He’d made it down the sidewalk, past half a dozen startled and fascinated diners, when she called after him.
“Jake?”
He turned to find her hat askew, her cheeks pink and her lipstick smudged. It took every ounce of self-respect he’d ever possessed to keep from going right back to her for more.
“Yes?” he said tightly.
“I’m confused,” she said, her gaze locked with his.
“Yeah, well, join the damn club,” he said. This time when he walked away, he didn’t look back.
“What the heck happened to you?” Mick asked when Bree made it back to the shop after her encounter with Jake.
Distracted, she gave him a puzzled look. “Nothing. Why?”
“Let’s just say if you’d just come in from a date, I’d be out trying to track down the guy who left you looking like that.”
Embarrassed, she pulled a compact out of her purse and took a quick look at her mussed hair, flushed cheeks and lips that looked as if they’d recently been plundered. Which they had been. She wasn’t sure whether to hate Jake for that…or for stopping way too soon.
“It was windy,” she claimed to her father. “My hat blew off, so my hair’s a tangled mess.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, his skepticism plain. “Did that vicious old wind take your lipstick off, too.”
“No, that was my lunch,” she said. “Lipsticks just don’t stay on through a meal these days.”
“If you say so.”
“Look, I need to head over to the inn,” she told him. “I’ve got a lot of paperwork to do this afternoon. Are you going to be okay here?”
He gave her an amused look. “I built a town,” he reminded her. “I think I can get this counter finished without your presence.”
“I just meant…” She had no idea what she meant. She hadn’t had a single coherent thought since her encounter with Jake, even though she’d sat in the bistro for a solid half hour after he’d left, trying to collect her thoughts. She’d eaten her sandwich without it even registering. She was still just as dazed.
“I’ll see you at home later,” she told Mick eventually.
“One last thing before you go,” her father said, touching her cheek. “Whatever happened put a sparkle in your eyes for the first time since you got back to town. It’s good to see. You might want to consider repeating it.”
Bree nodded, because she had no idea how else to respond to that. “See you later,” she said on her way out the door.
So, Jake had left her with a sparkle in her eyes, a decided hum in her bloodstream and more questions than answers. Now she had some idea why he’d been annoyed by all those unanswerable questions Will and Mack had thrown his way. She was a little bit exasperated herself at the moment.
And more than a little scared, because the one thing this afternoon had confirmed was that whatever passion there had once been between her and Jake, it was stronger than ever, even if he wasn’t one bit happy about it.
Jake was exhausted and emotionally drained by the time he got back to the nursery after six o’clock. The only good thing about finishing up his day this late was that his sister wouldn’t be around to cross-examine him about whatever she’d heard via the grapevine this afternoon. Given his performance with Bree on Shore Road, he imagined she’d heard quite a lot.
He passed through the sales area, greeted the employees on duty, took a quick mental survey of the plants on hand, then headed for his office. He intended to spend ten minutes glancing through messages and checking his calendar for any new landscaping jobs Connie had lined up, then he was going straight home to a shower and a cold beer.
Instead, he opened the door and found his niece sprawled across the sofa in his office with some punk kid half on top of her. Jake tried to remind himself that he’d been a hormone-driven teenager himself at one time, but it was hard to think through the haze of red fury spreading through him.
Jake grabbed the boy by the back of his shirt and set him on his feet. Jenny jumped up, trying frantically to button her blouse.
“I thought you were gone for the day,” she said, trying to back toward the door, a look of utter panic on her face.
“Because that would make this so much better?” Jake queried.
The boy, one he didn’t recognize, stared at him belligerently. “I’m out of here,” he said, trying to saunter past Jake.
“Sit!” Jake bellowed. “Both of you.”
Jenny reached for the boy’s hand and tried to pull him down beside her on the sofa.
“Not there,” Jake said. “Over here. In chairs.” He moved the two chairs so there was a reassuring amount of distance between them, then waited until both teens were seated. His niece looked as if she was about to die of embarrassment. The boy looked marginally less belligerent now.
“Okay, is one of you going to tell me what you thought you were doing here?” He shot his most intimidating look toward the squirming young man. “Let’s start with you.”
“Coming here was my idea, Uncle Jake,” Jenny said in a voice barely above a whisper.
He gave her a quelling look. “I’ll get to you.” He turned again to the young man. “What’s your name?”
“Dillon,” he said in a voice with a telltale quaver in it. “Dillon Johnson.”
“Okay, Dillon Johnson, start talking.”
“We, um, we wanted to be alone, you know what I mean? My house always has a bunch of kids around. I have three younger sisters.” He gave Jake a pleading look. “You gotta know what that’s like.”
“Sorry,” Jake said. “Only one older sister, so I’m not feeling much sympathy. Keep going.”
Dillon blanched at his tone. “Okay, well, Jenny’s mom was home from work. And neither one of us has a car, so Jenny said we could come here. To be alone. Nothing was going to happen, I swear it.”
“Nothing? Really? I walked in and you had my niece’s blouse halfway off. That’s already way past nothing.”
“It…I…”
Jake gave him a hard look. “Good. We’re agreed that you’d crossed a line.”
The boy nodded, his expression finally meek.
“And now we’re going to agree that nothing like this will ever happen again. Not here. Not in your house. Not at my niece’s house and definitely not in the backseat of anyone’s car. Is that right? You and I have an understanding?”
The boy blinked rapidly. “Yes, sir.”
“Then you can go now,” he said more gently. “Do you have a way to get home?”
Dillon nodded. “We rode our bikes over here.” He scrambled for the door, cast one last apologetic look in Jenny’s direction, then took off.
“How could you?” Jenny asked him, close to tears. “He’s the first real boyfriend I’ve ever had and you’ve ruined it.”
“If he really cares about you, I won’t have ruined anything. He’ll abide by the rules.”
“But everyone hangs out and…” She blushed furiously. “You know.”
“I do know, sweetie, and I also know exactly where that can lead.” In fact, he knew it with the kind of bitter regret that only someone who’d paid such a high price could ever understand. “I know you and your mom have talked about this.”
“Well, duh. Of course we have.”
“Then I don’t need to spell out the possible consequences, do I?”
“We weren’t going to do that,” she insisted.
The naive statement told him all he needed to know about how important it was that he get through to her before something life-altering happened.
“But what you were doing leads to that,” he said. “Sometimes before you know it.”
He ran a hand through his hair, trying to think of the best way to approach this. Jenny watched him expectantly. He was not prepared to be having this kind of conversation with a kid, especially not his sweet, innocent niece. It seemed like only yesterday when all Jenny Louise cared about were her dolls and getting a piggyback ride on his shoulders.
> Suddenly he stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”
She stared at him suspiciously. “Where are we going? Are you gonna tell Mom about this?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “But first you and I are going out for pizza.”
Her expression brightened at once. “Really?”
He ruffled her hair. “Really, and we are going to have ourselves a very long talk about boys.”
She frowned at that. “Do we have to?”
“Based on recent evidence, I think so.”
“But I told you, Mom and I have already talked about all that.”
“But apparently it didn’t sink in,” he said meaningfully. “Besides, she doesn’t have a guy’s perspective. I do. Believe me, sweetie, guys look at stuff like this a whole different way than girls do.”
She gave him an impudent look as he was putting her bike into the bed of his truck. “Does that mean you’re going to tell me what you were thinking when you planted a big ol’ kiss on that woman at the bistro today?”
Jake reddened. “How’d you hear about that?”
“My friend Molly left school at lunchtime and she saw you. She said it was pretty hot.”
Jake’s stomach clenched. “Please tell me that wasn’t what gave you the idea to use my office for a rendezvous with your pal Dillon.”
“Well, it did make me think maybe you’d understand, that you wouldn’t get all uptight the way Mom would.” She gave him a rueful look. “I guess I was wrong.”
“I guess you were.”
And he, heaven help him, now had one more regret to add to the list he’d been compiling ever since he and Bree had locked lips. That had definitely been a bad move. A very bad move.
Unfortunately, it was one he knew without a doubt he was doomed to repeat. He just hoped next time he wouldn’t have to explain it to his impressionable seventeen-year-old niece.
9
W hen Jake reached his sister to explain that he and Jenny Louise would be stopping for pizza, she sounded frantic.
“She’s with you?” Connie asked, clearly bewildered. “Why? How’d that happen? I’ve been calling everywhere looking for her. She didn’t leave me a note, nothing. This isn’t like her, Jake. I’ve been terrified that something happened, that she got in a car with one of her friends, even though she knows that’s not allowed, and they had an accident. I was about to start calling hospitals.”
“Stop worrying, sis,” he said, casting a scowl toward his niece. “I’ll explain everything when I bring her home. I just wanted you to know she’s with me and that she’s fine. Believe me, one of the things we’ll be discussing is not taking off without leaving a note. It won’t happen again.”
“Jake, she’s not your responsibility. Besides, I have dinner ready here,” Connie protested. “Just bring her home. I’ll set a place for you. There’s plenty of food.”
“I think maybe both of you need a cooling-off period. Trust me, Jenny and I have some things we need to get straight before you see her.”
“What things? Jake Collins, is my daughter in some kind of trouble? If she is, you’d better tell me right now. I won’t have you hiding things from me.”
“We’ll fill you in later, I promise,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
Connie didn’t sound one bit happy about the delay, but she finally relented. “One hour, and then I’m coming to the pizza shop after you. Neither of you will be happy about the scene I’m likely to make, either.”
She’d do it, too. Jake knew that. “We’ll be there.”
He disconnected the call and saw Jenny biting on her lower lip. She looked scared when she turned to him. “Is she mad at me?”
“For not checking in to let her know where you were? Yeah, she’s mad. What were you thinking? Couldn’t you at least have left her a note?”
“And said what?” she said more spiritedly. “That I was going to your office with my boyfriend? That would have gone over big.” She gave him a knowing look. “Or should I have lied and said I was having dinner at Molly’s house?”
“How about not going to my office with your boyfriend in the first place?” he suggested. “That’s definitely my first choice.”
“It won’t happen again,” she swore. “I promise.”
“Damn straight it won’t,” he muttered. He pulled into a parking space near the shop that sold pizza by the slice to beachgoers during the day. In the evening, it catered mostly to the town’s teens and local families.
For the next forty-five minutes he tried to give Jenny a crash course on the thought process of a teenage boy. When he’d finished, she stared at him incredulously.
“But what you’re really saying is that they don’t think at all, except with their…” She blushed furiously. “You know.”
“Exactly,” he said.
She regarded him wistfully. “Then it wasn’t really about me at all? What happened back in your office? That was just Dillon’s hormones looking to hook up with anybody?”
He tucked a finger under her chin and forced her to look at him. “I’m not saying that Dillon doesn’t like you. I’m not saying he doesn’t respect you. I’m just saying that when it comes to sex, for a guy his age that pretty much drives all the other thoughts right out of his head. That means it’s up to you to look out for yourself. You need to have enough respect for yourself to know where to draw the line and make sure whoever you’re dating knows that, too. There’s such an amazing future ahead of you, Jenny Louise. You’re going to college in another year. You can be anything you want to be. Don’t blow that because some boy gets you into a situation you don’t know how to control.”
“Because I could wind up pregnant,” she said, echoing what he and, no doubt, her mother had told her.
“Yes, even with just about every precaution in the world, you could wind up pregnant,” he said from experience. He and Bree had practiced what they’d thought was safe sex. They certainly hadn’t planned the pregnancy that had changed their lives, and they’d been a whole lot older than Jenny. They were still dealing with the fallout. He didn’t want any of that for his niece.
He looked into Jenny’s troubled eyes. “Am I making sense to you?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, let’s get home before your mom comes in here and we both wind up getting a lecture or worse.”
“What could be worse?” Jenny asked.
“A really, really embarrassing scene.”
“Been there, done that,” his niece admitted with a sigh. “Let’s definitely get home before that happens.”
Jake drove to his sister’s house and pulled into the driveway. When he opened his door to get out, Jenny didn’t move. A glance revealed tears tracking down her cheeks.
“I really, really don’t want Mom to know what I did,” she whispered. “Please, Uncle Jake. She’s going to be so disappointed in me, not just because of Dillon, but because I broke into your office. She’ll say it’s a violation of your trust and it was.”
“You didn’t break in,” he corrected. “You have a key.”
“Yeah, like that’s going to matter to her,” she said. “If I swear never, ever to do anything like this again, could you just not tell her?”
He hesitated. He saw the misery written all over her face, but he understood that his sister had every right to know about something this serious.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said at last. “I won’t tell her.”
Jenny’s expression brightened. “Really?” she said incredulously. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He held up a hand. “Don’t thank me yet. I won’t tell her, because I’m going to let you do it.”
Her expression faltered. “You want me to tell her? Everything?”
He nodded. “Everything.”
“Are you gonna be there?”
“I am, just to make sure you don’t leave anything out.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” she said sarcastically.
“Trust has to be earned, sweet pea. You made a pretty big dent in mine this afternoon, but owning up to your mistake to your mom would be a big step in regaining it.”
“If you say so,” she mumbled unhappily.
“I say so,” he told her. “Now, let’s go inside and get this over with.”
Jenny trailed after him at a pace a turtle could have outrun, but she did follow. They found Connie sitting at the kitchen table, half her attention focused on the rerun of a TV sitcom, the other half directed toward the clock on the wall as they entered.
“You made it with a minute to spare,” she said as Jake grabbed a bottle of beer and a soda from the fridge and sat down opposite her. He handed the soda to Jenny to give her something to do with her hands.
Connie focused on her daughter. “Where were you this afternoon?”
“Gee, get straight to the point, why don’t you?” Jenny sniped, then winced. “Sorry.” She glanced in Jake’s direction and he nodded encouragingly.
“At the nursery,” she confessed softly.
Connie frowned. “When? I didn’t see you.”
“I waited until you left, then I went to Uncle Jake’s office.” She swallowed hard. “With Dillon.”
Connie stared at her blankly. “But why would you…?” Her voice trailed off as she glanced at Jake. “No.”
Jake nodded again.
Connie was a petite woman, but when she drew herself up into full mother-hen mode, she was formidable. “Jennifer Louise, please tell me you and Dillon did not break into Jake’s office to make out.”
“Mom, that is so old-fashioned. Nobody ‘makes out’ anymore.”
Connie gave her a wry look. “They may not call it that, but I guarantee you they still do it. The more important issue here is whether that’s what you and Dillon were doing in your uncle’s office.”
With obvious reluctance, Jenny bobbed her head once, her expression filled with embarrassment and misery.
Again, Connie turned to him. “And you caught them?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “But it hadn’t gone very far, which is why Jenny and I have been having a nice long chat about boys tonight. We’ve agreed that nothing like this will ever happen again, at least until she’s thirty or married, whichever comes first.”
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