Present Day
Jace Bennett
SEX WASN’T ON the menu.
Besides, it wasn’t like I was about to let my re-awakened sex drive rule my life. Banging everything in a skirt was a thing of my past. I had a daughter now and I couldn’t be doing things like that.
Not that I would, anyway.
Yet, while at lunch with my friends, sex was exactly what was on my mind. Even as Ethan snapped his fingers to snag my attention, I didn’t stop staring at Amanda, who had just walked in the restaurant.
The place was the same one I had met her at earlier in the week. Good food. Fast. And close to the office. The same held true for her too, I supposed.
Ethan snapped his fingers again, and I jerked my head in his direction. “Hey, earth to Jace. Did you hear me?”
“What?” I asked.
He shook head. “Fiona asked me if I’d be interested in another threesome, this time with a girl.”
My eyes opened wide. “And you said . . . ?”
The shrug he gave was more than casual. “I told her, sure, if that was what she wanted. You know me, I’m up for anything.”
Now I was the one who shook my head. He had gotten that right.
Nick had a smart-ass comment about the whole thing, and as the two bickered, I zoned back out.
It wasn’t like I was trying to be rude. I got the gist of what the next topic of conversation was. Nick was telling us about Lucas, who was his younger brother. Things were looking good that the star quarterback of Notre Dame was going to get drafted in the spring.
But damn, Amanda had sat down and instantly captured my attention. I wasn’t certain why. It wasn’t like I was into her, but I could really use the distraction.
Today she was with a younger man. I didn’t have a clue who he was. Not that she seemed very interested in him at the current time. Whoever he was, she wasn’t paying much attention to him because she was flirting with me. Taking her seat, she crossed her long legs and gave me a wink and a wave.
By the look of things, all was forgotten from our business meeting gone bad. And it would be so easy to take her up on her open offer. In a warped kind of way, I was even thinking it might ease my guilt. The fucked up thing about that was there was a very real chance I’d feel guilty for a different reason.
Still, Amanda was a woman who wasn’t in my life before. I wasn’t attached to her in any way. It would be a random fuck, and maybe help ease my fucked up confusion over Hannah.
Would it though?
“Jace, man, what the fuck is going on?” Nick demanded.
Nick wasn’t as subtle as Ethan, if you could call snapping your fingers subtle. Whereas I was the quiet brooding one, and Ethan was the dependable one, Nick was the easy-going glue that held us together.
The three of us were having lunch. It was something we did on the off weeks when we weren’t hanging out on Friday nights.
The every Friday night thing started after Tricia died. Ethan and Nick would occupy me for that one night a week while Fiona watched Max and Scarlett. Without those nights, I might have really lost my fucking mind.
The ritual had evolved over the years though, and with the addition of Nick’s two kids, Nicky and Sophie, to the mix, it became once a month for the guys and once a month for the girls.
All was fair, I supposed.
The vodka tonic I was drinking was extra strong, and would have to serve as my lunch as I shoved my plate of uneaten food to the side and wiped my mouth with my napkin. My eyes were still on Amanda. She had lifted her glass of water and was running her tongue around her lips and then licking them. The act was for my benefit, I could assure you.
Nick turned his head in her direction and caught it too. “You know her?”
“Yeah, she’s a business associate,” I offered casually.
“And?” Ethan said, one corner of his mouth twitching upward.
The eye roll I gave him was on purpose. “And nothing. I know her, that’s it.”
“She looks like she wants to suck your dick,” Nick snorted.
“She does,” I offered matter of factly.
Ethan’s eyebrows popped. “Are you hitting that and keeping it a secret?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not hitting that,” I sneered, and then went back to staring. I was however, thinking about hitting that. That I kept to myself.
It was better than reliving last night with Hannah. How good it felt to sink into her, to feel her under my skin, to come inside her. And there I went again, losing myself in that feeling, which was of course, followed by an onslaught of guilt.
The fork in Nick’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth. “Okay, Jace, what the fuck is going on with you?”
Leaning back in my chair, I forced a bored look on my face. “I had sex with someone last night.”
This time Ethan’s brows nearly hit the ceiling. As three college guys who once drank, chased tail, and fucked what we could, when we could, we had all changed, but fucking was fucking and curious minds and all that.
It was my near celibacy though that had been concerning my friends. And it was always a topic of conversation, whether it was a Friday, or a random phone call. Their concern was genuine. They adored Tricia, but they also didn’t want me to put her in saint status, which according to them, I had already done.
I got it.
She was gone.
Fuck, I lived it everyday.
That didn’t change how I felt though. I wasn’t looking for anyone. Didn’t want to get attached. Everyone I had ever loved in my life died. There was no way I was going through that again.
The person I was focusing on was my daughter.
“And,” Nick drawled.
I made a show of checking my watch. Crap, I still had thirty minutes left before I had to leave. Fuck me. “And what?”
Wisely shutting up, he tilted his head to the side as if contemplating what to say next.
Ethan, however, did not take his cue. As soon as he finished chewing his food, he leaned forward on the table. “Who was she? That hot new secretary of yours?”
I shook my head.
“Someone else from the office?” he guessed.
Again, I shook my head, no.
“A door to door saleswoman?”
“Who?” I mocked.
He shrugged, and then asked, “Mrs. Sherman?”
Nick and I both blew out a breath in horror and then assaulted him with our gazes. “What the hell?” I said. “She takes care of my daughter.”
Ethan held his hands up in surrender. “I’m out of options here. You don’t go anywhere to meet anyone unless you’re with us, and last I checked there were no hot women at the sports bar we go to.”
At first I wasn’t going to tell them anything about the Scarlett/Jonah situation, but what the hell, I had time. And besides, it might help them understand how I ended up fucking Hannah over my kitchen table in the house I once shared with Tricia.
Crossing a leg over my knee, I started with, “Monday was Scarlett’s first day of kindergarten—”
“Miss Eastling,” Ethan surmised, pumping his fist in the air like he’d scored.
I shook my head.
Nick glowered at him. “Shut the fuck up, will you?”
Covertly, Ethan shot him the bird.
That made me chuckle, but then I got serious and started talking. I went on to tell them everything from Scarlett coming home from school crying, to what was said to her, to me seeking out the parent of the then thought to be bully, to it being Hannah Michaels who opened the door.
“Oh shit,” Nick murmured.
“Hannah Michaels,” Ethan echoed in shock.
“Well, it’s Hannah Crestfall now, but yeah.”
Nick set his napkin on the table. “Are you okay?”
“I fucked her over my kitchen table last night, how do you think I am?” It was crass, but it was the truth.
“Wait! What? How the hell did a run-in over a kids disagreement lead to that?” Nick asked.
“Hannah Michaels?” Ethan said again, this time as a question.
“Yes,” Nick assured him so I wouldn’t have to.
After all it was Ethan and I that shared that part of our past. Her.
Staying on course, and answering Nick’s question, I told them the rest of what had happened, and how I felt afterward.
Both of them just stared at me, speechless.
Just then Amanda halted at our table. I realized then I hadn’t paid any attention to her since I started talking about Hannah.
Her look was frigid. “Jace,” she said in a clipped voice. “How are you?”
“Amanda,” I said tersely. “These are my friends, Nick Carrington and Ethan Miller.”
They both greeted her.
Her eyes glittered as she shook each of their hands, but the shine vanished when she noticed their wedding bands. “Anyway,” she waved a hand, “I just wanted to say hello, and that I got the invitation for the fundraiser. It’s a cause near to my heart and I’ll be there.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said.
That stare of hers was still fixed on me. “Let’s talk before then though, December is much too far away.”
I gave her a nod, but no vocal response.
“Well, I should be going. I have someone waiting for me.”
“It was good to see you,” I offered.
When she turned around on her high heels, both Nick and Ethan resumed their staring at me.
Nick broke the silence first. “You shouldn’t feel guilty.”
“I know I shouldn’t, but that doesn’t stop the fact that I do.”
“So you knew her first. It doesn’t really matter,” Ethan contributed.
“It feels like it does. It feels like it makes what I had with Tricia somehow less important. Less real.”
“It doesn’t,” Ethan told me.
“What are you going to do?” Nick asked, changing gears.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing isn’t teaching her kid how to play football,” Ethan commented.
“It’s not the kid’s fault his mother and I have a past.”
“And it’s not your fault Hannah doesn’t have a husband,” Ethan huffed.
It was clear he wasn’t comfortable having her back in our lives. Not that I blamed him. It was all a cluster fuck that, to this day, I have no idea how we let it go as far as we did for as long as we did.
Nick shifted a little in his chair. “I think it’s a nice thing you’re doing, and if you want some help, I’d be happy to meet you in the park sometime. Just tell me it isn’t so you can keep seeing Hannah, though?”
I looked him directly in the eyes. “It’s because I want to do it. It’s because Scarlett will have fun. It’s because the kid doesn’t have a male role model in his life and I know what that’s like.”
The nod Nick gave me was imperceptible, but I saw it.
Ethan said nothing further about it.
I got it. They weren’t hopping on the Hannah train. Not because of her, but because of me—who I had become after her. Before Tricia.
They had nothing to worry about because I wasn’t hopping on the Hannah train either.
Or that had been my intent, anyway.
What I had forgotten was that I never could resist her.