Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance

by Braden, Magdalen

  It wasn’t hard after that to use her body to speak directly to his body. She loved him the best way she could. This “making love” stuff was new to her, sure, but she could learn new tricks.

  Based on his reaction, she seemed to have gotten the point across.

  Elise flopped onto her back, staring up at the ceiling as her breathing calmed and her skin dried in the pleasantly cool air-conditioning. Jack had a clock on his bedside table with a large digital readout constructed of oblong red shapes—the numerals looked like those diabolical toothpick math puzzles she could never solve as a kid. Nearly two a.m. Of course her body was still on West Coast time, so it wasn’t even ready for bed, let alone sleep.

  Add to that, she was still wired from the push to get back to Jack. This was the first time a flight back to Philly had been all about the man she was returning to. Even her opting to come straight to his house seemed off, a choice some other woman might make. The old Elise would have thanked him for the ride but insisted on getting back to home base where the mail was stacked up and her few houseplants needed life support.

  “Elise?” he whispered.

  “Mmm?”

  “Figures you weren’t asleep.” She could feel the faint vibration from his chuckle more than she could hear it.

  “At least I have an excuse. It’s only eleven for my body. What’s up with you?” she whispered back.

  He hitched himself up on one elbow. “I have my reasons.” His voice was low and resonant but at least he’d stopped whispering. Silly in an empty house to sound like teenagers trying to keep from waking the household.

  Elise looked at his body, which was a black void in the dimness. She reached out a hand to stroke his shoulder and hit his ear instead. She adjusted and managed to curve her palm along his upper arm, down to his elbow, his wrist, his hand. She was toying with his fingers when he spoke again.

  “Elise.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She followed the line of his hand to his hip, across the upper thigh to his groin. He was soft, but that could change. She ran the pad of her thumb along all the spots he was most sensitive.

  His hand caught hers, stilling her efforts to arouse him. “Sweetheart, stop. I want to talk to you.”

  Elise pouted like a spoiled child deprived of a favorite toy. Didn’t matter—he couldn’t see her expression. If he was awake enough for conversation, for sure he’d be ready for round two. Or was it three?

  She pulled herself up to lean against the pillows and reached over to turn on the light. “Okay. What’s up?”

  Jack sat up and swiveled around so he was facing her. Elise had one of those weird moments when he suddenly looked like Blackjack McIntyre, legendary prosecutor, and not her Jack. Considering that he was buck naked, and well satisfied sexually, his transformation into his larger-than-life Boy-Scout-of-Steel persona was impressive.

  “This wasn’t quite how I’d planned this,” he murmured. “But there’s something fitting about doing this in the nude and not after a five-course dinner.”

  “Oh, God. You’re breaking up with me,” she blurted. Her own words shocked her, leaving her mouth open in a comical O of surprise. Where the hell had that come from?

  Jack grabbed her hands and squeezed, hard. “Elise, darling, of course not. You’re everything to me, you know that. You have been since that first day, in court. I know we got off on the wrong foot. I’d have vastly preferred to ask you out the normal way, whatever that is, but it seems you and I don’t do ‘normal.’”

  He held her hands lightly in his left, petting them absently with his right. He seemed completely focused on this activity, his tanned fingers against her paler skin. It was vaguely hypnotic to watch him gazing at their hands.

  “When I looked at you that day, I saw a beautiful woman—no—” He stopped her mumble of protest. He looked up, his face calm and serious. “You are beautiful. Certainly you are to me, beautiful in ways that transcend looks and time. You’ll be beautiful in fifty years. I hope…” His voice trailed off.

  He sat up a bit taller and started again. “It wasn’t just your beauty. It was you, something about you. I don’t know, your intensity perhaps, or your obvious intelligence. Whatever it was, whatever I saw, I loved you immediately and irrevocably.”

  He smiled at her, that same Blackjack smile he used in his chambers, the smile with the crinkly eyes and flashing teeth. Still made her melt like ice cream, drat it all. She grinned back at him.

  He placed her hands carefully on her thighs and leaned back a bit. Even nude he looked increasingly like the successful prosecutor, midway through an important argument to the court.

  “I understand why you couldn’t believe that I was serious at first. And then I messed things up with that business with Mather. I’m sorry I didn’t handle that better, or let you handle it. You were generous to forgive me.”

  The knot in her stomach tightened a little more with each word of this speech. If she were clever, she’d know how to stop him. It was like a slow-motion disaster. All she could do was stare at him, her “obvious intelligence,” as he called it, lost in a growing fog of anxiety.

  “So I needed to go a lot slower, and that’s worked better, hasn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You only saw our differences at first—you know, the beer-versus-wine thing—but you have to admit we actually fit together well. We get along, we’re compatible in bed and out, you seem to like my family, I like your mother and I’m sure I’ll like your Ohio family.”

  “Jack,” Elise started. He didn’t seem to hear her.

  “And you love me. You know you do. I know you do. Not because of anything superficial, but because of that connection between us. Maybe I didn’t see it the first day, maybe love at first sight is a myth, I don’t know. But it’s real now. We love each other now.”

  He took a deep breath, swelling his torso. Time had slowed to a painful crawl. Elise couldn’t think how to prevent the inevitable train wreck.

  His voice deepened even further. “Elise, will you marry me?”

  She stared at him, chilled by the horror of what he was asking. Her heart was pounding, like someone trying to escape a burning building. What could she say, except the truth?

  “I can’t.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You can’t,” Jack repeated. He considered her expression of mingled regret, sympathy and a touch of adolescent mulishness.

  What did that mean, she couldn’t marry him?

  He tried again. “You can’t marry me legally because it would be bigamy, or you can’t because it would violate your principles?” Not that her answer mattered. It was pretty clear that she could marry him but that she didn’t want to.

  She must have guessed what he was thinking because she grabbed at his arm. “Jack, it’s not like that. I’m telling you, I don’t know how.”

  “It’s not hard. We get a marriage license, we discuss whether we want a big wedding, a small wedding, an Elvis impersonator in Vegas, or a twenty-minute ceremony in Anita King’s chambers with my clerks as witnesses, and then we go get married.” He remembered part of his carefully thought-out argument that he’d botched so badly. “Or we don’t get married. Move in with me, or if you love your house so much, we can live there.”

  Elise looked physically ill, her face waxy and pale, blue eyes nearly black with pain. She didn’t say anything. Venue, ceremony, and residence were clearly not the issues.

  He yanked his arm back. “Well, then what the hell is the issue, dammit? You can’t pull some ‘it’s not you it’s me’ crap at this stage. You love me, you know you do. And you know I love you. So what the fuck is going on?”

  Great. Now, on top of all the other times this woman had managed to get him to behave differently—Dave & Buster’s, sex on the floor of his office, even flying out to Oregon because he thought she needed his support—he could add to that list swearing like a sailor.

  When she didn’t say anything right away, Jack got up, put on some boxers and headed downst
airs.

  “Jack?” she called after him. He could hear her moving around in the bedroom. He turned on the lights in the living room, and then got a highball glass and took it over to the liquor cabinet. He glanced over his shoulder as Elise came down the stairs. She’d put on that asinine “knows a judge” T-shirt, which was pretty damned ironic under the circumstances. It skimmed the tops of her thighs. The sight of her pretty legs, soft and pale, made him crazy. He turned away and poured his drink.

  When he turned back, she was hugging her torso as if she was cold. It was warmer downstairs than in the bedroom, where the air-conditioning was still running.

  “I need a drink.” He lifted the bottle of Scotch in his hand. “Want one?”

  She shook her head and went to the fridge to get a beer.

  Beer. Of course. Did Elise really think he cared what she drank, that it was emblematic of some class difference between them?

  “Can we talk about this?” She leaned against the island, holding the beer bottle. She hadn’t bothered to take the top off yet. She played with the label around the neck, pulling at a loose edge with her fingernail.

  “Okay.” He felt exhausted, heavy, weighed down by the past twenty minutes. Or maybe it was the past twenty weeks. “Are we breaking up?” Even his voice sounded leaden.

  Elise put the bottle down on the counter. She looked like she wanted to join him, but she didn’t move. “No, of course not. I love you. I do. I just don’t know how to do—what you want. I don’t know how to be married. It’s not a relationship I’ve ever wanted.”

  “What is it you think people in love do?”

  “That’s just it, I have no idea. I’ve never been in love before.”

  “Neither have I, but there are certain conventions that give us some idea what our options are.”

  Elise came to him then, grabbing him. Her eyes implored him to—do something. Give her something? Four months and he still had no idea what this woman wanted.

  He looked down at her hands, clutched around his wrists. She could have been fighting him off, if someone only considered their body language. “Do you want to date other men?”

  “God, no!” She pushed away from him, apparently revolted by the idea.

  He grimaced. “What then?”

  Elise threw her hands up in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I do love you, though. I’m not saying that because it’s what you want to hear. If I was saying what you wanted to hear, I’d have accepted your proposal.”

  She walked back to the kitchen. She hitched herself up on one of the tall chairs by the island, her shirt riding up enough to show the bridge of lace across her hip. She’d put on her panties, although he couldn’t say why that struck him as important.

  Elise picked up the beer bottle again, maybe so she’d have something to hold on to. Jack went to sit in the other chair, placing his highball on the counter. Their knees were an inch apart, but there was no intimacy.

  She parted her lips, thinking. “I know things aren’t right the way they are. I get that. Dating on the weekend and not seeing each other during the week—that’s not what I want either. When I think about moving in here, with you, and selling my house, and making room in the closet for my things and getting up every morning and coming home every evening and—what if you’re not here?” Her voice sounded tinny and small, as though scratched by some emotion she was holding back.

  “Of course I’ll be here,” he said softly. He touched her knee, cupping the side of it so his fingertips curved into the crease of delicate skin at the back. She didn’t look up at him.

  What was really going on in that head? He could argue with her assumptions. She wouldn’t have to sell her house if she wasn’t ready to do that. Or they could sell both houses and buy a place that was equally new and different for each of them. He’d miss his home but without her, it was just a house.

  There were solutions to any specific hiccup, but she didn’t make it sound like this was a solvable problem.

  “I’m scared,” she said in the smallest voice yet.

  Then, in a stronger voice, she said, “God, I hate being emotional. I despise it. The tears, the snot, the loss of control.” She glared at him. “I cried all the way to Oregon, starting at the departures lounge right after you drove away. I never cry.” She sounded as though the tears were chasing her, and winning.

  Jack’s heart cracked. He could kick himself. She’d just come back from dealing with her mother’s heart attack, and he launched at her with a marriage proposal. He stood up and scooped her into his arms. “My darling girl,” he murmured into her hair. “It’s okay. I’m here.” He could feel her melt, almost shrinking as her bravado bled away.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she mumbled. He could feel the dampness of her tears slick on his skin. She reached up to scrub at her cheeks or something, but he had his arms around her so tightly she couldn’t get rid of the evidence that she’d cried. She put her arms around his back and shuddered.

  “It’s okay,” he said again. He doubted she was listening. “It’s okay.”

  No surprise to Jack, their two a.m. drama got lost in the bustle of getting ready for work while still blurry from lack of sleep. “Are you sure you want to go in to the office today?” he asked her as he looked in the closet’s mirror to adjust the knot of his tie. “I can let Brenda know I’m running late and take you home first.”

  Elise was hunched down over her open suitcase, pulling out clothes. “Jack, don’t be silly. I just need to go in to the office and see what’s what. I probably won’t even work a full day. I’ll come back here and make us supper, okay? Then you can drive me home after that.”

  “You’re welcome to stay longer,” he said, but she’d already headed into the bathroom and turned the shower on. She probably hadn’t heard him. He thought about trying to talk to her over the noise. A glance at his watch told him it was a bad idea. She’d be there that evening and they’d talk then.

  At least, he hoped they would talk.

  In his chambers, Jack deliberately buried himself in work, getting through the last of the backlog of briefs and memos that had piled up while he’d been in Oregon. The distraction worked until he looked up and saw how late it was. Six and still nothing from Elise asking when he was leaving.

  Somehow he’d known not to count on her rather optimistic prediction for the evening. He barely registered surprise when she called to apologize for having to work late. “I’ll just walk back to my house, okay? We’ll meet up tomorrow night and I’m sure at some point my suitcase will make it back to Fitler Square.”

  He sighed, said that sounded fine, and hung up as quickly as he could without seeming rude.

  His office seemed deadly quiet after the call ended. He could hear his clerks chattering away in their office. No words, just the cheery tone of their conversation. He pushed his door shut then walked back to his desk. If he swiveled his chair a little he could see the lights of Market Street and the Bourse in the late summer afternoon. People going for dinner out or maybe heading to the movies. He could see couples walking hand-in-hand, comfortable with the status quo. He turned back to the work on his desk, but he couldn’t focus on any of it.

  Why the hell had he proposed in such a ham-fisted manner? As a lawyer, he should have known better. How many trials had he handled? Had he ever done a worse job examining a witness or arguing to the jury?

  His trial advocacy professor had a rule—never ask a witness a question to which you didn’t know the answer. Well, he’d blown that rule last night.

  A future together seemed so obvious to him that he couldn’t see why it wasn’t similarly obvious for Elise. All along, he figured his job was to get her to see how well they fit together and how much they loved each other. Well, Elise had finally seen that she loved him and there was no suggestion they didn’t fit well together. Who didn’t want to marry the person they loved, or at least plan a future of some sort?

  Instead, he got “I can’t.” What did “I can�
��t” mean? Oh, and “I’m scared.” What the hell did she have to be scared of?

  Just as quickly, his annoyance was replaced by a sad resignation. He propped his elbows on the desk and pressed his face into his hands.

  It wasn’t a lost cause. Elise loved him and she liked sleeping with him and she hadn’t dumped him.

  She just didn’t want to marry him.

  No, he cautioned himself, that wasn’t what she said. She’d said she couldn’t. She’d also said she was scared. She’d been sincere about that. She’d even sounded young, like a child terrified of the monsters under the bed.

  Monsters. Childhood monsters. Jack’s head started to pound. Could Elise have been molested as a child? Maybe by that bastard, Tom something or other?

  There was a good reason he’d let other prosecutors in the US Attorney’s office handle the kiddie porn cases. He wasn’t good with the nuances and the need to understand the sick pervs who preyed on kids. He lacked the ability to split them open like overripe bananas.

  He called the woman over at the US Attorney’s office who had handled all their sex-crime cases. She reassured him that anyone with Elise’s confidence in bed and out was unlikely to be an adult survivor of molestation.

  He leaned back in his chair and let out the breath he’d been holding. He thanked her and got off the phone. Sometimes ruling something out was almost as good as solving the problem.

  Jack turned to stare out the window again. He’d get another shot at it, and the second time he’d mount a much better case for the two of them building a future together.

  When Christine walked into Elise’s office, Elise stopped sorting through files in one of the many banker’s boxes on the floor.