SADIE
I WAS A TOTAL CHICKEN.
After taking my time in the shower, taking my time drying off, and then taking my time putting on the robe, I wasn’t sure if I should go out in the other room and tell Jaxson everything about Simon, about Riley, about myself, or if I should just open the window and flee.
I didn’t want to face what I’d done.
To let all the bad slap me in the face.
And yet I knew I deserved that and so much more, so I took a deep breath, blew it out, and forced myself to open the door instead of shimmying out the window.
Step 5: Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Even from across the room he looked hot as sin. With that movie-star dark hair a mess from the outdoor breeze and those low riding jeans, he looked like sex on a stick. Seriously, he really was beyond good looking.
In the midst of my situation, he was also the last thing I should be thinking about.
Tall, dark, handsome, but also brooding.
Brooding.
Because of me.
Brooding because he’d lost the love of his life.
And then there was also the very real fact that he didn’t want me, not anymore, anyway. Obviously, once was enough for him. Or maybe it was the stealing thing that had turned him off. Not that I could blame him.
I cleared my throat.
He looked my way. “I was just about to come and see if you were still here,” he said from behind the kitchen counter.
It was a joke, and it was something that made me feel like staying was the right choice. Staying with him was the right choice. Still, I felt so bare. I stopped in the living room and pulled the ties of my robe tighter. “I had thought about squeezing out the window,” I replied honestly.
He was pouring a bottle of water into a glass, and when he looked up, the corners of his mouth tilted in a way that melted my heart. “I don’t doubt that for a minute, which is why I was standing outside it.”
“You weren’t?”
He shook his head. “No, I figured you had nowhere else to go.”
That was certainly right.
Nervous, I turned to look out the open doors toward the sprawling vastness of the sea. The sound of the ocean and the smell of salt in the air always calmed me.
“Here, drink this.”
I hadn’t heard him coming up on me, and I flinched.
From behind me, he held the glass out in front of me. “I told you I’m not going to turn you in. You don’t have to be afraid.”
My body reacted to his closeness with a yearning I had never felt. Ignoring it, I took the glass and said, “I know, but what I did was wrong, and it cost you a lot.”
“Yes, and you’re going to pay me back, and not on your back.”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know anything about being a photography assistant.”
“It’s not really that hard. You do what I tell you to do, and you’ll be fine. Let’s start seeing how well you follow instructions by drinking the water.”
Instructions?
It felt more like an order, but who was I to argue. With that, I did as he said and sucked the liquid down. Turning to set the glass on the coffee table, I saw a plate with a silver dome.
Jaxson leaned toward the table and picked up the first-aid kit that sat beside it. “I ordered you food. After getting sick, I think you should eat something, but first let’s take care of those cuts.”
No one had ever taken care of me but myself. “I can do it,” I said, reaching out my hand for the red and white box.
He shook his head. “Follow instructions, remember?”
I nodded.
“Good, now sit down.”
There was an edge of steel in his voice that warned me not to argue, so I took a seat on the white sofa. Jaxson sat beside me and lifted my bare leg. A low hiss escaped his tight lips when he did. I didn’t know if he was pissed or excited at the sight. My reaction was more blatant. I couldn’t hide the goose bumps rising all over my skin.
I was excited.
Getting right to work, he applied Neosporin to some areas and then bandaged the wider, deeper scrapes. When he was done, I had a total of six Band-Aids on my legs alone. The bottoms of my feet felt raw, and he used the gauze rolls to wrap them. “We might need to take you to the resort medic tomorrow and get an antibiotic so these wounds don’t become infected.”
“That’s not necessary. I’ll be fine.”
His gaze darted to mine and another low hiss escaped his lips. Now I knew it was anger, not excitement. “Goddamn it, Sadie, stop fighting me on everything.”
It was the first time he’d called me by my real name, and the concern in his tone took my breath away. “Okay,” I said.
Moving to my arms, he inspected them just as thoroughly as he had my legs, but they weren’t as bad. No Band-Aids were required.
When his hands went to untie my robe, I grabbed them and held them tight. “I don’t have any scrapes there,” I cried.
His expression turned dark again. “No, but you do have bruised ribs, and I want to make sure the coloring around them hasn’t gotten any worse.”
“I looked down at myself. They’re fine.”
He lifted his head, his mouth tightening once more. “Even so, they need to be wrapped.”
Of course, he was right. I acquiesced and untied my own robe.
“Son of a bitch!” His jaw bulged. “What the hell happened out there?”
“I fell a few times in the brush, but I’ll be fine.”
There was fire in his eyes when he pulled the robe from my shoulders and glanced at the bruising that had made its way to my back. “Tomorrow morning we are going to the resort medic. Your ribs are purple, and I’m going to guess they are more than just bruised. I’m not a doctor, but a buddy of mine is a fighter, and I’ve seen this a few times. I think you might have a cracked rib or two.”
Perhaps he was right, and Simon had been wrong. I had no idea, but I did know that I was once again naked as a jaybird in front of this man, and although I should have hated being so exposed, nothing about it frightened me.
Jaxson visibly inhaled and exhaled through his nose as he took the roll of ACE wrap and wound it around my naked body. “You shouldn’t have run like that.”
I looked at his perfectly chiseled face. “I felt like I didn’t have a choice.”
He averted my stare. Perhaps he wanted to say something, but he said nothing and just kept on with what he was doing—touching my naked skin and lighting me up from the inside.
When he was done, he pulled the robe back onto my shoulders and tied the belt tight, like he couldn’t stand to look at me one more minute.
I waited for him to look at me, but he didn’t.
Instead, he stood. “Eat first, and then I want you to tell me everything, and I mean everything. If I think you’re lying, or leaving anything out, I’ll drive you to the airport myself in the morning.”
Again, I nodded.
He was cold. Removed. And I believed him.
Taking that as a yes, he lifted the dome from the plate.
A burger and fries.
A memory from the night before.
It should have made me smile, and yet that, along with the telling-him-everything part put a frown on my lips.
While I ate, Jaxson went into the bedroom. I could hear him on the phone, but couldn’t hear what he was saying. For all I knew, he was lying to me about not calling the police and was on the phone with them now. Still, I didn’t really think that.
About fifteen minutes later, he came out of the bedroom, strode over to the bar, picked up two glasses and the crystal decanter, set them down in front of me, and then sat beside me. “So that you know, I had a friend of mine verify you are who you say you are.”
I blinked. “How did you do that?”
“Let’s just say he knows how to access the DMV database and found your license.”
I couldn’t help what came out of my mouth. “You mean he’s a hacker?”
He shrugged, and then pulled my father’s dog tags from his pocket.
“Where did you get those?”
“You left them in my hotel room.”
I snatched them away.
“They might be the only reason you aren’t in jail.”
I stared at him. “What are you taking about?”
“The whole kindred spirit thing. Dumb, I know. My father flew for the Navy and was downed by a surface-to-air missile.” I gasped. “Kids of the storm troopers. That makes us somehow responsible for each other, no matter how fucked up it sounds.”
Kids of the storm troopers. I hadn’t heard that phrase in so long. “What happened to him?” I asked.
“For twenty years he was classified as MIA. My mother kept yellow ribbons tied around all the trees in our yard for that entire time. And then one day, when I was in college, she was notified his remains were discovered and called me home. By the time I got there, she’d shredded the ribbons with her bare hands. She was a mess. Even more of a mess than she’d been my entire life.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He poured us both a glass of whiskey and pushed one of the glasses toward me. “You don’t have to be. It took twenty years for her to accept the truth but she finally did after that. She checked herself into rehab, and she’s been sober ever since.”
I was shaking.
“Here,” he said. “Looks like you need this. Drink up, and then start talking because I’m done.”
That very familiar sick feeling flooded my veins, but then I looked over at him, and all of a sudden I felt like I needed to do this for him, and for me. Like I’d feel better if I could just tell someone what had happened. Tell him. Share with him like he had shared with me. I sipped the whiskey, and then started talking. “To tell you the whole story, I have to go back seventeen years ago, to when I had just turned twelve.”
Jaxson crossed one ankle over his knee and set his glass on it. “That’s fine. We have all night.”
Talking wasn’t how we had spent last night, but it looked like how we would be spending tonight, so I started at the beginning. I wasn’t sure why but it felt somehow relevant to the events of late. Like dominos of my life that just kept falling. Somehow connected.
I squared my shoulders and started talking. Real. True. Honest. No lies. No holding back. “I grew up on Moon Island. It’s a small town on the coast in North Georgia, and it’s filled with secrets. Secrets so deep, no one knows them all.”
Jaxson raised a brow. “I doubt that.”
“It’s true. And my mother is one of them. She was found dead, and no one knows why, or if they do, they’ve never spoken of it.”
Over the rim of his glass, his gaze softened.
“I remember that day like it was yesterday. It was storming, and no one picked me up from school. My mother always picked me up if it rained. When I got home, I found my mother lying dead in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. Her skull cracked open as if something had struck her. The police found no evidence of foul play, though, and they ruled her death accidental. Exactly one week later, the majority owner and CEO of the small private airline in our town went missing. Ruffus Magnolia’s body was never found.”
All doubt had left Jaxon’s gaze. “Was there some kind of connection between the two of them?”
“Yes. My father was a minority owner in the airline and flew for it. At the time I thought that was the only connection. Sure, it was a little coincidental for a small town to have a death and someone go missing in such a short period of time, but no one questioned it. However, just before my father died he confessed to me that my mother and Ruffus had been having an affair.”
Jaxson raised a brow. “Did you believe him?”
I shrugged. “Does it matter? It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t know, it might explain the coincidence.”
“Or it might not. All I know is my father started drinking heavily after my mother died, and became delusional. He might have conjured that up in his head after all these years.”
“Drinking, like how much?”
The word was familiar to him. A fellow Al-anon member. “A lot. The drinking went on for years and only got worse. He had become an alcoholic.”
The lines on his forehead creased. “And he was able to keep his job flying a plane?”
I nodded. “The only people who knew about his condition were his two best friends, and they knew he never drank before a flight. Besides, they had their own issues trying to keep the company afloat without Ruffus’s influx of cash. Anyway, by the time I turned seventeen, my father only stayed sober when he knew he had to go to work.”
“So he was a functioning alcoholic?”
“He was.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. No one besides Harvey had ever understood the depths of my situation.
“Finish your story,” he snapped.
I drew in a breath. “On the eve of the five-year anniversary of my mother’s death, he started drinking, but this time he didn’t stop. It went on all night and the whole next day. When I got home from school, he locked me in the bathroom and left me there all night.”
There was a look of horror on Jaxson’s face.
I shook my head. “He did it all the time. He thought he was protecting me. He was worried someone was going to hurt me.”
The sympathy in Jaxson’s eyes was something I didn’t need. “Who?”
“That’s just it. No one. He was delusional.”
I downed my drink and poured some more, and then I spoke stronger, harder, with the resolve I’d forced myself to build up. “It was early morning, the sun hadn’t even come up yet, when he finally unlocked the door. Unlike the other times, this time he didn’t apologize. In fact, he was still drunk, and there was a strange madness in his eyes I’d never seen. A craziness that frightened me to my core. He kept calling me by my mother’s name. Brenda. Brenda. Brenda. When I told him I wasn’t Brenda, that I was her daughter, his daughter, he wouldn’t listen, but instead—” I stopped for a moment to gather my unraveling emotions.
“What?” Jaxson refilled his own glass.
Chill bumps formed and raced across my skin. “He told me it was time for all of this to end.”
He stared into my eyes. Surveying for truth? I let him. There were no lies in my words.
I went on. “I had no idea what he meant, but he locked me in my room and left for work. I knew he couldn’t fly in his condition, so I pried the window open and escaped. Breaking back into the locked house, I called the police. But I was too late. His flight had already taken off. The chaos must have spooked him, and he missed the runway and crashed the plane. Thank God no one died, but many people were hurt. My phone call shut down the entire operation for good. The town’s people, who had once tied yellow ribbons around their trees for him, as well as Harvey and Simon’s father, went ballistic and turned against the three of them.”
Jaxson grabbed hold of my hand. “What about you?”
“I knew social services would come for me, so I ran. Ran as far and as fast as I could. I found out months later my father was sentenced to ten years. Recently, I found out his two partners spent all they had trying to get him off.”
This time when I paused, he pulled his hand away from mine, and refilled our glasses. “You ran away at seventeen?”
“For five years I stayed away from Georgia. I took odd jobs and kept moving. Never looking back. Then I got myself together, went to college, and started working for Hotlanta. Not long ago, the only man who ever cared about me called me and asked me to meet him and my father.”
“Your father?”
I nodded. “He’d gotten out of prison on good behavior and wanted to make amends.”
His eyes flashed with sympathy. Anyone who knew anything about alcoholics knew the steps in recovery.
I drained the glass, and the buzz made it easier to speak without crying. “Anyway, Harvey Winchester convinced me to let him back into my life.”
Jaxson sighed. “And you did?”
“I did. I trusted Harvey. He might have been my father’s friend, but for most of my teenage years I thought of him as my guardian angel.”
Jaxson sat up. “Did?”
“Both he and my father drowned at sea a little more than six weeks ago.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, pretty much. And my life became a mess after that.” I went on to tell Jaxson how my lack of focus got me fired. How I went to Moon Island. Met up with Simon, drank and drove, accidentally hit that boy, how we ran. About Simon’s plan to get the money and everything else that led me to the very spot I was sitting right now, and then I stopped talking. The only thing I couldn’t bring myself to tell him was how Simon had been a thief when we were kids. Something felt so wrong about admitting I had known this and still accepted him in my life.
Jaxson ran a distressed hand down his face.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “And I’m sorry for how much I cost you. I’m going to try to get the camera back. As soon as I get back to the States, I’ll call Simon and ask him where he pawned it, and go get it.”
Dismissing my words, he leaned closer. Jaxson took my wrist in his hand and turned it over. “What’s the rainbow symbolize?”
“The other side,” I said matter-of-factly.
He looked at me questioningly. “Of what?”
“Life. A place where it is easier, freer, filled with happy things. Magic. Ironic, isn’t it?” I asked. “Where I’m headed none of that will be possible.”
He followed the arc of the colored ink, running his fingers from one side to the other, and then his blurry gaze found mine. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
“I am. I have to turn myself in, and you know it.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. I want you to stay with me.”
“You mean work off my debt,” I said sarcastically.
“I mean stay away from the bad shit you’ve been through for a while. I have this job for six weeks. Stay with me. Be my assistant. Travel with me. It will give you time to get some perspective and decide what you should do next.”
My vision blurred. Tears. Alcohol. I had no idea. “I have to turn myself in. What I did was wrong, and I have to pay for it.”
He shook his head and squeezed my hand. “That’s just it. It wasn’t all your fault.”
“It was.”
His eyes sparked with anger. “You’re wrong. You are a victim of circumstance.”
“But I have to pay for my sins.”
“We all pay for our sins one way or another.” His voice was gentler.
Tears pricked my eyelids, and they stung. I swallowed and tried to breathe them back but they felt like acid as they welled, and I couldn’t stop them from falling. “Why do you want to help me?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you see me as anything else but bad?”
Roughly, he pulled me to him, held me to his chest, and then pressed a tender kiss to the top of my head. “You’re not bad, Sadie.”
I closed my eyes and sagged against him.
Time passed. I didn’t know how much. I might have fallen asleep, I wasn’t sure. But then Jaxson moved, and I came awake.
My gaze skittered nervously up to his.
“You’ll be safe here. I’ll make sure of it. Do you trust me?”
I nodded. “I do.”
He held out his hand. “Then come with me.”
“Where?”
He raised a brow. “I’ll let that pass. I know you’re tired and you need to go to bed.”
There was only one bedroom, and I knew this. “I can sleep out here.”
He kept his hand extended, staring intently into my eyes. “Remember what I told you about taking orders?”
I nodded.
“Then come with me. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
My hand trembled as I took his and followed him into the bedroom. I was close to being drunk, and Jaxson was nothing but pure temptation. Except, he didn’t want me like that. He’d made that clear. So why was I so nervous to follow him?
In the bedroom, Jaxson opened a drawer and handed me one of his T-shirts. Then he pulled his own shirt off and stripped out of his jeans.
I almost choked on my own breath. The first time I saw him naked, it was dark, and I was drunk. I admired him, but this was entirely different. Muscular thighs, chorded arms, ripped abs, and the faintest line of hair traveling down his navel disappearing into the waistband of his boxers.
He cleared his throat. “Do you need some help?”
Confusion clouded my mind as I stood there, staring at him. Gawking actually.
He strode toward me with a grin on his face, and when he reached me, he untied my robe.
“What are you doing?” I asked softly.
“Helping you change into something to sleep in. Of course, you can sleep naked if you’d prefer.”
The robe gaped open, and I felt so naked. “Your shirt is fine,” I said.
After sliding the terry down my shoulders, he held the shirt out. “Go slow, okay?”
I lifted my arms. “Where are you sleeping?” I asked, but I had a feeling I already knew.
“Since I can’t afford to get another room and my assistant canceled hers,” he said, and I knew why of course. Because I’d just cost him a fortune. “And the couch is small and rattan, that leaves one place. In the bed with you,” he finished. “Platonically,” he added. He said this staring at my naked body, and I pretended not to notice the erection that was more than obvious in his boxers. He did want me. Even if he didn’t want to admit it.
“This whole thing is crazy. You should hate me. You know that, right?” I said.
Tearing his gaze from my nakedness, he pushed the shirt over my head. “Yeah, I do, but I’m tired of always being the good guy. Maybe for once I don’t want to do the right thing.”
I was certain he’d live to regret those words.