Intoxicated (24 page)

“I don’t know. I never tried that one. Most of the time it was about my fantasies not theirs. Do you want to hear one of my fantasies?”

“Maybe. You’re not into some kind of kinky weirdness, are you?” Her thoughts wandered back to the cheesecake and necktie with a shiver of excitement.
 

His eyes lit up. “Oh, I’ve got nothing against kink, believe me. But my number one fantasy right now is to spend the night with you in this bed. I’d like to tie your hands to this headboard and have my way with you.”
 

The thought of being completely at Jack’s sexual mercy brought a flutter of excitement to her womb.
 

“I might be able to arrange that.” She leaned forward and kissed him, empowered by his relaxed posture and the knowledge that he’d weathered a small peek into her convoluted family life.

The feel of his stubbled cheek against her palm inspired a slew of lustful fantasies. They stared at each for a long while, enjoying each other’s presence without the pressures of Chelsea or work. It had been a long time since she’d felt comfortable enough with someone to fall asleep in front of them. Jack continued to run his warm hand along the length of her arm. At his encouragement, she removed all the bobby pins from her hair and let it spill over her shoulders. He toyed with a long strand, wrapping and unwrapping it on his finger, tickling her nose with the end of it until she sneezed.

“What happened at the hospital – with Chelsea? I’m sorry that I never asked. I get too wrapped up in myself sometimes.” The smooth expanse of her forehead furrowed. “I hate that about myself.”

“Don’t say that. It’s okay. You’ve got plenty of things to worry about besides my problems.” He rolled onto his back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Are you sure you want to know? I need to tell you — if we’re going to be together. If you want to be together, that is.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It depends on what you’re going to tell me. Do you have two wives or something?” Butterflies flitted low in her belly at the words
be together
. As crazy as it sounded, she began to consider what it would be like to be Jack’s girl and the notion wasn’t altogether unpleasant. In fact, the idea gave birth to a whole new herd of butterflies in her stomach –
good
butterflies.

“No. Just the one.” The misery in his voice belied his mild expression.

“One what? Wife? Chelsea’s your
wife
?” She shrank back from him as if she’d been stung.
Married? He was married?
“You better start explaining, Jack. Right. Now.” An overwhelming sense of betrayal hit her in the gut followed by the ugliness of jealousy, causing her stomach to roil, and all her newborn fantasies of bliss to wither.
 

“Technically we’re still married, but I filed for divorce a few months ago and it should be final in a few weeks.”

“How could you have neglected to tell me something like that?” Feelings of anger and deception began to mix in with all the other emotions bubbling to the surface. One look at his face quieted her anger. He looked so sad that her heart squeezed in sympathy.

“We only lived together for a couple of years. We split up and went our separate ways years ago. She moved to New York with her brother and I went to California with my uncle David and Randy. It’s pretty easy to forget about the whole thing when you’re on different sides of the continent. I had no interest in getting married again, so divorce seemed like a non-issue. Besides, whenever a girl started getting clingy, I could always tell her that I was already married. Problem solved.”

“If you’re trying to convince me that this is all okay, you aren’t doing a very good job of it.” Part of her wanted to get up from the bed and toss him out the door, but the other part – the part that loved his lazy smile and his bedroom eyes and the way his dimples flashed when he smiled – tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. She owed him that. Besides, he’d always been honest with her up to this point. She had no reason to expect anything else from him.

 
“We got married when we were young – really,
really
young — too young to know what we were doing. She was about the most exciting thing I’d ever met and the day after we graduated from high school, we ran off and got married. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I thought I was in love.”

“You said that you weren’t in love with her.” Ally closed her eyes and waited for the answer with impatient dread.

“I never loved her – not really. I was in love with the idea of having a home and a wife and family and being an adult. It didn’t take me long to figure that out. We had nothing in common.
Nothing
. After the first month, I knew that I’d made a mistake but by then she was pregnant.” His hand shook a little as he passed it over his eyes, as if reliving the pain of those early years. She put a hand on his arm and he opened his eyes to smile at her, a thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“I didn’t want the baby, and I didn’t want her. We were struggling to get by and we were both using drugs pretty heavily at the time. The pregnancy was risky so she couldn’t work. Her older brother let us live in his basement. He was into some pretty nasty shit back then, before he got killed in a drive-by. Anyway, he gave me a job making deliveries and collecting payments – drugs and stolen stuff. That’s how I met Randy. He was running the streets too.
 

“She lost the baby about halfway through the pregnancy. I was relieved, but I felt so guilty for being happy about it that I couldn’t even look at her. I told her that I wanted out, but by that time she was pregnant again. I felt like I had to stay, to make it work. My parents were married for forty years and my grandparents for sixty years. Divorce isn’t an option in my family. So I stayed and I hated her for it. Just being in the same room with her made me physically ill. She hated me, too, for making her so unhappy, for being such a fuck up. Then I found out that she hadn’t been taking her birth control pills. She’d been trying to get pregnant.

 
“When she lost the third baby, I’d had it. I was nineteen years old and all I could think about was getting the hell away from her and her crazy ass brother. I knew that if I stayed, I would end up dead before I was twenty. We said a lot of hurtful things to each other before it was over. I packed up my shit and hit the road with Randy. We went to California to live with my uncle David. He had a couple of bars out there. Chelsea went to New York with her brother and I didn’t see her again for another four years.”

 
“Jack – I had no idea. I wish you had told me.” Ally struggled to wrap her mind around his words. There was so much information to process. She could picture a young Jack, overwrought with guilt over a wife that he didn’t love. She turned onto her side, slid her hand into his and squeezed. He smiled at her, a genuine smile this time, and squeezed back. The warmth of his grasp sent a shiver of attraction up her arm. When his fingers entwined with hers, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly.

“She popped into my bar one day, looking like hell, strung out, begged me to help her, said I’d made her that way, that she’d never been able to cope with me leaving. I put her in rehab and she seemed better for awhile…then she disappeared again for another three years.
 

“David – my uncle – knew about all the shit I’d been through. He called me up one day and said he was in some trouble and wanted me to take over Felony and the pub for him. I decided it would be a good chance for me to start over and leave all that mess behind. So I moved down here and we came up with an arrangement where I could buy both places from him over time.”

“And I thought my life was messed up,” Ally said, for lack of anything better.
 

Jack shrugged. “Like I said — life happens and you deal with it the best you can.”

“So she’s in the hospital. What happened? Did she overdose?”

“Yeah. She agreed to go to rehab — again. The thing is…I feel responsible for the way she is. I wasn’t nice to her. I cheated on her. She cheated on me. I gave her the drugs that got her hooked all those years ago. We weren’t — aren’t — good for each other in any way, shape, or form.”

Addiction was something that Ally understood. How it wormed its claws into your life and stole it away when you weren’t looking. She wanted to tell him about her mother but she couldn’t force the words to her lips. She’d kept the secret for so long that it seemed impossible to give voice to it now.

“It sounds to me like the ties between you two run pretty deep. Maybe you aren’t really done with her.”

“I was done with her years ago, Ally. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel responsible for her – for the way that she is.” He kissed the back of her hand again. “I never felt about her the way I feel about you.”

It took a minute for his words to register, but when they did, she searched his eyes. They were warm and liquid and deep, so deep that she might lose herself in them if she stared too long. From the quiet sobriety in his eyes, he spoke the truth. A tiny stab of nonsensical jealousy caused her temples to throb. Why on earth would she be jealous of a drug addicted ex-wife whom he’d never loved? The idea of Jack sharing a home and his name with another woman turned her vision red and conjured up all sorts of unpleasant urges ranging from panic to violence. In all the years of her relationship with Brian, she’d never felt anything more than minor annoyance at his lack of interest in her life. Even the debacle with Becca had failed to elicit jealousy.
 

“Say something.”
 

She chewed on her lower lip, too deep in thought for words. What was it about this bartender that made him so different from the other men she’d known? Aside from an inability to button his shirts, he was arrogant and irritating and seemed to enjoy pushing her buttons at every opportunity. He had witnessed her bad behavior and drunkenness, survived an encounter with her father, and after all of that still seemed to like her. Attraction and understanding and empathy pulled her closer to him than she’d ever been to anyone in her life.

Jack frowned and sat up then began to straighten his clothes.

“What are you doing?” She put a hand on his arm to stop him. He looked back at her in surprise.

“You want me to leave, right?”

A slow smile lit up her face. “No, I don’t think I do.”

***

 
When Ally awoke the next morning, the mattress beside her was empty. After the debacle of dinner and Jack’s confessions, he’d made love to her with a tenderness that had caught her off guard. On some level, she wasn’t surprised to find him gone in the morning. Of course, he had fled at the first opportunity. Only a fool would expect anything different. He was – after all – Jack.
 

Her heart sank. There really was nothing between them but sex. How many times had he warned her to remain emotionally detached? The wreckage of his former lovers should have been a warning; the last thing she wanted was to become one of those weeping, sniveling girls who trotted on his heels like besotted puppies. She had too much pride for that. Maybe it was better that he had gone. There would be no awkward excuses or stilted conversations this morning.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and set her feet on the cool wood floor, flexing her toes and thinking. The touch of his hands still echoed on her flesh. Every muscle in her body screamed with pain, making it impossible to forget where he’d been and what he’d done to her. Her cheeks flushed at the memories. Was it always like that between lovers, she wondered, or was it just Jack? He seemed to think this was something out of the ordinary and given his history, he would know. He had taken her to the farthest realms of pleasure time and again throughout the night. The aching space between her thighs said it was a reality and yet the whole tryst seemed more like some outlandish dream.

Shrugging on her robe, she padded barefoot down the hallway drawn by the scent of fresh coffee. With her hands shoved into her pockets and shoulders hunched as if to ward off an oncoming blow, she rounded the corner into the kitchen and stopped short. A bare-chested Jack stood next to the breakfast bar, barefoot and wearing his faded jeans.
 

“You’re still here.” Her heart soared at the sight of him poking around in her cabinets.

“Of course. Is that okay?” He rubbed a hand over his bare stomach and stretched like a lazy cat. “I made coffee. Do you want some?”

“Yes, please. Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast?” Ally asked, unable to hold back a huge smile of happiness as she walked to the refrigerator.

 
“What’ve you got?” Jack came to stand behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and rested his chin on the top of her head as she studied the contents of the fridge.

They ate in companionable silence. She felt comfortable with him. Her spacious kitchen seemed small and overpowered by his tall frame, something she had never noticed with Brian. Maybe that was because Jack seemed to always take the forefront in every scenario while the sedate Brian blended into the background.
 

As if sensing her thoughts, Jack looked up from his plate and smiled at her.

“This is great,” he said, scraping the last bite from the porcelain with his fork. “I’m tempted to lick the plate. Is there more?”