A derisive chuckle shook her shoulders. “Join the club.”
Chapter 21
Jackson sat at the kitchen counter doodling on a notepad as he watched Aja carefully layering what looked to be lasagna ingredients into an extra-long casserole dish.
“Jackson,” she huffed. “When you said you would watch my every move, I didn’t think you meant literally. I’m placing pasta, cheese, and meat sauce on top of each other. Surely there’s something else you can do to secure my safety that doesn’t include this.”
“Maybe I find your culinary skills interesting.”
“You ain’t slick, and you’re not off the hook either. I’m still mad at you about barring Mat from the ranch.”
He stiffened, preparing himself for battle. “Are we really gonna fight again about this?”
“Yeah, we are,” she continued. “But not right now. I firmly believe that fighting while you’re preparing food spoils the meal.”
“Just another reason I love watching you cook. You take so much care when you do it. It’s like watching the creation of art.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “I’m hardly an artist or a chef. I don’t know the difference between julienne cut and a paper cut. I’m simply repeating the same steps that have been passed down from generation to generation in my family.”
Jackson laughed. “That may be. But your cooking is still better than most, so I’m not the least bit bored watching you. Besides, you always seem so content when you’re doing it.”
She placed the ladle full of meat sauce carefully in a nearby pot as she stared at him. “Is that your way of saying you think this cooking thing is women’s work? You do know most cooking schools are filled with male students?”
He chuckled. “My daddy didn’t raise no fool. I’m not stupid enough to let something like that slip out of my mouth. I wasn’t assigning a gender role. I happen to have been raised by a single father who insisted my brother and I contribute to the family upkeep by cooking and cleaning.”
She raised a skeptical brow, and a loud ball of laughter swelled in his chest, pressing against his insides until Jackson set it free into the air. “I swear it’s the truth.”
“So you’ve had me sweating over a stove for you when you knew how to cook all along?”
He pointed an accusing finger at her. “Now, Counselor, you can’t blame me for that. You never asked if I could cook. You simply shoved a plate in my face.”
She threw a nearby hand towel at him. “Watch it there. Your chauvinistic tendencies are showing, cowboy.”
He caught the towel and waved it in surrender. He laughed again, this time in a silent but deep chuckle that made his entire body shake. When he caught his breath, he marveled at how easily laughter seemed to come when he was in her presence.
Maybe that was why he liked being around her so much. She made him laugh. That ain’t the only reason, and you know it. “I really wasn’t trying to be a chauvinist. I was simply observing that you seem relaxed, as if you forget about all the real-world hardships when you’re cooking. I’ve been told I do the same when I draw.”
“Draw? That’s what you’ve been over there doing? I thought you were doodling on the notepad.”
He was slightly surprised himself that he was drawing. The desire to put more than a few uninspired lines on the page hadn’t filled him in a long time. “Yeah, I haven’t done it in a while. But watching you doing something that made you that content inspired me to do the same.”
A bright smile spread across her face. “May I see?”
He was hesitant. He hadn’t shared his art with anyone since the world was pulled from under him. Sharing this with Aja, even after the intimacy of sex, felt like he was stepping further over the line than he should.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I was just curious.”
He put his pencil down and slid the notepad toward her. She grabbed a nearby towel before carefully picking up the notepad as if it contained a masterpiece instead of the doodling of a bored Ranger.
“Jackson.” She whispered his name like it was a prayer. “Is this how you see me?”
He swallowed uncomfortably. The last thing he wanted to do was offend her with his untrained drawing. “It’s a hobby. I told you, I haven’t done it in a long time. It’s not very good.”
He reached over to take the notepad, and she pulled it away from his grasp. “A hobby? This is beautiful. If I hadn’t been here to watch you draw it, I never would’ve believed this is me.”
“Why not?”
“Because the way the lines flow and converge on the page gives off an angelic, ethereal quality I’m not sure I possess in real life.”
Jackson tilted his head as he let his eyes slide slowly down her frame. She was dressed in a pair of fitted jeans and another one of those V-necked women’s T-shirts that exposed enough of her cleavage to make him want to lean in and see where that sexy dark-brown line between the swell of her breasts led. Her tiny braids were piled high on the top of her head in some sort of messy bun. But instead of looking haphazard, it drew his eyes to her face and neck, giving her a more regal glow. She wasn’t simply angelic; she was the queen of all angels as far as he was concerned.
“Aja, I don’t lie. My job doesn’t always allow me to be as truthful as I’d like to be. But in real life, I don’t lie. Lies destroy. They corrode.” He took the drawing from her and ran his fingers slowly across it, hoping some of her depicted glow would somehow jump off the page and chase away the cold shadows of his past. “The truth is important to me. So if this drawing makes you see yourself as angelic and ethereal, it’s because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, I’ve never been that imaginative when it comes to drawing. I just draw what I see.”
She was quiet for a moment. He couldn’t tell where her thoughts were going, only that she was piecing something together behind those deep-brown eyes. In the short few days he’d spent with her, he’d come to realize her intellect, her ability to puzzle things together until she had a working explanation in her head, was one of her greatest superpowers. Well, that and her ability to both bless and curse you with her tongue.
“You’re so talented. Why don’t you do this more often?”
A long sigh slipped from his lips as he slid down in his chair. “My ex-wife didn’t much care for the garage full of sketch pads and art supplies I stored over the years. She said it was a silly hobby I was too old to indulge in.”
Her brows furrowed, and the need to run his fingers across those creases and smooth them out almost overwhelmed him. “That seems unsupportive. No wonder she’s your ex.” Her eyes widened, and she placed her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. I had no right to pass judgment like that. I never want to be someone who villainizes the woman who came before her.”
Jackson shook his head. “Making a truthful assessment isn’t the same as passing judgment. Lana had good qualities. When things were going well, she was fun and generous. She effortlessly managed to be a bright spot wherever she went. But when things were bad, she changed into another person. That Lana wasn’t supportive. Not of things she didn’t feel there was a tangible benefit to anyway. You’d think her lack of support might have made me walk, but no, it wasn’t. I left because—” He searched for the words to express as much of the truth as he could. No one wanted to bare their scars to the world, but after proclaiming himself to be a purveyor of truth, it felt wrong somehow not giving Aja exactly that. “She’s my ex-wife because she lied to me, and those lies ended up killing someone.”
He glanced up to witness the quiet shock written across her face. Jackson wasn’t surprised she didn’t know about it. What was big news in a small hick town rarely made it on the mainstream wire. The anonymity of a small town in the South was the only thing that had saved his career after Lana’s unthinkable crime.
The light brush of Aja’s palm o
n top of his registered somewhere in the back of his mind, and he looked down to see her holding his hand carefully, as if he needed a delicate touch.
“Jackson?”
She didn’t have to ask the actual question for him to understand her meaning.
“About thirteen years ago, I married the mayor’s daughter back in my small hometown. Lana was a party girl. I’d always known that. Hell, everybody in town knew that. But as an adult, I wasn’t aware that the wild partying had turned into something much more ugly and uncontrollable than her silly high-school antics. After college, I did a stint in the military. By the time I came home for good, I figured she’d grown up like the rest of our peers. But I was wrong.”
He took a deep breath and cleared his throat, trying hard not to sound like the victim in this scenario. Because no matter how bad things got for him, he was still here, still alive. That wasn’t true for the real victim in this story. “Apparently her father threatened to cut her off if she didn’t get herself together. That meant no foolishness in public—she had to settle down, or he would snatch away everything his power and local celebrity offered her. Forever a daddy’s girl, she figured out how to play him and still do exactly what she wanted. And when we dated, she learned to play me the same way.
“Lana was an alcoholic, and even though I lay next to her most nights, I never knew it. By the time I figured something was off, she’d been so deep into her addiction, there was no way she could get out of it on her own.
“I tried to support her the best way I knew how. I put her into rehab, threatened to leave her if she didn’t give the program a serious try.”
Aja squeezed his hand, letting him know she was there for him, and the easy way she comforted him both soothed and stirred something deeper he wasn’t willing to acknowledge at that moment. “I’m guessing you sending her to rehab and threatening her to straighten up didn’t work.”
He shook his head. He’d hoped like hell it would, but none of it helped. “No. She smiled and made me and her daddy believe she was doing her best to get a handle on her problem. But the truth was, Lana hadn’t cleaned up her act. Instead, she learned to get smarter about when and where she drank and whose company she kept while doing it.”
“Jackson, addicts are very good at hiding in plain sight. Until someone is ready to address their problems, there isn’t enough outside motivation in the world to make them stop. They have to do the work for themselves.”
Again, she was right. But in his own arrogance, he’d believed he could pull Lana out of darkness with tough love and support. But it hadn’t worked. Nothing he did worked.
“What happened, Jackson?”
“We’d been arguing all week about something or other. It’s strange—as important as the subject seemed then, I can’t remember for the life of me what we were actually fighting about. All I remember is telling her I got called out on assignment and I wouldn’t be home that night. Somehow that bit of information escalated whatever else was going on. From what I can gather, because Lana never remembered, she went on a bender and decided she would give me a piece of her mind face-to-face.”
He laced his fingers through Aja’s, somehow needing an anchor to the present while his past sought to draw him into pain and guilt. “Halfway there, she drove the wrong way up a highway exit and slammed into another car. It was a young family. Parents and a toddler. The parents were pretty banged up. The little one died on impact.”
“My God.” She let go of his hand only to walk around the counter and stand next to him. Once she reached his side, she burrowed her way under his arm and wrapped him in her tight embrace, reinforcing the invisible cracks that were spreading through his foundation.
“Her blood alcohol content was more than double the legal limit. Even her daddy couldn’t get her out of the trouble she’d landed in, landed us all in.”
“You mean the legal and civil liabilities that come along with something like this?”
She was sharp, Jackson had to give her that. “Lana had two previous DWIs that her father paid the fines for quietly and kept her records buried. But with her killing a child, even her daddy couldn’t get her out of that unscathed. She was sentenced to twenty years and must serve at least half that before she’s eligible for parole. She was also fined ten thousand dollars. And that was just the legal penalties. The family sued us and was awarded a hefty sum in damages.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide, filled with compassion as she calculated her own conclusions. “You lost everything, didn’t you?”
He pulled her in tighter to him, kissing her on her forehead. The connection calmed the familiar anger and guilt that whipped around inside him like the raging waves of a stormy sea. “No, that young family lost everything.” Even through all his pain, he still realized nothing compared to the loss of that little one’s life. “I walked away with the clothes on my back and my job. And the only thing that kept me employed was that I hadn’t attempted to cover up Lana’s issues with my badge. Her father didn’t fare so well in that regard. He was removed from office when an investigation revealed he’d used his position to get her lighter sentences for her past transgressions.”
“Jackson, I’m so sorry.”
He held her closer. The feel of her pressed so tightly against him was reassuring, keeping the shadows of the past away. Who would’ve thought Jackson Dean, the big, burly Texas Ranger, needed someone to make him feel safe? God, this is all kinds of wrong. It was true. He should provide comfort, not her. But then he realized comfort was what Aja was all about. She’d said as much to him several times since they’d met. She was here to make things better for the people around her. And damn if he didn’t feel lucky to fall even on the margins of her proximity. Because being with her felt damn good, even when it shouldn’t.
Chapter 22
Aja remained in the kitchen thinking about Jackson after he’d shared his past with her. He’d been called away to one of the access points to help with something security related a few moments before. But even in his absence, she could still feel the heaviness of his confession.
She shook her head as she sat at the counter, in the very seat Jackson had recently vacated, and thought more on their conversation. It all made sense now, why he always seemed to walk the straight and narrow, why he seemed so torn between wanting her and doing his due diligence. Why he insisted he didn’t do relationships, and why even though they’d slept together, he still seemed to keep some distance between them.
During the most difficult time of his life, his job was all he had. And Aja’d been so angry and wrapped up in her own needs, she’d practically begged him to forget about his oath and focus on what she needed instead.
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You really are a piece of work, Aja. Didn’t your past teach you the cost of your selfishness yet?” The image of her sister’s face formed behind her closed lids, and regret, cold and heavy, spun tight around her chest. “Doing what you want has already ruined one life. You can’t add Jackson to that list too.”
She stood and walked over to a nearby desk off the edge of the kitchen and sat down. She pulled out her phone and opened a browser for her favorite online catalog. At first, the inconvenience of not having a major store within walking distance of her home had been a pain. But now, with one- or two-day shipping available, she didn’t miss going into the stores at all.
She was running low on planning supplies, and that was a problem she needed to rectify immediately. In the day of digital calendars, you’d think the paper planner was obsolete. But Aja was a visual learner who needed to see things and write them and rewrite them to commit them to memory. So although her planning sessions were about decompression and getting to play with pretty stickers, they were also about keeping her life and business in order.
Today, after Jackson had removed the police tape from her room so the construction crew could asse
ss the damage inside, Aja had walked in and pulled her planner from her nightstand.
She’d tried to sit on her bed as was her custom, but flashes of her struggle against her attacker filled her mind. So she collected her things, brought them down to this desk, and decided she’d organize the rest of her week when she found a moment.
Now was that moment, but instead of thinking about appointment stickers and color themes for her weekly spread, thoughts of a guilt-ridden Ranger and the terrible ordeal he’d found himself in the middle of filled her head. Jackson had made the same mistake Aja had made with her sister all those years ago. Thinking you could save people from themselves was the quickest road to despair she knew. A lesson he still seemed to be in the throes of.
“Jackson.” Just the thought of him made her sigh his name like a besotted schoolgirl. He was strong, determined, a little insufferable, but mostly committed to doing the right thing. And now she understood why. That stick she’d presumed was shoved up his ass was actually a reasonable reaction to a horrific experience.
Aja knew exactly what that pain felt like when your entire existence was being threatened by someone who was supposed to love you. She didn’t wish that on anyone, especially not the horrible guilt of a lost life that Jackson wore like a cloak.
God, he could use some happiness.
Aja was about to go to her online cart and check out when an idea formed, pulling a wide grin on her lips. “And I know just how to bring him some.”
* * *
Jackson was searching for the foreman of the construction crew when he found the man standing at one of the building sites on the ranch, talking to Brooklyn. There were five different structures covered with large construction tarps that looked like this one. Foundation poured, beams and framework erected, wiring done, but still an empty shell of what a building should be. Aja had mentioned that the previous construction crew from town had stopped work when they realized the scaffolding was sabotaged. Fortunately, the man had lost his nerve after he’d erected the building frames. Otherwise, Aja’s goal of opening by travel season wouldn’t be possible.
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