“No, I get it, Ethan. I know what you’re getting at. She’s been under a lot of stress and needs a little break.”
Ethan’s posture relaxed, and that’s when Jackson went in for the kill.
“Because when you fuck the life out of a woman, you got to give her time to recuperate. That’s the gentlemanly thing to do. And if anything, you, sir, are a gentleman.” Jackson did a curt bow and feigned doffing an imaginary top hat before he turned around, effectively silencing any retort Ethan might have come up with.
Maybe Ethan’s blind love for Lily made him incapable of seeing her in any light that wasn’t glaringly aglow with her haloed innocence, but not Jackson. No, he’d keep one eye open at all times from here on out.
Chapter Three
Lily buzzed with excitement. And dread. Today was the day—the unveiling. All of the work she, Jackson, and Ethan had done over the last few weeks would be on display for everyone to see, and it would set a standard for the work they would do for the other rooms at The Sweet Spot. Edie and Lena had invited a few of their regulars from out of town to the viewing, and Lily knew expectations were high.
She fiddled with the end of her braid as she paced in Lena’s office and organized her thoughts. What if no one liked what she’d done? Or worse, what if no one understood her vision? Sure, she had technically redone everyday furniture and vamped it up into sex furniture, but there was—in her opinion—inherent meaning in that and in the thought she put behind each and every piece. Not to mention that she looked at her projects as a tangible symbol of how far she and Jackson and Ethan had come in the past weeks. They would not have gotten any of it done without each other and, in doing so, had forged a bond that she was having a little trouble keeping under control.
Each day that passed brought with it newer, deeper feelings as she discovered new things about each of them, which terrified her. What was she going to do when she opened that damn letter?
“Ugh.” She passed a hand over her face, and a few strands of hair came loose. “That damn letter.”
It was still in her bag. It had been since the day by the lake. Her future was wrapped up nice and snug and hidden under her lip gloss, wallet, and cell phone. She blew the hair out of her face. Some go-getter she was, hiding from the exact change she had enacted for herself months before she had caught sight of how Ethan looked with a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear or how Jackson looked holding a hammer.
Sexual chemistry aside, though, there was a connection they shared that redefined what she knew or thought she’d known about romantic relationships. Namely, that people did, indeed, change and that she, Lily Chisholm, could fall—
Nope. Not going there.
She was in like. Most definitely in care. But in love? She was not even going to think about the implications of that.
Her gaze darted to her over-the-shoulder slouchy bag, and she chewed her lip. Jackson and Ethan were in the room doing some last-minute “sprucing” as Jackson had called it, so she had a few minutes to herself before all the guests arrived and she had to play reluctant hostess. She needed to stop putting off reading the letter. Either way, she would be crushed. If she got in, she would leave the two men who had, although she hated to admit it, haunted her for years. If she was rejected, then her dreams of getting her foot in the proverbial door to the design world would practically be shattered.
Her bag just sat there, staring at her. Taunting her.
“Oh, just do it already,” she chided herself.
Gathering her resolve, she stomped to her purse, wrangled the beaten-up envelope out from under her junk, and gathered it in her clammy hands.
“I was wondering when you’d get to that.”
Lily squealed like a little girl and whipped around. Edie stood in the doorframe with a knowing expression on her face. Apparently, Jackson and Ethan had been doing a few side projects around the bed-and-breakfast when she had not been looking, because Lena’s office door always squeaked. It was either that or Edie had been taking super-soldier lessons from Jason and had learned to move as soundlessly as he. Leaving the door open, Edie sauntered toward Lily in that full-hipped sway of hers, wearing a deep blue wraparound dress that hugged her curves.
“Get to what?”
Edie sidled up next to Lily and eyed her for a moment, looking a little worried. “You know, I completely understand if you don’t want to talk about it—especially right now—but if nothing else, you need to figure out what’s going on with you before you involve other people. Jackson and Ethan look like they’re on cloud nine, and I think you have a lot to do with that.”
Curse Edie and her spot-on intuition! Lily had a feeling nothing got past her. She noticed practically everything about everyone, which was just what she needed in order to deal with Lily’s brothers. She honestly did not know how the woman handled the two of them together, but she gave her props. Jason and Seth were not the easiest men to get along with. They were overbearing and overprotective, but they meant well. They really did. But Lily was old enough to make her own decisions, and she really wished her brothers realized that fact sooner rather than later.
Lily plastered a smile on her face. “It’s fine. I promise.”
“Okay. I’ll believe you for now. But something’s telling me otherwise. You know I’m here if you need anything, right?”
“Yeah, I do.” This time, the smile was real.
“Good.” Edie looked up at the sound of voices in the hallway. “Oh! People are coming in. I’m going to show them all into the room. Are you ready?”
Lily breathed past the butterflies erupting in her stomach. “I think so.”
Edie gave Lily’s hands a squeeze. “You’re going to be wonderful.”
She watched Edie hurry off to greet their guests, and she took a few moments to steady herself. She looked down at the letter and chewed her bottom lip. Crap. It felt thicker than a usual letter, which hopefully meant good news. Or bad news depending on how she looked at it. Oh, God. How was she going to do this? Was she really going to leave Liebling—her mother and her brothers? Jackson and Ethan?—depending on the contents of that letter?
There was only one way to find out.
Quickly, without giving herself a chance to stop herself, she tore the envelope open and fumbled with the multiple pages inside. Her fingers shook as she read the letter over.
Dear Ms. Lily Chisholm,
We are happy to inform you of your acceptance into our program....
Her heart stopped beating, and the words on the pages blurred.
Sweet heaven. I got in!
This was it. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for all this time—moving to New York, riding the subway to class, staying up late working on her portfolio, touring the best art galleries in the nation. All of it.
“Lily?”
She stiffened, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, and turned. Edie’s head poked through the doorway, her eyes bright. “Come on, missy! Everyone’s waiting on you.”
“Oh, uh…” She turned so the letter was hidden behind her leg. “I’ll be there in a second. I just need to, um, reapply my lip gloss.”
Edie rolled her eyes. “You already look gorgeous.”
“One second,” Lily said, backing toward her purse. “I swear.”
“Fine, fine. But hurry up. They’re all anxious to meet you.” With that, Edie disappeared back down the hallway, leaving Lily alone in the office, excited chatter from the room showcasing her furniture the only noise other than the crazy beat of her heart.
Lily stuffed the acceptance letter in her purse and rearranged it so her wallet and camera hid it and tossed the bag in a corner of the room. Then she applied some lip gloss absently, her fingers shaking the entire time. God, she hoped she did not get any on her chin. The short distance from where she stood to the door seemed interminable, and her heels clicked almost ominously on the wood floor.
What am I going to do? What am I going to do?
&nb
sp; The words ran circles in her mind, but she could not find an answer to them. With one last look at her purse, Lily smoothed her sweaty palms down her dress, straightened her shoulders, walked down the hall, and stepped across the threshold into the room.
* * * *
Hours later, Lily gave her best smile to her guests even though her cheeks had started hurting a while ago. Was it possible to have sore cheeks? There were other parts of her that were blissfully sore, sure, but her face? That would definitely be something new.
Behind her, Ethan stood tall and erect, his solid presence a balm to her nerves. She continuously scanned people’s faces for their reactions to her work, on guard against an upturned lip or skeptically raised eyebrow, but as of yet, she had not seen any of that. What she kept seeing were the blurred words on that letter.
God, the letter. It was really happening, wasn’t it? The whole dream-coming-true thing. She fought down the panic rising from her belly and tried not to think too hard about it. If it’s meant to be, then it’ll happen, she kept telling herself, but it did not make her feel any better. All of this would have to come to an end soon, and she hated it. Why did it have to happen just as everything was starting to be so perfect?
She resisted the urge to wring her hands. It all came down to what she decided, which was the hardest thing for her to accept. Being the youngest child in her family, she was used to having decisions made for her. When Lily was growing up, her mother picked out her outfits for her. When she was a teenager, her brothers did not allow her out of the house after the sun went down. Now, she was grateful because she knew she would have found some way to get into trouble as many of her friends did. At the time, though, she’d resented every moment of it. It was her time to make mistakes, she had argued, and learn from them.
That was what this situation boiled down to, also. She was so used to making choices to make people happy—working at Cedar Ridge, not going out of state for college, living at home because she did not want to leave her mother all alone in that house—that when it came to making decisions that would make her happy, she froze. But it was not just about her anymore.
She felt Jackson’s eyes on her from across the room, and she looked up to meet his serious stare. He had been looking at her like that a lot lately, as if he was trying to pick her apart, and it was so out of character for him to look or be so serious that she wondered if he could hear her thoughts from where he stood. Then, like quicksilver, his mischievous smile replaced his serious expression. Lily could not help but smile back. She knew what that smile meant—he wanted her alone in the room with Ethan and no one else. Clothes off. Lights on.
Her cheeks burning, Lily turned away, but not before his grin widened. That cocky bastard. Of course he knew the effect he had on her. She sent him her best scowl over her shoulder even as guilt set in.
No, it was not just about her anymore, and the weight of her decision pressing down on her felt like she was under twenty feet of water. Her head was ready to explode, her lungs burned, and her body felt as if it was being squeezed everywhere.
Ethan pressed a hand to her lower back, drawing her close. “You okay?”
She brushed a few loose tendrils of hair out of her face and glanced up at him. “Yeah. Fine. I’m just thinking about what we’re going to do with the other rooms when it comes to that.”
“They’ll be just as beautiful as this one. Trust me.” He bent down and kissed her cheek, and her heart clenched.
“Sorry to interrupt,” a man said from behind her.
Lily started in Ethan’s loose embrace and turned around to see who had spoken. A reporter she had been introduced to earlier from an independent Austin newspaper approached her with a charming smile on his face.
“I got all the information I needed from you earlier, but I was wondering if it would be all right if I got a picture of you and your assistants.”
Lily glanced over her shoulder at Ethan. “Assistants. I like that. I think I’m going to start using it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get used to it.”
Lily scanned the room and found Jackson talking to an older man in a Texas tux. They stood next to her favorite piece in the room—the chair she had designed as an homage to her favorite designer—and Jackson looked genuinely pleased as he ran his fingers over the back of the chair.
He must have felt her looking at him because he turned and met her gaze. She inclined her head and beckoned him over.
“So how long have the three of you known each other, again?” the reporter asked.
“Oh, it’s been a while, since we were kids,” Lily replied, her gaze never leaving Jackson and the confident way he crossed the room. He received more than a few appreciative glances on his way toward her, but he did not seem to notice. In fact, ever since he and Ethan had started working with her, they acted as if they were completely off the market and uninterested in putting themselves back on it. Who was she to complain?
When Jackson reached them, he stood opposite Ethan so they flanked her. With their arms around her, Lily felt so utterly feminine, so safe, protected, and desired. Their touch, even though casual, made her feel as if she were melting.
The camera flashed, and the reporter popped up from behind it. “Thanks a lot. The article should come out within the next week. I’ll let you know when.”
“Wait! I want a picture of us for myself, if you don’t mind,” she said to the reporter. She wanted to remember this moment, how happy she knew the three of them looked together. “Jackson, can you go get my camera from my purse in Lena’s office?”
“What am I? Your slave?” He tried to sound indignant, but the way his lips curled in the corners gave him away.
She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him, not caring who saw. “Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”
He grinned. “I’ll take you on top.”
“Well, that, too.”
“Then I really am your slave.”
“You mean you weren’t already?”
Jackson scoffed. “That’s the other guy who looks like me.”
“And here I was thinking I had you under my spell.”
His jade green eyes flashed a deeper green, and her heart started racing. His eyes only turned that color when he wanted her. “Oh, I am, babe. But that doesn’t mean I’m your love slave. There ain’t a woman out there who can tame Jackson Stone. Not even you. No matter how cute you are.”
Well, if that didn’t take the wind out of her sails. “Maybe I don’t want a picture with you anymore. I think I’ll just take one with the nice twin.” She stepped away from him, a little stung, but he gripped her elbow.
“Aw, come on. I’ll get you your camera.”
She took one look at his contrite expression and melted. “Fine. But hurry back. I want to get going soon.”
He gave her a naughty, conspiratorial smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
* * * *
Jackson wove through the people milling about the room with champagne flutes and bottles of beer as they chatted and flirted, but he really only had his mission in mind. The sooner he got Lily her camera, smiled for the pictures, and made a fashionably early exit, the sooner he and Ethan could get their hands on her. There was something about the way her face lit up when she realized her work was good, that people liked it, that he just could not get over. Maybe it was the way her lips curved into a content smile, but he had never seen her look that way before, and the image would forever be imprinted in his mind.
That and her dress.
Lily had worn this goddess dress—at least that was what it looked like to him—that hugged her body like he wanted to. Oh, man. He stuck his hands in his pockets and readjusted his pants. The material was black lace, and at first he thought it was see through. He, of course, was not happy with his woman showing off his—yes, his—goods to everyone in town, and he expressly told her so, but she had just rolled her eyes.
“Jackson, it has another layer of flesh-colored material underneath,” she
had said, “so you can’t see through it.”
He mentally scoffed. Flesh-colored fabric, his ass. It sure as hell didn’t look like it.
He glanced over his shoulder, looking at her as she smiled and mingled, a few strands of her hair coming loose from its style, and he was suddenly struck by the fact that his heart was throbbing. Which was odd. It was an entirely new sensation, one that made him beyond uncomfortable. Maybe he needed to go see the doctor or something because his ticker might be going south. Either that or Lily had done something very strange to him with her girly powers. Women had that effect on men. Especially beautiful ones with deep, deep blue eyes and long legs that wrapped around his waist so perfectly.
Jackson shook his head and continued with his camera-finding mission to distract himself from any more musings about women and hearts. Which, of course, proved to be impossible. She was radiant.
And so was Ethan, if Jackson was honest with himself. His brother had not left her side all evening, perfectly content to be near her and touch her and laugh with her. Which was great for Ethan. Jackson had never seen him so happy and alive. Perhaps that was the reason Jackson was even at this party in the first place. For Ethan and Lily. Sure, he cared about Lily more than he was willing to admit, but he just was not quite at the level of devotion and sadomasochism his brother was. Jackson had to admit, though, that he had not felt this satisfied in…
Strange, he could not recall this sense of peace blanketing him. He was always looking for something to do, some sort of new excitement. He was all about the novelty of things. Once the shiny newness of anything wore off, he disappeared right along with it, looking for the next thing to satisfy his curiosity. It had gotten him in trouble more than a few times, but, hey, now he had Lily Chisholm in his bed, and he really could not complain about that. In fact, he really wanted to shout from the rooftops that he had had the prettiest girl in town—hell, in Texas—sleeping curled up next to him at night and that all the other guys could just stare and get jealous for all he cared.
Mitchell, Ava and Holiday, Sydney - Corralling the Stones, Part 2: The Taming [Liebling, Texas 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 4