Chapter 47
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Fiona
I sat up so quickly that Jasper’s arm slipped from around my shoulders and landed across the back of the couch. For several seconds, I could only stare at him, trying to decide whether I had heard him correctly or whether exhaustion had finally scrambled something in my head.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer right away. Of course he didn’t.
Jasper had a maddening talent for looking directly at me while deciding exactly how much truth he intended to give me.
He never lied. I’d figured that out months ago.
He simply chose his words with enough care that sometimes it took me hours to realize he had answered a completely different question to the one I asked.
“Home,” he finally said.
Nebraska.
My stomach tightened at the thought, but not in the way it would have a year ago.
Nebraska had stopped being some abstract place in the middle of the country.
It was Diamond Creek. The clubhouse. King and Grace and everyone else whose names had slowly become familiar through Jasper’s stories.
It was snow deeper than I wanted to think about, an imaginary kitchen he insisted needed windows facing east, and a porch we had argued about even though neither of us owned the house attached to it.
It was also miles from everything I knew.
I looked toward the staircase, automatically listening for any movement from Granny’s room.
In a blink, I was back in the parking lot.
Cold brick against my shoulder. Fingers digging into my wrist. The horrible weight of another body trapping mine.
My skin crawled beneath clothes that had already been changed, as if that man’s hands had somehow stayed behind when everything else had been washed away.
Jasper saw it happen. His expression changed and his hand settled against the side of my neck, his thumb moving once beneath my ear. “Don’t go back there, Ma Belle.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“I know.” His gaze stayed on mine while his fingers continued that slow movement, giving me something else to concentrate on. “But before you go upstairs and start throwing shit in a bag because I told you to, I need an answer from you.”
That should have annoyed me. Under almost any other circumstances, it would have. Instead, I noticed the way he was watching me. The confident Cajun who’d been flirting for months was gone, and in his place was a scared man.
“What answer?”
His mouth curved slightly. “You know damn well what answer.”
I did. That was the problem.
He shifted toward me, resting one arm along the back of the couch while his other hand remained against my neck.
“I’m done pretending, Fiona. Been done for a long fucking time, if I’m being truthful, but I kept telling myself you needed room to figure out what you wanted without me standing over you acting like the possessive asshole I am. ”
A breath escaped me that almost became a laugh. “You hid that really well.”
“I thought so.” The brief spark in his eyes faded almost as quickly as it appeared.
“I’m serious, baby. I need to know if you’re ready for me to stop holding back.
Not tonight because you’re scared. Not because some motherfucker put his hands on you and now you think you owe me something because I showed up.
I need to know if this is what you wanted before tonight. ”
The answer came easily.
Everything around it didn’t.
I had wanted Jasper before I was brave enough to admit I wanted him.
When he sent me flowers for Valentine’s Day.
When I waited for his texts every morning and pretended I didn’t notice if they were late.
I wanted him when he showed up at prom in a tuxedo and turned a night I’d expected to endure into one I would remember forever.
I wanted him when I kissed him in September and learned just how much restraint a man could have while kissing me back like he had spent months imagining it.
I wanted the ridiculous imaginary house.
The arguments about Christmas lights and landscaping.
Wanted to know what his face looked like first thing in the morning and whether he was as irritating before coffee as he was after it.
I wanted things with Jasper I had stopped letting myself imagine with anyone.
But every one of those wants had Charlie standing behind it.
“I’m ready,” I whispered.
Jasper searched my face. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find it because the tension around his mouth eased. “Ready to be mine?”
There was something outrageous about the question. Something very Jasper about believing possession could sound like a promise when it came out of his mouth.
I should have made him work harder for it.
Instead, my fingers slid into his. “I think I’ve been yours since we met.”
His smile was slow and devastating, the kind I had seen him use on women without meaning anything by it and somehow still managed to look completely different when it belonged to me. Before I could lose my nerve, I tightened my hand around his and forced myself to keep talking.
“Jasper, there’s something you need to know first.”
The smile faded.
My heart started beating too fast, and this time it had nothing to do with the parking lot. I had imagined telling him about Charlie so many times that the words should have been familiar by now, but sitting beside him with his hand wrapped around mine, every version I had rehearsed disappeared.
Jasper watched my face as I tried to find the least terrifying place to begin, and then his free hand slid into my hair and he kissed me.
It wasn’t the hungry kiss I had imagined after our conversation two nights ago.
There was no teasing in it and no attempt to push me anywhere I wasn’t ready to go.
His mouth moved against mine slowly, warmly, until the frantic thoughts battering around inside my head quieted enough for me to breathe again.
When he pulled back, he stayed close enough that his nose brushed mine. “Whatever has you looking at me like you’re waiting for me to disappear can wait.”
“But you don’t know what it is.”
“Nope.”
“It could change things.”
His eyebrow rose. “Are you secretly a black widow?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Black widow. You know, sweet little thing that lures an unsuspecting handsome Cajun into her web, marries him, bumps him off, collects his millions.”
“You don’t have millions.”
“See? Already poking holes in your plan.”
A laugh slipped out before I could stop it, and Jasper looked absurdly pleased with himself. I shoved lightly at his chest, but he caught my hand and pressed it there instead, holding my palm over his heart.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“So am I.” The humor remained around his mouth, but his eyes didn’t leave mine.
“Unless you’re planning to marry me for my nonexistent fortune and murder me in my sleep, there isn’t a damn thing you can tell me that’s gonna keep me from claiming you.
Whatever it is, you tell me when you’re ready.
Not because you’re scared I’ll change my mind if you don’t get it out before we leave. ”
The words should have made it easier.
They didn’t.
They made me want to tell him more.
That frightened me almost as much as the possibility of his reaction because there had been a time when Charlie belonged to the quietest, most guarded part of me.
He wasn’t something I discussed. He was a little boy I loved from a careful distance, wrapped inside a family structure that allowed him to grow up knowing Frank and Claudia as his parents while I stood close enough to watch.
Jasper had already seen pictures of him. He had teased me about how many photos I kept on my phone and listened when I talked about my nephew without ever realizing the word nephew carried an entire history beneath it.
I lowered my eyes to where my hand still rested over his heart. “Okay.”
Packing took less time than it should have because I had no idea what I was packing for.
Jasper remained downstairs while I changed into jeans, a sweater, and boots, then shoved clothes into a duffel with hands that occasionally stopped working whenever my mind wandered back to the parking lot.
I added toiletries, my charger, another sweater, then stood in the middle of my room staring at everything I owned and wondering what a person was supposed to take when a man told her to pack a bag because she was becoming his.
Before I left the room, I looked at the framed photograph on my dresser.
Charlie was laughing at something outside the frame; his whole face crinkled with it. Frank had sent me the picture a few months earlier, and I printed it because some things deserved more than a phone screen.
I touched the edge of the frame.
“Soon,” I whispered.
I didn’t know when I would find the courage, but Jasper deserved to know the truth about Charlie. Not because anything about Charlie’s life was going to change. Frank and Claudia were his parents. That had never been a question for me.
The only thing that would change was Jasper finally knowing that the little boy I called my nephew was also the son I had given birth to. And how he would feel about me when he knew the truth.
I slipped down the stairs and left a note for Granny on the table.
She would panic if she woke and found me gone.
It felt cowardly sneaking out while she slept, but the thought of standing through another conversation about why I was leaving made my chest tighten.
I didn’t have enough pieces of myself put back together yet to survive Granny’s questions on top of my own.
Outside, Jasper secured my bag to his bike and handed me a helmet.
That was when I realized I wasn’t taking my car.
I stared at the motorcycle, then at him. “How far is home?”
His grin appeared much too quickly. “Get on, Ma Belle.”
I should have known.