JACKSON
We lay stunned and speechless, tangled in each other’s arms on the demolished bed like victims of a bombing.
After a while, Bianca said in a tremulous voice, “Oh. My. That was . . .”
“Perfect.” I stared at her in awe. “Incredible. Mind-blowing. We should get a trophy.”
Blinking slowly, she smiled. It was a heartbreaking smile, a thing of such soul-lifting and astonishing beauty I felt like a man who’d just discovered religion.
She was my religion. My north and south, my heaven and earth, the axis of rightness around which everything had suddenly aligned. For the first time in my life, all my polarized parts worked as one, humming happily along in harmony with the universe, finally understanding their place.
I surrendered to the feeling completely and without hesitation, knowing that most people would never experience this. This blinding joy. This transcendent bliss. This seismic shift of focus from themselves to someone else that strangely and simultaneously gave birth to the freedom and bone-deep peace they’d been seeking all along.
I always thought love was a pair of shackles, but I was wrong. Love was the opened door of a cage.
“You certainly have a lot of energy, Mr. Boudreaux,” my love said, prim as a librarian. It made me laugh so heartily it shook the bed.
I threw my leg over her, pulled her to me, and sighed in happiness. She burrowed against me, making soft growly sounds of pleasure, her little hands pawing my chest.
“Sex fiend,” I whispered indulgently as she ran her hands all over my body.
“I can’t help it,” she protested. “You’re built like a skyscraper, and your skin is like a unicorn’s mane.”
I frowned. “A unicorn’s mane?”
“All silky and shiny and mystical.”
She said it like, Duh, what moron doesn’t know what a unicorn’s mane is like? I laughed again, helplessly charmed.
“You’re awfully jolly after sex,” she said. “Me likey.”
Oh God. My fucking heart was going to split open like an overripe piece of fruit. “And you’re awfully chatty.” I captured her lips and kissed her to shut her up.
When we finally came up for air, she stretched against me like a cat, supple and satisfied, lazily licking her lips. “You’re a dish,” she declared. “If you were food, you’d be the filet from that cow on your father’s plane that was massaged and coddled into beefy, delicious perfection.”
“That’s disturbing,” I said, kissing the tip of her nose. “But thank you. I think.”
Her mood shifted like quicksilver, from gossamer light to guarded. She pursed her lips and contemplated my sternum. “Speaking of your father.”
“What?” I was instantly on high alert.
She glanced up at me. “You need to talk to him.”
There was something behind her eyes that worried me. “Why?”
She dropped her gaze to my chest and started toying with my chest hair. “Um. Well. I had a little chat with him last night after you passed out.” Her pause was infinitesimal. “With your mother, too.”
My blood pressure went from sleeping baby to day trader on the stock market on Black Monday. “About?”
Her eyes flashed up to mine. “Don’t shout!”
“I’m not shouting, I’m asking!”
She glared at me.
I blew out a deliberate breath and lowered my voice. “I’m sorry. Talking about my parents when I’m naked in bed with you is . . . yuck.”
She pouted for a second, then relented. “How much do you remember from last night?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it. How much did I remember? Backtracking to before the amazing dream that turned out not to be a dream this morning, I recalled arriving at Moonstar yesterday evening, meeting my father in the foyer, coming up to my room to change, going back down to dinner to suffer through the screaming silence of all the family dinners I’d enjoyed growing up, and then . . .
Nothing.
“I drank too much,” I pronounced. I slanted my eyes down at Bianca, hoping she’d fill in the blanks.
She knew I was bluffing but took pity on me. “You told me about Linc and Cricket,” she said gently. “And about what happened after. Going to New Orleans. Christian. Cody. Everything.”
Coldness sliced through me, freezing as an arctic wind. Then, worse, suspicion. Did she sleep with me because she felt sorry for me?
Examining my face, Bianca pounded her little fists on my chest. “If you ever look at me like that again,” she said, seething, “you won’t be a nice, tasty filet anymore, Jackson Boudreaux, you’ll be ground beef!”
Her threat made me feel oddly relieved. “I love it when you threaten me with bodily harm,” I said, and kissed her again.
She sighed contentedly against my lips. I was enamored by how quickly she could get over anger. It usually took me days.
She said, “Well, someone’s got to keep you in line. Might as well be your wife.”
It was a throwaway line, but it speared me right through the heart. It took a moment for my blood to start circulating again. “Wife,” I repeated solemnly, gazing into her eyes.
She wrinkled her nose. “Lord, you make it sound like someone just told you Christmas was canceled.”
I cupped her jaw in my hand. “No. It’s like someone just told me I won the lottery.”
“Do billionaires play the lottery?”
“They would if they knew you were the prize.”
She squirmed a little, pleased but acting like she wasn’t, and resumed toying with my chest hair like it was her new pet. I stroked her face, dazzled by all the little dancing hearts in my eyes.
“I need a shower,” she pronounced, then looked at me from under her lashes.
“God, those filthy eyes. You could probably be arrested for that look. Pervert.”
She said casually, “Well, since we’re doing a sex weekend before we go back to real life, I might as well make the most of it, right?”
Inside my head was the sound a freight train makes when it slams on its brakes, then topples off the tracks, spilling its load of munitions and poison gas, which promptly explode in an enormous orange ball of flame, scorching the earth and destroying all life in a fifty-mile radius.
Clearly for Bianca, this wasn’t the start of something deeper between us. This was the itch that needed to be scratched before it could be forgotten. This was the annoying, tickling pressure that had built to the point where it could only be relieved with a reflexive action, like a sneeze.
Bianca was going to sneeze me out of her system. She’d told me flat out, “it would be a good idea if we got it out of our systems.”
And I’d gone and fallen in love with her. What a fool.
“Right,” I said, shuttering my eyes.
She examined my expression for a moment. “What’s that face you’re making? I don’t recognize that face.”
This is what heartbreak looks like. “Nothing,” I said flatly. “I’m fine.”
She pushed me in the chest so hard I flopped onto my back. My eyes flew open in surprise. I grunted as she threw herself on top of me.
“No!” she shouted. “No, you don’t get to do that after you were just inside me not even five minutes ago! You do not get to be all weird and withdrawn and noncommunicative, do you hear me? Talk!”
She jabbed me in the chest with her finger. Glaring down at me with her dark hair wild all around her face and her eyes blazing black fury, she was a little bit terrifying.
But I was madly in love with her, so I had to tell her the truth. “I told you once wouldn’t be enough,” I said gruffly. It sounded like an accusation.
“So? And?”
It was a challenge, which pissed me off.
“So,” I snapped, “you fucking seduced me!” Her eyes flared in outrage, but I was only getting started. “And now you’re telling me this weekend is all I’m getting! And I already told you I didn’t want to fuck this up! So now it’s too late because it is fucked up because I won’t be able to have you just once and I’m going to go fucking insane trying to keep my hands off you now, because to you this was only sex but to me it was a lot more, and you told me I was beautiful!”
I roared it into her face with so much force her hair fluttered back from her cheeks. I stared at her, panting, enraged, all the tendons standing out in my neck.
Then her eyes softened and she smiled. “Oh, Jax,” she said tenderly. “We’re going to have to do something about that temper.”
She took my face in her hands and kissed me.
I was completely confused.
“Kiss me back!” she demanded when I remained frozen beneath her.
I sputtered, “Are you having some sort of psychotic break I should be aware of?”
She sighed and tucked her face into the space between my neck and shoulder, snuggling closer to my body. “You conveniently forgot about the ‘ten or twenty times’ part of our conversation, Beastie.”
When I remained stiff and unresponsive, she sighed again. “And the part where I asked if that would all be in one day and you said you’d need a lot more time than that?”
When I still didn’t say anything, she tapped me impatiently on my sternum. I turned my head and looked at her. She was smiling up at me indulgently, like I was a giant, fussing baby.
“I’ll be very clear, since you seem to be having trouble processing what I’m trying to say.” She cleared her throat, becoming businesslike. “Mr. Boudreaux. When I said we were having a sex weekend, I didn’t mean we were only having a sex weekend.”
All the breath left my body in an audible rush. I put my hand over my eyes to hide my relief.
More gently, she said, “I’m not putting any rules on this. When I said sex didn’t have to change anything, that was the truth. I hope it doesn’t make things awkward when we get home if—if—one of us decides it’s better to remain friends. Seeing as how this is a business deal and all.”
I couldn’t help myself. I growled.
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s an odd situation. For us both, obviously. But if it even has a chance to work out, we have to promise to be completely honest with each other.” There was a long pause. “And I was being honest when I said I thought you were beautiful. So. There’s that.”
After I corralled my stampeding emotions, I griped, “You’re not so bad yourself.”
She burst out laughing. “Such flowery, romantic words! Oh, I’m overcome!”
I rolled her onto her back, pinned her down, and kissed her all over her face as she laughed and laughed and my heart expanded like a balloon.
The problem with balloons is that at some point they have to either deflate or burst.
After I brushed my teeth and changed into clean clothes, I left Bianca dozing in my bed and went downstairs to find my parents.
They were eating breakfast in the solar off the kitchen, a large, sunny room with a glass ceiling to let in the light, the noisy chatter of my mother’s caged songbirds coloring in the air. I stood outside the doorway for a moment, watching them, a band of steel tightening around my chest.
What had Bianca told them? And would it change anything?
My father looked up and saw me standing there before my mother did. His face transformed. “Jackson,” he said, smiling. “Good morning.”
My mother looked up, slowly set her fork down onto her plate, and blinked, gazing at me like she’d never seen me before.
All in all, it was unsettling.
I walked stiffly to the table. My father stood. I cleared my throat, awkward words of greeting on my tongue, but he canceled that plan when he opened his arms and grabbed me in a bear hug, squeezing tighter than a man in his seventies should be capable of.
“Son,” he said, his voice choked. “Oh, son.” He gave me a good, hard shake. “It’s so good to have you home.”
Wide-eyed, I looked over his shoulder at my mother. She was dabbing at her eyes with her napkin.
My father released me and clapped me so hard on the back I almost pitched forward. I caught myself in time and took refuge in a chair, where I sat looking between the two of them with trepidation. My mother reached over and grasped my hand. A miracle.
A servant deposited a glass of orange juice on the table in front of me. “Breakfast, sir?”
I waved my hand, and the servant melted away. I couldn’t deal with food right now, but the orange juice was too great a temptation, so I chugged it.
“We owe you an apology,” said my father, instantly prompting me to choke.
He had to pound me on the back several times before I was able to catch my breath, and even then I wasn’t able to speak, only stare at him in watery-eyed, gasping disbelief.
“Oh, now don’t gimme that face,” he said, snapping his napkin over his lap. “You’re not innocent in all of this, either! You never even told us we had a grandson!”
The sound that came out of me wasn’t technically a word, but my father snorted like I’d disagreed with him.
“Yes, Bianca told me you adopted Christian’s son, and I’m damned pissed off that you’d keep that from us! You know how much your mother wants grandbabies! And you could’ve told me what really happened with Cricket—it would’ve saved us years of grief!”
He looked at me, stricken. “Not that it was anything like what you probably went through, of course. I didn’t mean that. Only . . . well, shit, Jackson. You never gave your mother and me a chance to be there for you. You just disappeared, and when Rayford found you, he wouldn’t tell us anything, either, and we never saw either one of you again! It was like the two of you went into the witness protection program!”
It took a long time for me to recover from that. “But . . .” I looked at my mother. “I gave you a stroke.”
She sighed like she was disappointed she’d given birth to such an idiot.
Exasperated, my father trumpeted, “You can’t take credit for that, boy! Your mother’s been on a blood thinner for twenty years because she’d had a minor stroke before you were born and the doctors were tryin’ to prevent another one! Sticky blood runs in her side of the family! Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, what nonsense! And this is why you stayed away?”
My temper snapped. I stood, shoving back my chair. “I stayed away because you loved Linc more than you ever loved me!”
My mother gasped. My father gaped at me. The servant silently excused himself from the room and disappeared.
“Jackson Walker Boudreaux,” said my mother in a halting, horrified whisper. She was white as a sheet. Her eyes filled with tears. “That is a terrible thing to say, and untrue!”
My father said crossly, “Well now you’ve done it. Congratulations, boy. You’ve made your mother cry.”
He went to her, took her hand and held it, crooned soothing words to her as she wept and I looked on, convinced I was in a state of shock so severe I’d had a mental break with reality.
Finally when he’d calmed her down, he pulled himself to his full height, straightened his shoulders, and let me have it.
“Now you listen to me real good, son, because I’m only gonna say this once. We love you. We love you now, we loved you then, we’ll love you until we die. You’re our son. We know we weren’t perfect parents, but you were a handful. Maybe we didn’t always know the right way to deal with you, but we never loved you less than your brother. Never. And we never blamed you for his death, either, even though I know you think we did.”
When I blinked in shock, he nodded. “That’s right. I’m not stupid. You got my blood in your veins, you think I don’t know what you’re thinkin’? But you’re a stubborn SOB—just like me. Once you get your mind set, that’s it.”
My mother made a placating noise, and he heaved a great sigh. “But it was my fault for leavin’ it alone for so long. I shoulda . . . done something. I don’t know. Made you talk to me. But gettin’ you to talk is like pullin’ teeth.”
He waved a hand in the air like he wanted to dismiss that last part. “Anyway. The bottom line is that the past is past. We’re gonna have a new daughter-in-law. It’s time we started actin’ like a family again. By the way, we love Bianca. What a firecracker. Hopefully we’ll have another grandbaby or two by this time next year.”
I stared at him. I stared at my mother. I opened my mouth and found I had no words.
“Well, look at that, Clemmy,” said my father. “Ha! I’ve left him speechless. Score one for the old man.”
I sank into the chair and put my head into my hands.
The servant reappeared, set a Bloody Dixie on the table in front of me, and murmured, “I hope you still like these, sir. Thought you might need it. Welcome home.”
When he disappeared again it was to the sound of my soft, disbelieving laughter.