Too bad that boys became men.
“Jake,” she said sharply. “Wake up.”
He jumped, levering up on his elbows and looking at her with drowsy eyes. “What’s wrong?” The sound of his husky early-morning voice was incredibly sexy, and she considered it a sign of her idiocy where he was concerned that she’d notice at a time like this. “Did I oversleep?”
“No.” Picking up his cell phone, which she’d set on the nightstand while she dressed, she lobbed it at him harder than she’d meant to—or maybe not—and it barely missed nailing him in the nose. “Here’s your phone.”
“Hey!”
“You have a text,” she informed him, turning away to find some sandals so she didn’t have to look into his bewildered face at this galling moment. “I didn’t mean to see it, but it was on the kitchen counter and it buzzed when I was in there.”
There was a quick silence during which he read the text—or was sext the appropriate term?—which was forever scorched across her poor brain:
Hey JJ—
I’ll be in town over the weekend.
Can you take me around the world again?
No one makes me scream like you do.
CC
XXOXOX
She and CC would probably never meet, Charlotte thought bitterly, but they had something in common, didn’t they? They’d both benefitted from Jake’s prodigious bedroom skills.
Jake cursed. The next thing she knew, he was standing next to her, a sheet tied around his narrow waist and a whole lot of let-me-explain in his eyes.
“CC’s a classmate of mine from law school. We’ve hooked up here and there when she’s in town. It was never anything other than sex. I’m going to text her back and tell her I’m involved with someone, and then I’ll probably never see her again.”
Though she’d desperately hoped he’d have just such an explanation, hearing it only infuriated her more. Because here was proof—more proof, actually—that Jake went through women the way Starbucks went through coffee beans. So he decided he was finished with a woman? No problem. He’d just send her a text and be done with her.
She stared at him and worked hard to manage both her temper and her grief. Because here, already, was irrefutable evidence that things between her and Jake were not sustainable and would inevitably end badly. She felt like she’d lost something enormous, and wasn’t that stupid? How could you lose what you’d never had to begin with?
“Why would you bother?” she wondered. “See her again if you want. It has nothing to do with me, JJ.”
This pronouncement didn’t sit well with him, and his brows lowered accordingly, as did his voice. “Excuse me?”
“In the light of day, I think you’ll agree that sleeping with your employee was a colossal mistake that we shouldn’t repeat—”
“I don’t agree—”
“—and you are therefore free to sleep with your law school classmate, or the barista at Starbucks who was making eyes at you, or the woman who called and wanted to cook you dinner, or any other woman who’s willing to take you on. That should make you happy.”
“It won’t.”
“In fact, maybe the best thing is for me to quit.”
“Quit? That’s insane.”
“No. Insane is sleeping with my boss, the player, and thinking it won’t lead to disaster.”
“Charlotte.” A flare of panic seemed to hit him, making his eyes flash. He reached for her upper arm and held it in his firm grip. “Some other woman can’t make me happy. I thought we established that last night. Making love isn’t a disaster. It’s the best thing that’s—”
She jerked free. She didn’t need his hot touch any more than she needed reminders of what he’d said last night and what she’d almost allowed herself to believe. “I don’t have time for this—”
“Don’t have time?”
“The reason I was in the kitchen earlier when you got your little text is because my mother’s neighbor called.” That stifling fear swelled inside her again, and she had to force a deep breath or risk a full-blown panic attack. “Mama’s having chest pains and they had to take her to the hospital.”
“What?”
“Which means I need to pick up Harry, who must be scared to death because he doesn’t know the neighbor. I need to get him to Roger’s and then get to the hospital, hopefully before my mother goes into surgery or cardiac arrest.” Growing hysteria made her voice shrill at the end, and she took another breath. “So you need to get dressed and leave.”
“I’ll come to the hospital with you,” he said quickly. “I don’t want you to be alone waiting for news.”
“No, thanks. I’ll be fine.”
“You won’t be fine,” he said, incredulous. “No one is fine by themselves in a hospital waiting room. You’ll need someone there with you.”
She shrugged, heading for the door. “Maybe, but it shouldn’t be my boss.”
“Your boss?” he roared, right on her heels. In the middle of the living room now, he grabbed her upper arm again, wheeling her around with a momentum that brought her up against his chest. Furious, she planted her palms on his shoulders and pushed free. “We made love last night, Charlotte! I’m in love with you!”
“Oh, Jake.” She injected a pitying note in her voice because she knew it would infuriate him. “Save it for the barista. Maybe she’ll believe you’d fall in love with her after just a few weeks.”
He flinched and then stilled.
They watched each other for several raw beats. Then, finally, he spoke.
“You think I tell every woman I’ve had sex with that I love her?” His voice was deathly quiet.
“Don’t you?”
“No. I’ve never been in love before.”
“Then how do you know you are now, Jake?”
He stared at her, his expression unreadable. “I just know.”
“You just know,” she scoffed. “Well, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t want to subject me and my son to your first love. Why don’t you practice for a while first? Maybe put some training wheels on it until you get the hang of it.”
She’d gone too far, and she knew it.
Looking murderous, Jake grabbed her by both arms this time, yanking her up on her tiptoes until they were right in each other’s faces, and there was no getting loose even if she’d had the courage to try.
“You know what I think, sweet Charlotte?” he asked, and the light in his eyes was taunting. Wicked. Knowing. “I think that last night, and the possibility of me loving you and you loving me and us building a life together with Harry scares you to death.”
This sliced away several layers of her bullshit, leaving her bared to the bone.
Roger hadn’t wanted her. Not really, not forever. Why would Jake?
“So you’re lashing out,” Jake continued. “You want to hurt me before I hurt you. Don’t you?”
Snarling, she broke free or he let her go—she couldn’t tell which.
“I don’t have time for this!” she screeched. “You need to get dressed and leave so I can get to the hospital!”
“I’ll drive you,” he said grimly, looking around the floor for his clothes. “I don’t want you behind the wheel when you’re this upset. It’s not safe for you. Or Harry,” he added, playing his trump card. “Don’t you agree?”
She looked away, fighting tears and loving him as much as she hated him.
* * *
Pivoting, Jake plowed into someone, hard, and heard a body thud to the ground in a cursing tangle of arms and legs. He didn’t care. Grabbing the basketball, he took two running steps and dunked it in a spectacular move that left the pole swaying dangerously. Soaking wet with sweat running down his forehead and stinging his eyes, he looked around, ready for more.
>
“Let’s go,” he snapped. “What’s the holdup?”
The gang—his brothers Marcus and Tony, and his cousins Harper, Shawn and Benjamin—rimmed the edge of Integrity’s court, giving him a wide berth and glaring. There were also a few angry mutters, although he didn’t try too hard to listen because he didn’t care who said what.
He didn’t care about anything, and hadn’t since the other day, when he had dropped Charlotte off at the hospital and she had dropped out of his life. Possibly for good. The only bright spot was that her mother had only suffered a bout of angina that was cured with a medication tweak. But he hadn’t seen or talked to Charlotte, and the longer he went without that contact, the more unglued he became. This, naturally, led to aggression.
Hence, the bloodthirsty game of hoops.
Only none of his boys looked like they wanted to play anymore.
They were all sweaty and all roughed up to one degree or another thanks to the unusually hot September. Benji, he realized for the first time, had a nasty elbow scrape. Shawn was favoring his left ankle. There was a rip in the sleeve of Tony’s T-shirt, and Harper—
“Oh, shit,” Jake muttered.
Harper was down on all fours, swiping at a nose that was bleeding like a stuck pig. A surge of guilt nailed Jake the way he’d just nailed Harper, and it wasn’t pretty.
He held out a hand to help him up. “Sorry, Harp. I didn’t mean—”
Harper surged to his feet and kept coming, charging into Jake with a low growl.
“I’m sick of your shit, man,” Harper shouted. “What the hell is your problem?”
This time, Jake was the one who went sprawling, landing flat on his back with Harper’s knee in his chest.
The urge was there to fight. Though he and Harper weren’t exactly BFFs, they’d never come to blows before, but he was happy to start now. On the other hand, maybe he should just let Harper beat the crap out of him. Maybe that would clear his head a little and help him think straight where Charlotte was concerned.
But the boys had other ideas, and they all piled on, pulling a snarling Harper off Jake. Tony and Marcus held Harper back. Shawn and Benji yanked Jake to his feet.
Jake and Harper glared at each other for a couple seething seconds. All of the men panted and wiped their sweaty faces on the bottoms of their shirts. Tony spoke first.
“I’m going to go out on a limb,” he said, “and say that this fun little game of three-on-three is officially over. Unless we’re playing to the death these days. Objections?”
Everyone grunted.
“Good.” Nodding with grim satisfaction, Tony turned and headed up the hedge-lined path toward the house. “Let’s get a beer. Assuming Mom’ll let us in the house. Ben smells like a used jockstrap.”
“Screw you, man,” Benji said, laughing.
“Kindly deposit twenty dollars in my jar on the kitchen counter,” said a female voice.
Jake looked around in time to see his mother emerge from the path and edge around the men, her nose crinkled against the smell of all that sweaty testosterone. In a pretty red dress and heels, even though it was Saturday, she looked like a sparkling ruby amid a handful of gravel.
“And kindly make sure you hooligans—”
“Jake’s a hooligan,” Shawn interjected. “The rest of us are ruffians.”
“—wash your hands before you touch anything in my clean kitchen, okay?” Mama continued, a dimple appearing in one stern cheek. “Thank yooouuu.”
Jake turned back to Harper. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to rough you up like that.”
Eyeballing his aunt, Harper lowered his voice and leaned into Jake’s face. “Get your shit straight, JJ—”
“And I’ll have a twenty from you, Harper. I take checks. Thank yooouuu.”
Harper grimaced and said to Jake, “It’s not our fault you hit a rough patch with your pretty paralegal, you feel me?”
Jake’s jaw dropped. And here he had thought he’d been so low-key about his feelings for Charlotte. “How did you know?”
“Please.” Harper ran his forearm under his dripping nose. “I have a nose like a bloodhound. The way you were looking at her at the photo shoot wasn’t exactly discreet, was it? And building an office nursery, once you started eyeballing an employee with a kid? That was a clue.”
With that, Harper turned to his aunt, adopting an oily smile and a sickeningly sweet tone. “Aunt Jeanette, Jake pushed me down and made my nose bleed. I think you should punish him.”
Jeanette, who’d always had a soft spot for Harper, grinned indulgently and patted his cheek.
Jake rolled his eyes and made gagging sounds.
“Poor Harper,” she said with a sidelong grin at Jake. “How should I punish my awful son?”
“Make him pay my fine.” Harper paused, considering. “And don’t give him any cookies. He’ll hate that.”
“Good idea,” she agreed. “You run into the house and eat Jake’s portion of any desserts you can find. I’m going to stay out here and give Jake a smack down. Does that make you happy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Harper said with an angelic smile. He turned toward the house and Jake turned up the volume on his gagging. Harper was really laying it on thick today. “Love you, Aunt Jeanette,” Harper added, disappearing down the path.
“Love you, too,” she called before turning to Jake. “I brought you some M&M’s.”
“Thanks. I’m not hungry.”
Mama fixed him with a shocked look, as though she’d just realized how dire the situation was. “Okay. What’s gotten into you, young man?”
He opened his mouth to issue the obligatory denial because grown men didn’t cry on their mother’s shoulders when they got their hearts trampled.
And then it hit him: Why bother?
What kind of fool would he have to be to turn away from help when help was offered? Especially when said help might help him get Charlotte back?
All of this struggle seemed to play out on his face, because Mama was giving him a kindly smile now, the type he hadn’t seen since he got cut from the sixth-grade football team.
“It’s about Charlotte the paralegal, isn’t it?”
Jeez.
Exactly how obvious had he been with the staring on the day of the photo shoot?
“Uh, yeah.” He grabbed a towel from the bench at one side of the court, covering up his too-hot face on the pretext of wiping sweat.
“Is she after your money?”
He yanked down the towel. “What? No!”
“Pregnant?”
“No, Mama.” After a quick hesitation, he decided to lay it all out there and get it over with. “But she does have a son. He’s two.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Mama said glumly, rubbing her forehead with a manicured hand.
Jake shot her a withering look.
“Well, what’s the problem, then?” Mama asked when she’d digested this bombshell.
“My, uh, extensive history with women has come back to bite me in the ass,” he admitted.
Mama scowled, raised an index finger and opened her mouth.
“Okay, see, the thing is,” he snapped, cutting her off before she got started, “I’ve had my guts ripped out. Right now, they feel like they’ve been stomped by a herd of elephants. So maybe you could give me a special twenty-four-hour exemption from putting money into your language jar. How would that be?”
Upon further reflection, Mama shut her mouth and put down her finger.
“How serious are you about this woman, Jacob?” she asked after a minute.
Jake slumped onto the bench and rested his elbows on his knees. Sudden exhaustion made him hang his head. Every blink these past several days felt like it was taking a day off his life.
What if he cou
ldn’t get Charlotte to trust in him?
What if it was really over?
Raising his head finally, he gave Mama as much of a rueful smile as he could manage. “Really? You have to ask?”
“And the boy,” Mama continued. “You know what you’re taking on there?”
Dumb question, Jake thought, shrugging. “No. I don’t know. Does anyone ever know what they’re signing up for when they have kids?”
“Jacob,” she began.
“But I’m willing, Mama. For Charlotte and Harry, I’d do anything.”
Mama hesitated and then nodded, satisfied. “Then you need to convince her.”
“How?” he snapped. “Every time I start to make progress, some woman from my past pops up. They’re like weeds.”
Mama patted his cheek. If he didn’t know better, he’d say there was a little affection there.
“You’ll figure it out,” she told him.
This was the advice for which he’d just spilled his darkest secrets? You’ll figure it out? Seriously?
“I think you’re giving me far too much credit,” he said.
Mama smiled. “I disagree. What’s got you so scared? Don’t bother denying it.”
Jake struggled, trying to put it into words. “She deserves a great man, Mama. What if it’s not me?”
“It is you.” The sudden urgency in her voice surprised and encouraged him. “If she doesn’t see that, then she’s not worthy of you. And if you don’t give her time enough to grow to trust you and your intentions, then you’re not worthy of her.”
Jake thought about that for a minute. This, finally, sounded like advice worth following.
Could Mama be right?
“Of course I’m right,” Mama told him, reading his mind and tugging his hand. “Now come inside. I have something to give you. I think it’ll come in handy.”
Chapter 11
Case for Seduction (Kimani Romance) Page 15
