CHAPTER 12
The farmers’ market was a huge success that week for Mara. She ended up preparing three times as much product as she usually did, even with limited time, and sold out within a few hours. Jared worked along beside her, doing all of the lifting and moving required, making her sit her ass on the tailgate while he worked. Her ankle was getting stronger, nearly back to normal, but he was still insistent that she could reinjure it. She gave him instructions while he worked, and even though he let her do very little physical work, they managed to function as a team.
Orders from stores in town and from a few restaurants like Sullivan’s came rolling in. She and Jared made the deliveries after the farmers’ market, the profits considerably more than she’d ever seen before from her products. It wasn’t big money, but it was a positive start for her.
The trouble came the next day when she tried to give Jared half the profits.
“No,” he grumbled. “The profits can go back into the business. I don’t need or want the money. You need to pay yourself, and then put it back into the business to keep growing. The website will be up soon.”
Mara rolled her eyes as she pulled out the stitches at the seams of Kristin’s bridesmaid dress, working on the alterations it needed to fit her fuller body. They had picked it up at Kristin’s house on the way home from the farmers’ market, and the sly look her best friend gave her as she introduced Jared to Kristin hadn’t escaped her notice. Thank God Kristin hadn’t said anything. She’d simply winked at Mara as she handed her the dress.
“You have to take a fair deal, Jared.” It was well past time for them to discuss their business issues. They needed a contract soon, a business plan that was fair to him. She didn’t give a damn if he didn’t need the money. For her to feel like she’d accomplished something big, she needed it to be professionally done.
“I gave you my terms,” he reminded her, shooting her a stubborn look from his position in the recliner across from her.
They’d just finished dinner, and he was working on his laptop while she was altering her dress. Jared lingered more and more at the guest house, slowly moving some of his essentials into the residence and leaving them there. Not that she minded. The moment he left to go back to the mansion at night, she was lonely. She was getting used to his company, craved it when he was gone. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he was also slowly replacing all of her belongings with new items, bringing her a new computer that he just happened to have lying around. Not so coincidentally, it was brand-new in the box and top-of-the-line. He’d looked so pleased with himself every time he gave her something new that she hadn’t had the heart to refuse the items. And she did need them. But his thoughtfulness made her uncharacteristically weepy. No guy had ever wanted to do things for her, or anticipated her needs. It felt strangely . . . good.
However, the business was a whole different thing, and she was willing to play hardball if she had to. And she knew she was going to have to do it. “Your brother made me an offer.” Damn! She really didn’t want to play this particular card or play any games with Jared, but the stubborn man wasn’t giving her much of a choice.
“He what?” Jared questioned cautiously.
“He made me an offer to be my partner. Complete with a contract and controlling interest. If we can’t make a deal, I’m taking him up on it,” she said, trying not to look him in the eyes.
“You’re not doing business with Evan. He’s a damn shark. He’d eat you alive without a second thought,” Jared snarled. “It wouldn’t matter to him if the money was nothing to him. He’s a goddamn anal perfectionist. He’d be bossing you around every minute of the day, working you until you dropped.”
“But it would be a fair agreement. And I don’t mind working hard.”
“It would be in his favor. It always is.”
Mara shrugged. “A major investor gets controlling interest.”
“I don’t want him controlling you,” he bellowed, angry now.
“He wouldn’t be controlling me. He’d be in control of the business.”
“No.”
“Then draw up a fair contract,” Mara insisted, finally meeting his gaze unyieldingly. “This isn’t fair, Jared.” She had to be strong. This was a business deal.
“Life isn’t fair, Mara. Is it fair that monetarily I’ve always had everything and you had nothing? Is it fair that you lost your mother too damn young and spent most of your adult life taking care of her? Is it fair that you’re so damn talented but can’t fund your own business? None of this shit is fair. For once in my life, I just want to help. Let me do it.” His stare was intense, his eyes dark with frustration.
Mara nearly caved in. Underneath Jared’s carefully constructed veneer of sophistication and coolness lay the heart of a generous man. However, she couldn’t give in to this. Jared talked tough, but she was fairly certain that many people had taken advantage of him in the past. She wasn’t going to be just another woman who used him. “Make the contracts or I walk. I understand that the money is peanuts to you, but it means something to me. It’s not ethical, and I can’t live with that.”
He scowled at her, silent for a moment before replying, “Fine. I’ll do the damn contracts. As long as you’re not doing business with my brother,” he rasped. “Happy?”
She dropped all pretense of working on the dress, letting it drop to her lap. “Yes. I’m excited about starting this business. The only thing bothering me was how unfair it was to you. I want us to be equal partners once the business gets going.”
“What woman worries about being fair to a billionaire?” Jared rumbled.
“I’m not dealing with the billionaire businessman right now. I’m dealing with somebody I care about,” she told him huskily. Knowing it was important that they put one more ghost to rest, she asked quietly, “Are you ever going to tell me about how your friends died?”
His expression turned dark as he closed his laptop and set it aside. “I killed them. I already told you that.”
“How?” Jared desperately needed to let go of his guilt and past pain, and Mara felt close enough to him to push now. And she’d do everything she could to release him from the prison he’d built for himself. She had no idea what had happened, but she didn’t have any doubt that he didn’t deserve to carry the blame that he’d carried for years. Evan had said Jared had changed after the deaths of his friends, and she wanted to see him find himself again. No matter what crap he spewed about being an asshole, deep inside, he wasn’t.
“By being young, stupid, and thoughtless,” he spat out flatly. “Because I was a selfish prick.”
Mara didn’t believe that for a minute, but she stood up, the dress she’d been working on drifting soundlessly to the carpet, and walked across to him, unable to stop herself. Gingerly, she slid into his lap, and Jared’s arms slipped immediately around her waist, cuddling her close as she rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me.”
For a moment, he didn’t speak. He just held her like she was the most precious thing in his life. Haltingly, he started to talk. “It happened right after Alan and I graduated from college. He wasn’t rich, and he took a lot of student loans to get through school. I had the money to put up the capital for the business, and he wanted to be part of it. We both loved old homes, restoring them back to their original condition. I wasn’t joking when I said I actually had a work truck like yours. I bought a few old homes while we were still in college, and we spent a lot of time restoring them ourselves. We didn’t decide to make it a real business until our last few months of school. The planning stage wasn’t quite over, but we were working on it. Selena and I dated all through college, and she still had one more year to go before graduation. I introduced them, and they’d known each other for several years by the time Alan and I graduated. I have no idea how long they’d been screwing each other.” Jared stopped for a moment and swallowed hard. “We were all attending a Fourth of July party that summer after Alan and I finished college. Pretty much everyone was drunk except me. I didn’t drink much then. My old man was a drunk, and the last thing I wanted was to be like him. So I volunteered to be the designated driver. The party was in full swing when I realized Selena and Alan were missing. I went to find them, and I found them making their own fireworks in a bedroom upstairs.” Jared broke off speaking, breathing hard as though he were living through the whole experience again.
Mara stroked his hair back from his forehead. His eyes were closed. “Don’t think about that. What happened after you found them?” He looked so vulnerable that she almost wanted to stop the entire conversation, but Mara knew he needed to talk it out, no matter how painful.
“I left,” he admitted hoarsely. “I took off, and they ended up catching a ride with a drunken student. They crashed not long after they left the party. The driver was going too fast and swerved off the road and hit a tree. All three of them died instantly.” His voice grew stronger, angrier. “I was supposed to be their driver. I should have gotten them home safely. I was pissed, and I never gave one fucking thought about how they were getting home.”
Her heart ached because he was so willing to take the blame when it wasn’t warranted. “It wasn’t your fault, Jared.” She pulled his head against her breasts and rocked him like a child. “Your reaction was no different than anyone else’s would be if they were betrayed. They were adults. Nobody forced them into that car. They could have called a taxi. What happened was a tragic accident, but none of it was your fault. How drunk were they?”
“Barely above the legal limit, according to their blood alcohol. The driver was plastered.”
“Then they still could have made the right decision, but they didn’t. Nobody can blame you for what happened, and you can’t blame yourself.” Mara’s voice was pleading. She had to get through to him, make him really believe he wasn’t responsible. His torment was evident now, and she couldn’t stand to see him this way.
“Her mother blamed me,” he replied gravely. “She always liked me, thought I was good for Selena. She was grateful that I was helping her daughter through school. Until the funeral. She let me know that I killed her daughter, and she hoped I went to hell. She never knew that I was already there.”
Oh, dear God. Selena’s mother never knew. “You never told her what really happened,” Mara said softly, her heart skittering as her brain furiously worked out what had occurred.
“I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone,” Jared choked out harshly. “All she knew is that I left the party without her daughter. There were plenty of friends who saw me leave. There were only three people who knew what really happened, why I left when I shouldn’t have, and two of them were dead,” he rasped. “How in the hell could I tell her mother that she was screwing another man, after Selena was already dead? That was her daughter. I couldn’t leave her with those kinds of memories of her daughter. It was better to let her think that I killed Selena and Alan without the details. It didn’t really matter.”
“You didn’t kill them,” Mara answered angrily, defensively. Sweet Jesus, Jared had taken the blame alone, too kind to tell his girlfriend’s mother or anyone else that he’d had a completely legitimate reason for leaving that night. The sheer selflessness that it had taken for Jared to shoulder all of the blame to let everyone else keep good memories of two people taken away so young nearly made her heart beat out of her chest with empathy for him. Jared had been young, but had still taken every criticism, every bit of blame to cover up for two dead young people who had betrayed his trust in every way.
“If I would have stayed—”
“You don’t know what would have happened. They would have been embarrassed. They knew you saw them?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. Selena saw me.”
They wouldn’t have gone with you anyway, Jared. Please believe that. Jesus, he’d been so damn determined to take the blame and let everyone else grieve that he’d actually convinced himself that it was really true, that he’d really been completely responsible for their deaths. Just the thought of his girlfriend’s mother condemning Jared to hell when he was trying to actually save her and other people close to Selena and Alan from additional pain made furious tears flow from Mara’s eyes. Her heart felt like it was being torn from her chest as she imagined what it must have been like for him during that time. He’d been alone, without a single soul to talk to about his own grief and betrayal. That was why he’d gone on a bender, the emotional pain so severe that he’d needed to escape.
“Do you really think they would have calmly ridden home with you?” she finally asked him gently.
“I don’t know,” he answered huskily. “I don’t know.”
“You need to stop blaming yourself. They made several bad choices. None of them deserved to die. But you don’t know if things would have turned out any differently, and your reaction was perfectly normal. I would have done the same thing. I would have been upset, and I would have left.” Mara took a deep breath, tears still streaming down her face. She found it amazing that years after the incident, Jared still blamed himself. Not only had he needed to deal with the betrayal and the death of two of the most important people in his life, but he felt he had to take the blame for his girlfriend and friend getting killed on top of it.
“I wish I could believe that things wouldn’t have turned out any differently had I stayed and insisted on driving them.”
What person does that? What young guy that heartbroken was going to keep a cool head and calmly drive two people home who had betrayed him? “They wouldn’t have gone home with you. How long do you think they were involved?”
Jared released a masculine sigh. “Looking back, they may have been screwing each other for quite a while. They weren’t drunk enough that night for it to have been a first-time fling, and I heard them before I actually saw them fucking. Selena was rambling about how much she loved some of the things that Alan did to her. It wasn’t a new thing.” He paused and took a deep breath before continuing. “They started doing things together about halfway through my last year of college. I thought they were just friends, and I was trying to get the business together, so I was busy. Selena and I just kept growing more and more distant. I thought it was just because I was so busy.”
So it was Jared’s fault for that distance between them, too? He worked too much so his girlfriend found someone else to screw her?
The whole incident was beginning to make Mara pissed off and defensive for Jared’s sake. “Why didn’t she just break up with you?”
“Her family was happy we were together then. She came from a family who didn’t have much. After we met, I helped her pay for all her college fees. They were grateful. I think Selena was just waiting until she finished school to make the break,” Jared answered flatly. “She had one more year, and Alan didn’t have the funds to help her.”
Bitch! Mara didn’t know if Selena had ever cared about Jared or if he was just convenient to pay for her education. But she sounded like she was a user. And his so-called friend? What kind of guy did the horizontal mambo with his best friend’s girlfriend, a friend who was completely funding their start-up partnership in business together? Okay . . . neither of them deserved to die because they were users, but she wished they were still alive so she could bitch slap both of them. “So this misplaced guilt caused you to go over the edge?”
His body tensed. “How the hell do you know about that?”
“Evan told me.”
“Fuck! He hasn’t mentioned that to anyone. He promised he wouldn’t. My family never even knew,” Jared growled. “Yeah, I went on a major bender. I just wanted to forget. Fuck! I just wanted to get rid of the images and sounds of the two of them together. I wanted to forget the scorn of their families and the whispers behind my damn back. I wanted to forget their funerals, and I really wanted to forget that they were gone forever because I’d done something stupid.”
“And did you forget?”
“Hell no. And I hated Evan for a while for forcing me into reality again.”
She stroked a palm over the stubble on his jaw. “I’m glad he did. What happened?”
Mara knew she was done fighting her attraction to Jared, finished trying to defend herself against getting hurt. This man had once loved and had been completely betrayed. Since then, he’d been torturing himself about what else he could have done to save the lives of the very people who had deceived him, and he’d shouldered every bit of blame. Jared might have been with a lot of women, but they were females who hadn’t cared what demons lurked inside him. She did. And if opening her heart to him completely was the only way to heal those wounds, she’d do it. She didn’t care about the risk anymore. She just cared about . . . him.
“I don’t remember most of those months,” Jared admitted in a hesitant, graveled voice. “Every time I woke up, I started thinking, so I got drunk again. It’s pretty much lost time for me until Evan showed up.”
Mara didn’t even have to ask how Evan had known that Jared needed him. While Jared’s eldest brother tried to act like he didn’t care about anyone or anything, he seemed to have an almost scary way of knowing what was going in his siblings’ lives. “So he sobered you up?”
“The hard way,” Jared grumbled. “He tossed my ass in the shower because he said I stunk. A cleaning staff showed up almost instantly to clean my condo, and he forced coffee and food down my throat. He got rid of every drop of alcohol in the house. I guess the main thing I remember is that he stayed, even though he badgered the hell out of me day and night.”
“Tough love,” Mara murmured.
“With Evan, I don’t think there’s any other kind,” Jared rumbled.
“How long?”
Jared shrugged. “Weeks. He took over my office and worked, but he never left me alone.”
Mara could imagine the two gruff brothers in each other’s company, snapping at each other, and caring so very much while they were doing it. “Your siblings love you, Jared.”
“They don’t even know me anymore,” he growled. “They don’t know what happened, or how naive and selfish I was.”
“Evan knows, and he still cares.” Mara could still remember Evan’s words of warning that he never wanted to see Jared suffer like he’d suffered after the deaths of his friends. “I’m not one of your siblings, but I know, and I still care.”
Jared threaded his hands through her hair and tilted her gaze down to meet his. “Do you? Can you really look at me and not see an irresponsible, selfish asshole who killed his friends?”
Mara turned her body and straddled him, letting her legs dangle off both sides of the recliner. “Yes,” she told him truthfully, holding his eyes with hers. Her heart clenched as she saw the momentary confusion and hope in his eyes. “You need to stop torturing yourself. Please. The. Accident. Was. Not. Your. Fault.” Mara put her arms around his neck and stroked the coarse hair at his nape. “I’m sorry they died. They were both way too young, and it’s sad. But you aren’t to blame.”
“You care?” he asked hesitantly. “About me? Even after everything I just told you?” He looked endearingly confused.
“I do,” she whispered softly, swallowing a huge lump in her throat. “I’m not going to try to protect myself from getting hurt anymore, and I’m never going to be less than honest about how I feel. I admire how you pulled yourself back out of the darkness and made yourself even more successful. I hurt for you because you gave up your passion and your dreams of restoring old homes because of bad memories. It kills me that you took the blame so others could keep their happy memories.” Mara was pretty certain not many people would have done what Jared had done. Honestly, it was probably the right thing to do with a mother who had lost a daughter, but she hated that he’d had to be the scapegoat. She absolutely wished Selena’s mother hadn’t been so desperate for someone to blame that she’d made Jared the villain, especially after all he’d done for her daughter.
“It was Evan who pulled me back.”
She pulled playfully at a lock of his hair. “It was you. Evan eventually left you alone to do what you wanted. You could have gone back to drowning in a bottle. You didn’t. It takes a lot of strength to choose to change your life. You did that, and built one of the most successful businesses in the world.” If she could do just a tiny fraction as well as Jared had done at changing his life after a tragedy, she’d be grateful.
Jared searched her face with a desperate expression before pulling her mouth down to meet his.
Mara sighed into his mouth, opening to him, returning his kiss by meeting his tongue as it pushed insistently between her lips. He kissed her breathless while she slowly slid her hands down to unbutton his shirt.
“What are you doing?” he asked as he pulled away from the fierce embrace, his voice crackling with desire.
“Seducing you. I’ve never actually done this before, so be patient with me,” she requested in a sultry voice. She could feel his rock-hard erection pushing against her ass, straining to be free. Mara wasn’t lying. She had never actually seduced a guy before. In her limited experience, they had both undressed and gotten right to it. Honestly, her sexual experience before her night with Jared had been so long ago and so unmemorable that she couldn’t even say how it had started.
Right now, all she wanted was to do something for Jared. It wouldn’t make his pain go away completely, but she hoped she could get through to him with time. There was no way she was going to let him live this way. He’d been there for her. Now she wanted to be there for him in whatever way would convince him that he was special. So damn special.
Opening his shirt after it was unbuttoned, she sighed longingly. “You’re so beautifully made, Jared.” He definitely worked at being fit, and it showed in every defined muscle on his chest and abdomen. “So smoking hot.” Leaning down, she nipped at his flat nipple and soothed it with her tongue as she slid between his legs to the floor. Palming his cock through the denim material, she smiled against his chest as he groaned, loving the way his body responded to her touch.
“I don’t have much control right now,” Jared warned her ominously as his hands threaded roughly through her hair.
Exactly! Mara wanted to break through his control, make him understand that he didn’t need it. Not when they were together. Her finger moving slowly down his happy trail of hair leading to what she already knew was an enormous cock, she looked up at him for a moment. “If this goes as planned, in a few minutes you’ll have absolutely none.”