Never Try To Explain

by Donna McDonald

  “Greg…”

  “Don’t dodge my compliment. I’m just holding you accountable for dealing with the current male in your life.”

  “Philippe is not all that strange. He’s just an artist. They’re all a bit eccentric.”

  “I was talking about me,” Greg said, chuckling at the surprise on her face. What was he? Invisible? “You barely know me and I all but saw you naked this evening. Your guard dog sons did a pretty good job of keeping my attention where it belonged, but I am still a man. It wouldn’t be fair to let you think otherwise. You need to understand that I did briefly consider ripping that sheet off you.”

  “Greg…”

  His chuckle and wink earned him a hard smack to the chest. The reverberation traveled south like a whole body earthquake.

  “Despite what your friends told you though, I’m still a safe guy. I would never push you into a relationship you didn’t want. I might try to win you over, so don’t start looking like I let you off the hook just yet.”

  Jellica bit her lip and stared at his face. “This friend stuff is a lot more complicated than I’d imagined it would be.”

  Greg nodded. “It’s nearly impossible to be friends with the opposite sex unless one of you is gay.”

  “You’re not gay, are you?” Jellica asked.

  Greg lifted an eyebrow and stared. “Keep it up. Next time I’m just going to rip that sheet right off, even if the boys are watching.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Jellica said, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. It was something in his eyes. “Okay, you’re right. Friendship is a difficult thing between a man and woman.”

  “And yet ironically it makes everything else ten times better when you get it right,” Greg said.

  “You sound very sure of that,” Jellica said softly.

  “I am. I was planning to marry my best friend once. She died before it got to happen. I’ve never really loved anyone since.”

  “Greg…”

  He ducked his head to chuckle. “You sure say my name a lot.”

  “I’m so sorry you lost your true love. I’ve never found that for myself. I cared about my ex but our love wasn’t true. After we divorced, I missed our family, but I never really missed him. If my prior dating experiences had worked out for me, I would have remarried without a single regret.”

  “My fiancée died a long time ago,” Greg answered, swiveling away from her gaze. “I’ve tried to move on but it hasn’t worked out yet. I’ve dated plenty of beautiful women but the chemistry isn’t there. When you asked to be my friend the other night, I didn’t know how to react. It was both appealing and appalling at the same time. My male ego has yet to recover. But I showed up to eat your lasagna anyway. Maybe that’s the sturdy and reliable part of me.”

  “Maybe. You certainly get hotness points for leaving your sweater vest at home.”

  “Faint praise, but I’ll take it.” A chuckle escaped his throat as he smiled without any effort at all. “Since I’m down one sweater vest, my choices are slimmer. I’m saving the last clean one for work.”

  Smiling at his teasing, Jellica studied Greg’s face and liked what she saw. “Your ego is safe with me, but my children are my life. I didn’t even want to date. It was just a favor for Mariah. She’s my friend, Georgia Bates’s, daughter. Georgia is a real piece of work, but she has a good heart. I went to a potluck at Georgia’s and the next thing I know I’m wearing call girl makeup and doing that stupid bio just because the younger male clients were wanting to date older women.”

  “Back up a minute,” Greg commanded, making a full stop sign with both hands. “You were supposed to be dating younger men? Explain this.”

  “That was the original reason I joined,” Jellica said with a sigh. “But I couldn’t do it. What in the world would I talk about with a twenty-eight-year-old? That’s barely a decade older than my sons. I couldn’t pick anyone that young to date. Could you?”

  Greg chuckled again. “This is a test, isn’t it?” He waved a hand. “It’s one of those tricky ones a woman tosses out to a guy to fish for information about the other women he’s dated.”

  “No, it’s not,” Jellica denied, surprised at his response. “Why would I care about who you dated before I met you?”

  Greg grinned and plowed on in the conversation. Now he was curious. “Younger men have a lot more stamina. Haven’t you heard?”

  “I have all the stamina I need and any man I choose to sleep with will as well,” Jellica said, practically huffing. “But when sex is all said and done, I’d still like to have some pleasant conversation afterward, not listen to the latest techno-grunge-punk-whatever. Stop laughing at me, Greg. I’m being serious here.”

  “No, no—I’m laughing because I agree with you. Here’s the acid test,” Greg began, leaning over the distance between them. “If you can’t converse easily over dinner, you’re certainly not going to be able to talk easily the morning after.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” Jellica said.

  “I know,” Greg said. “Guess you and I would fight the next morning, eh?”

  Jellica threw him a dirty look that had him belly laughing. If she had a mean bone in her body, she’d only use it to beat up anyone who came near her children. He could already tell Jellica was Mom with a capital “M” all the time.

  “You’re a lot of fun to tease,” he told her.

  “Ha. Ha. Why is only one of us laughing?”

  “Should I apologize?” Greg asked and got a surprisingly hard rap to his chest. It made him chuckle again. “What? I was being serious.”

  “How could I possibly tell?” Jellica demanded.

  Greg rubbed his chest. “You’re strong. Bet I know who you dress up like for Halloween.”

  “You’re just trying to get me into a Wonder Woman costume. Well, it won’t work,” Jellica informed him.

  “Wonder Woman?” Greg chuckled. “I was thinking more like the Hulk. I’m going to have a bruise on my chest tomorrow and no good memories of how it got there. That doesn’t seem fair after I drove all the way across Cincinnati in rush hour for you.”

  Jellica rolled her eyes and stood. “If the excrement gets any deeper in this room, I’m going to have to buy a pair of wading boots just to walk through my kitchen. And hint, hint, Mr. Skyler… I don’t have the freaking money for hip waders.”

  Greg reluctantly stood and sighed his defeat. Teasing Jellica had been fun while it lasted. “And that reminds me of why I came. Take me to your paperwork, Ms. Quartz.”

  Jellica held her hips in check as she slid by his body which currently filled up most of her kitchen doorway. She managed to not touch him, but just barely missed making contact.

  Greg was sorely disappointed that she’d gotten by him so easily. “I think you’ve missed your calling. Houdini had nothing on you.”

  “It’s all in my dining room,” Jellica said, not even glancing back to see if he followed her.

  Chapter Eight

  The dining table was covered, as was the floor under it. Along one wall boxes were stacked as many as four and five high. Papers had been crammed into cardboard containers and were sticking out of some very loose box lids. None of it looked organized or sorted or even packed away securely. It was going to take an army of people just to sort it out. Greg would normally charge upwards of twenty-thousand just to go through this kind of situation in even a cursory way.

  Flabbergasted at the amount of work he estimated it would take, Greg ran a hand restlessly through his hair wondering what in the world he realistically could do to help her.

  “Sorry. I know it’s a mess,” Jellica said quietly. “I dealt with it one thing at a time, and as I finished, it got put into a box. It’s not organized by projects, but it’s mostly chronological by resolution. It took me two and a half years. I wrote the dates on the box lids. The boys used to put them in the attic for me. I hadn’t looked at them all together like this before. I was stunned when I saw how many there were.”

  G
reg felt his jaw drop. “No one helped you with any of this?”

  Jellica shook her head. “My ex was an attorney and he helped for the first year. By the end of that time, we knew what money was left in the estate would have to be used to pay off my parents’ debts. The second year was after our divorce so I did the rest on my own.”

  “Unrepresented by counsel,” Greg said roughly, his chest burning with helpless rage over something he hadn’t even known was happening. If he ever ran across Jellica’s ex, the man was going to lose some teeth.

  “It’s okay. For the most part, the people I worked with were kind to me. They knew I was in over my head. I signed what I had to so long as everything absolved me and the kids. I insisted on that. Everyone went along.”

  “Thank God for that at least,” Greg said sincerely.

  “Don’t worry about me. Woo-woo is not the same thing as being crazy,” Jellica said, defending herself.

  “Woo-woo is probably the only reason you survived and aren’t on life-long depression meds over this level of shit,” Greg said tiredly, sweeping a hand. “I’ve seen the strongest and richest people brought down by pressure like this.”

  Jellica crossed her arms. “I couldn’t let myself get like that. My children needed me.”

  Greg turned her and pulled her stiff body into his arms. “If you’d found me then, I would have been your friend. I would have helped you somehow. I’m glad you asked Della to get in touch with me now. I’m sorry if I’ve been an ass about meeting you.”

  “Of course you haven’t been,” Jellica denied, her stiff arms uncrossing to ease around him.

  Jellica’s body leaned against his for support and he ran a hand down her hair before putting his cheek next to hers. His gut told him the truth. The pain of her ex’s defection was nothing compared to the trauma the stuff in this room had caused her. “This is going to take a while, but I still want to go through it all, even if it nets us nothing but dead ends. At least you’ll know everything afterward.”

  “It’s too much to ask,” Jellica said, shaking her head. “I knew that the moment I saw it all in one room. I have to keep all this paperwork for at least a decade, but at the moment all I want is to put it out of my sight. This was something I survived and it’s over. It’s probably a bad idea to bring it all up again.”

  “Maybe,” Greg said, pulling away to look into her eyes. “But I still want to look at it. Do you trust me?”

  “I don’t know,” Jellica replied.

  “Good thing I speak woo-woo,” Greg joked, slipping a hand between them to take one of hers. He placed it just above her stomach, just under her sternum. His Tai Chi training was being unexpectedly useful. “What do we know, Jellica? We know the fourth chakra energy center controls personal power. The stuff in this room and the secrets no professional told you about are probably blocking you from being your most powerful self. Let me help you release the power the past holds over you. That’s what a true friend would do to help, right?”

  “I… I’m not sure,” Jellica said.

  “Well, I’m sure,” Greg said sternly, calling himself three kinds of idiot for taking on something so overwhelming—and for free no less. “You can tell me no if you want, but your own words to me were that you needed financial advice. Well, this is my advice, Jellica. And going through this stuff to understand it is going to convince your children of the need for financial accountability far more than any words you ever speak to them. Let’s work together and put this to rest once and for all. We have four years to finish. I feel confident we can do it in much less time if we work together.”

  Jellica pulled gently from his arms and took a few steps back. She looked around the room and then stopped to close her eyes.

  Greg stood where he was, watching her enter her meditation. In the hallway, her sons hovered silently. He caught their eyes and lifted a finger to his lips. Two head nods told him everything he needed to know about them. Thinking of them as guard dogs hadn’t been too far off the mark. Well, the youngsters could rest a bit now. A meaner, older dog had come to stay a while.

  Maybe it was five minutes or maybe it was an hour, but eventually Jellica returned to them, her face serene and composed when she opened her eyes. He wished he had that ability to go wherever she’d gone for respite. He was very grateful Jellica possessed it because it had restored beauty to a face previously wilted by a past she’d had to brave alone.

  “Let’s do this,” Greg said again, even though he had no idea how he was going to get it done. The how would just have to take care of itself.

  “Okay,” Jellica said with a nod. “Let’s do this. Where do we start?”

  Greg blew out a breath and looked around. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  Jellica worried her lip as she thought. “I’ll have to look up the date to see…”

  “No,” Greg said softly. “What I mean is that I want to start by looking into the death of your parents. I want to see the police report, the autopsies, and any court rulings around the time you were appointed as executor of their estate.”

  “That’s not in this room,” Jellica said, rolling her now tense shoulders. “Everything from that first year is still in the law office where my ex works. But I’m sure they still have every scrap of paper somewhere. His office never throws anything away. It gets filed in a warehouse.”

  Greg lifted his hands and cracked the knuckles on each fist. How could this possibly get any worse? “Okay. We’ll request copies.”

  “Martin won’t be happy with me asking for them, Greg. He told me to leave it all alone.”

  Greg narrowed his gaze. “I need your signature on a single piece of paper and then there won’t be a damn thing your ex can do to stop you. Those papers belong to you, Jellica, not to him. You need to have copies of everything concerning your parents.”

  Jellica nodded her stomach a ball of dread. “You’re right.”

  Greg walked across the room and pulled her in for a hug again. “My intuition is singing about that ex of yours. Let me look into this. Trust me.”

  “Fine.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. Jellica cleared her throat. “Fine. Let’s do this.”

  “I’ll draw up the request and bring it by for your signature.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. “This is my number if you need to call me.”

  “So that’s what was poking my cheek when I hugged you?”

  “And that’s why I wear a sweater vest. It makes me more huggable. Now you know all my clothing secrets.”

  Jellica clenched the card in her fist and laughed. “Buy a card holder for your back pocket,” she ordered. When Greg smiled down at her, she lifted his business card and scraped the roughness of his evening beard with it. “Your smile definitely makes you much hotter. Do it more often.”

  “Like for homework?” Greg asked.

  “Yes. Smile at women all week. See if they don’t get friendlier,” Jellica ordered.

  Greg wanted to say she was the only woman he was interested in being friendly to at the moment but knew that would fall flat in light of all her other revelations.

  “Okay, Teacher. Whatever you say,” he joked. “Don’t blame me if they start lining up for dates. You’re not going to like it if I get too busy to tackle your little paperwork problem.”

  The sharp rap to his chest muscle was at least promising, even if it did hurt.

  Chapter Nine

  Greg arrived at his office a little late because he’d lost too much time daydreaming that morning as he went through his normal routine. Then he hadn’t been able to wear the stupid sweater vest with a clear conscience, so he’d ended up in a freaking suit. Now he felt caged in and mad at himself for acting as hormonally unstable as someone Eric or Noah’s age.

  At least if he decided to deliver the files request in person, he’d look as uber professional as it was possible to look.

  “Morning, Fran. I’ve got something I want to move to the top of our list.” He handed her a pap
er. “Draw up a request for file acquisition with a ten-day limit. Double the fines if they don’t comply in a timely manner.”

  “Who made you mad?” Fran asked, knowing her boss well.

  “I’m going after someone’s ex who’s a lawyer,” Greg said honestly. He never lied to his assistant. “I’m pretty sure he screwed her over somehow before he divorced her. My gut is sure of it. The statute of limitations hasn’t run on what he handled for her yet. I intend to find out what I can. I’m going to run it by her house to sign. We’ll courier it over to his law office tomorrow—if I don’t hand deliver it today.”

  “Sure,” Fran said, nodding with her chin. “There’s a new client waiting to see you. She was here this morning when I opened up. I let her stay because I recognized her. She’s insisting on seeing you right away.”

  Greg looked at the woman on the couch in his waiting room and laughed at the irony. “Uh… that’s not a new client.”

  Fran glanced at the woman again. “No?”

  “No,” Greg said firmly. “She’s here to see me about my new girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?” Fran asked. “You have a new girlfriend?”

  “Sort of,” Greg said vaguely. “I think I’ll talk to her out here where there are witnesses. Don’t go the bathroom for a while, okay?”

  Fran laughed at her employer’s idea of a joke. “Just smile at the woman, Greg. That always works. You don’t use your secret power often enough.”

  Knowing Jellica would laugh at Fran’s advice did bring a genuine smile to his mouth.

  “Yes. Just like that,” Fran said in encouragement.

  Rolling his eyes, Greg walked to his waiting room. The woman rose from the couch to stare him in the eye. He raised his hand. “I come in peace, Chef Baker. I have no nefarious plans for Jellica. We’re just friends.”

  Trudy crossed her arms. “I don’t believe you.”