Chapter 32 Above the Clouds #2
She awkwardly stood at the vanity in her jeans and t-shirt, running a borrowed comb through damp hair, dragging out each tangle as much as she was dragging out the time. The shadows beneath her eyes had softened and that pinched tension she’d carried in her jaw for weeks had finally disappeared.
Jack appeared behind her, meeting her gaze in the mirror.
Dark jeans sat low on his hips, and a black dress shirt hung open at the collar, exposing the hollow of his throat and the first inches of scarred chest beneath.
His grey eyes held hers as he stepped behind her, not stopping until his body touched hers.
Her pulse quickened for reasons she couldn’t blame on proximity alone. She set down the comb, afraid that this was the start of an unwanted goodbye.
“I have something for you.” His warmth radiated through the thin cotton of her t-shirt.
“Something for me?”
“I should have sent it to you weeks ago, but…” His voice trailed off.
“What is it?” She couldn’t imagine what else he could possibly give her.
His hands rose slowly, passing over her head, and a delicate gold chain caught the light. Her breath seized in her throat as tears sprang to her eyes.
“My locket!”
“It was returned to me the night of the Feast.” His voice was quiet, almost reverent, as though he understood the gravity of what he held between his fingers.
He gathered her damp hair with one hand, lifting the weight of it from her neck with utter care. His knuckles grazed the nape of her neck as he draped the chain against her skin, and the cool kiss of gold settling into the familiar hollow of her collarbone flooded her with a sense of homecoming.
He worked the tiny clasp with patience that contradicted the size of his hands. His breath teased her skin, awakening her body once more. When the closure caught, he smoothed her hair, his palms trailing the length of it with a gentleness so deliberate it made her heart clench.
His hands lingered on her shoulders.
Daisy lifted the locket from her chest and pressed the tiny clasp with her thumbnail. The oval face opened and her mother smiled up at her, unchanged, undamaged, that familiar sepia warmth radiating from the photograph as though Pamela Burdan herself had been waiting patiently to be found.
She closed the locket and wrapped her fingers around it, pressing the warm metal into her palm. “Thank you.” The words were wholly inadequate for what he had returned to her.
She turned in his arms and kissed him, softly, her free hand resting against his open collar where his pulse beat steady and strong beneath her fingertips.
Her lips parted from his in reluctant increments, and the quiet that settled between them carried a different texture than the charged silence of the bedroom.
Softer. More uncertain.
The kind of stillness that preceded questions a person wasn’t sure they had the right to ask.
His face was so close she could count the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the places where years of guarded expression had carved themselves into his skin.
He’d given her back a piece of her past, and that made her think of how little she knew about his.
Six years old. Eight years of suffering before he escaped whatever monster tortured him.
The mathematics of his pain were staggering, and the more she considered them, the more one detail snagged like a thorn in her mind.
“Jack, was R.A. a relative?” The people closest to children were often the ones who did the most damage.
His expression shuttered. “No.” His voice flattened to something clinical. “I don’t have a father.”
“Oh.”
The syllable hung between them, insufficient and clumsy. She could feel him receding, retreating into the fortified interior he had spent decades constructing, and the distance that opened between them in that small, awful pause felt wider than the weeks that had separated them.
“I… Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
He studied her face with those perceptive silver eyes, reading the questions she was holding back the way he read everything about her, with an accuracy that left her nowhere to hide.
Without a word, he took her hand and led her from the bathroom to the bed, where he sat on the edge and pulled her down beside him.
“Ask.” His knee pressed against hers. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded, ruthless determination rolling off him in waves. “I don’t want any secrets between us.”
She hesitated, sorting through the tangle of things she wanted to understand, discarding the questions that felt too invasive for an afternoon this gentle.
“Did you have a mother?”
The pain that flashed through his eyes was sharp and immediate, a flinch he couldn’t mask quickly enough.
“I did. She died twelve years ago.”
“Oh, Jack.” Thinking of her own grief, she caught his hand. “I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be.” His tone carried no bitterness or self-pity. “She was a terrible mother.” His judgement was flat, the calcified surface of a wound that had scarred over long ago.
Protectiveness immediately overtook her sympathy. She didn’t ask why she was a terrible mother, because the way he said it told her everything.
Whatever his mother had done or failed to do, the verdict had been rendered years ago by a boy who needed a protector and clearly didn’t have one.
“How did she die?”
“Drugs.” He turned his palm in hers and gripped, his fingers closing around hers with a pressure that spoke louder than words. “She was an addict.”
“Well, I’m sorry she wasn’t there for you.”
His thumb moved across her knuckles in absent strokes. “Can I show you something? Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
The question carried more vulnerability than he probably intended, a flicker of the boy who had learned early on that people left when he needed them most.
“I’m exactly where I want to be.” She squeezed his hand. “What do you want to show me?”
“I just have to get my keys.”
Jack moved to the dresser and rummaged through a crystal dish on top, slipping his wallet into his pocket, followed by a tiny fob. When he picked up his gold ring, he paused.
The engraved initials caught the sun, glinting like the blade of a knife.
Daisy watched from the edge of the bed as his jaw tightened. She could see the war in the stillness of his hand, how his thumb traced the familiar groove of the letters like a tongue returns to a broken tooth.
That ring didn’t just live on his finger, it shackled him to a brutal past.
Her chest tightened the longer he looked at it.
Then, slowly, he set it back in the dish with a quiet click that resonated like a glacial shift.
He turned to her, hand bare with a pale indent where the ring had lived. There was a tentativeness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“I’m ready.”
She rose from the bed and crossed the room, proud of him. She didn’t stop until her arms closed around him in a tight hug. “I love you.”
He kissed the top of her head, his arms tightening around her. “Never stop, okay?”
“Okay.”
He took her hand and led her downstairs, pausing only to grab a jacket from the hook by the door. “In case you get cold.”
She smiled at his thoughtfulness.
Outside, the afternoon sun had climbed past the peak of the house, casting the driveway in shadows. He paused at the sight of her rental.
“Yours?”
“For now. I haven’t bought anything permanent yet.”
Jack opened the passenger door of a black Bentley parked beneath a limestone awning and waited for her to settle in before closing it with a soft, decisive click.
“Well,” she said when he climbed in behind the wheel. “This is much nicer than my rental.”
He glanced back at her little Kia as he backed up. “It better be.”
They crossed the long bridge that connected the island to the mainland, the Bentley gliding over asphalt while the sea glittered on either side in shades of pewter and glass.
Jack drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her thigh, his thumb tracing absent patterns on the faded denim as the Isles of Kassel shrank in the rearview mirror.
“You know,” she said, breaking the silence. “Kassel isn’t on Google Maps.”
“It’s a perk. Pay enough, and you can distort any reality.”
“I had to bribe the man who answered the phone at the Seeds of Hope place to give me your address.”
He frowned. “What did you offer?”
“I told him to name his price.”
“And what did he say?”
“That’s between him and me.”
“It absolutely is not. Nick’s my employee.”
“He told me his name was Mr. Carrow.”
“Yes. Nick Carrow. And if you don’t tell me what his price was, I’m firing him tonight.”
She hated to betray the man who had been so helpful to her on the phone, but she also didn’t want to see him punished for helping her. “If I tell you, you have to promise not to say anything. I don’t want him getting in any trouble.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“That’s not the point. We formed an alliance of sorts.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
She smiled triumphantly. “He assigned me a book and made me give him my word I’d read it.”
Jack’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Which book?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.”
“Of course he did,” Jack muttered, clearly annoyed but not angry.
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it?”
He hesitated. “I found it relatable.”
“How so?”
“You’ll understand when you read it.” He gave her a sideways glance and smirked. “Do your own homework.”
She crinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue. “Fine.” But after another long stretch of road, she asked, “Is Nick more than some guy you hired to run the foundation, Jack?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“My mentor and closest friend.”
She settled in her seat, letting that little tidbit sink in. Another magical puzzle piece to clarify the mystery that was Jack Thorne.