It just meant that life could be cruel.
“I actually first heard her talking about it before Erik even died. She was telling one of her good friends about it while they visited at home, and I was supposed to be doing the dishes—but instead I was listening pretty hard. I always heard such fascinating things from the adults when they didn’t know I was around,” Jenna recounted with a small smile. Jimmy agreed with her, remembering for a moment what it had been like to be a child.
“Anyway, she started listing off all our family members who had died unexpectedly. Both my grandparents were dead before they were fifty. Two of my mother’s cousins. Her best friend growing up. Five people connected to her that all died young in ways connected to the Armada. She explained that when she dug into the background of it, she learned that not long before her father died, he’d had some kind of run-in with an early settler of Zenith. These early settlers had wanted to secede from the Union and force everyone not like themselves off the planet. It was called the Roran Uprising,” Jenna explained. Jimmy vaguely remembered learning something about the Roran Uprising. The people had been fervently dedicated to driving the Union government and anyone else who didn’t believe like them off the planet. The rebellion had ended up being brutally suppressed by the Armada when it seemed that the group was about to massacre all the settlers who didn’t agree with them.
“The Rorans were a weird lot,” Jenna went on. “They believed in a lot of strange stuff, including that the planet had a spirit of its own, that they were to worship it and protect the planet from humans, and that only a limited number of people could live on Zenith as guardians. They believed the planet’s spirit gave them special powers. Anyway, my grandfather was an Armada captain who had to gather up a village of Rorans and take them into custody. Once the Rorans were rounded up, my grandfather gave the order to burn their huts to the ground. I guess some of my grandfather’s men later reported that in revenge, the leader of the village cursed my grandfather, saying that as long as he or any of his descendants worked as butchers for the Armada, the planet would return death on their own heads.”
Jimmy listened to all this in fascinated horror. That the Rorans had been rather bloodthirsty zealots he already knew (before the Roran uprising was over, they had killed something like 1,500 other settlers), but that they had believed they could “curse” someone—that was new.
“So,” Jenna continued, “the other soldiers were a little spooked when my grandfather was killed only a few weeks later, and they remembered the curse and told my grandmother about it. My mother was old enough that she must have been told about it, or maybe she learned about it the same way I did, by eavesdropping on the grown-ups. It could have been a coincidence that my grandfather was killed—plenty of soldiers were killed during the uprising—but when my grandmother died only a year later, my mother remembered. It must have stuck with her, even more so when all those other family members died. I didn’t think much of it myself at the time, I was so young, and as far as I was concerned, all the people who had died had been ancient anyway, so what was the big deal?”
She swallowed. “But then Erik drowned, and Andie crashed her skiff, and who am I to say that the curse isn’t real? What if you’re next, Jimmy? I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear knowing that I brought tragedy down on your head too.”
Jimmy took her hand and shook his head firmly. “Jenna, nothing is going to happen to me, I promise.”
“You can’t know that, Jimmy,” Jenna said sadly. “You really can’t.”
He couldn’t actually promise that. He knew as well as anyone else that life could be capricious and cruel when suffering was doled out. But he looked for some way to lighten the tone of the conversation, like he always did when the discussion got too serious.
“I can so,” Jimmy promised, “because neither one of us is involved with the Armada. You did say that Roran witchdoctor curse stipulated that it was in effect only as long as the descendants worked for the Armada, right?”
Jenna brightened unexpectedly. “But neither of us work for the Armada, so we’re safe!” She almost seemed to believe it. Jimmy hoped that was good enough for her. Of course, her little brother hadn’t worked for the Armada either, but he wasn’t going to remind her of that. Their lives were dramatic enough without a curse to make their newlywed existence interesting. Speaking of drama, he thought, we are about to have some front row seats to it.
“You didn’t tell me you were going out for the day with the Quintans tomorrow,” he interjected, remembering his conversation with Quintan that morning.
Jenna dropped her fork into her salad. “Oh no,” she groaned. “I completely forgot about that!”
“Well, it’s a good thing you have tomorrow off then,” Jimmy remarked, taking a drink. It was good to know that she wasn’t keeping secrets from him, just forgetful. “Otherwise you’d be doing some serious scrambling right about now.”
“A whole day with Zane’s sisters,” she moaned. “I hope they don’t consider me a future sister-in-law. The pressure from Mr. Quintan is more than enough.”
“At least I’ll be there to keep you company!” Jimmy announced cheerfully.
Jenna stared at him incredulously. “You’re invited too?”
“Yep. I have no idea why. Just Quintan’s way of trying to be a good host again, I guess. Either that or he wants to pick my brain for ways to get Jax to finally solve the last remaining hiccup in the gate design.” He finished his salad and tore into a roll. “The biggest problem as I see it is that you will have to keep your hands off me all day.”
Jenna groaned theatrically. “You should talk! Sneaking kisses any time you think someone isn’t looking!”
Jimmy grinned. “Got to take advantage when I can.” He was making a joke out of it, but it was also serious. They did seem to gravitate toward each other when in the same room, no matter what. It was getting harder and harder to keep their relationship a secret. To spend all day surrounded by the hawkeyed Quintan sisters without giving them a hint of more than friendship between him and Jenna? It was going to take a miracle.
Their miracle came, though not in any way that Jimmy would have preferred. In the middle of the night Jenna leapt out of bed (he had stayed over with her for once) and dashed for the bathroom. He sat up, bleary-eyed and disoriented, and crawled out to follow her. He found her vomiting violently into the commode. There was nothing he could do but try and hold her hair out of her face for her as she retched over and over again. It seemed like it would never end. At last her stomach seemed to settle down a little, and Jimmy left her and padded to the kitchen to get a glass of water. When he returned, she was sitting on the floor, her head resting on the edge of the bathtub. He gave her the water so she could rinse her mouth out and then helped her back into bed.
“I guess bean salad doesn’t agree with me,” Jenna said weakly.
“No more bean salad,” Jimmy concurred. He slipped into bed beside her again, hoping that she would be able to sleep the rest of the night.
Unfortunately, by the time Lilah arrived home from work around dawn, Jenna had been sick two more times, though she had nothing left in her stomach anymore. Clearly she had picked up some kind of a virus. Jimmy left her sleeping fitfully and went to tell Lilah the bad news. He found her in the kitchen pulling what remained of the bean salad out of the fridge.
“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” Jimmy cautioned. Lilah jumped, dropping the container on the floor.
“Jimmy Forrest!” she rebuked in a strangled voice. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Give you advice?”
“Scare the scat right out of me,” she retorted. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in your own place? Or are you sneaking home right during the shift change, when you would be most likely to be seen by your neighbors?” Her tone was reproachful.
“Jenna’s sick,” Jimmy stated, ignoring
Lilah’s commentary.
Lilah frowned. “With what?”
“Something stomach related. That bean stuff’s what we had for dinner, so that’s why I said you might want to skip it.”
“You seem fine, though,” Lilah observed, eyeing him critically. “I bet it’s a gastro virus.”
“Probably. Anyway, she’s feeling pretty miserable. She’s supposed to be going out with the Quintan family today, but it’s better if you comm him and let him know she can’t make it. I don’t think it would go over well coming from me,” Jimmy said wryly.
“It would defeat the whole purpose of your super top secret antics,” Lilah agreed. “All right, just get me his information.” Jimmy passed it on and then went back to keep Jenna company. It was definitely not a side of marriage he had ever envisioned—stroking someone’s forehead while she dry-heaved over the toilet was the very antithesis of romance—but he was glad he could be there to try to comfort her. At least he had the right to stand there helplessly next to her.
When the time neared for the outing with the Quintans, Jenna weakly shooed him off. “Go get ready,” she ordered, her voice scratchy and pale. “Mr. Quintan’s probably going to be offended enough by my last-minute cancellation; he doesn’t need to be upset at you too. Besides, what excuse would you give?”
Jimmy reluctantly followed her advice.
The day trip to see Seven Falls should have been entertaining—Jimmy actually had wanted to see the famous series of massive waterfalls before this—except that he was worried about how Jenna was doing the whole time he was gone. Was she feeling OK? Was she keeping any liquids down yet? Worse, Moriel, the oldest of the Quintan girls, spent the entire day flirting with him. Normally, he would have flirted playfully right back (flirting was almost a matter of habit with him), but now he was acutely conscious that he was a married man. It didn’t seem like innocent fun anymore. It seemed at best deceitful (what if Moriel took him seriously and thought he was interested?) and at worst a betrayal of Jenna. He spent the whole second half of the trip avoiding Moriel while trying not to appear that he was avoiding her.
He had a feeling he wasn’t too successful. Moriel was glaring at him by the time they arrived back in Omphalos. Jimmy was too exhausted to care at that point. He’d barely had any sleep the night before. Luckily, though he stayed in Jenna’s room again, her stomach seemed to have settled, and though she tossed and turned, they both managed to get a bit more sleep.
By the next morning, Jenna felt much better. She got up and shakily made herself her own toast that she dipped in weak ginger tea, a huge step in the right direction. She was still too wiped out to head in to work, so Jimmy made his daily trek to visit Jax earlier than normal and then came back to keep her company. But by dinner time, he was queasy himself.
This time it was Jenna standing next to him offering the water to swish in his mouth afterward. “Nothing like sharing the stomach flu to cement your life as husband and wife,” Jimmy said miserably.
“I love you,” Jenna responded.
15. A Visit to Marah
Jenna got her marching orders before Jimmy had fully recovered from his bout with the gastro virus. Mr. Carter decreed that it was time for her to make a site visit to Marah. She’d known it was coming; Zane had been getting even more desperate to see her, and everyone wanted to keep Zane happy. But she wished it could wait. She wanted to be there for Jimmy, who was having a much harder time recovering from the virus (presumably because it was a Zenithian strain that his body was having trouble fighting). It seemed wrong on so many levels to leave her sick husband to go spend several days with another man. Every day the burden of their secret marriage grew heavier, and Jenna grew wearier of pretending. She was almost to the point where she didn’t care if they fired her. However, every time she started to convince herself that they should just go public with their relationship, come what may, Jimmy reminded her that the gate was almost finished, and with the gate in working order, construction on the West project would speed to a conclusion.
Then Jimmy could explain the situation to Zane (who hopefully would take the news calmly), Mr. Carter would realize there was nothing more Jenna could do with the Quintan connection, and she and Jimmy could move on to developing their lives together in a more normal fashion. Whatever normal married life was—but at least they could do it without secrets.
Jimmy didn’t react well when he learned she was leaving for Marah.
“This is ridiculous,” he grumbled. “Zane throws a temper tantrum, and they ship you across the continent to soothe him. Zane just needs to grow up. His own idiotic choices got him stuck out there.”
“You’ll survive,” Jenna consoled, kissing him. “I’ll be back before you even have time to get bored of old novellas.”
He had snorted at that; she knew, of course, that of all programs he could stream, those were his least favorite. It was far more likely that he would watch some kind of sport.
At the shuttleport she had joined two other project leads: the guy who was over disaster protection and the attraction planner for the resort activities. Officially, they would be going to check the progress of the contractors who were carrying out their plans. Jenna looked forward to seeing how the design was coming together in reality—that part was fairly exciting. If only she could have left Zane out of the equation.
But of course that was impossible.
Zane greeted her enthusiastically when she disembarked from the ship, coming forward and taking both her hands in his and kissing her on the cheek. She gave an artificial smile in return and tried unsuccessfully to remove her hands from his. She was uncomfortably aware of the other two leads exchanging knowing glances about her “special relationship” with the boss.
It made her want to scream. Couldn’t anyone just accept her as a skilled architect instead of some kind of pawn between the Quintans and Carter & Yen?
Zane wouldn’t even let her do her job. He sent the others off with the site foreman and then dragged her around on his own personal tour. The building was far too large for her to see much, but she did get a good look at the giant waterpark on the outside. The slides and pools were nearly finished, though nothing had been filled with water yet. She closed her eyes and pictured the renderings she had seen and thought that the reality might just live up to the concept.
The waterpark was pretty much the only part she got a good look at before Zane led her into his modular home. It was a plasticized box, essentially, one of the literally hundreds in the booming worker town next to the resort. Once the resort was finished, the Quintans would have their own family suite here too, but for now, Zane was living (mostly) like everyone else (he luckily got a plastic box all his own).
Jenna wandered around his tiny sitting area—it didn’t take too long. When she reached the far end, she stopped abruptly before a picture frame that showed slide after slide of her. She stared with almost fascinated horror as she watched a procession of shots that showed the progression of her relationship with Zane. There was one from their first meeting in the Carter & Yen office, when Zane had asked her to meet over dinner to discuss the possibility of her office working on the project. There was one from that dinner; he had caught her with her eyes downcast and her fork halfway to her mouth. There were several pictures that had to have been taken on their dates in the QE, even including some blurry ones of her sitting in the stands at the racetrack. He had a picture he must have taken of her right before he proposed, looking up in wonder at the moon in the arboretum. All pictures he must have unobtrusively snapped from his netband, candid shots of Jenna in the middle of talking, smiling back at him, dancing.
The final picture in the rotation was taken the night he had come to see her before he left. She had tired, red eyes in that picture. Her brow was furrowed, and she sat with her arms crossed defensively over her chest. A picture of angry heartbreak. Jenna knew it was because she had thought at th
e time that she was going to lose her job and her home, but to Zane, it must have looked like Jenna was devastated over their breakup.
No wonder he’d had such hope. He must have thought it was only the nanospeed standing between them.
Zane had stood silently behind her while she had processed his evident lingering desire for her. Was it an obsession? Or was it just the result of lonely heartbreak? She sincerely hoped he didn’t sit in here alone at nights, staring at static images of her as they slid by on the screen.
“I wanted to remember every moment,” Zane explained quietly. Jenna bit her lip and then turned to face him.
“Zane,” she began, trying to find the words that would convince him to let her go, “I wish you wouldn’t. There just isn’t a future for the two of us.” She tried to be as gentle as possible.
“I refuse to believe that,” Zane disagreed, his voice still quiet. “The woman I knew, the one I see in those pictures, she was determined and loyal. She didn’t give up on the things she wanted.” He took a slight step toward her. “And I don’t give up on the things I want either.” His voice was slightly stronger, more confident.
Jenna eyed the short distance between them. This was getting much too awkward. Zane was right about her loyalty and her determination, but she was now a married woman, and her loyalty to Jimmy came first above everyone else. She didn’t want to hurt Zane, but she would if pushed too far.
“I don’t think we want the same things, though,” she countered firmly. “Zane, you are caught up in a fantasy version of me—you don’t even know who I really am. Our relationship never got beyond superficial. There are other women out there who would make you infinitely happier than I ever could.”
“I don’t want some hypothetical perfect woman,” Zane argued, his voice getting warmer. He took another step toward her. Jenna edged back, but she was already practically at the wall. “I know who you are, Jenna Donnell.” Jenna Forrest, corrected Jenna silently. “I know exactly what I want. I love you! Everything I’ve done these last months has been to regain your trust.”
The Quintan Edge (Roran Curse Book 2) Page 17
