Dean propped his head up on his arm. “I wasn’t aware we were on a schedule.”
“We’re not. It’s just…” She turned back to him, wide-eyed. “I haven’t slept this late in a long time.”
He couldn’t help but smirk. “I think you were tired.”
“Guess so.” She ran a palm over his stomach, one finger dipping lower in a figure-eight tease. “Do I get to play again this morning?”
Fuck, yes.
“Depends.” He relaxed back onto the pillows, folding his arms behind his head. “You willing to play in the shower?”
She followed his moves, feint for parry, leaning over him. “I spend half my life underwater. You think I don’t know how to have fun when I’m wet?”
Oh, that was so happening. “Get your ass in the bathroom, Matthews.”
One long shower later, both of them satisfied and starving beyond belief, they were having a late breakfast in the hotel restaurant.
“We should probably eat something with protein,” Jamie said. “You know, to recover our strength.”
Dean laughed and checked over the menu. The prices were higher than he’d expected.
“Omelets are the cheapest,” she added, not meeting his eyes. “And the most likely to keep us full for a while.”
It pierced through him, this knowledge that she was cutting costs for him, something she probably never had to do on her own. She’d said it so casually too, like it was too insubstantial to warrant eye contact.
He appreciated the relief her suggestion brought.
And he absolutely fucking hated it.
It had been a sobering week for the business, as a depressingly detailed review of the books had shown. But Dean knew it was pointless to make any suggestions to his father, and he’d been happy to get away for a few days and not deal with the pressure. He’d coughed up the cost of the room, taking a chunk out of his paycheck to cover it, figuring he could continue to survive on PB and J and cereal until the next one came in. He’d nearly asked Jamie to look for a less expensive place, but offering her a glimpse into his financial state would’ve been too serious a blow to his pride.
He didn’t want her to know how bad things were.
His mood changed when they finished eating and went outside. The inn was pressed up against the bay, the surface of the water like crystal, the landscape behind them alive with the robust colors of autumn.
“Why don’t you take some pictures today?” Jamie asked when they climbed into his truck. “I saw your camera in the back, and it seems like a nice day for it.”
Dean didn’t answer at first, busying himself by starting the engine and letting it idle, not wanting to run it too hard in the cold. He hadn’t planned on using the camera again. He’d wiped the memory card after having the pharmacy save the images of Sean’s wedding to a flash drive, then charged up the battery with the intention of selling the stupid thing altogether.
It was a part of his life he needed to bury, shove dirt over its grave and walk away from for good. But Jamie’s request made him want to keep that casket open a little while longer.
“You could get a shot of me sprawled out on some old car,” she joked.
Dean huffed out a laugh, his sex drive exhausted enough to file the idea away for later. A different kind of thrill ratcheted up his pulse, one that involved revving engines, classic tunes, and the chance to capture it all on film.
What harm could it do? If road trip rules applied to him and Jamie, they could apply to taking pictures too. He could go back to his regularly scheduled programming when they got home.
“Okay,” he said as he pulled out of the lot. “You talked me into it.”
It seemed like all of New Hampshire had come out for the fair. Dean found parking on a side street and retrieved his camera. They paid their entrance fees and treaded toward the lines of shiny bumpers. Rows of classic cars gleamed in the sun, their hoods lifted, colorful paint jobs shining.
Jamie plowed through the carpet of leaves covering the ground, kicking them in the air as she walked.
“We here to look at anything specific?” she asked.
“Nah. I just wanted to see all these things of beauty before their owners put them into storage for the season.”
“Things of beauty?”
“Hell yeah.” Dean leaned into the interior of a Model T, snapping a shot of its shiny white-and-red steering wheel. “You don’t see it?”
“Not really. It just looks old.”
“They are old, but someone took the time to polish them up and help them reclaim their former glory.” He nabbed a shot of a toddler being hefted up by a parent, a look of wonder in her eyes as she peeked inside a vehicle built decades before she was born.
“Is that what you want to do?” she asked. “Fix up old cars?”
Dean hesitated. He devoted so much energy to ignoring what he wanted. Talking about what he did want was like ripping a bandage off a painful, oozing scar.
“Maybe.” He kept his tone light, not letting his words touch that nerve. “I mean, it’s the art to them that I like. Not fixing up busted wrecks for the lowest price.”
“You did always like art.”
Dean lifted his camera again, and kept his gaze trained through the viewfinder. It was so much easier to be honest with a lens between him and the outside world.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Why’d you stop?”
The question was a punch he didn’t have time to see coming, one he needed a minute to recover from. Several heartbeats passed before he could reply.
“I had to.”
“Why?”
“I need you in the garage, son. I just wanted to make sure you realized that.”
Dean swallowed. “Because of my dad.”
They stopped walking. He lowered the camera when Jamie stepped in close. Despite the people and conversations and music around them, everything seemed to get quiet.
“What did he do?” she asked.
He tried to keep in the anger, the frustration at having been chained to something he didn’t hate but could no longer love, not when he’d never had the option of choosing it.
“He told me photography was a great hobby and all, but that was it. The garage was my future.”
She frowned. “You didn’t ever tell him no?”
Dean shook his head and looked out at the cars, the people. Everything except Jamie’s concerned expression.
“It’s a family business. I couldn’t walk away from that, especially after what my father put into it. He lost his marriage over it, all to keep it alive for me. I owed it to him to give it my all. So that’s what I did.”
Even though it felt more like a prison sentence than anything else.
He didn’t tell her the rest. About exactly when that decree had been handed down. How it had made him end things with her when it was the opposite of what he wanted.
Jamie fit her hand snugly around his and squeezed. His gaze dropped to hers.
“Come on,” she said with a smile. “Show me more of what you love about these old wrecks so we can go have some real fun.”
Her words made his cock twitch. It felt good, to let her pull him into being playful again.
“You didn’t have enough fun this morning?”
“Not that kind of fun.” She pointed toward the fairgrounds. “There’s a carousel over there. We’re not going back to the hotel until we’ve eaten a ton of cotton candy and then nearly puked it up on one of the rides.”
He tugged her close so his lips hovered by her ear. “No offense to cotton candy or anything, but fucking you until you’re screaming sounds like a lot more fun to me.”
She pushed him away and started walking, but she was blushing, her ears bright pink. Man, he liked knowing he got to her. Dean chuckled and followed her into the crowd.
They trekked through the cars and he took tons of photographs, gawking over collector car profiles and winning stickers in the windshields. They came upon a ’54 Packard Clipper convertible, the owner beside it with a white beard and a radio playing Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”. He’d heard the song more times in the garage than he could count.
Jamie recognized it right away and began singing along. Dean raised an eyebrow.
“What? Sean was always blasting big hair band music,” she said, then asked the owner if Dean could take a picture of her in the car.
He obliged, and she hopped into the backseat, sprawling herself across the leather in a way that made Dean wonder why the hell he’d let her leave the hotel room in the first place.
Once they’d made their way through the rest of the vehicles, she dragged him to the midway, gleeful as she clung to the solid mane of a ceramic horse. She asked him to join her, but he elected to stay back and take pictures.
Only half of them were of her.
She bought them a funnel of spun sugar after that to share. It was the size of her head, and she happily ate more than her half, licking the sticky remains off her fingers when she finished. She tugged him to a shooting game next and won herself a teddy bear. Triumphant, Jamie blew air off the tip of her plastic gun and winked at him, saying the cowgirl boots she had on helped her do it.
Dean laughed and took in what she was wearing when she turned around to claim her toy. Light brown boots, leggings that clung to every luscious curve, a thick purple sweater that outlined her hourglass shape.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Dean realized how nicely she always dressed, but the larger portion of his brain was fixated on how she’d ushered him into the bathroom when she’d gotten dressed that morning, not letting him see what she was wearing underneath it yet.
He was like a ticking time bomb, wanting to get her back to the room and find out.
They made it back to the front end of the fairgrounds, and Jamie spun out in the middle of it, her grin encompassing a world of childlike awe. Dean stepped back to watch her twirl, everything behind her a rainbow of lights and toys and balloons. She tossed him her teddy bear and ran to jump in a leaf pile, then gathered two armfuls of crunchy leaves and sent them flying.
He tucked the stuffed animal under his arm and lifted his camera to catch the moment—Jamie with her face upturned toward the sky, her skin clear and bright, curls wild and hands high above her head as a shower of oranges, reds and browns rained softly down to the ground around her.
She looked like freedom.
That was always her, always what she was to him, while he’d had shackles locked around his wrists since he learned how to shave.
She did it again, and that same hollow yearning he’d been clobbered by at the wedding slammed into his chest. He finally recognized the emotion for what it was, and summed it up into one single word:
Mine.
He wanted her to be his. It was a fierce kind of possession he’d never felt for anyone.
He wanted more than Jamie shivering underneath him, though. He wanted to take the way she made him feel, bottle it and bring it home with him, and never let her go. But Jamie didn’t belong in his world, one filled with long hours and always hunting for the lowest costs. She belonged here, in lazy mornings spent at lakeshore inns, in Saturday afternoons full of color. This weekend was a dream, a step outside reality, a brief glimpse into a future that would never exist for them.
He could never give her the kind of life she deserved.
“I haven’t done this in forever,” she said, running to jump in another pile. “I always hated fall, but here it doesn’t seem so bad.”
Good. It was better that she didn’t notice him watching her. Much better.
He took a longer route driving them back, enjoying the way the road spooled out before them. Traffic slowed at the mouth of the lake, and she asked him to stop when they neared an Italian joint across from the water.
“Let’s get pizza,” she said. “I’ve already destroyed my diet for the weekend with the cotton candy. Why not ruin it entirely?”
“I thought you were on my case about taking off a few pounds,” he said, pulling into a spot on the side of the road.
Her hand was already on the door handle. “I’ll work it off you later.”
The sun had begun inching its way down to the tree line by the time their pie was ready. Dean offered to kick down the flatbed so they could watch the sunset. There was enough room back there, if they sat on the edge. She’d happily agreed, and they ate with their legs dangling over the open gate, looking out at the water.
“You really should keep taking pictures,” Jamie said.
Dean’s stomach tightened. He thought they’d left that conversation behind them. “I don’t have time for it anymore.”
She was quiet for a moment, thoughtful as she munched on her crust, then asked, “What if you could combine photography and the business?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, people with cars like the ones we saw today need parts, right?”
“Usually, yeah.”
“And you know how to find them. If you got the parts and fixed up the cars, you could photograph them after. Maybe make it a part of the business.”
“It’s not that simple.” He didn’t mean to be shutting her down. It was just something he’d thought of before. “Offering custom refurbishment requires cash. And labor. And a place to do it all.” There was enough work to do on the building they were in without having to find another one.
“Couldn’t you start with a few small jobs?” she asked. “There’ve got to be more clients like the one you were shopping for yesterday. Ones who’ve bought classic cars that need fixing. Couldn’t you advertise being available for work like that?”
Dean mulled it over. She had a point. And there were people out there who wanted to buy a classic, but didn’t know how to fix it up. He could hunt down the parts, offer the guys at the shop extra hours to help work on them, and take photos of the finished projects when they were done. Connor could easily add a gallery to the website, and put some of his supernatural tech mojo into it so it reached the search engines.
“Maybe,” he said. “There’s still the problem of space, though.”
She reached up and flicked his forehead. “You live in a warehouse, dumbass. Couldn’t you use some of that space?”
Dean flicked her back on the shoulder, then rubbed the still-stinging spot between his eyes. He could use the first floor, if he managed to clean out enough of his father’s crap. Maybe it would be something the old man would go for, if Dean could come up with a plan that cost the least amount of overhead.
Suddenly, the evening felt like an echo of that one back in high school, bright and brimming over with possibilities.
“Dumbass, huh?” He grinned. “Since when did you turn into a life coach?”
“It’s a lot easier to come up with answers for other people’s problems than it is for my own.”
The sarcasm lacing her tone felt heavy. Dean took another bite of pizza and bumped her shoulder with his.
“You gonna talk about it, or what?”
He’d had enough with tiptoeing around the shit that was obviously going down between her and her family. He’d pulled back the dusty cobwebs of his past for her. It was time she threw in her chips too.
She tossed a half-eaten piece of pizza back in the box and wiped off her hands. “I’ve been offered a promotion. Assistant Aquatics Director at the community center.”
“Assistant director? That’s a big step up.”
She snorted. “Oh, yeah. It’s my life’s dream.”
Dean studied her face. She was looking down, fussing with the tassels on her scarf.
“Art was your dream, right?” he asked.
Jamie swallowed. St
ared at the water. “Fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer.”
“Why didn’t you go after it?”
She shrugged, indifferent, her expression muted. “I tried. It didn’t work out.”
Dean suppressed the urge to tug on her hair, to use it to make her talk. He wouldn’t, not after last night. One look at her lust-crazed eyes and there’d be little he could think of other than getting inside her as quickly as possible.
“No clamming up on me, honey,” he said. “I revealed my big secret. Now it’s your turn.”
Jamie rolled her eyes, but the humor felt forced. “It’s no secret. I applied to some art schools and got rejected.”
She leaned back, balancing her weight on her elbows. Dean refused to look at the long, lean line of her body, and focused on her face instead, on the brightness that had suddenly shorted out. It was exactly like when she’d dodged his question years ago, when she told him about the scholarship she wasn’t sure she wanted.
“If it wasn’t a secret, why didn’t you tell me about it back then?”
A tight frown pinched the edges of her mouth. “It was too hard to talk about. Not when my brothers had all gotten into Ivy League schools.”
“I never thought you cared about stuff like that.”
“Yeah, I know. Crazy, fun Jamie, right? Why would she care about looking as smart as her brothers?” She offered him a smile, but its brilliance was dampened by her eyes, missing their usual luster.
Jamie looked away but the fissure was still there, the pain she’d covered up with humor and smiles suddenly all too obvious. It made sense now—her bratty, prankster side was nothing more than a defense mechanism. A way to get attention when she’d been eclipsed by her brothers’ accomplishments.
Funny. They were polar opposites, but exactly the same—her family’s success was hanging over her, while he’d been enshrouded by the failure of his.
“You couldn’t get a job somewhere in fashion?” he asked. Christ, she had a college degree. That had to get her somewhere.
“Nah. I’d have to go back to school and major in it. And move to New York if I wanted to get anywhere.” She rubbed her fingers together. “Ker-ching, ker-ching.”
The Hierarchy of Needs (The Portland Rebels #2) Page 10
