Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance (38 page)

“What?” He sounded exasperated with her hesitation.

“Nothing.” She got in on her side, not looking at him.

She couldn’t tease him about the nightgown because he’d interpret it as her complaining, and she wasn’t. Not exactly. She just wanted things to go back to the way they had been at the beginning, when he’d noticed that her panties did incredible things for her ass. Before he’d fallen in love with her—or maybe it was after he thought he’d fallen in love with her, but before he thought he had a basis for demanding she commit to a future with him.

He curved his arms around her but didn’t say anything. She nestled her head on his shoulder, a spot that had become so familiar it seemed odd during the week to fall asleep alone.

She had the option to sleep with him every night. She got that. She just didn’t see how she could say yes. Something bad would happen, disaster would loom on the horizon, she’d get hit with a destruction and heartache that she couldn’t name but felt compelled to prevent.

All the same, Jack had proposed. Those words couldn’t be unsaid. Like she’d been taught in Trial Advocacy, even if the judge instructs the jury to disregard what they just heard, they couldn’t forget they heard it. No way to unring this particular wedding bell.

She sighed.

“What?” His voice held only concern now.

“This isn’t going to work, is it?” she blurted out. So much for getting another few weeks.

She could feel him tense underneath her cheek. “What isn’t going to work?”

“Us. This. I—I can’t move forward and you can’t go back. And I don’t think there’s any middle ground.”

“Elise, we love each other. There has to be a way.”

“Between us, we have impressive problem-solving skills, Jack. If we can’t figure out a way…” she trailed off.

“We’re here for the wedding. Everything is unfamiliar in this setting. Let’s get through the weekend before we make any hasty decisions.”

He was using her words precisely. Elise wondered if they sounded any more convincing when he uttered them than they did to her.

She listened to his heart beating and felt his arm around her back. His hand was stroking her lightly, sliding the silk of the nightgown against her skin. His tenderness made her ache with emotions she didn’t understand and couldn’t sort out. She stiffened, afraid Jack would sense her discomfort.

Which was absurd, of course. They’d been extraordinarily intimate in the past four months, so why should her feelings stay private?

The idea of Jack’s knowing how upset she was made her panic. She needed to keep her dignity. She needed to be able to leave the relationship with the same sense of herself that she’d had at the beginning. No man robbed her of her self-respect. Jack McIntyre, as special and dear as he was to her, was not going to take her sense of self.

Elise put her hand around his chest and hugged him. She did love him. Loving him wasn’t the answer, that’s all.

She pulled in a long shuddering breath and relaxed slowly as she let it out. He stroked her hair. It seemed both odd and comfortable to be in bed with Blackjack McIntyre and not be thinking about sex.

She fell asleep still puzzling why that might be.

On Friday, Elise woke feeling much less stressed. The mood in the house was lighthearted, especially for those with no wedding-related chores to do. It was a beautiful day, sunny but not too humid. Everyone agreed they were crossing fingers the weather would hold.

After lunch Rand and the twins played Frisbee tag on the lawn with Hugh and Debbie’s children. Hugh’s sister Annette arrived with her teenagers, who instantly joined the younger kids. It must have looked like this twenty-five years earlier, Elise thought, with Jack being the youngest of the cousins. She could see how easily he had been left out of the older ones’ games.

Thinking of Jack, Elise glanced around to see him and Phil huddled together on the terrace, presumably talking about the law. Amusing to see how quickly Phil and Jack had glommed on to each other. Kindred spirits in some odd way.

Annette joined her, holding out a drippy glass of iced tea.

“Thanks,” Elise said.

“I’m Hugh’s sister.” Not the warmest greeting.

“Jack’s shared his stories about your childhood up here.” Elise eyed Annette over the rim of the iced tea. In her mid-forties, Annette was still quite beautiful. She was also the first one from the O’Hara side of the family to share the “Black Irish” coloring with Jack. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. Compared to Elise’s messy bob—she
owned
hairspray, she just forgot to use it—Annette’s hair was implausibly neat, despite the breeze off the lake.

“Jack’s very special,” Annette said in a clipped voice. She leaned against the balustrade and faced Elise. “I know you’ve charmed him, and that’s lovely, but if you break his heart I’ll personally find you and hurt you.”

Elise could feel her litigator smile taking over—slightly toothy, superficially sincere, even disarming. A smile to keep one’s colleagues close and competitors closer. Then she saw Jack jump up for an errant Frisbee, and at the look on his face—happy to be playing with his family—her prickly lawyer shell melted away.

She looked at Annette. “You know how we met, right? I care for Jack deeply, and I want his happiness more than you can know. But his happiness isn’t entirely under my control. It’s a negotiation, as it has been from the beginning.”

Annette’s jaw set as she looked out over the lake. Finally she nodded. “Just know that he’s not alone in the world.”

She waited a second, then walked away, calling out to her kids.

Elise considered going up to Jack’s room to hide. Before she could sneak away, Stacy wandered over to take Annette’s place. She nodded at the kids cavorting on the lawn with Jack. “You’re not playing?”

“Hopeless klutz,” Elise confessed. “I don’t think you need the rehearsal disrupted with a trip to the emergency room.”

Stacy smiled. “What did Annette want?”

“Jack’s happiness. As though I have it and refuse to cough it up.”

Stacy nodded. “He’s everyone’s little brother, which is why we’re so immensely proud of him professionally and protective of him personally.” She put a hand on Elise’s shoulder. “Don’t let Annette make things weird. We know you’ve been great for Jack.”

“The girls are so beautiful,” Elise commented. Lissa’s hair was flying around her face as she leapt for the Frisbee while Libby’s was still tidy in its ponytail. Without that difference, it would be hard to tell them apart. Except for the way that Rand snuggled with Libby, of course.

“Where’s Lissa’s boyfriend?” Elise couldn’t remember his name, and no one much mentioned him.

“Duke. He flies in tomorrow morning in a plane his boss, the senator, has chartered.” Stacy’s voice was so cool, Elise pictured dry ice smoke drifting toward the lake.

“I look forward to meeting him,” Elise teased.

Stacy’s eyebrows lifted but she didn’t speak at first. Then she angled her body so her back was turned toward Jack and Phil. “I thought maybe
they
—” she jerked her head a tiny bit in their direction, “—had bonded over being the bachelors in the household.”

Stacy’s tone stung. Elise made herself look directly at her. Stacy wasn’t that much younger than Peggy. They shared that uncanny knack for conveying maternal disapproval. “Yes. Jack proposed. I love him, I do.”

“But?”

Elise wrapped her arms around her torso even though it was quite warm in the sun. “I don’t know. I don’t want things to change.”

“It’s none of my business,” Stacy said carefully as she looked out over the lake. “So don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to know. But if you’re worried about Jack’s past, I can assure you that he’s never felt anything like this for any woman. And I would know.”

Elise’s head snapped up and she stared at Stacy. God, it had never even occurred to her to think that he might be fickle, flitting from woman to woman. That wasn’t Jack at all.

“Of course I realize that,” Elise said testily. “Whatever my problem is, it’s
my
problem. He knows that.” She paused. “Which is what makes this so hard on him. He would jump to fix it if it was anything he could fix.”

Stacy made a noise that seemed to convey commiseration.

Elise laughed briefly. “Yeah, he’s quite the zealous advocate, your brother. I know he means well, but it’s driving him crazy that he can’t make an impassioned appeal to the jury, highlighting the salient facts and disproving my false objections, all toward getting the correct verdict.”

Stacy laughed. “You know him well.”

“Yup. I think I know him better than he knows me.” She sighed. “The sad part is that I know him better than I know myself.”

“What’s up with you and Elise?” Stacy asked Jack that afternoon. The kids had gone to the beach with the twins.

Jack sat on the end of Stacy and Bill’s bed and stared at his shoes as she folded clothes.

“I proposed,” he told her in a flat voice. He didn’t look up. She’d be happy for him, and he couldn’t face that. “She said no.”

“No? That’s absurd. You guys are perfect for each other.”

“Tell that to Elise,” Jack said morosely.

“I will if you want me to.”

“I don’t think it would do any good. I don’t even know why she said no. I asked her, but she just said it wouldn’t work out and couldn’t we go back to the way things had been.”

Stacy moved across the room to hang something up in the closet. “Jack, be honest with me. How do you know Elise is the right woman to marry?”

He considered this for a moment. “She’s the only one I’ve ever fallen in love with.”

“Yes, well, that may be true, but it hardly equates to making a life together.”

Jack contemplated his feet, sensibly clad in pristine white crew socks and running shoes. He waved them from side to side, first in tandem, like windshield wipers, then in mirror action so the toes met in the middle then swung away from each other.

“Stace?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve never wanted anything like this before.”

“I know, Jacko.”

“Why won’t she say yes?” He felt silly asking his big sister for advice, but he was too worried he was going to lose Elise to care.

“I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask her that.”

Jack just nodded.

“You know, you’ve never before told me about something you ached to have,” Stacy said. There was something, a significance in her tone. Jack looked up.

His sister was standing in the middle of the room, the empty laundry basket by her side. Her mouth curved into a sad smile. She sat down in a rocking chair in the corner and started rocking.

“I used to nurse the twins in this chair,” she said. “Do you remember when they were infants and we all stayed here? Mom was still alive, and you were home from school. I had such trouble getting them on a regular schedule. Libby would settle down easily enough, but Lissa was fussy and she’d wake her sister.”

Jack dimly remembered that summer, but he mostly remembered being bored. He’d had a friend at Eagles Mere the year before, but that family were renters and they hadn’t come back.

“You were so helpful with the babies,” Stacy went on. “Bill had to be in Philly during the week, so I hired you to babysit. I expected you to refuse, but you seemed to enjoy it. You would walk around with Lissa for hours, jiggling her just enough to keep her from fussing. You were a lifesaver, in my eyes. At the very least, you saved my sanity.”

She had that misty look women got when remembering some event with a rosy sense of how they’d felt. That summer must have been hard on Stacy, but she was acting as though it had been this magical time.

“Elise accuses me—because believe me, she doesn’t mean it as a compliment—of being a Boy Scout.”

Stacy laughed. “You
are
a Boy Scout. You believe in doing the right thing. More importantly, you hate doing the wrong thing. You’re pathologically afraid of being seen as selfish or demanding.”

“I could find a hundred people who would swear blind I like getting my own way far too often.”

“Really? Are they talking about your demand for justice, perhaps? Or that you have the monopoly on reason and the logical way to do things? Because sure, those people would be right. But I defy you to produce two people who would say you’ve ever worked to get something for yourself alone, no matter the cost to anyone else.”

Jack stared at her. “I’m not sure I see the difference,” he said slowly.

“Take this judgeship. Did you ask for it?”

“Not really, I guess. A couple people approached me after I put away T-Rex. I was amenable, but initially I didn’t much care.”

“And the US Attorney’s job—did you ask for that?”

Jack had to think back. There’d been an acting U.S.A. for a couple of years before Jack had been named. Jack had wanted the job, but not enough to agitate for it. He’d figured that if he kept performing, getting convictions, someone else could decide if he was the best candidate.

“No,” he admitted.

“My point is, you’ve always worked very hard, but never to grab some brass ring of glory. You work hard because that’s who you are, that’s what you do.”