Montana Reunion (9 page)

He shrugged, not wanting to think
about it. He’d freaked out then gotten over it, but it had sure shown him that
he was right.
That he didn’t ever want to be in a position
like that again, and certainly not with his own flesh and blood.

“Don’t shrug, because I know it
took you back in time,” she said, voice soft and low.

Jack grunted. She was right, but it
didn’t mean he wanted to talk about it.

“Does it mean you don’t want to get
married now?” she asked.

His eyebrows knotted in surprise.
Jack clutched his wine glass. “If we did it, we’d have to set boundaries.”

She smiled and turned away again,
hiding her face.
Like
he’d managed to keep within his boundaries so well earlier.
That’s what she’d been
thinking,
it had to be, because it was exactly what had gone
through his mind when he’d said it.

“I’ve been working on my list,” she
said, sliding a dish into the oven, fiddling with the timer and joining him
back at the counter.

“You have?”

She laughed.
“No,
not really.
But I think you’re right about the whole agreement thing.”

Jack had expected her to tell him
off, to say it was too impersonal – to talk about contracts and rules. But then
they were talking about a marriage of convenience, not a real romance. Or at
least they had been. “Are you about to tell me we can’t do what we did before?”

He winked, trying to make fun of
the situation, and it worked.
Maddison
reached for
the bottle of wine, topping off both their glasses, shaking her head. “We’re
not driving so why not, right?
Although I should probably
stop at two given the pain meds I’ve taken.”

“Sure.” She was avoiding answering
his question and he wasn’t going to ask her again.

“Have you ever thought about your
dad.
I mean…”

Jack held up his hand. “Can we not
talk about him? I
was liking
this evening just fine,
but discussing my father is going to put an end to anything good.”

Maddison
took another sip of wine, slowly moving her head from side to side. “Can you
just hear me out? Let me ask you this, and then if you don’t like what I have
to say we don’t have to discuss him ever again.”

The last thing Jack wanted was to
talk about his father.
Period
.
He was gone and he didn’t need to consult the man, discuss him or think about
him again in his lifetime.
Yet here
Maddison
was wanting
to ask him
questions about the jackass
. “No, actually, I don’t want to hear you out,
but I know you well enough to know that you’re going to say it anyway.”

“Have you ever been in love, Jack?”

He stared at her long and hard
then. He hadn’t been expecting her to change the subject so thoroughly.
In love?
No.
In lust, plenty of times, but never in love.
So why didn’t
he want to admit it to
Maddison
. “I don’t think so,
no.”

Her smile told him that she knew it
was a definite no. “I thought I had, Jack, but now I don’t think it was ever
love
. Not really. Not when I look back on it.”

Jack wished he knew what she was
trying to say, because he had no idea what this had to do with his dad, or if
they’d actually changed topic completely.

“When my mom talks about my dad, I
know that I haven’t been in love. Because I’ve never been with a person truly
prepared to put me first. I’ve never been so passionately in love that I’ve
known my life would never be the same without that person.”

Her eyes glistened with tears now.
Jack watched as she deftly wiped them away, blinking and looking sideways for a
beat.

“When you put it like that,” he
said with a chuckle, hoping to lighten the mood, “then I’ve definitely never
been in love.”

“What I’m trying to say
is,
what if it had been my mom that day?
If
it had been her in that accident.”

They
were going back to a place he wasn’t prepared to go, that needed to be locked
away for good.
“It would never have been your mom,
Maddison
,
and I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, but can we just drop this?”

“If it
had been
my mom though, maybe my dad would have become someone
different too. Not in the same way, but maybe it would have changed something
about his personality, too. Maybe your dad was just so heartbroken, so lost
without his one person in the world, that he couldn’t help the man he became.
Maybe it triggered something that he’d been struggling with for…”

“
Enough
.” Jack could hear the cool, hard edge to his tone, was
struggling to stay in control of his anger.
He
wanted to bellow at her to stop her talking about this.
“So what if that
was the case,
Maddison
? It makes the reason I don’t
want children even more justifiable, don’t you see that?”

“Even if it was a
marriage of convenience?
If you weren’t in love?”

Jack shut his eyes, took a deep
breath. “What if I did fall in love? What if I repeated the mistakes I’ve
already lived through?” It was something that he thought of constantly, that he
might repeat the cycle that had almost broken him as a kid. “What if I couldn’t
help the man I became? What then?”

“I don’t believe you could ever do
that, Jack,”
Maddison
said, coming closer and placing
her hand on his arm, fingers firm against his skin even through his shirt.
“You’re a good man.
A
kind
man.
And I know you well enough to believe otherwise. If you were in the
same circumstances, it might change you, but it wouldn’t turn you into that
man.”

He cleared his throat. “You want to
know who I
am?
I’m a man who doesn’t want to be a dad,
Maddison
,” Jack told her, knowing exactly what she
was doing, trying to change his mind. “No amount of flattery or talking about
the past is going to change that. It’s not just something that I can change my
mind about, because it’s part of who I am.”

Maddison
leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, her
lips soft, warm. “It’s not just about me wanting to be a parent, Jack,” she
whispered, “it’s about me telling you that you shouldn’t deprive yourself of
being one, just because you’re scared. Whether it’s me or someone else one day,
I don’t want to see you making a decision you’ll look back on and regret.”

Maddison
shouldn’t have said anything, but everything about Jack screamed
dad
. He was one of the strongest,
gentlest, most genuine men she’d ever encountered, and it broke her heart to
see how much his father still affected him.

“How’s dinner looking?”

His deep voice pulled her from her
thoughts.
This conversation was clearly
over and she didn’t want to ruin things by pushing it.
“Maybe you could put
the rice on?”

Jack stood, looked at her one last
time like he was waiting for her to say something else,
then
walked into the pantry. She took her chance to watch him, to absorb his tall
frame, wide shoulders, dark hair that was an inch longer that he’d used to wear
it. His dark locks curled slightly at the ends. It was cute, kind of endearing.
Maddison
refocused on the window. She stared out at
the ranch, looked at the cattle grazing in the far distance.

When she’d decided to come back to
see her dad, to take time out of her normal life, she’d expected to recharge
her batteries, hang out with her family, and be itching to get back to work.
But now that she was here, just the idea of leaving and going back to reality
was like a slowly building headache that had developed from a mild pain into a
rapid thump in her skull. And she knew the man behind her had more than a
little to do with how she felt.

“How much?”

Jack was standing with a pot in one
hand and an open rice container in the other. Seeing him so domesticated put a
smile on her face. “Couple of cups,” she said, eyes fixed on him again.

“If we got married, would you cook
for me?” she asked.

“Would you put out?”

They both burst out laughing at the
same time.

“Trust you to say something like
that,” she said, trying to glare at him but unable to shake her smile.

“It’s a fair question,” he said
with a twinkle in his eye.

“So was mine.”
Maddison
was blushing, she knew it, but she refused
to be embarrassed even if her skin was betraying her.

“Can I ask you a serious question?”
Jack was pouring water into the pot, but his change in tone made her sit back
down and listen.

“Would you be here, with me? Or
would you be back in the city?”

She tilted her head, nodding. “You
want to know if our marriage would be real,
right?
”

Jack’s stare told her she was dead
on the money.

“I don’t know,”
Maddison
told him honestly. “I mean, I want to see more of my family, and if we’re
married I’d want it to be real in the fact that we’d be here for one another,
but I can’t just give up the career I’ve worked so hard for. It’s like I’m
between a rock and a hard place right now, and I don’t know which way to turn.”

It wasn’t as straight forward as
that and she knew it, but thinking about moving back here for good wasn’t
something she’d
ever
considered.
Until now.
Her dad
might not live to be the old man she’d always imagined he would; and now adding
Jack into the picture? Would their marriage even seem real if she
didn’t
move back here, at least
semi-permanently? The flight between Billing and Los Angeles was only a few
hours, but still. She knew she’d soon tire of it, even if she was spending
every other week back here.

“I wouldn’t ever stand in your way,
Maddison
, not if I could help it. I need you to know
that.” His voice was deep now, like he was telling her something that he’d been
thinking about for awhile, that he’d been waiting to tell her. “You were my
best friend and you probably will be again, and I want you to be happy.”

Maddison
felt tears welling up again. Why couldn’t her ex have been more like Jack?
Instead of taking everything from her like a bloodsucking leech when she’d done
nothing but give in return.

“That’s why I’d marry you, Jack.
Because you’d do anything for me, and I want you to know that I’d do the same
for you.”

The mood had changed again, the
feeling in the kitchen having gone from fun to serious too many times for her
liking. And from the look on Jack’s face, it wasn’t going back to fun anytime
soon unless she did something about it.

Only
she wasn’t ready to change things just yet. Not when she still had something
left to ask him.

Maddison
took another slow sip of wine, and then another for extra courage.

“What if we did fall in love? What
if we did get married, and then things…
”

Jack was standing in the center of
the kitchen, his eyes burning into her like he was capable of setting her on
fire just with his stare.

“Became real?” he asked.

Maddison
caught her bottom lip between her teeth, not sure whether to run away or
encourage him. Thinking about Jack this way was difficult. After telling
herself that she was sworn off men, that she’d never let herself be hurt again,
here she was ready to let Jack have his wicked way with her
and
marry him! But he was Jack – he was
dependable, strong… and available.
Would
she regret not giving them a chance, a real chance, if he met someone else and
was taken from her?

She shook her head, forcing the
thoughts away. “I, ah, need to check the chicken.”

Jack shook his head too, but his
was a slow side to side movement, a wicked smile curving his lips. “No,” he
said, walking slowly toward her, “you don’t.”

Her heart was starting to race.
“I’m scared,” she blurted.

That made him
stop
. Jack’s arms were hanging at his sides, feet spread hip-width apart
as he stood, staring at her.
“Of what?”
His voice was
low, deep.

“Of you,” she whispered, finding it
hard to maintain eye contact with him.

Jack slowly moved closer, his hands
rising and catching her arms behind the elbows, holding her in place. When she
didn’t meet his gaze he used one hand to tuck under her chin and gently tilt
her face up.

“I scare you?” he asked, whispering
now.

Maddison
swallowed.
Hard.
“Yeah.”
It
was as if the word came out on a breath.

“You scare me a little, too,” he
admitted, shuffling closer.

Maddison
shut her eyes, took a deep breath before opening herself up to him again. “I
don’t want to be hurt again, Jack.
I
can’t be
.”

“I don’t want to hurt again either,
Maddison
. It’s why I don’t want a family.
Because I don’t want to hurt anyone else, either.
More than
not wanting to hurt myself, I don’t want the burden of not being there for
someone.”

Could
she deal with it just being the two of them?
With never being
a mom?

She stared into Jack’s eyes, braver
now.
Yes, she could.
For
her dad.
To protect her family’s ranch in the future, and let her dad
see her with a man he already loved like a son.

Maddison
stood on tiptoe, hands on Jack’s shoulders as she pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“If we do this, I want to take it slow,” she said into his ear, voice almost a
whisper even though there was no one else in the room.
Even
though it was just the two of them.