“Are they from Chase?”
“Mmm,” she hummed noncommittally. Yes, they were from Chase. They’d come complete with an adorable message. “You make my heart go boom. Love, Chase.”
Mr. Jennings disappeared back into his office, only to reappear seconds later. “Maybe I should send Lori some flowers. Do you think she’d like that?”
“Oh, of course! Do you want me to order them?”
“No, no. A man should order his own flowers, right?”
“Sure.”
His office door closed, but opened again only twenty seconds later. “Jane, who should I order flowers from?”
“I’ll bring you a number,” she said, trying to hide her smile. A few minutes later she had the number of a place in Tumble Creek, and a backup number of her favorite florist here in Aspen.
“Mr. Jennings,” she said as she handed it over, “there’s a florist in Tumble Creek, but it’s called Randolph Gifts and Fly Fishing. I wasn’t sure if—”
“Oh, Mr. Randolph! Right. He’s perfect—thank you.”
“He sells flowers and…worms?”
“Well, it’s a small town. You’re coming to the party, right? You did the work, after all.”
Lori was leaving for the big tour of Europe in a week. Mr. Jennings would be joining her for two weeks, but before she left he was throwing a going-away party at her house in Tumble Creek. “Absolutely. I wouldn’t miss it.”
“You should bring Chase.”
“No! Chase and I aren’t…We only went out on one date. Maybe two. Anyway, it’s over. He’s not my type. Obviously!”
“Are you sure? He’s a good guy.”
“Mr. Jennings, last week you were convinced he was roughing me up!”
He shrugged. “Eh, I was freaked out. It’s too bad it didn’t work out. I hope it won’t be awkward for you when he comes in.”
“No, I’m sure I’ll be fine.” She hurried out to escape his eyes. The man never noticed anything around him, and suddenly he was Mr. Inquisitive. “Unbelievable,” she muttered as she sat down.
This bad habit of talking to herself was going to have to stop. The whole point of pushing Chase away had been to make herself
more
normal. But she couldn’t help her nervous energy. She’d gotten hooked on sex with Chase, and she needed a fix. God, how could he be so stubborn?
And she wanted to tell him that she’d seen Jessie, that he seemed to be growing up. Wanted to tell him she was trying to reconcile with her mother.
Sadly, it turned out that the man she’d been using for meaningless sex had become her best friend. A man she’d known for less than a month was her closest confidant. How pitiful was that?
Jane sighed. For once, her work felt tedious, but she forced herself to dive back into the next quarter’s budget and wrestle it to the ground. When the door whooshed open, she was just reaching into the closest filing cabinet to grab last year’s receipts. She glanced over her shoulder, and Chase was standing there.
Chase
. He smiled and her heart tumbled over and over and landed somewhere near her feet.
“Hi, Miss Jane.”
“Chase,” she whispered, taking him in on a wide-eyed glance. He’d cut his hair. Actually, he’d buzzed it so low it was practically shaved. He looked as if he belonged in a Mad Max movie. He looked…incredibly hot.
Jane cleared her throat. “Mr. Chase.”
His eyes slid to the vase of tulips. “You got the flowers?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I hope you like tulips.”
Finally pulling herself together, she straightened in her chair and forced herself to be stern Jane. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean,
why?
You need to go! This is completely inappropriate!”
“Jane, this isn’t—”
Mr. Jennings’s door opened. “Hey, Chase.”
Jane stifled a groan.
Great
. A scene at her office. “Chase, you need to—”
Mr. Jennings stepped past her. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yep,” Chase answered.
Jane froze. “Wait a minute. What’s going on here?”
He winked. “We’re going to lunch, Jane. Want to come with?”
“No!” she yelled, but Mr. Jennings’s words made perfect sense now.
I hope it won’t be awkward
…Crud. “Mr. Jennings, you didn’t put this on your schedule. I’m…”
Chase’s smile widened.
“Oh, just go,” she muttered.
“Bye, Miss Jane,” Chase said with another wink that made her face flash hot. But when he turned to follow Mr. Jennings out the door, more than just her face burned.
She knew why he’d cut his hair so short. That sneaky, slimy
dog
. With his head buzzed she could see all of his tattoo. The way the black ink curved lovingly up his strong neck and cupped the base of his skull. The way the tendrils narrowed like flames before they faded away.
Oh, God, she wanted to lick him so badly. She wanted to follow that ink with her tongue all the way from his arm to his skull. His hair would be rough and prickly under her mouth…. Jane shivered.
“Oh, crud,” she groaned, but that wasn’t the least bit satisfying. She glanced around as if someone might have snuck back into the office, and then Jane put her shoulders back and said, “Shit.” Then “Fucking bastard.”
The cursing helped her feel a little better. Not much, but a little.
She couldn’t date Chase, no matter how much she missed him. After all these years of striving to transform herself, she couldn’t just throw up her hands and admit defeat. Not for a
man
. She’d be telling herself and everyone else that it didn’t matter how fast and far she ran, she was still Dynasty Alexis.
Dynasty, who liked big men with criminal records. Who had emotionless sex with men in their cars. Who got turned on by steel-toed boots and tattoos and dirty T-shirts. Chase brought all that out in her, so it couldn’t matter that he was also kind and considerate and generous. It
couldn’t
.
Sniffing, pretending it was allergies and not emotion, Jane wiped her nose and glanced at the clock. The men had been gone for only ten minutes. She’d give it another thirty before taking her own lunch. She couldn’t see Chase again.
The sight of that tattoo would break her.
“The pizza should be here in a few minutes.” She gave Jane a quick hug, as if afraid her daughter would pull away if she squeezed too tight. “We’re in the den looking through old pictures. I’m thinking of trying scrapbooking.”
Jane followed her mom past the kitchen to the sunken living room, remembering how excited they’d both been about this house when Mac had announced he was buying it. A den. A
fireplace
. It had seemed like a fantasy.
Jane had thought everything was going her way when she was nine. She’d even dreamed that her real dad would move to Colorado when he got out, and she’d get to have everyone she loved in her life. Her mom, her stepdad, her new little brother and her real dad, too.
When I get paroled, the first thing I’m going to do is take you to Disneyland, baby girl
.
She vividly remembered sending off for a Disney brochure. She’d kept it under her pillow for months.
Calling Chase a bastard had been unfair. She knew what a real bastard was like.
Lost in thought, following her mom, Jane didn’t register at first that it wasn’t Mac going through photos with her mother. It was Grandma Olive. Oh, Jesus.
“Look who’s graced us with her presence,” Olive said.
“Grandma Olive.” She sighed.
“Where’s that big man of yours?”
“Chase is just a friend.”
“Pfft. Even I’d be tempted by a man like that, and you never said no to anything in your life.”
“Grandma,” Jane’s mom snapped. “Stop it.”
The old lady sniffed. “It’s just the truth.”
Jane had been hearing it for years, so she gritted her teeth and dropped into a recliner.
Her mom turned concerned eyes on her. “Are you doing okay? That ex-boyfriend hasn’t bothered you again?”
“No, I’m fine. He’s gone to stay with his parents in Fort Collins. I’m sure the D.A. will drop the charges, and once that happens, I don’t think he’ll be back.”
“Good,” her mom said, handing over a thick photo album. “Here, sweetie. Most of your pictures are in this one.”
Happy to avoid any further conversation about Greg or Chase, Jane cracked open the album. The first few pages were mostly pictures of Jessie as a baby, and she smiled as soon as she saw them. He’d been painfully adorable. It was easy to see how he’d wrapped their mother around his finger.
The pictures progressed, and Jane was there, grinning and stick-thin. In the summer pictures her hair was lightened by the strong mountain sun. The winter photos showed her wearing a collection of brightly colored knit caps, all of them topped with pom-poms. She’d forgotten those caps. Her mom had developed a passion for knitting, and Jane had been the number one benefactor.
“Mom, do you still knit?”
“Oh, my God, I haven’t knit anything in years!”
“You should try it again. You always looked so happy sitting in front of the TV with your yarn.”
“Oh, now I’m busy using Twitter. I can’t figure out
Lost
without my Twitter friends. And I don’t have any reason to knit. Neither of you kids seem anywhere close to giving me grandbabies.”
Olive piped up. “That Jessie might end up with a kid sometime soon. ’Course, it’d be a bastard. But probably cute as hell.”
They both ignored her. Jane flipped through a few more pages, noticing the way her appearance began to change. She’d started getting curvy in the fourth grade but still had that bright glow of childhood. A few pages later a different Dynasty began to appear. This one had short hair and too much makeup. Her eyes still flashed, but the smiles were hard and flirtatious. Soon the smiles stopped altogether, replaced with pouting lips and narrowed eyes and hair bleached nearly white. The girl got taller and the clothes got shorter.
Jane snapped the book closed. She always felt as though regret were stitched into her skin, but looking at those photos, she could feel the string pulled tighter and tighter, as if the seams of her body might tear themselves apart at any moment.
She took a deep breath, telling herself it was all long past, but when the doorbell rang, Jane jumped as if she’d heard a shot fired.
“It’s the pizza!” her mom called, jumping up. “Mac! Pizza’s here.”
Jane pulled the DVD out of her purse and stuck it in the machine. Mac brought in the paper plates and pizza, and Jane sat next to him on the couch.
A movie, beer and pizza. Everyone settled in happily to watch the show. But all Jane could think about were the pictures. She’d been so…young. One minute she’d been a little girl, and the next minute she’d been throwing herself at boys…and men.
She’d known that already, but the pictures had shown her something else, something she hadn’t known.
At one point she’d been happy. Oh, not as a teenager, but before that…before that, she’d been happy.
In her mind she’d remembered those awful years of moving from town to town, prison to prison. She’d remembered the hard-eyed new “daddies” and the guards with guns. The thin walls of rented trailers and the roaches in the sink. But for a while there, after Mac had been freed and they’d become a real family…she’d been
happy
.
She’d had a family and a house and a real yard to play in. She’d had her own bedroom and a dad who actually lived at home with them. Schoolwork had come easily to her. She’d done well.
In those few short years, everything had been perfect.
How could she not have remembered?
Sipping her beer, Jane leaned her head against Mac’s shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t notice if a few tears soaked into his T-shirt. Her head was wobbly, and she needed her dad to lean against for a few minutes.
Prison tattoos and all, he was the best man she’d ever known. The best man. So what the hell had she been running from for so long?
Groaning, he let his head fall back to his pillow, wondering why the sun was so insistent on crawling across the top of his bed.
Then he heard it. The faint beep of his phone. He sat up and glared suspiciously at his empty bedside table. Why wasn’t his phone there? Jesus, maybe he really had gotten drunk last night. Maybe he’d thrown caution to the wind and downed those two bottles of beer in his fridge, then passed out in an embarrassingly low-level stupor.
He finally identified his jeans as the source of the beeping and snatched them off the floor to dig his phone out of a pocket. When he saw the missed call on the screen, his exhaustion disappeared like a bad dream.
Jane.
Sunday morning seemed an odd time for a booty call. Maybe she was calling for something else?
He hit a button and held his breath while the phone rang.
“Chase?” she said, and the sound of her saying his name made him smile. Ridiculous.
“Hey, Jane.”
“You sound tired. Are you okay?”
Chase stretched and collapsed back onto the mattress. “I’m still in bed.”
“Oh. I…see.”
Was she picturing him naked? He was sure as hell thinking of her nude body stretched out next to him. Damn.
“Late night?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you go out?” Her voice sank a little.
Chase smiled. “No, I stayed home and moped around, missing you and wondering when you’d call.”
“Look, you don’t have to be a smart-ass. You can go out all you want. You don’t answer to me, obviously.”
“I wasn’t being a smart-ass, Jane.”
He heard her breathing for a moment before she said, “Oh.”
Stretching again, he rubbed a hand over his stomach. “So, did you call to find out if I was cheating on you?”
“You can’t cheat on someone who’s not your girlfriend.”
“Mmm-hmm. So you won’t mind if I hook up with the new check-out girl at the grocery store? She’s cute and she’s been checking me out. Ha! Get it?”
Jane didn’t laugh.
“She always shakes her head over my pile of frozen dinners and asks why I don’t have a woman cooking for me.”
“Shut up, Chase. I just wanted to talk to you, all right?”
“All right. Meet me at The Stube for breakfast?”
A pause. She was probably imagining who else would be at the most popular breakfast place in town. “I already had breakfast,” she mumbled.
“Okay, then. Brunch. Or coffee. Or a piece of toast.”
“Chase…I can’t…You practically shaved your head, for God’s sake! And I know
that’s
why you did it. You did it as a
challenge
. To see if I’d still go out with you!”
Chase ran a hand over what was left of his hair. “I thought it was time for a change. I also thought my tattoo might attract the interest of other complicated girls. I seem to have been deserted by mine.”
“You’re thirty-four years old, for crying out loud. And you look like you’re the lead singer in a punk band.”
“Yeah, I’m clear on my age. I’m also clear on the fact that I’m a grown man who runs his own company and wipes his own nose, and I can do whatever the hell I feel like doing. You should try it sometime, Jane. It’s called living your life.”
“Screw you,” she muttered halfheartedly.
“Sorry, but that gravy train is off the tracks.”
The line clicked dead in the middle of her vicious growl. Jane had hung up on him. Chase chose to take it as a victory, even if his heart gave a startled yelp of pain.
He was trying not to take it personally, but, truthfully, sometimes it hurt like hell. She’d never beat around the bush. Jane’s message was simple: you’re not good enough for me. Even when he told himself it had nothing to do with him…Shit, it still stung, and he had to wonder how long he’d give her.
A week? A month?
He thought of the way her sweet body had cuddled against him in her bed.
Probably a month. Something about her proud and prickly nature pushed all his buttons. The good, pleasurable buttons, not the bad ones. Jane Morgan was like dynamite. On the surface she looked safe and stable and easily managed. But beneath the surface calm she was contained danger that left him shaking. He loved it.
Still clutching the phone, Chase let his arm fall across his eyes to shut out the ruthless sunlight, so he was startled as hell when the phone rang right next to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Can you meet me in half an hour?”
Chase grinned at the sound of her grumpy capitulation. “At The Stube?”
“Yes.” The word was bitter and hard, but he’d take it.
“I’ll see you there, darlin’.”
She hung up again, but this time Chase didn’t even flinch. A month. Ha! In her dreams.