She was no female bombshell, no skinny, simpering blonde with lily-white skin and sparkly blue eyes. She had curves. Her hair was brown, shoulder length but not professionally styled, her eyes were brown, and she could bench press her own weight and then some.
But there was that tug in the belly when she thought of either Jason or Phillip Benedict, and especially when she thought of them both. And there was the sense that, if she didn’t at least try to make this move, she’d regret it for the rest of her life.
So she showered and did her best to make herself look—hell, who was she kidding? Gorgeous was out of the question. The best she could hope for was presentable, and that would have to be good enough.
Leesa never usually went beyond a bit of mascara and some lipstick, so that was what she did. Khaki green shorts, white tee shirt, and yeah, that was as good as it would ever get. She didn’t let any negative thoughts even form as she grabbed the casserole that she’d set in a small box and headed out the door.
Only to pull her car to the curb a couple doors down from where those two New York Benedicts currently lived. They’d traded in the one rental car for two that belonged to the family, and both vehicles were in the driveway. Unless they had gone somewhere on foot, both men were there.
They’re not here for the long haul. They’re only visiting so that means they will leave. There could be no happy-ever-after unless you pull your roots out of Texas and head up north with them.
All true. But even knowing that, there was still that tug in the belly.
Leesa blinked. Yes, that tug in the belly and that hungry, burning attraction she knew wasn’t one sided. She wasn’t looking for a happy-ever-after.
She wanted to explore the now, the moment, and maybe there would be pain after, but she’d never experienced the kind of heat others spoke of. Not even when she’d been a newlywed.
Hers had been a marriage of logic, a communion of the brain, not the heart and sure as hell not the libido. Oh, she’d been attracted to Bryce, but the sex between them had never been remarkable.
So maybe if she didn’t chicken out, if she could just grab hold of her nerves, she could see what all the fuss was about. At least she’d be able to have a sample of what all she’d missed.
She couldn’t live in Lusty Texas and not come to the conclusion that she’d missed plenty.
Enough of this shit. Move it, Sarge!
Leesa pulled her car out onto the neat little street, drove a few hundred feet, and then pulled into the driveway.
Just do it. She didn’t let herself think. She simply got out of her vehicle and walked around the back to the passenger door to retrieve her casserole.
She pushed the doorbell, and the waiting felt hard and tight in her chest. And then the door swung open. Jason Benedict stood there. He looked from the box in her hands to her eyes. His gaze locked on hers, and everything suddenly felt okay. His smile, slow and sweet, made her feel as if she’d done something remarkable.
“Leesa! Please, come in.” He opened the screen door and held it for her as she entered. As she took those few steps into the house, she passed close enough to Jason that his scent—something that triggered all her lady bits—seeped into her and sank deep.
“Who’s at the…Leesa! Hey, it’s great to see you!” Phillip had come into the front room, where the door was. He came forward and looked into the box. Then he smiled as he met her gaze.
“What have you got, there?”
She froze for only a moment, and then she mentally kicked herself in the ass.
“I heard that y’all had moved in. I know this is just temporary, but it seemed like I should…” That was as far as she got. Her nerves failed her, and her throat closed. She looked from one man to the other, not truly knowing if she would cut and run, or not.
Phillip lifted the small box from her care. Jason reached out and took her hand in his. He brought it to his lips and kissed it. “We were just talking about you. You see we’re both drawn to you.” He huffed out a breath and shook his head. She thought his smile, one that seemed a bit less tense than the one she’d seen at the restaurant, was self-deprecating. “That sounded lame, even to me. Come into the kitchen and sit. I think we need to talk. Unless…you’re not…attracted to us?”
“The kitchen’s a really good place to talk.” Then she closed her eyes, and the comedy of the situation pulled a chuckle from her. “I’ll join you in the lame department. Yes, I am attracted to you both.” She wanted to say more, to rush headlong into whatever was going to happen next.
But since this was new territory for them all, and she didn’t want to be the one in charge at the moment, she nodded.
Jason and Phillip exchanged a look, and then they led her toward the kitchen and, hopefully, whatever the hell would come next.
Chapter Five
Jason held a chair for Leesa. The automatic action stemmed from the polite behavior both his parents had drilled into his head from the time he was a kid, and yet it was a gesture he’d rarely been in the position to offer.
And one she’d rarely received, if the quickly quelled startled look he’d seen in her eyes was any indication.
“What can I get you to drink?” Phillip asked. “Coffee? Sweet tea? Beer?”
Leesa shot her attention to Phillip because his cousin had infused a bit of wistfulness in his voice when he’d said “beer.”
Then she smiled and relaxed slightly. Score one for Phillip.
“It’s already well past four,” Leesa said, “so I’ll have a beer, thanks. And I don’t need a glass.”
“Perfect.”
Phillip set a cold longneck in front of each of them. Jason experienced a moment of panic, wondering where to begin. Then he met Leesa’s unflinching gaze. Something in her expression calmed him, and he knew his only option was to start at the beginning and hold nothing back.
Phillip had always been smoother when it came to social interaction. He didn’t seem to have any of the awkwardness that had plagued Jason all his life. So Jason was relieved when his cousin opened the conversation.
“It really is a kind of karma, I guess, that you showed up here today. J. Coop and I’ve been talking about you. Hoping for a chance to see you, wondering if you were as attracted to us as we are to you. Just…wondering. And not knowing where or how to start talking about that.”
“J. Coop?” Leesa tilted her head as she looked from Phillip to him.
“Phillip has a brother named Jason,” he said. “While the rest of the family took to calling him J.J., for Jason Jonathan, Phillip has always called me J. Coop—Cooper is my middle name.”
“I started that because, when I was five, I thought J. Coop sounded way cooler than J.J.,” Phillip said. Then he shrugged. “And my brother was a pain in the ass. Still is, in fact.”
“J. Coop. I kind of like it.” Leesa smiled, and he liked the look of that on her, a lot.
Jason took a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. But nothing sounded right in his head. He didn’t want Leesa to think they’d stayed here hoping to get “lucky.” “We didn’t decide to stay here in Lusty just to hook up.” Hells bells, J. Coop get you shit together. He flinched, and Leesa laid a hand on his.
“No, I think a part of you saw the offer of a house and an extended stay as the opportunity to find proof of something fishy going on around here.”
Leesa had that soft smile on her face, but Phillip looked confused.
“I didn’t know anyone had figured that out,” Jason said. Then he looked over at Phillip. “While you went to the museum and the cemetery, I spent our first week doing some exploring of my own. I found a public lab in Waco and took some water samples there to be tested.”
It took Phillip a moment to understand. And then he completely unmanned Jason by laughing. Usually, if someone laughed at him, he’d feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. He usually didn’t know how to react.
But this time he didn’t experience any of those usual feelings. Leesa was clearly trying
not to laugh. But there was no scorn, no derision—no mocking. This was humor, pure and simple. He felt the sheepish smile slide onto his face as he offered up a small shrug.
“I should have figured that one out, J. Coop.” Phillip had recovered from his mirth. “I saw that look on your face before we accepted Grandma Kate’s offer. In my conversations this past week with some of the newcomers, several of them joked about wondering if anyone’s ever had the water tested.”
“That was something I’ve heard, too,” Leesa said. “From newcomers and lifelong residents alike. And now we can answer that question, finally, with a ‘yes.’” She picked up her bottle of beer and saluted him. More, the smile she gave him told her she hadn’t judged his actions to be over the top.
“I’m surprised you didn’t have the air tested, too,” Phillip said.
Jason met his gaze and grinned. “They can test for a specific substance in the air, but you need to identify what it is you’re testing for.”
“Oh, God.” Phillip’s laugh this time was less exuberant. Then he sighed. “So, Einstein, what are your conclusions after all that testing and attempted testing?”
“Absolutely nothing. No contaminants in the water, period. Thinking about it, you weren’t surprised I did that, and neither, really am I.” Then Jason looked from Phillip to Leesa. “I guess that’s as good as an opening as I’m ever going to get.” He put his attention on the woman between them. “I don’t know why I’ve always been so anal, so…rigid in how I’ve looked at things. Until Alice was born, I was the youngest of four. You hear about the middle child being the one with the most challenges in a family? In our family, the ‘middle child’ was a set of twins—Chance and Logan. They weren’t that much older than I was, and I guess I had the middle-child syndrome—right up until Alice was born.”
He remembered being in awe of this sweet-tempered, beautiful baby. Now that he thought about that, he had to admit his attitude toward her had been unusual for a boy of his age.
“I really liked having a baby sister, and I always felt protective of her. I was no longer the baby of the family, nor did I feel like the middle child any longer. I became the big brother, and I took that to heart. I was almost ten when she was born.”
Leesa nodded. “I get that. You became the elder sibling to her and felt responsible for your baby sister in a way that grounded you as nothing else had.”
She must have seen the wonder he knew showed on his face. Leesa shrugged. “I am the oldest of my parents’ children, and I know what you felt. You had a purpose. And a method, I’d bet, to achieve that purpose.”
“No real method, not at first. But sometime after I turned twelve, my parents put me in a different class. Sometime after that, everything I was learning at school began to make a wonderful kind of sense. I recall reading one book on how people could become successful in life simply by the habits they adopted.
“To me, that was a miracle discovery. All you had to do was set goals and then take steps to achieve those goals. But you know what? It became more than that. As I began to practice self-discipline, as I grew into a man and kept focused on setting and meeting goals, I extended that strict discipline to everything in my life—and every person. Including Alice.” Honesty, remember? “No, especially Alice. And I tried to mold my baby sister into the kind of driven person I’d become.”
As Jason put into words for the first time everything that he’d been thinking since coming to Lusty, he felt a calm enter him, a calm he’d never imagined he could feel. “In the last couple of weeks, I’ve begun to understand that there really is no such thing as one true way to do anything. Not even achieving success.”
He didn’t know if what he’d just said made any sense to the two people listening. But as he looked at both Phillip and Leesa to judge their reactions, he knew he’d been understood. In Leesa’s gaze he saw recognition, and in Phillip’s…in Phillip’s, he saw pride.
“My one true way was to enlist in the army,” Leesa said. “I signed up, with my parents’ consent, when I was seventeen. The only career goal I’d ever had was to become a chef. I understood there was no money for college in our family. Both of my parents worked, but there were a lot of us to feed. I felt a responsibility to help my folks and my siblings. A high school counselor suggested the army, and I, too, felt that sense of ‘eureka’ that it sounds like you felt when your education clicked for you. I could achieve my goal of becoming a chef while being in a position to send money home to help with the education of my siblings. I didn’t need to keep much of my pay. Food and shelter came with the job.”
“How many siblings do you have, and how many of them are college grads?” Phillip asked.
It was the question Jason had wanted to ask, because he saw a pride in Leesa that was genuine and, he’d bet, well earned.
“I have four younger sibs and two of them—Kaine and Serena—are twins. Eddie is the next oldest to me, and Kayla is the baby.” Then she grinned, and Jason knew in that moment that family was as important to her as it had always been to him and Phillip. “They’ve all graduated college. Eddie is an orthopedic surgeon, Kaine is a lawyer, Serena is a dentist, and Kayla is also in medicine, a psychologist.”
“And you?” Phillip tilted his head to the side, and Jason wondered what his cousin had seen that he himself had missed.
“I got fifteen years in, serving my country. I’m a certified chef, and I left the service with the rank of sergeant. And I am here, in Lusty, because, right from the first moment I came to that interview with Kelsey, Lusty felt like home. And maybe, though I wasn’t looking to hook up, either, that’s another reason I’m here.”
* * * *
It hadn’t been as hard to open up to Jason and Phillip as she’d thought it would be. There were still some walls within her she knew she wasn’t ready to pull down for them yet. The only bit of her history she figured she should tell them about right away, she would, before they headed down the path marked “intimacy.”
This, just sitting here and talking, this feels good. It feels right.
“I never used to believe in fate,” she told them. “But I find that I do now, because I’ve seen things and experienced things in my life that seem to point in that direction. That’s why I came here, today. Because I’d felt that pull, toward the both of you, the night we met.”
“We were sitting here before you knocked on our door, trying to decide when and where we’d make a move toward getting to know you better,” Jason said. “Thank you for being brave enough to knock on our door.”
“I was scared silly.” At the last moment she substituted the word “silly” for the one that had rolled so easily off her tongue in the army, “shitless.”
“But you came, anyway.”
“I didn’t like feeling like I was a coward. As you may have guessed, I don’t have a lot of experience in social situations. I’ve always felt like I was just a step off the rhythm.”
“I sure know that feeling,” Jason said.
“Believe it or not, I’ve had those moments, too,” Phillip said. “I just seem to have a reserve of glib that comes available when I need it. So.” He looked over at Jason, and then he focused on her. “What’s next?”
“I need to tell you both first that I was married.” She closed her eyes in defense of the concussion she felt for having just dropped that bomb. Then she opened them and pressed forward. “I married Bryce Jordan when I’d been in the service for about eight years. A few months later, we were sent over to Afghanistan for a tour together. I…” She ran her hand through her hair. “Sitting here with you, I can’t even say why I married him. I hadn’t ever dated much, mostly because I’d never felt any attraction to anyone. But Bryce was a smooth talker, and he acted like I was something special. In turn, I felt a bit of an attraction, too, so when he asked, I said yes.”
“You look sad, thinking of him. You don’t have to tell us, if you don’t want to.” Phillip’s hand on hers sent a wave of longing through her. Not
a longing for sex, though that was there, too. No, she felt a desire to be held. She felt a need to be comforted.
Leesa had never experienced that kind of a longing before.
When she read their expressions, she understood they thought she’d been widowed. “I’m only sad because it didn’t take me long to know I’d made a huge mistake. He isn’t dead—at least I don’t think he is.” She huffed out a breath. “It turned out there was a raging misogynistic narcissist asshole beneath that suave exterior he’d worn before we wed. I began to hear rumors that he was cheating. When I asked him about it? His response was to backhand me. It was the one and only time he ever hit me, and he was stupid enough to do it in front of my C.O.”
“I hope you divorced the son of a bitch and took him for everything he had,” Jason said. Passion practically seethed from Jason’s pores, and it gave her a thrill to know that, somehow, she’d inspired that flash of loyalty.
Leesa shook her head. “I just wanted it over and done with. He didn’t have much, anyway. He was court-martialed for the assault and made the dumb mistake of lipping off during his trial in a crude and sexist way to the JAG prosecutor, who was also a woman. So they added a charge of insubordination. The last I saw of him was when he was carted off to prison.”
“Did that experience sour you on relationships?” Phillip asked.
“It sure made me decide to just keep my head down and do my job for the rest of the time I was in the army. And I guess, at the base of it, I just figured I wasn’t cut out for relationships.” She felt her cheeks warm, but there was no help for it. She huffed out a breath and then finished it. “And I felt that way right up until that moment I met you,” she said to Jason, “and then you.” She looked at Phillip and then turned to face Jason again. “So, yeah, you tested the water here. I presume that came back normal?”
“It did. But that just leaves us with a huge truth we have to acknowledge. Because you see, Leesa, I haven’t ever felt that tug in the belly either, until I met you.”
Love Under Two Financiers Page 5
