“Carte blanche. I like it,” Shea said. “Do you have time to talk now? I have a private tasting for some conventioneers and I still need to get the back room set up.”
Jen steered Shea toward the hostess stand. Someone turned on music, and a slow, sexy beat drifted from unseen speakers. Leith sat back and watched the two women speak, their words swallowed by the music. After only a few minutes, Shea headed behind the bar to bend over and reach into hidden cupboards. The obnoxious jerks at the bar blatantly checked out her ass and nudged each other, making not-so-quiet comments about what they saw.
Jen returned to his little table in their isolated corner. Only this time, she didn’t sit professionally on the cushion edge. She collapsed into the chair, arms draped over the sides, a giant grin lighting her face.
“What was that about?” he asked.
“You’ve never heard of this place?” When he shook his head, she went on. “Shea’s one of the most well-known experts on Scotch whiskey in the world. Turn on any TV special about whiskey, and she’ll have been interviewed. She’s on a first-name basis with pretty much every distiller in Scotland. She probably has the big liquor conglomerates on speed-dial.”
“Or the other way around.” Leith watched Shea open a bottle with very little of the good stuff left. “Wow. And she owed you a favor?”
“She wasn’t my client at the Juniper Imports showcase, but I pretty much saved her ass that night when none of her booth arrived. Now she’s going to do my whiskey tent at the Highland Games.”
“The . . . Gleann’s Highland Games?”
Jen leaned back, looking wonderfully sure of herself. As well she should be.
“Fuck, Jen. That’s incredible. What a draw.”
“I know. I’m starting heavy promo tomorrow all over the valley. Gleann isn’t going to compete with the bigger, more commercial games across New Hampshire. So I’m going smaller and more intimate, but with elevated experiences. I thought of it when I saw your dad’s scrapbooks, how whiskey was so prevalent in the old games. Big, local tents. Huge bottles as prizes to the competitors.”
He loved how she glowed just then, knowing she’d done well. But even as he grinned in pride, he shook his head because he wasn’t sure where anything else in her life fit in. Now or ever. “Even on a date, you can’t not work.”
“Hey, you’re the one who said no phone. I wanted to bring you here, and I wanted to talk to Shea. Two birds, one stone.”
“I did say that.” The wonderful woman would always be working, always aiming for something. Leith gripped the armrests, fingers digging into the soft leather. “I wish I could be there,” he said to himself, but of course she heard.
She leaned her elbows on her knees, her focus switched solely to him. Her tone turned soft and serious. “Why won’t you be there, Leith? For real. Don’t give me the work excuse. That might work on the rest of Gleann, but not me. Not anymore.”
Shea, bless her, returned holding two spectacularly heavy-footed tumblers with a finger of shimmering brown whiskey in each. She set them down on the stone table with a musical chink. He reached for his without pause, lifted it to his nose.
“Thanks,” Leith told Shea. “I hear you’ll be in Gleann next week. It’s my hometown. But I should warn you that no one there knows anything about whiskey.”
Shea smiled in a way he could now classify as genuine, and he wondered what test of hers he’d passed. “Great to know there’ll be a familiar face. Doesn’t matter if no one knows whiskey. Nine times out of ten those people are more fun to talk to than the people who think they know a lot. I love teaching. And I do love to talk.” Someone out of sight caught her eye and she acknowledged them. “I’ll see you next week then. Enjoy the whiskey.”
“Nice deflection,” Jen said to him after Shea had gone. He’d known she’d been watching him the whole time. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He took his first sip, passing the lovely liquid over his tongue to bite on it with his back teeth. Heaven in a glass.
“Why are you helping Gleann?” he gently fired back. “For real? I asked you once before, in the barn. You want to talk about deflection?”
As she lifted her glass to her lips, she never removed her eyes from his.
“I mean,” he said, because he knew she was buying time and he wanted to get in all that he could, “I’ve only seen how you live here in the city for about an hour now, and I can tell you get energy from it. You carry that to Gleann, yeah, but a little, nonpaying gig like our games shouldn’t mean anything to you. Not after you left.”
Glass still in front of her mouth, she lifted one finger from its curved surface and pointed at him. “But they mean something to you.”
She knew him. Only one other person knew him better, and he was gone. Leith stared into his swirl of whiskey. “Of course they do. They’re some of my best memories.” He lifted his eyes to trap her gaze. “Along with you.”
She didn’t respond with words—and he didn’t expect her to. There it was, that hot, intense shock widening her eyes and making her mouth go soft. Then she looked toward the bar where the two suits had now become five and the noise had increased exponentially. Setting her glass on the armrest of her chair, she said, “It’s my best memory, too.”
“The games? Didn’t you used to think they were a little hokey—”
“No.” Her finger made a slow circle around the rim of the glass. “Not the games. I meant Gleann. I’m doing this for Gleann because that place means everything to me. I’m not sure if I realized the depth of that until I went back.”
She started to play with her hair, plucking at the back pieces and rearranging it around her face and ear. Her glance at him—holy shit—was fleeting and wet, like she was holding back tears. Never had he seen her that way.
“Did you ever wonder why I was in Gleann every summer?”
That confused him. “No. Should I have? Bev just always said her nieces were coming and left it at that.” He leaned forward, placing his glass on the table. “You never let on there was any reason more.”
Her voice drifted distant. “I was really good at that, wasn’t I?”
She had been. She really had been . . . up until the day she’d come back and he’d finally been grown-up enough to notice there was something more. “Jen, whatever you want to tell me, whatever you feel like you have to say, I’ll listen. You know that.”
The impending tears disappeared, just like that. She sat up, her posture rigid. She took a deep breath. “Going to New Hampshire every year wasn’t my choice. At least, not at first. Aunt Bev brought us there, insisted on it and paid for it. Anything to get us out of Iowa. She couldn’t stand the thought of us growing up in her sister’s home with my mom’s asshole boyfriend any more than we could stand to be there.”
Leith’s stomach dropped. The whiskey in his hand was easily the most expensive he’d ever had, and the thought of tipping it down his throat made him nauseous.
“Did he . . .” Oh God, he couldn’t get it out. “Did he . . . do something to you? To Aimee?”
She laughed, loud and short and harsh. “No. He didn’t do anything to us. Neither did my mom. And that was the thing. They didn’t do anything, period. They sat on their asses, with a bottle in one hand and the other held out for a government check. They’d follow me around the house, drunk, calling me names and screaming that I thought I was God’s gift. They called me ugly and nerdy and so many other names I’ve blocked out.” Jen took a pretty big gulp of her drink and didn’t even wince. “But no, there wasn’t any sort of physical abuse, nothing Bev ever reported to the police or called social services about. I think she was scared we’d be put somewhere where she really couldn’t help us.”
He sat perfectly still, only partly aware that more people had started filing into the lounge, scared that if he moved a muscle Jen would realize she was telling him her secrets.
She finished her whiskey and frowned into the empty glass. “I’ve always believed in help
ing others out if I had the means to do it. I don’t know, that part has always been in me, even when I was really young. But my mom . . . my mom made every excuse in the book. She sat around, waiting for handouts and hating the fact that I wanted to do more with my life. Hating that I wasn’t like her. There was no pride, only jealousy, and the fact I was making her look bad, calling out her own faults. So she tried to call out mine even louder.”
So it wasn’t the boyfriend so much as the mom. No wonder Jen had never spoken of her.
“Or she just made them up,” he offered.
“The sad part was, I didn’t understand how bad it was until Bev brought us here that first summer. From that year on—I was, what, eight?—I realized the toxic world my mom had created in that house. And I vowed to do everything in my power to get the hell away from her. To not be her in any way. To be her complete opposite. Aunt Bev helped me. She saw what I was doing and felt responsible for me. Then I felt responsible for Aimee.”
“That’s why you took all those jobs every year,” he said, piecing it together. “But not Aimee. She was pretty crazy when she was here.”
Jen nodded sadly. “She didn’t want to come. While I was saving every penny for college, I knew Aimee was going to end up like Mom. I tried to change that, but she never listened.”
“Bullshit.”
That got a big response, a nice emotional glare. Good.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Aimee would’ve stayed in Iowa if it weren’t for you, for your example.”
“But she ran away and got pregnant.”
“And now she has Ainsley. Who is amazing.”
Jen blinked at him. Once. Twice. “She really is, isn’t she?”
He let all that soak in. Jen was the kind of person who needed tangible proof for everything, but she was missing the biggest evidence right in front of her. That Aimee had an incredible daughter and had inherited a business that might go under through absolutely no fault of her own.
“Do you see,” Jen asked, “why I’m such a control freak about her? It’s killing me she won’t talk to me about Owen.”
“Because she and Owen have it under control. And she wouldn’t have that kind of control if it weren’t for all that crap you and she went through. Didn’t we go through this in the park?”
At great length Jen nodded, but he wasn’t convinced it was in agreement. She let out a long breath, like she’d heaved something invisible off her back and now had full range of and control over her diaphragm again. “So,” she said in a hollow tone. “Yeah. Now you know that Gleann was pretty much the only good thing in my life for a really long time. And you . . . you were a huge part of that.”
The old anger and frustration he’d once felt toward her seemed like it had happened to someone else. Those particular emotions were no longer hammering against his heart and mind, but her words, combined with the recollection of their last incredible summer, sliced open an old wound.
He had to ask. “If it was so wonderful, if Gleann changed you and healed you, and then we found something really powerful together, why did you leave? Why didn’t you consider going to school here?”
She closed her eyes, and he couldn’t recall a time she’d ever done that.
“We have to talk about it,” he said, when she still didn’t say anything. “We’ve been dancing around it for days now. I mean, I know we never made any promises to each other, but can you finally tell me why you left?”
When she opened her eyes, they were dry but sad. “It was only ever about college. About creating my own future. Somewhere else. But then you came along and, you’re right, we found something together. It scared me so much, that I was even considering staying. But the thought of picking my place in the world before I ever got to see the whole thing, before I ever knew what I could become . . . The thought of staying in—”
“A small town.”
She swallowed. “Yes. I suppose that was part of it. Gleann’s so different from where I came from in Iowa, but it was still sheltered. The whole idea was to not become my mom, and to do that I had to go bigger. I had to move up and away.”
He stretched his arms over the back of the chair, pressed his head into the cushion, and stared up at the ceiling beams. “I wish you’d told me that back then. I wish you would’ve just said, ‘Leith, I have a shitty mom and a shitty home and I have to get as far away from that as possible.’”
“But it was still too close to me then. I didn’t want anyone in Gleann to find out. The whole point was to pretend I was someone else and then literally become another person. Someone stronger.”
He pulled his head off the cushion. “You are stronger. I can see it. So can everyone else.”
And he hated himself for being selfish, for wanting her to stay with him all those years ago when she otherwise would have missed the opportunity to become this incredible, giving, talented person. To evolve.
I really did love you, he wanted to tell her. And I can see myself doing it all over again.
“I really did love you.”
The words cut through the growing noise in the lounge. It took several shakes of his head for him to realize that it was Jen who’d said them. It was Jen who had somehow heard his thoughts and repeated them back, simply because he’d wanted her to.
She was smiling and moving to the very edge of her chair cushion. Knees pressed together, legs angled to the side, she leaned over the table, closer to him. There was such aching beauty to her. It made every place she was in feel smaller, with her perpetually in the center.
“In my young, inexperienced way,” she said, extremely matter-of-factly, “I loved you. You probably don’t want to hear that now, do you? You didn’t want to hear it back then, and I didn’t blame you.”
His turn to scoot to the edge of the chair, only his legs bracketed the small table as he pressed his elbows to his thighs and leaned in. Their whiskey glasses now stared up at them from where they touched on the table. Hers was empty; his was not.
“I do want to hear it,” he said. “Thank you.” He was very glad she didn’t say you’re welcome. That politeness might have undone him. There was a sharp-edged need for her corkscrewing its way through his body. Hearing those two courteous words, on top of knowing what she’d gone through and that her feelings for him had once been real, and layered over what had nearly happened the other night . . . he was like a grenade, all primed and ready to go and just waiting for someone to pull out his pin. Waiting for her.
It was more than desire, more than sex. He had to make that clear to her, because he didn’t think he could be with her naked if there wasn’t going to be more when they were clothed. She needed to know how he felt and what he wanted. And what he wanted exactly, he just now realized.
“After you left,” he said, touching his fingertips together, “I had a string of really awful relationships, most never longer than a few months.” Carefully he watched her face, the way her jaw tightened and her eyelashes twitched in a barely discernible blink. “At the time I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I’m pretty sure I was purposely choosing the wrong girls. Deep down I knew that those things would never last, because none of them would ever compare to you.”
The last time he’d said something similar, Jen had sprinted in the opposite direction. But that corkscrew was turning tighter and tighter, and the pressure inside him was ready to burst. He had to get this all out, had to ease the weight bearing down on him.
Her shoulders dropped, the deep V-neck of her dress tightening across her chest, making him hard. He ignored it. He needed more than that. He needed her.
“Now that I’ve seen you again, now that I know our chemistry wasn’t faked, I know we can be good together again, Jen. Hell, we could be fucking fantastic. I’m pretty sure, all those years ago when I was picking the wrong women, my mind was holding out hope that you’d come back. It knew something I didn’t. Go figure.”
“Leith—”
He didn’t want to hea
r any protests, didn’t want her going through any of those lists she loved so much in her mind. Not yet. “Just hear me out, okay?” She nodded, and he began to tick off reasons on his fingers. “We can laugh about anything without embarrassment. We respect each other. We know each other’s past. We talk incredibly easily. I want to tell you things, Jen. So, so many things. We are both smart and business-minded, and we each have drive and dreams.” Honesty ran through his blood and bones and muscles, the most powerful of which was his tongue and lips. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.
“And look at you”—he waved a hand at her—“you drive me goddamn insane, you’re so beautiful. Ah, fuck it, Jen; I’m just going to say it. I want to be with you. I want to try to make it work again. You’re in New York. I’ll be in Connecticut. I want to try, Jen. I have to try. I have to have you.”
And there it was. He’d done it again. He may as well have slit open his chest, carved out his heart, and slapped it on the table between the whiskey glasses.
The longest pause in the world followed, and he had no idea how to fill it. When she slowly rose to her feet, the smooth fabric of her dress pulling snugly around her legs, he had an awful, sickly vision of her leaving again.
Then her eyes turned to green flame, like something magical, and the corners of her delicious mouth ticked up, and he did a mental fist pump.
“I know that look,” he murmured, catching her infectious smile and finally allowing himself to feel the pound of blood in his erection. Let himself ride the desire without reins.
“Oh, you do, do you?” The lounge had gotten loud, but somehow he still heard her.
He slid all the way back in the chair and lifted his face to hers. “I do. You’re going to kiss me.” He glanced down at his lap. “And you’re going to come over here to do it.”
Chapter
15
His statement pulled Jen toward him with a tender insistence. Her gaze dropped to his lap, where he was sporting a mighty proud hard-on. “I am?” she asked.
Long Shot hg-1 Page 17
