“You were supposed to stay out of sight.” She grabbed his elbow and dragged him towards the hall.
“I really like this passive-aggressive thing you’ve got going on,” he said, dimples twinkling. “It makes me hot.” His eyes darkened and his nostrils flared as he took her in.
“He will eat you alive,” Ally hissed.
“I doubt that. I can hold my own.” He pulled out of her grip and straightened his shirt. “I promise that I won’t tell your daddy that I had my hands in your panties before he got here.”
“Jack!” In spite of everything, she laughed. He bent down and dropped a quick kiss on her lips. “I thought you’d still be drunk.”
“Oh, I’m drunker than a skunk,” he said with a lopsided grin. “But I drank a pot of coffee and took a cold shower. I’ll have a hell of a hangover tomorrow and I’ll be wide awake all night.” He began rummaging through cabinets. “Where’s your liquor at?”
“It’s over here.” She sighed and pointed to the tall cabinet doors on the left. “I figured you went through every cabinet and drawer in this place while I was gone.”
“I didn’t get as far as the kitchen,” he said. “I got stuck on your nightstand. It was like a damn candy store in there. I might have to revoke your popsicle status after seeing all the toys in there. We’re going to have to take a couple of those items for a spin after your dad leaves.”
To her consternation, Jack and Mike hit it off. They talked about sports and laughed over ribald jokes that she didn’t understand. Jack could be very charming when he wanted and seemed knowledgeable on a variety of topics. Perks of being a bartender, he explained. Once Jack asked about Mike’s military history, they began a long and boring session of military talk that made her temples throb. She pouted in silence, sipping a glass of white wine while Jack drank coffee and topped off her father’s glass, and only took an occasional break to glare at him over the kitchen table. Underneath the table, his hand rested on her thigh. Each time she brushed it away, he replaced it until she finally gave up. If Mike noticed the climbing heat in her cheeks, he didn’t show it.
Mike raised his glass and peered at the younger man over the rim. “You like the circus, son?”
Jack’s brows rose and his eyes flitted to meet Ally’s, puzzled over the abrupt change of subject matter. He shrugged. “Well, I’ve been called a clown before.”
“That’s good ‘cause this family is one monkey on a unicycle away from Barnum and Bailey’s.” Mike smiled at them both, gulped down the last of his Scotch and nudged the glass forward for a refill.
As Mike regaled Jack and Ally with stories of his stint in the service, Jack couldn’t help but make comparisons between father and daughter. The resemblance was subtle but there nonetheless. Ally’s coloring was fairer and her hair darker, but her features had the same sharpness as her father’s and a similarity of expression that left no doubt as to her paternity.
“So what did you want to tell me, Daddy?” Ally interjected with characteristic directness during a pause in the conversation. Jack could feel the tension in the thigh beneath his hand; she was wound up tight like cat about to pounce.
“Right.” Mike took a swig of scotch and stared into the depths of his glass as if hoping to find inspiration in the golden liquor. “I got married again.”
“Married? Seriously? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.” Mike cleared his throat and, for the first time ever, looked somewhat abashed. “It’s Rita. You remember her, don’t you?”
“Daddy! She’s younger than me. Are you nuts? I hope you signed a pre-nup.” Ally’s tension transferred into Jack’s hand, making his fingers ache.
Mike pulled out his phone and called up a photo of a very leggy and curvaceous brunette wearing a tiny pink striped bikini. Mike handed the phone to Jack with smug male pride, and he could understand why after he saw the new bride. The picture had been taken at a beach party. Mike had his arm around Rita’s waist and Rita had her bodacious tits pressed against her new husband with bubbling affection. Dozens of people who looked like Rita’s family swarmed around the happy couple. Ally peered over his arm at the picture. A fleeting expression of hurt clouded her brow before the familiar mask of indifference slid into place.
“Beautiful girl,” Jack said sincerely. “You look very happy together.” Even on camera, the sexual chemistry hummed between the newlyweds.
“It’s disgusting.” Ally wrinkled her nose.
“She’s pregnant. Due in January.” Mike cast a sheltered glance at Ally, green eyes unreadable. The word pregnant stabbed into Jack like a dagger, a sharp and unpleasant reminder of his predicament.
“Oh.” A little of the tension in Ally’s leg eased beneath Jack’s fingers, like a balloon deflating, while his own stress level soared. “Where did you have the wedding?”
“On the beach at her parent’s place. Just some close friends and family.” Mike reclaimed the picture and stuffed it back into his wallet.
Ally’s lips pressed into a tight line and Jack saw the glimmer of tears. Apparently Mike had forgotten that Ally belonged to his family as well. By her expression, Ally hadn’t forgotten. Jack’s heart squeezed in an unfamiliar pang of empathy at this unexpected peek into her upbringing. She was an outsider to her own family. No wonder the girl had trouble accepting his affection.
“I’ve sold the house here. Rita wanted something closer to her parents. Jesus, look at the time.” Mike glanced at his wrist watch and cleared his throat again. “You got me talking and time flew by. I hate to leave but I promised Rita that I wouldn’t be out too late. We’re flying out in the morning. I had your things boxed up and put in storage. Here’s the key.” Mike dropped a small silver key onto the table beside Ally’s wine glass.
“It’s been a pleasure to meet you,” Jack said. He rose and shook Mike’s hand. Ally remained seated and silent.
“You take care, baby girl.” Mike nodded to Ally, more like a passing acquaintance than a father. In Jack’s family, even strangers got a hug when they dropped by for a visit. The physical distance between father and daughter puzzled him. “If you need anything you give me a call.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When the door closed behind Mike, Ally said nothing. Jack wanted to comfort her but the distant look in her eyes as she stared out the window suggested she was better left alone. To his surprise, she didn’t protest at his presence or try to throw him out. Instead, she made a straight line for the liquor cabinet, took out a decanter, and poured whiskey into a tall glass of ice. She handed a glass to him, but he shook his head. He’d be buzzed for days after this last binge. She shrugged, took her glass, and with the bottle in her opposite hand headed out the French doors to the small patio.
The temperature outside bordered on hot but had cooled considerably with the earlier rain and the humidity had dissipated with the daylight. Ally sat on the love seat. Jack took a seat beside her. It was one of those things that moved back and forth like a swing. His mother had one on her porch and it brought back a sharp pang of nostalgia. Ally rocked it with a bare toe, a little faster than necessary, but that was to be expected given her state of dismay. They sat in silence among the sweet scent of jasmine and the faint refrains of jazz music that escaped the open window of a neighbor’s house.
“I know that I’m in the business of selling drinks to people, but you’re hitting that bottle pretty hard, aren’t you?” He raised an eyebrow as she emptied her glass then refilled it.
“She’s twenty-three,” Ally said. “My stepmother is two years younger than me.” She slammed the glass onto the patio table, whiskey sloshing over the sides to form a brown puddle on the tablecloth. “And she’s pregnant. Pregnant! How does that happen?” He knew exactly how it happened, but didn’t think he should go into that subject quite yet. “He’s forty-fricking-eight years old. You’d think he’d know how to stop those things from happening.” A shiver of disgust shook her body. “I introduced them, you know. S
he needed a job to work her way through school and my dad needed an office girl so I gave her an application. I never dreamed that I’d have to call her mommy.” She slapped her forehead with her hand.
“Shit happens, Ally. Life isn’t neat and tidy. Most of the times it’s a fucked up mess and we do the best we can to get through it.” No one knew that better than he did.
“This is crazy, Jack, and you know it.” Ally jumped up from the glider and began to pace along the deck of the patio — back and forth, back and forth — with the whiskey bottle in one hand and gesturing madly with the glass in the other, sloshing liquid through the air. “It’s irresponsible, that’s what it is. The man has lost his mind.”
“Well, if you ask me, he seemed pretty stoked about it. I mean — a guy his age knocking up a hottie like that...” Despite the conviction of his words, he felt hollow inside.
“Not helping, Jack.” Ally stopped pacing long enough to glare at him. A tendril of hair had escaped its hairpin and fell over one eye. She puffed it away with an exasperated breath. It rose like a feather into the air then fluttered back over her eye.
“I’m just saying, is all. Why don’t you put your drink down and come over here? You’re making me dizzy.”
“No.”
Never in all his days had he met such a stubborn woman. With an exasperated sigh, he took the glass from her hand, placed it on the table, and then tugged her into his lap. She wriggled in protest, but he trapped her firmly against his chest and waited for her breathing to slow. It was like holding a bag full of angry squirrels against his chest, but after a few minutes, she relaxed against him. He had intended to tell her about Chelsea, to confess his own terrible mess, but somehow this just didn’t seem the time.
Ally leaned back against Jack’s chest, feeling the heat of his body through her shirt and the rhythmic pounding of his heart against her back. The power of his arms made her feel safe, as if nothing and no one could hurt her while in the circle of his embrace. His nose nuzzled her ear but he remained silent. After a few minutes, all of the tension in her body eased until she felt boneless, a sudden surrender of the mind that brought a sigh from her lips.
“Better?” His voice rumbled through his chest, the vibrations massaging her back.
“Yes. Better.” She let her head fall back against his shoulder and sighed again.
“Jesus. I thought you were going to blow for a minute there, Popsicle.” Even though he had just shaved, stubborn stubble had already begun to sprout on his cheeks. It tickled against her jaw as he nuzzled her neck.
“Don’t call me that,” she mumbled. The whiskey and the warmth of Jack’s body combined with the rocking motion of the glider made her eyelids droop with weariness. She was so tired. The meeting with her father had sapped the little remaining energy she had left.
“Go ahead and close your eyes for a minute, baby. I’ve got you.”
Something tickled Ally’s lips and woke her from the most erotic dream she’d ever had. She jerked to consciousness only to find Jack staring at her with a devilish twinkle in his chocolate brown eyes. It took a minute for her to remember why he was there and then heat rushed into her cheeks at the memory of her dream. Had she talked in her sleep? From the shit-eating grin on his face, she must have done something embarrassing. Then she realized that they were in her bedroom and no longer on the patio.
“How long was I asleep?” She bolted into a sitting position and rubbed a hand across her eyes.
“I don’t know. An hour maybe. I thought you’d be more comfortable in here.” Jack certainly looked comfortable, sprawled out on his side next to her with his head propped up on his elbow.
“You should have waked me.” The heat in her cheeks intensified. Why the hell was he looking at her like that?
“I tried but you told me to fuck off. You’re really feisty when you’re asleep.” He trailed a finger up her forearm and lingered in the bend of her elbow. “And then you started making these moaning noises, like you were in a porn video.” The long dark lashes blinked in innocent delight. “I sure as hell wasn’t going to interrupt your sex dream.”
“Oh, God.” She clapped both hands over her eyes and wished she could disappear.
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“No.” She flopped back onto the mattress. Moonlight streamed through the blinds, casting striped shadows on the floor, bright enough that she could see the angles and planes of Jack’s face and the curve of his full lips. In her dream, she’d taken his lower lip between her teeth and tugged on it.
“We could re-enact it. I’d like to make all your fantasies come true.” He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips.
In spite of her chagrin, she laughed. “Do women really fall for that line?”
“I don’t know. I never tried that one. Most of the time it was about my fantasies not theirs. Do you want to hear one of my fantasies?”
“Maybe. You’re not into some kind of kinky weirdness, are you?” Her thoughts wandered back to the cheesecake and necktie with a shiver of excitement.
His eyes lit up. “Oh, I’ve got nothing against kink, believe me. But my number one fantasy right now is to spend the night with you in this bed. I’d like to tie your hands to this headboard and have my way with you.”
The thought of being completely at Jack’s sexual mercy brought a flutter of excitement to her womb.
“I might be able to arrange that.” She leaned forward and kissed him, empowered by his relaxed posture and the knowledge that he’d weathered a small peek into her convoluted family life.
The feel of his stubbled cheek against her palm inspired a slew of lustful fantasies. They stared at each for a long while, enjoying each other’s presence without the pressures of Chelsea or work. It had been a long time since she’d felt comfortable enough with someone to fall asleep in front of them. Jack continued to run his warm hand along the length of her arm. At his encouragement, she removed all the bobby pins from her hair and let it spill over her shoulders. He toyed with a long strand, wrapping and unwrapping it on his finger, tickling her nose with the end of it until she sneezed.
“What happened at the hospital – with Chelsea? I’m sorry that I never asked. I get too wrapped up in myself sometimes.” The smooth expanse of her forehead furrowed. “I hate that about myself.”
“Don’t say that. It’s okay. You’ve got plenty of things to worry about besides my problems.” He rolled onto his back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Are you sure you want to know? I need to tell you — if we’re going to be together. If you want to be together, that is.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It depends on what you’re going to tell me. Do you have two wives or something?” Butterflies flitted low in her belly at the words be together. As crazy as it sounded, she began to consider what it would be like to be Jack’s girl and the notion wasn’t altogether unpleasant. In fact, the idea gave birth to a whole new herd of butterflies in her stomach – good butterflies.
“No. Just the one.” The misery in his voice belied his mild expression.
“One what? Wife? Chelsea’s your wife?” She shrank back from him as if she’d been stung. Married? He was married? “You better start explaining, Jack. Right. Now.” An overwhelming sense of betrayal hit her in the gut followed by the ugliness of jealousy, causing her stomach to roil, and all her newborn fantasies of bliss to wither.
“Technically we’re still married, but I filed for divorce a few months ago and it should be final in a few weeks.”
“How could you have neglected to tell me something like that?” Feelings of anger and deception began to mix in with all the other emotions bubbling to the surface. One look at his face quieted her anger. He looked so sad that her heart squeezed in sympathy.
“We only lived together for a couple of years. We split up and went our separate ways years ago. She moved to New York with her brother and I went to California with my uncle David and Randy. It’s pretty easy to
forget about the whole thing when you’re on different sides of the continent. I had no interest in getting married again, so divorce seemed like a non-issue. Besides, whenever a girl started getting clingy, I could always tell her that I was already married. Problem solved.”
“If you’re trying to convince me that this is all okay, you aren’t doing a very good job of it.” Part of her wanted to get up from the bed and toss him out the door, but the other part – the part that loved his lazy smile and his bedroom eyes and the way his dimples flashed when he smiled – tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. She owed him that. Besides, he’d always been honest with her up to this point. She had no reason to expect anything else from him.
“We got married when we were young – really, really young — too young to know what we were doing. She was about the most exciting thing I’d ever met and the day after we graduated from high school, we ran off and got married. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I thought I was in love.”
“You said that you weren’t in love with her.” Ally closed her eyes and waited for the answer with impatient dread.
“I never loved her – not really. I was in love with the idea of having a home and a wife and family and being an adult. It didn’t take me long to figure that out. We had nothing in common. Nothing. After the first month, I knew that I’d made a mistake but by then she was pregnant.” His hand shook a little as he passed it over his eyes, as if reliving the pain of those early years. She put a hand on his arm and he opened his eyes to smile at her, a thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“I didn’t want the baby, and I didn’t want her. We were struggling to get by and we were both using drugs pretty heavily at the time. The pregnancy was risky so she couldn’t work. Her older brother let us live in his basement. He was into some pretty nasty shit back then, before he got killed in a drive-by. Anyway, he gave me a job making deliveries and collecting payments – drugs and stolen stuff. That’s how I met Randy. He was running the streets too.
Intoxicated Page 17
