CARROLLTON, NEW ORLEANS

“How’s the problem going over there?”

Since Jade hadn’t told her older sister anything about the Zeker case, she had to assume Rita was referring to Nathan.

She shuffled her cell phone from one ear to the other as she let up on the gas to pass through a yield sign. “Who told you?”

“Mom,” Rita chirped in her ear, “who heard about him from Sammie.”

Jade snorted. “Of course she did. Why would Sammie ever to think to keep this to herself?”

“Because we’re family.”

“Then how come Mom doesn’t know about your pool boy over there in Cali?” Jade said, referring to the young twenty-something who took care of Rita’s massive pool. And, if one were being super honest, took care of Rita too, in other ways.

Rita made a hissing sound, then laughed heartily. Because that was Margarita Harper to a T—why get mad at the truth? “We aren’t seeing each other anymore.”

Oops. “I’m not sure if I should be offering my condolences right now.”

“No need, I’ve moved on, mi hermana.” There was a wistful note in Rita’s voice, as though she were imagining a very special . . . someone. Probably in bed. “He’s fantastic, by the way. A movie director.”

Jade crossed over the streetcar tracks and cut a right into her neighborhood. “Sounds fancy.”

“He is, and he’s got a great package.”

“Are we talking about his manhood or his finances?”

There was a pause on the line. “Who says ‘manhood’ anymore?”

“I do.” Actually, she didn’t, but Jade had never been as free with the sex talk like her older sister. She hadn’t even felt too comfortable with the act of sex itself until Nathan, which brought her to the fact that she desperately needed to speak with him. Before hopping on the line with Rita, she’d rung his phone twice only for it to go to voicemail.

They needed to do something about getting those signature copies from Shawna Zeker, and it had to be done soon.

Rita’s voice turned soft. “You okay, jeva? What’s wrong?”

Her hands gripped the steering wheel, hard. Sometimes she forgot amidst all the Hollywood talk about how much Rita cared. But when she called her “jeva,” the Cuban nickname for “girl,” it was a reminder that Rita always looked out for her younger siblings.

“Just stress,” she said, running a hand through her hair. She pulled into her apartment’s designated parking area and chose a spot on the far side of the lot. “I’m just . . . stressed.”

“Does it have anything to do with this problem of yours?” Rita said this quietly, but her tone was no nonsense. “Do I need to fly to Louisiana and kick his butt?”

Jade gave a warbled laugh, the kind that preceded exhausted tears. “No offense, but I think you’d have better luck if you went after him with a pair of your hair clippers.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Another pause, as though Rita were internally debating on something. “Really, jeva, do I need to come down there?”

“No! No, everything is fine. If anything, Nathan is the one thing in my life right now that seems steady.”

“That’s good. Mom wants to meet him.”

Groaning, Jade threw open the driver’s side door and grabbed her work duffel by the strap. “Mom just wants to see if he matches up to John Thomas.”

“Does he?” Rita sounded curious.

“Yes.” A thousand times more so, she added silently. “He’s great. Funny. My age. Not your type at all.”

“Ha-ha,” came her sister’s dry response, followed almost immediately by, “The movie director is older than me.”

“How old are we talking? Like, so old he needs a walking stick?”

“So old he needs the little blue pill.”

“Mom is going to be thrilled.”

“I’m kidding,” Rita said, “He’s forty. Perfect age for somebody who’s closing in on thirty-three.”

A little smile curled Jade’s mouth. “Watch out, you’re almost becoming respectable.”

Whatever else her sister would have said faded the moment Jade took the steps to her second floor apartment, turned the corner to her front door, and spotted Nathan leaning against the wall.

He was dressed in his standard work attire of black pants and a black polo. His thick hair, always combed back neatly, was sexily mussed like he’d shoved his fingers through the lengths repeatedly.

Her heart gave an unsteady thump as he kicked off the wall and sauntered toward her, his gray eyes alert and focused. He had the look of a starved man, one who knew what he wanted and would stop at nothing until he owned it, mind, body, and soul.

Did he want her?

“Jade?” her sister asked curiously, and Jade belatedly realized she still held her cell phone up to her ear.

“I’ll call you back later, Rita,” she said, hitting the red telephone button with her thumb before her sister could ask what was wrong. She set the phone on Do Not Disturb, just in case Rita called in reinforcements in the form of Lucia Margarita Harper.

She offered Nathan a bright grin. He didn’t return it, and Jade felt some of her enthusiasm die as unease settled in instead. She held her phone up. “That was just Rita checking in. Apparently Sammie told the entire family about you.”

His gray eyes, normally so expressive, were an inscrutable mask. “Your dad included?”

He sounded angry, bitter. Jade had no idea what to make of it.

Seeking a moment to gather her composure, she shouldered past the wall of man in front of her and unlocked her apartment door. “I haven’t heard from my dad”—to be fair, Kevin Harper wasn’t one for phones or social media—“but I’m sure Sammie told him, too.”

She heard his heavy boots enter the apartment behind her. From her periphery, she watched him toe off his shoes before entering the living room, just like always. She’d never told him before about her penchant for a clean house, but he knew anyway.

When it came to her, he seemed to pick up on the unspoken clues she left behind and readjusted to them accordingly.

It was one of the things she loved most about him.

Jade paused as the word settled in her brain. Love. So obscure, so vague—what had Sammie told her before? That she’d know love instantaneously because she’d spent years with John Thomas secretly wanting it but never knowing it firsthand?

Swallowing, she turned to face Nathan full-on. He’d moved into the kitchen, grabbing two glasses from her cabinets and filling them with filtered tap water from the fridge. He looked right at home, and, Díos mío, she liked him here. With her.

She loved him.

Jade accepted the glass of water with a shaky hand. “Thanks,” she said, taking a quick sip before cupping her hands around the glass. “I actually called you earlier. I know it wasn’t exactly my place, but I met with—”

“How’s your mom feel about me?”

Jade lifted her gaze to his face. She tried to read his expression, but aside from the hard line of his mouth, he gave nothing away. She bought herself time with another sip of cold water. “I haven’t really talked to her.”

“So you aren’t sure?”

“Aren’t sure of what?” she asked, more sharply than she’d intended. She put the glass on the counter and turned to him with her arms crossed over her chest. “What’s wrong with you? I know you were worried about my dad, but I’m telling you that there’s nothing to stress about. I’m sure they’ll both love you.”

He set his glass next to hers on the counter. When he faced her, it was with an intensity that left her reeling. “Maybe I should ask this differently,” he said in a deceptively soft voice. “Are you sure they’ll like anyone more than your ex-fiancé?”

Jade flinched.

It was her gut reaction.

She wanted to tell him how she and John Thomas had never been engaged, not really, but the words stuck in her throat.

Hard gray eyes lowered from her face to her feet, then inched their way back up again. “Guess I wasn’t supposed to know about him,” Nathan drawled, “because I was never going to be more to you than a hookup. Am I right?”

Past the growing lump, she whispered, “It wasn’t like I purposely hid my relationship with him from you.”

He scoffed, a harsh sound that was nothing like the Nathan she knew. “But you weren’t exactly forthcoming with the information, were you? Were you laughing at me this entire time? Listening to me wax on about my past and my fears, asking me to trust you, and all the while you just—” He twisted away and roughly shoved his hands through his hair.

“I told you things about me,” she said, reaching forward to place a hand on his arm. “More than I’ve told anyone else in my life.”

Her words, intending to sooth his ruffled feathers, didn’t do the trick.

He let out a humorless laugh. “Jade, you told me what you wanted me to hear. But even right now you won’t say his name. Either you care for him more than you realize or—”

“No,” she snapped, turning her comforting hand into a rough palm to his bicep that didn’t budge him an inch. “You don’t get to play that game and twist my words around. I don’t mention him because I don’t care, Nathan, that’s why. Because I spent four years in a relationship I didn’t want, and New Orleans was a fresh start.”

“A fresh start, maybe, but you can’t possibly spend four years with someone and not miss them.”

“Are you asking me if I miss John Thomas? The answer to that is no, I don’t. You tell me how I should miss a man who barely had time for me, and even when he did we sat in silence.”

Annoyance flashed across his features, but whether it was annoyance with her or annoyance with himself, Jade didn’t know.

“Y’all were practically engaged,” he said flatly, “and according to your dad, you moved to N’Orleans because you didn’t want to deal with men.”

Jade threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “So sue me!” she exclaimed, wanting to wrap her hands around his big shoulders and shake him. “I was stuck in a long-term relationship, which I ended by the way, and when I moved I wanted a break from dating. Is that so wrong of me?”

She didn’t give him a chance to speak, and even if he’d tried she would have barreled right over him anyway. She was sick and tired of playing games. “Why is it that men can say that they want to be single and no one thinks twice? But when a woman says she needs a break, when she wants to focus on herself for once, she’s deemed broken.”

He cut in with a swift and firm, “I didn’t say you were broken.”

She barely heard him over the thundering in her ears. “The implication was still there. Why would I want to be alone?” She jabbed a finger in his direction. “That’s pretty much what you’re asking me. That because I’m single it must be because I’m brokenhearted. Why aren’t I allowed to just have a fling with a guy, if that’s what I want?”

Because that’s not what you want, not with him.

Jade slammed the door on those thoughts. Yes, she loved Nathan, but she also cared about his perception of her. She was an independent woman—a woman who didn’t need a man’s reassurance to let her know that she was doing a good job. More importantly, she didn’t need a man, period.

She fixed her gaze on Nathan’s big body, noting the closed-off expression on his face. “This isn’t the problem here and you know it.”

In response, he arched a brow and turned to her with folded arms. “No?” he asked softly, and she could have sworn she saw a flash of regret in his gaze. “What’s the problem, then?”

You.

Jade threw her shoulders back, spine snapping straight. “I admit that I should have mentioned John Thomas to you. He was a big part of my life, though probably not as big of a part of it as he should have been, considering that we dated for years.”

He answered with a short nod. “I’m assuming there’s a ‘but’ coming soon.”

She ignored the sarcastic bite to his words. “The problem, Nathan, is that you were expecting something to go wrong this entire time. Maybe not consciously, but you’ve been waiting for me to screw up and ruin what we have.”

“According to you,” he said bitterly, “we don’t have anything but sex.”

Jade’s eyes narrowed. “You’re doing it again. I don’t know why I didn’t see this before.”

“See what before?” he pushed back, proving once and for all that men only saw what they wanted to see. And he certainly wasn’t seeing what she was struggling to tell him. “I haven’t been just sitting around, waiting for you to fuck up, Jade.”

“You have been.” She jabbed a pointed finger at his chest. “Instead of coming over or giving me a call to ask about John Thomas like a mature adult, you struck out and spun this entire thing around by making it seem like I intentionally left you in the dark.”

“You did leave me in the dark!” he exploded, the force of his words sending her back against the counter in shock. “Call me an idiot, Jade, call me a goddamn romantic, but I thought we had something special. Unique, whatever the fuck you want to call it. I told you shit that no one else knows—aspects of myself that my own mother doesn’t know about.”

Fingers curling into a fist, she brought her hand to her aching chest. Desperately she wanted to rewind this conversation, but what was the point? He clearly only saw the worst in her. He seemed determined to prove that she’d screwed him over. Would he continue to do so if they got together permanently? “Nathan, what do you even want me to say right now? That I’m sorry? I said that already. That I should have told you about John Thomas earlier? I’ve said that, too. But I refuse to apologize for wanting to live my life, for once, a certain way.”

His head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. “That’s the most backhanded apology I’ve ever heard.”

Jade lifted her chin. “I don’t see you offering an apology.”

His mouth twisted in a sneer. “And I’d be apologizing for what? For wanting more than just sex with you? That I pictured more than just fucking you in the dark? How do you suppose that apology should go?”

Her closed fist moved down to her belly. She thought she might throw up, her stomach felt so topsy-turvy. This wasn’t what she wanted. When she’d seen him standing outside of her apartment, this wasn’t what she’d envisioned happening. She wanted his arms wrapped around her waist, his mouth claiming hers in sensual abandon.

But she also wanted a partner who listened to what she had to say and supported her. Who took her word for the truth, and didn’t let jealousy and past hurt color the present.

Jade wanted a love that didn’t question but that supported and encouraged.

And if she didn’t have that, then she might as well still be with John Thomas, who had never once looked at her and actually saw her for who Jade Lucia Harper actually was.

A strong, independent woman with a fierce sense of loyalty and family, who wanted to be offered the respect she deserved.

“If you don’t think you owe me an apology, that’s fine,” she said, evenly and clearly, “but be honest with yourself at least. You may have asked me for help with the Zeker case, but don’t pretend you ever thought this thing with us would last. If you had, you wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that I was using you for a fling. You would have asked a much more important question.”

In a voice met with gravel, he rasped, “Which is?”

Lowering her fist to her side, Jade forced herself to meet his gaze. “If I loved you.”

She saw his shoulders visibly jerk at her words, and he twisted away to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, Jade,” he rasped, that smoky voice of his calling to her to give in. But she wouldn’t. She deserved more. “You’re right. I should have—”

“It’s fine,” she said stiffly, “but I think you should go.”

“It’s not fine—wait.” He turned back to her, his gray eyes wide with an emotion she couldn’t name. “You want me to leave? Honey, you’re right. I said that already.”

Jade shook her head, refusing to let him tempt her into changing her mind. It hurt. God, it hurt to say this. But wouldn’t it hurt more a few years down the line when she realized that he still couldn’t find it in himself to trust her?

“I’m sorry, Nathan.” Devastation pierced his gaze and she had to turn away. “I’m sorry, but I need to do this for me. I need someone . . . ” She bit down on her knuckle, anything to keep the tears from spilling forth. “I spent years with someone who couldn’t be bothered with me at all. I accepted it because I didn’t know better, and also because he didn’t inspire anything in me to care. I don’t feel that way about you. I care. I want better. But I’m realizing that even though I love you, I don’t think you’ll ever fully let down your walls. I can’t risk that, knowing how I feel about you now . . . ”

Something shuttered in his expression, like he’d expected her reaction all along. “So you won’t take a chance on me. On us.”

“I—” Jade lowered her gaze to the floor. “I can’t.”

His laugh was all hard edges and jagged lines. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he muttered, “because God knows I found everything I’ve ever wanted in you.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond.

He swept out of her apartment, leaving her alone. Just like how she’d arrived in New Orleans a month ago. But unlike when she’d moved here, so full of hope and excitement, he’d taken all of that with him too.

She covered her mouth to keep the sobs quiet. Because she had to face the truth—she had no one to blame for her current situation but herself.