’t you?” he asked and her body jerked.
She stopped crying and stammered, “Wh… what?”
“It’s for me to decide if what you did was unforgiveable,” he repeated, his hand coming to her face and gently wiping away her tears.
He was right.
“You’re right,” she whispered and held her breath.
He must have noticed it because his eyes dropped to her mouth and they were smiling. “Poppet, I forgave you a long time ago. Around the time I saw you resting your forehead against a toilet seat, talking to our child.”
“That’s not very romantic,” she blurted then her eyes grew wide at yet another display of her rampant rudeness and he burst out laughing.
He shoved his face in her neck and his arms went around her before he rolled them to their sides again and looked at her.
“Okay, how about when I caught you pushing Baron out of your room one of the first nights after you moved into The Point?” he suggested then went on. “Or when I saw you sleeping in the hayloft. Or when I kissed you later. Or when you tried to stop me from fighting Miles. Or when you kissed me in bed the next morning. Or, just after, when you got out of bed and tried to make rules. Do you want me to go on?” he asked.
Belle shook her head, though she kind of did but her heart had stopped beating on his first suggestion and she was having severe difficulty breathing. If he went on she might accidentally suffocate herself and then where would they be?
His face got closer. “Even if I hadn’t forgiven you, time and again, I would have done it when you told me you thanked your lucky stars when you met me.”
“Jack –” she began but her cut her off and he was using his low and rumbly voice when he did it.
“We’re not speaking of this again. It happened. It’s over. This is us moving on.”
That was nice, really nice, but Belle felt the need to apologise.
So she said again, “Jack –”
He interrupted again, “Am I understood?”
“Jack –” she tried again.
His face got even closer. “Belle, tell me I’m understood.”
“You’re understood,” she whispered and then stubbornly she went on. “But I want to say I’m sorry.”
She caught his smile right before his hand cupped the back of her head and pressed her face to his throat, his other arm holding her tight.
“My love, you already said it when you guided me into this room,” he told the top of her head and then he kissed her there.
Finally her body relaxed into his and she wrapped her arms around him.
“I need to tell you something else,” she said to his throat and she felt Jack’s large frame get tight.
“Belle, I’m feeling pretty fucking good right now, don’t piss me off.”
She thought about his warning then took another risk.
“It’s just that, I think you should know… I feel safe with you.”
His tight frame grew statue-still.
Then it relaxed.
Then he murmured, nearly inaudibly, “It’s the gift that keeps giving.”
She thought she heard what he said but to be certain, she tilted her head back to look at him and asked, “What?”
He looked down at her. “Nothing, poppet.”
She decided to let it go, got up on an elbow and looked down at him. Then she tilted her head in enquiry and watched his face grow soft when she did it.
“Do you want dinner?” she queried.
“Not right now,” he replied, rolling to his back and taking her with him, his hands going into the hair on either side of her head and holding it back. “Right now,” he started, bringing her face closer and when her lips were against his, he went on, “we’re going to work up an appetite.”
And they did.
By the time they ate, they were ravenous.
And it was safe to say even well before he ate the delicious steak Belle cooked for him, Jack Bennett didn’t know what hit him.
But he liked it.
Chapter Fourteen
Breakfast at the Cottage
Calvin
Calvin Cole looked at the picture of his ex-wife and James Bennett in the paper and not for the first time in the past week he clenched his teeth.
They were casually strolling, his arm curling her upper body to his, her arm wrapped around his stomach. She had her head tipped back and his head was bent. Calvin could see a grin on Bennett’s lips even as their mouths were touching.
They were kissing for all the fucking world to see.
And Calvin knew that James Bennett was fucking Belle.
The bastard was fucking his wife.
His eyes dropped to the caption and Calvin read it for the twentieth time, James and Belle, still loved up in St. Ives.
“That fucking bitch,” Calvin snapped and threw the paper on the table.
His new wife walked in and he looked at her.
She was blonde, it was a brassier blond than Belle’s but it would do. She was also thinner than Belle which irked him. And she had faded blue eyes, not at all the arresting grey of his first wife’s.
She didn’t dress as well as Belle either.
Nowhere near as well.
She put a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast in front of him.
“I hope that’s okay,” she said quietly, like a fucking mouse, placing her own plate on her mat and sitting beside him.
Calvin didn’t answer. His mind was occupied with that picture, burnt on his brain. Like the one of them fucking kissing in Bennett’s fucking Jag, of all fucking cars. Calvin had always wanted to own a Jag but never had the money. Or the one where Bennett was holding Belle’s face and fucking kissing Belle’s forehead.
Angrily, he forked up some scrambled eggs and put them in his mouth.
He nearly spat them out.
His eyes moved to his wife as he chewed and swallowed.
“There’s no garlic in these,” he said with soft menace and watched her shoulders curl toward to her ears.
He fucking hated it when she did that.
“Yesterday, you told me you wanted pancakes, Calvin. I made sure we had what we needed for pancakes. You changed your mind this morning and we didn’t have garlic,” she whispered.
“Did you at least put cheese in the goddamn eggs?” he went on and she swallowed.
“We only had parmesan but it was fresh parmesan,” she whispered again and his hand flashed out, quick as lightning, the backs of his knuckles striking with perfect, practiced aim on her cheekbone.
She cried out and put her hand to her cheek as he leaned threateningly toward her.
“Go to the fucking store and get some fucking fresh garlic and some fucking cheddar cheese and make the fucking eggs properly,” he clipped and then picked up his plate and threw it across the room where it, and all the food on it, exploded against the wall.
She got up, mumbling, “I’ll be right back.”
She tried to escape but he caught her hand and snapped, “Belle made my eggs perfectly. I didn’t even know good eggs until Belle fucking made them.”
His wife had heard this before.
Often.
Especially in the last several months when Calvin’s precious Belle had become The Tiny Dynamo.
He threw her hand away from him and she ran from the room.
Calvin picked up the paper and opened it to
the picture of Belle and Bennett.
And he sat and waited for his eggs.
* * * * *
Belle
Belle woke in the warm curve of Jack’s body.
He was in her bed with her in her cottage.
Other than the fact that she missed the dogs, she liked this.
She liked it a lot.
Maybe she could lure Jack to her cottage for dinner again.
Maybe that night.
She lay there waiting for him to wake and when he didn’t she carefully slid out from under his arm and went to her dresser. She put on a pair of undies and slid on a pair of black yoga pants and a white, shelf-bra camisole.
She went to her linen closet and grabbed her extra supplies. Belle always worried about running out of anything just in case of freak blizzards and the like. Not that this had ever happened, but it could. So she always kept extra stocks of everything.
She got two new toothbrushes, her extra cleanser and moisturiser and a new box of toothpaste.
Then she went to the bathroom, did her morning business, pulling her hair away from her face with a wide, black band.
Then she went to the kitchen.
As she normally did for the last however many months, Belle walked to the kitchen window situated at the front of the house and saw the photographers.
When she did, she sighed.
Then she turned to the coffeepot.
Carol, what she told Belle yesterday was “forward-thinking”, had also purchased eggs, bacon, cheese and bread. “And other bits and bobs”, Carol said.
Belle got to work, making the coffee, setting the table, mincing the garlic, grating the cheese, slicing the bread and was whisking the eggs when Jack walked in. He was barefoot, wearing only his trousers, his glorious chest on display, his hair tousled in a way that was too sexy for words.
She went into an instant trance at the sight of Jack looking like that while walking into her kitchen. She decided somewhere in the back of her mind that was still functioning that he definitely should be locked up for the betterment of womankind.
And Belle’s druthers would be that he was locked up in her cottage.