Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Jessa
I rest my forehead on the steering wheel and mutter into it, “I hate pickup lines.”
The line at Crestline Academy hasn’t moved in five minutes.
I’ve nosed the new rental into the waiting zone with the engine off, the one the agency sent over while my poor dead Ford waits to get fixed.
Now I’m doing what every other parent on this curb is doing: waiting and pretending not to mind. The junior bell hasn’t rung yet.
I lift my head. A few cars up, I catch sight of Rachel, the toddler propped on her hip and her older two trailing close as she steers them toward a battered hatchback.
She spots me through the windshield and lifts the baby’s hand in a little wave, then crosses the gap to my window. I roll it down.
“Hi.” She hitches the toddler higher on her side, a little breathless. “I was hoping I’d run into you. I’ve been meaning to thank you for the other day.”
“You really don’t have to.” I wave it off with a small smile. “Are the kids okay?”
“They’re a little rattled, but they’re fine, thanks to you.
” Her grip on the toddler tightens even as her face softens.
“We’re in the same building, I know. I just haven’t found a minute to knock on your door and thank you properly.
” She draws a breath, almost shy. “Would you want to come by for tea this weekend? My mother takes the kids on Sundays, so I’d be free.
We could do lunch instead, if that’s easier. ”
The offer catches me off guard. I haven’t made a single friend here, and the truth is I haven’t tried, too busy plotting my way back out of town to bother knocking on anyone’s door.
“I’d love to,” I tell her, and I’m not lying to be polite.
“Sunday it is,” she says, relief flickering across her tired features. “How about one in the afternoon?”
“Sounds perfect.” I beam at her. She gives my arm a quick squeeze through the window, gathers her brood, and heads for the hatchback.
Watching her go, I take in the shadows bruised under her eyes, the thinness of her shoulders, the heavy drag in her step.
She’s running on empty and doing a poor job of hiding it.
I decide right there to cook something and bring it Sunday, soup or a casserole, something she can feed those kids without lifting a finger. It would be nice to have one friend in this town, maybe the only good thing it ever hands me.
The back door opens, and Mia drops in, bag thumping against the seat, slumping low with her mouth set sullen.
I twist around. “All right, what’s going on? You’ve been sulking for three days straight.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Mia.”
She picks at the strap of her bag. “Bella’s still not back.”
My shoulders come down an inch. A friend problem I can handle. “Since when?”
“Wednesday.” Her chin drops. “Miss Harlow said she’s really sick. She asked the whole class if anybody would take her homework over so she doesn’t fall behind.” She pauses, and then her voice hardens. “Nobody put their hand up. The whole class just sat there.”
I already see where this is going, and my stomach drops ahead of her.
“Please tell me you didn’t volunteer.”
“I had to.” She rounds on me, eyes bright with temper. “Bella needs to finish her homework or they’ll push the class ahead without her, and then she’s stuck on her own again. Did you know I’m her only friend? She doesn’t have anybody else, Mom.”
I press my lips together and study her in the rearview. She’s a small, fierce thing who steps in front of trouble without stopping to count the odds. I love her for it. But it’s also troublesome because she simply doesn’t view the world through the eyes of an adult who understands consequences.
“I’m happy you found a friend, baby. I mean that.” I weigh the next words carefully. “But I can’t drive you over to a stranger’s house out of nowhere.”
“Bella’s not a stranger.” Then she delivers it, sly and sweet, the little wretch. “And her uncle really, really likes you.”
Heat floods my face. I turn back to the wheel and fix my eyes on the gate so she won’t catch it.
The last thing I need is for arrogant, infuriating Marcus Steele to like me.
I need him bored of me, ready to forget my face a second time and leave us be.
Every time I push the two of us apart, the girls or the school or some dead car drags us back together, and the only mercy left in my life is that Mia looks nothing like her father.
“Mom.” She leans into the gap between the seats, pleading now. “Please.”
I sigh. She always wears me down in the end. “I don’t even have his address.”
“I do.” Her whole face lights up with triumph. “Bella wrote it down for me.”
Of course she did. “Fine. I’ll take you over tomorrow morning.”
“Can we go today?” Her face crumples toward a beg. “I really, really miss her.”
I should say no. Bigger things than this have gotten a no from me this week. Instead I catch her hopeful face in the mirror, and I feel myself cave.
“Fine. We drop the homework, you say hello, then we leave. Understood?”
“Okay, okay, I promise!”
She reads the address off a folded scrap of paper, and I tap it into the GPS. I start the engine and pull out of the lot, telling myself this is a fifteen-minute errand, nothing more.
The roads narrow as we go. Trees crowd in close on both sides, and somewhere past the second turn, I notice my hands have gone tight on the wheel because I know this stretch.
It’s the same forest road I limped down the night the Ford died, the night a man with gray eyes leaned into my window and undid ten years of careful distance in thirty seconds.
We take a fork the GPS swears by right before it quits entirely, the little blue dot freezing and then spinning in a slow useless circle.
Past the fork, the trees open just enough to show houses set back among them, big, handsome places spaced wide, a whole community folded into the forest where I’d assumed there was nothing but timber.
The roads are smooth and well kept. Dense and dark even in the afternoon, the woods crowding up against them are anything but.
“This is kind of creepy,” Mia says happily, nose to the glass.
“It’s very creepy.” I follow a carved wooden sign, then another, since my phone’s no help out here. “Stay close to me when we get out, okay?”
The houses grow farther apart and then stop altogether.
A drive opens onto an estate that has me easing off the gas just to take it in.
There’s no gate and no fence, only a long, pale driveway unspooling toward a house so large it stops reading as a house at all, with a lawn rolling out around it that could swallow my whole apartment block.
The Steele name is worked into the stone above the door.
“Whoa,” Mia breathes.
“Yeah.” I can’t muster anything better. “Whoa.”
I park in the shadow of the place and cut the engine. “Wait here. I mean it. I’ll find out if anyone’s home.”
For once she listens, too busy gawking up at the house to argue.
The bell echoes somewhere deep inside and brings no one. I wait, count to twenty, and press it again. Nothing stirs behind the tall windows. I step back, weighing whether to call the whole thing off and drive Mia home disappointed, when it occurs to me to try the back.
A flagstone path leads me around the side, past clipped hedges and a low stone wall, and the lawn opens again toward the tree line at the rear. Movement there catches my eye. A man steps clear of the trees, shirtless, working the button of his jeans closed as he walks.
I stop where I stand.
It’s Marcus. Bare to the waist and damp with sweat, hair loose and dark against his neck, he’s all hard lines moving easily across the grass.
Ten years have made him broader through the chest, heavier in the arms, more than the man I remember from a hotel room a decade ago.
Then his head comes up, he sees me, and his eyes go wide.
“Jessa?” He pulls up short. “What are you doing here?”
I open my mouth. Not one word comes out.
He crosses the lawn toward me, and the closer he gets, the drier my mouth goes. A damp T-shirt was almost too much the first night. There’s no T-shirt now, and I can’t find a single word.
A few feet away, he slows, and his nostrils flare. I watch him drag in a breath like he’s tasting the air, his eyes narrowing, then warming, a slow smile curving his mouth that I do not like one bit.
He keeps coming. I keep backing up, one step for each of his, until the cool stone meets my spine and there’s nowhere left to retreat. He plants a forearm above my head and leans in, close enough that the heat rolls off his bare skin.
“Cat got your tongue?” he murmurs.
The smug curl of his lips does it. I bite down hard on the side of my own tongue, and the small bright sting snaps my wits back into place.
I shove him, both palms pressed against the broad slope of his chest, which is a tactical error of the highest order because the second I touch him, his eyes go dark and heated. He doesn’t budge an inch.
“Careful, Mrs. Vasquez.” His voice drops low and rough, and the sound of it tugs at something low in my belly. “I don’t have a lot of self-control where you’re concerned.”
My eyes fly wide. He tips his head, and his lips come a breath from mine.
“Don’t even think about it,” I whisper.
Then I drive my knee up toward his groin.
He’s already gone, sidestepping with a bark of laughter, so I stumble into the space he abandoned.
“You absolute jerk,” I snap.
“How’d you even find the place?” he asks, still grinning, far too pleased with himself.
“Mia wanted to see Bella.” I gather my dignity back together one piece at a time. “She brought her homework over. Apparently your niece has been out sick, and not one kid in that class would take her assignments across town except mine.”
The laughter fades from his face, and his expression goes soft. “That’s a good kid you’ve got. Really. That’s a kind thing for her to do.”
I shouldn’t glow at that. Pride warms me anyway, because she is a good kid, and I raised her that way alone.