by Anne Martin
She slipped into the car and pulled her seatbelt on, carefully adjusting it beneath her breasts while I tried not to notice. She couldn’t talk about her breasts like that without expecting some kind of reaction from me.
“That sounds healthy. Why are you getting rid of them?”
She shot me an exasperated look. “They were part of the job. That’s Vegas, baby. I’m retiring from that whole world, so I don’t need them for my job security.”
“You’d deface your body for money?”
Her smile grew larger and harder, Jezabel’s famous smile. It didn’t quite work as well without a trace of makeup while she wore that hideous nightgown. She just looked kind of sad. “Apparently. Any other deep questions?”
“What kind of pajamas should I get?”
Plaid. Of course we got plaid. We also got a bunch of button-up plaid shirts in extra small that she could wear after her surgery. She was really excited about it. She got me some matching ones because apparently, eleven-thirty at night was the time Jessie lost her shopping inhibitions. She would have bought anything, including a pair of hideous puppy dog slippers I suggested so she wouldn’t have to wear her boots next time she had to go shopping at night.
The only double-takes we got was when a man saw her. Without makeup, in the ugliest nightgown in the world, she was ridiculously beautiful and accessible. I had to glare and step into his line of sight several times before we got out into the parking lot.
She slipped in and started the ignition. When we got back to the motel, she put her hand on my arm before I could get out. I stared down at her in the moonlight, the air fresh after the hard rain.
“Thanks, Jackson.”
“You actually like shopping in the middle of the night.”
She smiled and shrugged. “I kind of did. I don’t usually do that kind of thing. Thanks for heading off the stud. It cut down the time considerably.”
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend or five?”
She shook her head tightly and got out, slamming the door behind her. She grabbed the shopping bags and headed back to the room.
Inside, I closed the door and leaned on it while she rummaged through and ripped the tags off the red plaid pajamas with her teeth.
“You’re afraid of commitment? Is that why you left without saying a word? You didn’t want to commit?”
She stared at me, big eyes getting bigger and bluer. Doe eyes. Bambi eyes. Trusting. Vulnerable. She was the best liar in the world. She blinked and smiled brightly, tossing me the pj’s. “That’s right. I just got all itchy at the thought of having the same man for the rest of my life, building a home, having kids, going grocery shopping together, planning meals, snuggling with Saturday morning cartoons.”
She climbed into bed and pulled the sheet over her head without taking off her jeans.
I went into the bathroom and got changed. Saturday morning cartoons. I had a flash of memory so visceral, I could feel the weight of the white goose-down duvet over us as I held her between my knees, watching cooking shows on mute while listening to Bonnie Raitt. That was the week after my sister died. I wasn’t supposed to go and see Jessie because she didn’t want to have a physical relationship until she was married. She’d been really clear about needing to stick to letters, but after the funeral, I’d gotten into my truck and driven for ten hours to the little town where the elite college was that she claimed to attend. She was there like she said, living in a little apartment that overlooked the river, a nice place that was clearly money. She didn’t have a lot of things, but what she had was high quality. She didn’t spend money carelessly late at night in those days.
She’d opened the screen door and stared at me with those soft eyes. I’d taken her in my arms and carried her inside, closing the door behind me and kissing her until she couldn’t breathe. She’d kissed me back as desperate for me as I was for her. Between kisses and ripping off clothing, I told her about my little sister, Katrina, Kat, killed in a car accident. She’d been drunk, killed on impact.
I’d needed to forget, begged Jessie to help me erase the pain until I could breathe again. She’d dropped her life for a week, holing up in that apartment, ordering in and hanging onto me like I was a stallion she needed to tame. That semester, her grades had been terrible, worse than usual anyway. Her grades weren’t ever that great. I only knew that after I went to find her, Jessie Strait who had gone to the little community college instead of the prestigious one, the girl who had won the apartment in a poker game from a girl with family I was acquainted with. The girl whose identity she’d stolen and used for college transcripts had some parents I’d tracked down. Jessie Strait was a real girl, but she’d gotten involved in drugs and run off when she was fifteen, not heard of since. The picture clearly showed that my Jessie wasn’t that girl.
I went to bed in the motel and woke up with Jessie’s cheerful, “Let’s hit the road, sleepy-head!”
She looked too happy. I’d slept terribly, tossing and turning, trying to figure out who she was, Jessie who would spend a week saving my soul, or the girl who could walk away without a word.
“Find a station,” she said, once we were on the road.
I messed with the old radio dials until I found something country. I kept finding stations across the stretch of sagebrush and sky. Sometimes I forgot how big Texas was. I could take a helicopter from point A to point B or fly a jet, working on my laptop while the pilot took care of transportation.
“When did you start gambling?” she asked a few hours past the border.
I glanced at her and shook my head. Her hair was in a braid this morning, but tendrils had loosened around her face. She wore one of the large plaid shirts with sleeves rolled up.
“It was after my graduation party. I lost big and then got determined to really lose everything. It was a lot of work. I had a lot of money to lose.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Such a hard worker. You’re going to have to manage your anxiety more productively.”
“It’s not anxiety.”
“Whatever you want to call it, the feeling you have before you indulge in your addiction so that you can forget about the feeling. You’re going to have to learn to accept feeling uncomfortable, embrace it. What about…” She veered across the lane to bump on the shoulder to a stop while I tried to not be afraid.
She got out and went into the trunk. She came back with a knife and a piece of wood instead of a gun. She didn’t stab me, just dropped it in my lap and then pulled back out, waving at the guy who had to swerve not to hit her.
I swallowed. Her driving was more adventurous than I remembered. No, she hadn’t ever driven when I was with her. She did pay her own way to everything I wheedled her into doing, like the Bahamas for spring break the year after my sister died. If she was a heartless gold-digger, you’d think she’d make me buy her plane tickets. Our relationship had probably put her in the hole.
I opened the knife and gouged the wood. “What am I doing?”
“Whittling. Make something. You can do abstract shapes, or animals, or food.”
“What kind of things do you whittle?”
She shook her head. “That’s not mine.”
“You just have whittling stuff in case you decide to take it up in the future?”
“No. I sort of thought I’d make a present of it if…” She gave me a hunted look. “I’m not the best at presents.”
“You don’t have to give me a present at the wedding, particularly if you don’t go through with it.”
She wrinkled her adorably freckled nose. “Going back to Dallas is kind of scary for me. I thought that presents would help pave the way. You know, I bought the ranch, but I haven’t actually been there.”
“You bought a ranch sight unseen?”
She shrugged. “I was busy working hard to pay for it.”
“Huh. So you’re going to offer the whittling supplies to the ranch as a gesture of universal hope and peace?”
She snatched the
wood out of my hand and tried to throw it out the side. I grabbed her wrist and stole it back.
“What was that? This is good wood,” I said, clutching it to my chest.
She scowled at me. “How do you know that?”
“The Dewitts are in lumber. So, who were you going to give it to if not back to the land?”
“My grandma.” She said it under her breath as she gripped the steering wheel.
I held my breath. Was this a legitimate truth? “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Shut up.”
Ah. Definitely an uncomfortable truth. “You should invite her to the wedding.”
She snorted. “Like that’s going to happen.”
“Are you ashamed that you’re going to marry a billionaire?”
“You mean a broke gambler I picked up in a bar? I should be. No, but she’d be ashamed of me, going through all that only to humiliate you in front of all your friends. Not that it would be new. She’s ashamed of me no matter what I do. She didn’t want me to go to college, you know, waste my time and money on a piece of paper that didn’t mean anything.”
“That’s interesting. Most parents prefer to have college-educated children. Did you at least have your parent’s support?”
She didn’t answer me, didn’t look at me. That was her answer. She didn’t need anyone to take care of her, no matter how soft her eyes were or how sweetly petite she was.
When we got to the outskirts of Dallas, she looked at me for the first time in hours. I had a good start on my whittling. It would be a girl on a horse.
“Jackson, what’s the ritziest hotel in Dallas? It’s been awhile.”
“Hotel? Why? You have a deed to the finest manor in town.”
She shot me a look. “You don’t think that would be slightly uncomfortable?”
I shrugged. Closure. I wanted her in that house. I wanted to see the reality, that it couldn’t live up to the dream, the fantasy, the angel and monster I couldn’t forget. “I can tell you where the best gambling is. If people saw us staying at a hotel, it would look odd. My fiancé should be staying at the manor with me.”
She made a face at me. “You don’t mind staying in your grannie’s house with me? I’ll be staying in the guest bedroom. The smallest one.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t like shaking loose in a big box. What other people think, is that so important to me? I used to think I was above all that, but I’m smaller than I supposed. All right. What exit?”
We drove up the winding road up to the wealthiest area around Dallas, houses set a respectable distance from the road. The iron-wrought gate required me to get out and punch the buttons on the passcode.
“Don’t you have someone here for security? Oh. You must have fired all your servants when you decided to go broke. Too bad. They were really nice.”
“You remember my security?”
She nodded with a little smile. “When I came to your graduation party, one of them gave me a ride through the yard on the golf cart. I’d walked from the bus station.”
I stared at her as she drove easily up the drive. “So you were dirt poor, ashamed of your background, and that’s why you lied about all the places you went?”
She shrugged. “I did a lot of travelling when I turned twelve. It wasn’t being poor. I wasn’t poor all the time, I just didn’t have the family, the stability, the roots. It wasn’t really shame, I just didn’t want you to treat me differently. I didn’t want you to have to think about whether I could afford something, or whether or not I fit in with your people.” She parked in front of the door. She got out and slammed the door closed before going to the trunk to get the white plastic bags of our emergency shopping supplies.
“You really went to Paris?”
“Sure. There’s great gambling in Paris. Haven’t you been to Cercle Gaillon? That’s a good place to lose a lot of money very quickly.”
I nudged her before I went past her and unlocked the front door. “You’re supposed to be my sponsor, but you’re way too educated on the subject. So, you travelled with your father, the gambler. I guess that makes sense. How did you end up in that summer camp with a bunch of stuffy rich folk?”
“I wanted to be normal. My grandma knew the guy who ran the stable, so she got me in because he could keep an eye on me.” She shot me a look and a slight smile.
“Did you know that such wealthy, boring families would be there, or were you surprised to see all those polo shirts?”
She shrugged and blushed a little bit. “I wanted to play Jackie O. I wanted high class, money with roots, you know? I know money, but not class. So, that was my summer of learning that wealth had no substance no matter where it comes from, at least that’s what my grandma called it, minus the big words. I forgot how big this was.” She spun around in the entry, swinging her white plastic bags in a large arc as she stared up at the dark chandelier encircled by two stairs climbing up either side. “Why are there two staircases? I’ve never understood that.”
“For races. If you only have one staircase, you can’t race anyone to the bottom.”
She shot me a look with sympathy in her eyes. I blinked as I remembered my sister, then shook off the memories and walked past her, leaving the lights off as I walked across the well-polished limestone floors.
I made it to the den, dark leather and mounted animals along the far wall. I threw myself on the long leather couch and put my boots up on the low coffee table. She followed after me, looking around with big eyes at all those glass-eyed creatures. “I don’t remember this room.”
“I kept it off the tour, knowing how much you liked your animals alive.”
She walked towards an enormous stag on the wall and reached up to touch the tip of a horn. “Who was the hunter?”
“My father took that one. I got the one to your right.”
She shot me a look of shock. “You killed it?”
“I did.”
She glanced back at the six pointer and then back at me. “Why?”
I sighed deeply. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about myself, but if she was going to keep opening up, I had to at least give her something. “It was something to do with my father. Before my parents were divorced he wanted to make me a man. Killing stuff together was bonding.”
“If you say so. I guess it’s better than teaching you how to have a poker face and how to count cards.”
“Your dad taught you how to play?”
She shrugged and walked over to the bear standing in the corner. “Don’t tell me that you killed this one.”
“Nope. Granddaddy got that one. He takes his Texas roots seriously. Do you want to go out tonight, find a public party where we can announce our engagement and ruin their big night? Let me see what I can find.”
She exhaled and continued on to the fowl mounted above the pocket doors that led into the room. “That sounds exhausting. After a long drive, I need a good ride and a long bath.”
My whole body stiffened up as a mental image of Jessie riding me blew through my mind. I shook it off with a great deal of effort. “Our stables are bare.”
“That’s too bad. I’ll have to call up the Rocking Stables and have them send something over. We can order in some groceries, too. Do you cook? I know a mess of Thai, Indian and cowboy.”
She pulled out her phone and was soon chatting with someone at the local stables, arranging a nice little strider and a larger thoroughbred with a good gait. When she hung up, I was still fighting against images of a naked Jessie. My bedroom was directly above this room, and the last time Jessie had been here with me, it had been intensely memorable. And painful. The memory of her last words, the days and weeks that followed put ice on my arousal.
“Jessie,” I said, walking behind her and putting my hands on her arms.
She froze while I struggled between the two emotions, painful betrayal and tender desire. She smelled like the cheap shampoo in the motel. Somehow it smelled better to me than any fanc
y French shampoo Bree could buy.
“What?” Her voice was breathless.
I licked my lips as I watched goose bumps rise on her neck and travel over her skin. She was aware of me, as aware as I was of her. “I’m feeling something uncomfortable, something that makes me want to do something risky. You’re my sponsor. What do I do?”
She broke out of my arms and rustled around in one of those plastic bags, coming up with the knife and bit of wood. I took it from her and settled down on the couch with a sigh while she went to find the smallest guest bedroom. I didn’t follow her, mostly because she ran like I was a bull charging her.
Chapter 7
Holy heaven. I’d been a fool for him when he was young and inexperienced. He’d clearly put a few more notches in his belt since his college graduation. I wasn’t about to become another one of them, but resistance was difficult when his warm breath skimmed over my nerves, setting me on fire and reminding me of the sweetest recollections I had.
Something risky, indeed. I paced out the small, cream bedroom with small kitchenette and tried to get it together. I couldn’t leave him or he’d gamble something. What did he have to gamble? I needed to take his credit cards, pay them off, cut them up, but he seemed more comfortable with cash, anyway. We needed to talk about his finances. We could sell off the cars in his garage. It was a relief that he didn’t have horses I had to cut. I couldn’t ever say no to a sweet pair of equine eyes, any more than I could say no to Jackson.
I shoved my new bought things into random dresser drawers and went back down when the doorbell rang with the groceries. I got busy in the big kitchen, making a mess as I put together the cowboy beans with hotdogs and salad stuff.
“What’s this?” he asked, leaning over my shoulder to put his face above the steamy contents of the soup pot.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know cowboy beans when you see them.”
He turned his head and his nose brushed mine. Electricity flowed over my skin and I dropped the spoon. He flinched as scalding juice flecked his neck and cheek.
