His smile faded. Hers grew. He was downright adorable like this. “Do what we were doing over by the pond a couple of hours ago?”
She had no idea where she got the nerve to say that. Reese’s reaction was more than worth the risk. He looked like she’d just punched him in the gut.
There was a short pause, then he said, “The reason I brought her up was because she’s a pro at fund-raising. I know she’d be willing to help you, at least give you some ideas.”
He’d recovered his composure so quickly, Jillian wondered if she’d imagined his dazed expression. But she hadn’t. What had gone through his mind?
Then his last sentence sunk in and her attention was caught up in figuring out how to answer him without telling him anything she didn’t want him to know.
Reese saw her close him out as effectively as the steel hurricane shields had shut out Ivan.
Why was she freezing him out now? What had he said?
“I appreciate the offer,” she said, her tone remarkably even, considering the change in her expression.
“But you’re not going to take me up on it, are you.” It was not a question.
“I’ll think about it. I have a lot on my mind.”
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” Reese shot back, his sudden irritation rising quickly to the surface.
“Are you always so testy when someone doesn’t jump at your gracious offers of help?”
“Are you just giving up, then?” he demanded. His arm swung wide as he gestured to the surroundings. “It’s not a no-hoper, you know. You can fix this.”
“I plan to.”
That seemed to set him back, but only for a second.
“It’s not going to be cheap, Jillian.” He leaned forward. “Why won’t you let me help? You’ve got this complex about having to do everything yourself. This is one battle you don’t have to fight alone.”
“And what do you know of my battles, Reese?” Even as she asked she knew it was a dumb question. The answer was in his eyes, had been there every time she’d looked at him. This was a man who knew more about battles and pain and being alone than she’d learn in two lifetimes. He knew.
And how she wished she hadn’t asked.
“I know you’ve been hurt. But you’re a battler, you’re no stranger to a bit of hard work.” His temper thickened his accent. “But we all need help, mite.”
“What about you?” she asked, wanting desperately not to be the one on the defensive. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who sits around and lets others do for him. You won’t even take care of a simple thigh wound.” Her pulse rose along with her temper. “You took your job as an evac assistant like you were on a personal crusade. You stormed onto my property and actually tried to carry me out of here. So don’t go telling me—”
She broke off when the stool he’d been sitting on crashed to the tiled floor. In the next second her arms were imprisoned in his big hands, and he bent his face down close to hers.
“You don’t know why I came here, Jillian. But you were right about one thing, it was a job. And I take my jobs seriously, just like you—otherwise, why bother? Right?” He shook her lightly, his grasp tightening. He closed the gap between them until barely a whisper separated his mouth from hers.
“But even I know when I need help, Jillian.” He took a deep breath, obviously trying hard to calm things back down. “I’ve got money,” he said, his tone lower, but just as intense. “I’ve got contacts, I’m willing to help you. So why don’t you stop blowing me off and tell me why you’re really refusing to let me help here?”
“Fine!” she exploded, shoving hard against his chest. He didn’t budge, but her temper had already pushed her past the point of caution. “I’ve learned the hard way that when you ask for help from people, the payback is always more than you can afford. So I stopped asking.”
“You also stopped giving. Except to your animals.”
“You got that right, buster. And they appreciate it, which is more than I can say for just about everyone else I’ve ever tried to—”
“To what, Jillian?” he broke in ruthlessly. “To love? To care for? Like who, Jillian?” His voice dropped to a dark, rough whisper. “Who took your love and threw it back at you?”
She felt her face drain of all color and warmth. Her mouth opened, then shut. He did know.
“Tell me!”
“Why?” she shouted, suddenly back in the thick of it, as if he hadn’t just pulled the rug out from under her neatly organized little life. “So you can hurt me too? Well you can’t, Reese Braedon, because I won’t let you. You hear me?” She thumped his chest. “I won’t let you.” And to her eternal shame her last word erupted on a choked sob.
In the next instant she was engulfed in his embrace. He held her head tightly against his chest, his cheek resting on the top of her head as he ran his other hand up and down her back.
“I’m sorry, Jillian. It was none of my damn business.” He pressed a kiss against her head, then leaned down and pressed another one on her temple. “I know what it’s like to have it tossed back in your face,” he whispered roughly. He tilted her face up so she had to look at him. “And I’m a bastard for badgering you at a time like this.” He dropped a soft kiss on her lips, then let his forehead rest on hers.
“It’s just …” He reached a rough fingertip up to trace away the wetness that had brimmed over her lower eyelid, but hadn’t enough steam to form a tear. “I like my life clean. Neat. No clutter. I get work, I do the best job I can, I get paid for it, I go on to the next job. Simple. And I’ve made damn sure it stayed that way. But now … with you …”
He broke their gaze and looked down for a moment, then finally met her eyes again. “I want to help you, Jillian. No strings, no payback. Nothing. I just want to help.”
Jillian trembled with the effort of keeping her cheeks dry from the flood of tears pleading for release. He would break her heart. Damn him. He wouldn’t even try, or mean to. But he would. Because she’d let him.
Even now, when she was still thinking clearly enough to tell him no, to make it clear his help was the last thing she wanted, she knew it would take very little, shamefully little, to get her to say yes. Say yes to just about anything he wanted to give her.
Only the one thing she suspected she was coming to want more than anything she’d ever allowed herself to yearn for, was the very last thing he’d give her.
His heart.
Damn him.
She sniffed. Not as indelicately as she’d have liked to. And another crack fissured across her heart when he smiled.
“I have money, Reese,” she said, her voice still clogged with unshed tears.
“Enough to repair this place?”
“Enough to rebuild it entirely if I wanted to.”
Reese shifted back, then broke away to lift himself up to sit on the counter. Before Jillian could begin to think, Reese tugged her between his legs and looped his arms around her shoulders. He wasn’t about to let her put any distance between them. She knew it was a lost cause right then. Because she didn’t mind a bit.
“Can I ask where? How?”
“Family money.”
“So you’re loaded, huh?”
She knew he was teasing her, suffered the painful irony of realizing she’d finally found a man who wouldn’t be swayed by the almighty dollar. But she’d spent too many years protecting herself to let all her barriers go at once.
“It’s all in a trust fund. I can use it only for the rehab clinic.” The story she’d told dozens of times, very convincingly and without a whit of guilty conscience, sounded hollow to her ears and exactly like the bald-faced lie it was.
The room was silent for several seconds. Jillian knew better than to look up at Reese. She kept her gaze at shirt-pocket level.
“So,” he said calmly, as if there had been no break. “Why haven’t you expanded?”
For a moment she thought she’d gotten away with it.
“Or
doesn’t your trustee let you make big, intelligent decisions like that?”
He knew. She looked up at him. “I don’t want to expand. My operation here is fine.” She shrugged. “Besides, the area really doesn’t demand a larger facility and—”
“And you know that if you grow any larger you’ll have to hire real personnel, maybe even take on a partner. And you’d rather stop altogether than have to do that.”
Bull’s-eye. Smack in the center of her heart.
But some part of her realized he’d been too damn certain of his statement for it to be all guesswork. And he didn’t know her all that well. At least not about her background.
“Is that why you quit, Reese?” she asked harshly. Going on the defensive was becoming a habit around him. “Why you went private? So you could be in control of who you worked with? Who you didn’t work with? So you could control who you’d be forced to get close to in order to do your job effectively without risking any … what was it you called it? Clutter?”
She’d scored a direct hit herself, if his instantly closed expression was any gauge.
But she found she didn’t like hurting him any more than she liked being hurt. Her temper quelled. “Doesn’t feel so great, does it?” she asked softly.
He blew out a long breath and pulled her against him. “What a pair of no-hopers we make, huh?”
She went easily, letting her arms slide around his waist as she rested her cheek against his chest. If her time with him was measured, she’d rather listen to his heartbeat than his angry words.
“It was a trust fund,” she said at length. “My father left it for me. It drove Regina—my mother—crazy that he’d left me in control of it.”
“Why? Didn’t he leave her any?”
“No. But it wasn’t as heartless as it sounds. My parents divorced when I was five. By the time my father died, Reggie had latched on to husband number two. And she’d made damn sure his bank account was up to her new standards.”
“New standards?”
A familiar tension tightened across Jillian’s forehead. This was the conversation she’d wanted to avoid. “Let’s just say that after she divorced my dad, Reggie decided to take the safe path, the secure path. For my mother, security is money. And she found that the most efficient way to achieve that goal was to marry it. Which she has. Several times.”
“Did she love your dad?”
The question took her off guard. She answered without thinking whether or not she should. “You know, I used to spend agonizing hours wondering about that. I wasn’t sure when I was younger, but when I was in college, I … had this relationship.” She snorted in disgust.
“Blinded by romance and foolish love, I was certain then that my mother had loved my father more than anything. So much that she’d shunned the whole concept of love when the marriage failed. It was so tragic, so romantic. I was so stupid, thinking I had it all figured out, that when I explained to her that it was okay because Thomas really loved me, she’d understand my decision to marry a man whose aspirations began and ended with being a science professor. Or so I thought.”
“I take it she didn’t.”
“The only thing Regina understands is money and the security it brings. And she’s convinced that anyone can be bought. Love doesn’t enter into it. Fortunately for her, she’s a beautiful, cultured hostess any man would be proud to claim as his own. His job is simply to provide the money. In stocks, bonds, property, whatever. And in her name. It’s all upfront and very civilized.”
“And you think this is mercenary, horrible.”
Jillian tilted her head back. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s her life. She won’t change.”
“But she thinks you should, right? That’s why she hates to see you spend money on your clinic when you should be in West Palm, getting your hair and nails done to snag that millionaire.”
Jillian knew she looked stunned. She recovered quickly, though. “I don’t need to marry anyone for money or anything else.”
“No?” he asked gently, lifting her chin with his finger.
“No.”
“You never married your college sweetheart?”
She pulled her chin away and looked down, wishing she had the strength to keep looking him in the eye. “No.”
“And you’re happy here, alone.”
Her head came up, temper flaring again. “You should understand that one, Reese. No clutter. And yes, Regina wanted me to marry rich, preached for years that it was my best chance at controlling my own destiny. Marrying for love was foolish and unnecessary in her eyes. In fact, she made damn sure I had every opportunity to see things her way.” Thomas hadn’t even bargained for a higher price. He’d taken the first figure Regina named—a fact she’d made certain to share with her daughter.
Jillian drew in a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “But I made my own destiny without falling into her trap. When I turned twenty-five, I got control of my trust fund, invested wisely, and now I answer to no one. No one!”
Reese gripped her shoulders, and it was only then she realized how badly she was trembling. How did he get her like this? And she knew deep down it wasn’t the life-shattering events of the last twenty-four hours, that no matter when or where or how they might have met, he’d have brought her to this point anyway. Why him? Why now?
“You know what I think?” He jiggled her shoulders to get her full attention. “I think you were right. I think your mother was so wildly in love with your father that when he rejected her it destroyed something inside her, something fundamental to her ability to love again, to trust it could be returned, to even believe in it.”
“And how in the hell did you come up with that analysis? Or are you talking from personal experience? Your own past?”
His jaw clenched tightly, but he didn’t react to her challenge. “I have a confession to make.”
“What?”
He nodded to the large green trash bag he’d carried over to the clinic. “When I went through your stuff, to pack for you, I found a photo in your drawer. Since you didn’t have it out, I wasn’t sure whether it was something you’d want to save—”
Jillian knew exactly what photo he was referring to. Her heart clenched, and her knees shook. She knew every individual grain of that black-and-white photo. She’d had a long love-hate relationship with it, had wanted many times to destroy it, but always stopped herself in time. Her breath caught in her throat as it occurred to her that since she’d kept it tucked in her bedroom dresser, the photo was likely somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico by now.
“Oh dear God,” she whispered.
“It’s in the bag, Jillian. I put it in there, just in case.”
“But that bag split open when I fell—”
“I wrapped it in one of your sweatshirts. I checked it when I picked up your things. It was okay.”
Instinct drove her into his arms, and she hugged him as tightly as she could. “Thank you. It’s the only picture I have of … of the three of us.” She pulled back, feeling suddenly too vulnerable. “My father hated having his picture taken. As you could probably tell from looking at it.”
Reese was silent for so long, she finally looked up at him. He was staring at her, his expression unreadable.
“You know what I saw in that photo, Jillian.”
She didn’t want to go on with this, didn’t want to hear him say it out loud, to confirm what she knew, had always known. And yet she heard herself asking him, “What? What did you see?”
His gaze intensified, locked on her, focused on her, connecting them in a way that was more powerful than any physical bond.
“I saw a woman very much in love with her husband.”
The conviction in his voice shook Jillian. She’d never thought of him as a man who put much stock in emotions like love. Caring, helping, yes. But not something as vulnerable, as threatening as love.
It shook her worse to realize that she’d just defined her own feelings about love.
“I also saw a man whose mind was occupied with things other than his wife and child.” His voice grew harsher. “Greater things, stupid things, wasteful things … I don’t know. Just not what his wife wanted him to have on his mind when he was with her. She wanted him to be thinking of her. To look at her the way she was looking at him. And I don’t think he did. Ever.”
Tears burned in her eyes, but refused to fall. The photo was etched in her mind in perfect clarity. Her mind’s eye kept focusing on the child that had been her. Had Reese noticed her? Or had his attention been captured by Regina’s beauty and tragic longing?
Some inner force compelled her to ask. “What did you see when you looked at … the child?”
His body jerked slightly as if she’d hit him, then he stilled, tensed. For a second she thought he would set her away from him, but then he bent closer to her.
“I saw me, Jillian. I saw me.”
Jillian’s throat knotted, tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks unheeded. He knew. Reese had known what she’d felt when she looked up at her mother so long ago. What he’d just forced her to admit she still wanted today. To be loved. Simply. Totally. Just for herself.
Through her tears she stared into Reese’s hard eyes and saw that same pain, that same yearning. Dear Lord, not him too. Such a fine man. Who must once have been a fine boy; a sweet, trusting child.
There was no relief in the sharing. Her own hurt escalated in the knowledge that he’d suffered, too, that she hadn’t been alone.
“Oh, Reese,” she whispered hoarsely. She reached for his face and pulled it down to hers. And she kissed him, letting down every barrier she’d ever erected. Everything she felt, everything he’d made her feel was in her kiss.
In the next instant she was pulled hard against his chest, his mouth fierce and full against hers as she felt his walls tumble down on top of hers.
“Jillian,” he whispered raggedly against her lips, his voice filled with undisguised yearning, heavy with newly acknowledged need.
“I know, Reese. I know.” And then the time for talk was over.
Their kisses were dark and powerful. Reese took her mouth, demanded possession of it at the same time he awarded her possession of his.
Wild Rain Page 13
