That was the last thing she needed on her strained bank account. “It doesn’t look too deep. I think it’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure? I absolutely don’t mind.”
“No, see, the bleeding’s already slowing down. Thank you, though.”
“Keep it there. I’ll wrap it up for you.” He left her side, and she missed his support immediately. Black sparkles edged into her vision. Air rushed in her ears. Her knees shook. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out, don’t…
Draping herself over the sink as best she could without actually hanging into it, she concentrated on breathing until he came back. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Pain was okay, pain wasn’t bad—she had the body art to prove it. But sudden, intense, unexpected pain coupled with ample blood flow was a different matter altogether. He was going to come back to find her collapsed on the floor.
“Hey, hey, hey.” As if from a great distance, his voice came to her. Strong hands grasped her. It felt as if it were happening to someone else. She felt herself lifted, carried, placed gently on a soft chair. “Starla.”
Coming back to herself, she gave her head a shake. Oh, her name sounded good on his tongue. “Yeah.”
“Still with me?”
Nodding, she inhaled deeply through her nose and exhaled slowly through her mouth, the way they coached people at work. The way she’d heard Brian instruct his clients a million times. It worked now, bringing everything back into focus—but she only wished she could escape. Jared’s wary blue eyes were steady on her face. He was holding a pack of gauze over her sliced finger. Fire traced along her nerve endings. Carefully, he began taping it into place. “I’m so sorry.”
“You? I’m the klutz.”
“I shouldn’t have been distracting you while you had a knife in your hand.”
“I shouldn’t have let myself get distracted while I had a knife in my hand. Really, don’t apologize. I feel bad enough for being a problem.”
He’d carried her into his living room and sat her in a cushy chair, seating himself across from her on the ottoman. “You’re not a problem, Starla.”
“Tell me I didn’t bleed on your furniture or carpet, at least.” She looked around at the beiges and tans in alarm, but saw no sign of any bloodstains.
“Please, I have two kids—I hate to think what you might be sitting on at this very moment. You should be afraid.”
Starla found it within herself to laugh at that. “I’ll keep that in mind. Check for stains of mysterious origins before sitting.”
“Right. Does this feel okay? Too tight?”
The cut hurt like shit, but his hands holding hers, soothing her, taking care of her… That felt fantastic. When he released her and sat back, she missed his touch desperately. It was probably all in her head, but the pain in her finger seemed to ratchet up a notch without his skin on hers. She wanted to tell him to keep touching her. Keep the pain away. “It feels fine.”
“Is there anything in the kitchen I need to do while you rest?”
Dammit, she had a dozen things she needed to check on. “No, I’ve got it.” She moved to get up; he stood to help her. She also wanted to tell him to quit being so fucking nice to her. It threw her off-balance. She didn’t trust it.
Ashley and Mia came back in, immediately spied her thickly wrapped boo-boo, and asked no less than nine million questions. Did she bleed? Did it hurt? Where was all the blood? Would there be blood in the food? Did she think she was going to lose the finger? At least their presence prevented any more strangeness with their dad, and Starla was able to get through with making dinner and serve it at a decent hour. By the time she dropped into a chair at Jared’s dining room table, she was exhausted, and eating was nowhere near the top of her list of priorities. But she forced herself. It would look weird if she wouldn’t eat her own food. Plus, it was pretty damn good, if she did say so herself. It even seemed to please the two finicky seven-year-olds, and their dad went in for seconds before all four of them attacked the chocolate chip cookies.
Mission accomplished. Now she could get the hell out of here. Only, she didn’t really want to. It was nice to be in the company of people she didn’t want to strangle. At home, there was nothing but Julie and Doug festering on the couch.
Jared excused the girls from the table, and they ran off for bath time. Starla watched them go with a strange desperation. Left alone with him, what other kind of weirdness was going to come up?
She didn’t want to wait around to find out. Standing, she began to clear the dishes from the table, but of course, he wasn’t having it.
“Hey, sit down. You cooked. I’ll clean up later.”
“I tend to make a gigantic mess. Really, let me help.”
“No. Sit. Do you want a beer?” he asked over his shoulder as he headed back toward the kitchen with his hands full of dirty dishes. Starla dropped back into her seat and stared glumly at her wrapped finger. It still throbbed despite the ibuprofen she’d taken soon after he’d played doctor for her. She was utterly torn, but as usual, she knew the right thing to do. It was just so damn hard for her to do it.
“Thanks, but I’d better not.”
This was why she preferred to know what was expected when she agreed to meeting up with someone. But this whole thing had been her idea, hadn’t it? She shot out of her chair again, too restless to sit still. Jared stood in the kitchen scraping food remnants into the disposal, and her breath caught again at the way his jeans fit the delectable curve of his ass. God, she could imagine sinking her fingernails into that.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“I should probably go.”
He flipped a switch on the wall, and the disposal growled to life. Turning to look at her, he leaned his hip against the counter and wiped his hands with a dish towel. “I feel bad that we haven’t had much time to talk. You’ve been in here working the whole time.”
Yeah, but you look so insanely gorgeous right now, and your eyes are so blue, and if I stay, if I stay… I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself.
Not that she had to worry. He had kids—how to explain to them that Daddy’s new “friend” stayed the night? He wouldn’t let it happen. She was safe.
Keep telling yourself that.
“All right. Maybe one beer.”
***
The girls were snug in bed, bathed and dressed in their jammies with one story read—that was all Jared had allowed them; otherwise, they would’ve kept him up all night. But they hadn’t wanted him to read the story. They had both wanted Starla to read it for them. Amazing how they’d both taken to her. Jared had never thought he would see the day both of his girls agreed on something. He’d been ready to tell them not to bother her, but she’d taken the storybook from him and given it a shot. He should have warned her it would be more a case of the girls reading the story to her than vice versa. She handled it like a pro.
Now, the two of them sat out on his deck at the patio table, beers in hand, stars bright above. He loved it out here for the simple reason that you could see every star in the sky, watch for meteors, and contemplate the vastness of the Milky Way stretching above. No town noise, no distant traffic, nothing but the sounds of nature…at least when his neighbors didn’t have the volume cranked up.
Starla nursed her beer carefully, one knee drawn up to her chest and the other bent around. He liked it when she gazed up at the sky; he could admire the graceful lines of her neck.
“So, you weren’t kidding,” he said when the conversation had lulled. “You’re a great cook. How did that come about?”
She turned a little smile on him. “Did you think I was lying?”
“Nah. Just curious.”
“Well, let’s see. Lots of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ when I was growing up, for one. Any girl old enough to reach the counter was expected to pitch in. I learned a lot.”
“You come from a big family?”
“Six sisters, four brothers.”
He’d been taking a dr
ink, but at her words, he nearly choked on it. Wiping his chin, he turned an incredulous look on her. “You’re kidding.”
Chuckling, she shook her head but didn’t look up from the bottle that suddenly seemed to have her full attention. “Nope.”
“That’s…unusual. These days, anyway. Are you oldest, youngest, or in the middle?”
“Toward the back. Eight in front of me, two behind me. My mother pretty much had a baby a year while she could.”
“Wow. Must’ve been crazy growing up in all that. I have one brother, and I don’t think a day went by when we weren’t torturing each other.”
“Let’s just say I was on my own from the day I turned eighteen. Not because they put me out, but because I wanted out. My family is religious. Like…really religious.”
Jared didn’t know what to say, but he knew he’d better tread carefully. Looking at her, one wouldn’t take her as the religious sort, but to point that out might be offensive to her. Religion and politics were the two subjects he absolutely refused to debate with anyone. He and his ex-wife had decided to raise their daughters in church and that was pretty much the extent of his involvement with any of it.
“And you?” he prompted, waiting for her to tell him her thoughts on the matter before he made any assumptions.
“Sick of the whole thing by the time I was ten. Then my brothers and sisters started marrying and breeding, and I realized that was expected of them. And of me. I could express my feelings on that in two words, but you guys just came from church, so I’ll let you use your imagination.”
“Fuck that?” he supplied. She turned big eyes on him and burst out laughing.
“Yes. Exactly. Thank you.”
“Starla, I take the girls to church because it’s something their mother and I want them exposed to—but then I want them exposed to a lot. I want them to make up their own minds. It’s my hope that they’ll grow up to live a full life, and to me that involves finding their own way, making mistakes, and learning from them. Trying different things, discovering what works. As for myself, I can take it or leave it. So don’t worry about offending me at all.”
“Whew,” she said, blowing out the word as if a weight had come off her shoulders. “I’m glad to hear you say that. People who don’t cuss make me fucking uncomfortable.”
He grinned, holding out his bottle for her to clink hers against it. “You can be yourself. It’s all good here.”
“Because I wasn’t sure if we could be friends,” she went on teasingly, holding his gaze now with more directness than he’d seen from her all night. Something about those eyes, somehow simultaneously sweet and naughty, did things to him. Dirty things. He began to wonder if he wasn’t…waking up. After a long, dark, cold hibernation.
“Can we?” Shit, don’t jump the gun here, guy.
“I’m good if you are.”
“That’s settled, then. We’re friends.”
“Great,” she said cheerfully. “So, as your friend who can’t offend you, can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” he drawled. “Doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”
“How about this, then? I throw out one word, and you elaborate upon it in whatever way you see fit.”
“Sounds like I might need another beer for this,” he said with a groan.
“Maybe.”
He already knew what word—what name that would be. Dammit. “Only if I get to do the same thing to you.”
“Deal.”
“Do you want another?”
Starla glanced down at her almost empty bottle before setting it aside on the patio table. “Um, sure. Yeah, I’d better.”
Heading back inside to the fridge, he tried to formulate a preemptive response. Macy. Jesus. He could babble about her all night. What she’d meant to him, what it had done to him to lose her. It was pretty deep material for new friends to peruse, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to tell Starla all of it. Play it cool, blow it off? She would see right through him if he tried those tactics, but it would have to do for now.
He wrenched open their bottles and returned to the deck, handing one to her before reclaiming his chair. “All right. Shoot.”
“Shelly.”
Immediate shame fell hard and heavy on his chest. Of course, of course Starla was curious about his ex-wife, and not so much his ex-girlfriend—while said ex-wife had never even crossed his thoughts. The woman he’d said vows to, the woman he’d promised to love and cherish and protect until his dying breath. And she wasn’t even a blip on his radar now except where Ashley and Mia were concerned.
“Okay,” he said, finding his voice strangled and taking a drink to soothe the guilt. “Shelly.” The beer bottle was cold in his hands. And he felt like a cold bastard when he said, “I never should have married her.”
Silence stretched out between the two of them, filled with only crickets and frogs and the lowing of a distant cow. True to her ground rules, Starla didn’t say anything, but he felt her looking at him.
“From her hospital bed, Macy told me to get out of her life. I didn’t want to, but I listened. Shelly…she was a rebound. Simple as that. We were careless, and she got pregnant. I thought marrying her was the right thing to do, the right thing for the daughters we knew we were having. Hell, maybe it was—I don’t even know. Maybe we should’ve tried harder to make it work for them if not for us. For a while, we did. But when everything you have is built on a lie, the truth comes out eventually, whether you want it to or not.”
“The truth that you’re still in love with Macy?”
He wanted to move, to fidget, to shift his weight, to turn the blunt question aside—but Starla was watching him like…like Shelly used to whenever Macy’s name came up. “She decided I was.”
“Were you? Are you?”
“Hey, I thought you weren’t going to ask questions.”
“All right,” she said innocently, relieving him from the weight of her assessing eyes and looking up at the sky again with a little smile curving her full lips.
“Now. It’s my turn.”
“Ugh. You don’t even have to ask. You know everything you need to know about Max—”
“Brian.”
The bottle actually slipped from her fingers, and for a second, she fought to reclaim her grip on it. He drank from his own, respectfully letting her recover without staring her down the way she’d done him.
“Um, I don’t know why you’d—”
“If I didn’t know from the way you can barely say his name, your reaction right then clued me in.”
“I—just—no. I can’t go there.”
“Starla,” he said gently, “it’s okay. We’re only talking here.”
“He’s married and he has a newborn baby. Please don’t think that I would ever do anything to mess that up for him.” The horror on her face made him feel like a colossal asshole. He shouldn’t have done this to her, but now that the subject had been broached, he realized why he’d been so uneasy about it, why he’d needed to know.
“I didn’t think you would.” It was the truth, but it was more that he hadn’t wanted to think she would.
“Because I swear on every star above us, I would never do that.”
“Tell me.”
She drew a deep breath, and even here in the golden glow of his deck lighting, he could see the pink tint of her skin. He could discern the tiny tremble in her hands and imagine her heart was about to tear its way right out of her chest. Had she never been called on this before? Never shared it with anyone, keeping it all bottled up? It must eat her alive. He knew. He’d been there.
“It started as soon as I met him. But we’ve never been anything more than friends. He met Candace. He fell in love with her, and he married her, and he had a baby with her, and I have to see how happy they are almost every single day of my life. The end.”
“Ouch,” he said after a moment. It was bad enough that he’d lost Macy. If he had to see her with Ghost, day in and day out, he didn’t know how
he would handle it.
“And it’s okay, you know? I mean, it’s not, it hurts like hell, but I’m not such a sleazeball that I’m not happy for him. He’s found everything he wants, and that’s, like, miraculous. He deserves it.”
“Still trying to convince yourself?”
She chuckled sadly. “Yeah, maybe.”
“All right, enough of that. I’m sorry it’s a situation that causes you pain.”
“Thanks.” Her relief obvious, she took a long pull on her beer.
“And this other guy, the one I rescued your purse from?”
“He’s nothing. Nothing. Just another terrible mistake on my part.”
“Glad to hear it.” Jared still felt the slow burn of anger creep through his veins. “How long had you been seeing him? Surely that wasn’t a first date or anything.”
“No, a few weeks. It was pretty casual, the occasional hookup. But it’s done.”
If the dude was that bad on a casual hookup, Jared would hate to see how he treated someone he was in a relationship with.
“I’m pretty much swearing off men for a while,” she announced.
Something akin to disappointment flashed through him. That didn’t make any sense, though, did it? Regardless, it was a shame that someone like her, who obviously had so much to offer, kept having such horrible experiences that she was ready to give up altogether. Even if he had done something similar himself, though for different reasons. “Is that necessary? I’m sorry that you’ve had a rough time of it, but surely you know there are good guys out there. Hell, I like to think I’m not that bad myself, but I guess my record might say otherwise too.”
“Have you dated much since your divorce?”
“I went out with someone a few times. It didn’t go anywhere.”
“What are you waiting for, then?”
Someone who makes me feel like Macy always did. He shrugged. “The right person, I guess. I don’t know.”
“What if you feel like you’ve found them, but you can’t have them?”