There was more laughter until Grant shut everyone down so he could say grace. The Amen hadn’t fully formed on his lips when the noise started up again, and huge scoops of lasagna starting hitting plates, along with Caesar salad and toasted French bread dripping with garlic and butter.
“Granny’s lasagna is the best,” Chase told her as he handed her a basket of garlic bread.
“Young man, don’t call me ‘Granny,’” Hazy warned as she returned to the table with parmesan cheese, which she was aiming at Chase.
Chase’s cocky grin was quick. “Call her ‘Granny,’ Madlyn; she loves it.”
Hazy narrowed her eyes on her oldest grandson. “No cheesecake for you.”
“What?” He dropped his fork, and it clattered against his plate. “That’s not fair, Hazy.”
She smiled. “That’s better.” She handed Chase the parmesan cheese, and he drowned his salad and lasagna in it before handing it to Madlyn.
“I’m totally eating cheesecake,” Chase told Jared over Madlyn’s head.
“Not my call,” Jared laughed, taking the parmesan away from Madlyn. “You need more than that.”
Cheese snowed down on the steaming pile of pasta. There was no way she could eat a fourth of it, but it did smell good. Really good. The comfort food combined with the large and loud group of people devouring it was suddenly overwhelming, and Madlyn didn’t overwhelm easily.
Now, sitting in that rustic kitchen with three generations of the Marshalls and the fourth on the way, all she wanted to do was run. She’d forgotten how to be in a crowd like this. All the different conversations that overlapped and back and forth about golf, baseball, football, college classes, someone’s ex-girlfriend, someone else Madlyn was pretty sure was a horse, and all the wisecracks swirling around.
It was too much.
And it was wonderful.
And it reminded her of just how much she’d lost when Robert and his parents had been killed.
The Taylors had been her family. More darts slid under her skin, and this time they started peeling back strips. For a second she couldn’t breathe. She stared at the plate and fought back the panic that was urging her to push to her feet. She had to get out of this place. If she stayed, she would start to remember what her life was supposed to have been like. She wasn’t up to that tonight.
Then a sock-covered foot hooked around her ankle and held her there. She glanced up at Jared, who wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking at Chase. “Pass me the salad.”
Chase offered the wooden bowl, and as Jared reached for the bowl, he used the opportunity to move in closer until their thighs were touching. His foot stayed on the inside of hers. No one at the table would have any idea he was doing anything as he sent the salad further down the table. The heat from his body chased the tension out of hers.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice husky with concern.
The panic receded as she stared up at him, seeing something different this time. Strength. Concern. Encouragement.
Safety.
Pain stabbed through her chest. She’d felt like this before, and she refused to ever feel like this again.
She refused to feel anything.
She picked up her fork and cut into the lasagna and forced herself to eat it. She moved her foot away from his under the table. This was not a date. She was not here to meet his family. She could never be part of a group like this.
When they finished eating, someone announced it was time for cheesecake. Lacey and her daughter popped up to retrieve the boxes from the refrigerator and a stack of paper plates.
“I know you’re not trying to serve my cheesecake on paper plates,” Jared called after his sister, his voice deeper than usual. His arm slid around Madlyn’s waist as he talked over her head. She shouldn’t have allowed him to do that. No, she shouldn’t be enjoying this so much.
“’Fraid so, unless you want to do the dishes,” Lacey smirked at him.
“We have company; get the good dessert plates,” Hazy said.
Lacey sighed heavily, then got the dessert plates out of a sideboard at the other end of the kitchen. Then the cheesecakes were out, and Madlyn was reminded of a pack of wolves descending on a freshly fallen deer.
Someone set a huge slice of chocolate ganache-covered cheesecake in front of Madlyn. She shook her head, unexpected memories of the last time she’d had cheesecake closing her throat without warning. Two little girls in white gauzy dresses, eating tiny cheesecakes while they had tea. Pain choked her, and she struggled to speak. “No, I…I don’t like cheesecake.”
An eerie hush fell over the room as everyone turned to her.
“You haven’t tried my cheesecake,” Jared said. “I dare you.”
“No, really…I…”
Then her mouth was full of cheesecake, and Madlyn slid into sensory heaven as it melted in her mouth with sweet perfection. She’d never tasted anything like it, and she was having all sorts of inappropriate responses. He grinned at her and handed her a fork.
“It’s okay to lose this round.”
She surrendered, which was not something she did often. But she had another bite. It was worth it. No wonder their bakery was so successful. “You made this?”
He nodded. “I’m not just a pretty face.”
She lost herself for a second in that devilishly pretty face, his smile turning smirky with satisfaction. She raised one eyebrow and closed her mouth around the last bite of cheesecake. She stared at him the whole time, daring him to say something.
He didn’t speak, but the look in his eyes clearly said, “Later.”
Grant interrupted whatever it was building up between them, and she remembered where they were. “You ready to talk shop, Madlyn?”
She set her fork down, folded her napkin, and set it down next to her plate. Jared was already on his feet and around to the head of the table. But he stood back and everyone else was careful not to notice as Milton Marshall struggled to stand. The man who rose to his feet was a shadow of the man she remembered, but the unspoken warning was there and no one dared to offer to help him.
“We’ll have coffee in my study, Hazy.”
“Already on it, Dad,” Lacey called from behind him.
He nodded at Jared. “Where are your manners? Show Madlyn to my study.”
Madlyn stood, dragging Jared’s attention back to her. Something warm and soft sparked in her chest when she read the real concern in his expression. It was disturbing for her to see the changes in a once dynamic and intimidating man. There was a fragility to Milton Marshall that was just so wrong, and Madlyn could see that it was cutting Jared and the rest of the family deep.
And there it was. She’d found it. Jared’s Achilles’ heel.
She remembered how fired up he’d gotten earlier with her about this meeting. He was upset about his father, but he covered it well. Now that she knew exactly how to rid herself of Jared when the time came, she felt sick to her stomach. And it wasn’t the cheesecake.
“Maybe you could show me the way?” Madlyn asked the older man, offering her arm.
Milton grinned at her, same cocky grin she had grown so familiar with, only on a younger face that was nearly identical. He caught hold of her arm. “How can I refuse an offer like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Madlyn said, airily. “I thought you planned to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Jared’s attention swung back to his father. If his dad would use his cane, things would be easier on everyone. But Milton wasn’t having it. Jared knew he thought it would be giving in, and his dad never gave in. But he still didn’t dare offer to help.
So when Madlyn stepped up and offered his dad her arm, everything inside of Jared went haywire. It felt like watching himself drown. He sank deeper into a darkness that waited to engulf him while watching himself scream from the shore.
Then his father laughed and accepted her disguised offer of help. When the shock wore off from watching her help her father maintain
his dignity, Jared fell so hard for her that he didn’t even realize what it was.
Chapter Six
The meeting didn’t take long. The elder Marshall was already feeling the strain of the loud family dinner, and Madlyn didn’t want to add to that fatigue. So they chatted for a few minutes and he handed her paperwork he’d already had prepared.
Her heart stopped as she read through it, catching her off guard. The offer was everything she’d never let herself hope for. Emotion burned her throat. There was no way she could have this discussion now. “Can we meet again during the week? I’m sure I’ll have questions, and I think I’m too full of lasagna and cheesecake to make an informed decision.”
Milton laughed, and Jared and Grant relaxed on either side of her. “That sounds like a plan.”
The ride back to the city was tense and too quiet. Jared flipped on the radio, and the car filled with too loud, too hard thumping heavy metal music. It had been a long time since she’d listened to heavy metal. Robert had loved it, dragging her to every concert he could when they were younger. She still wasn’t convinced she didn’t have hearing loss. But the music blaring out of his radio was like nothing she’d ever heard.
“What is that?”
“Not what. Who.” He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers. “That’s Adam.”
“But what kind of music is that?”
“Cajun fiddle death metal?”
“You’re serious?”
“Completely.” He turned it down. “He’s been experimenting with it lately. I thought he was crazy, but it works.”
“So that’s your band?”
“No, that’s just Adam.”
“But he’s in your band?”
“Oh, come on, you’ve never seen us play?”
“Don’t sound so shocked. Trick’s isn’t somewhere I go anymore.”
His grin widened. “But you know we play at Trick’s?”
“Stefan may have mentioned it.” She tried to sound bored as she pushed her hair behind her ears and pretended to concentrate on her phone, although the music was pretty distracting. She couldn’t decide if it was brilliant or sounded like a bunch of cats fighting on a chalkboard. Robert would have loved it.
“So when did you go to Trick’s?”
“I didn’t say—”
“You said it wasn’t any more.”
“I grew up,” she snapped back. He grinned at her again.
“But you have been there?”
Of course she’d been to Trick’s. A long time ago. Back when it was still a relatively unknown dive in a semi-dangerous spot of the French Quarter you didn’t want to get caught in after dark. But it had been a Mecca for local heavy metal musicians playing clandestine gigs. Gigs you had to know someone to get in to. Robert had known everyone.
“Does the concept of fun even exist in your world?”
“Dancing in the basement of a biker bar hardly sounds like fun.”
She was lying again. She’d had fun with Robert at a lot of different clubs. He’d gotten them fake IDs their junior year in high school, and nowhere had been off-limits after that. Now her chest ached just thinking about it. And remembering how long it had been since she’d done anything like that.
“What was the last thing you did for fun?”
She hesitated. The only thing that came to mind was taking Robbie to the aquarium with Jen a few weeks ago, but that hadn’t ended well, and she would never recover what she’d lost that night.
It had been necessary, she reminded herself, although now that felt more like an excuse than a reason. And the price had been too high. She’d severed her friendship with Stefan, Robert’s best friend, and that was a wound that would never heal. Even if she knew Stefan and Jen were both better off without her in their lives.
“Can’t remember?”
She swallowed down the painful lump. She couldn’t think about all that right now. “I took Robbie to City Park to see the lights at Christmas.”
“Did you ride the rides?”
She shook her head. “No, he brought a friend, and they rode a few of them. The line for the train was too long.”
“So you watched Robbie and his friend have fun. You didn’t participate in the fun.”
She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. If she could get mad at him, anger would feel so good right now. Better than this sudden claustrophobia his questions were causing. Fun wasn’t a part of her life anymore. Fun had ended ten years ago after seventeen hours in the burn unit at Baton Rouge General. “I had my son with me for the weekend. I had fun.”
“But not grown-up fun?”
She turned in her seat and injected just enough venom into her words to prick. “What would you know about grown-up fun?”
His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. She eased back into the seat and fought back a smile.
The song ended, and then the silence stretched between them. She shifted in her seat and checked her cell phone again. She shut off the screen and darted a look at him. He was staring straight ahead. His jaw looked ready to shatter despite the day’s growth of beard.
Scruffy, gorgeous, and brilliant was a dangerous enough combination, but there was something else there. Something she didn’t want to look too hard at.
If things were different, she could have fun with him. Maybe even dance with him, lost in the music with him for hours, pressed against him with his hands all over her.
Heat flared between her legs, and she looked away in case her expression gave her away.
And that cheesecake…had he actually made that? And the heat in his eyes when he realized she loved it.
She smiled to herself, careful to keep her face turned away. The silence closed in around her, and she checked her phone to distract herself. She glanced at him again. He was still focused on driving. Ignoring the burn in her belly, she forced herself to look at pictures of her son. Her heart softened, and she remembered why she’d made the choices she’d made.
He looked so much like his father, it broke her heart. And he was growing so fast. There was very little of her baby boy left in that grinning face. He was talking to Jen and showing her the sharks at the aquarium. The light was dim, but she’d managed to snap a picture of them together. Emotion burned her throat and her eyes. Seeing Robert’s son with Robert’s sister was enough. They were both happy. They were safe. It was enough.
But she couldn’t help wondering what Jared was thinking. His thoughts were still a mystery when they pulled in to her driveway. She tilted her head, drinking him in. If only things were different.
“I have fun arguing with you.” Had she said that aloud? What was wrong with her? She shouldn’t love baiting him. And that part of her she never let out was clawing against all her defenses.
“Yeah?” he gritted out, not glancing at her as he cut the engine.
She wanted him to look at her. She wanted to see that cocky grin one more time. “And torturing you. It’s fun to watch you rein yourself in. It’s getting harder to do, isn’t it?”
He exhaled. “You have no idea.”
“It will be fun when you snap.” She wasn’t faking the sudden husky tone in her voice. She couldn’t help herself. “I can’t wait.”
That got her the grin she wanted, but the look he darted at her rolled over her like molten lava, leaving her scorched and raw.
“It’ll be worth the wait,” he promised, his tone low and sexy. “All you’ll be able to do is beg for more.”
She laughed, then coughed to cover it. He had no shame, and he was only half-joking. She kind of loved that about him, and that was dangerous. He was dangerous. She didn’t want to love anything about Jared Marshall. She didn’t want to have fun with him. That wasn’t the road she was on. But somehow, she’d gotten sidetracked by a smartass grin and black ink that twined around him the way she wanted to. She had to end this. Sooner rather than later. She wasn’t sure how to do that without making him hate her.
And having him hate her
was no longer an option. She wouldn’t survive that. It would finish her off. Even a few days ago, that might have been okay, but now, after spending time with him, tasting him, having him touch her, she felt alive again. She wanted to hold on to that feeling and live a little. She wanted to feel something again, before all the other people she couldn’t afford to care about found out the secret she’d kept from all of them. A truth that would destroy them.
“You don’t have to get out.” She opened her door.
He watched her slide out of the SUV, his knuckles white on the steering wheel so he wouldn’t grab her back. Lust stabbed hard at him again when her dress rode up, teasing him with the tops of those lace stockings.
She turned before shutting the door. “Thanks for dinner.” She smiled slowly. “And the cheesecake.”
He groaned as she licked her lips, then slammed the door. He watched her walk away in the review mirror, but it was several minutes before he could start the car. A couple of deep breaths and he felt calmer. He made it down the street before he pulled over and banged his head on the steering wheel a few times.
He wanted to back up, go into that house, and take what he wanted. His whole body ached for her. He couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t breathe.
And it sucked.
Lights flared across his rearview mirror, and he looked up in time to see her Jaguar pull out of her driveway and turn the other way.
Son. Of. A. Bitch.
Where was she going?
He was about to find out. As soon as she turned the corner, he followed her.
The climate-controlled warehouse where her grandfather had stored files for years was not open, but the night security guard knew her and let her in. It didn’t take her long to get what she needed. She stowed the boxes in what passed for a trunk in her Jaguar. The third box went on the front seat.
She promised herself she would not go through it when she got home. She would put it at the top of her closet and pretend it was still in storage. Once she’d parked in her driveway again, she held on to the steering wheel for a few minutes. She would not open the box.
The Fall of the Red Queen (Self Made Men...Southern Style Book 3) Page 6
