One More Kiss (Affair Without End Book 2) (13 page)

~~~

An hour before dawn I wake and slip carefully from the bed. I go into the bathroom and dress in a simple outfit. Sweatpants. A tank top. Flip flops. I brush my teeth, and then collect my things from the vanity without doing my makeup. I return to the bedroom, and quietly pack up my things. I take my suitcase to the living room and settle on the couch to wait for Jack.

I want so very much to cry. But if I start now I won’t stop for a very long time, and that wouldn’t be a good thing for either of us.

CHAPTER TEN

Jack comes through the bedroom door, his eyes fix on me, and then he freezes. When he notices my packed bag his gaze sharpens.

I can’t look at him. “I didn’t tell you everything last night, Jack. You were so happy. I couldn’t do it. I figured why not wait until morning. Why ruin our night.”

He stares at me as if unable to comprehend what he’s seeing or my words.

“The job I got isn’t in Los Angeles,” I say abruptly. “The job I got with Sandy Harris is an eight week tour in the UK as a road manager’s assistant for some band Craig Entertainment Management just signed. Blackpoll. I leave Friday.”

His eyes are rapidly moving, back and forth, searching my face. “You’re leaving Friday? What are you trying to tell me, Linda? I thought we’d decided. You’d do the last leg of my tour with me, and then we’d figure out how to make us work better. You want to put us on opposite sides of the planet when you don’t have to so you can take some roadie job you don’t need. Why the fuck would you do that? Take a job and leave Friday?”

Roadie job?
Now I’m pissed.

“When you get it wrong, Jack. You get it wrong. You don’t understand anything. I need the job. I need the fucking money. I’ll make enough money to make it through my year abroad.” I’m so angry now tears are pouring out of my eyes. “You pretend we’re equals, but we’re not. We’re worlds apart Jack. Not just socially, but economically. You have everything and I have shit. And I chase after you, fighting to keep up with you, desperate to be who you need me to be, and I love it and I love you, but it’s not fucking easy. Not by a long shot! Sometimes when I come to see you during the tour breaks the only thing I’ve got is enough money to get there and back. Shit, the black sun dress I wore here isn’t even my own. It’s Jeanette’s. Fuck, I don’t even have enough money today to get my car out of the Hyatt parking lot. You need to focus on your life. Your daughter. Walter. And I sure as hell need to work on my life.”

“I’ve offered to help you financially. I want to share everything I have with you. You’re the one who has been too stubborn to take it. You never let me help you. You refuse everything I try to give you.”

Now both my heart and my pride are bruised. “I don’t want you to take care of me. I want to be able to take care of myself. Why can’t you understand this? I’d rather die than end up like Doris.”

He closes the space between us, and everything about his posture, the way he reaches out to me, tells me he’s trying to calm me. “What is it you want? I can’t understand unless you explain it.”

“Explain what? The obvious?”

Jack’s gaze turns glittery. “That’s not helping. Attacking me won’t help.”

I brush at my tears with angry swipes of my hands. “I was hoping you’d understand.”

“You just told me you were ending us, Linda. How do you expect me to react?”

Through gritted teeth: “I’m not ending us. I’m taking a job. I’m going to school. I’m taking care of me.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“I never had you,” I say in welling aggravation.

His eyes grow intense as they fix on me. The rapidly rising emotions on his face are too numerous to count. “You have me if you want me.”

I stare. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“If you want me, I’m yours. And I’m sorry I flew off the handle, but when a man wants to spend the rest of his life with a woman, he wants to start it the day he decides it. You’ve made me wait eight months.” His voice breaks off. It looks like he’s trying to forcibly pull himself into calm order. “I’ve never thought of what we have as an affair. You are the woman in my life. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

The rest of his life? What is he saying? He takes something from a small suitcase…
Oh my
…he has a ring box. I’m the one who has read everything wrong. All these months Jack has been preparing to start us, completely and always. When he arrived in West Hollywood, he had already decided to ask me…

“Marry me, Linda.”

He says it simply, quietly, and every emotion inside of me collides in a torrent. I feel dizzy, disoriented and weak. I sink onto the sofa. My rounded eyes fix on his.

“It’s all planned, you know,” he begins quietly. “I didn’t want you out on the road with me as anything less than my wife. I know how sensitive you are, Linda, underneath that tough girl front you have that doesn’t really fool anyone. I wanted to surprise you.” His laughter is gravelly, low in his chest, something other than of humor. “The plane at eleven isn’t going to Australia with the rest of the tour. It goes to Lake Tahoe so we can get married without waiting another day. We can collect Doris in thirty minutes. I thought we might get married today.”

I stare. It’s nearly impossible to breathe. How am I going to manage to talk? And how the heck am I going to manage the right words?

“I can’t marry you, Jack. The last four days has made that clear to me. I am not who I want to be, who I need to be for you. Or even myself.  If I marry you today I never will be and I will ruin us.”

Jack stares. I try to read his expression and I can’t. We are suddenly farther apart than we have ever been. And I don’t want that, and I hate knowing I brought us here.

He sinks down on a chair across the room from me. A neutral distance. Purposely, I think. “God, you’re the most complicated woman I’ve ever known. The most remarkable. And the most aggravating.” He rakes a hand, agitatedly, through his golden waves. “How could marrying me possible ruin us?”

“I have nothing, Jack. No life of my own. Not really. Not yet. I’m just starting to figure out who I am. Who I want to be. And if I marry you now I’ll just get sucked up into your life and I’ll be completely dependent upon you. I’ve seen what that does to a woman. It makes her needy and bitter and desperate. And then one day she wakes up alone, because she’s driven the man in her life away, and she has nothing except now she’s old. It’s not a pretty thing, Jack. I don’t want that. You shouldn’t want that for me.”

“Has it ever occurred to you marrying me might just make us happy,” he asks, his tone inflectionless.

I can’t meet his gaze any longer. I stare out the window. “For a while. Sure. Anything is possible. But what happens later? When I need you too much and you need me not at all.”

I feel his gaze sharpen and grow heavy in its hold on me. “I will always need you because I love you.”

I shift my eyes to meet his again. “Or perhaps you love me because you need me.”

He lets out an angry shudder. “I hate this habit you have of taking a glass full and crashing it so it’s empty. I’m not Brian Cray. You are not Doris. Maybe we’re just going to be happy.”

“I love you, Jack. I always will.”

I bite down on my lower lip, hard, trying to keep me from saying the words fighting to be spoken. Wrong words. Words to please him. Words to make me less afraid, because it’s not going to be easy to walk away from Jack this time.
Not that it was easy last time
, I amend silently in my head. But this time we are not two strangers who fell in love. We are two people who love completely and with eyes wide open.

I stare down at my hands. “It’s not forever, Jack. It’s an eight week tour and a one year graduate program in the UK. I think it’s a good time to give us a rest. You can work out your issues with Walter and I can do some of the things I need to do.”

“I’m an all-in kind of guy, Linda.”

“And I’m all-in whether we are together all the time or not. You should know that, Jack.”

“So your answer is no?” It hits me like a slap. How calmly he says that. The lack of inflection in his voice.

“I’m not who I want to be yet. And I can’t be with you until I am. It’s better for us both if we don’t try that. I’m not saying never. I’m just saying not today.”

“Then do what you have to do, Linda. And we’ll see where it leaves us.”

My insides go cold.
What does that mean?

“I need to do this, Jack.”

“Then do what you need to do, Linda.”

I don’t like that he’s repeating things. “Jack…”

He crosses the room. He cups my chin with his palm and his fingers lightly caress my cheeks. “Go quickly, Linda. Don’t drag this out. Get out of this room quickly.”

His lips touch mine. A gentle parting kiss. His eyes lock on me as his face lifts.  A lump rises in my throat. How can he look at me this way after I’ve told him I’m walking away? I fight to keep the tears from rising.

“I’m don’t want us to end,” I whisper. “That’s not why I’m leaving. It’s not you. It’s not us. The time isn’t right for us. I can’t be who I want to be with you. It’s about me, Jack.”

Jack’s smile is winsome and tender. It makes my heart ache even more.

“I know, baby. Go do what you have to do. I hope you get everything you need. And I definitely hope when do, you’ll finally be able to really see me.”

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Continue Jack and Linda’s Story in
One Long Kiss
Releasing March 2015
:

PREVIEW

Continue Jack and Linda’s Story in
One Long Kiss
Releasing March 2015
:

“I knew it would happen the first time my eyes touched him. Some men have that power. They instantly ignite something feral in you, whether you want it or not, and the sexual electricity is always there, in every room and every moment, from the first time you see them, an inescapable web, swirling around you until you surrender. And at that point, they devour you.”~~Linda Cray.

I stay carefully standing near the door of the hotel room.

“What was I to you?” I ask.

Alan’s black eyes burn into me. “Nothing. You were the girl who walked out on Jackson Parker. And I wanted to fuck you because of that.”

“Aha.”
How the hell does he know that?
I take a moment to collect my rioting emotions. In control again, I say, “And what was Jeanette to you?”

He lights a cigarette and stares at me though the smoke for a moment. “Nothing. Just something to do.”

“God, you are an asshole, Alan Manzone.”

He arches a brow. “Not exactly something I haven’t heard before. I was expecting something more original from you, Linda. ”

I take just enough steps into the room to sink down on the couch. A part of me wants to run as far away from him as I can. A part of me wants to smack him. And a part of me feels sorry for him. He’s not even twenty yet. How the hell does a guy get so fucked up so young?

“Let me set you straight on a few things, Alan. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the girl they call to fix things. You’re a mess. Everything the band is trying to accomplish—you’ve fucked it up royally. I am the girl they called to fix and handle you.”

The look in his eyes takes on a subtle glow. Crap, even as much as I hate him after what he did to me I can feel his stare running through my veins. “Then handle me, Linda,” he whispers, his raspy voice making me shiver.

“Why should I?” I snap, not at all sure what it is he’s suggesting there. “I should let you self-destruct and put everyone out of their misery. Why should I help you?”

He leans forward, elbows on knees. “Because I trust you.”

Not the answer I expected.

“I despise you,” I say, though deep down inside I know that isn’t true.

The smile that rises to his face is alluring and terrifying at once. “Good. It will make us better friends.”

Enjoy one of my current contemporary romance releases:

The Girl on the Half Shell

The Girl of Tokens and Tears
Releasing February 28th 2015

The Signature

Rewind

One Last Kiss

Or you might enjoy one of my historical romance releases:

When the Perfect Comes

Face to Face

Love’s Patient Fury

Love me Forever
:
Releasing Summer of 2015

EXCERPTS

If you enjoyed
One More Kiss
, you may enjoy
The Girl on the Half Shell
available now on Amazon, as the Parker Family Saga continues. Please enjoy the following excerpt:

The room is so quiet it is deafening.

I find Alan on his bed, casually reclined against a stack of pillows, dressed only in flannel pajama bottoms, and reading—of all things—the
Wall Street Journal
. There is a fire lit, the silver candlesticks flicker with flame, the bedcovers invitingly turned down as if in preparation for some sort of romantic scene. But he is focused on the
Journal
.

He doesn’t look at me and I feel stupid hovering by his door, so I start to wander around the bedroom, trying to still my frantic pulse. It’s a good thing that it’s an interesting room, otherwise my deliberate study would seem silly.

Even Alan’s bedroom is something I find weird and demands a certain amount of mental analysis. It looks like something from a nineteenth century English manor, elegant to the point of being almost a touch prissy. There’s an antique mahogany king-sized bed facing the fireplace; floral wingback chairs with pillows positioned before the hearth; and high-tech conveniences camouflaged in antique furniture. There’s a Monet on the wall; tall, polished sterling silver candlesticks; crystal; and fine, leather-bound, first edition books of classic literature. I sink down before a small, mahogany table where I find a stack of newspapers:
Barons
;
The New York Times; The Washington Post
; and
The Daily Telegraph
.