Chapter 4 #2
It was the kind of place where even the silence was expensive, where the air had that just-polished, barely-lived-in hush that made her want to tiptoe.
But beneath the surface, the suite throbbed with something vibrant and alive.
The far wall was glass from floor to ceiling, offering a view of the city so glittering it looked photoshopped.
Past the living space, she glimpsed a terrace with a lap pool bordered by clusters of potted olive trees.
Jenna followed the line of sight until she saw the shadowy profiles of hills beyond the city lights, unfamiliar and menacing, as if the world itself held its breath here.
D moved with unspoken confidence, leading her past an inset library with built-in shelves filled with actual books, not just decorative ones, and a media lounge with a screen so large it looked like a window to another dimension.
He showed her to a dining area furnished with a live-edge wood table and sculptural chairs, then a kitchen so gleaming and high-tech it looked almost fake, as if set-dressed for a magazine shoot rather than a midnight snack.
“This is comped?”
“Yep. There are three bedrooms,” he said, his voice low, reverberating off marble and glass. “Five baths. There’s an office, a gym, and the rooftop level is all yours if you want it. I’ll show you.”
She let out a forced laugh. “I can barely remember where the front door is. I think I need a map.”
D smiled, just the left corner of his mouth twitching up, as if mapping were something he’d already considered.
“I can draw you one, if needed.” He motioned for her to follow, and she did, lagging a few steps behind as her eyes darted from suede upholstery to hand-blown glass vases to a wall-sized, kinetic piece of art that seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat.
He led her down a hallway, the floor covered in a muted Persian runner, past two guest rooms, each more luxurious than the penthouse suite she’d once splurged on for Bree’s Vegas bachelorette.
Holy shit.
She froze, and her heart, her stomach, her soul felt like they plummeted from her body. Tanner. How had she not thought about Tanner?
D must have noticed that she was no longer following him because he glanced over his shoulder.
What he saw caused him to turn all the way around and take a large stride to close the distance between them.
He stopped so close in front of her she was staring directly at his chest and had to tilt her head back to a 90-degree angle just to see his face.
“Are you okay?” His eyes searched her face as if trying to find clues. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Sorry, I just…” She shook her head. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t think about Bree or James.
She hated going back on a rule she made for herself.
She was a stickler for that sort of thing.
Some even labeled it a compulsion, if she set a rule or boundary, that was it, no crossing it or breaking it.
But she’d give herself a pass tonight, it had been a fairly extraordinary day.
“I just remembered Bree’s husband in all of this.
I can’t believe I didn’t even think about Tanner.
I’ll be fine. James and I have only been together seven years, and I’m…
well me. But Tanner. Bree and Tanner have been together since senior year of high school, and he’s Tanner.
He adores Bree, she’s his whole world. I can’t believe all I thought about was myself. ”
D’s dark brows furrowed as he stared down at her, and he breathed, “Wow.”
“I know.” She took a deep breath and exhaled.
His lips curled at the edges slightly, as if something amused him.
“What?!” she barked, somewhat aggressively.
“I wasn’t saying wow because I agreed with you. I was saying, wow, are you always this hard on yourself?”
“I’m not.” She shook her head and took a step back as all of her emotional defense lasers activated, protecting her heart like it was the Fabergé egg in the Ocean’s Twelve movie. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know me.”
He shrugged casually, clearly taking no offense. “Maybe, maybe not.”
She noted two things in his response to her reaction.
One, he didn’t agree with her when she said he didn’t know her, which was odd since they didn’t even know each other’s full names.
Or, at least she didn’t think D was his full name, and he hadn’t asked her name.
James insisted on calling her Jen, so she knew he didn’t know her name.
Two, he wasn’t reactive. She’d snapped at him and been cold to him, and both times his behavior towards her hadn’t changed at all.
That was rare in men, at least the men she knew.
It was a quality she’d taken for granted in her first husband, probably because they’d been off and on since they were fourteen.
She’d promised herself years ago, after being with James for a while, “Self, if we’re ever single again, we will never be with a reactive man.”
His eyes studied her. “So, if your daughter had been through what you went through today—”
“She would never—” Jenna stopped herself mid-blurt. She really needed to get a head-to-mouth filter.
“She would never what?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He stared down at her, waiting.
He could wait all night, she was never going to say out loud the words that had nearly escaped her mouth, which were, “She would never marry a man like James, I would never let her.”
That’s not great. The fact that her first reaction was that she would never let her daughter marry a man like her husband.
And the thing was, it had nothing to do with his behavior today.
It was based on his behavior throughout their marriage.
She would burn everything down before she’d allow Blake to be in a marriage like she’d been in with James.
How had that never dawned on her before?
“Okay, she would never,” he continued. “But if hypothetically she’d been in your exact situation, that’s what you think she should feel. That she should be upset at herself after her mom passed away, and she discovered her husband and best friend cheating on the same da—’
“Hey, I’m the mom in this,” Jenna interrupted, trying to distract him because she got his point and didn’t want to admit he was right. She wasn’t the biggest fan of admitting when other people were right.
“No, you’re not,” he corrected her. “Because in this scenario, she is you. So she would have had your life.”
Just hearing those words caused Jenna’s stomach to cramp with nausea and the breath to be stolen from her lungs. Blake would never have had her life. She would die, kill before that would happen. Tears formed in her eyes, but she instantly blinked them away. She really hoped D didn’t notice.
Something flashed over his face before he very quickly continued as if the atmosphere hadn’t shifted, “And then after all that, she goes to a quiet bar, thinking she can just drown her sorrows, and ends up meeting the sexiest, hottest man she’s ever seen in her life, I mean, come on, that would be too much for any mortal person to handle. ”
She appreciated him lightening the mood, another check in the green flag box. Not that she was counting green flags or checking boxes. That would be crazy.
“Yeah, but then she had to knee that guy in the balls five minutes after meeting him because he was an asshole,” she teased.
The smile that spread across D’s face did things between her legs she hadn’t felt in so long she forgot her body could feel that way. Tingles and pressure began to build, and the only place he’d touched her was on her lower back through her sweatshirt.
“So backwards hat frat boy is the hottest, sexiest man you’ve ever seen in your life?” he asked, still smiling, going along with her joke. At least, she thought he was, but she did sense maybe a teeny bit of, not jealousy, but something.
“I didn’t see anyone else in the bar who could fit that description,” she responded with wide-eyed innocence.
His smile grew even wider, and his head fell back as he laughed. The laugh was full, rich, and contagious. It spread through her and warmed her like a fire on a cold blustery day. She couldn’t help but laugh along with him.
When he straightened again and looked down at her, he was still chuckling until he saw her beaming up at him, then his smile dropped, his breath hitched, and his eyes grew intense as he breathed out a ragged, “Fuck.”
“What?” Her own breath caught in her throat.
“Your smile is…” His words tapered off.
She felt nervous, the butterflies were back, but this time they were lower in her belly.
When she was nervous, she smiled so she smiled again automatically.
Her lips parted, curling at the edges. “It’s what?
” she prompted, not fishing for a compliment, just genuinely wanting to know how he would finish that sentence.
Men had told Jenna that her smile was the eighth wonder of the world, it was the sunrise and/or the sunset, it lit up a room, it made the world a better place, it made men forget who they were.
Her favorite was a gay writer, a client of hers, who told her that her smile was a plot twist and no matter how his day was going, it always changed his story for the better.
Compliments never meant anything to her. They were words. Anyone could say words. Most of the words from men she heard growing up were lies.
But for some reason she really wanted to know what the man standing in front of her was going to say.
His chest rose and fell in a shallow breath as she stared at his mouth. “Your smile is dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” That was a new one. She never got dangerous before. “How is it dangerous?”
He opened his mouth to respond, but her stomach decided to choose that exact moment to interrupt their conversation and growl. Loudly.
She chuckled. He didn’t find it funny. Instead, he looked concerned.
“When is the last time you ate?” he demanded as if her life depended on it.
“Um, last night around—”
“Last night?!”
“I’m not a big breakfast eater, and today was—”
He pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?” she asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.
“Ordering dinner. You’re eating now.”
“No, I need to… I have to take a shower. I can’t eat with…” She didn’t want to say death on her, but…
“Oh, right.” He looked up from his phone. “Of course. Shower. Dinner. Then…”
He stared down at her.
Yep. Then.