Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance

by Braden, Magdalen

  “The girls are so beautiful,” Elise commented. Lissa’s hair was flying around her face as she leapt for the Frisbee while Libby’s was still tidy in its ponytail. Without that difference, it would be hard to tell them apart. Except for the way that Rand snuggled with Libby, of course.

  “Where’s Lissa’s boyfriend?” Elise couldn’t remember his name, and no one much mentioned him.

  “Duke. He flies in tomorrow morning in a plane his boss, the senator, has chartered.” Stacy’s voice was so cool, Elise pictured dry ice smoke drifting toward the lake.

  “I look forward to meeting him,” Elise teased.

  Stacy’s eyebrows lifted but she didn’t speak at first. Then she angled her body so her back was turned toward Jack and Phil. “I thought maybe they—” she jerked her head a tiny bit in their direction, “—had bonded over being the bachelors in the household.”

  Stacy’s tone stung. Elise made herself look directly at her. Stacy wasn’t that much younger than Peggy. They shared that uncanny knack for conveying maternal disapproval. “Yes. Jack proposed. I love him, I do.”

  “But?”

  Elise wrapped her arms around her torso even though it was quite warm in the sun. “I don’t know. I don’t want things to change.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Stacy said carefully as she looked out over the lake. “So don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to know. But if you’re worried about Jack’s past, I can assure you that he’s never felt anything like this for any woman. And I would know.”

  Elise’s head snapped up and she stared at Stacy. God, it had never even occurred to her to think that he might be fickle, flitting from woman to woman. That wasn’t Jack at all.

  “Of course I realize that,” Elise said testily. “Whatever my problem is, it’s my problem. He knows that.” She paused. “Which is what makes this so hard on him. He would jump to fix it if it was anything he could fix.”

  Stacy made a noise that seemed to convey commiseration.

  Elise laughed briefly. “Yeah, he’s quite the zealous advocate, your brother. I know he means well, but it’s driving him crazy that he can’t make an impassioned appeal to the jury, highlighting the salient facts and disproving my false objections, all toward getting the correct verdict.”

  Stacy laughed. “You know him well.”

  “Yup. I think I know him better than he knows me.” She sighed. “The sad part is that I know him better than I know myself.”

  “What’s up with you and Elise?” Stacy asked Jack that afternoon. The kids had gone to the beach with the twins.

  Jack sat on the end of Stacy and Bill’s bed and stared at his shoes as she folded clothes.

  “I proposed,” he told her in a flat voice. He didn’t look up. She’d be happy for him, and he couldn’t face that. “She said no.”

  “No? That’s absurd. You guys are perfect for each other.”

  “Tell that to Elise,” Jack said morosely.

  “I will if you want me to.”

  “I don’t think it would do any good. I don’t even know why she said no. I asked her, but she just said it wouldn’t work out and couldn’t we go back to the way things had been.”

  Stacy moved across the room to hang something up in the closet. “Jack, be honest with me. How do you know Elise is the right woman to marry?”

  He considered this for a moment. “She’s the only one I’ve ever fallen in love with.”

  “Yes, well, that may be true, but it hardly equates to making a life together.”

  Jack contemplated his feet, sensibly clad in pristine white crew socks and running shoes. He waved them from side to side, first in tandem, like windshield wipers, then in mirror action so the toes met in the middle then swung away from each other.

  “Stace?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve never wanted anything like this before.”

  “I know, Jacko.”

  “Why won’t she say yes?” He felt silly asking his big sister for advice, but he was too worried he was going to lose Elise to care.

  “I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask her that.”

  Jack just nodded.

  “You know, you’ve never before told me about something you ached to have,” Stacy said. There was something, a significance in her tone. Jack looked up.

  His sister was standing in the middle of the room, the empty laundry basket by her side. Her mouth curved into a sad smile. She sat down in a rocking chair in the corner and started rocking.

  “I used to nurse the twins in this chair,” she said. “Do you remember when they were infants and we all stayed here? Mom was still alive, and you were home from school. I had such trouble getting them on a regular schedule. Libby would settle down easily enough, but Lissa was fussy and she’d wake her sister.”

  Jack dimly remembered that summer, but he mostly remembered being bored. He’d had a friend at Eagles Mere the year before, but that family were renters and they hadn’t come back.

  “You were so helpful with the babies,” Stacy went on. “Bill had to be in Philly during the week, so I hired you to babysit. I expected you to refuse, but you seemed to enjoy it. You would walk around with Lissa for hours, jiggling her just enough to keep her from fussing. You were a lifesaver, in my eyes. At the very least, you saved my sanity.”

  She had that misty look women got when remembering some event with a rosy sense of how they’d felt. That summer must have been hard on Stacy, but she was acting as though it had been this magical time.

  “Elise accuses me—because believe me, she doesn’t mean it as a compliment—of being a Boy Scout.”

  Stacy laughed. “You are a Boy Scout. You believe in doing the right thing. More importantly, you hate doing the wrong thing. You’re pathologically afraid of being seen as selfish or demanding.”

  “I could find a hundred people who would swear blind I like getting my own way far too often.”

  “Really? Are they talking about your demand for justice, perhaps? Or that you have the monopoly on reason and the logical way to do things? Because sure, those people would be right. But I defy you to produce two people who would say you’ve ever worked to get something for yourself alone, no matter the cost to anyone else.”

  Jack stared at her. “I’m not sure I see the difference,” he said slowly.

  “Take this judgeship. Did you ask for it?”

  “Not really, I guess. A couple people approached me after I put away T-Rex. I was amenable, but initially I didn’t much care.”

  “And the US Attorney’s job—did you ask for that?”

  Jack had to think back. There’d been an acting U.S.A. for a couple of years before Jack had been named. Jack had wanted the job, but not enough to agitate for it. He’d figured that if he kept performing, getting convictions, someone else could decide if he was the best candidate.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “My point is, you’ve always worked very hard, but never to grab some brass ring of glory. You work hard because that’s who you are, that’s what you do.”

  “Okay, but I still don’t see the point.”

  “You’ve worked hard to win Elise’s love, haven’t you?”

  Jack felt his face take on that blank stare he got when he didn’t want to reveal anything. “Yes,” he answered curtly.

  “Do you feel you deserve a future with her, that you’ve earned it?”

  How the hell did she know? He’d forgotten how infuriating Stacy could be. “Someone’s commitment isn’t something you earn, like a gold watch at the end of a long career.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a reflection of a relationship that two people have. You can love someone, even be devoted to that person, and not feel you have a claim on them.”

  Jack stared at his feet again. Then he fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Did he have a claim on Elise? Wouldn’t it be worse if he did? Because he didn’t think he’d ever convince her to marry him if his only argument was that he lo
ved her that much.

  The old-fashioned ceiling fan revolved lazily, soothing him as he worked through his thoughts. “When I saw her in court that first day, I just knew—I recognized her. I’d never seen her before, but she was as familiar and dear to me as you are, as Mom was. Plus, she was—she is—gorgeous to me. I look at her and I can’t believe that every other man on the planet can’t see how lovely she is, and how sexy.”

  Stacy didn’t say anything, but Jack could hear the creak of the rocking chair.

  “I was aware she didn’t know me, plus I had a bit of a reputation, so she had no reason to trust me. I thought I could get around all those obstacles. I agreed to her absurd conditions for our dates simply because once we spent time together, I’d learn everything I needed to know to win her over.”

  “You were planning it like a prosecution, weren’t you?” Stacy asked.

  He propped himself up to stare at her. “You make that sound so cold, like I was trying to convince a jury of something.”

  “Weren’t you? Wasn’t Elise the judge and jury here? If you could just learn all the facts and work out all the wrinkles, you’d mount the perfect case and she’d have to say yes. Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “We have fun together,” Jack said. “It’s not all about this big legal campaign you’re portraying.”

  “Of course you have fun. And you love each other. Any fool with half a brain can see that. I bet if you asked her the right way, Elise herself would acknowledge that.”

  “She does. Why isn’t that enough, then?” He pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged, waiting for her answer.

  “I don’t know why. It may not be enough, or it could be you haven’t told her everything she needs to know.”

  She rocked for a while. “I’m trying to get you to see that you’re thinking like a lawyer—treating your relationship as though there’s an objective truth that has to be acknowledged by anyone considering all the evidence. That’s not how life works in this situation. You may have to admit that you need her, even if that’s not rational. You may even have to admit that you want something solely because you want it, regardless of whether you’ve earned it or worked hard enough for it.”

  “I can’t,” Jack cried. He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know how. She’s everything, and everywhere now. The house, chambers, my courtroom—she’s in every corner of my life. I can’t push her to make a choice because I’m terrified she’ll choose to end it, and then I’ll have nothing.”

  “What precisely do you have now?”

  He looked up. “Her,” he stated. “I have her. I have her energy and intelligence and feisty sense of humor. The weeknights are hard, but then on the weekends, it’s almost enough.”

  “Almost.”

  Jack slumped back down. “Yeah. It’s only almost enough. And I have to be honest with myself—every weekend the gap between what I want and what I have grows larger.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it’s going in the right direction,” Stacy said gently.

  Jack grunted.

  “Jack, I’m going to give you one piece of advice.”

  “What?”

  “Ask for what you want, what you really want in your heart. Ignore the possibility that you haven’t earned it or worked hard enough or come up with the compelling argument for why she should say yes. If the answer is no, then it’s no. But you will never get it without taking the risk.”

  Jack lay still, feeling the summer breeze through the windows. He could hear various members of his family outside, or down on the porch, chatting, playing, or just being together. Even with Stacy in the room, clearly concerned for him, Jack felt lonely. He wanted Elise to be with him, really with him. With him in life and not just in bed.

  “I don’t know how to ask,” he whispered.

  “I know, sweetie. You never have. It’s past time you learned.”

  “Do you, Elizabeth Ann Pembroke, take this man…”

  Jack let the solemnity of the marriage vows roll over him. His niece—someone whose diaper he’d changed—was committing her life to that of the man she loved. She and Rand had decided they needed to be together more than either needed to be apart.

  What would it feel like if it were Elise up there in the gorgeous white gown, taking those vows? Jack swallowed hard at the image of his moonlight girl committing herself to him. She’d be telling him and the world that she wanted to be with him more than she wanted to live apart. In that moment, everything he longed for would come true.

  His mother would have loved to have seen Libby getting married. The twins were three when his mother had died of a particularly aggressive cancer. They had never known her, not really, but she’d known them. Stacy made sure Mom saw the girls every chance she could, working around her chemo treatments, until finally his mother had been too weak for a visit from two boisterous toddlers.

  Jack could feel his eyes well up as the organist played Mendelssohn and they all stood to watch Rand and Libby, and then Phil and Lissa, walk along the aisle and out the front of the church.

  Elise put her arm around him. She grinned up at him. She was happy. It was a wedding, a joining of two lives, and she was smiling without a care in the world. Just another day like any other. Jack struggled to smile back, to share her simple pleasure in the event, but somehow he couldn’t separate his happiness for Rand and Libby from his own sadness at the likelihood that Elise and he would never exchange vows.

  Elise reached for the satellite radio a third time, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn it on. Jack’s silence, his stolid driving and set mouth, all screamed for her to say something, crack a joke, something.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe he’d think she was asleep. Now that was a joke. All he had to do was look at her to see the tension in her body. Not that he ever took his eyes off the road.

  Plus, as soon as she closed her eyes, she was picturing him at the wedding, looking down at her with such sadness in his eyes. She stared out at the highway, the landscape dotted with clusters of suburban homes, the kind that families bought when it was a trade-off between location and size, and they needed the size. Families with kids. Families planning for the future.

  The wedding had made it worse, she saw that. It symbolized the joy of two people starting their life together. Everyone at the reception had been paired up, their futures certain, except for her, Jack and Phil, who claimed to celebrate bachelorhood.

  Other than them, though, it had been all happy couples. No divorce anywhere in the extended family? That seemed a statistical anomaly, at the very least. Elise’s parents’ divorce had been handled about as well as it could, she guessed. She’d been young so it had been all she’d known. She was fascinated by Jack’s intact family tree. How did they do that?

  She wanted to ask him about it. A few weeks ago, she could have. If she asked now, though, wouldn’t he take it as an inflammatory remark? When she refused his offer of marriage, she lost the right to ask things like that.

  Elise was tempted to do it anyway. Maybe he’d lose his temper and yell at her, maybe that would clear the air. Maybe they could have a huge blowout fight and then have make-up sex.

  Sex.

  She missed sex with Jack. Oh, they’d had sex over the weekend. It just hadn’t felt the same. She wanted the magic back, the sheer delight in each other’s bodies. She wanted what they’d had in the beginning. Falling in love seemed to complicate everything, clouding even the joy of arousing each other to the point of insanity. It was still good sex, just not mindless sex. Time with Jack had gotten creased and smudged with her worries about the future.

  Elise suddenly thought of his sunny yellow nursery. She had to let him go. He was hardly old, but he wouldn’t want to be a new dad in his 50s. She’d watched him play with Hugh and Debbie’s kids, who were still young enough to run around on the lawn after a soccer ball or demand piggyback rides. When the reception had gotten boring for two young kids, Jack had stayed with them after everyone
else, even their parents, had lost interest. Jack was great with children.

  She closed her eyes and let the road noise, muffled by his expensive car, remind her of the quiet whoosh of boats on the lake. Jack knew how to sail even if they didn’t have a boat now. He could buy one when his kids were old enough.

  He’d said it was okay if she didn’t want children. Did she? Her stepbrothers were okay, but did that really count? And her friends from college and law school had kids who seemed nice enough.

  An image of herself in that nursery popped unwelcome into her head. Really? A baby? A little boy with Jack’s dark hair and good looks? Or a little girl with—no, of course not. Jack might have those babies, but it wouldn’t be her in the pretty yellow room, surrounded by the pastures and woodlands, drinking in the soft, powdery smell of a baby’s skin.

  No matter what Jack felt for her, she had to let him go. It was selfish to want more time with him. He cared for her, she knew he did, so of course there’d be a void in his life. Eventually, he’d find a better woman and fall in love with her. He just needed some time. Elise wanted him to have that time, maybe even more than she wanted that time with him for herself.

  Wow, wasn’t she being altruistic? She wouldn’t marry him—she couldn’t marry him—so she’d let him go sooner so that he could get over her and marry the Stepford Wife of his choice?

  Elise crossed her arms in disgust. She’d really screwed this up. She’d thought he would have gotten bored by now, but no—he was still persisting in this delusion that he wanted to marry her. Insanity.

  “I’m not a good bet,” she said out loud.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You seem to think I’d make a good wife, but I wouldn’t.”

  “I see.” He concentrated on the road for a few moments. “Would you cheat on m—your husband, I mean?”

  “No, of course not. I hate cheaters. When I’m with a man, he’s the only man I’m with.”