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Authors: Becky Moore

Tags: #Romance

Closer to My Heart (13 page)

BOOK: Closer to My Heart
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She shook her head and sat up against the headboard to watch him. “Yes ma’am, it’s true. I think you’re my secret weapon, Janie, against the monsters that go bump in the night.” He started pacing.

 

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked quietly.

 

He stopped and looked at her. “I took an undercover assignment in Columbia almost two and a half years ago. Before I left, I had to break off a long-term relationship…she wasn’t too keen on waiting to see if I’d be executed.”

 

Jane leaned forward and reached for him. He stared at her hand for a minute, then took it and sat next to her. “Bitch,” she said. Then laid her head on his broad shoulders. He smirked and murmured, “yeah.”

 

“I was working with the LAPD—S.W.A.T. We’d been tracking a new cocaine route between Columbia and Baja. Tracy wasn’t too happy about the move from S.W.A.T. to undercover work, so about a week before I flew south she left.”

 

“Did she see you when you got home?” She was rubbing his back, lightly strumming her fingers along the corded muscles along his spine.

 

“Nah. She’s married…and pregnant now, from what I understand.” He turned to kiss her on the forehead, and she patted his shoulder and laid back.

 

“Let’s finish this in the morning, okay?”

 

He let out a huge breath. “Thank you,” he whispered. He crawled over her body and moved beneath the covers on his side of the bed.

 

They laid quietly for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling, out the windows; they watched Pop Tart bathe Penny’s face as they prepared for sleep. They looked anywhere but at each other.

 

Lucas spoke first. “Jane, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin our evening. I can go back to Amber’s apartment if you’d like.” The offer nearly tore his heart from his chest.

 

She caught him by the wrist. “No! Don’t go, Luke. I don’t know what happened, and you don’t ever have to tell me. It doesn’t really matter, but I would like to hear it if it would give you peace to get it off your chest.”

 

He took a deep breath and nodded. He let her burrow against his chest, closer to his heart, and turned over their conversation in his head, like she said kids did when they read her books. He could feel the tears burning the backs of his eyes.

 

After a few minutes of lying quietly in the darkness, he asked: “Why do you write stories for kids now? Did you get tired of traveling?”

 

He could feel her smile against his collarbone. “You mean, why stay at home to write instead of traveling the world as a top-notch, kick ass journalist?”

 

He squeezed her in appreciation. “That’s exactly what I meant. Thank you.” He kissed her on top of her head. A tremble jolted her body, and her breath hitched. But she forged ahead.

 

“I told you that I worked for Condé Nast for a couple of years, right?”

 

He nodded.

 

“Well, I was, I guess twenty-five. I was working out of my office in Manhattan, which was really more of a base than a home. Assignments kept me out of the states most of the time and certainly away from my family in North Carolina. Anyway, I had a younger sister.” She paused to wipe the tears out of her eyes.

 

“Well, she was mom and dad’s little surprise. Samantha—Sam—was her name. She was only fifteen. Oh, God. Yeah, that’s right. Just fifteen. She was in the tenth grade, taking driver’s education. Sam had her first boyfriend, but apparently, he used to date her best friend, Martha. Well, Miss Martha was not a generous enough friend to fully forgive Sam for stealing her boyfriend, Donald. It seems Martha was sort of stringing along Sam as the weeks went by. You know,
let’s go to the football game

let’s head out to the mall
. Stuff like that.”

 

“But Martha was having trouble keeping up the façade. Donald took Martha’s virginity over the summer, but hooked up with Sam when the school year started, and by Christmas Martha was having trouble hiding the baby.”

 

“No shit?”

 

“Nope, no shit.” He rubbed her back in long, soothing strokes. He ran his fingers down the graceful curve of her slim back, resting his palm atop the twin indentations at the base of her spine, drifting them back up to her shoulders, as she settled back against his chest.

 

“Well…”

 

“Yeah, Martha was pretty pissed when Donald and Sam got together. She was lashing out, I guess trying to prove Donald would be sorry for leaving her behind. And because she didn’t want to cop up to the pregnancy, the other kids teased her for gaining weight. She was miserable. But since she’d been keeping up a friendly face with Sam but dragging her name through the mud behind her back, Sam just got caught up in that stupid pettiness. Before my parents knew it, my sister was really depressed—nearly unreachable. When the kids went back after Christmas break Sam was on anti-depressants and Martha was missing school regularly. Of course Sam knew about the pregnancy, but everyone thought it was another boy she’d dated right after Donald dumped her.”

 

She paused and let out a big sob. Lucas kept his hand moving gently down her back and waited for her to begin again.

 

“I was so busy that I was only home for Christmas Eve and half of Christmas day before I flew out to a shoot in Fiji for a once-in-a-lifetime assignment from
National Geographic Traveler
. My job was very important then, you see. But while I was home Sam had lots of questions about boys and peer pressure and why girls her age could be so bitchy. We talked, but I had to go. She said I always had the
right words
for everyone else … but—but not for her. God, I didn’t even have time for her.” She whimpered, but forced herself to finish.

 

“When it really counted I wasn’t any help at all. During spring break in March Martha told the kids at school that the baby was Donald’s, and took the bus to my mom and dad’s. She shot Sam a minute before she turned the gun on herself. The baby died, too.”

 

Oh, no.
Lucas was shocked into silence. Jane wept in huge gulping sobs that wracked her whole body. He lay on his back and pulled her to lie across his chest.

 

“And you figured you could share the right words with other kids so they’d know how to deal with things like that, right?”

 

Jane lifted her face and looked at Lucas. She couldn’t believe he figured her out so easily and so quickly. Nobody, not even her parents, truly understood her compulsion to shift her writing to a children’s audience. How important it was to empower kids of all ages to know how to deal with bullies, or peer pressure, or the stress of school, or bickering friends. God, or something awful like teen pregnancy.

 

She grabbed him by the neck and squeezed him tight. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said over and over, raining kisses all over his face and neck and shoulders. She pushed herself up and sat across his belly. Tears still ran down her cheeks, but she was getting a little color back.

 

“Nobody has ever
gotten
that before. Mom and dad humor me and tell me Sam’s death wasn’t my fault…and I know that. I do. They know the books are good and they’re important to children, but they don’t really see my need to get the words out. You know, I am a commercial artist by education and a journalist by experience. But mostly I’ve always been a writer, and I like to connect with my readers. My life was moving so fast there for a while. It was hard to find my place in the world. These books have helped me, too.”

 

His eyes widened. “So that’s why those kids were so crazy about you at Ben & Jerry’s. They know you’re talking to them, not just building up your bank account.”

 
Chapter Fifteen
 

Sitting atop Lucas, Jane’s tears finally stopped. She smiled and bent down to kiss him, her heart in her throat.

 

“What was that for?” he asked. Though, in truth, he was no dummy. He’d take it where he could get it. He rested his hands on her hips.

 

“That’s because I feel so much better talking to you about it. I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about Sam’s death and I’ve been feeling guilty since right after the funeral. Mom didn’t even have the guts to talk to me about it.” She petted Luke’s chest, twining her fingers through the crisp, sparse spattering of dark blonde hair across the broad planes of his pectoral muscles. With her pointer finger, she traced the sharp groove along his sternum and down the centerline of his body.

 

He chuckled and grabbed her wrist. “Stop,” he said lightly. He eased his command with a kiss to the inside of her wrist.

 

She moved her hands to hold the sides of his face and whispered, “Lucas, I think I’m falling in love with you.”

 

He stared at Jane without blinking. His heart stopped beating in his chest, and then kicked back in triple time. She smiled and went on.

 

“I definitely know that I don’t want Amber to come back and finish out her last couple of weeks. I can’t stand her.”

 

Lucas laughed at that. “No, I don’t imagine you would like someone like Amber.”

 

“Have you met her yet?”

 

“Nope, but Andy had pictures of her in his wallet.” He whistled. “Did she ever go anywhere without two inches of makeup on her face?”

 

“Ah, no. She’s a kindergarten teacher. Did you know that?”

 

“Yeah.” He was vaguely following the conversation now since her unrestrained breasts garnered more of his attention. He cupped them in his palms and just held her while she spoke. She was so animated with her arms and hands, and her facial expressions. What a delight.

 

“. . .and my friend Jacob said he’d seen her somewhere before, but I told him it was just an excuse to look at a pretty girl. But he said he could always look at me if that’s what he wanted.” She stopped for a second and shrugged her shoulders. “And then one day when I was picking up lunch to go he remembered. He’d seen her on Playboy TV. On a show about amateur home videos. So I started watc—”

 

“You what!” he yelled, clearly startled out of his reverence. He tried to sit up but Jane pressed her palm down to his breastbone and he stayed down.

 

“Could you repeat that last part, honey?”

 

“Well,” she started with a furious blush that crept from her chest up her neck and onto her cheeks. “Okay, first I want to tell you that I never met Andy until he stopped by to pick her and the suitcases up. And then I realized that he wasn’t the same guy I’d seen her in the video with. On Playboy TV. Uh, on my Tivo.”

 

Luke’s face was turning red, mostly with anger she supposed. His fingers dug a little deeper into her hips and she winced.

 

“Yeah, she was getting the hell banged out of her by a humongous black dude all while, um, concentrating on the woman straddling her face.” She kept her hands still on his chest and waited for his reaction.

 

At first, it seemed that he would explode from the blood rushing to his face. But he did the unexpected. He arched his back and roared with laughter. He laughed so hard tears streamed from his eyes.

 

It took him a few tries to shut up long enough to tell her what was so funny.

 

“Oh my God, that is so fucking funny. My brother is such a dumb shit. His biggest goal in life has always been to nail as many women as possible before his belly turns to pot. He swore he’d never fall in love, yet he fell really hard for Amber because—get this—she was a good girl. She was the woman of his dreams, all sunshine and innocence. You know, a kindergarten teacher. The kind of woman he wanted to be the mother of his children. God, this is great. Oh, if I could only tell mom.” He cracked up again.

BOOK: Closer to My Heart
5.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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