Olive piped up. “That Jessie might end up with a kid sometime soon. ’Course, it’d be a bastard. But probably cute as hell.”
They both ignored her. Jane flipped through a few more pages, noticing the way her appearance began to change. She’d started getting curvy in the fourth grade but still had that bright glow of childhood. A few pages later a different Dynasty began to appear. This one had short hair and too much makeup. Her eyes still flashed, but the smiles were hard and flirtatious. Soon the smiles stopped altogether, replaced with pouting lips and narrowed eyes and hair bleached nearly white. The girl got taller and the clothes got shorter.
Jane snapped the book closed. She always felt as though regret were stitched into her skin, but looking at those photos, she could feel the string pulled tighter and tighter, as if the seams of her body might tear themselves apart at any moment.
She took a deep breath, telling herself it was all long past, but when the doorbell rang, Jane jumped as if she’d heard a shot fired.
“It’s the pizza!” her mom called, jumping up. “Mac! Pizza’s here.”
Jane pulled the DVD out of her purse and stuck it in the machine. Mac brought in the paper plates and pizza, and Jane sat next to him on the couch.
A movie, beer and pizza. Everyone settled in happily to watch the show. But all Jane could think about were the pictures. She’d been so…young. One minute she’d been a little girl, and the next minute she’d been throwing herself at boys…and men.
She’d known that already, but the pictures had shown her something else, something she hadn’t known.
At one point she’d been happy. Oh, not as a teenager, but before that…before that, she’d been happy.
In her mind she’d remembered those awful years of moving from town to town, prison to prison. She’d remembered the hard-eyed new “daddies” and the guards with guns. The thin walls of rented trailers and the roaches in the sink. But for a while there, after Mac had been freed and they’d become a real family…she’d been happy.
She’d had a family and a house and a real yard to play in. She’d had her own bedroom and a dad who actually lived at home with them. Schoolwork had come easily to her. She’d done well.
In those few short years, everything had been perfect.
How could she not have remembered?
Sipping her beer, Jane leaned her head against Mac’s shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t notice if a few tears soaked into his T-shirt. Her head was wobbly, and she needed her dad to lean against for a few minutes.
Prison tattoos and all, he was the best man she’d ever known. The best man. So what the hell had she been running from for so long?
CHASE WOKE LATE on Sunday morning, bleary-eyed from a rough night. His dad had called him at ten, obviously drunk, to offer some new ideas about how to get Jessie clear of murder charges. Chase had reminded him that Jessie had already been cleared, then listened to his dad reminisce about his mother for a little while before hanging up.
That call had kept him awake until two in the morning. Now it was 9:00 a.m. and his eyes felt gritty and swollen. He felt as if he had a hangover, though he could judge only by the way his employees looked after partying too hard. They always looked like shit, and he definitely felt like it.
Groaning, he let his head fall back to his pillow, wondering why the sun was so insistent on crawling across the top of his bed.
Then he heard it. The faint beep of his phone. He sat up and glared suspiciously at his empty bedside table. Why wasn’t his phone there? Jesus, maybe he really had gotten drunk last night. Maybe he’d thrown caution to the wind and downed those two bottles of beer in his fridge, then passed out in an embarrassingly low-level stupor.
He finally identified his jeans as the source of the beeping and snatched them off the floor to dig his phone out of a pocket. When he saw the missed call on the screen, his exhaustion disappeared like a bad dream.
Jane.
Sunday morning seemed an odd time for a booty call. Maybe she was calling for something else?
He hit a button and held his breath while the phone rang.
“Chase?” she said, and the sound of her saying his name made him smile. Ridiculous.
“Hey, Jane.”
“You sound tired. Are you okay?”
Chase stretched and collapsed back onto the mattress. “I’m still in bed.”
“Oh. I…see.”
Was she picturing him naked? He was sure as hell thinking of her nude body stretched out next to him. Damn.
“Late night?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you go out?” Her voice sank a little.
Chase smiled. “No, I stayed home and moped around, missing you and wondering when you’d call.”
“Look, you don’t have to be a smart-ass. You can go out all you want. You don’t answer to me, obviously.”
“I wasn’t being a smart-ass, Jane.”
He heard her breathing for a moment before she said, “Oh.”
Stretching again, he rubbed a hand over his stomach. “So, did you call to find out if I was cheating on you?”
“You can’t cheat on someone who’s not your girlfriend.”
“Mmm-hmm. So you won’t mind if I hook up with the new check-out girl at the grocery store? She’s cute and she’s been checking me out. Ha! Get it?”
Jane didn’t laugh.
“She always shakes her head over my pile of frozen dinners and asks why I don’t have a woman cooking for me.”
“Shut up, Chase. I just wanted to talk to you, all right?”
“All right. Meet me at The Stube for breakfast?”
A pause. She was probably imagining who else would be at the most popular breakfast place in town. “I already had breakfast,” she mumbled.
“Okay, then. Brunch. Or coffee. Or a piece of toast.”
“Chase…I can’t…You practically shaved your head, for God’s sake! And I know that’s why you did it. You did it as a challenge. To see if I’d still go out with you!”
Chase ran a hand over what was left of his hair. “I thought it was time for a change. I also thought my tattoo might attract the interest of other complicated girls. I seem to have been deserted by mine.”
“You’re thirty-four years old, for crying out loud. And you look like you’re the lead singer in a punk band.”
“Yeah, I’m clear on my age. I’m also clear on the fact that I’m a grown man who runs his own company and wipes his own nose, and I can do whatever the hell I feel like doing. You should try it sometime, Jane. It’s called living your life.”
“Screw you,” she muttered halfheartedly.
“Sorry, but that gravy train is off the tracks.”
The line clicked dead in the middle of her vicious growl. Jane had hung up on him. Chase chose to take it as a victory, even if his heart gave a startled yelp of pain.
He was trying not to take it personally, but, truthfully, sometimes it hurt like hell. She’d never beat around the bush. Jane’s message was simple: you’re not good enough for me. Even when he told himself it had nothing to do with him…Shit, it still stung, and he had to wonder how long he’d give her.
A week? A month?
He thought of the way her sweet body had cuddled against him in her bed.
Probably a month. Something about her proud and prickly nature pushed all his buttons. The good, pleasurable buttons, not the bad ones. Jane Morgan was like dynamite. On the surface she looked safe and stable and easily managed. But beneath the surface calm she was contained danger that left him shaking. He loved it.
Still clutching the phone, Chase let his arm fall across his eyes to shut out the ruthless sunlight, so he was startled as hell when the phone rang right next to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Can you meet me in half an hour?”
Chase grinned at the sound of her grumpy capitulation. “At The Stube?”
“Yes.” The word was bitter and hard, but he’d take it.
She hung up again, but this time Chase didn’t even flinch. A month. Ha! In her dreams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JANE CLUTCHED her too-hot coffee cup and watched Chase exchange a few words with the older lady at the hostess stand. Good Lord, he was a beautiful thing. When he moved toward Jane’s table, the hostess turned to look at his tattoo with wide eyes, but then Jane was too distracted by his smile to notice the rest of the world.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he said, leaning down to give her a quick kiss before she could stop him. When he moved toward his chair, Jane glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. Nobody was looking their way. Nobody but Chase, whose warm blue eyes cooled at her panicked look.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, not sounding sorry at all. “Were you going to pretend I was just a friend?”
She shook her head, even though that had been exactly what she’d planned to do. “No.”
Chase scowled and picked up his menu without saying another word. The waitress stopped by less than thirty seconds later, but he was ready. Jane shook her head when the girl asked if she’d decided to eat, but Chase ordered an enormous amount of food, plus coffee and orange juice.
“How’s your dad?” she asked when she couldn’t stand the silence anymore.
“He’s good.”
“That’s great! Maybe he really is on the road to recovery. If he—”
“Actually, I lied. He’s not good. He called me up drunk last night, which probably gives you another reason not to get involved with me. Grandparents’ Day at the kids’ school would be a real bitch. Which grandparent would be the least embarrassing? Hard call.”
Jane looked down at her coffee, distressed by the hurt in his voice. He’d looked so happy until she’d gotten worried about that little kiss. Crud.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Chase met her eyes over the edge of his coffee cup. Those eyes saw through her. They saw through her and he didn’t like what he was seeing. “Why’d you call, Jane? I thought maybe you were coming around. I guess I was wrong.”
“I…” She was afraid to say it. Afraid to say that she couldn’t stop thinking about him and she missed him and maybe she’d been wrong the whole time. “I…I called my mom last week!” she blurted out. “I invited her over for a drink and then yesterday I went to her house for pizza and a movie.”
Frowning, he set the cup down. “Why are you saying that like you’ve never done it before?”
“Because I’ve never done it before.”
“Wow.”
“I don’t want you to think my problems have anything to do with you.”
“I know it’s not about me, but that doesn’t make it easier to be treated like trash.”
“Oh. I’ve tried to tell you how I—”
“I get that, Jane. Why would I be here if I didn’t get it?”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to change. I’m reaching out to my mom, but…” They fell into silence. Chase added another sugar to his coffee. He played with the empty paper packet.
When he cleared his throat, Jane jumped.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry I kept that arrest from you. You were right. I did it deliberately. I knew you wouldn’t like it, so I kept quiet. But I swear to you, it was a onetime screwup. My boss didn’t even fire me.”
She nodded. Of course she understood. She wasn’t that big a hypocrite. “You don’t have to apologize. I’ve been keeping so many secrets for years….”
While she was still trying to put her thoughts into words, the waitress rushed over, setting four plates in front of Chase. The lumberjack special with blueberry pancakes, plus a side of wheat toast and half a grapefruit.
Chase poured syrup on the pancakes. “So what was it like, hanging out with your mom?”
Relief tightened her throat. She didn’t want to argue. She just wanted to talk to him. “It was nice. It would’ve been nicer if Grandma Olive hadn’t been there.”
He smiled, and Jane’s skin flashed hot. For a moment she just watched him eat, aware of a creeping feeling of jealousy for the blueberry pancakes. He seemed to be enjoying them immensely. She wanted Chase to be enjoying her like that.
Chase pushed the plate toward her. “You can have the rest.”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“Why are you drooling over my pancakes, then?”
Crud. Jane took the pancakes just to avoid saying “I’m starving for you.” Still, she watched him while he ate. The muscles of his jaw shifted, drawing her eye to his temple and beyond to the last little tendrils of his tattoo.
Funny, this whole situation had started because she’d lost it over Greg’s chewing. Now she was getting turned on by Chase eating breakfast.
Unbelievable.
Chase cleared his throat. “So why did you call?”
Because I miss you so much I can’t stand it. She swallowed those revealing words. “I wanted to talk.”
He set down his fork. “About what?”
About anything. But he was watching her too closely and she couldn’t get any words out. “Go ahead and eat. I don’t want your food to get cold.”
He picked up his fork and started on the eggs.
Jane began with something easy, telling him about Lori’s upcoming trip to Europe and how Quinn would be joining her in Spain because he’d lived there for a year in college. Then she updated him on how Jessie was doing. “He wrote to the family of Michelle Brown.”
His eyebrows rose. “He did?”
“He wanted to apologize for the part he played in their loss. His lawyer said it would leave him vulnerable to a lawsuit, but Jessie said he didn’t have anything to lose anyway, so he wrote to the family to say he was sorry.”
“That’s good.”
And then there was nothing easy to talk about. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she’d drawn a line between them, so how could she cross it now?
“I’ve been thinking about my mom,” Jane said.
He started to set down his fork again, but when she frowned, he sighed and picked it up.
“My mom had photos out when I went over. Family pictures. And I noticed something in those pictures.”
“What?”
“I think there were a few years that I just forgot. I forgot them because there was nothing dramatic going on and everything was okay. And I was looking at those photos and I thought…maybe I’ve been mad at the wrong person all these years. My mom made mistakes, but she was there, and…and I think I was actually happy.”
“But you talked about those prisons, all those moves from town to town.”
“That was bad. But after Mac was released and Jessie was born…We were a family. And everything was really good until my dad was paroled. My dad…”
She glanced up to find him staring at her, but his eyes dropped to the plate so that she could continue. “I learned to write when I was four, just so I could send him letters. From the moment I sent that first letter, he wrote to me every week. Told me how proud he was and how much he loved me and all the wonderful stuff we’d do together someday. But as soon as he got out of prison, he disappeared. He had better things to do. He didn’t need to entertain himself with a kid. I was mad at him, but I think deep inside I blamed my mom.”
“Because she chose him?”
“Yes. It was her fault he was my dad, but mostly I blamed her because she was there. It was easy to hate her. But if I’ve been mad at the wrong person my whole life… That’s kind of awful, isn’t it? That’s really, really bad.” She heard his fork hit the plate, but she couldn’t see much past the tears pooling in her eyes.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, but as soon as his fingers slid over hers, two fat tears dropped down her cheeks.
“Jane, you need to talk to your mom.”
She tried to sniff hard enough to make the tears disappear. “I can’t. I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell her what you
told me.”
“I don’t want to admit that I’m a bad person. How can I just say that? ‘Mom, I’m an awful person. Sorry about that.’”
“Oh, come on.” His chuckle sounded a bit panicked, perhaps because the tears were escaping her control. “You’re not a bad person, Jane. Jesus.” His fingers tightened. “Don’t cry.”
“Of course I’m a bad person. I like you so much. But I tell myself I can’t like you, because I need to have a man who comes from a stable family. A man without a record. Someone who’s refined and settled and educated. Because I’m not, and I need that pretense. On my own I’m just a low-class girl with a sordid past who lucked into a good job.”
“Jane, look at me.”
She grabbed a napkin and wiped her eyes, then let her gaze rise as far as his mouth. Chase hunched down until she was looking at his eyes.
“Listen to yourself.”
“What?”
“You’re looking for a man who can fix you?”
“No! I don’t expect a man to fix me! I’m not an idiot. I just want a man I can hide behind.”
Chase’s eyebrows flew high. His mouth twitched up, and Jane felt her mouth twitch, too.
“Jane, I’m no Dr. Phil, but I’m pretty sure you’re certifiably fucked-up.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s true. Man, if I wasn’t already in love with you, I’d be out of here.”
For the first time, his talk of love didn’t make her feel nauseated. In fact, she felt rather warm inside. Scared to death, but warm.
“Do you love me?” he asked softly.
Okay, now the scared-to-death part had arrived. Oh, God. Since he’d walked out of her condo that night, Jane had been telling herself she missed his body. She’d stared at the phone, hands sweating with the need to call him, sure that she wanted only to climb on top of him and use him as stress relief again.
But the brutal truth was unavoidable. More than anything, she’d wanted to talk to him, to hold his hand, to watch a movie with his arms curved around her. And, yes, she wanted to have sex with him, because he used her body just the way she liked and then whispered of love afterward.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered.
Lead Me On Page 25
