Embarrassed, Sylvia blushed. “Oh. Forgive me, dear. I guess I just got carried away.”
“It’s okay,” Zora said, relieved for the reprieve.
“Grans means well,” Jaxon said, giving Zora a reassuring smile and wink. “She’s probably just happy that you don’t make your living by sliding down a pole.”
“Jaxon!” Sylvia delivered a swift kick to his shin.
“Ow. What am I, your personal punching bag today?” Jaxon laughed.
“Well, you have to admit that was a cruel joke you pulled on us.”
“Sorry, but if you asked me, it served you guys right. My life. My decisions.”
Zora reached to her right and gave Jaxon’s hand a firm squeeze. It was an act of support, yet, a request for him not to start anything.
Jaxon got the hint and pulled back. “Well, I guess it’s neither here nor there. I believe I’ve finally found the one I’ve been looking for.” He picked up Zora’s hand and brushed a kiss against her knuckles.
A delicious thrill coursed up Zora’s arm and caused a smile to bloom across her face.
Sylvia and Carlton glanced at one another and both knew without a doubt their grandson was in love.
Sylvia reached for her wineglass and tried not to gloat.
Chapter 23
“Melanie, she’s perfect,” Sylvia declared, clenching the cordless phone against her ear. “And the best part is that Jaxon has fallen for her hook, line and sinker. I couldn’t be more pleased!”
“I’m certainly happy to have another satisfied customer,” Melanie said. “Given the information that you provided about your grandson, I just knew that Zora was our girl. Though it did start off a little bumpy there.”
“You’re telling me. Jaxon really had me going with that Kitty character. Not that I have anything against strippers per se—I just don’t want them marrying my grandson.”
“Per se.” Melanie chuckled. “Anyway, I’m just thrilled that it has all worked out. Do we know whether he’s proposed yet?”
“Not yet. At least I don’t think so. But I can tell it’s gonna be anyday now. You should see how he looked at her last night during dinner. He’s absolutely crazy about her.” Sylvia sighed. “Ah. It all just reminds me of when your grandmother first introduced me to my Carlton. I know that she has to be proud of you.”
“That’s so kind of you to say,” Melanie said. There was a beat of silence and then, “Um. There’s just one thing,” Melanie hedged.
“Is there a problem?”
“Well…I don’t know,” Melanie began. “My nephew Vincent brought up something the other day that, in all honesty, does have me a little worried.”
“Oookay,” Sylvia said, picking up Melanie’s anxiety over the line.
“It’s just that…if Jaxon ever finds out that you hired a professional matchmaking service, he could construe this whole thing as a form of manipulation and well…given what you’ve told me about him—” Melanie explained.
“I know where you’re going with this, and I agree. I love him but Jaxon is too stubborn and hardheaded for his own good. So he must never find out that I hired a professional matchmaking service. He would absolutely hit the ceiling.”
“Good, then we’re all on the same page.”
“What about Zora? Should one of us tell her not to tell Jaxon?”
“I’ll do it,” Melanie said. “I’d already told her not to divulge your involvement at the beginning, but she may be tempted, given the status of their relationship.”
“Well, that would certainly be a disaster,” Sylvia said. “But it has to be encouraging that she has said nothing before now.”
“Yeah. But I’ll talk to her just to make sure.”
“Thanks,” Sylvia said, releasing a sigh of relief. “We’ve come too far to have all this blow up in our faces.” After a few more reassurances from Melanie, she quickly said her goodbyes and hurried off the phone. When she turned around to head for the kitchen for her morning coffee, she jumped at the sight of Jaxon standing at her reading-room door. “Oh, my goodness.” She pressed a hand against her heart. “You nearly scared me to death!”
“Now, I wouldn’t want that now, would I?” Jaxon deadpanned. His eyes were flat and hard.
A small prick of fear pierced Sylvia in the center of her spine. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough.” His jaw clenched.
“Oh.” Sylvia’s mouth went dry and she suddenly had an overwhelming need to sit down.
Jaxon stood there and watched his grandmother as she crept across the room like a tortoise. It was a stark difference from the spry woman who had raced into his arms just yesterday. When she finally settled down into a high-back wing chair, she quietly braided her hands together and waited for whatever explosion that was coming her way.
Jaxon didn’t really know where to begin. He was simply coming down to the kitchen to ask the cook if he could prepare and deliver breakfast to his and Zora’s room. It was just by chance that he was walking by his grandmother’s reading room when he overheard her conversation. “You hired Zora to meet me?” he asked, wanting—no—needing clarification.
“No.” Sylvia chuckled awkwardly. “I didn’t hire her. I hired a professional matchmaker. Melanie Harte. She runs this company called the Platinum Society.”
Jaxon’s head started spinning. “Melanie Harte. Why do I know that name?”
“Oh. You’ve probably met her. She’s usually at all the social functions. Plus, it was her grandmother who introduced me to Carlton. You’ve met her. You probably just don’t remember.”
Jaxon had another memory associated with the name. The woman who was waiting outside the bathroom at Cipriani’s. Hadn’t Zora said her name was Melanie? Jaxon calmly walked over to the chair across from his grandmother and said, “Start from the beginning.”
Zora woke up smiling in a bed that had the softest sheets she had ever slept on. After a night of great conversation and great food, she and Jaxon had retired to one of the guest rooms for a night of great sex. Even now, she relished the pleasurable soreness between her legs. Jaxon had certainly turned her on and turned her out—to the point she kept hearing a voice inside her head say: Mrs. Zora Landon. Each time she heard it, she smiled.
Uncurling in a tangle of sheets, she kept reaching across the bed in search of her lover. Then finally she sat up and glanced around. “Jaxon?” When he didn’t answer back, she reluctantly pulled herself out of bed, wrapped the sheet around her body and went to look for him in the adjoining bathroom. But he wasn’t there.
Since she was up and already in the bathroom, she decided to go ahead and jump in the shower. If he came back to the room, he could always join her. But twenty minutes later, her lover boy hadn’t returned. Zora was disappointed but she really wasn’t all that concerned. Maybe he was off finally having that heart-to-heart talk with his grandfather.
She sincerely hoped so. She liked Carlton and could see that the two men really did have a lot in common—in looks and in personalities. She quickly got dressed in another pair of jeans and a T-shirt and set about to see if perhaps there was some breakfast down in the kitchen. However, Zora hadn’t taken more than a couple steps outside the bedroom door when Jaxon appeared at the top of the stairs.
Zora smiled, but then her lips quickly curved the other way at the look on Jaxon’s face. She was instantly concerned. “What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“You tell me,” he growled, storming toward her.
“Jaxon, come back here.” Sylvia’s voice snapped at him a second before she also appeared at the top of the stairs.
Zora was confused. “What’s going on?”
Jaxon’s long strides were coming at her so fast, she was almost afraid that he was about to mow her down. “Tell me about the Platinum Society.”
Zora’s face drained of color.
“How about Melanie Harte?” Jaxon tried. “Does her name ring a bell?”
Sylvia butt
ed in, “Jaxon, please let me finish explaining.”
“No,” Jaxon snapped, his patience was clearly just held together by the thinnest thread. “I’ve heard enough from you right now, Grans. I want to hear Zora’s answer.”
Zora quickly processed what was going on. Jaxon had found out about Sylvia hiring the Platinum Society to find him a wife—her. “Jaxon, I know what you’re thinking.”
“How in the hell would you know what I’m thinking?” Jaxon snapped. “Are you going to tell me that you’re a mind reader, too?”
“You’re upset,” she said, trying to talk to him in a calming voice.
“How could you tell, Ms. Campbell? Could it possibly be my angry tone, my tense expression or the fact that my hands are just dying to bounce something up against the wall?”
“Jaxon—”
“How dare you—both of you—try to manipulate me—”
“No,” Zora snapped. “That’s not how it was.”
“Was all of this some kind of sick game—all of it? The whole cat-and-mouse ruse and—”
“No!” Zora started to panic. She could very well lose him over this. “Trust me, I know—”
“Trust you?” he thundered. “Lady, I don’t think I even know you.”
His words slapped her and she stepped back in shock. “How could you say something like that?”
“How could you not tell me?”
Zora drifted to his side to see his grandmother’s ashen face. “I made a promise.”
Jaxon laughed. “Well, how honorable. You keep your promises.”
“It’s not like I was paid to be with you. A friend asked me—”
“You know what?” Jaxon started backing away. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear it. I’m just glad I found out before I made the biggest mistake of my life by asking you to marry me.”
Zora’s heart sank like a stone. “What?”
Sylvia slapped a hand across her heart. “Jaxon, nooo.”
Jaxon’s eyes misted, but he shook his head as if that would prevent the tears from falling. “I have to get out of here. As usual, these damn walls in this house are closing in on me.”
Zora no longer had the will to fight with him. “Then I guess that means that you have to do what you always do—run away.”
Jaxon jerked from the verbal blow but then still backed away.
Zora lifted her chin and did a better job in keeping her tears from showing. “Mrs. Landon, would you mind if I had one of your drivers drive me back to the city?”
Sylvia was the only one not ashamed to show her tears. “This is all my fault,” she gasped. “Please, won’t you reconsider?”
“No. It seems I’ve already made the biggest mistake of my life. I would like to go home now.” Without waiting for another word from her glaring ex-lover, she turned on her heel and went to pack her clothes. Oh, well. It was good while it lasted.
Chapter 24
For the next two months, Zora threw herself into her work. She did everything she could to block anything that had to do with Jaxon Landon from her mind. Turned out that that alone was a full-time job. But lately she was into this thing where she kept telling herself that she was doing better and so he would be nothing but a distant memory.
Of course it didn’t help that the tabloids were back at it, trumpeting from every page that the love affair had crashed and burned. They all speculated on the causes. Some stated that she was still secretly in love with Richard Myers and the others claimed the Jaxon couldn’t handle the pressure of living in the spotlight. Zora tried to avoid these rags, but once again, the staff on photo shoots always seemed to leave those gossip magazines in places where she was sure to see them.
Zora’s mother grew concerned and now had developed the habit of calling her at least ten times a day to check in on her. She was fine, she kept telling everyone. At least she would be if everyone would just stop asking how she felt.
In the first few days right after the big fight out in the Hamptons, Todd had thought that Zora’s sudden zest for work was great. But when sixteen-hour days became twenty-hour days, he grew concerned and just stopped telling her about some of the jobs that were pouring in. And poor Monica started to complain and hint that maybe she needed to start looking for another job. She couldn’t keep up with the new hectic schedule, and well…she did have a personal life that was suffering.
Zora tuned it all out. As far as she was concerned, she worked hard so that she could fall into bed exhausted. Turned out her dreams had it in for her. All that would play during her deep slumber were memories of her and Jaxon. The first time they met, that crazy time in the ladies’ bathroom and certainly that Twilight Zone first date. They were all great memories and more times than she cared to count, she would wake up with her pillow soaked with tears.
But all it took for those sweet memories to go away was for her to remember his cruel words at his grandparents’ estate or even how he’d looked as though he didn’t know her.
“I should have told him,” she admitted in the shower. Once the words were out of her mouth, the tears were down her face. She knew how Jaxon felt about his grandparents’ needling. She should have broken her confidence with Melanie to tell the man that she loved the truth. But truth was a very tricky thing. Melanie just set her up on a blind date that technically never happened. But she knew none of that would matter to Jaxon.
He was stubborn, prideful and hardheaded.
And she loved him.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Dale said, sitting across from Jaxon in the Velvet Rope. “But, man, I hate to see you in here.”
Jaxon rolled his eyes and pulled at his tie. “What? You’re not having fun anymore?”
“How can I? Looking at your long face every night is dragging me down.”
Jaxon shrugged as he waved at a new girl to bring him another drink. “I don’t hear anybody else complaining.”
“That’s because you’re shoving a lot of money down their G-strings, trying to get over Zora.”
Jaxon glared at his friend. “I told you not to mention her.”
“Yeah, well. My doctor told me to stop drinking, but I don’t listen to him, either.”
Jaxon received his fresh drink and tossed back half its contents before the waitress left the table.
“You love the woman. What difference does it make how you met her?”
“It makes a big difference. It means that this whole time everyone was playing around with my life.” He shook his head. “You know I’d expected that sort of thing from Carlton, but from Grans? It means I just can’t trust them.”
“Oh, cut me a break.” Dale rolled his eyes. “It’s not like you’re not above manipulating people, too. What about that whole fake fiancée thing—or the fact that you tried to blackmail the woman into going out with you—or fake a limousine to break down on the side of the road just so you could see whether she was going to be one of those high maintenance chicks.”
Jaxon shifted in his chair.
“So don’t give me that holier-than-thou routine. You pull the same kind of tricks that your grandfather does. Why? Because you two are so much alike that you can’t even see it. Your grandmother hired a professional matchmaker because she feared that you were about to make one of the biggest mistakes of your life. News flash, that’s what parents do. They look out for your best interests—whether you want them to or not.”
Jaxon sat stubbornly in his chair. He didn’t like the mirror Dale was holding up to him.
“He’s right, you know,” Kitty said.
Jaxon glanced over his shoulder at the smiling stripper in a sharp, black pantsuit.
Dale shook his head. “You don’t have to take my word for it, Kit, but I don’t think you’re going to make good tips in that outfit.”
“Shut up, Dale. It’s my day off. I just came in to look at my schedule.” She turned her attention to Jaxon. “As much as it pains me to say it, you should go af
ter her. It was clear to me that first night you met her that there was an energy around you two. An energy that you cannot fake or manufacture.”
Jaxon turned his head. “What—now you two are my therapists?”
“No. We’re your friends. And friends do not let friends screw up their lives,” Kitty said.
Dale set his drink down and pushed it aside. “Get out of here, man. You know you want her—so go get her.”
“I just feel like this is all my fault,” Sylvia croaked to Melanie and the Platinum Society staff. “I should have never put my nose where it doesn’t belong. Now my baby isn’t talking to me or to Zora. It’s just one big mess.”
“Shhh, now,” Carlton said, curling an arm around his wife. “You know Jaxon. He just needs some time to calm down.”
“Yeah, but he’ll never forgive me.”
Melanie felt horrible. When she glanced over at Vincent it was hard to not miss his I-told-you-so expression. “Everybody calm down. I’m sure that this whole thing will eventually blow over.”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “Jaxon can be stubborn. He gets it honestly from his grandfather’s side of the family.”
“Hey!” Carlton said, clearly affronted.
Sylvia patted his hand. “I’m sorry, baby, but it’s true.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Jaxon’s voice boomed into the office. “I think I might’ve gotten a touch of it from you, too, Grans.”
Sylvia sprang to her feet. “Jaxon!” She rushed across the room and wrapped her arms around her big baby.
Carlton slowly rose to his feet as tears brightened his eyes. “Son?”
Jaxon glanced over and saw so many emotions coursing through the older man’s face. “Hello, Carl—Grandfather.”
A smile twitched up the corners of Carlton’s lips, but he cleared his throat and said, “You made your grandmother cry.”
“I know.” He kissed the top of his grandmother’s head. “I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.”
Carlton nodded. “See that you don’t.”
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