Page 26 of It’s You

T hey eventually made their way up to Jack’s bedroom, making love twice more before falling into an exhausted slumber. When Darcy woke up, the moon was high and bright. She pulled a blanket over her shoulders as she swung her legs over the side of his bed and went to the window.

She didn’t hear him get up, but felt his arms close around her, pressing, laced, against her heart. She sighed with extreme contentment.

“Rain’s stopped,” she murmured, leaning her head back against his shoulder, feeling his lips press softly on her neck. “It looks full, but it’s not. It’s waxing gibbous. It’s not full until Tuesday.”

“I’ll be gone,” he whispered, his lips moving against her neck.

She reached up to cover his hand and felt him hardening against her backside.

“Where?”

“Just business. I’ll be gone from Monday to Wednesday.”

Darcy couldn’t help the way her heart dropped.

She hadn’t really thought any farther in her mind than tomorrow morning when she would wake up beside Jack on Sunday.

And practically speaking, she had to put in some hours at Dartmouth on Monday and Tuesday.

But knowing that he would be gone affected her.

She didn’t like it. It made her unaccountably sad to think she wouldn’t be able to see him for three days.

As if sensing the dip in her mood, he turned her in his arms, pushing the blanket off her shoulders until she stood naked before him.

He sucked in his breath, taking a leisurely look at her body before meeting her eyes and pulling her loosely into his arms. He didn’t press himself against her, even though she wanted him to.

“Come for dinner on Thursday.” He kissed her forehead. “Bring work and stay the weekend. You can use the studio. Just…”

“Stay?” Placated, Darcy smiled and took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, feeling her breasts rise and rub against the skin of his chest, then ease away as her lungs emptied. “Okay.”

He surprised her by lifting her off her feet into his arms and carrying her the two or three steps to his bed. Placing her in the middle of the bed gently, he lay down behind her like a spoon.

She felt his thick, swollen sex against the back of her thighs and adjusted slightly, pushing back against him, and felt him slip, hard and smooth, into her waiting warmth.

“Ahhh,” she breathed as his arms encircled her, and his hands found her breasts, squeezing and kneading them to the rhythm of his thrusts behind her.

As the inevitable liquid swirling took over, she placed her hands on top of his, lacing her fingers through his, curling their fingers as they climaxed together, shuddering their release, their incomparable unity, their requited longing for one another.

“Darcy,” Jack breathed, tightening his grip around her as tremors still shook his body.

“Jack, it’s so?—”

“Good.” He finished nuzzling her neck and started to pull out of her.

“No,” she murmured, fighting against the heavy draw of sleep as the muscles inside of her body still contracted lightly around him. “Stay.”

He pushed back into her body, tucking his knees back behind hers, and they fell asleep with their bodies bound together.

He had been right. She had never experienced anything in her life like sleeping with Jack Beauloup. Never.

Darcy had read the cheesy romance novels about climaxes that quaked the earth, but she had yet, in her own life, to achieve anything close to the fulfillment she had read about…until last night, which felt wonderful and terrifying and frustrating all at once.

Physically, she couldn’t deny that being with Jack was mind-blowing on every possible level, which somehow gave credence to his theory about them being bound to each other.

Her heart, in cahoots with her body, was ready to believe the absolute truth of the sweet fairytale, but her mind wasn’t ready to make the leap.

It wanted to reject such a fantastic, unsubstantiated claim.

Could she truly believe that she and Jack were in the grip of an old Métis spell that bound one person to another?

It made no scientific sense. And yet, how else could she explain the heartbreaking, staggering perfection of merging her body with his?

How else could she explain the explosion of feelings she had for him, for someone she barely knew whom she hadn’t seen in years?

Last night, he had been deliberate about holding her eyes when he told her he loved her. That wasn’t a misplaced thought he had in the heat of the moment that she happened to pick up on. No, he had looked at her. He wanted her to know.

On one hand, she knew that she should feel uncomfortable with Jack using the word love.

They hadn’t spent more than a handful of hours together since their reunion last Saturday.

How was it possible that he should love her?

Yet maybe for Jack, who had spent the last twenty years of his life feeling bound to her, it was not only possible, but deeply, irrevocably true.

And the truth for Darcy was that she wasn’t uncomfortable hearing him tell her that he loved her.

Although she wasn’t ready to reciprocate the words, it was only because some misguided propriety told her she should wait.

The reality was that Darcy felt as deeply for Jack as he felt for her.

She had never felt this sort of visceral, invasive, all-consuming love for anyone ever in her life.

All other previous relationships faded, gray and gauzy, against the vibrant totality of his hold on her heart.

She breathed deeply, rolling over onto her side, and had two immediate thoughts. The first was that she was alone. The second was that her body was on fire.

Darcy had taken a trip to Mexico with her family when she was a pre-teen, and while her parents had been busy entertaining young Amory, they hadn’t noticed that Darcy had fallen asleep in the sun.

Two hours later, rousing her for a late lunch, her mother had gasped at the color of Darcy’s skin.

An angry, blazing red had taken over her daughter’s normally pale, freckled skin.

“I can’t see your freckles!” her mother had almost screamed in a panic.

Darcy had opened her eyes to the extreme pain of her raw, blistering skin, and spent the remainder of the week in the hotel room either lounging in the cold bathtub or lying supine on the bed, covered in aloe vera and soothed by the cool breeze offered by a ceiling fan.

Her skin didn’t precisely feel as bad as it had in Mexico this morning, but that Mexico was her only comparison wasn’t a good sign.

Wincing, she carefully lowered her feet to the floor and stood up.

Whoa. Pain. She looked down at her arms and saw the angry, sunburned skin.

Walking in the stilted steps of Frankenstein, she made her way to Jack’s bathroom, where she gasped.

A good portion of her body was covered in pink and light red burns.

She turned to look at her back and winced, noting it was similarly afflicted.

What happened? What is this?

Darcy tried to remember the last time she was in the sun. Certainly not yesterday, when she was wearing layers of clothing on an overcast day.

A rash, Darcy. It could be a rash.

She considered the possibility. It made a lot more sense than sunburn. Darcy’s skin was fair, and more than once she’d needed to switch detergents when she realized she was overly sensitive to one with colors or fragrance.

She walked gingerly back to the bed and put her nose against his sheets. It wasn’t a cloying smell, per se, but it did smell strongly of some synthetic floral scent. She started to sit back down on the bed, then stood up quickly.

Don’t sit on the bed, idiot! You could make it worse.

She opted for a wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room instead.

She sat down carefully, naked, then sighed with pleasure.

The wood was smooth and cool, a balm to the back of her bare thighs.

She sat rigidly, trying to adjust to the painful heat of her body as she looked around Jack’s bedroom.

This was the first time she’d seen it in daylight.

It was an attractive room, exactly what Darcy would have chosen if Jack had asked for her help in decorating instead of his fancy designer from Boston.

She loved the woodland tones in tans and creams, and the simple lines of his enormous cherry bed.

Two large dormer windows had alcove window seats and built-in bookcases that made them snug reading nooks, and two traditional rocking chairs flanked the fireplace.

It was a warm and inviting room, elegant in its simplicity, and Darcy felt completely at home.

The only thing that bothered her, she realized, was the absence of any personal photos.

Not that it was obligatory that a grown man should have a picture of his family in his bedroom, but he’d been so closed about them when she had asked yesterday.

It would have helped her to get an idea of his family dynamics if she could have seen one.

She made a mental note to ask to see one.

She was so distracted by her reverie that she didn’t hear Jack come back into the room, bare-chested, only dressed in his jeans from yesterday and a pair of shearling slippers. He was standing in the doorway of the room, watching her, a concerned expression on his face.

“Hi,” she murmured, smiling at his tousled black hair, his intense brown eyes.

“I love you,” he whispered from across the room, gazing at her, not moving.

“You do.”

“I do.” He approached her slowly, wincing as he noticed her skin. “Are you okay?”

“I think I got a rash from your sheets.” Darcy looked down at her arms and thighs. “Not so pretty, huh?”

Jack squatted in front of her. “Beautiful.”

“You need glasses, Mr. Beauloup.”

He shook his head lightly. “I don’t need anything but you.”

Darcy grinned. “Then you’re all set.”

He pressed his lips lightly to her kneecap, and she sucked in a breath.