Marrying Mister Perfect

by Lizzie Shane

  Probably because whenever they tried to talk about emotional stuff, Lou was spending half her energy trying to conceal her feelings from him. She hated that deception, the tension of always living right on the edge of discovery.

  “Let’s talk about something else.” She scrounged for a safe topic. The memory of that damned picture from the supermarket swam up in her mind. “You were in a tabloid last week,” she blurted out.

  Jack visibly flinched. “Damn. What did it say?”

  “I didn’t read it. The picture on the front was of you kissing a pretty blonde with a caption about auditioning new mommies.”

  He cringed. “It’ll blow over soon, right?”

  “I think you have several more months of hell in front of you, Mr. Perfect. The show hasn’t even aired yet. The worst is yet to come. Kelly says everyone harasses Mr. Perfect and the girls while it’s being aired because they all want to know who you picked.”

  “I didn’t think people really cared that much about reality TV.”

  “That’s because you live under a rock.”

  “Hey,” he protested defensively.

  “It’s not my fault you have no awareness of pop culture. Reality TV is huge, Jack. Like epic, gazillions of people watching it, huge. I bet one of the reasons the producers picked you is because you’re so clueless.”

  “Hey!”

  “It’s a compliment. You’re a doctor with two kids who does crossword puzzles in his spare time and makes me watch those awful CSI shows. There’s no reason why you should have known about reality TV. Though anyone with half a brain would have looked into it before they signed on the dotted line.”

  “I read the fine print. I just underestimated the scale of it.” He swallowed more champagne. “You know, even if I didn’t know what I was getting into, I might still sign that contract again, knowing what I know now. It has been an intense and bizarre experience, but I’m kind of glad I’m doing it.”

  Lou didn’t want to hear how glad he was he’d done it. The show was dismantling her life piece by piece and he would do it all over again. Lovely. “Just wait until it airs. That’s when the real insanity begins.”

  He grimaced. “When does it end?”

  “When you get married? Or maybe when you announce you’ve broken up with your fiancé. Or maybe never. I don’t know. Kelly’s the expert.” Lou tipped up her glass and found it empty again.

  Jack reached behind him for the bottle, angling it to see the little that was left. They’d nearly polished off the entire bottle. “It’s a crime to leave it. Gimme your glass and we’ll split the rest.”

  Lou stood and waded through the hip-deep water to Jack’s side. He wrapped his hand around hers, holding the flute steady so he could splash the last bit of bubbly into her glass. He set down the bottle and picked up his own refilled glass, still holding her hand. His hand slid down to her wrist and tugged gently until she sank onto the ledge beside him.

  “To the end of the insanity,” he murmured, clinking his glass against hers.

  Lou leaned her shoulder against Jack’s, sipping champagne. It was a gorgeous night. Fairy tale perfect. It wasn’t’ hard to see why Jack liked it here. All of the aches from the day had long since washed away.

  Her jealous raving aside, this had been a pretty fabulous day. It could almost have been one of Marrying Mr. Perfect’s dream dates. Jack had been attentive and considerate—without any producers there to coach him along. That familiar twinkle had lit his blue eyes, which crinkled around the edges when he laughed at TJ’s attempts to mimic a gibbon.

  What girl wouldn’t fall for that?

  If Lou had been a Suitorette on the show, she would have been a goner—even without knowing in advance what a great guy Jack was. She could just picture those laser-blue eyes locked steadily on hers as he drank in every word she said over a candlelight dinner. A string quartet would be playing in the background—or maybe, since it was Jack, an old Allman Brothers track. He would ask her to dance and they would sway slowly to the bluesy growl of the song, pressed so tight against one another she could feel his every heartbeat. His hands would press against her spine, pulling her even closer until she was molded against him…

  “It wasn’t perfect, you know.” The low rumble of his voice startled her out of her daydream.

  “Sorry?”

  “My marriage to Gillian. You said it was perfect. It wasn’t.”

  Lou would have blushed, but her face was already rosy from the hot tub. She’d said a lot of things she shouldn’t in the last half hour. Her head was starting to feel distinctly fizzy. She wasn’t sure of half the things that had traipsed out of her mouth without permission. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “No. It’s what you think. I want to know what you think, Lou. No more censoring yourself so you can tell me what you think I want to hear, okay?”

  And what if she was censoring herself to tell herself what she wanted to hear? Did that honesty have to extend to owning up to her own desires?

  Lou swallowed the last of her liquid courage and set aside the empty flute. “Okay.”

  “No marriage is perfect. Not without effort, anyway.” He rolled his shoulders, rubbing again at the back of his neck.

  “Here. Let me.” Lou shoved his shoulder until he shifted to give her his back. She pressed her fingers against the muscle of his neck and he groaned.

  “Perfect. Just keep doing that.”

  She worked his neck, shoulders and upper back in silence for a few minutes, but now that he’d opened the topic of his marriage to Gillian, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d always had this idea in her head that Gillian and Jack had been one of the great love affairs of all time. She couldn’t compete with Juliet for Romeo’s attention. Even if Romeo had lived, he would have always loved Juliet more than any other woman in the world, wouldn’t he?

  She felt like she’d just been told Romeo really hadn’t been that into Juliet after all. She wasn’t sure whether to be excited that Romeo still had room in his heart for someone else, or depressed at having her illusions of the perfect love affair shattered.

  A question burned at the back of her throat. She had to ask it now. Who knew if this mood of comfortable confession would ever arise again?

  “So you and Gillian weren’t… happy?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered sincerely. “Sometimes we were. Sometimes we were euphoric, but on the whole… I don’t know. I loved her like crazy, but Gillian wasn’t exactly the easiest person to live with. You know how she was. The dramatics, the temper tantrums… Gillian was a force of nature, but compromise wasn’t exactly her strong suit, and she had almost no patience for kids, even when TJ was a baby. She got frustrated so easily.” Jack shook his head. “I don’t know how things would have turned out if not for… you know.”

  If she hadn’t died. Yes, Lou knew.

  She didn’t say anything, but it felt amazing to hear Jack talking about Gillian like she really was—not as the saint everyone had made up in their minds the second she passed away. She’d been vivacious and wild and fun, but she’d also been a royal pain in the ass. Everyone just carefully chose to forget that. It always made Lou feel guilty for remembering.

  Tears pricked the back of Lou’s eyes and she blinked them furiously away. She and Gillian had never really been close, but somehow hearing Jack acknowledging Gillian’s faults made her death seem more real and Lou’s throat closed. She was Emma and TJ’s mother—and she’d never really gotten a chance to know them.

  “The producers all want me to talk about Gillian. They think I’m looking for someone exactly like her. The truth is, even though Gillian was all passion and fire and energy, she was a demanding wife and completely unwilling to compromise. The day-to-day was always a challenge, but with you…”

  Lou held her breath. With her?

  “I think, on the whole, I’ve been happier these last four years. Through every crisis, I always know you’re going to be my rock. Stea
dy and calm through it all.”

  Lou’s hands stilled. She should be ecstatic to hear him say that. Why did she feel like she’d just been kicked in the gut? Didn’t she want to be his rock?

  She pulled her hands off his shoulders.

  “Thanks.” Jack glanced over his shoulder, his blue eyes piercing at close range and seemed to realize she hadn’t just finished the massage. “Lou?”

  Champagne fizzled through her blood, giving her courage she didn’t know she had. “I don’t want to be a rock. I’m a person, Jack. I have feelings and…” Do it. Say it. She tipped her chin back to meet his eyes squarely. “And needs.”

  He turned to face her fully, never taking his eyes off hers. “I know you have feelings, Lou. I hope you never thought I took you for granted.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I’ve been too undemanding.”

  He nodded, frowning slightly. “And I’ve taken advantage of that, but I’m not going to do it anymore. You just tell me what you need, Lou. I respect—”

  “Not respect. I don’t want respect.” No, that wasn’t right. The champagne was getting ahead of her. “I want more than respect.” Yeah, that sounded more like it. “I require passion,” she informed him.

  “Boss? We might have a situation.”

  Miranda glanced up from the prospective travel schedules she’d been reviewing for next week’s Meet-the-In-Laws dates. They’d sent advance teams to all six hometowns, but only four of the girls would make it through tomorrow’s ceremony. Marcy was a lock and Katya seemed likely. She’d marked Natalie as a probably, but she had no idea which of the other three he was going to keep—and it was making scheduling a pain in the ass. If only Jack were slightly more obvious about his feelings—without being too obvious about his feelings, of course. Suspense was paramount.

  “Is one of the girls trying to sneak over the wall for some nookie?” she asked Todd as he hovered nervously in the doorway of the room she’d claimed as a temporary office in the basement of the Mister Perfect Mansion. “We still have one roving crew hanging around, right? Just get good footage on her attempt and send her back over the wall. We can’t have any stowaways while the kids are here.”

  “It isn’t that,” Todd said. “It’s Lou.”

  Miranda frowned. “Is she okay?”

  “I think you’d better see this.” Todd hesitated—since he was not a hesitant person, Miranda immediately stood, tucking her tablet under her arm.

  He led the way to the room that held the live feeds from all the surveillance cameras around the estate. Avery, the story producer who’d drawn the short straw and stayed behind when everyone else took the night off, sat monitoring the feeds, a shot of the Jacuzzi dominating the main screen.

  The angle was bad, but the picture was crystal clear. “Is that Lou and Jack?”

  Avery grinned. “Yep.”

  “Do you want me to break it up?” Todd asked.

  There wasn’t technically anything to break up. They were sitting very close to one another—intimately close. Close enough to get in trouble, but they seemed to just be talking. Very, very intently. “Did anything else happen?”

  “She was giving him a massage a second ago,” Avery answered. “And they killed that entire bottle of champagne.”

  Oh Lou. Never mix alcohol and a hot tub. Miranda studied the pair of them, an idea taking form.

  “Boss?” Todd prompted.

  “Do we have audio?”

  “Just the directionals from the surveillance cameras. Neither of them are mic’ed. We can get most of it, but we’ll have to subtitle the whole things for the home audience.”

  “Can you get me more angles?”

  “Nothing closer.” Avery flipped through a couple other shots. None of them perfect, but clear enough.

  Miranda nodded, watching. “Keep rolling.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Passion,” Jack rumbled.

  Had Lou just said she required passion?

  It was the champagne. It had to be the champagne. God knew it felt like it had gone straight to his head. And his cock. But he couldn’t entirely blame the champagne for that. He’d been half-hard since she stepped onto the patio in that little red scrap of sin.

  But all this talk of needs and passion. That wasn’t Lou. That was the champagne talking.

  And the champagne wasn’t done. “I need heat and lust and chemistry,” the words were throaty and raw and his body reacted to the sound like a touch. She angled toward him, her eyes huge and hypnotically dark. “I want excitement and ertos--eroticism.” She stumbled a bit over the word and again he remembered the champagne.

  Don’t take advantage of the champagne, dumbass.

  But she was practically on top of him. She swayed and braced her hands on his shoulders. They felt cool against his overheated skin and he shuddered at the contact.

  “I demand a man who can’t keep his hands off me. Who sees me and has to have me no matter what logic or reason say. I want sex and—”

  Fuck. His resistance evaporated and his mouth captured hers, silencing her demands.

  The first touch of her lips was like taking a sledgehammer to the forehead. All the confusion of the last few weeks. All the frustration and the emotional tug-o-wars and the doubt, it all coalesced into an explosion inside him that rocked him down to his soul.

  It was Lou.

  How had he never seen that it was Lou he needed, Lou he—God, did he love her?

  It sure as hell felt like it as he wrapped his arms tight around her, pulling her into his lap. Lou came willingly, her long, sleek legs straddling his as her arms wound around his shoulders. She held on, kissing him for all she was worth.

  She tasted of champagne and sin. And he wanted more. He wanted all of her. “Lou.”

  Jack was kissing her. Sweet Holy Hot Tubs, Jack was kissing her.

  This was no tentative, accidental brush of lips. This was a declaration of possession, a spiraling vortex of lust that sucked her straight into its center and spun her senses. She may not be a swimsuit model, but she could be a sex goddess too.

  Through the champagne filter, Lou’s world narrowed down until it was only Jack. Jack’s hands. Jack’s lips. Jack’s—oh my he was quite interested, wasn’t he?

  She couldn’t seem to hold onto more than one thought at a time—and that was fine because she only needed one, replaying itself: Yes.

  This was it. This was Jack.

  It was the fantasy and more. He wasn’t just passively accepting her kiss, he was demanding more, his tongue tangling with hers, his hands pressing her closer. Fire kindled between them, fueled by friction and need, her every nerve-ending aflame.

  “Jack,” she gasped, when he finally released her mouth to press a line of kisses along her jaw. He rumbled her name. She felt his fingers brush her back and realized he was tugging at the ties of her bikini. Another dizzy wave of heat swept through her. This is really happening.

  The ties gave way under his fingers, freeing her breasts. He slid both hands beneath the fabric of her top, cupping her breasts and flicking her nipples with his thumbs. Lou sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes falling closed. She rocked against him, feeling the hard evidence that he was right there with her, the pressure hitting exactly where she needed it and shoving her into mindlessness. It had been too long. She had been wanting this for too long. Every glance over the last four years had been foreplay. Now that history intensified every touch, sending electric pulses to her core. His mouth captured hers again, consuming. She couldn’t take much more. Please, just a little—

  “Aunt Lou?”

  Lou yelped and threw herself off Jack, ducking into the water up to her shoulders to cover herself. She fished frantically for her missing top.

  Jack frowned into the darkness of the pool patio, seeming utterly unfazed, as if she hadn’t just been astride him with his hands in places they most certainly should not have been. “Emma?”

  Lou’s fingers closed ov
er the trailing strings of her top in the water. She yanked it toward her and hurriedly went about retying it as Jack rose to stand in the center of the hot tub—though he stayed in waist deep water to cover the incriminating bits.

  “Emma? Is that you, hon?” he called.

  They heard the slap of tiny feet on the tiles and then Emma appeared out of the shadows, Fluff Muffin dangling against her leg with her thumb corked in her mouth. “I had a bad dream,” she mumbled around the obstruction.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Her swimsuit situated, Lou climbed out of the Jacuzzi, whipped a towel around herself and crouched in front of Emma, somehow managing not to tip to the ground as the blood rushed from her head with all the sudden movement—damn champagne—and all without looking once in Jack’s direction. Do not look. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  She stared into Emma’s wide blue eyes, so like her father’s, and tried desperately to think of anything other than what she’d just been doing with Emma’s father. Dear God, had she actually jumped Jack? In a Jacuzzi of all places? What had she been thinking?

  Oh right. She hadn’t. Her head still swam.

  “I was a baby monkey,” Emma explained and it took Lou a moment to remember she was supposed to be making Em’s bad dream all better. “Bad men took me away from my mommy monkey and put me in a zoo and were gonna feed me to the croc’dile.”

  Damn Peter Pan. Emma had been having nightmares starring crocodiles ever since she saw that movie. Lou had tried to steer them away from alligators and crocodiles at the zoo today, but Emma must have sensed them with her scary-reptile radar.

  “There are no crocodiles here,” she soothed, rubbing Emma’s arms in a slow, comforting motion.

  Emma had taken her thumb out to explain her dream, but now it popped back into her mouth. “Can I sleep in your bed?” she mumbled around it.

  For a second, the urge to glance over her shoulder at Jack nearly overwhelmed her. Only minutes ago she’d been certain the only person sharing her bed tonight was going to be a lot bigger than Emma. They’d gotten carried away so quickly. One second they’re sipping champagne, the next they’re kissing, and a heartbeat later she’d sell her soul for one night with him. How could things have gotten out of hand so fast?