This can’t go on, Gracelyn had thought, lying there in the dark feeling scraped raw and hollow and scarred by all the things she wanted. This is going to kill me.
But she knew it wouldn’t. That would be easy.
It took her a second to realize that the dark blonde, too-handsome man who stopped before her then, in athletic trousers and a green t-shirt and the wrong hair, wasn’t Jonah at all.
“Good morning, Jasper,” she said.
He grinned that lazy grin of his, but maybe because it was directed only at her this time, Gracelyn noticed that it didn’t quite reach his eyes. She smiled brightly to cover the little lurch in her stomach.
“Walk with me,” he said, in that voice that was so familiar, yet different. More drawl, less doom, and Gracelyn didn’t know what it said about her that she liked Jonah’s version better. “Let me buy you a coffee. I can’t offer you any of that six-bucks-a-latte crap, but there’s decent coffee shop around the corner.”
“You’re so much like your brother,” she said, falling into step with him, wishing she wasn’t quite so sweaty from her run, because this felt like she was facing the enemy defenseless. Which was probably why he was doing it. “Because I don’t get the impression that was an invitation so much as an order.”
Jasper’s grin only widened. “Jonah gives the orders. He’s the one who likes to rule the world. Me, I’m just a simple small town bartender.”
“Meaning you take orders rather than give them, then?”
“Meaning I take the orders I feel like taking and otherwise concentrate on keeping the bad element out of my brand new brewery,” he replied easily, and she thought that really, he was nothing like Jonah. That they were identical only in appearance—and that as beautiful as that appearance was, curiously, Jasper did nothing for her. She wasn’t sure why that felt like a relief. “You’d be surprised at the kind of bad element that can turn up in a tiny Montana town way out in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe not, since you’re from here.”
“Not quite from here,” Gracelyn amended as they walked. “Where I come from it was all bad element and a few prairie dogs, for local color. I’d be happy to tell you all about it if the coffee you’re offering this morning is Irish, but you might not enjoy the conversation. I hear it’s maudlin.”
That time his laughter reached all the way to his eyes, and then he blinked, as if surprised. They turned down Main Street, which was fairly deserted so early in the morning. There were only a handful of pick up trucks and hardy four-wheel-drive wagons clustered outside the few restaurants and cafes that catered to the breakfast crowd, such as it was. It didn’t take them long to reach the coffee shop Jasper indicated, or to place their order at the bustling counter inside, which offered many coffees and coffee drinks but at far more reasonable prices than six dollars.
Gracelyn glanced at her watch when Jasper sat down at a little table in the corner near the window and gestured for her to do the same.
“I don’t have long,” she said as she obediently took her seat and held her latte in its cardboard cup between her palms. “Jonah and I have a—” she almost forgot herself and said meeting, which was far too corporate for a girlfriend—“date for breakfast in ten minutes.”
“Y’all seem pretty close,” Jasper said. He was watching her a little too intently, and she was glad she’d had a week to work on her lack of reaction to him. She was glad she’d learned how to simply smile blandly back at him and give nothing away. Or so she hoped. “He says you’ve been together six months.”
Gracelyn nodded, as if that was a simple fact that didn’t require comment. She decided not to torture herself wondering how Jonah had arrived at that particular number. If it meant something beyond whatever it was he was trying to convey to his brother. That way lay only madness, she was sure of it.
Jasper studied her a moment or two more. “You understand that makes you his longest relationship, don’t you? Ever.”
It would make it hers, too, she reflected with a jolt of surprise. Had it actually happened.
“I’m sure Jonah would be thrilled to think we were sitting around discussing his personal life like this,” she replied coolly, taking a sip of her latte. “Since he’s so open that way.”
Jasper settled back in his seat with his coffee cup in his hand. “I can’t get a handle on you.” He cracked that smile of his again, like he was being nice. She understood, on a very visceral level, that he wasn’t. “Jonah’s raved about your resume. And who can blame him? You’re an impressive woman, Gracelyn. Not everyone can come from nothing and set themselves on a course to success the way you have. It’s admirable.”
Yet the look he was giving her was more assessing than admiring, she couldn’t help but note.
“You and Jonah had amassed a major fortune or two by the time you were my age,” Gracelyn countered, swirling her three dollar latte around in her own cup to bring the foam down. “I’m not any more admirable than anyone else for getting an academic scholarship. Many people do the same thing.”
“Here’s the thing,” Jasper said, making no particular attempt to soften that segue, and grinning as he did it.
“There’s a thing? And here I thought this was just a friendly chat.”
“Believe me, Gracelyn.” And that grin of his was as much a weapon as that Lone Star drawl was, she realized with a sudden start. He wasn’t quite the dilettante Jonah claimed he was—and she very much doubted that she was the first person who’d underestimated him because he pretended to be so lazy and at his ease. She blinked, and tried to readjust—knowing all the while that he was watching her do it. “You’ll be the first to know if I stop feeling friendly. I’m just the tiniest bit concerned.”
About his soon-to-be-fiancée, she assumed, and braced herself for the slap down she richly deserved after a week of her little campaign.
“The same sort of concern that led to you leaving Dallas and not seeing Jonah for two years, I assume?”
She hadn’t meant to say that, surely. But there it was.
Jasper’s grin went hard, but he only took a pull from his coffee, then lowered the cup to the table. His gaze never left hers.
“Fair enough.” He nodded toward the door. “It’s coming on seven. I’ll walk with you.”
“Thank you,” she said dryly, “but that would probably feel more chivalrous if you weren’t headed to almost the same place yourself.”
“That’s the thing about the Flints, Gracelyn,” he said as they walked back outside and then headed back toward their little stretch of Front Street, the sun warming the crisp air around them as they moved. “We’re nothing if not masters of the convenient.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, and they both grinned. And it hit at her hard, then. That this wasn’t actually her life. That she wasn’t going to have any kind of friendship with this man. This wasn’t the beginning of anything. He probably didn’t like her very much, and why would he? She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life with his brother and make nice with his girlfriend and turn this all into some brightly animated set piece with dancing furniture and singing animals.
That was a Disney movie. That was something she would have said, a scant week ago, wasn’t even something she wanted. This, by contrast, was reality. This was the job she kept forgetting to do.
“Thank you,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as stiff and subdued as she felt, when they arrived at the old train depot. The Graff was barely half a block down, rising solid and faintly gleaming in the light of the new day. “I can walk the rest of the way to the hotel myself.”
But Jasper stopped her with a look that was so like Jonah’s, it made her ache all over again. It made everything that much worse.
“The thing is that my brother might look like a ringer for the next Wolf of Wall Street, but he’s not,” he said quietly. “And no matter how loud and fierce and ferocious his bark, that’s not who he is. Not where it matters. Though between you and me, I think he might keel r
ight over and die before he admits that.”
Jasper’s gaze was level on hers, quietly commanding, and Gracelyn found she couldn’t look away. She felt caught. Terrified, again, and she couldn’t have said why.
And then Jasper smiled again, and she knew why. It was because she was falling apart in every possible way, and she couldn’t admit it. Couldn’t show it. Couldn’t do a single thing but let it happen.
Jasper’s smile became far too knowing, then, and something too much like sad. “I don’t want to think that he’s with somebody who looks at him and can’t see that, Gracelyn. I’ve been there before myself. I don’t want that for him at all.”
*
She was much too quiet that night and Jonah didn’t like it.
It was like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. It sat there, beneath his skin, despite the way she played her role to the hilt. He let them into their suite with the old fashioned key and locked the door behind them, taking his time with it because he was a freaking coward and he knew it. God, did he know it.
Because if tonight was like every other night she would bolt off and barricade herself in her room by the time he made it into the salon, and he was well aware of that. He was counting on it.
But when he walked down the long, gleaming hallway, she was still there. She stood in the living room in the dark, with the moonlight from outside the big windows skimming over her figure. It made her seem like something more like a ghost.
Jonah didn’t need any light to see her. She was burned into him, deeper by the day. Like she was inside of him.
He stood there, just inside the door, and watched her. Hungry. Needy.
Wary.
“I heard them talking about us tonight,” she said softly, and she didn’t turn when she said it.
His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he could see more of her. She’d tucked her lusciously tight jeans into a pair of knee high boots tonight, and was wearing something flowy on top that made him think of the mountains in winter. Of cold nights and long snowfalls. And her hair was still tugged back into that always-sleek ponytail that made that itch in him expand, until he thought it might drive him wild. Right there where he stood.
He didn’t dare answer her. He didn’t know what he’d say. He only knew it would have nothing to do with his brother or the schoolteacher or the point he was trying to make here. He couldn’t imagine, looking at her athletically trim body right there in front of him, gleaming in the moonlight and so tempting it actually hurt, that he could bring himself to care about either one of them, much less some point.
“They think we match.” She let out a small, empty kind of sound. “Isn’t that funny? They both laughed when they said it. Somehow I don’t think it was a compliment.”
She swung around then, and Jonah saw she had the whiskey bottle from the room’s fully stocked bar in one hand. And a dangerous kind of glitter in her gaze that made his chest feel tight.
Tighter.
“We’ve been here an entire week. It feels like a year.” She took a swig from the bottle and if he was any kind of a good man, Jonah couldn’t possibly have found that as sexy as he did. Pure sex and danger in one sharp-mouthed, lethally-curvy package and God help him, he was losing his grip. “I was thinking I might take a day off from all this excitement and drive back out to the prairie tomorrow. Just to say hello, you know, and remember what it was like to really feel badly about myself. This is Little League in comparison.”
He didn’t think she had the slightest intention of digging up her roots, or maybe it was that he had no intention of letting her leave him, even for a day trip down memory lane. But he chose not to explore that thought any further. Not when she was right there in front of him, looking like a country song waiting to happen.
And Jonah had always loved a good country song.
“I thought you wouldn’t stop a car there.” He was still in the doorway, though he already knew he wasn’t walking away from her. Not tonight. Not again. “Much less visit.”
“You probably shouldn’t stop one of your cars there,” she corrected him. “I would be perfectly safe.” She took another pull from the bottle and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Physically.”
“Your job is here, Gracelyn. Right here in Marietta, not off in whatever little house on the damned prairie you grew up in.”
With me, he thought, but didn’t say. When had this happened? When had he become so fascinated by this woman he couldn’t see anything else? It was another thought he didn’t care to examine too closely just then.
Gracelyn only rolled her eyes at him. Only a deeply perverse man would feel that like a lick of her sharp tongue, right where it counted the most.
“Who knows? People are making a lot of money in eastern Montana these days. Maybe the Packards have taken up mining and come on up in the world like everyone else.” She smiled then, slow and something like sweet, and Jonah thought it might have ripped him wide open. He could feel the scrape of it, deep and harsh. “Then again, more money only means better access to worse choices.” Another one of those painful laughs. “Look at me. Look at this.”
He was much too tense, Jonah realized. And there was a dark current running in him that he didn’t entirely understand. He only knew he wanted his hands on her, and not in public this time. Not where he would have to stop or pretend anything or worry about who was watching them. And he was starting to think he would be willing to do or say just about anything to make that happen.
But that wasn’t what they’d agreed. That wasn’t why she was here—though it seemed he had to remind himself of that more and more often with every passing day.
Every second, more like.
“Didn’t we decide that drinking whiskey wasn’t a great idea?” he asked instead, and even he could hear that his voice was too harsh. That it filled the dark room and was too aggressive, too fierce.
“Maybe I want to be maudlin,” she retorted, but she put the bottle down on the table nearest her and made no move to pick it up again. “Maybe maudlin is the appropriate response.”
“Gracelyn.” And he didn’t know when that had happened, either. When her name had become the endearment, all by itself. When it had wrapped its way around him, into him, like a great tangle he had no hope of ever unraveling.
More alarming, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t care.
He wanted her. That was all. He wanted.
But she was frowning at him, the way she didn’t do when they were in public. The way he was starting to crave, because he knew it was real. He wanted real.
“Why are we here, Jonah?” she asked then. “Why do I have to play the bad guy while you hang around pretending that you’ve suddenly become so nice and sweet and friendly, fooling absolutely no one?” She rubbed her hands over her face and dropped them again with a loud slap against the tops of her thighs. “If you don’t want your brother to marry that perfectly nice woman who’s never done a thing to you, why not just say so? That’s what he did.”
“He did? When did he do this?” Jonah didn’t like that. She muttered something he didn’t hear, and he didn’t like that, either. “Are you having clandestine meetings with my brother, Gracelyn? That can’t end well.” For Jasper, he didn’t add, and didn’t like that hot, possessive thing that streaked through him.
“I believe,” she said with a quiet sort of dignity, “that he was trying to figure out my intentions toward you.”
And everything seemed to tilt a bit, there with the moonlight dancing over her, making her gleam. Making his breath catch.
Making him want and need and want some more.
“And what did you tell him?
Her smile was a twisted thing. “What could I tell him? My orders are to convince him we’ve been fake-dating for six months, not that we’re on track to a fake wedding.” She shrugged, though it struck him as defensive. Maybe that was wishful thinking. “I wouldn’t want to fake-escalate our fake relationship. What if that made you fake-nerv
ous? A man hates it, I hear, when he’s just fake-boning but she thinks it’s fake-something-more. All hell could break loose in our fake life!”
There was nothing fake about the way he felt about her, or the way he said her name. “Gracelyn.”
“What you should probably know is that he didn’t say any of the things he could have said,” she threw at him, sounding as raw as he felt. “He didn’t ask me why I was so relentlessly awful to Chelsea. He didn’t wonder—out loud, anyway—why an obviously career-minded person like I’ve always been is supposedly sleeping with her boss. He didn’t try to twist things around and come between you and me, though I can’t imagine he thinks I’m any kind of positive influence in your life. Why on earth would he after the past week?” She shook her head at him.
And he was sure that was despair he saw then, etched all over her lovely face, making him crazy with the need to touch her. Soothe her. Save her. Just touch her, damn it. “He was nice, Jonah. A Flint through and through, sure. But nice.”
“Yes,” Jonah gritted out, furious or torn or something he didn’t want to look at just then. “That’s why he’s the Good Twin. It’s annoying.”
“It’s only annoying if you’re an idiot,” Gracelyn snapped back at him. “He loves you, Jonah. He was concerned about you. And meanwhile, all you want to do is destroy him.”
And this time, it wasn’t that the world seemed to shift beneath him. It shattered, and all that was left was Gracelyn and her luminous dark eyes and that way she was looking at him that he couldn’t stand. He didn’t care if everyone hated him, including his brother. But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t.
“Enough,” he said, very carefully. Very quietly.
But she glared at him as if it had been a shout.
“You know what, Jonah? Our fake relationship sucks.”
And he couldn’t take the itch anymore, the unbearable need that moved in him and made him feel like howling at the moon.