Forbidden

Dan…

Leah waited for an emotion, any emotion, to hit her. She’d been married to the man for eleven years and for the past three months they’d been going through post-marriage therapy to try to patch up their marriage. But her ex-husband failed to bruise the outer edges of her thoughts.

J.T…..

The bottom of her stomach dropped out and her heart began pounding harder than the rain against the asphalt. Such a profound reaction, despite that nearly sixteen months had passed since she’d last seen the man. Despite that he had tempted her into an affair that had ended her marriage and plunged her daughter into a preadolescent funk. Yet how could she forget that he’d made her feel alive again for the first time in…well, a very long time. In truth, she hadn’t felt so vital, so free, since that one long-ago August when she was sixteen, he barely eighteen, and the summer had seemed to stretch on forever, making it seem like what they had might never end.

But it had ended.

Only to begin again fourteen years later. After she’d married another man. After she’d started a family. After she’d believed she’d long since grown out of her crush on J. T. West.

A passing car’s headlights cut a swath through the soggy night, making Leah blink. She reached for the umbrella on the passenger seat, then hesitated, deciding a little cold rain might be just the thing she needed to wash away wayward memories of the few steamy weeks she’d spent loving a man who had twice disappeared from her life as abruptly as he’d appeared.

She walked toward the supermarket even as her brain told her she should run. Within moments her beige blouse was plastered against her skin and her tan slacks were soaked and wet. But she couldn’t bring herself to care beyond pushing her thick, blond hair from her face. An uncharacteristic reaction for someone who spent a great deal of time perfecting her conservative yet stylish appearance. First it had been because she was a judge’s daughter, then because she was a prominent attorney’s wife. But mostly she enjoyed taking care of her appearance because she liked to look good, liked to feel feminine. Which was also why she allowed herself one self-indulgence—the supersexy lingerie she always wore. She caught a glimpse of herself in the automatic glass doors the moment before they opened. She barely recognized the bedraggled woman staring back at her. The limp, wet hair. The vacant expression. The untidy clothes. She guessed that she should feel something at the sight, but didn’t.

She pushed herself forward, blinking at the bright lights. It seemed odd that everyone was going on with life as usual. She didn’t know what else she expected. Maybe that they would all pause and look at her as if they knew what she’d been thinking. Or rather whom she’d been thinking about. Whisper comments on her dreadful appearance. Instead the cashiers scanned groceries, the patrons perused the impulse-buy magazines on display at the checkout counter, and the bag boys slid merchandise into white plastic bags, none of them giving her any notice.

All in all, life went on as usual.

Why, then, didn’t it feel that way for her?

She absently picked up a shopping basket and cut through an empty line, her steps slow, her mind sluggish. All day she’d been distracted and disoriented. She’d forgotten to wash Sami’s basketball jersey and her daughter hadn’t been happy about it, Febreze-doused and sporting a spot above the “U” in Burger no matter how hard Leah had tried to rub it out. She’d sat through lunch with her sister, Rachel, barely tasting the food and hardly registering her sister’s presence beyond how happy she looked now that she and Gabe Wellington had set a date for their wedding. Her father had called while she’d been making meatloaf for dinner and she’d forgotten to add eggs so it had come out dry and cracked. She wasn’t sure how she felt that Sami hadn’t seemed to notice beyond commenting on how much better her Grandma Burger’s meatloaf was, then reaching for the ketchup bottle.

When had life become so…routine? So dull?

“Oh, Leah, if only life was all roses and candlelight,” she could hear her mother saying when she’d been stood up the night of her junior prom. “Comfort yourself with the knowledge that when things get bad, it means good times are ahead.”

Leah figured she was long overdue for good times. Or even okay times.

Or, at the very least, a few minutes with her mother who had always somehow managed to make her feel better.

But Patricia Dubois had died of breast cancer over a year and a half ago.

Curiously, at the same time Leah had crossed paths with J. T. West again.

She stared down at the can of chicken noodle soup in her hand, not remembering picking it up, and with no real sense of how long she’d been standing staring at it.

“This weather is something else, isn’t it?”

Leah looked up at an elderly woman standing nearby. “Isn’t it, though?” She managed a feeble smile, put the can in her basket, then moved farther on down the aisle.

Bread. She’d come here for a loaf of bread. She programmed her feet to head in the direction of the bakery section. Maybe a long, hot bath and a book would help ease her out of this strange mood. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate. She stopped at the end of the aisle and rather than continuing toward the bakery section, she backtracked to the racks upon racks of sweets where a nice extra-large bar of Hershey’s with almonds was waiting for her.

Along with J. T. West…

She blinked. It wasn’t possible. Had to be a trick of her imagination. She’d conjured up his presence through the power of wishful or wistful thinking. But no. The more she blinked, the clearer he became. He was there. Back in Toledo. In the grocery store. Looking at her as if she was the entire reason he was there.

Where she’d been numb, now every nerve ending sparked to glorious, heated life.

Temptation incarnate, J. T. West. Looking better than any one man had a right to.

Standing at the other end of the aisle, leaning a wide shoulder against the shelving, his long, thick jean-clad legs crossed at his booted ankles. His leather jacket remarkably dry, the white T-shirt underneath hugging his abs in all the right places. The only evidence that he’d been out in the rain at all lay in the dampness of his hair. Jet-black hair that swooped down over his forehead, giving his eyes an intense quality even here in the brightly lit supermarket.

It seemed strangely apropos that he’d picked the candy aisle in which to reveal himself. He fit right in among the forbidden sweets. Decadent and illicit.

Oh, God, J. T. West is back.

A shiver ran the length of Leah’s body from the top of her head to the very tip of her toes.

She swallowed thickly.

Oh, God, J. T. West is back….

J.T. WASN’T SURE WHY he’d chosen now to reveal his presence to Leah. This moment. He’d rolled back into Toledo on his Harley four days ago. And had been tailing Leah ever since.

Up this close, Leah Dubois Burger looked better than even his memory of her. J.T. shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his jeans for fear that if he didn’t trap them they’d automatically reach out for the woman who looked so hauntingly beautiful—even in the glaring fluorescent lights of the supermarket, even soaked to the bone—it made him ache.

“Hello, Leah.”

He stared at the long line of her elegant neck as she slowly swallowed, her gaze fixed on him.

“J.T….”

Something coiled tight in the pit of his stomach at the way his name exited as a hushed breath through her lush, lush lips.

He fought a groan.

How long had he envisioned this moment? When he might come face-to-face with Leah again? Might take in her beautiful features? A month? A year?

No. He knew exactly how long. Since the moment he’d left her sleeping in that ratty motel room exactly sixteen months, three days and fifteen hours ago.

Throughout every waking and sleeping moment since then, she’d been a constant presence in his life. As a memory. A sigh.

And throughout every waking moment he’d cursed that clinging memory. Tried to ban it. Ban her. Make himself forget.

But it was during his dreams when he had no power over the direction of his thoughts that she wiped away all his willpower and held him at her mercy. Until he stood right where he was now. Looking at her. Assessing her. Trying to fathom whether she’d thought about him as much as he had about her.

Somehow he knew that she had thought about him. Thought about them. Could tell by the dilation of the pupils in her dark eyes. The flick of her tongue at the corner of her mouth. The shallowness of her breathing. The tightening of her nipples under her damp blouse that seemed to beg him for attention.

J.T. knew that if he slid his fingers inside the waistband of her slacks he’d find her hot and wet and ready. And right then he wanted that more than anything. More than the food that sustained him. More than the air that he breathed.

More than the risk of his own freedom.

Leah finally broke away and turned toward the shelf. She stuffed a chocolate bar into her basket, began to walk away, then backtracked and put another bar, then another into the basket before she passed him.

J.T. noted that she had yet to say more than his name. As she disappeared at the end of the aisle, he supposed seeing him again after so long was quite a shock for her. She might even be having some trouble convincing herself he was really there.

His mind filled with the ways that he could prove to her that he was back.