by Ward, Susan
“Groupie. All the musicians you’ve been with. It’s almost your profession. Do you really attend USC, or is that just something to spice up your narrative? How long have you been playing me?”
I waited, wanting desperately for her to deny it.
Instead she stared down at her lap and said, “It didn’t start that way. Not in the beginning. I just found you on the beach. I didn’t even know for sure who you were until later…”
“How much later?”
Her face snapped up and her eyes met mine directly. “Inside the house. When I saw Lily.”
I leaned back in my seat, my emotions careening out of control because for the second time in my life a woman I cared about had made me Jack the fool.
Fuck.
My accusations shot out of me before I checked them. “So you decided to stick around, play attentive, accommodating girlfriend. You want me to tell you where your father is! You’ve been trading your body to find your father. Trading favors for help, so to speak.”
I knew I shouldn’t have said that, that it was cruel and crass and wrong, even before she slapped my face and sprang from the car.
I watched her run into the field I’d parked next to and sink to the ground with her back toward me, and I could tell by her posture she was crying.
After only a handful of minutes, my anger was gone and I felt like an ass. We were all with someone for our own reasons—even me. I felt like a shit having drunk in for a week what she gave me and reacting like that over something she wanted from me.
That moment in the car with her was among my worst ever, and that was saying a lot. It was made even more repulsive to realize I’d probably been no better than every other jerk she’d ever known. And, fuck, no matter how it started, I was happy that it did because miraculous girls were hard to find.
I climbed from the car, trying to sort through the debris to figure out a way to hit the reset button. I stopped next to her and it broke my heart she wouldn’t look at me.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me truth about everything?” I asked softly.
She dropped her face into her hands and cried louder.
“I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I didn’t play you. Well, not after the first day because everything changed. At least for me it changed. I’m in love with you, so if you’re going to tell me off, can you please do it quickly and go away?”
God, in all moments, even that one, she was an honest soul. I stepped around her body to stand in front of her. “If you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.”
Her face snapped up, her glassy eyes assessing my face.
“I don’t know if I want to tell you anything.”
I sank down in the dirt beside her and took her in my arms. “It’s going to be OK. Nothing is ever as terrible as we think it is.”
Tentatively, she glanced up at me. “If you believe that, you’re lucky. Everything always proves to be more terrible than I think it is.”
I laughed and then pouted. “In all moments a wisecrack. It’s all going to be OK. You’ve got to start having faith in something at some point in your life. Why not now?”
She shook her head as she dissected my face as if unsure I was being straight with her, then she made a little snort sound and laid her cheeks against my shirt. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not. I may not like how we started, but I sure like where we are,” I said gently, trying to calm her. She looked so broken and dismayed when she peeked up at me. Even strong girls reached a limit, and only a fool could have walked away from her then. “Why don’t we go home and figure this out together?”
“I’d rather go home to bed,” she teased softly.
I smiled—always a quip and never what I expected. “You haven’t figured out my code yet. I didn’t say we’d start with figuring this out together.”
She made a soggy laugh. I dropped a kiss on her nose, sprang to my feet, and held out a hand. “Come.”
She stared at my fingers for the longest time before she took them. But as we walked back to the car, I wrapped an arm around her waist and held her to me.
I opened her car door and kissed her cheek. “I want to go home, make love to you, and then finally meet Linda Cray.”
Her eyes alertly searched my face, and then she did something I would never forget. She leaned forward and put a kiss on the top of my hand curled over the car door.
In my head flashed my first kiss with Lena, how it had been like this, with the car door between us, and how powerful that had been. This was something very different and no less powerful—gentle and unsure and hopeful.
Linda was scared shitless by what was happening between us. I could tell it wasn’t something she had experienced before, and she fought so hard not to show both her fear and her heart.
“How do you do? I’m Linda Cray,” she whispered on her husky voice, not even able to hold my gaze all the way through it.
The way she said that melted my heart, partly because it was hard for her to trust anyone, partly because she trusted me, and partly because—
I stared at her and spoke a truth I hadn’t even admitted to myself until that moment. “I’m Jackson Parker, and I am in love with you.”
Forty-Two
My first affair with Linda lasted thirteen days before she walked out on me from a series of events I thought were unrelated to me, but of course, they weren’t.
When we went home after the incident in the car, she told me the parts of her history she hadn’t shared with me before she asked me to help her find Brian Cray.
She’d never met her father, had only seen him once in a store when she was little, and she’d spent the last three years trying to find him.
Hence all the musicians she’d been with.
Hence, after figuring out who I was, her interest in me.
Blunt Linda honesty—God, it was what I loved most about this woman—clear, direct, no bullshit ever.
I let her tell me everything—it was clearly important to her to bring down in her own way what she thought was the wall between us—but she didn’t need to explain a darn thing to me because I’d pretty much pieced together the entire thing back in the car.
I had an advantage she didn’t have.
I’d known lots of women, and Lena had definitely taught me how a complex woman’s mind worked. Things were never simple for a miraculous girl.
I also knew Brian Cray fairly well, enough to know without being told that he was the kind of man who’d knock up a woman and walk away. I’m sure he thought giving up his daughter was fair trade for not having to pay to raise her. He was your classic asshole, player musician.
So without telling her, I started making discreet inquiries to find Linda’s father. I told myself I owed it to her after everything she’d done for me but, fuck, that was another of those kinds of lies men tell themselves to feel good about something they did for selfish reasons. I thought if I found her father, fixed that part of her life for her, it might be enough to keep her with me.
I should have remembered what I knew about Brian Cray before I rushed to try to right Linda’s world for her, only to have it blow up in her face. Yep, I was still seeing the small issue and not the bigger one.
I also should have listened to the voice of Lena that wouldn’t shut up in my head. Sometimes being hopeful is not a good thing. Sometimes it’s better to leave things alone.
It would have definitely worked out better to leave this one alone, because when I drove Linda to San Francisco to meet her father, it played out exactly how I should have expected and not how I pretended it would.
The bastard blew her off.
She’d run from her father in tears.
I brought her home and tried to console her as best I could, but she was devastated and I felt like a complete bastard for putting her through that. Hell, not only was I the one responsible for that miserable, heartbreaking
moment for Linda, but it had made the wound in her larger instead of giving her closure.
The next morning, I realized I was wrong even about that last part—the closure part—because I’d forgotten that miraculous girls scramble up from the abyss in ways men can’t predict.
Finally meeting Brian and having him reject her to her face was immediate closure for Linda. She let go of her hopes for her father and rallied in less than twenty-four hours to chart a new direction for her life. A direction that didn’t include me, though I wasn’t sure if it was just specifically me or all men in general.
After passing a terrible night of her crying, I woke up in bed to find Linda standing in the bathroom doorway, wearing the expression of a woman with a set plan in her head. I could see it on her face that she was going back to LA long before she told me, when in my mind we were a forgone conclusion, forever thing.
When she asked me to ring for a car to take her back to LA, I reacted in that overly confident, charmingly stupid way.
I’m a guy who knows when he’s met forever.
What a moronic man I was at times. That was actually my response to try to keep her from walking after she told me she was going back to finish USC then fix her life on her own.
I should have played my big cards then—I wanted to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her—instead of blurting out vague romantic drivel, especially with a girl who had never known anything but empty promises and disappointment from men.
Linda squared her shoulders and lifted her chin high. I missed what that posture warned, and yep, I let her walk out the door.
I thought I was doing the right thing. You know, that Khalil Gibran kind of thing. “If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.” At that point, I didn’t blame Linda for walking away. The man she’d found on the beach had been drowning in his own life and, hell, I hadn’t done a thing to prove to her a future with me would be different.
What woman would want to change the road she was already on for that?
So the next month, not to focus on her, I started repairing the prior year’s damage I’d done while drunk.
I made peace with Walter, got Chrissie back, and enrolled her in boarding school like he asked me to. Fuck, it was the only way he’d back down on his threats to fight in court for custody and so I gave it a shot. Why not? At that point I had everything to lose and nothing to gain by being stubborn about it.
After that, I did a lot of dialing while sober.
I patched up things with Georgie and started socializing again with him, though some of the things I’d said while drunk about him walking out on Patty the way he did were the truth. He was a lucky man. She was loving and faithful, and only a fool would throw away that. It sort of bugged me after my apology that he took what I’d said as a blend of grief and booze he could dismiss. It bugged me even more when he divorced Patty.
Next I called Liam and told him I was ready to work again, and that I’d do the tour he’d been pressuring me to do since Sammy died. Yep, even that one—which had pissed me off at the time—I saw clearly now. He knew me well, both my flaws and weaknesses, wanted to keep me busy, and wanted to keep me close to him so he could watch out for me. Fuck, he was a good friend.
I undid the wreckage I’d created like a man possessed, but four weeks later, not a single peep from Linda, and that Gibran quote, well, fuck that shit.
That asshole was wrong or had never truly loved a woman. That was the kind of thing men said when they were too much of a punk to work for a woman or, worse, never really loved and only pretended they did.
Loving Lena had taught me that if you love somebody, hold on because life is too short, never let them go, and do everything you can to keep them.
I went to LA without calling Linda first.
It didn’t matter that I was internationally famous, very wealthy, and at my age still able to get any woman I wanted easily. If it took chasing after her to have Linda, I would chase.
By the age of twenty I’d already learned the wisdom of quality of over quantity thanks to Lena, and in the vast pool of women, Linda was quality—make no mistake.
When Linda opened her dorm room and found me in the hallway, I have to admit it was a little anticlimactic that she wasn’t happy to find me there.
“Aha,” was what she said before she calmly arched a brow.
Anticlimactic—an understatement.
I leaned with a shoulder against the doorframe, when what I’d wanted to do the second I saw her was to kiss her. “Nope, definitely not the greeting I’d hoped for. Do you want to close the door? I’ll knock again. You can pretend to be…surprised? Happy? I think even annoyed might work better than aha.”
A hint of a smile appeared on her lips—that got through her guard. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll close the door and not answer it again?”
I grinned “No, not at all. I could see you checking through the peephole to see who was out here. You knew it was me and decided to answer anyway.”
Her lips puckered inward—Linda fighting back another smile—and her gorgeous dark eyes started to shimmer. “I did debate with myself if I should open the door before I did.”
“I’m sure you did.”
Her eyes grew enormous on her face. “Then why did you knock?”
I could feel my gaze turning into a caress. “Because you’re here.”
She nodded and turned away, grabbed a sweater from her room, and said something to her roommate before returning to the hall. She closed the door loudly behind her and walked briskly toward the exit without even asking me to join her.
In the center of a grassy area, she finally whirled and said, “What the fuck are you doing here? Didn’t I make myself clear in Santa Barbara? We’re—”
I stepped into her, clutching her tightly against me as my mouth crashed into hers. My kiss was quietly searing, my hands a touch too familiar given that I’d just been on the cusp of being brushed off again, and, worse, I could feel heavy stares telling me we were being watched and that more than a few students had figured out who I was.
I didn’t give a fuck about any of that.
It wasn’t until she melted in my arms and returned the moves of my lips that I lifted my face and said, “Do you really want us to be over, Linda?”
She wiggled free and slapped me rather hard. As I rubbed my chin where I didn’t doubt I’d find her palm print if I’d had a mirror, I started to laugh.
That made her frown. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I abruptly checked my amusement and locked her in a gaze I was pretty sure looked lovestruck and stupid. “I love you, even after that slap, so there is probably a lot wrong with me. Though, I admit, that part of you I’d change—your compulsion to slap people when you don’t want to hear what they’re going to say. But I understand it. You do it out of fear. You’re afraid, and here’s a news flash, baby: I’m afraid, too, but I’m here.”
She crossed her arms and looked away.
I took a moment to regroup and tried again. “Do you want to go somewhere and have dinner?”
Her gaze shifted back to me. “Just dinner?” she asked suspiciously.
I grinned. “Just dinner. Well, for now. Why don’t we see if you can get through a meal without you either hitting me or seducing me or dumping me before we decide where we go from there?”
That got her. She busted up laughing in deep, husky purrs of amusement. Amusement over me, in that oh, men kind of way.
Rapidly, she searched my face as her teeth closed on her lower lip, and she made this annoying sucking sound against it then lifted a brow. “I can’t dump you. We’re not together.”
“Oh, Linda, we’re definitely together. I told you when you walked out on me in Santa Barbara that it wasn’t going to change a damn thing for either of us. It would only make you gone, but nothing would make us over.”
“The la
st thirty days we’ve seemed pretty over to me, Jack.”
She tipped her hand—she was hurt I hadn’t called.
The slap I now felt was deserved.
I took her in my arms and whispered, “Really? We’ve seemed over to you? How many dates have you been on, Linda? How many parties and clubs have you gone to? How many times have you cried? How many times have you picked up the phone wanting to call me?”
She turned her face from mine, staring off at the campus, proud, stubborn, and silent.
I moved my hands to her cheeks and tilted her face so she had to look at me as I said, “I haven’t thought, much less seen, another woman since you. And I’ve picked up the phone hundreds of times to call you.”
Her gaze clouded. “If that’s true, why didn’t you call?”
I brushed her cheek with my thumb. “Because a call wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to be with you.”
Partial truth—I was afraid by phone it would be too easy for Linda to keep her resolve not to see me again.
“Dinner, Linda. That’s all I’m asking. Have dinner with me?”
She shook her head, sighed finally, and said, “Let me go change.”
I beat back a smile and stopped her with my hand. “No need to. You look beautiful today.”
And she did, even with the stiff arrangement of her features betraying she still wasn’t sure she should go to dinner with me.
In the car, I made a decision to keep it casual and took her to a hamburger stand at the beach. I don’t know why that seemed the right next move to me, maybe because things always worked out better for me at the beach, but that’s what I did.
She laughed at me more than once as we sat at the stone table and bench near the sand, dabbing fries into ketchup.
Smiling, I asked, “Why do you keep looking at me and laughing?”
“I can tell chasing women is not in your wheelhouse any longer after this,” she countered impishly. “You’re the first man in five years who has taken me to a snack bar.”
The way she said that made me pause for a second. I was pretty sure it was part test and part what she knew about my past, good and bad, and part what she thought of herself.
