More Than a Man - Chapter 3
by CFaulkner
copyright© 2001

She was nearly as good as her word, and if he had been a normal man it might have been enough. Kevin had been absolutely ecstatic that she was staying, even on a trial basis. But she kept as much to herself as possible – making breakfast for them in the morning, but not eating with them, instead she returned to bed for another couple of hours of sleep. J.D. found that he liked the idea of her sleeping under his roof, although he admittedly would have preferred that she lay warm and soft in his own bed . . . Jessie finally got the housework under control, and once the house was no longer a sty to clean, keeping it that way wasn’t that hard to do. She spent a lot of her time at her computer, writing alone in her room.

Whether Jessie was in front of his eyes or merely trailing an enticing perfume everywhere she went, J.D. wanted her until he literally ached with it. The harder he became, the nastier he got – downright surly. It seemed like he was looking for any excuse to yell at her, since he couldn’t see himself doing what he wanted – to pull her tight up against his chest and feel the softness of her breasts pressed flat to him as he took her mouth with his. Lurid thoughts about what he longed to do to that sweet, soft body kept him up at night, in more ways than one.

It was exactly a month later, after an especially nasty exchange between the two of them about the fact that dinner had been late that Jessie knocked on the door to J.D.’s study. It was late evening, and Kevin had already gone to bed. It was the first time since they’d hired her that dinner hadn’t been on the table when they came in, and that was only because she’d gone in to town to get some mozzarella for the casserole she was making.

"Come."

He didn’t need to look up to know who had come into his sanctuary; every finely honed sense he owned was immediately primed and ready. Jessie didn’t come very far into the room and she left the door open just a little. J.D. noticed both of these small hints at her mood, as well as the telltale nervousness of her stance - her hands were clasped behind her like she was standing at ease. It wasn’t at all like her to be so jittery around him; she was one of the few people in his life who didn’t react that way to him. His jaw twitched with a burning anger directed solely at himself. He had been downright hostile to her this afternoon when he found out dinner wasn’t ready yet, and, to her immense credit, despite ample provocation, she had responded with neither tears nor harsh words of her own. J.D. remembered how she had drawn in on herself, as if shielding herself from his anger. Jess had explained in a calm, quiet voice why things were running late, and had apologized sincerely but without being obsequious.

James thought for a split second that he had seen a thin sheen of tears cloud those clear blue eyes, but in the next blink it was gone, if it had ever been there in the first place. He had watched closely as she straightened her back and crossed to the fridge, pulling out a plate of summer sausage and cheese arranged prettily with crackers piled in the center. She put it on the end of counter, saying quietly, "Why don’t you start on these, and dinner will be in about a half an hour." Without another word or glance in his direction, she turned away from him to finish fixing dinner.

Cursing himself as fifty kinds of a heel, he had grabbed a handful of the hors d’ouvres and stomped into his study, aching deeply with both the need to offer comfort and the fear of where that might lead.

Now here she was, trying to look everywhere in the room but at him. J.D. sighed and got up to lean against the front of his big desk, his eyes devouring her like a starving man at a smorgasbord. "It -," Jessie began, but nothing came out. She cleared her throat and tried again, fidgeting with her fingers and twisting the lacy gold pinky ring she favored. "It’s been one month."

For a long moment, J.D. drew a blank, then her point struck home. It was the end of her trial period. She was obviously waiting for him to ask her to leave, especially after this evening’s fiasco. Nothing could have been further from his mind. If he let her go, his brother would find a way to kill him, he was sure. But much more than that; she had become something of a fixture in their lives, Kevin’s more than his, of course, because she had certainly taken her vow to heart that he would barely know she was there. He had decided that he liked clean clothes and hot, homemade dinners – even the leftovers she forced them to eat on the weekends, which she claimed as her days off. No, she very carefully stayed out of his way. He knew Jessie stayed up even later than he did some nights because the light was on in her room and he could hear her clacking away at the keyboard when he walked down the hall to his own lonely room.

Dinners were the only time they really saw each other, and while they were both heaven and hell for him, he wouldn’t give them up for anything. She and Kevin carried the majority of the conversation about everything under the sun, laughing and teasing like best friends who had known each other forever. He would sit alone in his study sometimes and hear them bantering back and forth as they cleaned up the kitchen together. Jealousy ripped violently through him on the frequent occasions when he saw her grin at his brother openly, although she didn’t let him escape unscathed from the warmth of her personality and sense of humor, either. She was always teasing him about how staid and conservative he was, how old fashioned and chauvinistic he tended to be. His taciturn tendencies and irascible personality didn’t usually phase her; instead she would joke about his grumpiness, inviting him to laugh at himself.

But he had unintentionally made her wary of him this evening with his tirade, and he was going to do the only gentlemanly thing and apologize to her about it, although he could certainly never reveal that the true cause of his tantrum had been that when he entered the kitchen, she had been bending over, presenting him with a perfectly rounded, fleshy bottom in the optimum position for the use he preferred. J.D. was sick of constant arousal that was never fulfilled, and had had enough, letting the source of that irritation have it with both barrels.

"I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier." He had no problem making the apology. If he was wrong about something, then he was wrong. He was man enough to acknowledge the fault, although it admittedly didn’t happen that often.

Jessie felt traitorous tears begin to fill her eyes and blinked them back hastily. Though she had somehow known deep down that he would never hurt her, the ferocity of his anger had been startling, and had made her just the tiniest bit uneasy around him for the first time. And there he was, a walking wet dream, bulging arms folded over a truly impressive chest. Her mouth went dry and she swallowed hard, her gaze skittering away from him to the books on the wall, looking anywhere but at him. She shrugged, trying for a casual tone she didn’t quite feel. "No, you were right to expect that dinner would be on time. That’s what you pay me for."

J.D. winced. What they paid her for what she did was an embarrassment to him, and besides, she was more than a paid employee, regardless, even after such a short time. "Still, I shouldn’t have been so – "

"Loud? Vociferous? – " her sense of humor came to the rescue.

He grimaced comically, which broadened her smile. He liked making her smile like that. "I was going to say ‘aggressive’."

Jessie snorted indelicately, but said nothing.

"Excuse me?" he prompted, a bushy eyebrow slanted upwards, wanting to know the cause of her derision.

Feeling a bit more comfortable, she let sarcasm drip from every word. "J.D., you being unaggressive would be acting entirely against type."

He was inordinately interested in her opinion of him. "Sit," he commanded, and though she stuck her tongue out at him, she obeyed, taking a seat at the end of the big overstuffed leather couch as far away from his favorite chair as she could get. "You think I’m aggressive?" he leaned forward in the old recliner.

Another snort. "Do you remember what happened with Sammy?"

Sammy was her dog. Rather, had been her dog. Thom had given her to Jess as a means of protection when she first moved out. That had backfired, but nonetheless they were darn near inseparable. She had brought him back to the ranch in the first week she was there. Sammy was part Doberman, part Rottweiler, and all cream puff. There wasn’t an aggressive bone in her body. In fact, Kevin and J.D. were home the afternoon she brought Sammy into the house for the first time, and the first thing she did was go right over to J.D. and present her belly, as if it had been a rehearsed event. From that point on, Jessie might as well have said she didn’t have a dog. Sammy was slavishly devoted to J.D., even though Jess was the one who walked her, fed her, and pottied her.

The dog’s defection annoyed her to no end. "You’re Alpha through and through."

Her innocent comment made his head snap up. J.D. caught her gaze with his. Did she know something, anything about what he was? "What do you mean?" he asked, trying to be casual.

"You’re an Alpha-male. Pack leader. I’ve been deposed," she added dramatically, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead with a theatrical sigh. "I was the Alpha-female, but you outrank me in the pack. Sammy is no leader, and she’ll follow whoever around her is the strongest." Jessie’s mouth wrinkled distastefully. "That’s definitely you."

James relaxed fractionally. Her assessment of the situation was exactly correct, concerns that she might know anything about the former Alpha Unit were assuaged. "So?"

Jessie sighed exasperatedly. "So I don’t like being replaced in my dog’s affections! I might as well not exist when you’re around as far as she’s concerned! And you’re bossy and autocratic and chauvinistic and pushy . . . " Surprisingly, he was not objecting to any of her characterizations. An eyebrow rose to her hairline. "Stop me when you think I’ve said something wrong – "

"You’ve been here a month; you know what I’m like," he growled unrepentantly.

"Yeah. I know. Sheesh, I might as well not have left my family – you’re just like my brothers and my father. Always telling me what to do – "

He had come home one day and found her sitting calmly at the top of a ladder in the living room, industriously washing the walls near the nine-foot ceiling. J.D. hadn’t even taken the time to think, instead following his first instinct, sweeping her off the ladder with a thick, strong arm around her middle. He had deposited her on her own two feet, even though his second most prominent instinct was to take the little brat over his lap. "You shouldn’t be on a ladder," he’d scowled fiercely down at her.

Jessie hadn’t backed down. In fact, she was furious right back at him. "Bullshit."

"Watch your language, young lady," the warning flew out of his mouth before he had a chance to consider it.

She grimaced, but kept a civil tongue. Somehow, this man managed to channel her father and her brothers unerringly. "Why shouldn’t I be on a ladder? Because I’m a woman?" she shot back at him, standing on tiptoe and deliberately trying to get in his face.

His broad grin threw her completely off. Because I want you to be my woman, and I protect what’s mine, he thought quietly. Instead, he was reveling in the fact that she had confronted him without a shred of hesitation. He liked that. Here, perhaps, was a true potential mate. Maybe.

"Because I said so," he’d replied without a hint of sarcasm. "And because if I find you up there again, I’ll take you over my knee."

Dumbstruck, Jessie wondered what he knew about her; how he knew that the idea of being spanked was guaranteed to turn her on like nothing else. She managed to cover her surprise admirably, though. Of course he didn’t know anything about her "special preferences", although, wouldn’t it be something if he ever actually fulfilled one of those teasing threats . . .

J.D. had gotten his way and extracted a promise from her that she wouldn’t get up on a ladder while they were gone. All he could see in his mind was coming home to her lying in a crumpled heap on the floor . . . He shook the image from his head and had looked around, noticing that the heavy furniture had all been moved away from the walls so that she could wash them. He procured a second promise from her right then and there that she wouldn’t try to move any more heavy furniture. "What the hell are we here for?"

"Certainly not your sparkling personality, J.D., " she’d thrown over her shoulder. The old chauvinist had gotten his way, of course. As usual.

He was busy nodding his head with her list of his personality flaws. "Damn straight. No need for you to be on a ladder, especially with no one else in the house if you fell. And I don’t want you trying to lift a couch that’s three times your weight when Kevin or I could do it for you."

"Well, maybe then I’m too delicate to lift the five pound bags of flour I use to make coffee cake and cookies and bread . . . "

"Brat."

"Bully."

J.D. sighed. Despite his constant arousal, he was just about as content as he had been in years, maybe since he’d been forcibly "adapted". Jessie was just what he had needed. A woman who could hold her own with him, who wasn’t afraid to challenge him, who made him laugh. Hell, she even provoked him deliberately on the rare occasions they were in the kitchen together, constantly putting herself bodily in his way as she did with Kevin, poking a sharp little elbow into his ribs hard, then apologizing with patently false sincerity.

The first time she did this, he hadn’t quite known how to take it, until he looked down at her and saw that she was having a hard time not bursting out laughing.

"It’s not going to be so funny if I stick my elbow into your ribs, young lady. It’ll knock a lightweight like you into next week," he warned in his best no-nonsense tone, though he liked it that she felt comfortable enough with him to tease him like this. She certainly had no fear of him physically. In fact, she didn’t really seem to see either of them as male, per se, but rather as eunuchs. He wasn’t thrilled with that at all.

She looked up at him doubtfully. "This is me, scared," she reported in a bland tone, leaning nonchalantly against the counter directly infront of the cupboard he was trying to get into.

Not about to be undone, J.D. merely picked her up and deposited her in the middle of the kitchen floor. Jessie frowned as he turned his back to her and got what he needed from the cupboard. "Hey, no fair removing a competitor from the field of battle!" she whined, knowing there was no way in the world she could do the same to him.

He merely grinned. "I fight dirty, little girl."

"In other words, you cheat." Men had been picking up their teeth for a week after even hinting something like that to him.

But his grin merely became more smug, if a touch evil. "I win," he stated, sauntering away down the hall towards his den.

J.D. shook himself out of his reverie. "So did you come here to tell me you’re leaving?"

"No, I came here to ask you if you wanted me to leave." She met his eyes squarely for the first time since this afternoon, and he melted inside but stiffened outside, becoming completely engorged in one full swell. Like the Grinch, his heart – as well as other parts of him – grew three sizes at once, making it hard for him to breath.

J.D. rose quickly, trying to hide the all-to prominent evidence of his arousal by sitting behind his desk. Every part of him literally ached to go over there and lift her into his arms – he wanted to feel the weight of her as he carried her into his bedroom and placed her beneath him on the big bed. His hands itched to learn the softness of her skin, to caress her breasts and use his callused fingertips to roll and pinch her nipples . . .

Realizing that the bent of his thoughts was not helping him any, he gruffly turned back to the work he had been doing before she came in until the phone rang. "I think we should give it another month," he stated, picking up the phone with a gruff, "Hamilton."

Puzzled at his abrupt change of demeanor, Jessie stood and walked out the door, half listening to the conversation he was having with whoever it was on the phone. At first it sounded like he’d just heard from a long lost friend, but quickly turned somber.

"Hey, B! It’s good to hear from you . . . You all right?"

Shaking her head, she mulled over what had happened until she fell asleep a half-hour later with no more answers than she’d had before.

J.D.’s avid gaze had followed her out the door hungrily, but he didn’t think of her again until he got into bed that night and replayed the scene, adding a very different ending that left them both sated and asleep in each others arms.

 

To Be Continued...