Becoming a Jett Girl (The Bourbon Series)

by Meghan Quinn

  Kace’s word struck deeper than I thought. I was in denial most of the time about Jett’s feelings so when he told me the cold hard truth, it stung, it fucking stung bad.

  “I can’t go on tonight, Kace.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to.”

  Shocked about how he didn’t put up a fight, I looked up at him and said, “You’re not going to kick me out on the streets for missing a presentation?” The corner of his mouth twitched as I asked about his ongoing empty threat.

  Kace brought his hand up to my cheek and rubbed it with his thumb as she shook his head no. “No, you deserve a night off. I can stay with you if you would like, if you want the company.”

  “Thank you, but I’m going to go visit my parent’s grave. I’ll feel better if I do.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  I didn’t understand why Kace was being so nice, but if I was to be honest, it was freaking me the fuck out. He was a moody cockhead and the fact that he was not only putting my well-being before anything else right now and touching me as if I was a porcelain doll, made me feel a plethora of mixed emotions…emotions that were not welcomed right now.

  “Thanks, but I think I should just go by myself. I think I would feel self-conscious if you went, since I talk to them out loud like a crazy.”

  “Well, if you need anything, let me know.” Kace placed me back on the bed and stepped away. He looked down at me and pulled on the back of his neck as he studied me. If only I could go in his head for a couple of minutes, just to see what he was thinking, I would be able to figure out the man much better.

  “Are you going to stay?” The sadness in Kace’s voice as he asked me as the question surprised me, as if he would actually be sad if I left.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I don’t know if I can stay here if he keeps inviting up every other girl except for me. I know…his rules, his house, but a part of me feels so incredibly connected to him, like we were two souls drifting and finally found each other. I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t help it. He’s captured me and not being able to see him, hear him or touch him while I live under his roof is just torture. I don’t think I can live like that.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “Not sure,” I said, as I shrugged my shoulders, “But I have to figure something out soon because I can’t continue the way I’ve been living.”

  I got off my bed and went to my closet and turned around to face Kace. “I’ll be home later tonight.”

  He just nodded as I headed off to get changed, not even questioning me.

  ***

  I traced the letters on my parents’ gravestone in the Lafayette Cemetery as tears streamed down my face. Tourists walked past me, which reminded me why I hated the fact that my family’s vault was in the ever-popular cemetery. A tour guide walked past me as she talked about how there were over 500 vaults in the cemetery as tourists took picture of the above ground cemetery, which was fascinating, I would give them that, but when it came to the only place I could sit and talk to my parents, it was frustrating.

  I wished for privacy, I wished for the opportunity to talk to my parents without being interrupted every two seconds by a tourist exclaiming they found a gravestone form the 1800’s, as if it was a scavenger hunt. If I was wishing for things, then I might as well wish for my parents to still be with me, rather than their souls at the gravestone and their ashes scattered across the Mississippi river.

  “I miss you guys,” I mumbled to myself as I scooted closer on the ground and continued to run my fingers over their carving. “I don’t know…”

  “Hello.”

  A screech escaped my mouth as my hands flew to my heart from being startled. Quickly I wiped my tears away and looked up to see Jett staring down at me. The sun was behind him so I could only see the outline of his body, but I would know that frame and that voice anywhere.

  “What are you doing here?” I said snidely, as I gathered my legs in my arms. “Stalk much?”

  “You were crying.”

  “Wow, did you pay a lot of money for that detective degree?”

  He ignored my sarcasm and asked, “Why were you crying?”

  “Why do you care? Just get out of here, you found me…congratulations, you can win stalker of the year now. Kace gave me the night off.”

  “Why were you crying, Goldie?”

  The way he said my name, with such concern, broke the microscopic thread I was hanging on to. Tears streamed down my face as I buried my head in my knees and wished for Jett to leave. I didn’t want him to see me like this, completely and utterly weak. I prided myself on being able to be strong and stick up for myself and the fact that he was seeing me at such a broken moment in my life, made me feel extremely self-conscious.

  A warm arm wrapped around my shoulders and pulled me into a comforting embrace. I gave in to his gesture for a second before I pulled away and scooted closer to my parents’ gravestone.

  “Don’t,” I commanded as I held up my hand. “Don’t act like you care when I know you don’t.”

  “That’s not true…”

  “Isn’t it? When was the last time you even thought about talking to me? You got what you wanted, you fucked me, worked my pussy like your own damn toy and then you pushed me aside. So don’t come over here and pity me; I don’t need your fucking pity.”

  “I never promised you anything, Goldie.”

  “I know,” I practically shouted, “I know you didn’t, but damn it Jett, you sure didn’t make it easy on a girl when you were sending me flowers, notes, and acting as if I was God’s gift to earth.”

  Jett sat there speechless next to me as his pupils moved back and forth, observing mine, looking for answers. How could a man so smart, so powerful and so commanding be so incredibly dumb?

  “Let me ask you this one thing.” Jett nodded, so I continued, “Why me, Jett? Why did you pick me?”

  Running a hand through his hair, Jett exhaled loudly as he leaned against a wrought iron fence that encased a giant mausoleum. As he sat next to me, I couldn’t help but soak in every last inch of him, from his pressed jeans to his simple black shirt to his perfectly styled hair. His jaw ticked as he thought about his answer and the image of my tongue running across his jaw ran through my head. I was hopeless.

  “The first time I ever saw you, I was visiting my mom, just like you’re visiting your parents today.” Jett cleared his throat and said, “My mom’s family is on the east side of the cemetery. I like to come visit her often, just like you visit your parents. One day, I was coming to visit my mom after a rough day and you were sitting in front of her stone, drawing it.”

  A gasp escaped my mouth as I knew exactly what stone he was talking about; it was my favorite. The one I had more drawings of than any other sketch in my collection.

  “I was going to ask you what the hell you were doing, but when I saw you were wearing ear buds and completely lost in your drawing, I decided to observe you instead. I couldn’t get over the fact that your hair looked soft as silk or the way you tilted your head slightly to the side and bit your bottom lip as you tried to caress your paper with just the right shadowing. When you got up, I followed you to your next stop, and that’s when you stopped here and started talking to your parents about your life and the trouble you were going through. At that moment, I knew my mom brought you to me to help, to save.”

  My heart was pounding rapidly as I tried to take in everything that Jett was saying to me, but it was all too much to think about. He believed his mom brought us together? His mom’s grave was my favorite in the cemetery? To say I was creeped the fuck out was an understatement.

  I didn’t get him. At this moment, his eyes spoke to me and cared for me, but what about the last couple of days? I was used to Kace being hot and cold with me, but when it came to Jett, I couldn’t handle his emotional mood swings because I cared too damn much when he looked at me with those soulful eyes…those eyes that made
me promises the owner couldn’t keep.

  Shaking my head and getting up off the ground, I started to walk backwards to put distance between me and him. Coincidences I believed in, but outright fate? I had a harder time with that.

  “Where are you going?” Jett asked, as he walked toward me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I flailed my arms, trying to block off any form of him holding onto me like a lunatic. “I can’t be here right now. I can’t listen to you talk to me as if the last couple of days haven’t been torture, as if you actually care about me.”

  “I do care about you…”

  My head snapped up to look at him. “No, you don’t. If you cared about me, you never would have dropped me like you did. You never would have made me feel like a cheap whore that you were tired of. I have been paid for sex many times, but never once did I ever feel cheap and used. But, after you refused to even be near me the past couple of days, you made me feel like a used slut that you were too good to be with.”

  “That was not my intention.”

  “Then what was?” I asked, as my chest heaved from being too worked up.

  Jett opened his mouth to answer, but then shut it as he was racking his brain to figure out what to say. Too little too late, I thought, as I huffed and stormed off. In the far distance, I could hear him call my name, but I didn’t listen. I just continued forward; I had a date to make.

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  “Thinking About You”

  Jett

  Fuck me.

  What possessed me to tell Goldie why I picked her? I never told anyone about my mom, besides Kace, but that fucker could care less, so why did I tell Goldie? Why did I even follow her to the cemetery in the first place? I’ve been doing a good job of keeping my distance, staying away from her maneating ways, but for the life of me, when I observed her from my third floor window walking in the direction of the cemetery, I had to follow her; I had to see her.

  I remembered the day I saw Goldie specifically. She was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an oversized T-shirt with a boy band on the front and a sad looking pair of Converse. She was tapping her foot to music I couldn’t hear, but could tell made her happy because the smile on her face as she drew the intricate curves of my mom’s grave fascinated me. The way her fingers stroked against her thick drawing paper urged me to get to know her, to have her fingers make the same strokes on my body. Little did I know, once I followed her, that she was going to need me more than I was going to need her, but at the moment, I wondered if it was the other way around. I refused to acknowledge that thought and continued to convince myself that the infatuation I had with the smart-mouthed girl was because she was new and she was different; that was it.

  I walked back to the Lafayette Club, replaying the conversation I had with Goldie just moments ago, as I chastised myself for confessing to her about how I thought we were brought together by my fucking dead mom’s spirit.

  What. The. Hell.

  It was a little intense. I didn’t quite expect her to run away from me, but I didn’t expect for her to fly into my fucking arms either, not like I wanted her to or anything.

  Shit.

  What the fuck was I thinking? I actually wasn’t thinking. I hadn’t been thinking since the moment I buried my fingers into that sweet pussy of hers. She bewitched me that night with the way she responded to my touch, the innocent looks she gave me, and the way she thanked me for saving her. That night, she drove a wedge into me and staked her claim.

  Now I was in a hell of a spot as I fought for my own sanity and losing Goldie. I knew the distance I put between us was hurting her, but I couldn’t bring myself to call her up. Instead, I called up Babs and Pepper and talked to them…fucking talked to them!

  When the hell did I ever talk? We didn’t talk about me, we just talked about their future and what they planned on accomplishing after they left the Lafayette Club. Babs wanted to design her own makeup line named after her Jett Girl name. She had mock ups of all her designs for packaging and started mixing her own colors for eye shadow. I didn’t know much about the makeup side of things, but I sure as hell knew how to help her market herself and that’s what we’ve been working on the past couple of nights.

  Babs was on her way out and I couldn’t be happier with the way she’d turned her life around. She was my first-ever recruit and I was sad to see her go, but proud she was able to accomplish something while she was here. It meant what I was doing for these girls was actually something good.

  I started walking up the stairs to the third floor when I stopped at the second floor landing where Kace was sitting, staring straight ahead at me. He stood up, grabbed my arms and ushered me up the rest of the steps. By the time I reached the top, I shook off his hands and pushed him to the side. The man had the ability to kill with one punch, but he didn’t bother me. I knew I could stand my ground with him.

  “Watch it,” I said, as I stood a couple paces away from him.

  Kace paced the floor of the third floor landing as he said, “Do you know what you are doing to her? Do you realize you are pushing her completely away, to the point that she is going to leave the club to go back to her old life? Is that what you really want?”

  “She told you that?”

  “She said she didn’t know if she could stay. Where else would she go if she didn’t have the club? She doesn’t have parents to lean on and her only friend is the one from Kitten’s Castle. You are driving her back to her old life, the complete opposite of your goal here.”

  I blew out an exasperated breath as I headed to my office to grab a drink. Once I had a handle on some bourbon, I whirled on Kace and said, “What the hell am I supposed to do? She is…she’s too much for me.”

  “Shocker. I fucking told you she wasn’t the girl for this club. Now, not only have you hurt her, but she is probably going to be worse off because she won’t be able to get her old job back after the way you told off her old boss. You have made her life a living hell.”

  “I’ll give her as much money as she wants.”

  “You really think she is going to take your money? You are more delusional than I thought.”

  “What?” I shrugged my shoulders, “She took Rex’s money.” The minute the words escaped my mouth, I regretted them instantly. She was right, I did treat her like a whore. I was about to take a drink of my bourbon to sooth the aching burn in my chest when I was pinned against the wall. Kace’s forearm cut off my throat as his other hand pushed against my shoulders. I dropped my glass and upper-cutted my fist into his stomach, making him buckle over.

  “Fuck you, you don’t deserve the way she looks at you,” Kace said, as he was bent over, but then quickly stood up. The man was a machine. “You don’t deserve her.”

  “And what? You do? Is this what this is about? Your infatuation with a girl you can never have?”

  “You treat her like crap…”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve given her everything I have except myself; that is just something I can’t hand over and I know it’s the one thing she wants. I might have pulled away from her the past couple of days, but it was for her own good. She was becoming too attached and I had to put her in her place.”

  “Well, by you putting her in her place, you only ended up driving her away instead…into another man’s arms.”

  I stilled at Kace’s words. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Where do you think she is right now? She sure as hell isn’t pining after you in her room. No, she is at a café meeting up with Rex Titan as we speak.”

  Pure and jealous rage ran through my body as I thought back to Rex’s text. Son of a bitch!

  “Why the fuck didn’t you stop her? Is this because you want her? You think that by her talking to Rex she is going to find out everything about me and not think that I’m man enough to take care of her?”

  Flashes of Natasha leaving me for Rex ran through my head as I spoke. Her ring left on my dresser with a note saying she wanted
more, more than I could give her, reminded me of what a sorry excuse for a man I was. Her words still rang through my mind to this day. I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t rich enough, and I wasn’t strong enough for her. She needed a man who was established, she needed a man who didn’t lean on his daddy—which I didn’t—and she needed a man who could give her what she wanted physically, which I did, lying bitch. I was nineteen then, with four buildings under my belt and a growing business, but that wasn’t good enough for her; I would never be good enough.

  Rex’s maniacal laugh passed through my ears in the far distance as I remembered him talking to me about his new wife at a business meeting. How she had the longest legs, a perfect head of blonde hair and the most beautiful steel eyes he had ever seen. The minute he described his wife, I knew it was Natasha and the sardonic look on his face confirmed it. She told him everything she had told me when she broke things off, which broke me as a man. It was all a game to Rex, but to me, it was my life. From that moment, I swore to never get involved with another woman because, even though I wanted to help the lost souls of the women on Bourbon Street, I couldn’t trust them, any of them.

  “Frankly, I didn’t feel like stopping her,” Kace said, breaking me from my thoughts.

  “What the hell am I paying you for then?” I asked, as I slammed my fist on my desk.

  “Not sure, but I’m out. I can’t take this bullshit anymore. I’m sick of you playing around with her heart only to break her, just like Natasha broke you.”

  “Fuck you, you know nothing about that.”

  “Don’t I, though? I was there, man. I know what happened to you…”

  “Really? Because I remember you were out trying to make a name for yourself, a lot of good that did.”

  “How many times are you going to throw that in my face?”