Willows, Jennifer - A Harem of One [The Moreland Brothers 3] (Siren Publishing Allure)

by Jennifer Willows

  Even when she ate, she was reminded of the many meals Marq served her in their short time together. She never had to worry about him being offended by her choice of diet. He just accepted as she was. He didn’t care that she chose to eat rabbit food. In fact, he made some of the best vegetarian meals she’d ever had. She’d learned to cook, since it was hard to find good alternatives and she didn’t want to eat peanut butter every night. God knows that after having that for the first month of being meat-free she never wanted to try that again. Now even the smell of peanut butter made her sick. After that month she learned how to cook very quickly. Before that she could barely boil water. That wasn’t something the group home bothered too much with. The group home wasn’t terrible, but any place that throws barely adult children into the world without a single marketable skill was not a system she wanted to deal with. She was lucky that she had the grades to go to college. She got a partial scholarship to Berkeley, but she ended up at NC State with a full ride after her freshman year.

  It was apparent her morose thoughts were impacting her mood, and she didn’t want to feel the way she did. It was time for a mood adjustment. She sat back in the hot tub in the altogether and looked at the view around her. If she couldn’t find serenity and Zen here, it wasn’t to be found at all. She took in deep breaths until she found herself. She felt calmer now and more in perspective. She had a few minutes to get dressed and meet the riggers and foreman of the drilling site. They had just come off of their respective tours. The men working the sites went on rotations for weeks at a time and then would take time off. In this case, they worked four-by-twos, essentially four weeks on duty and two weeks off. The two weeks off were handled by scabs. The scab workers kept the rig in production but were considered part time until a place was available on the main crew and full-time employment with all the benefits it entailed. The full-time employees received numerous discounts and stipends that the part-timers were ineligible to receive, including inexpensive health insurance coverage, gas cards, even spending accounts for certain items they needed. Fairbanks Oil and Gas was one of the premier employers in the area, and many workers from other rigs were on a waiting list for the opportunity to work there.

  By the time she met the workers at the furlough house, a home owned by the company that was used frequently by the unattached men after their rotations were complete, it was early in the afternoon, and her day was half over. She spoke with the geologist, who was a stereotypical absentminded professor. In the midst of the interview, Dr. Johanssen was barely present. His mind raced a mile a minute. She could see he was lost in some concept due the fact she had to repeat several questions and the responses were not even appropriate at times. She asked him about the role he played in the hierarchy, and he ended up telling her about Alaska’s seasons and the phenomena of the midnight sun. She learned some interesting facts, but not really what she was after, and she dismissed him after a half hour fraught with frustration.

  The roughnecks were as coarse as their title implied, but surprisingly all of them were gentlemen. They offered her beverages and their complete undivided attention. She received several offers for dates, but she felt no interest. Even though the men were handsome and thickly built, she couldn’t muster up any excitement or a spark of desire for any of them. There was one man in particular, Bear, who refused to take no for an answer. Bear’s real name was Jergen Brandershmidt, and his nickname made complete sense from the look of him from the waist down. He was a burly man, and freshly shaven, his face was incongruous with his form. Bear had strong features, but well carved and aristocratic. His hair was a rich sable and made the rich brown of his eyes warm. His body was pure bodybuilder, massive and bulkily hewn. He reminded her of a centuries-old oak tree, impressive and naturally masculine. But she didn’t even feel any spark there, although she knew one thing for certain, if she weren’t in love with someone else, she would have taken him up on his offer. But there was only one man she wanted to spend time with. One man she wanted to watch her do her yoga in the mornings and make sweet love with all day. Without him she felt like a different person, there was less laughter and happiness in her life. It was as if all the joy had been sapped from her existence the moment she closed his condo door for the last time.

  In reality, the way she felt was no different from the way she felt before. It seemed she had gone full circle and now she was back at square one. She didn’t want to feel that way anymore. Even if she wasn’t jubilant now, she could find a measure of serenity in her life. One without Marq. There was more to life than a significant other or so she told herself. The nights were colder and lonelier than any she’d known before, and she rarely slept as she always awoke frigid to her bones, no matter the temperature on the thermostat. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

  What was she doing here? Why did she leave and go so far away, only to want to be back in Wilmington? Why couldn’t she let Marq go? Why did every moment seem so long? Hours seemed days long now. The days were endless years and spanned centuries worthy of lengthy misery. Damn him for making her feel again.

  * * * *

  When Marques woke up alone, he was ready to tear his hair out. He had walked around as a zombie for two weeks now. He didn’t care about anything at all. Food had no taste. His favorite music sounded like crap. He couldn’t even jerk off and feel good about it. Life truly sucked. All he wanted was to hold Jamison again, feel her in his arms as he slept and watch her twist into a pretzel at dawn in front of the windows with the sunlight framing her golden skin. He felt incomplete. Jamison was the yin to his yang, the sun to his moon. He was going to find out everything there was to know about Jamison and get her back. She couldn’t hide from him forever. Just long enough to make him think of eternity. Together.

  Marques knew he was short-tempered. His mom was still in town and habitually tested his patience without mercy. She mentioned Jamison during every conversation they’d had in two weeks, and there had been plenty of those. His mom came over to his place after he’d left her at Deven’s house almost two weeks ago. He would never forget her reaction to the chaos in his home.

  “Good god, did you get robbed? I think you need to call the police.” He was standing over a mass of glass and twisted metal. His home now resembled a Dali painting made physical, a mass of confusion and items unable to serve their innate purpose from his willful destruction.

  “No, Mom, I didn’t. Wait, how did you get here anyway?”

  “I called for a rental car to pick me up. So what happened to your house? There’s glass everywhere.”

  “Mom, I’d rather not talk about it now.”

  “You need to go and get her, Marq. You’ve destroyed half of your house with a temper tantrum, and your attitude stinks.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Okay, so what are you planning to do about it then?”

  “For now? Nothing. She left for good reason, Mom.”

  “What reason is that, Marq? Do you really know why she left, or are you letting guilt over your past color her departure?”

  “A little of both, I guess.”

  “That’s what I thought. You’re a tech genius, Marq. You were offered scholarships to premier universities based solely on the strength of your self-taught knowledge. So I know that you can find her if you want to, and I know that you do. I have never seen or heard of you throwing tantrums, let alone acting like a madman in a frenzy. That alone speaks louder than anything else you could say. You have real feelings for this woman, and they aren’t going to disappear, no matter what you pretend. True love isn’t about fire and passion, although that is part of what the emotions start as. True love is about liking someone beyond their physical form, knowing who they are and still accepting them. Love is about being willing to share who you are and what you want from life with that person. When you love someone, there is no stone left unturned for them, there is no need you are willing to leave unfulfilled for them, and there are no barriers between the two of you. A re
al man is willing to fight for the love a good woman, and nothing will stand in the way.”

  Marq shook his head, silently agreeing with every word his mother spoke. He tried to pretend over the last weeks that everything was okay and that there was nothing he needed. Not even Jamison. But truly she was the only thing he needed, not even money could make him happy. Even though it was too soon and Jamison didn’t love him yet, he just needed her to give them time. Then she could get to know him and feel the same way he felt with her.

  “One last thing, Marq, and I will let the matter go for good. People in love become one flesh. It says so in the Bible. That means it changes you, and it should always be for the better. You become the others’ strength and sole weakness. A situation that would normally make you run the other way in self-preservation, you would stand your ground and fight for the one you love and vice versa. So ask yourself, do you love her enough to be the one?” He did. The only reason he was still here instead of traipsing the world looking for her was the fear that she didn’t love him back. He wanted what his family was blessed with, homes with spouses that loved them to the ends of the earth and back.

  So here he was two weeks later still alone and searching for the truth about Jamison. He knew where she was right now. It only took a little work and a lot of care to find her. He’d broken every computer he had in his tantrum after she left. But he was able to cobble together a PC with a smashed hard drive, a screen from a small TV, and some know-how. He ordered new terabyte parts and monitor for the quickest delivery possible. From there the search was simple, Jamison had used his computers before to do her work and check her e-mail. He was able to recover her passwords, and bingo, most of her current life and recent history was in front of him.

  He knew she was in Juneau. He saw the flight information and rental house she’d procured. He even saw some of her interviews of the oil riggers in front of him. What he read was disinheriting. He knew there were other men who would want her. She was a vital, beautiful woman, and any man was lucky to get the time of day from her. Especially him. There were e-mails in her deleted box from a guy who called himself Bear and even IMs from the same man. He saw how she had rebuffed the man, but still it chafed to see how easy it was for her to move on with her normal life. The worst part was that all the while he remained stuck in his own mire of emotional muck and nostalgia. After he completed the hunt for his quarry, he had started the lengthy process to backtrack her history. Who was Jamison really? What made up the woman he had fallen so deeply for in less than thirty days?

  The truth astounded and dumbfounded him. Jamison was the product of a single parent household. Her father was her sole caregiver almost from her birth. Her mother had disappeared not one month after her birth. Her father died in a car accident not too long after her twelfth birthday, and she was routed to several foster homes in quick succession until she was sixteen when she was placed in a group home. The reason she was sent there remained a mystery for over a week, until with persistent digging and zero sleep, he finally unearthed the extent of Jamison’s past.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  The Truth is the Light

  Marq knew something about the amount of money that Jamison had socked away was very unusual. When he took possession of her accounts, she had a tidy nest egg of over a quarter million dollars. He didn’t ask how she had acquired the money. In fact, he assumed he had time to get to know all of her before they ended. But now he was forearmed and forewarned. The money he’d doubled for her to a total of five hundred thousand dollars was from a lawsuit presented to the state on her behalf. There had been prior complaints about the Fosters, the family that had taken her in, but no action was taken, and they were allowed to receive wards from the state with little to no further investigation. The social worker was the one who found a pro bono attorney willing to take the personal damages case after what happened to her. Jamison was too much like him in some ways. She didn’t touch the money at all, and the funds were left to rot away, moldering in a cache of banks for the last ten years. In other ways she was his polar opposite, even beneath the skin. She was a simple woman and settled for comfort over flashy lifestyles and cavorting. But she was the one for him, and he was going to retrieve his woman and bind her to him forever. There was no reason they couldn’t be together, even if he was a reformed playboy and she was strong beauty hidden in plain sight. He wasn’t leaving now. There were a few plans he was going to make first. He found the flash drives with his functional fetishes stored and called Charyn.

  It rang long enough that Marq assumed that there would be no answer, but just as he was set to hang up the phone, his brother picked up the other end.

  “Damn it, you better be dead or damn near it you cock blocker.” There was a light at the end of the tunnel, Marq thought as a hastily choked back laugh escaped his lips.

  “Not quite. But I need your help.” Marq heard his brother breathing slow.

  “Okay, hold on a sec.” There was a muffled groan, and he heard his brother speak, presumably to his wife. “You better not come, Makenzie, or I’ll spank you hard enough to leave you begging me for three days.” There was a cry of pleasure and tortured need before the lengthy cry went silent with only a whimper.

  “So what do you need, little brother?” Charyn no longer sounded impatient. Instead, he sounded as if he had all of the time in the world.

  Marq gave his brother the basics of what he wanted to do, and without delay Charyn agreed to help him any way he could. They made plans for the next night, but before he could hang up, Charyn stopped him.

  “Oh yeah, Makenzie said your painting is finished if you want to see it.” With everything that happened, he forgot all about the painting he’d posed for with Jamison.

  “Uh, okay, that’s fine with me.” He was torn between madly wanting to see Jamison’s skin once more, even if it was on canvas, and needing to run the other way to keep his sanity intact. The only reason he’d made the two weeks thus far was by not looking at their video, as he knew the sight of her would be more than he could take. He woke up too many nights with his cock up literally to test himself with the sight of what he presently didn’t have. Even with those thoughts Marq went to sleep like a baby, even though his plans peppered his brain intensely until the moment he closed his eyes.

  The next day, he shipped a package before he found himself at Charyn’s house without much thought. It was a surprisingly sunny afternoon considering the meteorologist’s prediction of rain. He walked inside the house without knocking, and the first sight was Makenzie bouncing down stairs, flamboyant as always. She greeted him with a quick hug, which was scented warmly with her light perfume.

  “Hi, Marq, follow me. By the way, Charyn will be down in just a minute or two. He’s doing something in the attic.” He didn’t speak, just matched her smile and allowed her to graciously lead him to her studio. As they progressed further into the house, his memories of Jamison the day they posed for Makenzie assaulted him. He couldn’t let them go, much the same way his heart had held on to her throughout their separation. When she opened the door, a large canvas greeted him, but the massive square was swathed in fabric.

  When they were ten feet from the picture, Makenzie stopped and faced him.

  “Close your eyes and no peeking until I say so. Okay?”

  “Okay?” Marq closed his eyes and heard her move before the fabric rustled.

  “You can look now.” Her tone was flat.

  Curiously, Marq opened his eyes slowly and saw— he couldn’t even describe what he saw at first sight. The painting was perfect and direct in a way he’d never seen before. The canvas was propped high on the easel, which explained why it appeared before to be a massive ten-by-ten square. In actuality, it was a ten-by-five-foot rectangle. It was done in neutrals, black, white, and hints of sienna. There were small patches of color here and there on the canvas, a touch of rose on Jamison’s lips and a touch of gold where his hands met her flesh. The simplicity of the color schem
e made the scene it created in more evocative than erotic, more emotional than mere sated lust could denote. It was, for lack of a better word, beautiful. It was from the last sketch made that evening, after he took her on the floor during the break following their first clumsy attempts at posing. Jamison was straddled over his lap, her head rested against his shoulder. Here she was looking at him, and her eyes were soft and held a tenderness no woman save his mother had ever gazed at him with.

  The feelings that he was so sure she didn’t have for him yet were in her eyes, and he knew that he was going to get his way. In fact he could see and feel it now. His eyes were closed, and his head was leaned over toward hers. His face spoke of unparalleled satisfaction as his hands spoke of delicate greed cupped over her skin. The paint was luxurious in places. Sleek glistening strokes created the illusion of skin slickened with sex and the dew of sweat. There was something incredible about the way the painting came together. It was as if Makenzie had captured something more than him and Jamison. She showed him what he’d been waiting for. The painting showed him the one thing that could redeem his youthful transgressions and adult sins. Ever since the moment he was accused of being a rapist and exposed as a pervert due to his stash of personally taped porn, he needed to be absolved of his wrongs against women. He needed to be seen with more than desire and acquisition in mind. He needed to been seen for who he truly was and loved anyway. Marq wanted nothing more than that, and over the years he doubted he would ever find it. He saw everyone around him fall in love and watched his own parents love one another beyond life itself.