The Love Trap by Nicole French

19

“Come home.”

Home.

The word rang through Eric’s head like a bell. It was synonymous with Jane, had been for months, maybe even years. It was a word he had struggled with all his life, but he remembered so clearly thinking it the first time they had spoken.

The booth. The napkin. The stupid limerick.

He had been running away from home for more than a year, since his had been stolen from him. And in a dank bar with an impetuous blue-haired siren, he had found it again.

That famous quote from Robert Frost came to mind: Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But here she was, putting herself out. Running away. Closing herself off. She was afraid of their home. Maybe she was afraid of him.

“Eric, please.” Her voice, normally so strong, so pointed, was barely above a whisper. She slipped a long finger under her eye to wipe away a bit more of the dewy tears building along her lower lid. Her engagement ring, with the black diamond he’d chosen for the way its sharp beauty reminded him of her, hung slightly loose on her finger. “Please don’t do this.”

Eric sagged against the door. The sound of her defeat? It fucking defeated him. “Don’t do what? Fight for us?”

At the word “fight,” her tears welled even more.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t fight anymore. My mother. You. Please don’t make me. Please.”

Her breaths were shallow. She looked small, several inches less than her normally statuesque five feet seven inches and a quarter. Yes, Eric knew Jane’s height down to the quarter inch, thanks to his curiosity one night, just a few months ago.

* * *

“Stop squirming, you little pixie. Let me measure you.”

Eric batted Jane’s hands away from the tape measure he had nabbed from her work table. It was the soft one she used to measure her own waist, bust, hips, and other parts when she was making her clothes. She never knew how many times he’d stopped when he was walking past this room, struck by her sudden grace as she held the tape around her bare stomach or reached from ankle to hip. Her grace, yes, but also her focus, the way she might clench her pencil between her teeth or bite her full red lip as she read the numbers. He loved watching her work. He always had.

“I can tell you my own measurements, you know. I’ve done them enough times. And they are hardly pixie-sized.”

“I think I need to see them to believe them.”

Jane giggled with delight as Eric stretched the malleable plastic down her naked body. Down, down, down its long, lean lines, over the legs she irritably called chicken pins, but Eric called works of art. Shit, he couldn’t even look at them without imagining them wrapped around his waist. Again. Fuck.

“Thirty-four and a half inches,” he pronounced after he pulled the plastic from her hip bone to her ankle. “Nice stems, Lefferts.”

She peered at him down her body. “What are you doing? Taking inventory?”

His teeth closed over a particularly smooth, fleshy part of her thigh. She screeched, and Eric laughed.

“Just memorizing the terrain,” he replied with a grin.

She grinned back, and he honestly thought his heart might burst out of his chest.

His lips pressed back up her body, sucking here, licking there as he trailed his way back up her legs. He paused over her chest, stretching the tape between the pert nipples he loved to worship.

“Seven inches,” he pronounced with a smirk, dropping a kiss on one, then the other. Jane arched into his mouth, begging for more. Eric’s lips curled into a smile over the pebbled flesh. God, he loved the way she responded to him. She loved it rough. She loved it sweet. Hell, she seemed to love it any way he wanted to give it.

But he wasn’t quite in the mood for domination tonight. There was a rosy tint to this evening. He wanted to swim in it.

He released her nipple with a pop, wove his tongue over her neck while drawing the tape measure over one arm from wrist to shoulder.

“Twenty-one,” he observed, his breath hot at her ear.

Jane purred. “I think you might be doing this wrong. That is not what I usually get.”

“I’m doing it perfectly.”

“What else, Mr. de Vries?” she asked, stretching both hands upward.

Eric arched over her, relishing in the feel of skin meeting skin, the way their bones seemed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. He looped the tape around her wrists, crossing them over her head.

“Six inches,” he murmured over her mouth. That sweet, succulent, cherry-red mouth. Fucking hell, he could die right here, kissing this woman, and have lived the fullest life possible.

Jane arched beneath him, and the near seventy collective inches of legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him closer. He slipped the tape measure around her wrists a second time, then looped the plastic through itself so he could hold her wrists securely against the mattress. He bound her. She bound him. Mutual captivity by equals.

Her heels dug into his skin, urging him to find that dark, heated space inside her. The tip of him teased her wet entrance, but Eric held back, pushing against her wrists, the bed, luxuriating in that sweet limbo before he completely gave himself up to this woman. Before he let her consume him.

“Come,” she whispered against his lips, her tongue slipping out to find his. Her kiss was a siren’s call. “Come home, Mr. de Vries.”

His head tipped back, and she licked his neck. And then he sank in. She was home, goddamn, all sweet, soft, slick forbidden spaces of her. Home. And all his.

* * *

Eric touched Jane’s shoulder,feather-soft. “You don’t need to fight, pretty girl. I’ll do the fighting. For us both.”

When she didn’t move away, he drew his hand over the symmetry of her shoulder, down the flannel-covered arm. Measuring. Remembering.

Wanting.

“Sex isn’t going to fix this, Eric.”

His whole body jerked. “What?”

Suddenly, Jane looked angry. Well, maybe that was an improvement.

“It’s the only time you suck at hiding your emotions, you know. When you’re thinking about nookie.”

Eric blinked and withdrew his hand. “I was not—”

“You totally were.” But the fight of the words still wasn’t completely there. Jane stepped away from the door, back, back, back until her legs hit the edge of the bed and she dropped onto the deep blue comforter.

“So what if I was?” he asked finally. “It doesn’t mean I have to have it right that moment. I love you, Jane. I want you, sure, but it’s a hell of a lot more than that. So I’m not going to apologize for daydreaming about my own damn wife. Or wanting her to come home.”

But Jane just stared at her hands, defeated.

Amazing how this woman’s silence was so much more deafening than any of her sharpest words.

Eric closed the door, then took a seat next to her. His weight caused her to teeter into his shoulder. He placed a hand behind her back, hoping the open movement would encourage her to sink into him like she used to.

But she just readjusted herself farther away.

“Yes, I was, thinking about sex,” he admitted again, doing his best to sound remorseful for something he still didn’t think he should be sorry for. “I can’t help it around you. You know that.”

“Because I’m so sexy right now,” she said bitterly, her voice dry and hollow. “In old leggings and my dad’s Cosby sweaters. I look like a Tim Burton heroine.”

Eric looked her over, trying to see what she saw.

Her glasses were on the bureau, and tears streaked her pale cheeks with no sign of ruined makeup. No lines, no lipstick. Her lips were a pale, cool pink instead of the red he always knew. Her brownish-black hair hung around her shoulders in limp, uncombed waves, like she had just pulled down the perennial knot of hair that had been at the base of her neck for weeks.

And then, of course, there were her clothes. Eric didn’t think he had ever seen Jane in something so banal as yoga pants, but here she was, in a nondescript pair, topped with the ugliest sweater he had ever seen. Oversized, patterned with maroon and yellow plaid, she looked like a child playing Harry Potter dress-up.

He suddenly realized that he had never seen her like this. She was nothing like the unique, stylish woman he fucking worshipped. Stripped down to nothing. Absent of armor.

And yet…he was more in love with her than ever.

“The truth, gorgeous?” he said quietly as he reached out a hand. His pinky finger touched hers. She didn’t move away. “I hadn’t even noticed.”

Jane snorted. “Yeah, right. Mr. Poetry over here doesn’t notice basic aesthetics? You love beautiful things. Maybe even more than I do.”

“You’re still beautiful.” God, he wanted to touch her. Wanted to push her hair aside and kiss her neck. Hell, he wanted to do more than that. Like tie her to the damn bed and force her to look at him while he plunged into her, make her see the truth in his eyes. The love he could never hide. Not from her.

Another snort. “If I ever was ‘beautiful,’ I’m certainly not now.”

“Jane, you could be covered in garbage and still look like a masterpiece to me.” He gave in. Raised his hand and traced the line of her jaw with his index finger. “Pretty girl.”

Jane’s shoulders shook, and she looked up, hazel eyes impossibly big and shining. And so, so sad.

For a moment, Eric thought she might kiss him. Thought that maybe, just maybe, he had finally broken through that miserable shell.

“How,” she whispered. “How do I really know that?”

Was she kidding? Did she really not know, after all this time, how he felt?

“Jane.”

She looked away. “Please don’t.”

Don’t what?he wanted to demand. Don’t compliment you? Worship you? Tell you all the things you’re dying to hear? He wanted to shout at her to snap the hell out of it. But instead, he just reiterated his chief objective:

“I just want to go home,” Eric said again. “With you. We came up here to settle your mom, and we did. You both need some time apart, no matter what she says. And you and I need time together. To heal from this fucking terror of a month.”

Jane immediately burst into tears all over again. “I can’t,” she cried. “Don’t you understand that? I can’t just leave her again. If I hadn’t in the first place, none of this would have happened.”

And that was the crux of it. Her guilt paralyzed her. Eric never thought he would see the day when this woman was stilled by the fear of her own actions. This was Jane—brazen, bold, as direct as they came.

Her tears overcame her completely, and it was then she finally rocked toward him, allowing him to wrap an arm around her and pull her into his chest. Where he had been dying for her for weeks now.

Every frustration he had disappeared. Was it sick that he was simply enjoying the feel of her again?

“No one is going to hurt her here,” Eric crooned as he stroked her hair. “No one is going to hurt either of you, I promise. Ever. Again.”

“It’s easy to say that, isn’t it?”

“It’s the truth.”

Jane sat up, pushing his arms away and wiping at her face. “That’s what we thought before. When I had four mountain-sized security guards trailing after me. You still ended up in jail, Eric. And Eomma and I still ended up drugged in that fucking house!”

Well, at least she had a little spunk in her.

“That was before we had enough evidence of John Carson’s treason to lock him away for life, Jane!” Eric burst out, finally unable to keep his frustrations at bay. “You told me to be the man this family made me, and guess what? I am! I’m calling in every fucking favor I can to bring that bastard to justice, I promise you. He’s got half the U.S. government ready to arrest him.”

“But he also has the other half in his pocket, doesn’t he?” Jane cut back bitterly.

“What else do you want me to do?” Eric asked. “I’m out of ideas here. I’m doing everything I can to keep that maniac away from us so we can heal. Together. But I can’t do that without you.” He rubbed a tired hand over his face. “Jesus Christ, Jane, you’re not the only one who had a shitty month. Did you forget I was literally behind bars for half of it?”

Jane opened her mouth, eyes flashing through their watery expanse like she wanted to fight back.

Do it, Eric wordlessly urged her. Fight back, gorgeous. Fight like I know you can. Tell me I’m full of shit. Tell me my cushy stay at Rikers was nothing compared to what you went through. Tell me so you can tell yourself. So we can yell at each other and get back to fucking normal!

But the flash of anger only turned to smoke, then died. She closed right back up and stared at her hands all over again.

“It’s not just that,” she said after another minute or two. Back to unnerving quiet. Back to scared.

“What do you mean?” Eric asked, taking her hand in his and not letting go. He wasn’t willing to relinquish all that space yet.

“When I was there…before he…before the baby…” She looked up, and the pain in her eyes felt like a knife through his own chest. “We are killing people, Eric.”

He stilled. “What in the hell would make you say that?”

Maybe she didn’t need to answer. Visions of his father in the casket, Penny in the tub. Grandmother in the church. Even the investigator, Kim. Fucking hell, death did follow him everywhere, didn’t it?

Was that what he was? Some kind of raven, an omen of destruction for everyone he loved?

Jane sniffed back another round of tears. “If we had just listened to him, none of this would have happened.”

“If we had listened to him, there wouldn’t have been a baby in the first place.”

“Maybe that would have been for the best!”

Her words dropped like grenades, and Eric literally fell back on his elbows like he’d been pushed by the blast. His hand rose to his heart, flattened over his chest to calm the pounding.

“You don’t really believe that,” he said.

Jane didn’t answer.

He considered leaving. Jog out to the car, out of Boston, away from the pain and suffering that vibrated through this room, through this marriage, through this life. For a split second, Eric wondered if she was right after all. Maybe, in the end, all they were together was pain. Maybe the best thing to do would be to cut their considerable, permanent, life-shattering losses and find a way to exist in the world without one another.

But he didn’t. Because in the next split second, he also knew there was no way he could function that way. Hadn’t he promised her that in the hospital? While he screamed at her to stay with him? While he had rolled up his sleeve and offered the very blood running through his veins if it would only keep her with him?

No, he wasn’t leaving her now. Not now. Not ever.

“It’s not that,” he said. “The worst things in the world happen when we’re apart, not together.” He sat up again and took her hand. “Splitting us apart is exactly what that bastard wants, Jane.”

When she didn’t respond, he squeezed her hand between his palms. Then forced himself to look at her again, really look at her. Take in how her weakened, shrunken body folded in on itself the way people did when they believed they had no one.

But she had everyone in this house.

She had him.

Eric got off the bed, squatted in front of his wife, and set his hand on either side of her too-slim hips.

“Okay,” he relented. “We’ll stay a little longer. Until you know she’s safe. Until you understand that we are safe. Together.”

“You don’t have to—” she started.

“Jane.” He framed her face, forcing her beautiful hazel eyes to meet his. “Of course I do. You have to know I do.”

The doubt shining so clearly through her face broke his heart.

“Eric,” she whispered.

He popped up on the balls of his feel, and slowly, carefully, placed a tentative kiss on her lips. He stayed there for a solid five seconds, willing her to remember the love and devotion and rightness that he knew without a doubt.

She didn’t kiss him back. But she didn’t move away either.

It was something.