Some Girls Don't (Outback Heat Book 2) (6 page)

And they’d both lost about a hundred IQ points.

“Crap. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I guess there wasn’t …” a small smile touched his lips, “a whole lot of studying going on there for a while.”

“No.”

That was an understatement. She’d spent a lot of time
studying
with Jarrod, but not the kind her grandmother or Jarrod’s mother thought they were doing in his bedroom or at the library or at any number of friend’s places they’d lied about to sneak off to this very place.

Had they been required to sit an exam on the male/female reproductive system, that they would have passed with flying colours.

“But your other results for the year would have almost cancelled them out.”

Yes. Overall she’d still come out with a B average. But that had just been one of the whammies she’d been dealing with.

“There’s something else.” She dragged her gaze from his and stared out her window. She couldn’t look at him when she told him the truth. “I missed a period, Jarrod.”

‡

A
n ominous silence
stretched between them as his gaze lasered into the side of her face. Selena could practically hear the clash of his thoughts as he pieced the puzzle together. “You were …
pregnant?
I … got you
pregnant
?”

“No, Jarrod, no.” She turned back, shaking her head, but he wasn’t listening. He slammed his open palm against the steering wheel and Selena jumped.

“Oh God, what did you do?” he demanded, staring at her with wild eyes. “
Why
didn’t you come to me about that?”

She shook her head again. “I
wasn’t
pregnant, Jarrod,” she repeated. “But I thought I was. My cycle is every twenty-eight days. W
ithout fail.
I hadn’t been late before that or since. For three days I thought I was pregnant. And you and I both know that was possible. There were times when we were bloody careless.”

She’d wanted to go on the pill but there’d been no way she was asking Doc Janson for a script—he’d only just stopped giving her a lollipop with every visit. They’d planned to go into the city after they’d finished school and get it seen to then. They’d planned to wait until then.

But they hadn’t.

And condoms weren’t exactly easy to buy when the only chemist in town was run by a couple who knew both your parents.

He visibly relaxed, huffing out a breath before resting his forehead against the steering wheel for long moments.

“Fuck, Selena.” He sat back. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“Well multiply that by about a million and you’ll probably be in the ballpark of how terrified I was.”

“But … why?” he asked again, raking a hand through his hair as he searched her gaze. “You didn’t have to go through that alone. Didn’t you think I would support you?”

Selena shut her eyes briefly. “It’s because I knew that you
would
.” She opened her eyes to find him watching her. “And that you’d love our baby and that
I’d
love it too and then I’d be stuck in Jumbuck Springs, a teenage mother, pumping petrol at Alec Campbell’s or slinging beers at the pub, all the things I always wanted just gone in a puff of smoke. Just like my mum.”

Even now the emotions—the
panic
—that had swirled inside her those few days still had the power to steal her breath.

“I’m not your father, Selena. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you from doing what you wanted to do.”

Her mother had wanted to be a lawyer. Two months before leaving Jumbuck Springs for university she’d met and fallen in love with a young ringer from one of the local sheep stations and fallen pregnant. Instead of college she found herself married and ensconced in the middle of nowhere with a new baby, no money and a very traditional man who insisted his wife and child stay by his side.

Grandy was convinced Abby Durrum had been in a fog of depression when they’d left Selena with her that day. Her parents had apparently been arguing as they’d arrived—about Abby enrolling to do some university subjects externally—and Grandy said she could see them arguing as they’d driven off.

“You could have had both,” Jarrod continued. “It might not have been easy but I wouldn’t have been like your father. I would have worked my ass off to make your dream happen.”

Selena snorted, because, while she didn’t doubt Jarrod’s sincerity for a moment, becoming an anchorwoman for TV news would have been next to impossible to achieve without completely neglecting her duties to both him and their child.

And that’s where the
truly
terrifying part of the story came into play.

“No. You don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “I was petrified that I might actually
enjoy
settling. That I’d embrace it. Love being with you and our baby as a family and forget that I ever had any ambitions at all. I didn’t even know if I was pregnant but there was a part of me that wanted that happy little family
so
badly I could almost taste it.”

He lapsed into silence again, looking out his window, the angle of his jaw as it clenched tight giving his profile a forbidding set. Was he pissed at her or merely overwhelmed by everything? “But … you weren’t pregnant?” he said eventually, facing her.

Selena shook her head. “No. I got my period the afternoon I got my results. But the whole scenario scared the crap out of me. That part of me that wanted to be pregnant, that wasn’t worried about those results?
She
scared the crap out of me. And I knew the longer I stayed, the more we came out here, the more I fell in love with you, the more powerful she’d grow. I had to stop her in her tracks right then and there. I had to cut her off at her knees. I had to remove myself from all temptation.”

He nodded slowly. “So you ran.”

“Yes.”

“And you couldn’t tell me? Ring? Write?”

“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “I loved you so much. I
wanted
you so much. And I was weak around you. My exam results told me that. I didn’t trust myself. If I’d gone to you that night and told you I was leaving, I wouldn’t have left. I would have stayed.”

He held her gaze. “What makes you think I would have tried to stop you?”

“Really, Jarrod? Can you look into your heart and tell me you wouldn’t have asked me not to go? Begged me to stay for those few months until college started, until I absolutely had to go?
Really?
”

He glanced down at his hands on the steering wheel and Selena had her answer. She shut her eyes on a sigh before opening them again.

“I knew I’d cave,” she told his profile. “Grandy knew it too. And she didn’t want that for me. She wanted me to have the life I’d always dreamed about. She watched her own daughter’s growing unhappiness staying in Jumbuck Springs because of my father, and she didn’t want to risk the same thing happening to her granddaughter. So she rang a friend in Brisbane, and she drove me there that night.”

He looked at her. “She told me that you wanted to end it with me but didn’t know how. That a job had come up in the city with an immediate start date and she’d encouraged you to take it. She said she knew a clean break would be hard for me, but it was the best thing for both of us. She asked me to respect your decision and leave you be to get on with your life. Then she gave me a postal box address for you if I wanted to write.”

Selena nodded. “Yes. She told me. I’m sorry. I really am. I just panicked. All I could think about was getting the hell out of here. It was wrong and immature.”

“It was more than that, Selena. It was selfish and
cowardly
. You should have given me a little more credit.”

Selena flinched. If she thought Jarrod was going to pull his punches, she was wrong. “Yes. It was that too.”

The hard truth in his words hurt. Harder still was the knowledge that she’d deserved them, and she swallowed against the lump in her throat.

If confession was supposed to be good for the soul, Selena wasn’t feeling it. The guilt that had been eating at her for years, the guilt that Grandy had identified so succinctly yesterday, was still there.

Where was the rush of relief? The sense that she’d righted a wrong? That everything would be okay between them now?

It sure as shit felt like there was still unfinished business between them.

He rubbed his palms over his whiskers and the scraping sound went straight to Selena’s belly. His gaze fell to the long, bare, stretch of leg exposed by the split in her dress and lingered there.

She felt that in her belly too. And places a little further south.

Maybe this was their unfinished business? Never saying a proper goodbye?

Could sex be their salvation?

“Say something,” she said into a silence heavy with cicada song and recrimination.

“What do you want me to say, Selena?” he demanded, his voice low and rough as he dragged his eyes north. “That I absolve you, that I
forgive
you?”

She licked her lips nervously at the sudden tension that had crept between them. His gaze followed the dart of her tongue. Had their breathing got louder or had the insects got quieter? “Maybe … yeah.”

“Jesus, Selena,” he snorted. There was more rubbing of his whiskers. More delicious scraping noises. More heat spreading from her belly to her thighs, to her breasts. “I think you’re going to have to give me a moment or two.”

She shifted in her bucket seat until she was angled more towards him, deliberately planting her feet apart a little, giving him a better view. He followed the movement, his eyes practically scorching a path up her thigh. They stopped at the top of the split but the heat kept travelling. All the way up, settling right between her legs.

“Maybe I could say ten Hail Marys?”

His gaze flicked up to hers. “I don’t think that’s going to cover it.”

“I could get you on TV?”

He rolled his eyes. “Does that actually work?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Thanks. But no thanks.”

Selena shifted slightly in her seat, wondering what Jarrod’s price was. Twelve years in journalism had taught her everyone had one. For now she figured it was her legs or where they led to, anyway, as he stared at them intently.

“There must be something you want from me, Jarrod?” she murmured, leaning forward slightly at the hips, widening the split a little more.

It was all kinds of fucked up to be taunting him like this but Selena’s brain was on a one-way track as her blood pounded through every pulse point. Her body was on high alert, every cell taut with anticipation. Having Jarrod inside her again was all she could think about.

Jarrod the man.

I can control myself. Can you?
Clearly the answer to that was no. Not then. Not now.

He lifted his gaze but didn’t say anything for long moments. He just stared at her, his jaw clenching and unclenching. “Are you trying to seduce me?”

The gravelly question hit her straight between the legs and she let out a husky breath. “Yes.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “You want to
fuck
your way to forgiveness?”

Selena refused to flinch this time.
Screw it
. They were both adults. And he could sit there and brood and judge as much as he liked but she remembered a lot of things about him too, and he couldn’t hide from her how tempted he was. His fingers were wrapping and unwrapping around the steering wheel to stop himself from reaching for her, the muscles in his forearms taut under the strain.

“Never heard of sex with the ex?”

“It sounds pretty dumb to me.”

“It’s supposed to be cathartic.”

“You want catharsis?”

She shook her head at his calm response when she was shaking inside. In anger
and
anticipation. “Come on, Jarrod. Don’t you? You’re pissed that I left without saying goodbye. So how about we do that now?”

“What? One last hurrah?” He threw it at her disparagingly, his gaze raking up and down her body. She guessed it was supposed to be insulting, but her body heated shamelessly beneath its thoroughness.

“You want me to …
fuck
you right here, right now? In Rhonda? Just like old times? You want me to rip you out of that dress?” His roughened breathing filled the space between them as his gaze dropped to where her heart beat frantically and her nipples were two tight points.

“Tear your underpants off?” He stared at the slit in her dress like he could rip it the rest of the way up her leg through sheer force of will.

If he was trying to put her off with his dirty words he wasn’t. His vulgarity only quickened her breath, tripped her pulse. “Why not?” she demanded. “Or do you prefer to walk around like some bloody martyr because your high school girlfriend dumped you
fifteen
years ago?”

His green eyes went from stormy to flinty. He shook his head at her. “Bloody hell, Selena. I don’t have a condom and even if I did, you have a
boyfriend,
remember
.”

“I’m on the pill,” she said. “Also … I lied about the boyfriend.”

“What?” he hissed. “What the fuck for?”

“Because part of me always knew we’d end up here and I was trying to avoid it.”

Their breathing was loud as it sawed in and out between them, their glaring was mutual. They were probably scaring every native animal in the vicinity into early extinction. “And how’s that working out?” he demanded.