Chapter 2 Janie
JANIE
He didn’t remember me. Why would he? It was one day twenty years ago, and we hadn’t spoken a single word since. I hadn’t even seen him again until my first day at Aspen Springs High School, when I’d been a freshman and he was a senior.
By the end of the first week of school, I’d had his schedule memorized. I knew he saw me standing there against the lockers that lined the halls, pretending I had some reason to be in his vicinity because Jack Price saw everything, but he never acknowledged me. He’d already forgotten me, even then.
But I remembered him. I remembered the way he moved through the high school, so sure that every step he took was the right one.
He never got in trouble, never clowned around, and somehow he was still invited to every party.
Every teacher wanted him in their classroom.
Every guy wanted to be him. Every girl wanted to date him.
Including me.
Not that he cared about some gawky freshman stalking him. And at fourteen, I was definitely gawky. I blossomed my junior year and never wanted for dates after that, but by then Jack had graduated. He left Colorado and joined the military.
Whereas I stayed put and got in trouble.
Probably a good thing he didn’t remember me, actually.
I grabbed a rag and a spray bottle of cleaner and started wiping down the tables.
No one else would be walking through that door tonight.
Not with the snow coming down like this.
If Jack weren’t here, I’d call up Brax and ask him for permission to close the bar early. Brax wasn’t a jerk, so he’d let me.
But Jack was here.
And I wanted him to stay.
I glanced over my shoulder at him and found him staring straight at me. He had turned around on his stool so his back was to the bar top. My cheeks heated and I wiped harder at the wood table. Jack didn’t have to know it was already so clean you could lick it.
“You play cards, Jack?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “You got a deck?”
“Behind the bar,” I said.
His gaze tracked my movements as I finished cleaning up.
I could feel it on my skin, hot and teasing, like a physical touch.
Awareness shimmered through my body, a heady rush that made my hands vibrate and my stomach swoop.
I would call it a premonition if I believed in all that woo-woo stuff, which I didn’t.
What I did believe in was chemistry and straight-up horniness and right now the pheromones coming off both of us were enough to choke an elephant.
I squatted behind the bar by the old pine cabinet where we kept odds and ends, angling my backside away from Jack’s all-seeing gaze.
These jeans tended to give me plumber’s crack and that wasn’t a good look on anyone.
I pushed aside the notebook and colored pencils I kept for doodling when things were slow and located the deck of cards that were floppy from years of use.
They were faded but each card was a work of art, if you considered paintings of pinup girls to be art, which I did.
“What are we playing?” I asked, setting the deck on the bar top between us.
Jack’s blue eyes dropped to the bare-breasted Marilyn Monroe card on top. The tiniest twitch of his eyebrow was the only sign that he saw it at all. “Poker?” he suggested.
I shook my head. “I’m too gullible for poker. Can’t lie and can’t read people to save my life,” I confessed. “A man could run out of a bank with cash spilling from his pockets and a bandana over his face, alarm bells ringing, but if he told me it wasn’t what it looked like, I’d hear him out.”
He laughed and whoosh went my stomach. There was nothing as blue as Jack’s eyes when he laughed. “Rummy, then. Although, for the record, I think you’re selling yourself short, Janie. Unless you’re just bluffing.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I pulled the jacks out since we wouldn’t be using them and split the deck in half, then shuffled the only way I knew how, pushing the cards against my thumbs so they alternated falling together, bits of tits and ass flashing as they went.
“I mean you’re reading me just fine.”
He kept his gaze on my hands like he knew eye contact would be too much for us to handle right then.
Too honest. That frisson of awareness danced down my spine again, but I pretended it didn’t.
Pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about or where this was going.
I wanted to wrap all that delicious tension around me like a cloak and burrow into it.
It had been so long since I had felt anything like this.
“Nine card draw, aces high,” I said, laying down the rules.
“Aces are low if they’re paired with a number card,” he countered.
“No, aces are always high. Fifteen points for aces, ten for face cards, five for number cards.”
His head tilted as he thought that through. “Why?”
“Because they’re pretty.”
“As good a reason as any, I suppose.” His eyes drifted over my face, and I felt warm all over. “Hard to resist something pretty.”
I rolled my eyes. “Was that a line, soldier?”
“Not a line. A confession.” His lips quirked. “And I’m not a soldier.”
He drained the last of his beer on a long swallow, his head tipped back to expose his throat. My mouth went dry. Goddamn. How was everything this man did so damn sexy? Just…how?
“Hm.” I gave him a stern don’t try it, mister look despite the fact that I absolutely wanted him to try it and butterflies were swooping dizzily in my belly because ahhhh! Jack Price thinks I’m pretty! The gawky teenage girl inside me was about to embarrass us both.
He gave me an impish smile and I melted further. With an exasperated huff, I pushed the deck at him. He rapped his knuckles once on the top card, a show of trust, and I dealt the cards, alternating between us until we had nine each.
“Another beer before we get into it?” I asked.
“It’s what, seven-thirty? I’ll take one more.”
I glanced at my watch before pivoting to the fridge. “Seven thirty-three,” I said over my shoulder as a confirmation, not a correction. “Lucky guess.”
He smirked. “I was rounding.”
I laughed as I set the bottle down in front of him. “Is that your special talent? You never lose track of time?”
His blue eyes locked on mine as he wrapped his long, thick fingers around the base of the beer bottle. His thumb absently stroked up and down the neck, condensation forming in its wake. My own neck broke out in goosebumps like I could feel his touch on my nape. “I never lose track of anything.”
Me. You lost track of me. I bit the words back.
They weren’t even true. You couldn’t lose track of something you never knew existed, and I hadn’t existed for Jack.
I couldn’t expect him to remember a half-hour spent with a little kid twenty years ago.
That sting I felt was wounded pride. Because maybe back in high school I had suspected he didn’t think of me the way I thought of him, but now I knew for sure.
But tonight…tonight I could give him something worth remembering.
“How long are you home for?” I asked, studying my cards to cover my flushed cheeks.
I fanned the cards out in my hand and quickly reorganized them to my liking, from useless to promising, with high cards I wasn’t ready to part with to the far right.
Three of hearts, six of clubs, a pair of tens, the queen and jack of spades, and the ace of diamonds that I couldn’t do anything with, but I wasn’t going to hand over fifteen points unless I had to. It was a decent hand. I liked my odds.
“I’m not home yet,” he said. It sounded like a dodge.
I glanced at him. His cards were still in an untouched heap in front of him. Catching my gaze, he scooped up the pile, considered them without changing their order, and set them down again.
“So tonight doesn’t count?” I teased. I flipped over the top card on the deck and my stomach dropped. Ace of hearts. Goddammit. Well, at least he knew I hadn’t stacked the deck in my favor.
“It counts, Janie,” he said simply. Firmly.
My mouth went dry.
He didn’t look at me as he ignored the ace and slipped the top card from the stack, added it to his pile, and put down the seven of diamonds, lining it up neatly with the ace.
I blinked. Had the seven been in his hand, or was it the card he had just picked up? He had moved so fast I couldn’t be sure.
Suddenly I had the feeling I was going to lose. Badly.
“So, really. How long are you home for?” I asked. We moved through our first few turns quickly, neither of us keeping anything. The line of unwanted cards grew longer. “A week? Two weeks?”
“For good.”
That surprised me. My gaze shot to his face, but he kept his eyes on his cards. “You’re out? Essie didn’t mention that.” This was different than just surprising her with a visit. Essie worried about him all the time. She would have shouted the news from the rooftops, if she had known.
“She doesn’t know,” he said, confirming my suspicions.
I cocked my head. “Why doesn’t she know, Jack?”
He rolled a shoulder.
I figured that meant he wasn’t going to talk about it.
Fine. I wouldn’t push. I picked up the king of clubs.
On his turn, he picked a card from the deck and used it to form a set with a ten, jack, queen, and king, all diamonds.
Dammit. I chewed my lip. I could put down my ace of diamonds and play it off his set, but I wasn’t going to.
Not with the ace of hearts still sitting there, calling my name.
You know you want me, Janie. Ignore all those cards between us. I’m worth it.
“Four months ago, I took a bullet to my shoulder. It made me medically unfit to perform with my unit. I could have stayed in uniform, but shit. I’m thirty-four. I figured enough was enough, so I resigned my commission.”
“You were shot?” I whispered. I stared at his shoulder like I could see through the fabric of his shirt to the injury underneath.
His eyebrows went up in amusement as he made his next play. “More than once. But it was the last one that went septic and left me with nerve damage.”
“Essie doesn’t know.” It wasn’t a question. If Essie had known her twin brother’s life was in danger, nothing could have kept her from his side. “Your mom doesn’t know.”
Jack rubbed his fingers along his jaw line. “I figured it was better to tell them I was in danger after the danger had passed.”
My mouth dropped open. “But what if the danger didn’t pass? What if you had…” I swallowed the sudden thickness in my throat. It was hard to say the word aloud. “Died?”
“I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
I shook my head. “You can’t control everything, Jack. Especially not death.”
“I’ve done a good job of it so far.” His cheek twitched under his eye. He put down another set and discarded the ace of clubs. “Your turn.”
I stared at the ace. “There are two aces down. Kind of risky, don’t you think?”
“No.”
I looked at him. He held up his card—his last card.
His sets were better than mine and worth more points, and he could go out at any second.
If I picked up that line of cards to get the aces, I would lose for sure.
There was no way I could turn all those cards into sets before he went out, and anything left in my hand would count against me.
I couldn’t resist.
I scooped up the cards with a flourish.
“Kind of risky, don’t you think?” he teased, using my words against me.
I laughed. “I’m holding all the aces. I can’t lose,” I joked, quoting a line from one of my favorite country songs.
He watched me put down the set: ace of hearts, ace of diamonds, ace of clubs. “Not all of them,” he noted, taking me literally.
The ace of spades had to be in that stack somewhere, and we were down to maybe ten cards more. There was a fifty-fifty chance it wouldn’t be me, but I wasn’t worried. I already knew how it would end.
I was definitely going to lose.
After I had played everything I could—number cards that I could play off his sets or mine—I was still left holding ten cards, and a few of them had faces. There was no coming back from this.
Jack arched an eyebrow at me. I grinned unrepentantly. “Aren’t they pretty?” I murmured, tracing the calligraphy lovingly with my index finger.
The game went fast after that, each of us moving rapidly through our turns, Jack still holding that same single card, me playing what I could, until I was down to two cards in my hand.
The deck had one card left and the ace of spades still hadn’t made an appearance.
On his turn, Jack picked up the card with his right hand.
He didn’t even glance at it, just put the card in his left down with the rest of his sets.
The ace of spades.
He’d had it the whole fucking time.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You could have gone out ten minutes ago.”
“I could have.” He discarded the four of hearts and stretched, lifting his arms up and out.
I tried not to stare. He was just so big. His hands, his wingspan, the breadth of his chest. He took up so much space and, judging from the way my breaths turned shallow, all of the oxygen. “Why didn’t you? Were you letting me win?”
“You didn’t win. I wasn’t done playing, that’s all.” His blue eyes met mine. “It stopped snowing ten minutes ago.”
Oh. My skin prickled. He could have gone home ten minutes ago, but instead he had dragged out our game to stay here with me.
He hadn’t touched his third beer, I noticed.
He was definitely sober enough to drive home.
I glanced to the window. “The roads might be slippery, though. Essie would never forgive me if I let her twin brother die in a horrible crash.” It would be so easy for him to take the hint and blame the weather.
He didn’t take it. “My truck can handle it.”
Dammit.
“Janie.” He said my name like he was holding back a laugh. His large, warm hand covered mine and his thumb stroked over my knuckles. “If I’m staying, it’s not because of the snow.”
Butterflies erupted in my stomach. “What would Essie say about that?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “She’s my best friend.”
“Well, your best friend happened to marry my best friend, so I’m thinking there’s not a hell of a lot she can say about it without looking like a hypocrite.”
I bit my lip and looked out the window again. I felt…restless. Reckless. Maybe it was the fact that I’d harbored a crush on Jack Price since I was ten years old. Or maybe I just needed to get my bad out, like my mama always said. Either way, I was doing this. I squared my shoulders.
“I have a room upstairs,” I said.