Chapter 9 #2
She was starting to appreciate that Jack Wexler might not be the stereotypical, overprivileged rich guy she’d first made him out to be. At least, he was more than that.
And, it had to be said, she’d enjoyed the way his eyes had widened at the sight of her when she’d arrived.
Zoe had been totally right about the sweater.
It was a particularly empowering feeling, to know she could make a man like Jack Wexler look at her in such obvious and undisguised admiration.
It didn’t mean anything, of course, and she was pretty sure this still wasn’t a date.
But… her feminine confidence had taken a bruising over the last few decades, and it was nice to get a little of it back, however briefly.
She’d also appreciated just how nicely Jack Wexler cleaned up, but then he pretty much always looked good.
When she’d caught sight of him looking so freshly ironed and fantastic, and yet with that little nick on his jaw that made her think he must have cut himself shaving, which made her like him all the more—well, she’d reacted with a fizzy sense of expectation.
This might not be a date, but it was starting to feel like one.
“This place is pretty huge,” she remarked as Jack led her through the enormous foyer, complete with a massive chandelier, marble floor, and a double staircase curving up to a landing. “Do you get lost in it?”
“I only go in a few rooms, to be fair,” Jack replied.
He opened a pair of bi-fold doors that led to an equally huge living room, with white leather sofas scattered artfully in front of a massive stone fireplace laid with a few tastefully varnished logs.
Everything about the house was built on a grand scale—it was a cross between a castle and a ski lodge, and it could probably sleep twenty, if not more.
Jenna thought she would feel lonely, rattling around in all those rooms, beautiful as they were. Did Jack?
“Why did you buy such a big place?” she asked curiously. “Do you have six kids tucked away upstairs, or are you just planning on hosting huge house parties?” She smiled playfully. “Invite your jet-setting friends over every other weekend?”
He laughed wryly, although his eyes suddenly looked sad, the corners drooping, and she half-wished she hadn’t made the joke. “Nope,” he said as he ushered her out of the room. “No kids and no house parties. And”—he paused as he closed the doors with a click—“no jet-setting friends, as it happens.”
“What about all your city friends, though?” Jenna pressed, wanting to know more about him. “They must like to travel, even if it’s just to northwestern Connecticut.”
“The funny thing about those,” he told her as he walked across the foyer to the dining room, which was equally impressive with a table that looked like it seated sixteen, “is that they tend to be city friends. Once you lose your status there, they’re not so interested.”
Ouch . “Is that what happened?” Jenna asked quietly. She was surprised to feel a stirring of pity as well as sympathy for him. She certainly knew what it felt like when someone dropped you. Hard. She just had assumed Jack, with all his success and self-assuredness, didn’t.
He stared at the empty table, a stretch of ebony that was made for dinner parties it didn’t seem like he would ever have.
“Pretty much,” he replied with a shrug, his gaze sliding away from hers.
“I’ve become irrelevant in that world, now that I’m retired.
I get it, because when people left Wall Street, I treated them the same way.
When your work is so intense, and it’s basically your whole life, well, it’s hard to remember the people who got out of the rat race.
” He sighed and then smiled, although it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’m trying not to take it personally.”
“Still…” She thought of his remark when they first met about how small towns were supposed to be so welcoming, and a sharp pang of guilt assailed her at how nasty she’d been.
Had he still been reeling then, from such an abrupt change in his life?
“You know, now I really feel like a big meanie,” she confessed suddenly, the lightness dropping from her voice.
“Being so rude to you before. It sounds like you could have used a kinder welcome. I should have been more understanding.”
Jack shrugged. “I think I deserved it. Well, some of it, anyway. Besides, clean slate, remember?” He smiled down at her, his eyes crinkling, and when Jenna breathed in, she inhaled the scent of his cologne, which smelled citrusy and expensive and made her head spin.
Jack moved past her to step out of the dining room.
“Next up is my study, which is a room I actually use, so it might be a little more interesting than these set pieces.” He gestured similarly to the room they’d just left.
“Well, now I’m really curious,” Jenna teased. She was flirting, she realized, and she didn’t mind.
Jack led her down a narrow hallway to the study, a classically male room, all leather and mahogany, with nautical maps gracing the walls.
Jenna stepped closer to study one. She’d assumed the whole place had been decorated by some anonymous interior designer, as Jack had intimated; it had that feel, elegant but somewhat soulless.
But these maps, she saw, were well-used and wrinkled, with routes outlined in red marker.
“What are these?” she asked as she turned around to glance at him. “They don’t look like they were chosen by some woman in a white silk pantsuit named Helena, or whoever did your interior decorating.”
He laughed softly as he stepped closer to her. “Actually, her name was Pippa, and I don’t remember what she wore.” His shoulder was almost brushing hers, and Jenna felt a tingle up her arm as if it was. “These are maps of the sailing trips I’ve taken over the years, with my dad.”
“You sail?” she asked, before wincing at how dumb a question that obviously was.
“Yep, although not too much recently.” He grimaced. “Too busy.”
“But with your dad…?”
A shadow came over his face as he glanced back at the maps. “Yeah, my dad and I used to go on a sailing trip every summer. We started with day sails and then moved up to some bigger trips. When I was little, I loved it. Highlight of the whole year, hands down. But then I became a teenager…”
“And you didn’t love anything,” Jenna filled in gently. She remembered those angst-filled days.
“Yeah, especially not something as boring as messing around on a battered old boat with my old man.” He sighed, his eyes still shadowed with regret.
“He died when I was in my twenties, and I always regretted not having gone on one more sail with him. I’d always said I would, but then I’d put it off.
I started sailing solo, kind of in his memory.
” He nodded toward some of the other maps.
“Not too often, but I liked taking the time out.”
Jenna stepped closer to one of the maps to trace the line in red with one finger, impressed. These were not short journeys. “You sailed all the way from New York to Florida?”
Jack laughed softly, sounding both bemused and proud. “Yeah.”
Jenna turned to face him, even more impressed. “And you sail alone?” she clarified. That sounded brave… and lonely. Kind of like living in this house… but maybe Jack preferred it that way.
He nodded. “All my trips were solo.”
That took some skill, as well as courage. “Wow, I’m impressed,” she told him sincerely.
“Well, it was kind of my downtime. So I could get away from it all, you know, for just a few days.”
“Seriously. I guess when you decide to do something, you don’t do it by half.” He gave a slightly abashed, smiling sort of shrug that was kind of adorable. “So, what’s your next big trip?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t think there will be one,” he replied after a moment. “Not for a while, anyway. Can’t exactly sail solo for four or five days when you might keel over with a heart attack.” Jenna thought he’d tried to sound flippant, but he hadn’t quite managed it.
She frowned. A heart attack sounded way more serious than anything she’d been envisioning, although considering he’d been forced to retire, maybe she should have expected something like that. “I thought you’d had an ulcer?” she asked uncertainly.
“Well, that too, but trust me, there is nothing more boring than some worn-out middle-aged man droning on about his health problems, so…” Gently he touched her shoulder to steer her out of the room, and Jenna resisted the impulse to shiver under that light touch.
“I wouldn’t call you worn out,” she teased as they walked back to the foyer, sensing that Jack wanted the conversation back on lighter footing. “Especially since you’ve sailed around the world. Also Zoe informed me tonight that you made your first million when you were, like, eleven or something.”
He chuckled at that, which she was glad of. She realized she didn’t like seeing that look of sadness in his eyes, like some essential spark had gone out. “A little older than that, but all that’s in the past, so…” He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “Worn-out middle-aged man it is.”
“You still can’t convince me.” She realized she sounded flirtatious again, and she took a sip of wine to cover her own confusion.
All right, she was attracted to this man, mainly because he was gorgeous and way more interesting than she’d first given him credit for.
But beyond that? Did she even need to think beyond that, at least for now?
Maybe she should just enjoy this evening for whatever it was…
even if that felt kind of terrifying, all of a sudden.
“Do you want to see the upstairs?” Jack asked, with absolutely no innuendo in his voice, but Jenna blushed anyway. Considering the recent nature of her own thoughts, she didn’t think she could handle seeing Jack Wexler’s bedroom, even if she was intensely curious about it.
“Maybe later,” she said, and then realized how that sounded. She could feel her face turning as red as her sweater.
Jack laughed softly, his blue, blue gaze moving slowly over her. “I’m guessing that didn’t come out the way you meant it to.”
“No,” she agreed with a shaky laugh as every part of her tingled, “and the unfortunate thing about being a redhead is your blush gives you away every time.”
“I like it,” Jack told her. His gaze was still resting on her, thoughtful but also… admiring? At least it felt like it, and it was making her blush all the more. “It’s like an emotional monitor.”
“Yeah, one I can’t control.”
“All the better,” he assured her. “A little honesty is refreshing. When I was working on Wall Street, everyone was so devious and manipulative, always out for the main chance. It was a seriously cutthroat world. I loved it, but now that I’ve been out of it for a little while…
well, I still miss it, a lot even, but I wonder if I should.
” He shrugged, seeming almost embarrassed by the admission, like he’d said more than he’d meant to.
“Anyway, enough philosophizing,” he continued with a quick smile.
“You came here to talk about business, right?”
Jenna made a face. “I think I’d prefer talking about philosophy.
” And she wanted to learn more about him, because he really was far more interesting than she’d realized.
“I have a suspicion you’re going to tell me my store sucks, and you’ll probably be right.
” She sighed, feeling dispirited for the first time that night.
As exciting as it was to have Jack look at her in admiration, and to feel like they were flirting, the truth remained…
Miller’s Mercantile was going down the drain.
“I certainly wouldn’t say it like that,” Jack told her as they walked into the kitchen. He’d laid one end of the huge oak table for two, complete with plates, silverware, glasses, and linen napkins. It looked both intimate and elegant.
“Full disclosure,” he called back as he headed to the oven.
“I didn’t feel, considering our history, that I could buy anything readymade at the deli in Litchfield, so I actually made dinner, which you might regret.
I’m not a great cook. In fact, I’m not a cook at all.
I strictly ate take-outs for most of my adult life. ”
“You cooked?” Jenna was both touched and impressed. “I’m honored.”
“As long as I don’t give you food poisoning…” He took a covered cast-iron dish out of the oven and lifted the lid to eye its contents dubiously.
Jenna put her wineglass on one end of the enormous marble island. She was enjoying the sight of Jack Wexler with a pot in his hands, looking adorably uncertain. “What did you cook?”
“Mushroom barley risotto. I had a sudden crisis about whether you were vegetarian. And full disclosure, as I’ve droned on about before, I have to be careful about what I eat.” He grimaced, and she laughed softly.
“I eat everything, but risotto sounds delicious.” She really was touched that he’d cooked for her. It was just about the last thing she would have expected from what she’d thought Jack Wexler was.
He was surprising her in all sorts of ways tonight, and she’d only been here for half an hour. What, Jenna wondered with a thrill of anticipation, would the rest of the evening hold?