"No. His father—"
Pace put his hand up. "You don't have to say anything more unless you want to."
"I have to go to him." Jayne was already well down the hall.
"Can I come, or do you think I'll make it worse?"
Braeden already loved Pace, but Jayne told him exactly what she was thinking. "I don't know, but he's already more bonded to you than he ever was to his father, so that would probably be a good thing."
And he did follow her, as she'd known he would.
The entered the bedroom, but the little boy was nowhere to be found—not on the bed, not under it, or in any of the corners, either. But then they heard a soft sob, and it was coming from the large walk-in closet.
"Hey, punkin'. I know you're scared, but I'm right here. You don't have to come out, but I'm going to stay right here until you do," Jayne promised quietly through the doors.
"I'm here, too, partner. You don't have to be afraid. It's perfectly okay that you are, but you don't have to be. Accidents happen. Why, I once knocked an entire big bowl of salad off the table when I was little, like you, and my Dad, who was big like me, ended up wearing most of it. He had a lettuce on his head, like a hat, and carrots in his lap, and some of the dressing leaked down into his shoes. And do you know what he did?"
Pace didn't wait for the scared little boy to answer him but forged on.
"He laughed with the rest of us and said just what I just told you—accidents happen. Then he told me that I could have just said 'no, thank you' if I didn't want to have any salad. We all, Dad and Mom and Brownie and I, cleaned up the mess together, and we had a great meal.
"Of course, as we passed the food around after we'd cleaned up, he had to ask me, every time he was holding a new dish of something, if I wanted to throw it at him, but I decided not to."
Was that a slight giggle she heard?
"Everyone has accidents of all sorts of kinds, sport, and the best thing to do—the thing we do in this house—is to know that and try to laugh about it. I mean, my big strong dad wearing a lettuce leaf hat is pretty funny." He paused then, but there was no response to his rambling speech. "Your mom and I will be right here, whenever you decide you want to come out, but I want you to know—and hear in my voice—that I'm not at all angry. When you're ready, we'll all go back to the dining room and clean up the stew together, and then we'll finish dinner and maybe watch Frozen together before bedtime."
As he was speaking, Pace arranged himself so that he was leaning up against the wall next to the closet, as Jayne faced him while leaning against the end of the bed.
They didn't have to wait long, though, because Braeden appeared shortly after they got settled, flinging himself at Pace and crying fit to break his heart. Pace hugged him and rocked him, patting his back, and murmuring reassuringly to him.
Then Brae leaned away from him. "Not mad?"
"Not even the teensiest, tiniest, itty-bittiest bit, my man." He held his enormous hand up. "High five me, bro." Braeden threw his entire body into it, and Pace made as if he was hit by a sledgehammer. "Good job being brave and coming out, Brae. When something happens and you get scared like that, try to remember—if you can—that you and your mom are safe here. 'Kay, partner?"
Braeden nodded solemnly.
Pace stood with the boy in his arms. "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry."
"Me too! Me too!"
He put his hand down to help Jayne, but he didn't think she saw it, because she was already on the way up.
And they did exactly what he'd said they would. They cleaned up the mess together, Braeden eager to help and Pace and Jayne giving him age appropriate tasks to do until there was no trace of stew on the floor. Pace got Braeden and himself back into their seats while Jayne brought in reheated dinner, and afterward, they watched Frozen for the gazillionth time.
When they put him to bed, a ritual into which Pace hadn't inserted himself at first, but Braeden had quickly begun requesting his presence soon after they'd gotten there, so that now he was just a part of the whole thing, and Jayne had only too happily given up the task of reading "Goodnight Moon" to him.
She hadn't felt awkward around him, really, until Braeden had gone to bed, but then it was brought home to her that it was just the two of them in the house together. She didn't have a tablet, and her cell phone was from 1972, but she had a small Chromebook that she'd gotten very cheap on a Black Friday deal, so she opened that up, just to have something to occupy herself with that would hopefully calm her nerves.
But Jayne knew that she was likely to forget what had been on her mind to say to him, so she did it while she was thinking about it.
"I want to thank you for the way you were with Brae tonight. You're so good with him—it's very touching to watch."
Pace cleared his throat, answering a little gruffly, "Well, he's easy to be good to, as is his beautiful mother, I might add."
He meant what he said, but he also liked watching the color bloom in her cheek.
"Stop."
"All right, but sometime I'm not going to. I know you don't like compliments, but I'm of a mind that that's because you haven't heard enough of them. But I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable."
"Thank you."
"Are you settling in okay? Is there anything we could do make things better?"
"Absolutely not," she returned a bit too vehemently, but it just made him laugh.
"Well, that was—"
His sentence was cut short by her phone ringing beside her. Pace had never seen anyone's face blanch white before, but hers did. She was looking at her phone as if it was a water moccasin or vial of Ebola.
Although he knew he had no right to ask, he did it anyway.
"Is that him?"
Still staring at her phone as if she was mesmerized by it, Jayne nodded slowly.
"Has he been contacting you since you left?"
"Sometimes. Not often."
"Just enough to renew your terror." Pace's voice was hard, but not because of her.
Without thinking, she nodded again, cringing away from the phone as if it was the physical embodiment of her husband.
"Again, I know I have no right to ask, and you don't have to answer me, but have you responded to him?"
She nodded again, slowly, still staring at the buzzing phone. "A-at first. To l-let him know we w-were all right. But n-not lately."
He wondered unkindly if the man even cared whether or not they were safe, but he kept that distasteful thought to himself. But he couldn't stand seeing her look like this, so he got up and put her phone in his room, where they couldn't hear it ringing.
When he returned, he realized that he might have overstepped the mark with her yet again, although he didn't look angry, and she hadn't tried to stop him. "I'm sorry, but you can't expect me to see you so afraid and not doing anything about it. Do you want your phone back?" he asked, coming to stand as close to her as he dared, grimacing when he saw how she was shaking.
"N-no, thank you, if you don't mind."
"I absolutely do not," he stated as vehemently as he dared.
Pace stood there for a few minutes, watching her tremble, hands flexing but not angrily. Instead, they were desperate to hold her and soothe her. Restraining himself from doing so was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do.
"Damn, I wish Brownie was here," he muttered, shuffling his feet in place, arms literally aching to hold her. "Would you—would you let me hug you?"
It surprised him—and he knew it was a measure of just how scared she was—that she nodded and stood but didn't come any closer to him, and now she was looking even more scared and uneasy despite what she'd agreed to.
So, he took one of his enormous steps toward her, watching her closely the entire time, arms out. He ended up standing in front of her. "Why don't you come to me, and then, when you're sick of me, you can just back away, and I'll let you go?"
Again, Jayne surprised him with the way she practically launch
ed herself at him, glomming onto him in a way that was somewhat reminiscent of how her son sometimes hugged him—but that was where the comparisons ended.
Damn. She was warm and disturbingly fine and delicate, and she felt fucking amazing in his arms, which he closed very slowly and carefully around her. His face ended up in her hair, and he could smell the light perfume of it and her. He was doing everything he could not to become aroused, but it was pretty near impossible not to be. All he could hope was that she wouldn't notice it. But one of the drawbacks to being so big was that he was that big all over.
But he put that out of his mind as best he could. If she said something—which he doubted she would—he'd confess to it and tell her not to worry about it, but he knew it would add a dimension of tension to their hug that he really didn't want her to have to bear.
If she was his, or anywhere near close to being his, he would wrap his arms tightly around her and bury his fingers in her hair where her head was lying on his shoulder while he kissed the top of her head and murmured low, reassuring nothings to her. Then he'd lift her in his arms and sit down in the big man-and-a-half sized recliner that was his and hold her on his lap until she felt better and had relaxed.
As it was, he wasn't really sure what kinds of attentions she might welcome from him, but he finally decided to quit worrying about it and just do what he thought might help her. He was amazed that she was even there, in the circle of his arms, and he was going to do his damnedest to comfort her.
"I won't let him hurt you, Jayne. I promise," he whispered, rubbing his hand up and down her back. "You don't ever have to talk to him again if you don't want to."
Without thinking, he began to rock the two of them, just slightly, feeling her beginning to calm, the shivers only occasionally overtaking her, causing him to hug her more tightly when they did, until they disappeared again.
And she wasn't just standing in his embrace, either. Pace could feel her clinging to him, her arms not able to get very far around him, nor her hands very far up his back, but he could feel them there.
She wasn't crying, but he certainly would have understood if she had been.
"Is this okay? Not too tight or anything?" he asked, sounding utterly sincere.
"Yes, please," she breathed, relaxing even further against him.
Jayne was quite sure she shouldn't have been letting him do this, but it felt too good to be held like this for her to convince herself to step away. She'd thrown herself at him without thinking much about it. He'd offered solace, and she'd been unable to convince herself that she didn't need it.
She did; so much so that that scared her, too.
And it was everything she'd thought it would be. He was big and strong, but, in him, those were good things. She wasn't afraid of his size. She didn't worry that he would try to cop a feel or suddenly get angry for no reason and take his fists to her. He felt like a warm, human haven. She would have paid him to just hug her for the rest of her life if she could have afforded to.
It felt that good.
Surely, she would be invincible with a man like him at her side.
It was a fanciful thought, but not one that she put any stock in.
Eventually, before she overstayed her welcome, she moved a bit away from him, and he immediately let her go, staying right where he was, arms dropping from her, then hands, both with obvious reluctance.
Jayne tucked a curly strand of hair behind her ear a bit nervously, not looking at him. "It seems that I am forever in your debt. Thank you for that. It helped enormously."
"You have never been in my debt, angel," he crooned quietly. "And you never will be. I mean that." He wanted to emphasize what he was saying by bringing her eyes to his, but he didn't.
"I think I'm going to retire, if that's okay."
"Of course. Sleep well." He sat back down in his own seat, using his tablet to cover his painful erection. "I'll be up for a while, if there's anything else you need, and I'll put your phone on the dining room table so you can get it anytime you like."
"Thank you. Night."
Meanwhile, the man who had given her such solace did something he wasn't particularly proud of, although it was much less than he really wanted to do.
After she'd gone to bed, Pace went to his room to retrieve her phone—but he didn't immediately put it on the dining room table. Instead, he put it on the coffee table in front of him, where he could see his face come up every time it buzzed. He'd called more times than Pace could count before he finally went to bed himself, but not before he remembered to leave the phone where he'd told her he would.
Alone in her room, she headed for the bathroom to pee and perform her evening ablutions.
While she was sitting on the toilet, she happened to look down at her panties and noticed something about which she wasn't sure how she felt. It was a big, dark wet spot on her otherwise pristine panties—something she'd never seen before in conjunction with any man. But she refused to acknowledge what that meant about how she felt about Pace.
Jayne bit her lip, took them off, and threw them into the hamper as if that was going to be the end of it, even though she knew it was just the beginning.
Chapter 5
And she wasn't wrong.
She couldn't blame it on him in the least. He treated her the same way he had—teasing, funny, affectionate but only verbally and never out of line.
The difference was in herself.
Jayne didn't think that she'd ever felt as ultimately safe as she had that night in his arms. And it had been utterly asexual. Oh, she'd felt his arousal poking at her, but, for some reason, she'd never felt threatened by it or him in any way, which was a major advancement for her.
She couldn't remember a time, even when they were dating, that Jake had ever been like that with her—sincerely warm and affectionate and supportive. He was always trying to get into her pants, always being inappropriate, and he certainly wasn't any kind of safe harbor for her. He wouldn't even have known what that was, and he would have called any man who tried to provide one for a woman a wuss.
But there was no doubt in her mind that Pace never had and never would feel that way.
The problem was that she was realizing that she wanted more—much more. He was showing her everything that had been missing from her life. And what's more, she knew that he wanted to give her all of those things. He'd said so, without any kind of prompting and without ever having hugged her like he had.
She wasn't at all sure what she should do, not that she was ever really sure. The most determined she'd ever been was when she'd driven away from the life she'd had for almost the past decade and into a future of uncertainty. But it would be whatever she made it, and she was going to make damned sure that she never had to live in fear again.
As her second month with Pace and Brownie progressed, she got some interviews, none of which panned out, but she didn't feel discouraged. Both Pace and Brownie continued to reassure her that she could take her time and find the right job, encouraging her to keep applying for anything that interested her.
She was certainly doing more than that; she was applying for anything that would get her out of their hair. And at the same time, she found a really good daycare in Bath, run by someone Brownie herself had vouched for. It was small, but she liked that. She talked with the very motherly woman who ran it and met the "teachers" who were helping her. The woman—Mrs. Winely—encouraged her to stop by anytime she wanted to, to check the place out when they weren't expecting her, which she thought was good, too.
Both Pace and Brownie acted downright insulted that she'd found a daycare she was happy with, which was something she hadn't expected.
"Well, sometimes I have interviews, and I can't constantly impose—"
"If I hear that word one more time, Jayne…" Pace downright growled, giving her a look that she knew was making her panties even wetter than they now always seemed to be when he was around.
Everyone was gathered in the living room. Pa
ce was watching the Monday night game, Brownie was kind of watching, but mostly she was on her iPad, looking at wedding sites and saving things to her Pinterest boards, while Jayne was on her Chromebook.
Pace was a riot to watch when he had football on. He really got into the game—yelling at the players, the refs, and the coaches. But she supposed it came with having played it professionally. When she bothered to look up, though, his sister was almost as bad, but then, she had actual skin in the game. Jayne didn't know much about it. Jake hadn't wanted her around when he was watching sports, and she was only too happy to oblige, since none of them really meant anything to her and they inevitably made him mad.
"Too bad," she threw back at him bravely. "It's true. I can hardly expect to rely on the two of you all the time for childcare."
"But we love him!" Brownie pouted without even looking up, not that Jayne doubted what she was saying in the least.
"I know you do, but you guys have jobs and lives, and I need to be prepared for the time when we'll all have something to do at the same time. I have to have a place for him to go that I trust."
Pace nodded. "She's right. That's the smart thing to do—be prepared."
Brownie growled, but she didn't offer any solutions.
"Thank you." She nodded to Pace then stuck her tongue out in Brownie's direction. Her friend gave her the old one fingered salute.
Pace looked thoughtful. "But before you bring him there, I want you to promise me that you'll ask me and Brownie if we can do it, so that you don't spend any more money than you have to."
Jayne could live with that. "All right. Thank you."
"Of course, honey." He smiled, then his attention reverted to the game and he groaned. "Well, that's over. I hate it when a team gets blown out of the water. No contest at all."
"How'd my honey do?"
"He did fine, but his teammates did not. They lost."
"Oh."
"I'm going to go into my study to pay some bills. Can I get anyone anything while I'm up, ladies?"
His Runaway Bride Page 7