She certainly seemed to live a quiet, private, carefully organized life.
He saw that when he went into her apartment.
He figured he understood why her brothers and sisters had nicknamed her James.
She was a neat, logic-oriented woman No dishes left on the kitchen table in the morning. Her bed properly made. When he opened her closets, he found things neatly hung and stacked. Even her underwear drawer. Panties folded, bras the same.
The underwear—and what a utilitarian name for those bras and panties—surprised him. Having seen the suits in her closet, the pristine condition of the apartment, he’d expected serviceable cotton.
What he found was silk and lace. Thongs that would heighten the beauty of her hips and ass. Bras that would cup her breasts like a man’s hands.
His hands.
Zach felt his body stir. Stir? It came to instant, urgent life.
He touched nothing. Shut the drawer. And got the hell out of Dodge while he still could.
He did note that she always showed caution, looking left and right when she came down the steps of the townhouse, checking the back of her car before she got in, checking her rear-view mirror when she drove, but in itself none of that was meaningful. Any intelligent woman living alone in a big city would know enough to be alert to all possibilities.
What did mean something was that no one was watching Jaimie Wilde except him.
And the more he watched, the more he doubted the story Caleb had been told.
He’d checked out Steven Young, too. Young was tall. Light haired. Well groomed. He wore a constant smile on a bland, Midwestern face.
Zach disliked him on sight. There was something about the man that whispered of unpleasant things, like going to church on Sunday mornings and then going home to jack off to porn in the afternoons.
The thought of him touching Jaimie made his skin crawl, but Young never went near her. If he was obsessed with her, he had a strange way of showing it.
It was cold on this fifth night of his surveillance; the moon was a thin sliver of ivory in a clouded sky. It was also one of Jaimie Wilde’s sleepless nights. She’d turned out the lights at ten, turned them on at eleven, turned them off twenty minutes later. They’d come on again a couple of minutes ago; he’d watched her silhouette as she went from one room to the other.
Somebody should tell her to replace the curtains at her windows with heavy drapes.
Zach yawned.
It was time to put an end to this.
Tomorrow, he’d call Caleb and assure him that there was nothing to worry about. Either Jaimie had imagined a man was tailing her, imagined he’d been in her apartment, or she’d made the story up.
For Caleb’s sake, he decided not to mention the second possibility.
Normally, he’d confront her. Confront her when she was off-guard, demand to know why she’d invented a tale that had scared the crap out of her family and that could have gotten a blameless man in trouble.
Zach stretched out his long legs.
But that was not possible.
He’d have to let her know about her sister going to Caleb and Caleb coming to him. So, no, he wouldn’t confront her. He wouldn’t ask her questions that really needed answers.
Like, why had she slept with him that night?
Was it because she was into that kind of thing?
If she weren’t, if she’d been with him because of the spark, the electricity, whatever you called the thing that had energized between them, then why had she run away and left him that note as if they were strangers because yeah, maybe they’d started as strangers, but that had changed once she was in his arms, burning hot in his arms, with him deep inside her while she moaned his name, saying Zacharias, oh God, Zacharias, that name he’d always hated until he heard her it on her lips, until she’d sobbed it as he moved over her and into her, into her, into her…
“Jesus H. Christ,” he growled.
Enough was enough.