Page 19 of Jacking Jill

She’s yours, came the message from somewhere inside him, from everywhere inside him. She’s yours.

“I . . . I don’t understand,” Jill stammered, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek, then taking a step backwards into the bathroom. “I don’t understand, Jack.”

“Yeah, you do,” Jack whispered, his jaw so tight he could barely speak, his head buzzing so loud he couldn’t even hear his own damn voice. “You do understand, Jill. You understand that you’re mine. You’re mine, Jill. You’re fucking mine!”

The words rumbled out of Jack like the possessive growl of an alpha beast. He took another step forward, his fists clenching by his sides as Jill stared wide-eyed like a mouse frozen by the venomous gaze of a viper about to strike.

Jack swallowed thickly, trying to blink away the raw need that had been brought to a head by the unimaginable prospect of this woman giving herself to another man. He wasn’t sure if he was losing his mind, if this Darkwater bullshit had tweaked something in his brain, if he’d been primed to believe that the woman was the mission just because it seemed to have been the mission for nine other Darkwater men, including Jack’s older brother.

Jack knew he wasn’t thinking clearly, but he took another step towards Jill, shaking his head slowly, his green-eyed gaze locked on her wide-eyed stare, his shadow falling across her as he advanced like he couldn’t hold himself back, couldn’t stop the urge to possess, the obsession to own.

“Jack, what does that mean?” Jill’s voice was low and husky, her cheeks flushed with confused arousal, her eyes wide with fearful excitement. “I don’t understand what that means. What does it . . .”

Jill’s voice trailed off into silence. She backed all the way into the bathroom as Jack advanced on her slow but deliberate, his gaze locked on hers, his senses a swirling mess of madness, the kind of madness he’d never learned to control because he’d never wanted a woman like he wanted Jill, not just physically but completely, like he wanted not just her body but her mind, not just her sex but her soul.

Not just now but forever.

Then suddenly Jack felt his phone buzzing angrily in his jacket pocket. He blinked twice, his gaze still focused on Jill standing inside the bathroom, her body half-shielded by the open door, her wide-eyed stare now settled to a steady gaze of watchful curiosity, like a part of her wanted to kick that door shut but another part of her wanted to leave it half-open, see if he’d step across that threshold, enter her private chamber and stake his claim, back up those possessive words with decisive action.

Now Jack felt the decision loom before him like two paths in the road, the forked tongue of the great serpent licking at him, hissing that he needed to choose his mission, decide whether this was temptation or truth, falsity or fate, deception or destiny.

The phone kept buzzing like an angry bee, and Jack felt himself reach into his jacket pocket and slide out the insistently interrupting instrument. He tore his gaze away from Jill’s eyes that flashed with an alluring mix of insecurity and invitation, swinging between fear and flirtation, oscillating between trust and trepidation, like an unconscious part of her feminine was testing Jack to see if he was a predator or a protector, if she was to be his prey or his princess, if he was the kind of man who destroyed his possessions or kept them safe forever.

Jack already knew the answer to that eternal question which every woman silently asked with every subtle smile, every graceful glance, every hidden heartbeat. But he also knew Jill wasn’t ready for the answer yet, wasn’t prepared for the way fate unfolded its plan, the way destiny dealt the cards. So he blinked himself away from the moment, looked down at his phone, read the series of messages from Darkwater HQ.

And was immediately pulled back into the real world with a suddenness that felt like a punch to the face.

“Our mystery target’s phone popped back online twenty minutes ago,” Keller’s message said. “Paige traced it to the Winchester Hotel. Now she says it’s moving towards the Carmine Estate.”

Jack blinked rapidly, his mind whipping back to Kay Steffen. She’d gotten a call about twenty minutes ago on a small black phone that looked like a burner. And he’d just seen her drive away from the Winchester Hotel parking lot towards the Carmine Estate.

Coincidence?

Was there even such a thing on a Darkwater mission?

Jack acknowledged the message with a thumbs-up, slid the phone back into his pocket, then glanced up towards the bathroom door.

It was closed.

7

TWO HOURS LATER.

CARMINE MANSION.

Jill closed the bathroom door and locked it. The restroom was one of at least six on the Carmine Mansion’s main floor, and was only slightly smaller than Jill’s first apartment after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania a decade earlier, back when the future seemed bright and boundless, full of promise and potential.

“And now look at you,” Jill whispered to her reflection as she leaned close to the oval mirror framed in ornate silver polished to a shimmering sheen brighter than the full moon that lit up the clear winter night-sky outside the frosted glass window. “You haven’t had sex in years, but you come here dressed in a black fuck-me dress to seduce that revolting Bobby Carmine, destroy sweet Nina’s fairytale wedding because you think you know better than her, maybe because you think you are better than her. Well, you’re not. You never were. Nina was always the fun one, the sexy one, the pretty one. Maybe what’s driving you isn’t guilt but envy. Maybe you want to be Nina, and since you can’t, you want to take away what she has. Maybe you really are a cliché from a daytime soap.”

Jill touched up her red lipstick that looked grotesquely vivid under the hot bathroom lights. She dabbed the corners of her mouth with a tissue, frowned sternly at herself, then smiled even more sternly, the ornate oval-framed mirror making her think of the evil stepmother from Snow White. The thought made her smile for real, and for a moment Jill thought she saw something in her reflection.

Something new.

Something different.

Something dark.

Now Jill gulped back a thickness that had been sitting at the base of her throat, midway between her heart and brain, the two opposing centers of decision-making. She’d been stuck in that halfway-house of the soul ever since Jack had said those two words that still echoed inside her skull, getting louder instead of more distant.

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