Claim Me Now (Heron Harbor Book 2)

by Lea Nolan

  “Now all we need is some s’mores. We’ve got chocolate and marshmallows. Are there any graham crackers in that pile of yours?”

  That damn horde of sweets. She wished she’d never stopped at that stupid convenience store. “I didn’t buy any, no.”

  “We could try roasting some of those Tinks.” He nudged her, teasing.

  “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “You’re right. They’d probably give off toxic fumes. Don’t you want dessert? There is a ton of stuff in there, and we haven’t eaten any of it.”

  She’d rather spend the night outside naked in the storm. “Thanks, but I can’t.”

  Jack appraised her, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Okay.”

  They sat in silence and watched as the fire gained strength. The wood popped and crackled as the flames consumed it. It brought her back to her childhood when her father would build a roaring fire on a cold, rainy night, and she and her sisters would stare, mesmerized by the way the flames danced and changed colors.

  Jack edged closer. “I can’t say I love losing the electricity, but the fire, the candles, it’s nice.”

  “You won’t miss The Fast and the Furious?” Raven asked.

  He laughed. “That goes without saying. But I like enjoying the quiet with you.”

  “Not so quiet.” Without the television for distraction, the howling wind and rain sounded even more monstrous.

  Jack wrapped his arms around her. “It’s pretty fierce out there, but I’ll protect you.”

  She laid her head against his broad chest. “My hero. By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look like Superman?”

  A laugh blurted past his lips. “No, why?”

  She shrugged. “No reason.”

  “Has anyone ever said you look like Snow White?”

  She twisted her head toward him. “What?” That might have been the craziest thing anyone had ever said about her.

  He chuckled softly. “Never mind.”

  As they watched the flames, heat radiated off the fireplace. Raven couldn’t remember a time she’d felt so warm, and it was only partly due to the fire. Jack’s strong arms had something to do with it, too.

  Finally, Jack spoke, breaking the spell. “There’s so much I don’t know about you.” His fingers lazily stroked the length of her arm.

  “I’ve told you pretty much all there is to know.” Or all she ever divulged to anyone.

  “Have you?” he asked.

  Something about his tone worried her. She twisted around to face him. “What don’t you know?”

  “Well, you’re Raven, and you’ve got sisters named Lark and Wren.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s with the bird names?”

  She smirked. “My father was an ornithologist.”

  “Hmm, bird guy.”

  “Yup. He loved his birds. Named us after his work.”

  “It’s kind of sweet.”

  “Or weird. It’s kind of like a dentist naming his kids Filling, Floss, and Crown.”

  He laughed. “Is it really that bad?”

  “Well, let’s just say it would’ve been easier for him to communicate with us if we had feathers.” Reaching for her glass, she took a drink of her wine. “So, what else do you want to know?”

  “Um, where do you live?”

  She laughed. “That’s an easy one. I’m currently based in Philly—”

  His expression lit up. “I might know of a job possibility for you in Philadelphia.”

  She raised her hand. “Thanks, but I’m thinking New York, maybe Boston. I haven’t lived there in a while.”

  “I’ve got a place in Manhattan. You could use that as a base while you look. If you wanted.”

  He was trying to be helpful, but it didn’t stop her blood from running cold. Staying at Jack’s would extend their tryst beyond this weekend—a prospect, though enjoyable, she wasn’t remotely ready to contemplate. “Uh, maybe. We’ll see.”

  He must have understood her concern because his enthusiasm diminished slightly. “I’m not there all the time. You could use it when I’m away on travel.”

  “Oh, okay. That sounds nice. Thanks.” She offered a grateful smile.

  “And if you find yourself in Boston, I’ve got a place in Somerset, Connecticut I hardly ever use. They’re not exactly next door, but if you need a place to crash, you can always use it.”

  Her stomach clenched. In the entire country, Connecticut was the last place she’d stay overnight. Whenever she traveled there, it was only to drive through to get to somewhere else. And then she white-knuckled it all the way.

  Relax, Rae, he’s just being nice. He’s not trying to marry you, and he’s got no idea how much you loathe that place.

  She nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.” She took another drink of wine. If they were playing twenty questions, it was well past her turn. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Almost anything.” He lay down, propping his elbow against cushions they’d scattered on the floor.

  So some topics were off-limits for Jack Baines, too. Interesting.

  “It’s about your tattoo,” she clarified.

  “Ask away,” he said.

  “Does it mean something?” She laid her palm on the soft cotton of his sweatpants above where the rose sat on his thigh.

  “It’s for my mother. Yellow roses were her favorite flowers.”

  “Were. So she’s passed.” Raven didn’t pose it as a question.

  He nodded. “When I was fourteen.” Jack’s voice was quiet but calm.

  She brushed her hand along his scruffy cheek. “You were so young. I’m sorry.”

  “Older than you were.”

  Raven’s hand froze. His words were filled with compassion, but they landed like a sledgehammer to the gut. She wasn’t used to being blindsided. Her life was tightly controlled, as was the information she chose to share about her life, especially when it came to her mother’s death.

  Nodding, she took a large swallow of wine. “Right. I’d forgotten that Lark might have told you about that.”

  “Only the barest details. That there was a car accident, and you were all very young.”

  Had Lark let slip that Raven was the only one with their mother when the car crashed? That she’d been trapped there until someone found them in the stream beside the Connecticut country road?

  Maybe Lark had forgotten those details, or perhaps she’d held them back, realizing they weren’t appropriate for a friendly coffee shop conversation. Raven was sure of one thing: Lark couldn’t have spilled the worst detail of their mother’s death because Lark didn’t know what happened. No one did. It was the dirty little secret Raven kept from the world.

  Raven nodded. “I was seven.” Her lungs were tight.

  Jack took her hand in his. “I can’t imagine. It must have been so hard.” His expression was tender in the glow of the fire.

  She forced a deep inhale through her tight throat. “It wasn’t easy.” Desperate for a distraction, Raven reached for a pillow and clutched it against her stomach. “Tell me how your mother passed.”

  Jack tilted his head and gazed at this extraordinary woman. For all her beauty, there was no mistaking the sorrow in her eyes. She’d changed the subject. Again. Clearly, her mother’s death was something she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk about. He, of all people, understood that. It had to have been difficult. Losing his mother as a teenager had nearly wrecked him. To do so at half that age must have been devastating.

  For all her toughness, Raven had a soft underbelly. So rather than press her to share more about her pain, he’d honor her request and share his own. Jack reached for his glass of wine.

  He cleared his throat. “Breast cancer. It was very aggressive. There was nothing that could be done. She was gone in eighteen months.”

  His eyes instinctively closed. No matter how old he got, the ache of that loss still burned. Her death had left him alone, without a real champion. And she’d been
robbed of the life she deserved.

  Raven reached to stroke his forearm. “It must have been so hard for you and your father.”

  “Stepfather, actually. My father wasn’t around.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Jesus, she was really digging deep into his past. This shit was a walled-off territory, triple-locked behind steel bars in his brain. But here she was, her big, brown eyes searching his, full of compassion, wanting to understand more about him.

  What the hell, why not?

  Jack stared into the orange-red flames of the fire. “Uh, if I say he was in jail, would you think less of me?”

  “Of course not.” She leaned toward him and whispered, “Was he?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. SEC violations. Insider trading. A bunch of shady shit that got him put away for fifteen years.”

  “Oh. Wow.” She breathed out, shocked, then lay down beside him.

  “The stress was hard on my mom. Probably contributed to her illness. Anyway, she dumped his ass and ended up marrying my stepfather, who was one of my dad’s business rivals. They were only married for three years.”

  “And she was sick for half that time.”

  It was so fucking unfair. “Uh-huh. My stepfather was good to her the whole way. I’ll always respect him for that.”

  “And you?”

  “He kept me around after she died and paid for my schooling. He didn’t have to do that. He could’ve sent me to live with a great aunt I’d never met before who lived in Washington or put me in foster care.”

  Beckett had cared for Jack when he needed him the most, but his stepfather always found a way to keep him at arm’s length. Like when he’d told Jack that he’d adopt him but then claimed his biological father had refused to sign over his parental rights. They both knew it was bullshit—nothing stood in Beckett’s way if he wanted something. Then Beckett promised to adopt Jack after he turned eighteen, a symbolic adoption since he’d already be an adult, but that birthday came and went, and no adoption ever took place.

  Now, decades later, Jack was still hovering in a similar position, promised the helm of WFG, and still waiting for Beckett to relinquish control.

  “He sounds like a good man,” Raven said.

  Jack swirled his wine glass. “Sounds like it.”

  “He’s not?”

  He lifted one shoulder. “He is. And he’s not. He’s like everybody. Good points and bad. He’s complex. He’s also my boss.”

  “Do you feel obligated to him? Is that why you stay in a job you don’t like?”

  “He’s done a lot for me.”

  “But you hate your job.”

  “I never said I hate it.” Defensiveness wicked inside him. The real estate and infrastructure arms of WFG were good, solid business concerns. He was proud to work for them. Making Raven think otherwise made him feel disloyal. “There’s a lot to like about my job. A lot of good comes out of it, not to mention a fuckton of money.”

  “So, what’s the downside?”

  That was easy. He didn’t have to think about it. The collateral damage. Hands down. Knowing he and his investors profited at the expense of others was beyond shitty. He couldn’t wait to take control of WFG and change things around.

  Until then, he got through each new company buy-out by trusting Kiara to handle the human resource decisions about who stayed and who went. If he didn’t read the personnel files, he couldn’t put names to the actual people he sent to the unemployment lines and kicked off of insurance.

  The thing was, in many cases, WFG could afford to keep more staff on when it purchased a new company and provide decent wages and benefits. Jack knew that happy, well-compensated employees were more productive and loyal, leading to lower turnover rates, reduced recruiting, and retaining costs. But Beckett wouldn’t hear of it. He refused to leave a penny on the table and expected Jack to toe the line.

  Jack could walk away, but he’d lose his chance to change WFG for the better. He had to see this through. Beckett would retire sometime, but God only knew when.

  “Time,” Jack said.

  “Huh?” Raven’s brow furrowed.

  “The downside to my job, time. I have no idea how long it’ll take before I can make some decisions that matter.”

  She nodded. “Maybe you should stop waiting and make them on your own time frame.”

  Jack scoffed and took a drink. “That’s not the way it works.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just isn’t.” He wasn’t about to explain the ins-and-outs of his relationship with Beckett, the promises that’d been made, or that after all he’d done for WFG—in every conceivable subsidiary and department—he was owed his due.

  Raven leveled a hard stare. “How do you think I graduated high school so early? Or got through college so young?”

  “You’re a super genius?”

  “Not really. I set a goal for myself and worked my ass off to make it happen.”

  “It’s not the same with my job.”

  “Why not? You’re unhappy with what you’re doing. Make the necessary changes to be happy—even if that means leaving. You don’t owe your stepfather a lifetime of servitude.”

  That sounded so pretty. And so absurd. “You don’t understand. It’s . . . complicated. I can’t leave. Look, I appreciate the advice, I really do. But you just can’t—”

  A flash of lightning illuminated the sky a millisecond before a thundering boom crashed, shaking the house.

  Raven sat straight up. “What was that?”

  Jack was on his feet. “Whatever it was, it was big. And heavy.”

  Brilla yelped, then scurried between the sofa and coffee table, cowering low to the ground.

  Raven gripped Jack’s pant leg, her eyelids stretching wide. “Is that . . . a car alarm?”

  He strained to listen through the sound of the still-raging storm.

  Fuck. It was.

  Before he could blink, Raven raced down the center hall, headed for the foyer. He followed and got there just as she threw open the front door.

  Holy shit.

  Chapter 13

  Her car. Her pristine, metallic white baby had been destroyed by the giant weeping willow that used to stand so proudly beside the driveway. Amid the rain, smoke plumes rose from the section of trunk that remained in the ground. The rest of the tree lay crosswise across the BMW’s roof, windshield, and hood, flattening her most favorite possession like a sardine can.

  The car’s emergency flashers blinked, and the alarm blared like a death wail.

  “Oh my God,” Raven muttered. A mixture of shock and anger swelled inside her. First, she was fired, and now this. How much more was she supposed to endure?

  She dashed to the hall closet to grab her key fob from her tote bag, then pressed the button to disable the alarm. The torturous wailing stopped.

  Raven rejoined Jack. Brilla sprinted from the living room and wiggled her body between them, then barked at the fallen tree.

  Jack rubbed her back. “I’m so sorry.”

  Shit. Her briefcase, gym clothes, and a few library books were still inside the car. Without thinking, her feet carried her over the threshold and out onto the porch.

  Jack ran after her and caught her just before she hit the stairs. “You can’t go out there.”

  “I have to. I left things in the back seat and trunk.”

  Jack took hold of both her arms. “Raven, you have no idea if the tree took down power lines when it fell. You could be electrocuted.” He pointed into the dark at the mass of downed willow branches.

  That struck her like a second lightning bolt. “Oh. Right.” She stepped backward.

  “It’s okay. Come inside.” He wrapped his big arms around her and ushered her into the house and back to the fireplace. As they sat in front of the fire, he rubbed her back again. “It could have been so much worse. I don’t know how it missed the house.”

  She nodded, still numb. “If it’d fallen just a few feet to the left . .
. ” Shuddering, her voice trailed off. She couldn’t put a voice to the words, imaging the house’s destruction. Her family’s retreat—her sanctuary—could’ve been demolished so easily. “Instead, it destroyed my BMW.”

  “It’s just a car.”

  Easy for him to say. His Range Rover had been spared and sat untouched at the end of the driveway.

  “It was my car. I loved it.” A hot tear spilled down her cheek.

  “I know you’re upset.” He swiped it away with his thumb.

  “I’m not upset. I’m angry.” Frustrated tears threatened to fall.

  “I get it.”

  Her hands balled into fists. “No. I don’t think you do. This is the cherry on top of my shit sundae, and now I’m stuck on this island without a way to get home.”

  “Hey, come here.” Jack took her in his arms. “I’ll get you home. I promise.”

  He held her there, her head against his shoulder, his hand cradling the back of her neck. As she sank into him, breathing in his scent and listening to the beat of his heart, her anger began to subside.

  Jack was right. It was only a car—a beloved one—but still, merely a vehicle that got her from one destination to another. In the scope of things, it was small. They’d been spared the worst. The house was intact, and they were safe. And she trusted him to get her home.

  “Is it so bad being stuck on this island with me?” He tilted her head back to look into his eyes.

  She mustered a smile. “It has its benefits.”

  He laughed. “That’s a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one.” Rising to his feet, he got up to add a second log to the fire. “For safety’s sake, I think we should sleep down here tonight. I don’t trust the other trees not to fall, too.”

  That would be smart. The neighbors on both sides had large trees that could take out the upper levels of the house. That didn’t explain the butterflies that fluttered in her stomach when he suggested it, though. Raven was a grown woman. The idea of a living room slumber party shouldn’t make her that excited. Even if it was with Jack.

  “I agree. And the fire will keep us warm.” Raven rearranged the throw pillows and blankets, then lay down on the floor.