Burned (4 page)

There was a piece of paper resting against the pillows of the neatly made bed.

The second note from Holly today.

Too bad I didn’t spend more time poking around in her and Max’s bedroom. I would’ve seen the note earlier.

This one was simple as well:

Jake~

The bedding is clean. Help yourself to anything.

~Holly

I handed it to him.

He skimmed it quickly.

“Awesome,” he said. “I’m gonna go grab my bag.”

“What’s going on in here?” Jake asked as he took in the sight on the kitchen counter. He had just deposited his bag in the bedroom and wandered into the kitchen. My bottles of wine and glass were resting side by side…by side. Lined up like little soldiers ready to fight my emotional battle.

“Um…” I didn’t know Jake well and I wasn’t sure what the best response was. I tapped my hands against my thighs as I tried to come up with something logical. Something that
sounded
logical. Something that wasn’t the truth, meaning I was drinking in the middle of the afternoon. Alone.

Just because.

“Oh, damn,” he said. “Were you having a party tonight? Am I intruding?” He vaguely motioned to the entry, or the bedroom, or somewhere else in the house. I wasn’t sure. “I can…just…I can hang out in the bedroom. I brought some textbooks. Or,” he eyed the wine and he cringed just a bit, “if you want privacy, I can go to the café. I honestly didn’t mean to intrude.”

He looked so apologetic I decided to put him out of his mental misery.

I gave him my brightest—though not very genuine—smile. “The only party I’m throwing is for me, myself, and yours truly. I guess you’d call it a pity party. You crashed it.”

“A pity party?” he asked with raised eyebrows. It took a moment for that to sink in. He glanced at the spot on the counter where my dilapidated phone rested. Then the tiniest smirk danced on his lips. “Why is that?”

I reached for my glass and shrugged. I filled it to the brim with a little more chardonnay. Then I pulled out another glass and held it out to him, an open invitation. “Care to join me?”

He glanced at the clock hanging over the kitchen sink.

“
I know
,” I said emphatically. “Do you want to join me or not?”

He smiled. My heart pitter-pattered annoyingly. Definitely his first real smile since this whole debacle began. “What the hell.” He motioned to the glass in my hand. “Fill it up.”

~*~*~

Four hours, one pizza delivery, and two and a half bottles of wine later, I felt like I was getting to know Jake fairly well. We seemed to have lost some inhibitions as we bonded, sharing sob stories about our broken, mixed up, messed up families.

“I thought you were kind of a snob when I first met you.” I scrunched up my face apologetically. “Back when I worked at the café? Girls would flirt with you all the time. You acted like you didn’t even notice. But really, some of them were pretty hard to ignore. So then,” I continued to ramble, “I thought maybe you just didn’t like girls. Because I decided you
weren’t
a snob. You were always really nice to the wait staff. By wait staff, I don’t just mean me. I mean you were nice to everyone. But then someone said that you’d been engaged. So I knew you
did
like girls…and you were
not
a snob…and that you just took your studying very seriously.”

He stared at me a moment. “Wow,” he finally said. “You got all of that just by bringing me coffee refills?”

I nodded somberly. “Pretty much. It got boring working at the café. Especially in the evenings when the dinner rush faded.”

He laughed. “So you entertained yourself by trying to figure me out?”

“Yes,” I said seriously, “I guess I did.”

“Why didn’t you just ask someone, like Clarissa? She would’ve told you.”

I made an offended face. “I don’t like when people nose into my business. I didn’t feel right nosing into yours.” I clapped my hand over my mouth and spoke through my fingers. “Oh. No. That’s a fib. Yesterday, after lunch, I did ask Holly about you.”

“Eh, that wasn’t nosing around. Holly’s your best friend. You were just making conversation.”

I nodded in agreement to his skewed reasoning.

“What did Holly tell you?”

“Not. A. Damn. Thing.” My lip popped out in a pout. A pout I wouldn’t have allowed to emerge if not for feeling slightly muzzy headed. I took another sip of my wine.

“What would you like to know?” He laughed before saying, “My life really isn’t that interesting.”

The wine made me feel brazen. I asked him a question I never would have dared to otherwise. “What’s with the broken engagement?”

He took a big gulp of his wine. “That question is really—”

“Personal,” I said. Even in my muzzy headed state I realized that, if somewhat belatedly. “You’re right. Forget I asked. I totally overstepped.”

He shook his head. “Nah. I was going to say ‘loaded’. I mean, it might be personal, yeah, but half the town seems to know about it so it’s hardly private.”

I looked at him patiently. Though to be honest, I may have been squinting a bit to reduce the number of Jake’s in the room from two, to one. I leaned forward and set my wine glass on the coffee table. On a coaster even. Then I leaned back to give him my full attention.

“Like I said, loaded question. I totaled my motorcycle, ended up in the hospital, lost my family—my identity—got dumped by my fiancé all in one weekend.” He let out a huff of air, as if the admission had exhausted him.

I blinked at him repeatedly, letting my mind catch up. “She dumped you that weekend? After that kind of an accident?” What kind of heartless person had he been engaged to?

He shook his head. “No. But I could see in her eyes, the moment things went to hell with…with my mom’s husband, she was done with me. She waited until I was out of the hospital before making it official.”

“I’m not following,” I admitted.

He scratched his temple. “It all started with the accident. It wasn’t even my fault. Some guy ran a stop sign. I swerved to miss him. He never even stopped. I slid into a post, tore myself up pretty good. I needed a blood transfusion. Mom was out of town, my da—” he cut himself off before saying, “
Frederic
was around and so were Maggie and Tanner, my little sister and brother. But they were too young to try to donate. Mom is O positive. Frederic is A positive. So, yeah,” he said on a weary sigh, “there were immediate questions raised.”

“You needed a blood transfusion?” It hit me then, how serious his accident had to have been. Maybe the bigger question in my mind should’ve been circling his paternity, but I was more concerned with his overall well-being.

He nodded. “The accident was pretty bad.” To my surprise, he reached for the edge of his shirt. Some quick maneuvering resulted in his shirt being pulled up halfway. I felt my eyelids blink, slow and heavy in surprise. It hadn’t occurred to me that Jake would show me some skin for any reason. I was expecting to see perfection…and I did. But it was marred by a scar that made me cover my mouth with my hand to seal my gasp inside. A gash ran across his abdomen, curling around his ribcage and ending on his side.

I felt tears burn behind my eyes. Maybe it was the alcohol or maybe it was the thought of a world without Jake Thompson in it that had me feeling a bit emotional. I knew all too well how easy it was for something like that to become a reality. Life was fragile.

He tugged his shirt back down.

I had a hunch I’d seen something he didn’t show off to many people.

“Like I said, I slid into a metal post. It impaled me and tore me up. Did a number on my leg, too, but not quite this bad. So, yeah, ended up needing a blood transfusion. Turns out I have a fairly rare blood type. So not only didn’t my
parents
match, the hospital didn’t have any on hand. Mom ended up calling the sperm donor before she even booked her flight back to town. He came in and donated. Luckily, I guess,” he said with a frown, “he only lives about twenty minutes away.”

“So your dad saved your life.”

He didn’t say anything but the look he gave me let me know that he didn’t like looking at it that way.

“The whole thing has
ruined
my life. Or at least ruined my life as I had known it. I had no idea Frederic wasn’t my dad. Apparently, he didn’t either.” He tilted his wine glass toward his mouth, realized it was empty, and leaned forward to place it on the coffee table. He also put it on a coaster. Holly would be so proud.

“Oh. I see,” I said as the pieces of this puzzle started sliding into place. His accident had uncovered a pretty monumental secret.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It was a mess. Frederic pretty much went ballistic when he found out I wasn’t his.”

“He must’ve been furious with your mom,” I winced, imagining it.

“He wasn’t happy with her. But it was me he cut out of the family,” Jake admitted.  

“Wait, what?” I tried to backpedal my memory. My thought process wasn’t that blurry, but surely I had missed something. “He cut
you
out of the family? What about your mom?” I asked indignantly. “Seems to me she was the one at fault here. You were just an innocent byproduct.”

“Things were tense with them for awhile but I have a younger sister. She’s sixteen. My younger brother, he’s only eleven. I think he kept her around for their sakes. But me? I’m not welcome anywhere near the family.”

“Huh.” I could think of nothing else to say. I was speechless.

“He wasn’t as…
generous
as my ex,” he said sarcastically. “He cut me off before I’d even left the hospital. He exaggerated the accident. Came up with some story about how he was sick of me being so reckless all the time, made it sound like he had a
reason
to disown me.” He clenched and unclenched his jaw a moment. “What he told me was that he’d wasted eighteen years supporting a bastard child. And he wasn’t going to do it anymore. The day I got out of the hospital he had a taxi waiting for me. My life was stuffed into cardboard boxes in the trunk. He’d written out a check for a thousand dollars along with a note telling me I was on my own.”

I winced. “What did you do?”

“First thing? I tore up the check. Eventually I got a job, got my crappy apartment, and started concentrating on school.”

“And the girl?”

“Oh. Right. When Darby found out I was cut off from my
very
wealthy family, she moved on to the next rich, eligible bachelor in line. Since Frederic Cartwright had disowned me, that was all the ammo she needed to use against me. No one would expect her to stay with a guy that was thrown out of his own family.”

“What about your real dad?” I asked.

He offered up a derisive snort. “I don’t have a dad. Real or otherwise.”

I felt generous under the circumstances so I decided to humor him. “Fine. What about your
sperm donor
? Do the two of you have a relationship?”

He gave me a look.

“Right. Dumb question.”

“I’ve been completely on my own since the accident. I used the insurance money from my motorcycle for school. Hell, I sold my truck, bought a piece of crap car and put the difference toward school. I have one year left and I’ll have to take out loans for that. Not ideal, but all in all, it’s manageable.”

“I’m sorry about the motorcycle,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.” His tone let me know that was a lie. It was a huge deal. Maybe not the loss of the motorcycle itself, but what that loss represented.

“Wait. I thought your last name was Thompson.” Hadn’t he said something about Frederic Cartwright disowning him?

“It is. Thompson is my mom’s maiden name, but I didn’t choose it because of her. My grandparents, her parents, have been great to me. They took me in when I first got out of the hospital. They’re pretty disgusted with my mom right now, with the way she let Frederic just cut me out of their lives. I took their last name because of them.”

“I’m glad you had someone to support you.” My hand twitched where it rested next to my lap. I had a strong urge to take his hand into my own but I ignored it. Despite our talk, I just didn’t know him well enough to take that kind of liberty.

“You know, I want to make something of myself. I want to prove Frederic wrong and make it on my own. He told me that since I wasn’t a Cartwright, I wasn’t going to amount to anything. And I hate that I
want
to prove myself to them. To him,” he said with a scowl.

“Really, you have
nothing
to prove. You don’t owe him, or anyone else, anything.”

“I know. And even though I know that, it doesn’t seem to matter.” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “This past year, I’ve done nothing but study my ass off. I’ve made the Dean’s List and I’ve impressed my professors enough that they’re willing to write me damn good letters of recommendation. So this year has been good for me. I feel like I’ve gotten my life back on track.”

“And you did it all on your own,” I said.

He looked at me and for the first time since the conversation started, a smile kicked up the corners of his lips. “Yeah. I did.”

“You lied! Your life is
very
interesting.” I gave him a teasing nudge.

“I don’t know if interesting is the word I’d use.”

“Is that why you would never even blink in a girl’s direction at the café? Darby turned you off of dating?”