BIANCA
The next afternoon, Jackson kept to his usual MO and arrived unannounced at the restaurant.
It was five o’clock, an hour before the first reservations, five hours after the meat delivery was supposed to have arrived. The staff was eating their preservice meal together at the long table in the glassed-in private dining room. Meanwhile I was pacing, my new favorite form of exercise. When the door opened and I saw the long shadow fall across the dining room floor, I knew who it was without even turning around.
Pepper’s excited squeal only confirmed it.
I turned and found Jackson standing inside the door, staring at me. He was wearing faded jeans and his battered motorcycle jacket, with a white cotton shirt molded to his body so his abdomen muscles were on display like an ad for stacked bricks.
He was not altogether unfortunate looking.
I said, “Oh. Hello.”
His brows quirked. He glanced at the gathering in the private dining room, fifteen people staring at us in open curiosity from behind a sparkling sheet of glass. “Is this a bad time?”
Is there a good time to sign away five years of your life?
I said, “It’s fine. They’re contained for now.” I made my employees sound like a nasty viral outbreak, which wasn’t too far from the truth. “Let’s go into my office.”
I led him through the restaurant, past the private dining room with its gaping menagerie, and through the kitchen. My office was down a hallway in the back. It was a cramped, messy space where I regularly collapsed into exhausted comas at the end of the night or cried over the mountain of unpaid bills strewn on my desk while I examined my life choices.
I opened the door, he closed it behind him. He looked around with a critical eye. “Looks like a bomb went off.” Then his gaze fell on the bouquet of red roses on the edge of my desk, and he went stone-still. His tone was acidic. “From an admirer?”
I snorted. “If you can call Satan’s spawn an admirer.”
In two long, jerking strides, he was in front of the bouquet. He snatched the little white enclosure card off the plastic stick. He read it aloud while his free hand curled to a fist. “I’m sorry, bumble bee. I didn’t mean what I said yesterday. Please call me, we need to talk. Trace.”
Jackson pronounced Trace’s name as a hiss. When he cut his gaze to me, all the air left the room.
He growled, “What happened?”
I dropped into my ratty captain’s chair and sighed. “We had a little run-in at my mother’s house.”
“A run-in?” he repeated slowly. His eyes had turned an unnerving serial killer shade of black.
“Long story short, I stopped by Mama’s on my way to the restaurant, and he was there. I told him we were getting married, and he called me the c-word.”
Jackson turned the little white enclosure card to dust with a single crushing flex of his fist.
I said, “That’s not the worst part.”
His eyes were seriously weirding me out. I expected laser beams to shoot out of them at any second and blow the place apart.
“He’s opening a restaurant,” I said, unable to hide the quaver of fury in my voice. “Down the street. As a big f-you to me and all the plans we made to do it together.”
Suddenly my office wasn’t big enough to contain Jackson. Hulklike, his entire body expanded with his angry inhalation. I wasn’t sure the seams of his clothing would be able to hold him.
I said, “It’s just another one of his childish games. There’s nothing he can’t stand as much as being ignored, and he knew this would get my attention. He wants me to obsess over it. Which is why the only thing I can do is act like it doesn’t get to me.”
Jackson said darkly, “We’ll see.”
The implied threat made the little hairs on my arms stand on end. “I’m not condoning violence, Jackson.”
“Who said anything about violence? There are ways to deal with this kind of situation that don’t involve shedding blood.” His serial killer eyes burned. “Even though I’d very much like to rip his head off and shove it up his own ass for what he said to you.”
I allowed myself to enjoy the mental image of that for a moment. What a beautiful thing. Then I waved a hand at the chair across from my desk. “Sit. Please. You’re making the room seem smaller than it already is.”
He sat in the chair. His bulk appeared to reduce it to the size of a piece of child’s furniture. He seemed to be getting bigger every time I saw him, all legs and arms and towering strength, potent masculinity. I felt dainty in comparison, which was impressive considering what the bathroom scale had read this morning.
“I brought the contract,” he said, still bristling.
I blew out a tremulous breath.
“Bianca. Your face just went white.”
The laugh I produced sounded a little crazy. “That would certainly be a feat.”
We stared at each other. He said, “Do you want to see it?”
I held out my hand. From his coat pocket he brought out several folded pages and handed them to me. I flattened them over my desk and reached for a pen.
“You need to have your attorney review it before you sign,” he said sternly.
“I don’t have an attorney.”
“Then get one.”
“I can’t afford an attorney, Jax.”
He swallowed at the mention of his nickname. Moistened his lips, shifted his weight in the chair. Intrigued by his response, I momentarily forgot about the contract. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“It’s a legitimate question. If we’re going to be married, I should probably know these kinds of things.”
He glowered for a while, then said, “You’ve made me uncomfortable since the moment we met.”
I smiled in spite of myself. He was throwing my own words back at me and avoiding the question, all at once. He liked avoiding questions, which of course made me more curious than I otherwise would have been.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about the rings.”
He leaned back, crossed his legs, and blasted me with his baby blues. Then he said, “I can’t concentrate with these fucking roses staring down at me like a dozen bloody middle fingers.”
Was he mad that I didn’t throw them away? “I was going to toss them in the garbage as soon as they arrived this morning, but Eeny said she’d take them. Something about a ritual involving rose petals and goat blood. I didn’t ask for details.”
Jackson stood. He grabbed the vase of roses, opened the office door, set the vase outside in the hallway, closed the door, and sat back down, looking slightly less inclined to engage in a murder spree.
“Better,” he said. “The rings. Shoot.”
Amused, I shook my head. “I want a five-carat flawless Tiffany brilliant-cut center stone with a pair of flawless one-carat stones flanking it, set in a platinum band.”
One of his eyebrows slowly lifted.
I smiled. “You got me. A simple gold band will do. What should I get you?”
He cocked his head and stared at me with new interest. “You want to get me a ring?”
“I’m not marrying a man who refuses to wear my ring. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right. Jewelry included.”
“Why does it matter?”
Good question. I didn’t think I could tell him I wanted every other female who looked at him to see that small gold “off-limits” sign on his ring finger, because that would make no sense. Other than legally, I’d have no claim on him. In fact, since sex wasn’t part of the contract, as he’d so kindly pointed out, I had no reason to believe he’d be faithful to our pretend marriage.
Interesting that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. Or to ask myself if I would be.
He said, “Whatever conversation you’re having with yourself, I’d love to join in. It looks fascinating.”
I chewed on my lower lip. It made his eyes flare, so I stopped. “I was just . . . wondering . . . about the sex stuff.”
How can someone go from blistering anger to amusement to whatever this molten, dark energy thing was that he was doing now? However he managed it, I found myself squirming a little in my seat under the heat of his stare.
“What about it?” he asked in a neutral tone that didn’t match his eyes or the tension in his body.
Feeling shy, I looked down and fiddled with the pen. “Um. What if you get a girlfriend? How do we—”
“I won’t.”
Startled by the finality of that pronouncement, I glanced up. “You can’t know that. You could meet someone the day after we get married and fall madly in love with her. We should talk about what will happen in that scenario. Would she come live with us?”
In a move I was beginning to recognize as his tell for whenever he was really agitated, he raked a hand through his hair. He sat forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and pinned me in his gaze.
“There won’t be any girlfriends,” he said. “There won’t be anyone else while I’m married to you.”
The air was sucked out of the room again. I really needed to take a look at the ventilation. “So the ‘no sex’ clause is actually like a ‘celibacy’ clause?”
He leaned back in his chair, none of the high-tension electricity leaving him. “You should go over it with your attorney.”
“I want to go over it with you.”
One of his fingers started a restless staccato beat against his thigh. “It clarifies that there’s no expectation of sex between us. It’s not a requirement to fulfill the contract.”
I mulled that over for a while. “So, then, it’s voluntary.”
He’d been looking at a print on the wall of a kitten hanging from the branch of a tree by one paw that read, HANG IN THERE! but his head snapped front and center, and he stared at me with such intensity I almost thought he was angry.
I said, “I mean, it’s not against the rules.”
I can’t describe his expression. It hovered somewhere between serial killer and starving animal.
He said softly, “Why, Future Mrs. Boudreaux, are you propositioning me?”
And here came the blood flow from my neck straight up to my hairline like my head was dipped in a bucket of red paint. I looked down at the contract, hiding.
“Sorry,” I said. “This is just all very strange. I suppose I’m nervous. Forget I even asked.”
“Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easily. Look at me.”
I peeked up at him from under my lashes.
He asked, “When was the last time you had sex?” and I swear I almost fainted.
“That’s none of your business,” I said primly, and sat up straighter in my chair.
He said, “The last time I had sex was more than four years ago.” His chuckle was wry. “I mean, with anyone other than myself.”
Wow. And I thought my dry spell was bad. “No! Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you a monk?”
He got that burning look again, the one I expected would ignite me. “Do you get the impression I’m a monk?”
Something unhealthy was happening to my heart. Being around him was causing a terrible arrhythmia that might eventually kill me. I decided to ignore his question and hazarded a tentative, “Did you . . . go through . . . um, a time when you weren’t sure . . .”
Jackson looked in aggravation at the ceiling. “I already told you I’m not gay, Bianca.”
I said, “So . . .”
He snapped, “I’m not bisexual, either, if that’s where you’re heading! I’m not confused about which sex I prefer, and I don’t have a disease I’m trying not to spread! I just haven’t had a girlfriend for a while, for Christ’s sake!”
I had to backtrack before he exploded into full Hulk mode and his clothes were ripped to shreds. “Okay, I hear you, you’re not confused, you’re not diseased, you’re just unusually . . . nonsexual.”
That was the wrong thing to say. I sensed the change in him the way you sense a change in the weather. The electricity that crackles dangerously in the air before a thunderstorm, the spike of pressure in the barometer. If his eyes had been black before, now they were the pitch of the deepest pit of hell.
He rose, stood over me, and lifted me to my feet with his hands under my armpits like I was a doll. He said, “Tell me if this feels nonsexual to you.”
Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me.