Chapter 15
JENNIFER
Santos Ferretti held the knife wrong on purpose, probably. No man who can negotiate billion dollar business deals, or whatever it is billionaires do before nine in the morning, is incapable of holding a kitchen knife. That was a performance.
I held his hands for four seconds and my strawberry scent spiked, and my omega wasn't much better.
It's as if my body is betraying me by remembering the weekend in Vegas and forgetting how they treated me after that night.
I don't know what frustrates me more right now, my scent, my omega, or my mind?
I hopped in the shower, wanting to wash away my feelings for him, but it doesn't help.
By the time I've dried off and changed into a pair of navy shorts and an oversized shirt, I call Anna.
I sit on the bed cross-legged, pull my knees to my chest, and stare at Anna's name on the screen.
Here goes nothing.
I take a breath, close my eyes, and hit call.
It rings twice.
"Jennifer." Anna's voice comes through warm and immediate, and behind her something small and extremely loud is happening. "One second."
"Take three," I say, because I need all of them.
The chaos resolves. A door closes. "Okay," Anna says. "Talk."
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
There is something sitting in my throat that is not going to move without a fight, so I swallow hard, try again, and just say it.
"I'm pregnant."
"Jennifer Marie Sullivan," Anna says, breaking the silence, as if she's had a few seconds to take it all in, even if it feels like minutes have passed.
"Yep."
"How far along?"
She's not going to like the answer, but I'm going to be straight with her. "Fourteen weeks."
Another pause. "And you're telling me now because."
"Dunno," I say, because she's right. There was no real need to wait to tell her, even if there felt as if there were at the time. I know now it was all in my head.
"Jen." Her voice has dropped into that register, the one that means she's decided not to yell and I should appreciate that. "You asked me for the recipes. I thought it was for a job."
"It is. Was. It's just that at the time when I found out, I couldn't tell you what was going on."
I pick at a loose thread on the duvet and focus on it like it's the most interesting thing in the room, which it isn't, but it doesn't require eye contact. "I felt ashamed," I say.
"You have nothing to be ashamed of."
"Try telling my brain that." I pull the thread loose. "I just felt like a walking disaster. I have a bad track record with men. One steals my taco truck and a weekend of passion leaves me with an envelope on the nightstand." I exhale.
"I would have wanted you to drop it on me," Anna says. "That is literally what I am here for."
"I know."
"Is it pride?"
"Partially," I admit.
"Mm." The sound she makes is one I have heard my entire life. It means I see you and I love you anyway and also you are being a little bit of an idiot.
"So, I'm working as a chef on an island."
"Jen—"
"Anna, let me finish, or I may back out. Carmen, the island manager, offered me the job, and the pay is a full year's airline salary. If I need to lean on you, at least I won't come empty-handed."
"I see. But being stressed and pregnant isn't a good thing. My alphas wouldn't mind. They're dying to meet you and so are your niece and nephew."
Now, I really do feel guilty. I've been thinking about myself, but I didn't think about how Anna would feel about me shutting her out like this.
"You're pregnant, you're by yourself," Anna says. "Did I do something to make you want to stay away from me?"
I imagine this is how she feels, but it is far from the truth.
"It's not about you, it's me and my bad choices. Besides, I haven't told you the worst part."
"Oh God, I need to sit down for this, if there's more."
I don't wait for her to confirm she's sitting.
"Anna," I say. "The island belongs to them."
A pause. "Belongs to who?”
I close my eyes. "Vegas. The three alphas from Vegas."
"What the fingers?" Anna blurts out. Probably a word she invented to stop herself from cursing. In the craziness of all of this, it makes me laugh.
"I'm here. In their kitchen. Cooking their food. Sleeping forty meters from their house." I press my hand flat on the duvet because it is solid and real and currently the most stable thing in my life. "And one of them came down to my kitchen this morning and made me correct his knife grip."
A very long pause.
"Was that a euphemism?"
"No," I say. "I mean a literal knife. He held it wrong. I fixed it. It took four seconds and my omega has been unbearable about it ever since."
"Oh, Jennifer."
"I know, Anna. I know."
"Okay." I hear her shift, settling in the way she does when she is about to say something she has thought through. "Come to Cedar Ridge."
I knew she was going to say that.
"Anna."
"Come here. Come now. Call Carmen, tell her there's a family situation, get on the next boat, and come home."
"I can't come home. I don't have a home, that's the whole problem."
"You have a home here. My home is your home, you know that, my alphas are not going to have a single issue with it, and I will have your room done up in about forty-five minutes. I timed this once. I can absolutely do it, Jen, I just need you to say yes."
And the thing is, I know she means every word. Her alphas would probably absorb me into that house without complaint. I know my sister would sit next to me on the bed and hand me tea at three in the morning and not once make me feel like a problem she was solving.
Which is exactly why I can't.
"I'm not coming empty-handed," I say.
"Jennifer."
"I need to do this first. Three months, Anna. I finish the contract, I get paid, I come to you with something. Not with nothing."
"Jennifer Marie Sullivan, you really are as stubborn as a mule."
I sit up. The room is small and warm and smells of sea air coming through the cracked window and I feel very clearly, in this moment, what I mean even if I don't quite have the words assembled yet.
"If I come now, I'm running again. And I have been running since Vegas and I'm very tired of the sound of my own footsteps.
I need to stand somewhere for five minutes and do something that goes right because of me.
On my own." I pause. "And then I'll come.
I promise I'll come. But with money and a plan and my head actually attached to my shoulders instead of tucked under my arm. "
Anna is quiet.
Then she says, "You're the most stubborn person I have ever loved."
"I know."
"Don't let pride get in the way of what's right."
"I'm not. I'm letting self-respect get in the way of what's easy, which is different."
"Is it."
"Yes. Ask me again in three months when I can actually defend that argument properly."
She sighs. "Fine," she says. "But you call me, and anytime you want to come then you do it. I'll wire you the money with no questions asked. Got it."
"Gotcha."
"And you eat. Real meals. Not crackers."
"I cooked a lamb roast tonight. With tarragon sauce. From scratch."
"From my recipe?"
"Adjacent to your recipe. With improvements."
"Name one improvement."
"Bay leaf in the stock. Left it in longer than you'd recommend."
A pause. "Did it work?"
"Beautifully."
She makes a sound that is almost, almost a laugh. "Fine. You're allowed improvements." Then, quieter: "Jen. Are you okay?"
I lie back again. The ceiling fan turns. The water makes its sound somewhere below the hill, steady and unhurried, going about its entire business without any reference to mine whatsoever.
"I think so," I say. "It was a weird day. But the kitchen is genuinely excellent and she kicked when the lamb came out right, which I'm choosing to interpret as a good sign."
"It's a great sign."
"And the herb garden has an actual bay tree."
"The thing is I know how bad things can be, and us women think we're all to blame. I know I did when David died and left us with all kinds of debt. I thought I had no one and Violet helped us."
"I know." She told me the story, about how some loan sharks were after her, she fled to Cedar Ridge and found love. If only my life was a fairytale, then I wouldn't feel like crying right now.
"You're going to be fine," Anna says, firmly, in the voice she uses when she has decided something is true and is stating it into existence. "You're going to come here with your money and your plan and your baby, and we're going to figure out the rest together. All right?"
"All right," I say.
"Good night."
"Good night, Anna."
The call ends.
I stay horizontal on the bed for a moment with the phone on my chest, looking at the ceiling fan, thinking about lamb and tarragon and bay trees and the way four seconds of correcting someone's grip can apparently undo three months of perfectly good decisions.
Then something at the window makes me stop thinking about all of that entirely.
A shape. Just past the curtain edge, where the fabric doesn't quite reach the frame, a suggestion of something just outside in the warm dark. Still. Deliberate. Not quite hidden.
I don't move.
My nose does its job before my brain does. Slow and certain, picking through the salt air and the yellow flowers and the evening, finding it underneath all of it, the thing it apparently stored in permanent memory at two in the morning in a hotel suite it has no business still cataloguing.
Sandalwood. Dark. Controlled. Present in the specific way of someone who has chosen to be outside a window rather than at a door.
Matteo.
He scared the crap out of me, but I won’t let him know I know that he’s there.
My omega wants me to to go the window, but I’m telling her to shut up tonight. I’m going to bed.
I get up from the bed.
Cross to the window, and draw the curtains.
I get back into bed, pretend he's not there, and just try to get some sleep. It's going to be tough, but as I reflect on the conversation with Anna, I know I can do it.