by Unknown
So. Grandpa Joe’s feelings weren’t the only ones being freed tonight.
“Or maybe it’s not a completely different topic,” her mom was saying feelingly.
“Right. Because it’s all about family,” Stephen finished for her. He looked out at them. “In one way or another, we’ve all been like family to each other, ever since the day Esme lured that cub into the garage and you were born, Ursa.” He said with a smile. “We thought the news all went together, in a way. Tonight, you all found out that I’m Grandpa Joe’s son, and that I’m Z’s and Jude’s uncle.”
“So we thought it’d be as good a time as any to tell you that Stephen and I plan to be married on Christmas Day,” Ilsa said.
Ursa was the first to break the deafening silence, and she did so in a very un-Ursa-like fashion.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
Ilsa started and gave a nervous laugh. Her youngest daughter rarely cursed.
“No, we’re not joking, honey. I know how shocking this must to you all.” Ilsa glanced over at Grandpa Joe, who was watching her warmly. “Well, maybe not all of you. Joe has been the only one who is here with us full time, so he’s probably the least surprised of all.”
“How…how long?” Esme gasped. She felt as if she’d just been physically shaken very badly, like her brain still hadn’t settled from the unexpected jolting motion and was still sloshing around inside her skull. Mom and Stephen? I’m going to have a stepfather?
Someone was going to replace Dad?
“Things have mostly been progressing in the past year. I don’t want you girls to think—any of you to think—that what has happened between Stephen and I at all relates to what I shared with your father. And it’s not about my grief over his loss, some kind of compensation or attempt to block up that void in my life. Your father was a wonderful man. I will always, always love him.”
Stephen’s arm went around her mother, pulling her against him. Esme watched in numb amazement as her mother’s cheek snuggled briefly against his chest, as if she were absorbing strength from him. Stephen was a good twelve or thirteen years younger than her mom. He was very fit and virile, young enough that Esme had always mentally placed him in the ‘uncle’ or even “much older brother” category. He’d always managed, somehow, to seem both contemporaneous with Z and Jude and her parents at once.
“I loved Clive, too,” Stephen said. “When he was alive, I was happy and honored to be both his and Ilsa’s friend.”
“A special friend,” Ilsa added, looking up at Stephen, her heart in her eyes.
“Special,” Sadie repeated. Her gaze flickered anxiously to Mat. She looked very pale beneath her tan.
“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned through all this, it’s that love really is enormous,” her mom said. “It knows no boundaries or barriers. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it, but I’ve been blessed to share my life with not just one, but two amazing, unique men. I love Stephen,” Ilsa said with simple, calm, elegant conviction to everyone in the room. “And Stephen loves me. At first, we loved each other as friends. That love was my salvation. I thought my life was over after your father died. I won’t lie to you. There were some very dark, scary moments for me,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. Then she looked up at Stephen. His smile seemed to strengthen her.
“But somehow, some way, Stephen brought me back from the brink. You all know how wonderful he and Grandpa Joe have been. They’ve never left my side during all this. And then, slowly…that love we had for each other became bigger. Deeper. It was like a miracle,” Ilsa said, her voice breaking. She looked at each of them, her eyes brimming with tears. “Sometimes I still can’t believe it, it’s so amazing. I’m happy again. Actually happy. I know this has come as a blow to you all, but I thought you might be glad to know. That I’m happy, I mean…”
Her voice faded off into silence, as she seemed to fully take in the stunned, disbelieving expressions of her daughters, Jude and Z.
Suddenly, Ilsa looked afraid.
Chapter Nine
Movement fractured Esme’s trance of shock. Sadie stood and walked toward her mother. Her face looked drawn in the golden light of the fire as she approached. Sadie hugged her mother tightly.
Esme exhaled raggedly, and realized she’d been holding her breath.
“Of course we want you to be happy,” Sadie said in her low, mellifluous voice. Ilsa brushed back her eldest daughter’s hair in a gentle gesture, her expression thankful, but searching. Sadie’s hug for Stephen was more restrained.
“It’s just…it’s all so unexpected,” Sadie said.
“Stephen and I are so happy. Euphoric, maybe?” Ilsa laughed anxiously. “I guess I thought you’d all…Oh, Lord. I’ve made a mess of all this, haven’t I?”
It killed Esme a little, seeing her usually peaceful and confident mother, look so uncertain.
“Of course you haven’t,” Esme insisted, heading toward the couple. She may be confused and disoriented as hell, but only a heartless person wouldn’t comfort her mother at that moment.
“What made you fall in love with him?” Someone asked sharply. Esme paused. Vaguely, she realized that Ursa had also stood to hug her mother, and had similarly hesitated en route. All eyes zoomed to Z’s rigid face.
“Z,” Ursa whispered heatedly. “What are you—”
“I mean, why now?” Z persisted, his tone stubborn. “Why do the two pieces of news—the two big secrets—go together? How are they connected? Was Stephen only really worthy of an Esterbrook once you found out he was related to Grandpa Joe? That he’d likely inherit everything Grandpa Joe had? That he was worth something. Even if it was nowhere near what an Esterbrook is used to, it’s still something that Stephen isn’t just the live-in help next door, I guess.”
“Z,” Ursa muttered in hollow disbelief.
“Shut up,” Jude interceded angrily when his older brother opened his mouth to defend himself. Z stood up to his intimidating full height.
“You shut up, you hypocrite. You know you thought the exact same thing. You said something similar just last New Year’s.”
“What?” Esme asked incredulously at the same moment that Jude sprung up from the couch. He appeared every bit as big, tall and intimidating as his brother as they faced off. Neither one of them seemed to notice Esme’s dazed question.
“I said no such thing. You know this is as much a surprise to me as it is you. I never guessed they planned to get married,” Jude breathed out ominously. If looks could kill, Esme thought Z would have dropped to the floor in an instant.
Instead, Z laughed cynically. “Yeah, but Stephen’s news about being Grandpa Joe’s son obviously changed the playing field, didn’t it?”
“Both of you shut your traps,” Stephen said, his voice like a shot going off in the room. Esme jumped. She’d never seen Stephen look so furious. “We asked you two boys here because you’re family. Because we thought you loved everyone here enough to help us celebrate this special moment. I wouldn’t have believed that you had it in you—either of you—to be so disrespectful of Ilsa. I’m ashamed of you.”
The days were past when Stephen could silence Jude and Z with a sharp word and glowering glance. Jude looked bitter at Stephen’s remonstrance. He cast a scathing glance at Z. For a few horrible seconds, Esme was painfully reminded of those angry orphans who felt as if he’d been discarded like a throwaway family heirloom on their grandfather’s front step. For a suspended moment, Esme braced herself for a Beckett explosion.
For a split second, part of her wanted Jude to loose his temper, to rage at Stephen or Z…to do something, anything, to get her mind off of what her mother had just told them.
But Jude wasn’t that raw, wounded little boy anymore. He was a man. He walked across the room and embraced her mother.
“I’m sorry. Congratulations, Ilsa. I hope you two will be very happy,” he said gruffly, hugging her tightly.
Ilsa squeezed him back, murmuring her than
ks.
Jude’s gaze caught on Esme as he stepped back from her mother. She read a kind of wild, yet tightly tethered concern in his gaze. It suddenly dawned on her where she’d seen that expression before. The truth hit her like a kick to the gut.
In Beverly Hills. He looked at me like that when he’d asked about mom. He’d known about Stephen and mom, even then.
And he’d kept the truth from her, Esme realized. The knot in her gut twisted even tighter.
That night Esme stood under a shower for a good ten minutes straight, her face turned up to the steaming, pulsing water. She wanted to wash it all away: the memory of what her mother had said about marrying Stephen in just a few days; the fevered, worried expression on Jude’s face after he’d congratulated them…
The hot, focused wildness on his face when he’d first entered her body back in that damn hotel room.
Everything was getting all screwed up. It was like some giant was scrambling up her life with an enormous spatula, filling in the gaps in ways she’d never expect and leaving entirely new, gaping holes.
After everyone had heard about the upcoming wedding, and Z’s volatile response to it, the party had broken up fairly quickly. Ilsa seemed dismayed that the news about Stephen and her plans had struck such a negative, uncomfortable cord, but none of them seemed to know what to say to make things less awkward. Grandpa Joe had tried, bless his heart. Most of them seemed too preoccupied with absorbing these new realities to be capable of softening the waves rocking their communal world. Everyone had publicly congratulated the couple—everyone except Z, that is. Z had only approached Ilsa at the end of the evening when they’d gathered in the great hall. Esme had seen him hug Ilsa, but she couldn’t hear what he said so intently to her mother.
For Esme, her father had been an unseen observer of it all. Much of her agitation came from imagining what his reaction would have been, had he been sitting in the family room tonight, hearing his beloved wife saying she planned to marry his best friend and neighbor.
“Two years,” she muttered out loud, her eyelids clenched tight. “He’s only been gone for two years. Now this.”
She loved Stephen. She really did. But it was nearly impossible for her to imagine him in her father’s place.
And to make matters worse, Jude had known about her mom and Stephen for a year now, and he hadn’t told her in all that time. She’d tried to corner him in the great hall tonight as everyone was saying their goodbyes. She was sure he’d purposefully avoided her. He knew that she knew that he knew the truth about her mom and Stephen when they’d been together that night in Beverly Hills. He knew, and he didn’t want to talk to her about it.
You may have gotten away tonight, Jude Beckett, but I’m going to pin you down and force the truth of you. Like it or not.
Sharp frustration pulled her out of her trance. She shut off the water and toweled off. Out in the bedroom she’d slept in since she was five years old, she rifled through her disaster of a suitcase. Esme was horrible about packing and unpacking. Holier-than-Thou Jude would psychoanalyze that particular bad habit along with all my other faults. He’d probably say that I can never truly settle into a place, or with one person, that I always have to be ready to move on. She frowned, imagining Jude’s casual, infuriating assessment perfectly.
From long experience, she knew that her childhood bedroom was one of the warmest in the house during the winter months, and had packed accordingly for sleep. She slipped on a tiny pale yellow silk nightgown on and found a comb in her purse. She was standing at her vanity mirror, untangling her long, wet hair when she heard the sharp knock at the window. Spinning around in surprise, she saw Jude’s face peering at her through the glass. Excited and outraged in equal measure, she flew across the room.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Esme asked once she’d opened the window. “Did I step across a time warp back to the fourth grade?”
Jude crouched in the opening, forcing his attention onto her furious face. Her huge eyes glittered at him with barely suppressed rage, but that didn’t prevent them from shining like a thousand diamonds in his vision.
When he’d first looked through the window, he’d had a few seconds to absorb the image of her while she wasn’t aware of him. Her pale gold limbs gleamed in the lamplight. She wore only the flimsiest of nightgowns. He emphasized only because as she stomped across the room toward him, her bedside lamp shone behind her, making the material transparent. It was mouthwateringly clear she wore nothing but that scrap of a gown. He could see all of her: the long, slender legs, the tiny waist, the curving, compact hips, the neatly trimmed triangle of dark pubic hair between her thighs.
Suddenly and joltingly, Jude was there. He was inside her tight, warm body, dying with pleasure and praying for restraint as she squeezed the daylights out of him. Might as well face it: It’d never felt so good before.
No, you’re not remotely like a fourth-grader, Es.
His wholesale response to the unexpected sight of Esme’s nearly naked body was hardly like it would have been at age ten, either.
Willing his cock to heel, boy, Jude grabbed both sides of the windowpane and heaved his body into her room. It was a hell of a lot more cumbersome to do now than it had been as a scrawny tween. So had been scrambling across the slate roof without losing his balance and breaking half a dozen bones.
“Jesus, I forgot how hot it gets in here,” he said, immediately whipping off the brief jacket he’d put on for his roof-scaling adventure.
“Don’t you dare take off your coat, Jude Beckett. You’re not staying.”
“What are you so pissed about?” he demanded, rounding on her, meeting her bad mood with an even bigger dose of irritation. He stepped toward her, feeling a brief, selfish moment of triumph when her eyes went wide. He couldn’t deny, it was gratifying to have nearly a foot and some seventy or eighty pounds on her. This was Esme, after all. He needed every advantage he could get.
For a few seconds, it looked as if so many different answers to his question popped into her brain that she was rendered temporarily speechless.
“You knew about Mom and Stephen,” she bit out eventually, and Jude had his answer as to what was most offensive to her about his misdeeds. Well, at least his selfish treatment of her in Beverly Hills a few months back didn’t top the list. Or was this topic only the safer one?
“I didn’t know, know,” he defended.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Shit. She was quivering with rage. Actually trembling. The realization made him take a beat to calm down. He shut his eyes briefly and exhaled. “I suspected. That’s not the same thing as knowing, Es.”
“You should have said something. In Beverly Hills.”
For a brief seconds, their eyes met. She turned her chin and stared at the carpet. The color in her cheeks deepened. He got it. Or at least partially, he did. Those two words—Beverly Hills—had come to hold a library full of meaning for him: Teeth-gnashing, out of control need. Regret. Anger. Shame…
The nearly overwhelming prod inside him to do what they’d done in that hotel room again.
Frequently.
And soon.
Chapter Ten
Jude willed his attention away from his crotch and how tempting Esme looked, standing there in that scrap of a nightgown, her glistening eyes screaming silent accusations at him.
“I told you,” Jude said. “I didn’t know anything for certain about Stephen and your mom. I definitely didn’t have a clue they’d be announcing they would be getting married in a few days.”
“But you did know something. Z mentioned it.”
“Z’s an idiot.”
“He was tonight, that’s for sure,” she agreed, crossing her arms at her waist. Her action pulled the material tight across her breasts…sweet, soft, thrusting breasts with incredibly sensitive nipples that pebbled under his lips and tongue like magic…
“But don’t try and change the subject,” Esme said sharpl
y. “You noticed something while you were last New Years. What?”
He dragged his gaze off her chest. Her lips looked flushed now, her eyes incriminating and…
Confused?
“I saw them together out in the garden on New Years Eve.” He saw her questioning look. “It was dark, and they were in the trees. There were a lot of shadows.”
“Jude?” she bit out impatiently when he paused.
“I thought I saw them making out, okay?”
“You didn’t think. You knew,” she accused. “You said something to Z afterward. What was it, exactly? That you were surprised that an Esterbrook would lower her standards enough to make out with the live-in help?”
Jude winced. Her words seemed to hang in between them for a moment like a toxic mist. Damn Z. His brother had insinuated that Jude’s stunned comments on New Year’s Eve were a lot more ugly and cynical than they ever had been. He should never have admitted to Z what he’d seen that night, but his brother had caught him off guard. In revealing what he’d seen that night, Z and he had touched on a topic that was typically taboo between them.
“Did you find Stephen?” Z had asked him when Jude had walked into the great room of the Lodge that night, highly distracted by what he’d just witnessed.
The ancient furnace at the Lodge had started to sputter and clank as Z, Grandpa Joe, and him had been watching The Outlaw Josey Wales following a low key New Year’s dinner and celebration over at the Esterbrooks. Stephen was the only one that could expertly do battle with the old, finicky furnace, so Jude had volunteered to go and find him. Stephen had stayed behind at Ilsa’s to help her change a high light bulb that had gone out in the hall. When Jude hadn’t found them in the Esterbrook family room or kitchen, he’d looked for them on the grounds.
