Chapter 9
Nine
Most of Jason’s romantic relationships had evolved from situations of convenient proximity… a female executive he’d met at a game-developer conference, or a journalist who’d interviewed him, or a voice actress who’d had to do two hundred hours of recording for an Inari game.
He never let anyone set him up on a blind date, having learned long ago that it was the surest way to kill a friendship. In fact, Jason disliked the very premise of a date, which amounted to making the commitment of an entire evening with someone you didn’t know and most likely wouldn’t want to see again.
His relationships tended to be short-lived. He always ended them by giving the woman a piece of jewelry as a salve for hurt feelings, and it usually worked, except for a couple of times when a woman had told him that the parting gift felt like payment for services rendered. “A fuck-off bracelet,” the last one had called it sourly, sliding the Tiffany diamond bangle onto her slender arm. But she hadn’t given it back.
Justine Hoffman was the first woman he’d met in a long time who he suspected would probably tell him where to shove it, if he gave her a fuck-off present.
Maybe it was just that he’d become so accustomed to receiving admiring attention from women, from having his way too easily and too often, that it was a novelty to encounter a woman who had no desire to become involved with him. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Justine. He kept remembering the way she laughed, throaty and natural, tapering down to a luminous grin. Irresistible.
Jason had already broken one of his personal rules: The woman always had to come to him. Since Justine clearly wasn’t going to do that, he would have to do the pursuing. Another rule was that when he was interested in a woman, he would learn as much as possible about her while at the same time revealing as little as possible about himself. Justine would demand mutual risk, mutual honesty. He wasn’t certain how much he could lower his guard, or to what extent he was capable of opening up to anyone. If he wanted her, however, he would have to try. He’d have to unlock doors that had been closed for so long, he would have trouble even finding the key.
It would be a hell of a lot easier just to walk away. He was good at walking away from things he wanted, ignoring temptation, letting the rational part of his brain override emotion. But once in a blue moon, he encountered something or someone he wanted too badly to deny.
Jason went to the doorstep of the cottage behind the inn at one minute before seven, and knocked.
Justine opened the door, all silk and slender curves. “Hi.” Her smiling gaze ran over him. “Come in.”
Jason obeyed, so mesmerized that he nearly tripped over the threshold. She was wearing a short halter dress made of a thin knit fabric, in a shade of peachy-beige that had given him a brief and startling impression of nudity. Her feet were bare, the toenails polished with pink sparkles. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail with one lock wrapped around the fastener.
“I just need to put my shoes on,” Justine said.
Still staring, Jason responded with a wordless nod as she went into an adjoining room. A miniature hook at the top of her dress zipper had been left undone. He couldn’t help imagining pulling the zipper down, the slithering sound as the fabric opened and fell away from the smooth flesh of her back.
Trying to distract himself from erotic thoughts, he focused on his surroundings. The cottage was small and immaculate. The walls and furniture were painted in pastels, the plump sofa piled with oversized pillows covered in striped or flowered fabric, some trimmed with tassels. It was an unapologetically feminine room, but the distressed paint and touches of antique-shop finds made it comfortable and inviting.
Justine returned, wearing sandals with cobweb-fine straps and kitten heels.
“You look beautiful,” Jason said.
“Thank you.”
“I noticed—” He was forced to break off, the words sticking in his throat. “The hook at the back of your dress—if you’d like me to—” He paused again as he saw her blush. Not an ordinary blush, but a deep infusion of color that swept all the way from the bodice of her dress to her hairline. He wanted to follow that visible heat with his mouth and fingertips, kiss her everywhere.
“Yes, thanks,” Justine said, trying to sound casual, not quite managing. “I couldn’t reach it.”
She turned away from him slowly, gathering the gleaming length of her ponytail over one shoulder. Jason’s gaze passed over the fine musculature of her back, the tender nape of her neck with its nearly invisible dusting of down. She had the build of a dancer, slender and flexible.
The ties of the halter-neck bodice were done in a fragile bow. He hesitated, struggling for self-control. When he was able, he reached for the miniature hook-and-eye closure with the caution of a man defusing a bomb.
His knuckles brushed her silky back as he worked at the hook. He felt her stiffen, and excitement crackled through him like the pinging of metal that had heated too rapidly.
“Done,” he said huskily.
She let her ponytail fall back into place. He wanted to grip the glossy length of it in handfuls, wind it around his palms.
Justine faced him, looking up at him with eyes the color of bittersweet chocolate. Heat underscored the silence in a dark, sweet pulse.
“Where are we going?” Justine asked.
It took him a moment to assemble thought into words. “The Coho Restaurant, if that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, it’s one of my favorites.”
The restaurant was in walking distance, only three blocks from the ferry dock. As Jason accompanied Justine along the quiet sidewalks, he matched his pace to hers, every stride relaxed and unhurried.
They entered the restaurant, a converted Craftsman house that seated only a handful of tables. Gentle flickers of candlelight dappled the white tablecloths. The servers achieved the perfect balance of attentiveness and restraint, appearing at the table when needed, becoming invisible for just the right amount of time.
“Did you have a good meeting with Alex?” Justine asked after the wine was poured.
Jason nodded. “He seems like the right guy for the job.”
“Because…?”
“It’s obvious he cares about the details. His work is good, and he brings projects in on time. And he doesn’t scare easily. We ended the day talking to the lawyers about adding a financial-risk transfer mechanism to the contract. If the project isn’t finished by a specified date, we lose a million-dollar municipal tax credit, and Alex will be on the hook for it. He’s fine with that. He knows he can get it done. I like that kind of confidence.”
Justine looked perturbed. “But if something happens, Alex will be ruined. He wouldn’t be able to come up with a million dollars.”
Jason shrugged. “Big risk, big reward.”
Picking up her wineglass, Justine said, “Well, then. Here’s to obtaining your municipal tax credit.”
Her expression was innocent, but Jason knew when he was being mocked.
“I would have suggested a more lyrical toast,” he said.
“Feel free.”
After a moment, he quoted, “‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’”
Justine gave him an arrested glance. “Who wrote that?”
“Matsuo. A Japanese poet.”
“You read poetry?”
“Sometimes.”
“I didn’t know men did that.”
“Being well read is one of the benefits of insomnia.”
They touched glasses and drank, savoring the berry and smoke flavors of a Willamette pinot noir.
“Alex mentioned that you own the cottage at the end of Dream Lake Road,” Jason said.
A glint of enjoyment appeared in Justine’s eyes, as if she’d been waiting for such a remark. “Why, yes, I do.”
“How did you end up owning it?”
“I never even knew about the cottage until this past summer. Zo?’s grandmother Emma owned it, but no one had lived there for years. It was in terrible shape.” She stared into her wineglass, swirling the bright liquid. “Emma had been diagnosed with vascular dementia, and she was going downhill fast. Zo? wanted to take care of her for the last few months of her life. So I offered to buy the cottage and renovate it, which gave Zo? and Emma some cash and also a rent-free place to stay.”
“That was generous of you.” From what he’d seen of Justine’s finances in a background check, she wasn’t exactly swimming in cash herself.
“It was no big deal,” Justine said. “And Alex outdid himself with the renovations—he threw in a lot of custom stuff we didn’t have to pay for.” A quick smile crossed her face. “Somehow I think that had more to do with Zo? than with me.”
“It doesn’t sound like you have an emotional attachment to the place.”
“I do now that I know you want it,” Justine said demurely, sipping her wine.
Jason grinned and said idly, “I might have an interest in it.”
Her slender fingers slid along the wineglass stem, and his gaze tracked the movement closely. “Does it bother you that there’s one little piece of lakefront you won’t own?”
“I don’t like loose ends,” he admitted. “Have you thought about pricing the house?”
“I haven’t even thought about selling it.”
“I’ll give you a half million for it,” he offered, enjoying the astonished look on her face.
“You’re not serious.” She saw that he was. “My God. No. ”
Jason looked askance at her reaction. “It’s a generous offer.”
“It’s a stupid offer. Why would you offer to pay so much more than it’s worth?”
“Because I can. Why are you offended?”
Justine let out an exasperated breath. “Maybe because an offer like that could be construed as trying to buy someone.”
That reached down to the cynicism that was never far beneath the surface, and Jason found himself saying, “You’re not going to argue the fact that everyone has a price, I hope.”
“No. But you can’t afford my price.”
“I have a lot of money,” he countered.
“My price has nothing to do with money.” She stared at him with a bruised gravity that touched him. “And don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t try to impress me with your oversized wallet. It’s annoying. And it’s not fair to either of us.”
Jason gazed at her for a long moment. “I apologize,” he said gently.
Her face relaxed. “It’s okay.”
Conversation paused as the server brought their entrées. They had both ordered halibut sheathed in potato crust and doused with chardonnay cream sauce, accented with the crackle of fried basil leaves.
As they enjoyed the fresh, perfectly prepared food, they turned the discussion to their families. They quickly found they had something in common: Neither of them had one. In response to Justine’s tentative questions, Jason told her about the point in his life when everything had fallen apart, midway through his sophomore year at USC.
“It started when I realized I was never going to be more than competent at college ball,” he said. “I didn’t have the instinct that makes a competent player into a great one.” He smiled wryly. “And on top of that, I’d become obsessed with game design. Whenever I was working out or going through conditioning drills, all I could think about was when I’d get a chance to hang out in the campus digital media lab.” Catching the stem of his wineglass between his fingertips, Jason traced along it slowly, remembering. “So I went home at Christmas to tell my parents I was dropping out of the football program. I would pay my own way—I’d already written and sold a 2-D game, so I had a foot in the door. But the second I saw my mother, I forgot all about my personal crap. In two months, she’d turned into a skeleton.”
“Why?” Justine asked softly.
“She’d been diagnosed with liver cancer. She hadn’t told me. Refused treatment of any kind. That kind of cancer moves like a freight train. She died within a week of that visit.”
College hadn’t mattered after that. Nothing had mattered. He’d left school and home and everything familiar, in the attempt to find meaning in something.
“I’m so sorry,” Justine said.
He gave a quick shake of his head, not wanting sympathy. “It was a long time ago.”
Her hand crept toward his. Jason let his hand open naturally, palm exposed. Her touch was tentative, warm.
“What about your dad?” Justine asked. “Do you see him at all now?”
Jason shook his head, still staring at their adjoined hands. “If I did, I might kill him.”
Her fingers stilled against his palm. “He was a bad father?” she asked in a neutral tone.
Jason hesitated before answering. You could either describe a man like his father with a hundred thousand words, or one. “Violent.”
As a residential plumber, Ray Black had had no shortage of work supplies to use in disciplining an unruly son: wrenches, pipes, brass chains, flexible plumbing line. Jason had endured more than a few emergency-room visits, joking with the nurses and doctors about what a clumsy teenager he was, always getting contusions and fractures. High school football injuries. Got his bell rung again, that was contact sports for you.
“Your father knows he went too far. He promised it won’t happen again. Smile and say it was an accident.”
And Jason had done what his mother asked, smiling and lying, knowing it was far from the last time. Knowing also that the way to be as different as possible from Ray was never to lose control.
“Before my mother died,” he heard himself say, “she asked me to forgive and forget. But so far I haven’t managed to do either.”
There were no reserves of forgiveness left in him. The details of his childhood were as indelible as headstone engravings. He remembered things he didn’t want to remember. Although no one could understand him without knowing at least some of those details, he’d never brought himself to confide in anyone. His past was not something to be used as a bargaining chip to force someone’s sympathy. And so far he hadn’t seen any benefit in having someone understand him.
Justine’s fingers slid across the inside of his wrist, rubbing lightly as if she could feel his heartbeat. “I haven’t managed it, either,” she said. “My mother and I are estranged. We blame each other. She can’t forgive me for—” A helpless pause. “So many things. Mostly she can’t forgive me for not wanting her life.”
“Which is?”
“Oh…” Justine shrugged and looked away from him, her smile evasive. When her gaze cut back to his, she seemed to look at him through a hedge of secrets. “She’s… different.”
“Different how?”
“She’s very committed to what you might call an alternative religion.” Another weighted pause. “Nature based.”
“She’s Wiccan?”
“Sort of beyond that.”
Jason stared at her alertly.
Her hand began to pull away, but Jason closed his fingers over hers in a gentle snare.
“I was raised pagan,” she said. “Most of my childhood was spent at psychic festivals, spirit gatherings, magical arts meetings, drum circles… I even marched in a couple of pagan pride parades. I’m sure it looked pretty crazy to outsiders. It looked crazy from the inside, too.” Justine smiled and tried to sound light, but a vein showed on the porcelain surface of her forehead, a delicate blue longitude of tension. “I was always different,” she said. “I hated it.”
Jason wanted to touch her face, smooth away the signs of distress. Instead he let his thumb skim her knuckles in soothing strokes.
“At Halloween,” Justine continued, “I never got to dress up in a costume and go trick-or-treating. Instead I had to go to a Samhain dinner and sit next to empty plates set for the spirits of deceased relatives.”
His brows lifted slightly. “Did any of them show up?”
“I can’t tell you, or you’d freak out and run away.”
“Not before dessert.” He paused. “I’m getting the impression that your paganism involved some elements of… witchcraft?”
She blanched and kept silent.
To her astonishment, his eyes contained a glint of irreverent humor. “So are you a good witch,” he asked, “or a bad witch?”
Recognizing the quote from The Wizard of Oz, Justine tried to smile but couldn’t. “I’d rather not be labeled.”
She had told him too much. And even worse, it had all been true. What was it about him that turned her into such a blabbermouth? Feeling vaguely ill, she tried to pull her hand away again, but Jason wouldn’t let her.
“Justine,” he said quietly. “Wait. Can I just say something?… I’ve spent the past ten years creating complex fantasy worlds full of dragons and ogres. It’s the kind of job that a normal person couldn’t do. A couple of my closest friends, who both happen to work with me, have been known to wear pointy latex ears or hobbit feet to office meetings. And as I’ve already told you, I’m a pathological workaholic insomniac with no soul. So a little dabbling in the black arts during your spare time is hardly a problem for me.”
Justine was afraid to believe him. But she stopped trying to pull away. And the sick feeling was fading. Her fingers were tucked firmly in his now; she wasn’t going to let go.
Neither of them were.