During the night her eyes fluttered open to see him still sitting by the window. Every time she looked, she found those green eyes watching her in the darkness.
The last time she woke up shivering and confused, and when she saw him still sitting there, alone and watching her with eyes that were almost as shadowed as the room, she curled herself into a ball and groggily said, “You should get some sleep, Jules. You can keep on hating me tomorrow.”
He started coming over with something in his hands. “People with insomnia don’t sleep, Molls,” he murmured, and covered her with a blanket.
And that was as close as he got to her.
Eleven
It was past 7:00 a.m. when Julian heard someone fiddling with the outside bolt, and he stalked across the room like a man chasing a diabolical fiend. He’d slept exactly zero hours, had been torn between taking Molly in his arms and breaking a freaking window with his fist, but he would be damned if he gave his family the satisfaction of doing either.
No. He was through doing whatever they wanted him to do.
They thought he and Molly would have something to celebrate? The only thing Julian was going to celebrate today was ramming his fist into his brothers’ jaws.
And that was exactly what he did as soon as the bolt was removed and he pushed the cottage door open to find Garrett outside, turning to leave.
“Good morning,” Julian said to make his brother turn back around. He did.
And the force Julian put into his punch was so heavy it floored him instantly. Garrett smacked the ground with a loud thump.
Inside the cottage, Molly jumped to her feet with a start, her eyes wide and startled as she came over and saw the middle Gage brother sprawled at Julian’s feet. She whipped her face up to him and fiercely scowled. “Oh, you were just itching to do that, weren’t you? You’ve been talking about your guns for months!”
Frowning, Julian stretched out his fingers in confusion, because damn, that had hurt. Apparently, Garrett was too hardheaded to punch without getting a bit of a jolt in his knuckles, too.
“Yeah,” Julian admitted to her. Then he glowered down at his brother and nudged him with his foot. “That felt real good, you son of a bitch!”
Coming up to a sitting position, Garrett wiped the blood off his mouth with the sleeve of his polo shirt and spat out the rest. “We have the same mother, you moron.”
“I’m going home,” he heard Molly mutter under her breath as she stormed toward the terrace, where Julian watched her grab some keys from Kate’s purse. A minute later the catering van was pulling out of the driveway.
He wanted to chase her, yell and fight with her, the adrenaline was so off the charts in his body. But his instinct to spare her his rage was still too strong, and he was more bloodthirsty to make his brother his outlet for his rage.
Garrett was pushing to his feet, but Julian didn’t let him. He shoved him back down by bracing one knee on his shoulder. “Stop meddling in our lives! We’re not your responsibility, or Mother’s or anyone else’s. And if we wanted to be together, we sure as hell have never needed your idiotic help!”
Garrett pushed him aside and shuffled to his feet, rubbing his sore jaw. “She loves you, Jules. You’re being an ass.”
“Make that a headline in the paper tomorrow, brother. See if I buy a copy.” Julian stalked away and flipped Garrett his two middle fingers without even glancing backward.
“Argh, you hardheaded bastard.” Garrett pounced, scowling as he blocked his path. “You’re going to make me fight you, aren’t you?” Gritting his teeth in obvious frustration, his older brother began rolling up his sleeves.
“Get out of my way,” Julian warned.
“Molly didn’t betray you, you imbecile! She was furious because we were warning her away from you. She didn’t know we’ve been riding you about her for years and she was trying to defend you. Why can you not see that?”
Julian wasn’t listening. He was still restless, reckless, seething.
All night. All night, watching inches and inches of goose-bump-covered, creamy white skin, lustrous red hair and parted pink lips. All night, torturing himself with wanting her so damned much. He’d had a hard-on for hours. Hours.
“You know that girl loves you more than anyone or anything in this world. Don’t you? Don’t you, Julian?” Garrett demanded.
He glared at his brother. Goddammit, he wished he was sure of her. That she did not want anyone else. That she would never put any other man before him, ever again, before Julian.
“And you love her so bad you were ready to dump your whole family just to be with her,” Garrett insisted.
Julian was suddenly incensed. “Because she’s mine. Mine. Always has been. Always will be. She gave me her damned lollipop, and I took it, and right then and there—she was mine, Garrett. Mine.”
“Well, then. Why are you here arguing with me while she’s on her way home?”
Julian dropped his face with a grimace of pain, remembering her words as he rubbed his throbbing temples. Please, please help me out here. I’m so in love with you I can’t bear this anymore.
If only he could be absolutely sure that she truly loved him. Him.
Not…his brother.
“Well? Are you going to let her get away now that you have her?” Garrett pressed as he signaled at the empty driveway. “Do you think a good girl like Molly would be with you if she wasn’t all for you, man?”
Julian stared off to where she’d disappeared. “She was never with me.”
“Come again?”
“Molly. It was a lie. Our relationship. She was never really with me. She wanted…you.”
Just saying that to Garrett made him feel sick to his empty stomach. He didn’t even know how he could have gone along with her foolish plan in the first place.
“Sooooo…that’s what this is about.” Garrett threw his head back and released one of his few real laughs, the sound booming across the landscape. “Molly doesn’t want me, Jules. Hell, I sure as hell would know when a woman does.” His gaze strayed over to Kate. She was speaking to their mother by the docks, and Garrett watched her for a long, long moment, his eyes on fire with emotion.
He jerked back when he realized he was being watched and growled, “Molly’s loved you her whole life, jerk. She wanted to marry you when she was younger. She thought when it was time for her prom, she would be taking you. Kate had to tell her once and for all that she should see you as a brother and start thinking of another boy to invite to prom. She cried for days because she’d never be able to marry you. She even packed her bags and that feisty little girl actually tried to leave—said she didn’t want to grow up with us and have you as a brother. Our mother forced her to stay, but can you please understand how Mother would remain concerned about this development?”
It took a moment for him to absorb this. He imagined Molly in all her stages. Never once had any man featured in any of them—except for Julian. While he’d known he could never have her and had sought to fill in the void with a thousand different women, she had done the opposite and had wanted no man.
Until one kiss from Julian had awakened her.
God, if he had known that all this time… All. This. Time. She’d wanted to go to prom with him? Had wanted to marry him?
She’d been his friend, and he’d been hers, and neither had realized that they had truly ever only loved and wanted each other.
His heart soared at the realization, and for the first time in days, he felt as if he could take a normal breath again. But he still glared at his brother for having made his life a living hell where Molly was concerned. “Clearly what you all failed to see is that I loved her. I always have, you morons.”
Brow rising in interest, Garrett stopped pretending to roll up his sleeves and now began to roll them down. ??
?Oh, well, then. So what are you doing here?”
Julian stared out at the placid lake, and then once again noticed how Garrett kept glancing at Kate on the docks. “You plan to give me advice, old man,” Julian dared, pointing at her. “And yet I don’t see you following your own. I know you want her, Garrett, I’m not blind. Why don’t you freaking do something?”
Garrett stiffened, his face harsh and pained. “The difference between you and me is that you’ve always known you deserve Molly. And I’ll never deserve Kate.”
Every muscle tense with longing, Julian thought of Molly as she’d been last night, how vulnerable she’d looked as she slept, how she’d shivered and how he’d watched her, covered her with a blanket while he’d wanted to cover her with his body instead. All night. All night he’d spent memorizing her face, wanting to pretend this little beauty had not hurt him like she had.
If you had a fan club you know damned well I’d be the president!
How adorable she’d looked, ranting at him. And he’d been an ass. Unreasonable and closed off to her, not even listening, letting his anger and that damned feeling of jealousy overcome him.
His heart began to race at the thought of losing her, really losing her, for life. No. Never. Because Molly was smarter than he was, and she would not cling to the one thing he’d done wrong in his life. She was better than that.
And he was getting her back. He had to, and this time it would be for life. His heart swelled as he thought of her. His little Moo, his Mo-Po, his Mopey, his Molls, his Picasso, his Molly. The one he’d always wanted, with all her paint-streaked skin, frilly skirt and sassy attitude that got her into trouble.
No, Molly had not betrayed him to Garrett intentionally, or out of preference for the other man. She’d been too innocent for her own damn good, which was why she’d always needed Julian in the first place. He’d be damned if his pride and anger and jealousy would keep her away from him now.
“You’re right,” he said, resolute. “I do deserve Molly, or at least I did.”
He started across the gravel path, suddenly wanting to get his favorite pair of Nikes and run like the wind to her home. But then, his Aston Martin was probably faster.
“I’ll just go and put some ice on this,” Garrett called after him sarcastically, rubbing his jaw.
“I have a better idea. Why don’t you let Kate do it,” Julian yelled in return, and began sprinting to his car, his heart galloping. He would tear her clothes off when he saw her. He would nibble, lick and kiss her until she couldn’t stand it and begged for him to stop. And then he’d stop, only to do it all over again.
* * *
His heart pounded as he drove, his mind homing in on one thing, just one thing.
He could barely feel the pain in his muscles now, the synapses in his brain all firing on one word, one thought, one girl.
Outside her place, he grabbed the key they hid in the planter, opened the front door and slammed it shut. He could hear his own footsteps echo as he charged down the hallway to her room.
Her door was open a crack, and he stopped. All of a sudden his system was ready to go haywire, and he wanted to do everything at once.
When he entered her room, he saw her lying facedown on her bed, as if she’d been crying or just tired or—God, he hoped she hadn’t been crying.
As he quietly backed out of the room, she sat upright with a start.
Then she saw him and leaped to her feet, her gaze throwing daggers at him. Gone were her earrings, her bangles and her smile. Despite her obvious anger, he was about to detonate with hunger and love for this passionate little redhead. He reversed course and advanced on her with slow purpose, like that night at the masquerade, with the single-minded determination of a man truly possessed. By love, by desire, by a woman. By his woman.
She continued to look fiercely at him. “Go back to fight with your brother, Julian,” she snapped.
Julian paused in the middle of the hall and spread out his arms in a gesture of pure innocence. “I’d much rather fight with you, Moo.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. I don’t plan to fight with you anymore.”
He smiled the smile he knew to be irresistible to her, his hands up in the air as if she’d trained a loaded gun on him. “All right, then. Let’s make up. What do you say?”
She opened her mouth to answer, then shut it.
At the first sign of her hesitation, Julian dropped his arms and started forward. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
She shook her head. “You don’t say you’re sorry, Julian John. You bring flowers and say, ‘Here are your flowers and look outside, there’s another truckful for you.’”
“Damn, you’re greedy, Moo. I’ll get you a whole flower shop as soon as I get my hands off you.”
Lines of confusion settled across her features, and suddenly her lips quirked at the ends. “You can’t get them off me if you don’t have them on me, Jules.”
“Count to three.” He could literally see her lovely baby blues start to glow for him once more.
“One,” she suddenly whispered.
His heart turned over in his chest, and he almost fell to his knees from his gratitude to her. Struggling to find words, his voice came out rough and uneven. “I’m sorry I was so damned jealous and unreasonable, but please understand there’s not a woman in the world who drives me as crazy as you do. I couldn’t stand the thought of you siding with them, of you putting my brother before me in any way. The thought of you responding to him like you respond to me—”
“Jules, no one has ever come before you. It wasn’t him I responded to that first night you kissed me, it was you. I realized right away that I was kissing my soul mate.”
He charged toward her. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Molly, and I want to know that I will always be your first and foremost, because you’re sure as hell mine.”
She lunged forward. “Two, three!”
He laughed in pure male thrill when he opened his arms at the same time Molly leaped and curled herself around him. “I love you,” she murmured, open-lipped against him.
He slanted his head and fitted his mouth to hers, a sound of desperation and hunger rumbling up from his throat. Molly met this sound with her own breathless gasp, her fingers delving into his hair until he could feel the delicious bite of her nails on his scalp.
Oh, baby, yeah.
He could feel her kiss in his every living cell, she kissed him so thoroughly, so completely. He hungrily squeezed her buttocks as he suckled her tongue and almost drowned in the taste of mint and apples and Mopey.
“I missed you so bad I haven’t even been myself,” he growled. Ducking his head to her breasts, he pulled down her strapless dress to find them bare and waiting for him. He suctioned a nipple between his teeth and closed his eyes as bliss pummeled him from the inside.
“Jules, I could’ve killed you for being such a hardheaded, moronic—”
“Shh.” His head came up and he silenced her with a fingertip. “Be nice to me or I won’t do this, hmm.” He stuck his finger into her mouth and she suckled it greedily while he watched, his eyes feeling heavy.
She mewed in protest when he retrieved his finger, so then he used his lips to part hers wider and thrust his hot, wet tongue inside her. “Please tell me I didn’t make you cry, baby,” he desperately whispered as he broke their kiss for a moment to slant his head and get a better angle.
She nodded, speaking into his mouth as she gloried in the taste of him. “Like eleven times.”
“Now I’ll have to make it up to my girl with an hour of this for every time I made her cry.” He cupped her breasts lovingly and kissed each one with care.
Molly panted, quivering with arousal as his skillful hands gripped the fabric of her dress at her hips and pulled it over her head, leaving her in her la
cy black panties.
“It was really more like thirty-five times. I just didn’t want to sound desperate,” she confessed, her voice full of yearning as she fondled his dampened lips with her fingertips.
“Poor baby.” He drew back to take a good look at her, his eyelids heavy as he caressed her lovely curves with his fingers. “Let me get my math straight…how many times?”
“A hundred times,” she concluded, her breasts jerking up and down with her laboring breaths as she tightened her legs around his hips.
“A hundred times that I made my baby cry… I have a lot of making up to do.”
Molly shuddered at the words, at the way he muttered them against her swollen breast, the way he laved her nipples and then breathed on them until she thought she would burst.
She’d been waiting for him, praying and plotting and planning to get him back. The one and only man for her.
A little hardheaded, true. But to her, Julian John Gage was still the bomb. The bomb.
Now he was here, in her arms, and she never wanted him to leave.
She held her breath as she frantically pulled his shirt over his head, and when he sent it flying across the room, his magnificent muscles bulged.
“I was about to call Garrett and ask him to pretend to love me.” She rubbed his hard, square shoulders and delighted over the satin feel of his skin. “Just to see if you came back around.”
“Oh, yeah?”
His smile was all cocky as he set her on her feet, then he hooked a finger in her panties and pulled them down, off one leg, then the other. “The difference is,” he said as he undid his belt buckle and sent it clattering to the floor, “that he would be pretending. While I never was.”
Once he was naked, he kicked the door shut and boosted her up against the wall, guiding her legs around his hips. Molly locked her ankles at the small of his back, clenching him tight between her arms and thighs and never planning to let go. His eyes glowed so bright and tender on her face, the light warmed her to the very depths of her being.