by Robin Kaye
Jax opened his mouth to say something—anything—to shut Jaime up, but he was like a snowball bounding downhill, picking up girth and speed and rolling over everything in its path—even Jax’s attempts to change the subject.
“And since when do you leave that much money just lying around? Shit, Jax, you have enough there for me to live comfortably for a good six months. Put it in a coffee can or somethin’.”
“Jaim—”
“And just why is the clock facing the wall? You can’t read the time if you can’t see the face. Did that blow to the head knock a screw loose?”
Jaime’s form took on that eerie stillness he always got before he lost his temper. Jax had never had that look pointed at him and couldn’t afford another blow to the head. Not now—possibly not ever.
Jax held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t read the time, okay?”
Jaime stopped. “So turn it around.”
Jax tore off his gloves and scrubbed his cold hands over his face. “You don’t understand. Ever since my accident, numbers don’t mean anything to me. I can’t make sense of them.”
Jaime stepped back and sat hard on the tailgate. “You’re a freakin’ human calculator.”
“Not anymore, I’m not. I seem to have fried that particular memory chip. If you gave me a calculator, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
Jaime gave him a who’s-punking-whom look.
“I mean, I know what it’s for. I just can’t . . .” He pulled off his hat and ran his frozen fingers through his hair, tugging on it as if that would change anything. “I have a stack of cash, but I can’t count it, and even if I could, I wouldn’t know how much anything is worth.” He blew out a breath that didn’t begin to release the frustration he felt during every waking moment. “It’s like that part of my brain just disappeared.”
Jaime rubbed his hands on his thighs and leaned forward. His eyes squinted almost shut, as if he were trying to read two-point type. “No shit?” He rubbed his chin. “So I could have swiped all the big bills, and you wouldn’t have known?”
“Pretty much.” He let out a rusty bark of laughter that sounded strange to his ears. He hadn’t had much to laugh about lately. Shit, his life, even before the accident, was no night at the Laugh Factory. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more than a polite chuckle, unless he counted the time he spent in Red Hook with his sister and her new family. There was a lot of laughter there, even though they were dealing with serious issues. Unlike him, they’d never forgotten how to laugh.
Unfortunately, the loss of laughter wasn’t as noticeable as losing his ability to do anything with numbers, but it had been lost just the same. At least laughter, once rediscovered, no longer evaded him.
A staring contest ensued between him and Jaime. Jax watched the wheels of Jaime’s mind spin as he judged the ramifications with his usual lightning speed. His expression grew more and more serious. He started at shocked, made a quick right into contemplative, and parked in the handicapped spot by the front door of stunned. His eyes widened until he finally blinked and let out a long stream of air, as if he were blowing up an invisible balloon. “Wow, it sucks to be you.”
Jax laughed again. This time it didn’t feel so foreign. “Tell me about it.”
“So, are you stuck this way forever?”
“I don’t know, but, then, no one does.” He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage without the aid of acting lessons. “I’m supposed to go back for another MRI. I have the date written down—not that it means anything to me. I’m hoping they’ll call to confirm the appointment.” He rolled his shoulders, trying to dispel the sudden tightness. He hated even thinking about this stuff. “The doctors tell me the brain heals, forms new connections or something, so it might come back. It might not.”
“And you’re hiding out here because you don’t want anyone to know?”
“I’m not hiding.”
Jaime’s brow rose again, almost hitting his hairline. “The hell you aren’t. You could be staying in the lake house—a freakin’ palace compared to this place.”
“It’s too big and too empty.”
“It wouldn’t be empty if you weren’t hiding. What’s with the secrecy? You’re not going to be able to hide it for long.”
“I just needed some space. If Addie saw me, she’d know something was up, and she wouldn’t hesitate to call in the cavalry. Grace and Teddy would ditch the rest of their once-in-a-lifetime Mediterranean cruise and run home. Rocki would drop everything and leave her new family, and I’d become her newest pet project. That’s not happening. There’s nothing anyone can do but wait and see if my brain heals, so why worry them?”
“And if Addie knew you were in town, it would kill your chances with Kendall.”
“This has nothing to do with Kendall, and you know it. I had no idea she’d show up here. Besides, there’s nothing between Kendall and me. Who the hell would want someone who can’t even count spare change?”
Jaime ran a hand over his face. “That’s just fucked up. I never thought about it before, but numbers are everywhere.”
“I never thought about it either—until recently, and now it’s the one thing I’m trying not to think about. That’s why I’m here.” He looked at the sagging, leaking roof. “Here there’s something I can do—I can fix the roof, clean the place up. I can accomplish something between now and the date of the MRI.”
“And how are you going to do that without measuring things?”
Jax pulled a pencil from behind his ear. “I can pull out the rotted pieces and put new ones in their place. I can measure—I just mark where I have to make the cut and cut it. I can do this. I’m going to do this.
“I have to do this, or I’ll go crazy thinking of everything I can’t do.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Kendall climbed, breathing deep and steady as she traversed the steep trail. Her thigh and calf muscles screamed from exertion, but she kept up the punishing pace, trying to outrun her demons, wishing the part of her mind that saw and heard them had an on/off switch. If it had, she hadn’t discovered it. She’d thought getting away from the cabin, where the memories had assaulted her for the past week, would do the job. It failed miserably.
Maybe she needed to take Jack’s advice. She had turned a corner, and the view from her new vantage point was unfamiliar. There were so many trails branching off from where she stood, but not one would allow her to return to what had been. Even if she’d wanted to, it was as if a fire had destroyed all remnants of her past with David. The life she’d lived no longer existed in anything other than memory. It hurt like hell—the physical pain between her breasts was still sharp and clear and ever present—but she’d get past it. At least she wasn’t coming out of this period of her life empty-handed. She had her master’s degree. She’d learned a lot and she’d keep her credentials, her three years of work experience in her field, and all the knowledge she’d gained, and nothing—not David or anyone else, for that matter—could take that away from her, save a blow to the head like Jack had suffered.
She tried and failed to push that thought from her mind. Talk about demons. She wouldn’t trade hers for Jack’s if given the choice. No, at least now she had a real sense of control, something Jack didn’t have.
She took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind. She needed to look toward the future—a future she’d never imagined but one she would choose for herself, not one given to her or one for which she’d have to settle. She wished she could help Jack as much as he’d helped her, but, unfortunately, there was nothing either of them could do. Her only option was to wait and help him deal with whatever came. Maybe he could be her first patient in Harmony. The thought brought a smile to her face, and then she rejected it—she was already too personally involved with him to be clinical. But she could be his friend, and that might be the best thing for both of them.
Jack had been a good enough friend to point her in the right direction, probably wishing he h
ad the same options she had. The least she could do was to continue. No matter how difficult the path before her was, she’d get through it, for both their sakes. He might be farther down the trail than she was, but she’d catch up quickly, and maybe they could discover their individual paths together.
It was as if she stood at the edge of a cold mountain pool, where the water sparkled like diamonds in the clear morning sun. Fear clawed at her; her lungs seized with the knowledge that if she jumped, the water would engulf her, stealing the heat from her body. She wasn’t sure how to prepare for the cold, harsh reality of how to move forward with her life. Still, it was time to take the plunge.
“My future.” She said the words aloud and hated the quaver in her voice. Not good enough. She was going to attack her future with courage and she needed to believe that. “My future.” There. She was loud and clear and sounded strong. She took a deep breath and mentally jumped. Envisioning a picture of her perfect life. A chill traveled the length of her spine. For as long as she could remember, every vision of her future had included David.
She wished for mental scissors so she could cut David out of every picture she’d imagined. Her wedding day—she ripped off the figure of David standing beside her and had no image with which to replace him. No standin. No idea of what kind of man she’d look for or even if she’d ever consider marriage again.
She wanted a family, of that she was certain. And when she thought of the word family, she pictured a traditional one. So, yes, she’d like to marry eventually, but she moved that picture far into the future. In order to marry, she’d have to date. God, she’d have to start all over, and she hadn’t dated since spin the bottle was in vogue. How did one even date now?
She’d seen her single friends struggle in the dating pool and had always felt lucky, smug even, certain in the knowledge that she’d never have their problems. After all, she and David had been the perfect couple—or so she’d thought. They’d never even fought. She wondered if that had been a good thing. Had she just gone along with what he wanted in order to get along? Always looking at her future as part of a team instead of going after what she’d wanted for herself.
Had she abdicated her goals for what she thought were their shared goals, only to discover she was the only one doing the abdicating? She had. She’d done everything for the greater good, which, she now realized, translated into David’s good.
She sat on a rock, the cold seeping through the seat of her jeans. Great. These lightbulb moments just wouldn’t stop. They were coming so fast, it felt as if she were in a dark room with a strobe light flashing on a picture long enough to highlight a relationship problem and reveal her lack of a backbone and her apparent malleability. She shook her head to clear the image. She’d have to think about past mistakes later. Right now, she would look to her future.
The first thing she needed was a job. She could look for available office space in town to start her therapy practice. She was free of the constraints of David’s list of things they must achieve before returning to Harmony. That was a positive. She could do what she’d always wanted to do; she just needed to be able to make enough money to live on while she got the practice up and running. She should look into the feasibility of taking out a small-business loan. She didn’t know anything about the Small Business Administration and the loans available to small businesses, contracting with insurance carriers, advertising, or anything of the sort, but she was smart and she could learn. She’d never taken any business courses because she thought David would handle that side of the practice. That wasn’t her brightest move, but she would figure it out.
She hoped to avoid moving back in with her parents, if at all possible. She was independent and wanted to continue to be. An SBA loan might give her enough if she lived frugally, and there was always the possibility she could do work with the local hospice, and maybe even take a part-time job at the hospital doing social work. There were definitely options.
She had a plan and, right now, she liked the look of it. So she rose from her perch on the rock and rubbed her frozen backside. She was going to hike up the ridge—it had been her goal—and then she’d go back to the cabin and make a hearty dinner and tell Jack all about her revelations.
*
Jax had his mouth full of nails and was doing his best not to swallow them while he furiously hammered an eight-foot piece of plywood onto the newly rebuilt and repaired roof trusses.
A few days ago, he’d checked the weather forecast when he’d stopped at Jaime’s home. At the time, the meteorologists forecasted no snow all week. He hoped more than believed the forecasters here were better at predicting snowfall than they were in Chicago, where he’d lived and worked until his accident.
That thought brought him up short. He supposed technically he still lived in Chicago. After all, he owned a penthouse on the Magnificent Mile with an amazing view of Lake Michigan. He’d thought the view would be great for resale—not that he ever got to enjoy it. His work hours were such that he’d leave before the sun rose and return long after the sun had set. He should have gotten the place with the city view instead. Live and learn.
Whether or not he still had a job was the one question for which he didn’t have an answer. He’d taken a leave of absence and didn’t want to contemplate what he’d do if he didn’t recover sufficiently to resume his position.
He set his mind back to the job at hand: hammering sheets of plywood onto the replaced, repaired, or sistered trusses. The repairs had proved to be slow work, because he’d spent most of his time running up and down the ladder. Up to measure, down to cut, up to install, back down if the cut wasn’t perfect—which was more often than not. It had been so long since he’d done any work with his hands that didn’t involve a computer, and longer still since he’d had to eyeball the length of something without the aid of a measuring tape, so a perfect cut was a rare thing.
His leg and ass muscles would take a while to recover from all the climbing. If he could have counted the steps, he was sure they’d be enough to have climbed to the top of the Sears Tower.
He pulled another nail from between his lips and hammered it home. At least at this stage of the job, there wasn’t a lot of cutting to be done.
The sun dipped below the edge of the mountains, and the temperature dropped with its departure. He sent up a prayer that the wall of clouds growing closer by the minute would dump the snow they contained on the mountains and not on the lake. He wasn’t ready. He needed to hurry the hell up and get the rolls of tar paper, which silently mocked him from their resting place on the porch, nailed onto the roof so the cabin would, once again, be dried in.
“Jack, I’m back.” Kendall’s voice startled him, and he almost swallowed a nail.
He spat the rest of the nails into the box, wiped his hands on his grungy jeans, and decided to shut down for the day. There was no way he’d get the rest of the tar paper on before dark.
Sliding onto the porch roof, he grabbed hold of the tree limb and swung down, landing neatly. Unfortunately, the jarring didn’t do anything to help his ever-present headache.
Kendall’s cheeks were pink with exertion, her eyes so dark and bright, they looked like sparkly onyx jewels in a field of white. She wore a bulky cream-colored fisherman’s sweater, a navy blue down vest, jeans, and worn hiking boots.
“Did you have a good hike?”
Her forehead wrinkled as if she were deciding how to respond. “Are you familiar with that quote, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’?”
He tugged off his hat and rubbed his throbbing temples. “Buddha, right? So you realized that you can’t outrun, or, in this case, outhike your problems. Yeah, I’m intimately familiar with the concept. Why do you think I’m here?”
One of her dark, highly arched brows rose, and his fingers itched to trace the curve. “Are you trying to outrun your problems?”
He scrubbed the back of his neck to keep from reaching for her and didn’t meet her eyes. The woman didn’t beat around
the bush. “Maybe I was at first, but we both know how well that works. Now I’m just . . . I don’t know . . . dealing with it in my own time, in my own way. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.”
A smile played around her full, reddened lips. “And do you believe it?”
He didn’t know what the hell to say to that. Since he saw no reason to stand outside in the cold when they could do this inside by the fire, he headed for the door.
Kendall followed him inside and just watched and waited, like the therapist she was. Damn it. Being under the constant scrutiny of a trained therapist was getting to be a drag.
Jax pulled off his coat, tossed it on the hook in the mudroom, and ran his hands through his hair, hoping to erase the hat head he was sure he sported. He’d love to lie to Kendall, but he couldn’t—not to her, not about who he was now. “For the most part, I do believe it.” He went to the kitchen and leaned into the refrigerator, reaching into the back for the stash of beer Jaime had brought over one night. He held a bottle out to her. “Want one?”
She shook her head and wrinkled her nose.
“Wine?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just grabbed a glass and wondered if she was really interested in his answer or merely in the habit of asking probing questions. Either way, he felt no irritation. It didn’t matter why Kendall asked. Not really. She might be terribly hurt and upset about losing David and her job, but that didn’t stop her from being who she was: an incredibly compassionate person.
When she’d told him she’d become a therapist because she wanted to help people, he knew it to be a calling, not an occupation. Kendall might ask questions out of habit, but she cared about the answers and was an active listener. He reminded himself that she was like this with everyone—he wasn’t special.