The walls started closing in on Jane and her ears were ringing loudly as her nana started listing, in detail, all of the reasons why Jane should be taking care of herself and multiple symptoms of pregnancy.
Trying to ward off the nervous breakdown that was making a very good case for itself in her mind, Jane tried to go into crisis-management mode. Because if this wasn’t a crisis, she didn’t know what was.
Facts:
Her grandparents were there. In California. That was amazing.
They believed that Adam was her boyfriend. Not so amazing.
They’d told Adam that they thought he was her boyfriend. Also bad.
They’d walked in on Adam kissing her. Adam had kissed her! Amazing! But what the what?!
Her mind was swimming like sharks chasing chum. The only logical explanation was that she must’ve imagined the kiss. It couldn’t have been real. There was no way Adam had kissed her like he’d needed her more than he’d needed his next breath.
She might have gone along with that logic, except for one thing. Her lips still tingled from where he’d branded her. Because, make no mistake, that hadn’t been just a kiss. He’d claimed her.
What did that mean? Had it been a fluke? Had he been invaded by body snatchers and an alien had done the smooching?
Was it like that book she read, The Secret, and this was a clear-cut case of the law of attraction? She’d put it out into the universe that Adam was her boyfriend, and maybe this was just him acting on cosmic forces that were beyond his control? Was their kiss a Secret kiss?
Or maybe—and this was a Grand Canyon–sized maybe—he’d kissed her because that was what he’d wanted to do? Because maybe he felt the same way she did? Because maybe he thought about her like she thought about him, which was every second of every day?
No. That was crazy talk. Jane shook her head to try to clear it.
She’d have to process that later. Right now, she needed to get her grandparents as far away from Adam as humanly possible. So it was time to pull out the old faithful. She’d had to use this play more times than she could count on the campaign trail with Mike to get constituents to move along without making them feel ignored or unimportant.
Sure, they were her grandparents, but Jane needed to stick to the tried-and-true formula of redirecting the focus onto the parties themselves and then redirecting their attention onto another objective.
The key was knowing where the conversation was headed and not letting anything divert from that destination.
“I can’t believe you guys are here!” Jane said, interrupting her nana’s rambling, and briefly hugged them both again. “This was the trip you were taking so you couldn’t make our call!”
“Yep, I told your nana to tell you we were coming. I said, ‘Dolores, Jane’s a grown woman. We can’t just be showing up out of the blue, disrupting her life.’” Then, leaning forward, her papa whispered conspiratorially, “But you know your grandmother. She’s hardheaded.”
“Oh, Wally, I am not!” Nana playfully swatted her husband’s arm. “I just wanted to surprise you, bunny. And I didn’t want you going to any trouble.”
Thanks, Jane thought dryly. This way, she wasn’t going to any trouble. Nope. She was already there, right in the middle of it.
Nana continued telling them word for word the conversations—plural!—she’d had with her papa on this subject, but Jane tuned out.
She needed to focus. This was a code-red situation. One she was having even more of a difficult time dealing with because Adam’s arm was protectively wrapped around her, giving her body all kinds of signals it was more than ready to receive after that scorching-hot kiss. Signals she was trying like crazy to dispel.
It was so difficult to have a coherent thought when he was touching her.
She wished someone would pull a Cher from Moonstruck and slap her face while telling her to, “Snap out of it.” Since there was no one to fill that role, she mentally did it to herself.
Stay on track. Refocus on them and get the heck out of here. That was her mission.
“How did you guys get here?” Jane said, cutting her nana’s retelling short.
“We flew,” her grandparents answered in unison.
Her papa filled in the rest. “Once we got to Sacramento, we rented a car and were up here lickety-split.”
“Flew?” Jane was momentarily sidetracked. “You hate to fly!”
“Well, we wanted to come meet your fella more than we wanted to stay on the safety of the ground.” Nana looked at Adam with a look that Jane had seen quite a few times, and she got a sick feeling in her stomach. “That’s how much our little girl means to us. We put our lives at risk and flew across the country to meet you and make sure you have honorable intentions.”
Time to go!
“You guys must be hungry! Why don’t we go to Sue Ann’s and get some food?” Her cheeks were on fire, but nothing could be done about that. One humiliating catastrophe at a time was all she was able to tackle.
“I’m starving!” her grandparents chorused in unison.
They did that a lot. Jane had heard of people finishing each other’s sentences, but she’d always thought it was sweet that her nana and papa regularly said the same thing at the same time. It was like they were perfectly synced. That was the kind of relationship Jane had always wanted, what she’d been looking for in Disasters #1-5.
“Okay, great!” Jane clapped her hands. “Let’s go eat.”
To her horror, though, Nana slid her arm through Adam’s and said sweetly, “It will be so nice to be escorted to dinner by such a handsome young man.”
“No! He can’t come.” The words catapulted out of Jane’s mouth like an adrenaline junkie diving off a cliff.
Three pairs of eyes zoomed in on her. All three people the peepers belonged to looked equally puzzled.
“I can’t?” Adam asked, his brow furrowed.
“No. You’re busy,” Jane snapped. She hadn’t meant to, but she hadn’t expected him to question his get-out-of-jail-free card.
“Well, it looked like he had plenty of time for hanky panky,” her papa pointed out.
“That’s true. And now, he’s probably worked up an appetite,” Nana chimed in, wagging her eyebrows.
“You don’t have to talk about him like he’s not here,” Jane mumbled. She had no idea how to get this back on track. Getting them to dinner had been her Hail Mary play.
“I am pretty hungry,” Adam concurred, nodding his head and—unless Jane was crazy—from the smirk on his lips and the gleam in his eyes was more than a little amused at the situation.
“But what about those reports?” Jane asked through clenched teeth.
“Your grandparents traveled all this way. The reports can wait,” Adam shot back. There was the slightest hint of a challenge in his tone.
Jane was sure that her grandparents hadn’t picked up on it, but she had.
This was a living nightmare. Worse than the ones where she showed up to a meeting with no clothes on. She would gladly conduct a PowerPoint presentation naked as a jaybird rather than endure a dinner with her grandparents and the man they believed was her boyfriend, the man who’d just kissed her senseless. Unfortunately, life wasn’t a game of Would You Rather, so she didn’t have a choice.
Short of faking a sudden illness (which she decided against because she was scared her pants would catch on fire from being a liar, liar), Jane saw no way out of this dinner. The most she could hope for was to keep her grandparents talking about themselves and steer the conversation off Adam and Jane and their nonexistent relationship.
“Great,” she said brightly. “Let’s go. You can leave your bags here. We can walk to the café and then come back and pick them up after dinner.”
The foursome headed out of the office as her grandfather talked about getting a bowl of Sue Ann’s homemade chili, which he’d never had but Jane raved about. She was trying not to let her hysteria show, but she’d never been a good actress, an
d she was pretty sure it was shining through like sunlight through a Windexed window.
As they rounded the corner to Main street, only a block from Sue Ann’s Café, Jane remembered something that trumped her nervous breakdown, her grandparents’ visiting, the fake relationship that was about to get exposed, and even the sizzling lip-lock she and Adam had exchanged.
“The proposal!” Jane cried out. She’d guaranteed it would be sent by five-o’clock. Looking down at her watch, she saw she had ten minutes.
Her grandparents looked confused at her sudden exclamation of a random noun.
“You guys go on ahead. I have to send a proposal we’ve been working on for months. I’ll catch up with you.”
She spun back around, not waiting for their response. Whatever it was, it could wait ten minutes. Moving her feet as fast as they would carry her without breaking out into a full-on sprint, Jane rushed back to the office. Behind her, Adam was addressing her grandparents’ questions. It wasn’t lost on her that she owed him big time. If, and this was a colossal if, he even spoke to her after today.
Her hand shook as she unlocked the door to the office. Taking a deep breath, she tried to tune everything else out as she walked into her safe place, her domain. She’d always felt like she could rule the world from her command center. Her motto came from the immortal words of Vanilla Ice: if there was a problem, yo, she’d solve it.
Since Adam had entered the picture, that confidence had been shaken down like a mom-and-pop store in the mob’s territory. Jane wasn’t used to feeling unsteady or unsure of herself, and she didn’t like it. Her work was suffering, her sleep was nonexistent, and her sanity was slipping away from her like sand through her fingers.
Rushing to her computer, Jane scanned the document she’d almost forgotten to send, which could’ve greatly jeopardized Latch Key’s ability to have a nationwide launch. She had to make sure everything was in order. As she glanced at the lower right-hand corner of the screen, the minutes mocked her while they ticked by. She wished she had time to do a thorough proofing, but that was not a luxury she was afforded at the moment. So, at one minute to five, she attached it to the appropriate e-mail group and pressed send.
When she saw the confirmation that the message had been sent, she collapsed back in her chair and wrapped her fingers around the armrests. She gripped them tight because she felt like she was on the Tea Cup ride at Disneyland. So she closed her eyes and focused on calming thoughts.
Her entire life was spiraling out of control, and she was the sole party responsible for the tornado-like state of affairs she was in. It was her fault she was firmly planted in the eye of her soap-opera-life shitstorm.
In a flash, she experienced a split second of clarity. A plan to unravel the knot of lies she’d created started taking shape. She would go back to Sue Ann’s and just tell the truth. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but the upside was that it would set her free, right?
Was she going to be embarrassed? Sure. Was there a good chance Adam would think less of her? Most definitely. Was it the right thing to do? Yes.
Jane took in a deep breath.
Decision made.
Chapter 16
‡
Jane was sitting back in her chair, her eyes closed, and Adam wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then he remembered what she looked, and sounded, like when she slept and realized she couldn’t be sleeping.
“Jane,” he said as calmly and quietly as possible so that he didn’t scare her since it was obvious she hadn’t heard him come in.
He wasn’t successful.
Jane let out a scream and jumped out of her chair. It reminded him of a cartoon; she was a cluster of flailing arms, legs, and hair. In two steps, he was at her side, steadying her. He’d heard a few bumps in the commotion, but her reaction had been so fast that he hadn’t seen what she’d knocked into.
“It’s me.” Even though it had only happened twice, Adam felt like startling Jane was becoming a habit.
Holding her elbow and wincing, Jane pulled away from his steadying hand. “What are you doing here? Where are my grandparents?”
Adam gazed down into Jane’s toffee-colored eyes and his body responded to her. That kiss had done something to him. He’d always been attracted to Jane—more than attracted. But now that he knew what she tasted like, how soft her lips were, what her tongue felt like against his, he was concerned he would be walking around with a permanent hard-on.
Trying his best to conceal his reaction to her, Adam answered her with a gravelly tone. “I got them seated at Sue Ann’s and I came back here to make sure you didn’t have any issues sending the proposal.”
“Oh, thanks.” A blush rose up Jane’s cheeks.
For a second, he thought her flush was because she was feeling exactly what he was, but when she continued, it was clear that it was out of embarrassment, not arousal.
As she swallowed loudly, her eyes became rimmed with moisture as she explained, “Okay, I did something, and it’s bad. I honestly didn’t mean to. It just happened, and then I wasn’t sure how to make it un-happen. And I never in a million years thought that you’d even know.”
She grew more and more frazzled as she continued. Holding her hands up in frustration, she spoke so quickly that it was difficult for Adam to keep up. “I mean, what were the chances that you would you ever find out? Not that that makes what I did right. It doesn’t. I just mean that I would’ve never dragged you into this if I’d thought for a second that my grandparents would come here. And this would all get dumped on your lap. They’ve never, ever, come out to California.”
After letting a forced laugh out, she kept speed talking. “Not for disasters one through five. That’s for sure. Of course, they only knew about two of them. And thank God. I mean, this is bad, but it’s still better than if they’d met any of them. That would’ve been…”
She shuddered and then shook her head as if to get herself back on track. Looking up at him with new determination, she spoke with focus. “I’m so sorry about all of this. I know that you don’t know me very well, but I promise this is very out of character for me. Well, at least, it was out of character for me. Honestly, I haven’t been myself lately. But don’t worry. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to tell them everything and clear all of this up.” Then she started to walk around him, he assumed on the way to go “clear all of this up.”
Before she made it two steps, Adam reached out his hand and stopped her. “Jane.”
“What?” She looked up at him, confusion and stress swimming in her eyes.
“Why do your grandparents think we’re a couple?” He appreciated the fact that she wanted to go clear all of this up with them, but he wanted some clarity too.
“Oh.” Jane laughed nervously. “Right. I said all that and didn’t say the most important part. Last Monday morning, on our weekly call, I lied to my grandparents about being in a relationship. They worry about me being single and alone. They always have, but since I moved to Hope Falls, it’s been especially bad. So I told them I’d met someone, and when they asked me what his name was, I said, ‘Adam.’ But that was only because I saw you through the window the night you moved in and I was so shocked that I said your name,” she clarified quickly. “I said your name because I saw you and then they ran with it. I just didn’t do anything to stop their race. I justified it because they’re older and my papa has high blood pressure. Then my nana called back and said that his blood pressure had gone down. Which was most likely due to the fact that he’d taken his medicine and less likely due to the fact that I had a pretend boyfriend. But, nevertheless, it seemed to make them so happy that I was with someone.”
Throwing her hands up in the air, she breathed out in frustration. “Obviously, they were happy. They flew all the way out here to meet you. I mean, to meet my boyfriend ‘Adam.’ ” She made air quotes with her fingers when she said his name. “But don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to them. I’m so sorry, again, that you got dragged into this.”<
br />
“Why?” Adam asked, using the one word that represented the question in his head.
Jane looked at him like he’d just sprouted another head. She spoke slowly. “Because you don’t deserve someone lying about being in a relationship with you.”
Apparently, she wasn’t a mind reader, because she had no idea the direction he was actually going with this.
“No. I mean why do you have to explain anything to them?” Adam asked, still not communicating the direction his thoughts were actually going in. Maybe because even he couldn’t believe what he was suggesting.
Didn’t he want to get away from lies, from pretending? Hadn’t he just left an entire career, a relationship, because of that very thing?
“Because…” Jane shifted her feet and shook out her hands, her agitation growing by the second. “If I don’t, they’ll think that you’re my boyfriend.”
“Okay,” Adam said.
“Okay?” Jane repeated, a question in her tone. “Why would you… You don’t have to… I know that kiss didn’t mean… I mean it was great, but I know it didn’t mean—”
Her phone buzzed, interrupting her rambling about a kiss he sure as hell couldn’t explain, but he’d been enjoying watching her attempt to. Looking down, she groaned, and the first thing he thought was, I wonder if that’s how she’d sound if I was buried deep inside her.
Her face blushed as she spoke. “It’s my nana.”
Something about her not offering what her grandmother had texted made him want to know what it was. His lips turned up in grin. “What did she say?”
“Nothing.” Jane typed back furiously before glancing back up at him.
“If we are going to be pretend boyfriend and girlfriend, you can’t keep this kind of thing from me.” He was half teasing but half serious. He honestly did want to know what had made Jane blush.
Sighing in resignation, she showed him the text.
When you two lovebirds are finished playing tonsil hockey, your papa and I would like to eat. Proposal my hiney. I know what you two went back there to do. LOL!
Secret Kiss Page 13
