Island Love Songs: Seven Nights in ParadiseThe Wedding DanceOrchids and Bliss

by Kayla Perrin

  But the soft woman in his arms made it hard for him—in more ways than one—to focus on the reasons they shouldn’t be doing this, especially since he’d wanted her for so long, so very, very long.

  The kiss made him ache. He trembled with the want of her.

  “Baden,” he murmured, his mouth teasing her.

  In response, she pressed closer to him.

  Jesse groaned.

  Then, with one last taste of Baden’s sweet nectar, he pulled away.

  “Jesse, don’t you want me?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment trying to get himself under control.

  “God, Baden. I want you more than you know, almost more than I can stand.”

  She tried to again wrap her arms around his neck, but Jesse held firm, gently pushing her away.

  “Baden, I want you. But not like this,” he said. “I want us to be together because it’s us. Not with Sean between us. Not with you still coming to grips about who he was and maybe getting that confused with what’s going on between us now.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she stood taller.

  “Get out.”

  This time, Jesse didn’t question if she really meant it. Baden needed time and space. He needed a cold shower.

  Without another word, he turned and left.

  * * *

  More than two hours and three glasses of wine later, Baden found sleep eluded her. Her thoughts continued to race with questions, questions and more questions. She regretted that she had let her emotions rather than her head, and her good sense, respond to the news about Sean.

  Inside the three-thousand-square-foot guest cottage seemed as tight as a broom closet, more a claustrophobic prison cell than Hawaiian oasis. So she wandered the grounds of the Kapule Garden Estate, grateful for both its seclusion and the privacy the large property afforded.

  As she walked, she wondered why, even after all the time that had passed since her wedding day and even after the months since Sean’s tragic death, she felt so psychologically bound to Sean.

  About a quarter after two in the morning, she figured it out: the goodbye went undone.

  The unfinished business between them is what caused her guilt then...and now. That she no longer had the opportunity to explain to Sean why she’d left, and he no longer had the opportunity to tell her about that other Shaun, the girl he’d been.

  But Sean had sent Jesse.

  Had he known, maybe on a subconscious level, that she was interested in his partner?

  Jesse had told her that Sean gave him the photo to deliver to her a month before he died. A month.

  A month before he died in that shoot-out in Raleigh, Sean gave Jesse the photograph with its apology to deliver.

  Had there been more to his death than what was reported by the papers and the television stations back home?

  The Sean she knew was brave, true, a cop’s cop. Would he have deliberately put himself in danger in the hope of getting killed in the line of duty—suicide by cop, but in a different fashion?

  The very thought seemed ludicrous. But so, too, did the thought that the muscular and masculine Sean Mathews that she’d fallen in love with had spent the early part of his life as a female.

  Baden rolled those thoughts and questions over and over in her head, considering what she knew then and what she now knew. What she now knew wasn’t enough, though. She felt lost, confused and terribly, terribly alone.

  Jesse had been right in rejecting her advance.

  Great, another thing to feel guilty about, she thought.

  Trying to jump Jesse’s bones was a rebound move if ever one existed.

  She could apologize to him for that. Right now, however, she had questions, quite a few of them in fact. And she knew who could answer those questions.

  Jesse Fremont, she knew, had the answers.

  * * *

  When his cell phone pinged with an incoming text message, Jesse scowled.

  His sister, with no accounting for the time differences, had sent three texts and two emails in the last twenty-four hours. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with yet another of her well-meaning platitudes about his forced leave of absence.

  In bed, but wide awake, unable to sleep since leaving Baden, he’d stretched out on top of the sheets. He glanced at the phone, though, ready to delete the message. The number caught his eye, however. It wasn’t a familiar 919 or 252 area code of North Carolina or even one of many he recognized as friends scattered across the country.

  There was just one telephone number in his cell phone’s directory that started with 808. Hawaii.

  Baden. I could really use a hug right now.

  It was almost two-thirty in the morning but Jesse didn’t hesitate.

  Chapter 7

  She sat in the dark, the only illumination came from the pool’s recessed lights and the miles of fairy lighting strewn throughout the garden. She needed to tell Deato Kauhane that they could go off timer and onto motion activation now that the prospective buyers were gone.

  But Baden didn’t need light to see the photograph in her lap, to remember exactly what it looked like.

  “It’s beautiful here at night.”

  His voice didn’t surprise or startle her.

  “I was sure the cop in you would first remark about the open front door.”

  “It went noted,” Jesse said, “but I figured you’d just done that this once.”

  Baden smiled.

  “You got here awfully fast.”

  “Your text sounded like a 9–1–1. That’s my specialty.”

  She smiled bigger, knowing he couldn’t see it. “Come on around and enjoy the view.”

  “Did you want that hug now or later?”

  “Later,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Jesse said as he settled on the chaise next to hers and dropped his keys on the table between them.

  “I come out here to think,” she said. “And clearly I have apparently been doing too much of that tonight.”

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Nope. Even the wine didn’t have much of an effect.”

  She shifted to her side so she could see him in the intimate darkness.

  “When I realized it was you at my door, I was angry and pissed and hurt and confused. Your very presence interrupted my self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement and dragged me back to that day. Back to what I’d done. What I had left behind.”

  “And now?”

  “Now? Well, I’m just confused, and still a little hurt. Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “I don’t know, Baden. Maybe he was afraid you wouldn’t love him, wouldn’t want to be with him.”

  She sat up, pulled her legs under her and regarded Jesse.

  “Did he tell you, about her I mean?”

  Baden, despite her protests to the contrary, was still having a rough time getting her head around the whole thing. That girl in the photo didn’t exist for her and was like another person—Sean’s sister or cousin or a distant relation. But not Sean. Not ever Sean.

  “We were partners, Baden. That relationship is close. Sometimes closer than a married couple’s because so much is on the line. The job...” He shook his head. “The job is why a lot of cop marriages fail in real life, not just on TV. You have to depend on that person to have your back. Your life, your partner’s life depends on that.”

  “Jesse,” she said reaching for his hands as understanding dawned. “It sounds like you’re blaming yourself for what happened. Sean’s death wasn’t your fault.”

  He pulled away from her, not wanting or appreciating either her sympathy or her empathy.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was. And it’s more complicated than you know.”

  �
�Then help me understand.”

  He remained silent for a while. Then, almost reluctantly, he turned his back to her.

  “We were partners, Baden. Your partner on the street has to know that you have his back unconditionally, one hundred and fifty percent. So, yeah, we talked. He told me.”

  She cocked her head as if divining the truth from him.

  “When?” she asked. “When did he tell you?”

  Jesse sighed, then swung around to face her, their knees almost touching.

  “About a year after we were partnered up,” he said. “We were on a case. There were a couple transvestites mixed up in it and a ruckus when they were busted for prostitution. They were both put in male holding cells. They wanted to be in the female cells. Needless to say, there were a lot of off-color comments in the squad room.

  “Later, we were on the way to Fayetteville to interview a witness in another case. He told me then.”

  “What did he say exactly?”

  He reached down for her hand, but Baden scooted away.

  “Why do you want to go over all this?” he asked. “It’s history.”

  “It’s history to you, Jesse, but it’s new to me. You dumped it all in my lap last night with that photo. I’m just trying to understand.”

  Jesse nodded. “I’m sorry, Baden. I get that.”

  He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I get that,” he repeated. Expelling a breath, he again cursed Sean for leaving him with the dirty job of being messenger and particularly under these circumstances.

  “We were sitting in the car when he said, ‘I need to tell you something, and I hope it won’t change things between us.’ He said he thought he understood what the trannies, I mean, the uh, transvestites, were complaining about. I made some smart-ass remark like ‘Why, Sean, you gonna tell me you’re really a girl?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I used to be.’”

  Baden’s gaze held no censure, no condemnation. She just looked curious.

  “We were late getting to the witness,” Jesse said. “He told me how he’d always felt like a boy, even when he was little. By the time he was twelve and had hit puberty, he said he thought he was gay because he didn’t like boys the way all his friends did. At fifteen, when that picture was taken, he’d done tons of research and said he knew he’d been born in the wrong body. He started saving money then because he said he knew he was really a man trapped in a woman’s body.”

  “That’s awfully mature for a teenager.”

  “He was lucky. Much luckier than most kids who have gender and sexuality issues at that age.”

  “It doesn’t sound very lucky,” Baden said. “It sounds horrible and sad and very lonely. There was a gay kid in my class in middle school, a white boy named Aaron, no, Avery. Avery Bronson. His father was a preacher, one of those fire and brimstone Southern Evangelical Baptists. You know the type. Avery tried to kill himself a couple times and finally succeeded because he was bullied so much, and his father was probably telling him he was going to hell. I doubt if he’d think he was lucky.”

  Jesse shook his head. “That’s what I thought until Sean told me he had strong family support.”

  “Family support? Sean didn’t have any family. He only mentioned a couple aunts or some relations who were...”

  She stopped as Jesse continued his head shake. “Another thing I didn’t know,” she surmised.

  “Sean had family,” Jesse said. “He called them and I quote here meaning no disrespect, but he called them ‘a merry band of flakes, fags and fag hags.’”

  Baden closed her eyes. “I didn’t know him at all, did I? I was going to marry someone I thought I knew and loved, and it turns out I didn’t know him at all.”

  “You knew what mattered,” Jesse said.

  Baden pointed to the picture in her lap. “This tells me differently.”

  “I think the only thing Sean died regretting was not telling you about his former life. But, Baden, keep in mind that he lived his entire adult life as the Sean you knew. He had the surgery when he was eighteen. He took a year or so to acclimate and when he enrolled in college as a freshman, he was Sean.”

  Baden eyed him. “You were okay with it?”

  Jesse shrugged. “It took me a minute to take it all in.”

  When she lifted a brow, he smiled.

  “All right, it was more than a minute. But in the end, it didn’t matter,” Jesse said. “But I’ve learned a lot since that night. That girl was from another life, someone I didn’t know and couldn’t even see in him no matter how he was born. Sean Mathews was a good friend, a good cop and a good man. And I was jealous as hell that he had you.”

  * * *

  They fell quiet after that, each lost in his or her private thoughts and memories. The only sounds between them came from water rippling in the grotto and the calls and squawks of the tropical birds that made the garden their home.

  “I’m trying to process all of this,” Baden eventually said.

  “Which part?”

  She let out a little laugh. “All of it, Jesse. All of it. And I’m not ignoring what you said.”

  She needed to be sure he understood what she referred to and added, “About me. Us. It’s—it’s a lot to take in.”

  Boy, was it ever.

  The man she had been trying not to think about was right here in front of her. Jesse Fremont was part of the reason she’d walked away from Sean. Now, here she was dealing with Sean again, and this time he was coming between Baden and the man she wanted.

  Jesse’s rebuff had hurt.

  She wanted him and knew he wanted her. But he was being so frustratingly honorable.

  Baden knew the timing was off. The timing was always off when it came to her and Jesse Fremont. The memory of his kiss, his hot mouth on hers still lingering, making her want to taste even more of him. But he had—her brain knew—done the right thing in pushing her aside. He probably thought she was turning to him for physical comfort while jostling any lingering feelings for Sean. But what she and Sean had had was over long before their actual aborted wedding. Yes, she would always love Sean, but not that way.

  How could she make Jesse understand that?

  Baden felt torn between two worlds and versions of reality. There was the one she had actually lived and thought she knew, and the one that cast a new meaning on that history.

  On top of that was Jesse.

  Her feelings for him were wrapped up with her memories of Sean. But Sean was dead, and she had moved on physically. It was time to do the same emotionally, as well. Maybe that’s why she’d been thinking about making a visit home to North Carolina. And then the universe or God or fate had sent North Carolina to her front door.

  “It shouldn’t matter,” she said. “About Sean, I mean. But it’s unfinished business, like not finishing a book or walking out of a movie when there’s still fifteen minutes left of it.”

  “Sean is gone,” Jesse said.

  Baden nodded. “After I left him like that, I thought he might try to reconcile. You know, come out here, beg me to change my mind, try to explain that my cold feet were just a bad case of nerves, wedding-day jitters. I had this whole scenario worked out in my head about how it would all go down.”

  “You feel cheated.”

  She lifted pain-filled eyes to him. “No,” she said. “I feel guilty and petty.”

  “Baden. There’s something else.”

  She jumped up and backed away and put her hands over her ears like a child not willing to listen to bad news.

  “Baden.”

  She dropped her hands. “Jesse, I don’t think I can process much more of this.”

  He rose, came to her and took her hands in his.

  “You need to know this part,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to feel g
uilty about, especially when it comes to the wedding that wasn’t.”

  She grimaced at that, but Jesse forged on before Baden could voice an objection.

  “I’ve been straight-up with you about my feelings for you,” he said. “For a long time I walked around thinking I was just wrong for wanting my partner’s woman. But something Sean told me, much, much later, made me realize that sometimes life does offer second chances and opportunities for do-overs.”

  He caressed her hands, running his fingers over the sensitive skin of her palm.

  She swallowed, looked at his hands on hers and rallied her thoughts to focus on the words instead of the actions.

  “Okay, Jesse. What did he say?”

  “That he was glad you’d run. You just beat him to the moment.”

  Of all the things she may have expected him to say—things like Sean had changed his mind and wanted to be female again or that he was quitting the police department to become a private detective or something—this was the very last.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard right, Baden. You were minutes away from being a jilted bride instead of a runaway bride. I didn’t know that he hadn’t reconciled his past with you. So when he told me that, I just figured he was the one having second thoughts about getting married. In a way, he was glad you’d called it off.”

  Baden yanked her hands from his and turned away.

  “This pisses me off more than the not telling me about her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said, “it’s like we were actors in a bad romance novel or something. God, we spent thousands of dollars and months of preparation for a wedding that neither of us wanted. And not a word said about our doubts because we were afraid of hurting the other person. We were idiots.”

  “Don’t say that, baby.”

  She shook her head, whether at his words or the endearment, he didn’t know.

  Tell her!

  Everything in Jesse propelled him to tell her the rest of it, the whole truth. How and why he’d ended up suspended from his job, under police department review and in Hawaii...all because of her and because of Sean.