Sera holds the sheet over her breasts and takes a peek into the sink where a lump of coal and ash has become one with the bottom of my only frying pan. “Breakfast. Yummy.” She grins softly.
“I was trying to impress you with my cooking skills. Please make my day and tell me you have an acquired taste for charcoal-flavored crepes,” I beg.
She wrinkles up her nose. “Sorry. I think that’s more of a classy European thing. I lack the sophistication.”
With resignation, I give her a tilted grin. “Fine. I’ll start over.” Because I am going to get this right.
She laughs softly as she drapes an arm around my waist and squeezes her body against me. Mmm. She’s all curves and soft golden skin. And she smells like her and me. Fuck. I’m getting hard.
“I appreciate the sentiment but you really don’t have to.”
“I want to,” I insist.
I want to show Sera what life could be like if she took a chance on me, I want to show her the life I could give her. I need to salvage this somehow.
She glances around the room. Her expression tells me she does not want me doubling down on the mess I’ve made in here. “How about I go make myself decent and then I’ll let you pour me a bowl of cereal?” She waggles her brows at me and I can’t help but grin.
At least she’s in my arms and she’s not telling me to get lost. This looks promising. I kiss the top of her head. “Sounds like a good plan.”
I don’t miss the way she nuzzles her nose into the fabric of my T-shirt and pulls in a lungful of my scent. Smiling, she gently strokes the center of my chest then she turns back for the bedroom. My dick twitches. There’s pancake batter dripping from her butt cheeks, but they’re still the prettiest butt cheeks I’ve ever seen.
I hear the shower turn on and I get to work wiping down the counters, getting dirty bowls into the dishwasher and cleaning up the floor.
Twenty minutes later, she reemerges into the kitchen, bright eyes, glowing skin, thick dark waves weighed down from the shower. She’s wearing leggings and a simple white T-shirt that reveals hints of the pink bra she has on beneath it.
My heart is doing funny things when I look at her.
I hold my arms open and she steps into me. I curl my body around hers, letting my chest and biceps swallow her up. She feels so good pressed against me like this.
My palms cruise down to her ass and I cradle the globes, rubbing gently. “How’s your bum doing?”
She titters. “It survived the fall just fine. Thankfully, it’s squishy.”
I squeeze the heavy cheeks. “I like squishy.”
Our lips skate and dance together. She drapes her arms around me and sighs into my mouth. I take my time, kissing her slow. My cock starts getting ideas but he needs to calm down. I’ve got to feed the girl before I eat her again. It’s only fair.
“Have a seat, mademoiselle,” I say gallantly as I pull out a stool for her at the counter.
“Thank you.” She climbs onto the seat and I set a bowl in front of her. I tuck one hand behind my back like a waiter at some fancy restaurant. With my other hand, I gallantly pour Fruity Pebbles and milk into the bowl.
I stand by as she plucks a pebble from the bowl with her fingers. She closes her eyes to chew, exaggeratedly savouring the taste. “Exquisite!” She clasps her hands over her chest. “Fruity Pebbles are truly an underrated delicacy.”
Laughing, I drop into the seat next to her with my own bowl. Now, we're sitting side by side at the kitchen island, joking around and snickering into our cereal bowls and despite the rough start, I love everything about spending this morning with her.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Sera asks, her perceptive dark eyes scanning my face.
I shrug. "I like this..."
"You like what?"
"Waking up like this."
Sera titters nervously around a spoonful of cereal. "Nothing starts the day like a little smoke inhalation, huh?”
As if looking for a distraction, she grabs a furniture store catalogue that’s mingled with my mail on the counter. She starts browsing the pages with shaky fingers.
I huff out a little chuckle and take the catalogue from her hands. I slide my arm around the back of her stool. I can hardly keep from touching her. "I was serious about what I said in the car last night."
She swallows. “What?”
“You know what, Sera.”
"You want to stay married to me?" She angles her head to the side. Her eyes say she thinks I'm full of shit.
“I feel like we should give this marriage thing a go. See how it works out.” I shrug and lift a spoon of cereal to my mouth. Mostly to avoid eye contact.
Her tone goes dry. “Well, that was a resounding ‘yes’…”
“I…” I tug on the neck of my T-shirt and clear my throat. “I…like you…a lot. I just don't see the need to rush things. I mean, with the annulment and stuff.” I shrug again. “This could be fun. You and me. And after everything that happened with Rocky, you deserve to have some fun.”
I'm doing my best to find the right words but Sera's expression is telling me that I'm not building the strongest argument.
Her eyebrow jerks up. “Jace, this is a marriage. Not a toaster oven we can test out in the thirty-day return window. We can’t just stay married and ‘see how it goes’.”
I blink at her. “But I said I like you…”
“Yeah. Great. Let’s base a marriage off of a grade school level crush.” She chuffs snidely.
“This could be fun. So much fun. Look how much fun we’re having right now.” I sound like the most superficial asshole alive. But I’m barely keeping my head above water. The idea of diving deep beneath the surface—honestly examining my motivations for not wanting to give her an annulment—terrifies me.
“Again, we cannot base a lifelong commitment like marriage off of how much fun we’re having in one singular moment.” She says it slowly, enunciating the words to make sure they sink into my stupid skull.
I roll my eyes and lean back in my seat. “You’ve always been the good girl. The rule-follower. The Sweetheart of Sin Valley. Doesn’t it get old? Haven’t you ever just wanted to be…bad?” I give her the sexy eyebrow waggle that usually gets women all warm and blushy for me.
But, on Sera, it’s not working.
I try again. “Tell me—who better to explore your wild side with than your lawfully-wedded husband?” I give her a tilted smile. “Think about it, Sera.”
She just glares at me, half annoyance, half bewilderment at how stupid I am.
I’m doing this all wrong and I know it. But I just can’t bring myself to say that I’m so attracted to her it’s crazy and almost losing her to another guy drove me up the wall with jealousy and it would kill me to let her walk away only to end up with someone else who’d never value her as much as I do.
I want to try to make this work even though I’ve never wanted to try to make anything work with any other woman I’ve ever met because Sera’s unlike any woman I’ve ever met or will ever meet.
Jesus. I’m rambling.
Long story, short—I’m into her. In a way I’ve never been into anyone.
Those are the thought-squirrels skittering around in my head. But I can’t bring myself to admit any of it out loud.
Chicken shit am I.
“You’re oversimplifying this.” Sera shakes her head at her cereal bowl.
“But it is simple. As simple as, we just don’t get an annulment. We just stay married.”
“Marriage has consequences. Legal consequences. We can’t just keep playing house and hope the roof doesn’t cave in on us. We have to be adults about this.”
I’d never imagined myself married. Settled down with one woman for the rest of my life. But this is Sera. She’s smart and she’s genuine and she’s kind. She cares about me in a way no one ever has. And now, she’s making me want things I never thought would resonate for me. The wedding may have been an accident but more and more, I wa
nt to give this marriage a shot.
However from the expression she’s wearing, I can see it clearly—I don’t have a chance in hell of convincing my insta-wife to play house with me.
She swivels her stool to face me and she sighs. “You’re my friend, Jace. My lifelong friend. Let’s not ruin this over a…a sex-thing.”
Her words hit me in the gut. “A sex-thing? This is not a sex-thing.”
“Then what is it?” She stares challengingly.
This is the part where I’m supposed to open up, tell her she’s the most incredible woman I know, that I spend all my days thinking about her, that I want to be with her. But when I try to get it out, it’s like my vocal cords are glued shut with fear and pride and ego. The only thing I can get my lips to do is twist into another stupid smirk.
She lays a hand on my arm, making my entire body ache to hold her. “Look—we’ve already made a big enough mess with this whole accidental marriage thing. Let’s not dig our hole any deeper.” A decided expression slides over her face. “Me being here is confusing things. I think I should leave. I’m…I’m gonna go pack up my stuff.”
Panic swoops right in. When she gets up to walk away, I grab her wrist. “Wait. Hold on a second.”
She pauses, her cautious eyes on me. “What, Jace?”
I try to say something. Anything. But my vocal cords still won’t work.
“That’s what I thought.” She eases her wrist out of my grip, so much sadness on her face.
I watch helplessly as she disappears down the hallway, into the bedroom.
She’s leaving me. My wife is leaving me.
Fuck—this hurts. So damn much.
But why am I surprised? I broke my rules. I got married. And now she’s leaving.
In the end, it’s always the same. Everyone I get close to ends up walking out on me. That’s how relationships go. I’ve always known that.
So why the fuck does this hurt so bad?
Nineteen
Sera
Thankfully, Minka and Katrina brought my car to Jace's condo a few days ago. I’ve got all these confused thoughts racing through my head and unfamiliar emotions pounding through my body. If Jace had had to drive me here, there's no way I would have survived the ride across town to my mom's house without doing something crazy. Something friendship-altering.
He says he wants to stay married. Because it would be ‘fun’. Sure, let's ‘give it a go’.
Pfft. Is this guy kidding me?
Jason Bellino is as impulsive as he is charming. Spontaneous, wayward, capricious, reckless. He’s an emotionally-stilted man-child with a severe allergy to responsibility. It’s just like him to find a way to turn the sacred institution of marriage into nothing but a game.
…But what does it say about me that I’m deeply tempted to take him up on his offer?
I want to surrender my inhibitions, stay with him at his place, and act like we’re just shacking up without consequences. But we can’t.
Because we’re freaking married.
That’s a big deal. Marriage means commitment. Responsibility. The deepest degree of trust.
You can’t just go into that on a whim.
We need an annulment. Logically, I know that. I’m a reasonable person. But the hormones and proximity of living with Jace in his house was clouding my brain. It feels like our friendship is on fire. There’s an emergency alarm blaring in my head. If we have any hope of maintaining our friendship after the smoke has cleared, we need distance between us until we snap back to our senses.
That’s why I had to leave.
I can’t let myself like Jace. Because I could. I could really, really, really like him. And he’d never be able to like me back—to love me—in the way I’d need him to. And that would hurt more than anything.
I drove myself to my mom’s house, and now I’m here, in the small bedroom my sister and I shared as teenagers. There are still boyband posters on the walls and a bookcase bursting with Harry Potter books and the angsty YA novels Katrina used to gobble up.
I’m curled up in the window nook with a bowl of rice and beans that I’ve barely touched. I stare blankly at the pages of a Blakely Hamilton novel but I just can’t seem to get into Taken by my Bad Boy Uber Driver tonight. I take a tiny sip of my pineapple Goya. I’m trying to jumpstart my brain, to coax my heart into not feeling so frayed. It doesn’t seem to be working.
With a sigh, I close the book and stare out over the street. A group of little girls are bickering as they play hopscotch on the sidewalk. An old man comes out of his house to holler threats at the little boys playing football on his front lawn. I chuckle quietly to myself.
This isn’t the best neighborhood in town, but it’s home. I have so many memories in this place. Not all that long ago, I was one of the girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk along with Katrina and Minka. Jace, Wyatt and Declan were the boys playing football and causing trouble. Back then, life was so simple. Now, everything’s a mess.
Right around 7:30 p.m., Mom’s rattling blue sedan squeezes into a parking space behind mine on the street. I watch her clamber up the walkway. She looks tired as she always does after a long shift at the hospital.
When the front door swings open, I straighten my spine and force on a bright smile. Like everything is peachy. "Hey Mom,” I call out, craning my neck to peer out into the hallway.
A part of me hopes that she’ll return my greeting and go about her evening as usual. But of course not. Because try as I might, I can hear the brokenness in my own voice.
My mother quickly kicks off her tennis shoes on the front mat and hurriedly heads in my direction, a worried look on her face.
"Hi, darling. Is everything all right?" She weaves her way between the wooden wardrobe, the computer desk and the pair of twin beds crowding the tiny room. "You didn't sound all right in the message you left on my phone. Did something happen at Jace's?"
She's still in her dinosaur-patterned scrubs from the hospital. She works so hard. Most weeks, she pulls double shifts. More than one.
I’ve tried to talk her into slowing down, especially now that my siblings and I have all moved out and she doesn’t have any extra mouths to feed. When I was with Rocky, I even started helping her with the bills since being engaged to a professional footballer alleviated some of the pressure of having to cover my basic needs. But Mom refuses to cut back on her shifts. Hard work is engrained in my mother. There’s no talking her out of it.
“Pfft. Nothing happened. Nothing happened at Jace’s.” More smiling. Just keep smiling.
Honesty was a big thing in our household. Lying to Mom is always so hard. I’m not very good at it.
The harder I smile, the more concerned she looks. She sits next to me on the narrow window bench and examines my face. "How are you holding up, mija?” She brushes hair back from my forehead and I do everything in my power to keep from bursting into tears.
“I’m…holding up, I guess.” I sip my soda again.
“You sure?”
I nod. I catch sight of my smile in the window. This is what a constipated hamster smiles like. But Mom has had a long day and there’s no way I’m letting go of this happy face.
Her eyes narrow further. “It's just, all of last week, I tried talking you into coming to stay here and you wouldn't budge. You insisted on staying at Jason’s. And now, all of a sudden, here you are. So, I figured something had happened…”
Something did happen. I woke up married to the guy I spent my entire adolescence secretly crushing on, and now he’s randomly telling me that he wants to be with me but for the most superficial reason imaginable. And I want so much to grasp onto the flimsy thing he’s offering me but I don’t trust my decision-making right now because the last man I trusted left me at the altar.
I’m a mess.
The truth feels like a thousand-pound boulder sitting on my diaphragm and I’m ashamed to tell my mother.
So I lie again. “I’m okay, Mom…”
Sh
e squints at me some more. Then after a long beat, she sighs and gives me a resigned, you’ll-come-to-me-when-you-can’t-hold-it-in-anymore look. She pats my hand and rises.
Phew.
"I cooked," I tell her, to fill the silence when her doubtful gaze lands on the bowl of now-cold food in my lap.
“You just happened to be in the mood for spicy beans and rice? With Vienna sausages?” She jerks a judgmental brow. She knows that spicy beans and rice with Vienna sausages is my comfort food of choice.
I force a laugh. “You know it.”
From the doorway, she tiredly rubs the back of her neck. "Well, thanks. I have to go check on Granny Bellino next door and I’m definitely not in the mood to cook when I get back. I’m exhausted and Christ knows—”
“I married Jace.”
There. I said it.
Mom’s hand slowly drops from her neck. She blinks at me.
"I married Jace. The night I was supposed to marry Rocky, I accidentally married Jace instead.”
I try to make it sound casual. Like I mistakenly picked up lemon-scented dishwashing liquid when I’d been meaning to pick up the apple blossom fragrance. Or like I ordered spring rolls as a side dish when steamed dumplings are what I’d been meaning to ask for.
Mom’s expression is anything but casual. I sit and watch as a half-dozen reactions cycle over her pretty face. Shock. Alarm. Confusion. Disbelief. Concern. More shock.
"Am I supposed to laugh? Is this your idea of a prank, Seraphine?”
"No, Mom.” Unfortunately, your daughter is now a cliché in the worst way. Jilted. Blackout married. And disgraced.
“You married Jason?”
“I did.”
My mother cautiously backtracks and reclaims her seat on the window sill across from me like she doesn’t trust her legs to keep her upright. “Dear god, Sera. How on Earth did that happen?”
I shrug, feeling helplessly, hopelessly dumb. “We were at the club. Jace was trying to cheer me up by drinking with me. We went overboard. And we…woke up married."
Mom rubs her forehead like she’s getting a migraine. “I don’t even know what to ask? How are you handling it? And what about Jason? I’m assuming your brother doesn’t know about all this since Jason is still alive?” She laughs tightly.
Playing House: A Small Town Brother’s Best Friend Romance (The Playboys of Sin Valley Book 1) Page 13
