“Cooperate, and I won’t have to,” muttered Jax.
That left money.
No, Jared had already said that he didn’t need money to keep Carrie’s heart.
What else?
Patriotism?
If Jared had the opportunity to make a fortune and at the same time help the Northern war effort…
England had provided weapons to the South during the Civil War. Despite the Northern blockades, English ships continued to smuggle guns to the Confederacy.
Enter Captain Reilly, the same old friend of Jared’s father’s who had appeared in chapters two and six, thought Jax with triumph. Reilly would offer Jared a chance to sail on his ship, to pirate the British vessels, seize their cargos and deliver the weaponry to the North—at a fair enough price to make a small fortune, of course.
Jax reached for his computer keyboard.
A sharp knock sounded on the door, rousing Jared from his sleep.
He sat up, his heart pounding as he stared into the darkness of his tiny room. Carrie, he thought. Carrie!
But even as he lit a candle, the knock sounded again, along with a familiar rusty voice. “Jared Dexter, you in there, boy? Open the damned door.”
It was Captain Magnus Reilly, the owner of the ship called the Graceful Lady Fair.
Jax wrote quickly, bringing Captain Reilly into the room and letting the grizzled old man describe his plan to Jared.
“What do you say, Jared?” the captain asked. “Are you in? We’ve a chance to make a fortune.”
Jared looked at Reilly in the flickering candlelight. Slowly he shook his head. “Sorry, old man,” he said. “Not this time.”
“No,” Jax nearly shouted. “You’re supposed to go with him, you fool. Don’t you get it? It’s your chance to serve your country and make some bucks. You’ll come back rich, and then there’s no way Carrie’s family can refuse you.”
Jared crossed his arms obstinately. “I’m not going anywhere until I find Carrie.”
We’ll see about that. Jax gritted his teeth as he deleted the last few sentences that he’d written.
Jared looked at Reilly in the flickering candlelight.
The boy’s normally handsome, exuberant face looked pale and tired, thought the captain. And from the looks of things, he’d recently been in a fight.
“Magnus,” Jared said slowly, “can you wait a few weeks? I can’t leave the country right now.”
What was wrong with him today? Jax pressed the palms of his hands against the headache that was starting to throb behind his eyes.
In his mind, Jared smiled nastily at Jax. “I know what’s wrong with you,” he said, then uttered the words writers hate most to hear. “You’ve got writer’s block.”
“I do not have writer’s block,” Jax said very calmly. “I simply have an obstinate, pigheaded, stubborn fool of a character who is refusing to cooperate.”
Jared sat back on his bed, lacing his fingers together behind his head. “Don’t worry, the writer’s block is only temporary,” he returned with equal calm. “Work this thing out with Kelly and you’ll be able to write again in no time, whether I cooperate or not.”
“Just tell Reilly you’ll go with him.” Jax ran his fingers tiredly through his hair. “Please?”
“Write me a love scene with Carrie and you’ve got a deal.”
“Look, you’re gonna have a happy ending,” Jax promised. “I can guarantee that—”
“That’s what’s bothering you.” Jared sat forward. “There’s no guarantee that things are going to work out between you and Kelly. Bummer.”
“Don’t say ‘bummer.’ People in the nineteenth-century didn’t say ‘bummer.’” Jax took a deep breath. “Will you please go with Reilly?”
“My offer holds,” Jared told him. “Write me that love scene and your wish is my command.”
This was ridiculous. Jax readjusted the keyboard and began typing, refusing to be held hostage by his own character.
Without warning, Reilly pulled a revolver from under his jacket, pressing the cold metal of the barrel to Jared’s head.
“You’re coming with me, boy,” he growled. “And you’re coming now!”
Jared burst out laughing. “Wow, Jax,” he said, between gasps for breath. “That’s really stupid. There’s absolutely no one who’s going to believe that.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jax muttered. Cursing under his breath, he saved the job, turned off the laptop computer and went searching for some aspirin.
Dear Kelly,
You appear in my cell again today, and again, even though I know you can’t possibly be real, I am thankful for your presence.
You are twelve years old this time, and as you look around at the rough stone walls, at the damp dirt floor and at the wooden bench and dirty straw that I use for a bed, I can see anger in your dark blue eyes.
You look me over just as carefully, taking in my beard and my long, dirty hair.
You speak!
I can hear your husky voice clearly in the quiet of the cell. Last time you visited, you didn’t talk. You only watched me.
“You smell,” you tell me sternly, as if it were my fault, and I apologize.
“Sometimes,” I say, “when it rains, the guards let us out with some scraps of soap and we can wash—”
You are looking at me oddly, and I realize I am speaking to you in Spanish. It’s been so long since I’ve heard an American voice. I translate, and you nod.
“I guess it’s been a while since it’s rained,” you say, sitting next to me on the straw.
“Soon it will do nothing but rain,” I tell you, “and there will be five inches of brackish water on the floor of my cell.”
You reach over and take my hand, holding it tightly with your slender fingers.
I notice the scabs on your knees and elbows, and you tell me about falling off of your bike.
I sympathize. I am careful to hide my own healing wounds—three deep cuts from an irate guard’s whip that I earned by helping a fellow prisoner to his feet when he stumbled on his way to the courtyard for another endless roll-call session.
But I can tell from looking into your eyes that you know. You also know about the broken rib I received from an earlier beating.
“I didn’t cry,” I tell you. “They can beat me, spit on me, treat me like less than an animal, but I will not cry. I hold my head up when I walk. I look them in the eye. I am the Americano, and they both hate me and respect me for that.”
You look at me as if I am your hero, and for a few short hours, I am.
“Hey,” you say, looking more closely at the walls, “igneous rocks.”
We spend some time identifying and arguing about the rocks that were used in building this prison.
I almost forget where I am as I chip at the wall to get you a sample for your rock collection.
You leave when the sun hits the correct angle. For forty-seven minutes it will stream into my little window. A narrow strip of sunlight will travel across the wall, and I will stand in it, letting it shine on my dirty face. It gives me hope to know that only a few thousand miles away, that same powerful sun is shining on you.
I love you.
Love, T.
Jax leaned against the corridor wall outside the university classroom, waiting for Kelly.
This was probably a mistake. No, not probably. Definitely. Following Kelly around this way was definitely a mistake. She would definitely be annoyed. But Jax knew only one way to achieve success in life, and it involved a large amount of tenacity and a great deal of perseverance, and all the stubbornness he could muster, which could actually be quite a bit when it came down to it.
He was going to marry Kelly O’Brien. That much was certain.
What wasn’t so clear was how he was going to deal with the fact that the bride-to-be didn’t even want to have a cup of coffee with him.
After rejecting his offer of Chinese food five days ago, she’d turned him down the next day for lunch. He
’d tried brunch the following day, and breakfast the day after that, with similar luck. Yesterday he was reduced to asking her out for coffee, for God’s sake, and she’d turned that down, too.
So what was he doing here, waiting for her to come out of class? What was he going to invite her to do now? Go out with him for a glass of water?
Maybe it was time to start over again with dinner.
Sooner or later, she was going to give in.
She had told him once that she loved him. And if she had loved him even only a tenth as much as he loved her, he would bet his entire seven-figure bank account that those feelings hadn’t totally disappeared.
The classroom door opened, and students spilled out into the hall. Good grief, they looked so young. Some of them were twelve years younger than he was. Had he really been their age once?
Kelly didn’t see him as she came through the door.
She was wearing a denim workshirt with the sleeves rolled up, a worn-out pair of jeans and cowboy boots. Her hair was back in a single braid. Except for the hint of makeup on her face and lips, she looked almost exactly as she had when she was fourteen.
Except almost ten years older, thank God. Her jeans hugged her body in a way that they never had when she was fourteen.
Jax followed her down the hall, not catching up with her until she stopped to swing open the big double doors that led into the building’s main foyer.
Her eyes narrowed dangerously as she stared at him. “You’re following me around,” she said, not bothering to say hello.
“Yeah,” he said, unperturbed.
She went into the foyer, moving out of the way of the steady stream of students who were going in and out of the doors. “Well, stop it,” she said sternly. “You can tell Kevin that I’m really okay—”
“This has nothing to do with Kevin,” Jax said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to get you to go out to dinner with me, Kel, and if you keep saying no, then you better get used to me following you around.”
Kelly gazed at him. “Do you even own any socks?”
He looked down at his feet, lifting his pants slightly to get a better view of his bare ankles. “If I go back to my hotel and put on a pair of socks, will you have dinner with me?”
“I can’t.” She headed toward the doors that led out into the warm spring sunshine. “I have my last exam of the semester tomorrow.”
“How about tomorrow night?” Jax followed her.
“How long are you going to be in town?” She stopped on the steps outside the building to fish in her backpack for her sunglasses.
As long as it takes. “At least a few more days.” Jax put on his own sunglasses. “I’ve got some business to take care of on Friday, so…”
They began walking slowly down the sidewalk. The sun was hot on Jax’s back, and he slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “If you want, I could help you study tonight.”
She slid him a sidelong glance. “For an advanced calculus exam?”
“Ouch.” He winced. “Are you really taking calculus?”
“Advanced calculus.”
“Yeah, right. Rub it in.” He’d barely made it through trigonometry back in high school. And as an English major in college, he’d purposely stayed far, far away from the math building.
The sunlight glinted off his golden hair. With his dark sunglasses and his million-dollar smile, he looked like some kind of movie star. It was just Kelly’s luck that T. Jackson had become better looking as he got older. Now, why couldn’t he have thinning hair and a potbelly like some of Kevin’s other old college friends?
“Why are you taking it?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve never known you to be a masochist.”
She shot him a quick look, but he didn’t realize the irony of his words. He was right, she wasn’t a masochist, and that was one of the reasons she didn’t want him hanging around.
“I’m taking it because I like science, and calculus is a prerequisite for some of the advanced science courses I want to take next year,” she told him. Her cowboy boots made a clicking sound against the concrete sidewalk. “I’m sorry, T.,” she added, “but I don’t think you’ll be any help as a study partner.”
“It’s been years since you’ve seen me,” he protested. “How do you know I haven’t suddenly become a math whiz?”
Kelly burst out laughing.
“How many more semesters do you have before you graduate?” he asked.
“Three,” Kelly said. “I married Brad when I was a sophomore. Appropriate, huh?”
Marrying Brad had been incredibly sophomoric. She’d thought she knew what she was doing, what she wanted, but in reality, she had had absolutely no idea, not one clue. And apparently Brad hadn’t known what he’d really wanted, either.
“We moved to California that summer,” she told T. Jackson, “and there wasn’t enough time for me to transfer to a school out there. So I got a job, and by the time the spring semester started, Brad had been laid off and we really needed the money.”
“Are you going to take this summer off,” he asked, “or do you have a job lined up?”
She shrugged. “Nothing definite. I’ve interviewed at a couple of places.”
“Spend the summer on the Cape with me.”
Kelly stopped walking. “What?”
“I live out on Cape Cod,” T. Jackson said. He took off his sunglasses. She could see from his eyes that he was actually serious. “I’ve got a house on the beach, on the bay side, in Dennis. It’s this huge modern monster—we’ve got lots of extra bedrooms, there’s plenty of room.” He stopped, laughed softly, shaking his head. “Look, I’d love to spend some time with you, and…”
“I won’t even go out to dinner with you,” Kelly told him. “What on earth makes you think I’d want to spend the entire summer with you on the Cape?”
He put his sunglasses back on. “I don’t know,” he said. “You always wanted to. You talked about it all the time, and I just thought…”
“I was twelve, T.” She wasn’t being completely truthful. She’d talked about it when she was older than twelve, too. Dreamed about it. A summer at the Winchester compound on the Cape.
Kelly stared up at him, seeing her face reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. Truth was, spending the summer on the beach with T. Jackson would fulfill just about every single one of her childhood fantasies. And quite a few of her teenaged fantasies, too.
But as an adult, she knew her fantasies about T. were simply that. Fantasies. She knew what kind of man he was, because she’d been married to a man exactly like him. She no longer had any illusions about living happily ever after with T. Jackson, no matter how charming and handsome and sexy he was.
If she wanted happily ever after—and she did—she was going to have to find a different type of man. She’d gladly trade some of the spark, the sexual chemistry, for a man who would love only her. She wanted a man who gave as much as he took, a man who truly knew how to love, not just be loved. A man who kept his promises.
But there was something to be said for spending a few months with T. Jackson Winchester the Second. It would be one hell of a summer, that was for sure.
Unless this was just another of his favors to Kevin…
She could just imagine the conversation her brother must’ve had with T. “Cheer her up,” Kevin must’ve told Jax. “Take her out, show her a good time. She used to have a crush on you, remember? Make her feel important. If anyone can do it, you can.”
But it hadn’t been a crush. What she had felt for T. Jackson had been so much more than a crush. And did she really want to wreck her romantic memories of her first love by going and having a tawdry affair with the man?
When the answer didn’t come as an immediate no, Kelly shook her head in disgust. What was wrong with her?
“I’m going to be busy all summer,” she said, starting down the sidewalk again. And she would be. When she finished writing her second novel, she’d start on a third. It was a never-ending proce
ss, but one that she loved. And right now her writing was a way to stay safe, insulated from the rest of the world. And from T. Jackson Winchester the Second in particular.
“Think about it,” he said.
The annoying thing was, she would. In fact, she’d probably think about nothing else. She’d probably dream about spending the entire summer with T. He’d already appeared in her dreams last night, her imagination clothing him in a hell of a lot less than the bathing suit he’d wear as a standard uniform on the Cape. Her subconscious was giving her a very deliberate message—there was unfinished business between the two of them.
But it was a hormonal thing. It was pure sex, and it had nothing to do with love. Even if she ended up giving in to T.’s persistent demands, even if she ended up sleeping with the man, she’d never let him back into her heart. Never.
“So are we on for dinner tomorrow night?” Jax asked as they stopped outside the school newspaper office door.
“Tomorrow night?” She shook her head. “I don’t—’”
“Friday night, then.”
“No,” she said definitely. “I’m going to a meeting in the late afternoon. I don’t know how long it’ll last.”
“I’ve got something happening Friday afternoon, too,” he said. “We can eat later—”
“No.”
Jax looked at her, silent for a moment. Then he laughed. “I guess I’m going to have to keep following you around, then.”
Kelly took off her sunglasses, sighing with exasperation. “Jackson—”
He kissed her.
It was little more than a light brushing of his lips against hers, but it was a kiss. And it was enough to make her system go haywire. She stared at him in shock.
“See you tomorrow, Kel.” He smiled and walked away.
Jared was right. Jax realized it would be much more romantically tragic if Carrie were whisked away to the safety of distant relatives after she and Jared had a scene in which they planned to run away together. Jax just wasn’t convinced it should be a love scene.
“She’s only sixteen,” he muttered. “She’s too young.”
“That’s a load of crap, and you know it,” Jared countered. “Just because you made the mistake of thinking that Kelly was too young—”
Letters to Kelly Page 4