Project Virgin

by Megan Crane

  As he drove through the looming walls of snow the snowplows had left behind on their last pass, he found himself grinning slightly, and it hit him. This was home, whether he liked it or not, this pragmatic, rough-edged town that could never quite transcend its working class soul. And much as he’d spent his life pretending otherwise, he hadn’t sprung into being when he’d set foot on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. He’d been raised right here, a part of this matter-of-fact place hunkered down against the big sky and the wide plains. This was where he’d learned that some beautiful things weren’t necessarily obvious to the casual observer, that some things rewarded a little dedication and patience, like the sun reaching over the Rims in otherwise desolate winters. This was where he’d learned what hard work was and how not to fear the doing of it, an inbred local reality that had set him apart from his college classmates and had served him well ever since.

  Fight it he had, for years now, but this was where he came from. In a very real sense, he realized then, Seattle was who he aspired to be—but Billings was who he was, down deep in his bones.

  He turned that over and over in his head as he made his way along the mostly deserted streets toward his father’s house. It was the same house Jesse had grown up in, though Billy had renovated it several times over the years, so it was now very much in the height of the popular nouveau ranch style. High ceilings and alder wood and a grand two story stone façade that was Billy’s way of proclaiming his successes to his neighbors.

  And then Jesse was sitting there in the driveway to this house he swore he’d never set foot in again, having no idea what the hell he was doing here instead of two hours west in Marietta, where he belonged. He had Michaela in his head like some kind of better angel, gazing at him with those bright hazel eyes of hers, making him wish he was the kind of man who could have claimed her when he’d had the chance. When she’d wanted him to. When he’d been stuck here instead.

  Suck it up, princess, he growled at himself, and then he was out of the car and headed for the door.

  The cold was a good thing. The cold felt like reason as it stung his exposed face, and he felt his tension ease down at least three degrees—to match the plummeting temperature, he imagined—as he rang the ostentatious bell his younger sister Scottie, in her usual lawyer-sharp way, had once called Dad’s mating cry.

  And then the great door swung open, and Angelique stood before him, and there was no pretending he wasn’t standing here, doing this.

  Jesse didn’t know who was more uncomfortable in that first moment, his ex-girlfriend or him.

  She was staring at him in shock, so he had more than enough time to process the fact that she wasn’t quite what he’d expected. Gone was the full face of makeup, and all the mascara that had always highlighted her pale blue eyes. Gone was the darker hair dye to call more attention to the contrast between its glossy blackness and those eyes. Her hair was a rich brown pulled back into a haphazard ponytail now, and her face was scrubbed clean. She was beautiful, of course—she would always be beautiful—but this was an Angelique he’d never seen before, in cargo pants and a simple white shirt.

  “Jesse,” she said, as if her voice didn’t quite work or she thought she might be seeing things. Then she cleared her throat. “What… What are you…?” She blinked hard, then stepped back into the house, beckoning him in. “Come in. Come in—I mean, if you want…” She looked over her shoulder helplessly, then back at him. “Your dad is here. If that’s why…?”

  The Angelique he’d known had never been at a loss for words. Then again, he’d made her so much the Wicked Witch of the West in his head he realized he’d half-expected her to be green and covered in warts. So maybe he didn’t know her at all anymore. Not really.

  “You look good,” he said quietly. And she did, if different. He forced himself to say the obvious thing, because it was true and because the only reason not to say it was sheer pettiness. “Happy.”

  She swallowed. Hard. To her credit, she didn’t look away.

  “I am,” she said. Then, in a rush, “Jesse, I’m so sorry that came at your expense. So very sorry. We both are.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. “I appreciate that.”

  Angelique took a breath. “If there was a way we could go back and do this in a way that didn’t hurt you, we would. I want you to know that. No matter why you’re here.”

  And he supposed he should be glad she didn’t regret that it had happened, only the way it had. Because maybe it would be worse to have been betrayed like this for something that didn’t matter. He opened his mouth to tell her that.

  “Why are you here?”

  That voice was as familiar to him as his own. Jesse looked past Angelique, down the length of the great foyer that was all arched wood and skylights in sheer defiance of the dizzying Montana heating bills, to see his father for the first time in over three years.

  Billy stood in the doorway to the family room, flanked by two little girls in pigtails and pouts, each of them clinging to one of his legs and blinking toward Jesse with identically wide, shy eyes. The girls were adorable. Billy, meanwhile, looked exactly the same and yet older at the same time. He dressed like a man who was pushing fifty rather than sixty, in a dark Henley and that spiky dark hair of his, with a hint of a beard as an accent. Jesse supposed he was good-looking, though he hated admitting it. There was more grey in the old man’s dark hair now, Jesse was pleased to note, and more lines around his eyes. And Billy stood there very straight and very defensive, a hand on each of his daughter’s heads, as if he expected Jesse to start swinging at any moment.

  “No fatted calf, Dad?” Jesse asked mildly. “That hurts a little.”

  “You want beef,” Billy replied in a similar tone—or maybe not a similar tone, Jesse thought with some surprise, maybe it was the same exact tone, like he’d inherited it from Billy—“there’s a new hamburger place a few miles back down the road toward town. You’ll love it. It’s in a hotel where, bonus, they can also put you up while you take care of your business here. Whatever that is.”

  “He can stay here,” Angelique retorted, and rolled her eyes at Billy with, Jesse realized, the kind of absolute confidence she had never displayed when she’d been with him.

  It occurred to him that all the things he’d thought were who Angelique was—the bids for his attention, the sex kitten routine—had been nothing more than insecurity. Right here, right now, she looked every inch the tough, capable Montana women he’d grown up with. That made him blink. And more, made him realize that if it was true, his split-second take on the changes in this woman, he really hadn’t ever been the man for her. How could he have been?

  Angelique looked back at Jesse. “Ignore him. Of course you can stay here, and for as long as you want.”

  “Like hell,” Billy threw right back. “You’re not staying under the same roof as my—”

  But he didn’t finish that sentence.

  And it all made sense, suddenly. Jesse knew that look on his father’s face. He could see the old man’s fears like a scrolling marquee. Billy had stolen his very hot, much younger wife—who was the same age as his own daughters, for God’s sake—from his own son. And maybe after three years and two kids, Billy figured that son might look pretty good to a woman who’d already switched allegiances once under this very same roof. Next to him, Jesse could feel Angelique vibrating slightly, with temper or emotion he couldn’t quite tell, and there was a certain liberation in recognizing that whatever it was, whatever he might have figured out about what had happened between them, this wasn’t his problem.

  She wasn’t his problem. His father’s paranoia wasn’t his problem. He didn’t have to fix any of this. And yet at the same time, like it or not, these people were his family.

  He wasn’t sure he was ever going to truly understand his father. This was a man who had slept around so much and lied so expansively to Jesse’s mother that she’d become a hermit since the divorce, preferring the c
ompany of horses on her little spread in Idaho. Billy was a salesman to his core, which meant he was a great guy to have a few beers with but was never around to clean up the mess the next day. He was a weak man and he’d been a terrible father, but then again, Jesse had built his own company from scratch exactly the way Billy had, almost as if he’d taken a few things from the old man after all. Maybe if he stopped waiting for his father to apologize, if he stopped expecting that this man, who had never changed, would do so at Jesse’s command, they might discover they had a lot more in common than Jesse had ever thought.

  If your father’s in the room, I didn’t invite him, Michaela had said.

  Well, his father was in this room. And if Jesse didn’t deal with him here, he’d spend God only knew how many more years dealing with his unresolved daddy issues in all the places Billy wasn’t. And he was done with that. He wanted something better. He wanted to be free of this mess.

  And if he wanted this crap behind him, he was obviously going to have to do it his own damn self.

  “I’m not here to dredge up the past,” Jesse said then.

  Jesse recognized that tilt to his father’s head, the squaring of his shoulders. He’d seen it often enough in his own goddamned mirror.

  “Why show up here unannounced, if not for that?” Billy asked.

  And Jesse had the same dislocating sensation he’d had driving through Billings to get here. That he might not love this place, he might define himself in opposition to it, he might have done his level best to distance himself in every way he could… but this was where he was from. This was his hometown and Billy was his father, and there was no getting around that. Billy hadn’t killed anyone, or abused anyone. He and Angelique were two grown adults who hadn’t even been married to other people when they’d gotten together, they had their own family now, and Jesse didn’t want this anyway. He didn’t want a woman who would choose his father over him, not even if the timing had been better, and he didn’t want their life. Not any part of it.

  He knew exactly what he wanted, and she was roughly eight hundred miles to the west and, he could only hope, disentangling herself from Terrence Polk. And he couldn’t possibly deserve her if he didn’t free himself of his shit the same way he’d demanded she free herself of hers.

  “I heard I had a couple of little sisters,” he said then, holding his father’s gaze and then dropping it to look at the little girls who were still staring back at him, their eyes bright and cheeks pudgy.

  He smiled at them, and waited. Slowly, very slowly, one of them smiled back.

  “That’s Layla,” Billy muttered, his hand on her head. Then the other one smiled too, even wider. “And this is Lacey.”

  He heard Angelique suck in a breath beside him, as if she hadn’t believed that any of this would ever happen. A quick glance showed him she was wiping tears away, covering her mouth with her hands. And when he looked back at Billy, even his father’s eyes were suspiciously bright.

  “It seemed like a good time to introduce myself,” Jesse said gruffly. “That’s why I’m here.”

  *

  That Saturday night, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, Michaela walked into Grey’s Saloon in Marietta, Montana, on a mission.

  She’d accomplished a great deal in the past few days, not least of which was paying a king’s ransom or two to get the last seat on the last plane into Bozeman this afternoon. Not to mention throwing down about five times that to wrangle a suite at the gloriously restored Graff Hotel right here in town, which had, lucky for her if not for her wallet, a last minute cancellation on this most romantic of weekends. Because a woman didn’t head off into the Wild West in search of a man she wasn’t sure would have her and plan to bunk down in her Aunt Cathy’s spare room with the twin beds.

  But it was all worth it when she saw the most beautiful man she’d ever beheld, outside of a movie theater, standing at the far end of the bar, staring down at the whiskey in front of him as if he’d been doing it a while. As if he was completely alone instead of surrounded by the boisterous Saturday night crowd that heaved around him. She started toward him, not surprised that Grey’s was decidedly not decked out in pink hearts and red garlands in celebration of the Day of Love.

  She’d dressed the part herself—or anyway, she’d dressed the way she’d like to think she would have dressed had she imagined that a week ago, she’d have been meeting the man who would completely alter the course of her life. A sweet little red dress for the holiday, and for the man who didn’t know she wanted to share it with him, and she’d even tried to do something with her hair. A slick of lipstick and a touch of mascara. Boots because this was Montana and it was viciously cold out there, and she wasn’t going to get anywhere with Jesse if she’d tripped and broken her neck on the frigid walk over here from her hotel.

  And Michaela really, really wanted to get somewhere with this man.

  She knew the exact, precise moment he saw her.

  Because it was like every other time their eyes had locked in those wild two days they’d spent together.

  Hot. Consuming.

  Epic.

  He didn’t move as she wound her way toward him, dodging groups of women making the typical declarations in the face of apparent singlehood, couples swaying together as if they were in private, and then the usual packs of men on the prowl and animated women looking happy enough to be prowled upon. All the usual shenanigans, and then Jesse there, like a clear, high note that cut straight through the noise.

  She slipped into the space at the bar directly to his right, and then she could feel him. All that heat and strength. The heft of his brooding attention, his milk chocolate gaze, as he leveled it at her.

  Michaela turned slowly, leaning her elbow on the bar so she could face him.

  And he was exactly the way she remembered him. He hadn’t been some snowstorm delusion. If anything, she’d dimmed him a bit in her head because she still couldn’t believe any man could really, truly look like this.

  But he did.

  And he was gazing back at her as if there wasn’t another woman alive, the hint of a curve on that hard mouth of his.

  “Well?” she asked, after one moment dragged into a year or so, and they still only looked at each other.

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to buy me a drink?” She lifted one shoulder, then dropped it, fully aware of what that did to the deep V neckline of her dress. And to him. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

  “I think I can bribe the bartender into making you something hideously pink,” Jesse said after a moment, dragging his gaze back to her face. “He’s practically family. He can’t refuse.”

  “Only if it’s sugary and awful and will make my teeth hurt.”

  “You can trust me,” Jesse said, and she did.

  Not just about the pink drink, which was delivered with an eye roll from the dark-haired bartender who appeared only slightly less surly than the man Michaela knew to be Jesse’s uncle. But she was finally here, and he was looking at her as if he could do that forever, and she figured there was all the time in the world to get into that.

  “Your game is pretty dire,” she told him, when the silence dragged out again. “If this is how you flirt with women, I don’t think there’s any wonder that you’re still single.”

  Jesse had ordered a beer when he’d ordered her drink and he took a pull from it, then leaned closer, his smile like gold in those eyes of his.

  “I don’t have to flirt, Michaela. I think you know that.”

  “Maybe you should start.”

  His mouth moved into that delicious curve again, and then he reached over and stroked a finger along her shoulder. She felt that touch like a current of light, and it took her a breathless moment to realize he was doing it again, tracing the strap of this dress up and down and up again. Making her whole body seem to liquefy and run hot, that easily.

  “It wouldn’t be fair,” he murmured.

  Jesse shifted so he was
leaning against the bar too, and they were face to face again. He looked perfect. Better than perfect. He was wearing another Henley, this one a soft grey that made her hands itch to touch him, and which clung lovingly to every etched stone ridge and valley on that gorgeous torso of his.

  And Michaela hadn’t come all this way to stare at him, as much as she enjoyed doing exactly that.

  “Technically,” she said then, very distinctly, “I didn’t betray anyone.” His dark eyes gleamed, but he didn’t say anything. “All we did was kiss.” That light in his eyes turned to a very knowing, very male sort of amusement, and she felt the answering flush swamp her immediately. And everywhere. But she lifted her chin, held his gaze, and soldiered on. “It doesn’t matter where.”

  He didn’t quite laugh and that was heat in his gaze, she was sure of it, not the dark and tortured thing that had been there the last time she’d seen him.

  “Believe me,” he said, quiet gravel and all that fire besides. “It matters.”

  “I didn’t break any promises,” she told him, frowning at him. “It’s important that you understand that, Jesse. I’m not that person.” He looked as if he was going to comment on that but she forged forward. “You came out of nowhere. I’d never had the slightest interest in exploring what an open relationship meant. Maybe it always feels like cheating. I don’t know. But it wasn’t cheating and it doesn’t matter, because I’m never going to have to worry about it again.”

  “Oh?” He sounded bored, but she could see that hard thing in his gaze, and she knew whatever else he was, he wasn’t bored.

  So she told him Terrence had taken a little tracking down. That she’d finally managed to find him late on Tuesday night, though she’d been reeling and exhausted from having woken up at three in the morning with Jesse in Montana, and maybe a little less composed than she should have been. She’d been waiting for Terrence outside his apartment when he’d finally turned up, and he’d looked decidedly unexcited to find her there.