That Thing Called Love (5 page)

“And now you’re the sheriff of Nottingham.”

“Deputy of Nottingham. The sheriff’s about a hundred years old.”

But Jake was barely listening. Hearing a raunchy feminine laugh on the other side of the room, his head snapped up. That couldn’t possibly be...

His gaze cut through the crowd that was beginning to fill the watering hole, tracking the sound to its source. And discovered that—
hell
—not only could it be, it was. Jenny Salazar was at the bar, laughing with the bartender and another woman.

She looked different tonight. Not at all like the little girl he’d first mistaken her for. Her lips were red and soft looking. Her hair without those braids was longer than he’d realized, a shiny rippling curtain of dark against the red sweater she wore. And her—

“What the hell are you staring at?” Max twisted in his seat to look over his shoulder. Then with a nod he settled back. “Ah. Tasha. She has that effect on guys. Not sure why—it’s not like she’s drop-dead gorgeous. Still, she’s got a way of stopping the show.”

Jake tore his gaze away. Gave himself a mental smack to get his head back in the game. And discovered that even then he didn’t have any idea what Max was babbling about. “Who?”

“Tasha Riordan. The strawberry blonde? That’s not who you’re looking at? Who then—
Jenny?
” He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want to go there.”

That got his full attention. “I don’t? That is, I really don’t—my interest in her isn’t like that.”
At least not much.
He gave his head a shake. “But just to clarify,
why
don’t I? Is she yours?” He didn’t question too closely why the idea bugged him.

But his half brother seemed almost appalled by the idea. “No!”

“Okay. Some other guy’s?”

He shook his head.

“She’s a nun, then.”

Max gave him a
what-the-fuck?
look. “Here’s a thought. How ’bout you try not to be any more of an idiot than you already are.”

“I’m groping in the dark here, bro. She a lesbian?”

“Jesus. No. She’s just...sweet. Loyal. A good friend to everyone. Not someone for a guy like you to be messing with.”

“Yeah? Does she roll over and wag her tail when you scratch behind her ears, too?”

Max scowled, but Jake was too familiar with the expression to be intimidated. “What? She’s a woman, big
B.
You make her sound like an old dog.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No shit. I thought she was a kid when I met her this afternoon, but she herself disabused me of that notion right from the get. I take it she’s single, so I don’t see the problem if some guy—not me, but someone—wanted to slap the moves on her. So if she’s none of the things I’ve already mentioned, what does that leave? Terminal?” He shook his head. “No, the conversation I had with her didn’t leave me with that impression—she’s not inward looking enough. Leper?” He was enjoying his brother’s disgust at his guessing game, until a sudden thought turned his blood to ice and drop-kicked the smile right off his face. “Christ.
Rape
victim?”

“
No.
Where do you come up with this shit?”

He shrugged. “I’m a journalist. I’ve seen things.”

“I thought you were some hotshot photographer for
National Explorer.
”

“I am. Well, a photographer anyway. The hotshot part’s still a work in progress. But just because most of my work is told through the lens of a camera, doesn’t mean I’m not a questioning kind of guy.” Jake glanced over at the woman under discussion once again. She and her friend had migrated to a table. The friend, who had taken a chair facing him, did have something, he admitted. But it was Jenny, sitting in profile to him, who commanded his attention.

Well, of course she did. She held considerable sway over any relationship he might forge with Austin.

He looked back at Max. “I talked to her for all of maybe fifteen minutes this afternoon. So tell me about her. How does she fit into Austin’s life?”

“She’s like his sister.”

“Yeah, I got that. What I don’t get is, how did that happen? No way in hell they’re related. Kathy was an only child, and Emmett had one older sister who never married.”

Max shrugged. “She came here when she was fifteen—” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Sixteen?” He shook his head. “The exact age doesn’t really matter. She came here as a teen in the midst of a huge scandal. I was home on leave when she hit town.”

That caught Jake’s attention, but his brother immediately gave the air a negligent swipe with one big-knuckled hand.

“Not her scandal. It was her old man’s. He’d been all over the news because of some big swindle that crashed down around his ears and landed him in Monroe. Jenny came here with her mother.” Max’s face hardened. “Who, as far as I could tell, planted her skinny socialite ass in bed from the shame of it all, while her underage kid kept the two of them off the streets by doing housekeeping at The Brothers after school and on weekends.”

“And Emmett and Kathy just invited two strangers with a questionable past to move into their home?” In a way it sounded like something they’d do. But in other ways, it wasn’t like them at all, especially in light of Kari’s death, which couldn’t have been more than a year or two before that time.

Max shook his head. “That was a while later. When they first got here, Jenny and her mother rented the Bakers’ little place.”

“Christ.” He shifted uncomfortably. “That old rehabbed chicken coop?”

“Yeah. Where her mom just curled up and died. I’m talking literally. From what I heard, the woman couldn’t live with her loss of status and just willed herself to die. But it took her a while. By the time she passed, Jenny was a senior and had been working for the Pierces almost two years.”

“So—what? They just replaced Kari with her?” Even as the words left his mouth, he knew he was the last person with any room for righteous indignation.

But somehow that didn’t stop him from feeling it.

Max gave him a look that suggested he was thinking the same thing. But he merely said, “The one time I went to their house to see Austin, I was strongly discouraged, so I’m hardly an expert on their mind-set.”

That sidetracked Jake. “You wanted to see Austin?”

“I thought I should meet my nephew.”

He simply stared at Max for a moment before admitting, “It never occurred to me you were his uncle. But you are, aren’t you?”

“Not as far as Emmett and Kathy were concerned,” Max said drily. “They said considering my background with you and the fact that the little dude didn’t know me from Adam, they didn’t see the point in my spending time with him—that he’d only be confused.” He shrugged. “They were probably right. I mean, you and I never acted like real brothers. Why should my relationship with your get be any different? But I always wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have pressed them a little harder. Done more. Hell, I put more effort into getting to know the boys over at Cedar Village,” he added, naming the home for delinquent boys on Orilla Road outside town.

Then he shook his head. “That’s not what we were talking about, though. Because one thing I do know about the Pierces is that they sure as hell mourned Kari. So I doubt replacing her with Jenny entered into the equation. I think they saw a hardworking girl who was the age their daughter had been when she died and who was struggling to make ends meet—and thought they could help. In the end, I believe they came to think of Jenny as the next best thing to a daughter.”

“What about her? What did she get out of the relationship, besides the obvious?”

Max’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t like what you’re implying, bro.”

“She went from the Bakers’ chicken coop to the Pierces’ big Craftsman.”

“Where she refused every enticement to live a life of leisure.” Max looked him in the eyes. “And you know she could have. But Jenny kept working at the inn and, after graduating, put herself through college. With no help from the Pierces, from everything I’ve ever heard. She earned her promotions with good, old-fashioned hard work. And she moved out of that big Craftsman. Bought the little cabin she lives in from Emmett.” Max gave him a hard look. “So, you don’t want to be calling that kettle black, pot.”

Jake scrubbed his hands over his face. “I know. I know.”

“I’ll tell you what
I
think she got from her relationship with Emmett and Kathy. They were considerably older than her own parents, and I think she looked on them as sort of grandparents. You gotta know how they spoiled Kari—”

He nodded. God, did he ever.

“They did the same thing with Austin, but Jenny curbed it wherever she could. So the kid is less spoiled than his mother was. And she flat-out refused to let them spoil her.”

“Yeah, she’s a goddamn paragon,” Jake muttered, staring across the room at her profile.

“Pretty much,” Max agreed cheerfully. “A helluva lot more than you can ever hope to be.”

Jake abruptly became aware that the strawberry blonde was watching him watch Jenny, and even as he noticed, she leaned into the table to say something to her friend. Jenny turned to look his way, a friendly, interested smile on her face.

It turned cool as the evening wind when she saw him.

“Shit.”

Max glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at him with raised eyebrows. “And you call yourself a big-city sophisticate? Hell, even us rubes know if you stare at a female like a dog at a juicy bone long enough—”

“The hell I did!”

Max thrust an authoritative forefinger at him. “Dog.” The finger thrust in Jenny’s general direction. “Juicy bone.” He shook his head. “Jesus, kid. I’m embarrassed to acknowledge some of the same blood runs in our veins. It was only a matter of time until you were busted.”

CHAPTER FOUR

J
ENNY
STROLLED
INTO
THE
INN
’
S
dining room the following morning, only to rock to a halt in the doorway when she saw Jake Bradshaw sitting alone at one of the window tables. How did he do that? How the hell did he manage to be everywhere she went?

Wasn’t it enough that he’d thrown a monkey wrench into her get-away-from-it-all evening with Tasha last night? Now he had to invade her dining room, as well? This was
her
time of the morning, dammit, her territory, her inn.

Okay, maybe the latter wasn’t hers in the legal sense, aside from the portion Emmett had so generously bequeathed her. But in all the ways that mattered, she claimed ownership. The Brothers Inn had been a major part of her life since she’d arrived in Razor Bay at sixteen. Hell, it was the reason she’d come to this town in the first place—the promise of a job when the pampered life she’d known had disintegrated in the wake of her father’s arrest and incarceration.

And ever since Emmett had promoted her to general manager, she’d made a habit of coming to the dining room each morning at the end of the breakfast shift to eat that much-touted most important meal of the day. She’d found it particularly beneficial since Austin had moved in with her. Breakfast at the inn was her way of easing into the day, a transition between getting the teen off to school and diving into her busy shift at the inn.

Striding across the room, she smiled at or murmured hellos to the few guests still finishing up their meals, before stopping at Jake’s table.

“What are you doing here?” Okay, so it was obvious, given the topped-off coffee cup at his elbow and the plate containing a smear of egg yolk, an untouched bunch of red grapes and a single crust of toast, which he’d pushed out of the way to accommodate the
Bremerton Sun
he was reading.

But it was the best she could do when she wasn’t allowed to say,
You breathe, therefore you bother me—get the hell out of my dining room.

“Hey.” He looked up from the newspaper spread out on the table. Flashed her a million-dollar smile. “I’m having breakfast. You, too?”

She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and tapped the toe of a fabulous-if-she-did-say-so-herself Steve Madden Mary Jane. It reverberated a soft tattoo against the hardwood floor.

Jake’s smile faded. “Is it a problem that I’m staying here? Do you want me to leave?”

Yes!
The moment Austin had left this morning, she’d put in a call to the Pierces’ lawyer to discuss her chances of keeping the boy with her now that his absentee father had stated a willingness to fight for custody. Already feeling ragged from the results of that conversation, learning that blood relatives are almost always chosen over a nonrelated contestant, she wished nothing more than for Jake Bradshaw to go far, far away.

And never come back.

But he’d made it pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. And she knew the bastard had been right when he’d told her that either she could make things easier for Austin, or she could stick to her guns and likely make them a lot more difficult. So she sighed and dropped her arms to her sides.

“No. We don’t make a habit of turning customers away at The Brothers just because we don’t like their looks.” Hearing herself, she almost blew a pithy little raspberry, but managed to sink her teeth into her lower lip before she could follow through on the impulse. But, please. She doubted anyone had
ever
turned this guy away over his looks. “Or their history. Not if they aren’t currently doing anything wrong.”

He raised his eyebrows. “But it’s just a matter of time, eh?”

“You said it, not me.”

He laughed. “You’re not shy about trying to kick my teeth down my throat, are you? I like that about you.”

She gave him her politest GM smile. “Always happy to oblige.”

“I bet you are.” He kicked the chair across from him away from the table. “Have a seat.”

The response that rose to her lips was very un-GM-like, not to mention an anatomical impossibility.
Austin,
she reminded herself firmly.
I have to consider Austin first and foremost.

She sat. “Thank you. I’m not sure I’ve ever received an invitation so suave.”

He grinned. “It’s my big-city polish.”

Dammit, she didn’t want to like anything about this guy, but she couldn’t stop the corners of her lips from twitching upward in appreciation. Then the decision she’d made after a night spent tossing and turning slammed front and center.

And the smile dissolved.

“I gave your request a lot of thought,” she said. “And I’ve decided to do what I can to make Austin’s transition as easy on him as possible.”

He sat straighter in his seat. “
Thank
you.”

“Like I told you yesterday, I’m not doing this for you. And you might want to hold the thanks, anyway, because I don’t know if you’ll like my take on how you should handle things.”

“Lay it on me.”

“For starters, I wouldn’t tell him your plans to haul him back to New York yet, if I were you.”

His brows drew together. “You don’t think he should be prepared?”

A plate with scrambled eggs, toast and a ramekin of yogurt, blueberries and handmade granola was slid onto the table in front of her, and Jenny looked up at the waitress, giving her a smile. “Thanks, Brianna.”

“No problem.” The young woman turned Jenny’s cup over in its saucer and filled it with coffee. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thank you.” Glancing around, she saw that she and Jake were the only diners left—not that there’d been that many to begin with. “Go grab your own breakfast. And tell the crew to work around us if we’re still here when they’re ready to set up for lunch.” A chore they performed as soon as the breakfast crowd cleared out and they’d eaten their meals.

The girl shot her a grin. “Will do.”

She watched Brianna walk away, then turned back to Jake. “I absolutely believe Austin needs to be prepared,” she said, picking up the conversation. “But if you lead off with the fact you’re taking him from Razor Bay, he’ll shut down on you so fast it’ll make your head spin—and it will only take you that much longer to gain his trust. Look, you might be accustomed to packing up and taking off at a moment’s notice, but trust me, Austin is not.”

He studied her. “What makes you think I am?”

“Please,” she said with dismissive scorn. “There’s a wealth of stuff about you on the internet.”

“You looked me up?”

“Of course.” She tipped her head. “Do you find my assessment off the mark?”

He hitched one shoulder. “No, that’s pretty accurate.”

“So you’re used to living life on the fly. You’re also an adult. He’s a kid who’s lived in one place his entire life.”

“And is probably dying for a change.”

“Why, because you were at his age? That’s something you should definitely discuss with him, but aside from longing for a daddy when he was younger, I can’t say that I’ve ever witnessed signs of Austin being dissatisfied with his lot.”

He started patting his chest and her eyebrows drew together. “What are you doing?”

“You slipped that knife in so sweet and slick, I want to be sure I don’t bleed to death before I even realize I’ve been shivved.”

She shrugged. “Put yourself in his place for a minute instead of trying to shoehorn him into yours. I know you’re getting up there in years but—”

A bark of laughter interrupted her. “Jesus, you’re a pisser.”

Jenny ignored him. “—try to remember back to when you were thirteen. How open would
you
have been if a man you’d never met suddenly inserted himself into your life and, without giving you so much as a moment to get to know him, told you he was gonna haul you away from everything you knew to a life different from anything you could imagine, clear on the other side of the country?”

“In all honesty?” He gave her an ironic smile. “I probably would’ve burned rubber packing my bag. But in the interests of that putting-myself-in-his-place thing, I agree that a different kind of kid might be pissed.” He gave a grudging nod. “I’ll keep my plans to myself until we get to know each other.”

“And I’ll work on trying to get him to spend some time with you.”

“Thank you.”

She shrugged and picked up her fork. She’d prefer to move to another table where she could eat her breakfast in peace, but for the sake of cooperation, she stayed put. But the sourdough toast and eggs in her standing Saturday order tasted like wood chips and glue.

He didn’t try to talk to her while she forced herself to eat every bite. For a while she appreciated it. But as the silence dragged on, she felt an antsy need to fill it with something.

Anything.

She shifted in her chair. Set her fork down and looked at him across the table.

Got hung up for a minute on his eyes.

Stop that!
Dammit, what
was
it about him? She’d never been one to go all crazy over a handsome face. Yet with him—well, it was scary how unlike herself she felt when she looked at him too long or too closely. She was so not the bubbleheaded
Ooh, what pretty eyes you have—what’s your sign
type.

So why did she look at this man and feel darn near that vacuous?

Giving herself a mental head-smack now, she sat a bit straighter in her seat. “Why did it take you so damn long to get here after Emmett died?”

She almost crowed in self-approval, but managed to confine herself to a silent
Thatagirl. Put him on the spot.

He leveled those glorious green eyes at her. “The phone call was made to my home rather than my assistant—”

“Maybe because no one knew you had an assistant,” she snapped.

He sighed. “Look, I stipulate that everything is my fault, okay?”

Jenny reined herself in, because these knee-jerk reactions weren’t helping. “I’m sorry,” she said and put real effort into sounding as if she actually meant it. She gave him the slightest nod. “Go on.”

“Said the queen to the peasant,” he said drily.

Shooting him her snootiest look, she twirled her hand to urge him to get
on
with it.

He only laughed. “It was a perfect storm of lousy luck. The housekeeper had been with me less than a month when I left on this trip, so by the time it occurred to her to contact Lucinda—that’s my assistant—the news was several weeks old. I was photographing the reefs and the Karangetang volcano in the Sangihe-Talaud Archipelago of Northern Sulawesi at the time. It’s remote, it’s freaking monsoon season, which our scheduler should have known before he set the damn trip up, and we only got access to a satellite phone when we came back to Minahasa about every third weekend or so.” He shrugged. “Even when I heard about it, I was obligated for an additional six days. Then it took time to get a flight to the Philippines and even more time to get a flight from there to Seattle. I don’t go to the most accessible spots in the world.”

“So even if you heard right away, you wouldn’t have been here any sooner?”

“I had a contract! Would you have left this inn in the lurch?”

“For Austin? In a New York minute.”

His expression went blank. “I genuflect to your superior parenting skills. But I’m trying here, okay?”

And since Jenny had caught a glimpse of genuine pain cross his eyes before he slapped on a poker face, she nodded. For the first time she really saw that he was, indeed, trying—and that maybe this wasn’t as easy for him as he’d made it appear up until now. “Okay. I guess the important thing is that you’re here now. But you’ve gotta understand that this isn’t going to be easy.”

“I know,” he said wearily. “Believe me, I get it that I’ve got a lot to make up for.”

She pushed her plate away, sat a bit taller and reached for her coffee cup, wrapping her hands around it in an attempt to warm her cold, cold fingers. Despite the lip service she’d given, a part of her must have secretly hoped this was something that would simply disappear if she wished hard enough.

Instead, it was growing more real, more concrete, by the second. She drew in a deep breath, then quietly exhaled. Replaced her cup in its saucer and pressed her hands, fingers splayed, against the cool wood of the tabletop to disguise the faint tremor they’d developed.

“Give Austin time and don’t bullshit him,” she told him quietly, “and he’ll likely come to love you. He adored the idea of you when he was little.”

Jake leaned into the table. Slid his own long-fingered hands across its surface as if to touch her. But he halted their progress when his fingertips were less than an inch from hers.

She hated that the near touch set up a series of quivers deep inside.

“And you’ll help me?” he demanded.

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

He nodded.

“Then I will.”

Even though it’d likely rip her heart right out of her breast to do so.

* * *

“B
RADSHAW
! G
ET
YOUR
head outta the clouds and pay attention!”

Austin literally jerked at the sound of Coach Harstead’s brisk bellow—and raised a baseball mitt-encased hand to acknowledge the reprimand. “Sorry, coach!” Drawing a deep breath, he forced himself to refocus on the Bulldogs’ Wednesday practice.

God, it was hard, though. His so-called father had been trying to pin him down for the past week and a half, wanting to talk and
bond
and shit. Austin had been doing his best to avoid the guy, but surprisingly, Jenny, who he’d assumed would be the last person wanting him to spend time with the man, hadn’t been much help. She actually thought he should be—how had she put it?—
open-minded.

My ass.
Resettling his cap in front, he narrowed his eyes on the batter. His friend Lee was up. Dude was right-handed with a tendency to pull the ball, so ninety percent of his hits came straight to where Austin played shortstop, between second and third base. “Come to Mama,” he murmured.

Yet even as he concentrated on being ready for it, he wondered where his “dad” had been when he’d actually
wanted
a father. Nodamnwhere, that’s where. Or maybe, given the guy’s big-deal job, everywhere.