The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  “You haven’t said a word the last hundred miles,” Jake said.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Jake smiled thinly; his hand slid from her knee. “Listen. I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About . . . us. And this . . . this thing between us. There’s something really special between us, I think, but I’m starting to worry that the whole goddam world is conspiring against us.”

  “Are you talking about my dad? Because if you are, believe me, I am—”

  “No, not just your dad,” he said, and reached up, rubbed his eyes. “I don’t even know how to talk about all the things going around in my head right now. I just know that when I look at you, I think to myself, God, is this woman for me? Am I that lucky? I have fallen in love with you, Robin. I can’t think of anything else, there is no other place I want to be, and honestly, the more I am with you, the harder it is to be apart from you.”

  The warmth of his sentiment, however undeserved, or frightening, seeped through to her jaded heart. “Jake . . .”

  “No wait, before you say anything . . .” He looked at her, held her gaze for a moment, his hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. “I feel that way about you, but at the same time, I know that I don’t have what you have—I will never have what you have.”

  “Please, you have no idea what you are saying. I don’t have anything—”

  “Looks to me like the only thing you are missing is your own country,” Jake said, sighing. “I’m only saying that I understand why your dad feels like he does. I can understand why my mom believes you are just messing around with me. But I guess the question is, how do we feel? How do we know this is right and we aren’t headed for a fall? How do you feel? I love you, Robin. But I need to hear you say it.”

  Damn. Damn damn damn. She could feel it coming, the crash and burn—the Inevitable Question, the defining moment in a relationship where the couple must pass on to the next level or abandon their attempts at togetherness. The strange thing was, Robin could feel her answer to the Inevitable Question in the pit of her belly, where a horde of butterflies flit about every time she saw Jake. But she couldn’t deny the fear that what he said was true—he was not accustomed to her lifestyle, and by the looks of things, he would not achieve her lifestyle anytime soon. She had heard him grouse enough about his bills to know that he lived from job to job. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in him. That wasn’t it at all. If anyone would succeed, it would be Jacob Manning.

  But at the moment, she had no faith in herself, no faith that she would not retreat to the cover of her shroud, no faith that she could turn her back on the Lear wealth and all its privilege and walk away.

  Jake sighed. “I guess your silence is my answer, huh?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I’m thinking.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Please don’t misunderstand me. I think you are wonderful, Jake. But I . . . I’m afraid of the expectations.”

  He shot a quick, confused look at her. “What expectations?”

  “Yours. Mine. Everyone’s,” she said, shrinking into her seat. “How do we live up to it all?”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding slowly, and frowned, his brown eyes filled with confusion. And hurt. A lot of hurt. “Okay, I get it—”

  “No, you don’t get it, you can’t get it,” she blathered helplessly. “I am just trying to figure out where I belong.”

  “I think you belong with me,” he said gruffly, now staring straight ahead. “But you have to come to that conclusion yourself.”

  “You’re angry,” she sighed wearily, her inability to explain herself dragging her down. “I am just trying to be honest. I am trying to say that . . . that expectations are inevitable, aren’t they? And we might not be able to fulfill each other’s list of them. Where will that leave us?”

  He didn’t answer right away, just stared straight ahead. After a moment he said softly, “I don’t know where anything leaves us right now.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way.

  An hour later, Jake pulled into her drive and roused Cole from his sleep, directing the stumbling teen to his pickup. He hoisted their bags onto one shoulder and turned to face Robin. She was standing at the passenger door of her Mercedes, silently watching him, despising herself for having hurt him. He looked at her for a long moment, his jaw working with the clench of his teeth, but then he looked away, down at the ground.

  “Jake . . .” she said, but couldn’t finish, having no idea what to say, her confusion as deep as his hurt.

  “No, never mind,” he said solemnly. “Don’t feel like you have to say anything, because you don’t. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “Please don’t—”

  “Look, I gotta go,” he said, and turned abruptly, headed for his truck.

  From the truck cab, Cole was watching, and as Jake pulled out of the drive, Cole turned and looked at her over his shoulder. Even though it was dark, and she could barely make out his face, Robin could have sworn that he looked as confused as she felt.

  After a restless attempt at sleep, Jake passed Sunday at Hermann Park at a baseball game. He swung at the ball with fury, wrenched his back twice, but went three for four before it was all said and done. Part of him expected to hear her calling out to him to get up on his toes; another part of him hoped he never heard her voice again. The hurt or the disappointment was too much for his puny, unused heart to hold. And he resented the hell out of the fear, which, no thanks to her, had kept him awake most of the night. A dull fear he had once felt about the prospect of even falling in love was now a fear that he might not ever be in love again.

  And then there was the fear that he might never touch her again . . . or be touched by her.

  As he stood in right field, waiting for the batter to swing at something, he thought he should have seen it coming, should have known the minute he kissed her the first time that it couldn’t last, that all his little fantasies were just that—fantasies. The first time he laid eyes on her, he knew—a woman like that would never settle for someone like him. How he had allowed himself to believe otherwise was a great mystery and had to be his greatest, crowning stupidity.

  When the game was over, and his hope that she might come completely obliterated, he drove out to his mom’s to get Cole, thinking they could go for an ice cream.

  Mom was sitting on the back porch, snapping peas. “Hey, Mom,” he said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  “Jacob.”

  He sat down next to her, stared out over the clover-infested yard.

  “You doing all right?” Mom asked, without looking up from her work.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cole says you had a fight with the girl.”

  The girl. Jake sighed, unwilling to have this conversation, and looked down at his hands. “I wouldn’t call it a fight.”

  “Well, you can’t say I didn’t tell you so,” Mom said, shaking her head, and Jake couldn’t decide if he despised his mother or loved her for her keen, unwaveringly critical insight.

  “No, I can’t say that,” he said, and with another sigh, stood up. “I’m going to take Cole to get an ice cream.”

  Mom kept on snapping peas.

  Jake found Cole in his room, lying on his bed and throwing a tennis ball against the wall. In usual fashion, he barely acknowledged Jake when he came in, but at the mention of ice cream, seemed to perk up a bit.

  Neither of them said anything in the drive over to the Tastee Freez; Cole stared out the window. When they were seated in the orange plastic benches, and Cole was hunched over a double banana split, Jake asked, “So why are you in such a rotten mood?”

  Cole shrugged, took a huge bite. “Tara,” he said through a mouthful of butterscotch-and chocolate-covered ice cream.

  The admission surprised Jake; he couldn’t believe Cole was willing to talk about it. “What about her?”

  Another shru
g, another bite. “She dumped me. Sorta.”

  “Then she’s stupid.”

  “No, I’m a jerk,” Cole said, putting down his spoon.

  “What do you mean, you’re a jerk? You’re not a jerk,” Jake said, figuring that in truth, Cole likely was a typical, fourteen-year-old insensitive clod. What male that age wasn’t? “What happened?”

  “Robin said I should ask her to this dance. So I did, and she said yes. And I was gonna ride with Danny Futrell, but Grandma said no, ‘cuz she doesn’t like his dad, and she was gonna take me and all that, and that was just like really stupid. So then I started thinking about it, and I dunno . . . it just seemed really weird or something.”

  “What, the dance? When is it?”

  “It was last night,” Cole said, and picked up his spoon, took another bite as if that explained it all.

  “Why didn’t you say something? I could have got you to the dance—”

  “No, I decided not to take her.”

  Jake groaned softly. “You called her, right? You made some excuse?”

  “Yeah,” he said in a less than convincing manner. “I told her I had to do something for Grandma. She said I was a jerk and now she won’t talk to me. And I found out today she went to the dance with Danny Futrell.”

  “Well, hell, kid, don’t worry about it—”

  “I’m a jerk. No girl is ever gonna like me. Especially if Grandma has to drive me.”

  Jake definitely felt the kid’s pain on that front and tried not to smile. He looked at Cole’s young face, could see the handsome man he would become and knew that girls would be sticking to him like white on rice sooner than he knew. “Girls are gonna like you fine, Cole. But here’s the thing. When you sign up for girls, you gotta expect to crash and burn now and then. Girls are strange creatures—they get upset about funny things and make us miserable. But it’s worth it in the long run, and I promise, you will recover from Tara. There will be another girl.”

  “Except I don’t want another girl,” Cole said, twirling his spoon in the melted ice cream.

  “So she’s pretty special, huh?”

  “She’s got really pretty eyes.”

  Man, oh man, Jake thought, as he reached across and helped himself to a spoonful of melted ice cream, he and Cole were exactly alike in that regard. Who would have thunk it? The two of them, captured by a pair of pretty blue eyes, unable to look away, running headlong and fast toward a massive wipeout.

  “Robin says girls like presents when it’s not their birthday or anything. You think I should give Tara a present?”

  Cole looked so hopeful, that Jake believed for a split second he was looking at his own reflection. He nodded, took one last bite of the banana split. “I think that’s an excellent idea. Let’s go over to Wal-Mart and see what they’ve got.”

  They spent an hour at Wal-Mart going through long aisles of girl stuff. Cole finally took Jake’s advice and got a little bottle of perfume. When Jake dropped Cole off at his mom’s, he went out back, found his mother on the porch drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette.

  “Cole has a gift for Tara. Will you help him wrap it up nice?”

  “Oh Lord,” Mom said with a roll of her eyes. “He’s just gonna get his feelings hurt, that’s all.”

  His mother’s bitterness was endless, and Jake was suddenly struck with the thought that he did not want to end up like her, bitter and angry and old. “Mom,” he said evenly, “Just this once, could you not criticize?”

  That startled her; she looked up at him with her watery eyes. “Well, I’m not criticizing—”

  “Yes, you are. You always do. You’re so unhappy that sometimes I think you try to make the world around you just as unhappy so you won’t be alone.”

  Stunned, Mom blinked. She swallowed, looked as if she tried to find something to say, but when she couldn’t, she looked down and methodically stubbed out her cigarette. “Well, I never meant to criticize.”

  Jake instantly felt contrite, and put a hand on her bony shoulder, squeezed it lightly. And she managed to startle him by reaching up and covering his hand with hers, patting woodenly. It was a rusty show of affection, but affection all the same, and it touched a rusty part of him.

  “I best go find the paper,” she said on a sigh as her hand slipped from his, and stood up, wrapped the ratty old sweater tightly around her and walked past Jake without looking at him.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mom,” he called after her and thought he heard her say good-bye in return.

  The clouds were thickening as he went outside, rows and rows of big black clouds hanging low over the city. Jake drove slowly, hardly noticing the lights or pawnshops rolling by, not even noticing when yellowed lawns turned to the lush green of the Heights. His mind was too wrapped around a hodgepodge of thoughts, all of them too vague to really latch on to, the cacophony of them exhausting him.

  It had begun to sprinkle lightly when he turned onto his street, and at first he didn’t notice her car, parked politely at the curb in front of his house. As he turned into his drive, he saw her sitting on the top step of his porch just beneath the overhang, her arms crossed over her knees, hugging them to her.

  For the first time in his life, Jake really didn’t know what to do. He had never been in a situation he didn’t know how to get out of, especially when it came to women, but this woman had him turned all around. Hadn’t he given up on her just hours ago? Hadn’t he convinced himself that he could no longer afford the personal toll of their affair, not after giving over the very best and last pieces of himself? Yet here he was, his heart leaping at the sight of her, fighting the urge to jump out of his truck and grab her in his arms. Instead, he turned off the truck and gripped the wheel in white-knuckled confusion, afraid to let go, afraid of what he might do if let go his anchor.

  From the corner of his eye he saw her rise slowly and gracefully like a mist on the lake, and he suddenly let go of the steering wheel and felt himself fall. Hard.

  He got out of the truck, testing his weight on each leg, oblivious to the sprinkling rain. Likewise oblivious, Robin walked around the front of the truck, her hands shoved deep in the pocket of her jeans. “I know the answer now,” she said, and Jake felt his heart shift precariously in his chest. He leaned against the open door, moving with it until it closed behind him, bracing himself.

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  Hell no. But he had to. He nodded.

  Robin blinked, bit her lip. “Okay. Well, I did a lot of thinking last night and today, and I realized something about myself,” she said, taking a tentative step closer to him. “I realized that I am really nothing without you.”

  The disbelief knotted in his throat. “That’s crazy—”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head so fiercely that her corkscrew curls bounced about. “It’s not crazy at all. I realized today as I was walking through my empty house, that without you, there are definitely things missing from my life.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a life,” she said softly. “Do you know how I would melt into nothing if I ever had to watch you walk out my door and know you weren’t coming back? For a long time now, I’ve known I was looking for something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Until now . . . and now I realize that this desperation inside me is not the fear of getting tangled up, but the fear of being untangled. And that’s when I knew.”

  Jake risked a glance at her now saw the shock of light in her pretty blue eyes, that preternatural glimmer from somewhere deep inside her. “Knew what?” he managed.

  “I . . . I love you. I love you, too, Jake.”

  His heart surged—how he had wanted to hear her say that! But could he trust it? “Robin . . . are you sure? Are you sure this is what you want? That would make me so incredibly happy . . . but I can’t help wonder, what about all those expectations you’re so afraid of?”

  The rain was coming a little harder now; Robin pushed a hand through her damp hair, looked wild
ly about. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I only know that I don’t want to be without you, not now, not ever. I can’t imagine how barren my life would be if you weren’t in it, Jake. Can you just accept that for now?” she asked and flashed a rueful smile up to the leaden night. “I don’t know how to explain, because I am still trying to sort everything out. I just can’t seem to put it all together yet—I only know that you make me happy,” she said, her eyes pleading with him.

  It was enough.

  Jake reached for her, pulling her possessively into his embrace. Robin turned her face up to his like a sunflower. Raw need and desire was flooding him now, swept along by the rain. He devoured her lips as he pushed her back, and when she stumbled, he picked her up, holding her against the full length of him until he reached the garage, where he put her down only long enough to push the small side door open.

  Just as he pushed her through the door, the skies opened above them.

  Robin was reaching for him inside the dark cavern of his garage, and he pushed her up against his Harley, buried his face in her neck. Her arms tightened around him and they clung to one another, Jake nuzzling her neck, Robin stroking his damp hair.

  “How did you do it?” she murmured helplessly in his ear. “How did you manage to crawl under this shroud with me? I’ve never let anyone in, no one, yet there you were, lying next to me, forcing me to breathe—”

  Jake cut off her examination of a thing too precious and fragile with his kiss. “Hush,” he whispered, caressing her face, and kissed her more fully, tasting her sweet breath, dipping into the soft recesses of her mouth. Robin’s hands slid down his back, to his waist, circling him, pulling him into her body and pressing against his hardening cock. He ground his hips against hers, acutely aware that she felt so right in his arms, fit so perfectly, and wondered madly how he ever thought to give her up.

  His hands slipped beneath her blouse, covering her ribcage, and moving slowly up, until his fingers brushed against the hardened nubs of her breasts beneath her camisole. Robin arched her back, so that her breasts filled his hand within the confines of her shirt. Eager and tantalized, Jake slipped one hand out and roughly handled the little buttons up the front of her shirt until it fell open, then pushed the garment from her shoulders.