Home To You (6 page)

“I do have money—I just don’t know how much.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “It looks as if we have that in common.” He might not have his old knack for numbers anymore, but he’d spent years ensuring that his sister had more than enough to live comfortably for the rest of her life, without worry. He’d done the same for himself.

The look on her face told him he’d missed the old solidarity target. “We really do have an amazing amount in common. Both of us recently turned corners in our lives. Neither of us are the people we were before we came here.”

She shrugged but didn’t pull away.

“And we both have the gift of time—”

“Aka unemployment.”

“If you want to mince words, be my guest. Still, we
have time to take stock of our new situations, figure out who we are, and envision what we’d like our futures to hold.”

She didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if that was good or not. “Kendall, most people spend their lives walking down the same road. Every day, they drag themselves through the same rut. After a while, that rut gets so deep, you can’t see anything but the ditch you’ve made. If either of us was in a rut, we’ve been blasted out of it now. And we have the opportunity to investigate all the new and different paths available to us.”

“I never saw my life without David, not once. He’s been a part of me for so long, I’m not sure who I am without him. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . scary.”

“All new things are scary. Scary and exciting. That’s how we know we’re alive. We’ve survived, we’ve changed, but we’re strong enough to get back up after being knocked down, or, in my case, knocked out. This is a new beginning for both of us.”

“Are you sure you weren’t a therapist in a past life?”

“Definitely.” Although he’d seen his fair share of therapists after his parents’ death. “I just turned my corner earlier than you did. I’ve been at this longer. I’ve reached the point where the shock and memories, or lack of memories, have worn off. You’ll get here—probably a lot faster than I have.”

She twisted in his arms, hers coming around him, and pulled him in for a hard hug and held on. “Thank you.” She whispered in his ear and then pulled back, looking embarrassed, as a flush rose from the plunging neckline of her nightgown he hadn’t noticed until that moment.

Holy hell. He wished to God he hadn’t noticed, or at least not while she sat on his lap. He swallowed
convulsively. The warmth of her skin heated the silken material, burning his hands splayed across her back.

“When I came here yesterday, all I’d wanted was to be alone, but now I’m so thankful I’m not. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.” His voice rasped through his throat, sounding like a metal canoe dragged across a pebbled beach. He slid her off his lap and onto the bed. The skirt of her nightgown pulled taught around her thighs, and he bit back a groan.

“Jack? Are you feeling okay?”

He stood and avoided looking at her. “I’m fine.” But his voice sounded foreign, gravelly, and strained.

“You’re flushed. Do you have another headache?”

The answer depended on which head she was talking about. The one on his shoulders was doing just fine; the one in his pants was definitely aching. “No—” He felt as if he should say more, but what? “I’ll be outside if you need anything. I have work to do.”

“Oh, okay.” Her voice wavered uncertainly as he closed Kendall’s door behind him.

*

It was a difficult task to work up a sweat outside in the mountains of New Hampshire in January, but Jax accomplished it. He was unloading lumber from Jaime’s Tundra pickup, and the last thing he wanted was to slow down. If he did, he would have to talk, and talking wasn’t something Jax was interested in—not even to his friend Jaime, and definitely not about himself.

There were so many unknowns in his life right now, talking about them made his head ache worse than it already did.

Jaime came around the tailgate and leaned against the side of the truck, his gloved hands stuffed in the pockets of his Carhartt jacket. “Where’s Kendall?”

“She went for a hike up to the ridge.”

Jaime nodded and looked in that direction, spotting Kendall’s tracks in the snow.

“How long ago did she leave?” Jaime probably had a better notion of that than Jax. Jaime was a good tracker, and Jax knew damn well that he could tell from her footprints how long ago she’d taken off.

“I don’t remember.” His sense of time was so severely skewed, he couldn’t even go there. It could have been a few minutes or a hell of a lot longer—he didn’t know, and it was driving him insane.

He followed Jaime’s gaze and stared at Kendall’s footprints and the path she’d taken toward the ridge. A second later, the image of her in her negligee eclipsed everything else. He wished the vision of her hadn’t been branded on his brain, but he couldn’t unsee it. He’d tried. He’d been trying for a week. It hadn’t worked yet.

“I managed to get just about everything on your list and avoided Ernie’s questions over at the hardware store. Where do you want me to put the receipts?”

Jax slid the sheets of plywood onto the frozen, snow-covered ground. He grabbed the stack, rested it on his steel-toed boot, and walked them over to lean against the wall under what was left of the porch roof. “Just total what you spent on the lumber and groceries you brought over. My wallet’s inside on the dresser in my room. Take whatever I owe you; there’s plenty of cash.” If he was wrong, Jaime would tell him and he’d figure out how to get more. There was a lot more where that came from—or at least he thought there was. For a man who’d never
had to worry about money, he had spent an inordinate amount of his life doing just that. He had a lot of money but no real life. Looking back now, he saw what a waste of time it had been.

When he’d come to, alone in the hospital after the accident, he hadn’t ached to see his bank account balance or how the market closed that day. No, he ached to see the people he loved—his sister, Rocki, and Kendall’s parents, Grace and Teddy, who had unofficially adopted them after their parents’ deaths. He remembered searching his mind, wondering if he’d forgotten someone. A woman, perhaps? But when he’d closed his eyes, the only female’s image that had come to mind that day had been the face of his late mother—so clear, so real, as if she’d come to him in his dreams. The shock of it sent him bolting upright into a sitting position. The blare of medical equipment and the movement had split his screaming head in two, and then the nurses were there, holding him down.

“But—” Jaime tore off his gloves and ran a hand through his too-long sandy brown hair and lifted an aristocratic brow, his looks at odds with his demeanor.

But what? What had they been talking about? Money. Right. “Leave the paperwork on the dresser. I’ll look at it later.” Not that it would make a bit of sense to him. Still, that didn’t stop him from trying. Who knew? Maybe his mathematical talent would return just as quickly as it had disappeared. He waited until Jaime kicked the snow off his boots and stepped into the dilapidated cabin before releasing a relieved breath. He rubbed the indentation in his skull where, a few weeks ago, doctors had drilled the hole to relieve the pressure on his brain.

Jax stared through the branches of pine trees toward
the ridge where Kendall hiked, and then above it into the crisp, bright blue winter sky. The one time he took a ski vacation, he’d inadvertently ended up playing chicken with a tree and lost. One doesn’t realize what a big part numbers play in daily life, and the loss would suck for anyone. For him, a fund manager, a man who built his life on numbers, it achieved cosmic-joke status.

Breathing in the crisp, pine-scented air, Jax concentrated on the cold seeping through the soles of his work boots when he heard the cabin door slam behind him, followed by the sound of footsteps stomping through snow. He didn’t look at Jaime. He knew he’d been found out—not that he’d tried overly hard to hide it. And why was that? From the look on Jaime’s face, it was obviously something better contemplated at a later time.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Anger, urgency, and the live wire of frustration rolled off Jaime and slammed into Jax’s central nervous system with all the subtlety of a no-holds-barred electroshock therapy treatment rendered by Dr. Frankenstein.

He’d known sooner or later he’d have to tell Jaime the painful truth—all of it. And he supposed, if Jaime had entered the cabin sooner, he’d have known a lot earlier. As it was, in the back of his mind, Jax had expected Jaime to confront him. After all, Jaime was smart and definitely not like one of the guys he’d worked with who would pretend to be your best friend but not really give a shit about you or your life. Still, he hadn’t been prepared for the ferocity of Jaime’s reaction.

Jax blinked, slowly moved his aching head, and focused on Jaime. Wow, he didn’t have to have a master’s degree in the study of body language to know that this was not going to be pretty. Jaime bounced on the balls of
his feet in a fighter’s stance—hell, even his hands were fisted—and the look of concern mixed with anger and hurt eclipsed everything else. Shit.

He lifted a brow, hoping the subtle challenge would remind Jaime of the live-and-let-live attitude to which he usually subscribed.

“Come on, Jax. That King of the Lake House superior smirk is not going to work with me. I’ve known you since we were, what—four or five?” He lowered his shoulders and crossed his brawny arms.

Grace had shown him a picture once of his fourth birthday party, and, as always, Jaime had been there, right by his side.

“Something’s way off with you, and I want to know what it is.”

How does one say he’s lost his mind—or at least an important part of it—without sounding like a fucking basket case or a loon?

“What’s with the stack of cash in your wallet?”

“Where else do you keep cash?”

Jaime got in his face. “It’s not in order.” Each word was punctuated. He stepped back and dragged his hand through his hair. “Even when we were kids, you kept your change in different pockets because you hated when the coins were mixed. Hell, you still sort your cash by denomination and have all the faces pointing the right direction. That wallet you have in there”—he shook an accusing finger at the cabin—“is one step above wadded bills stuffed in a paper sack. Unsorted currency is normally enough to make your ass twitch. A wallet in that condition would send you completely over the edge.”

Jax opened his mouth to say something—anything—to shut Jaime up, but he was like a snowball bounding
downhill, picking up girth and speed and rolling over everything in its path—even Jax’s attempts to change the subject.

“And since when do you leave that much money just lying around? Shit, Jax, you have enough there for me to live comfortably for a good six months. Put it in a coffee can or somethin’.”

“Jaim—”

“And just why is the clock facing the wall? You can’t read the time if you can’t see the face. Did that blow to the head knock a screw loose?”

Jaime’s form took on that eerie stillness he always got before he lost his temper. Jax had never had that look pointed at him and couldn’t afford another blow to the head. Not now—possibly not ever.

Jax held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t read the time, okay?”

Jaime stopped. “So turn it around.”

Jax tore off his gloves and scrubbed his cold hands over his face. “You don’t understand. Ever since my accident, numbers don’t mean anything to me. I can’t make sense of them.”

Jaime stepped back and sat hard on the tailgate. “You’re a freakin’ human calculator.”

“Not anymore, I’m not. I seem to have fried that particular memory chip. If you gave me a calculator, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Jaime gave him a who’s-punking-whom look.

“I mean, I know what it’s for. I just can’t . . .” He pulled off his hat and ran his frozen fingers through his hair, tugging on it as if that would change anything. “I have a stack of cash, but I can’t count it, and even if I could, I wouldn’t know how much anything is worth.” He blew
out a breath that didn’t begin to release the frustration he felt during every waking moment. “It’s like that part of my brain just disappeared.”

Jaime rubbed his hands on his thighs and leaned forward. His eyes squinted almost shut, as if he were trying to read two-point type. “No shit?” He rubbed his chin. “So I could have swiped all the big bills, and you wouldn’t have known?”

“Pretty much.” He let out a rusty bark of laughter that sounded strange to his ears. He hadn’t had much to laugh about lately. Shit, his life, even before the accident, was no night at the Laugh Factory. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more than a polite chuckle, unless he counted the time he spent in Red Hook with his sister and her new family. There was a lot of laughter there, even though they were dealing with serious issues. Unlike him, they’d never forgotten how to laugh.

Unfortunately, the loss of laughter wasn’t as noticeable as losing his ability to do anything with numbers, but it had been lost just the same. At least laughter, once rediscovered, no longer evaded him.

A staring contest ensued between him and Jaime. Jax watched the wheels of Jaime’s mind spin as he judged the ramifications with his usual lightning speed. His expression grew more and more serious. He started at shocked, made a quick right into contemplative, and parked in the handicapped spot by the front door of stunned. His eyes widened until he finally blinked and let out a long stream of air, as if he were blowing up an invisible balloon. “Wow, it sucks to be you.”

Jax laughed again. This time it didn’t feel so foreign. “Tell me about it.”

“So, are you stuck this way forever?”

“I don’t know, but, then, no one does.” He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage without the aid of acting lessons. “I’m supposed to go back for another MRI. I have the date written down—not that it means anything to me. I’m hoping they’ll call to confirm the appointment.” He rolled his shoulders, trying to dispel the sudden tightness. He hated even thinking about this stuff. “The doctors tell me the brain heals, forms new connections or something, so it might come back. It might not.”