A baby. It was the middle of the night and Luna lay in her bed staring up at the ceiling instead of sleeping. Willow and Shayne were having a baby. It boggled, it’d come out of nowhere, but it also felt so right for them, and she felt the smile curve her face.
At her side in the dark, the only light being a faint sliver from the moon slanting in the window, Jameson came up on an elbow and peered into her face. “I’d like to claim credit for that smile, but I’m not sure it was me.”
She pulled him down for a quick but hot kiss. “Oh, it’s you too.”
His smile heated, probably, like her, remembering how they’d just taken each other apart and put each other back together again. “And . . . ?”
“And it’s also Willow and Shayne. Willow’s pregnant.”
“Explains the intermittent barfing. Are she and Shayne going to be okay?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“And you? Are you and Willow going to be okay?”
She met his gaze and saw the genuine interest, and more than that, worry and affection. For her. “I think so,” she repeated softly.
With a soft smile, he leaned in, but just as the kiss got interesting, her stomach growled so loudly it sounded like a geyser about to blow.
Jameson laughed and got out of bed. He tossed her his shirt and then pulled on the pair of soft, clinging pj bottoms he’d left on the floor. She stared at the sight of him in nothing but the pants that rode indecently low on his hips. “What are you doing?”
He pulled her from the warm bed. “Feeding the beast.” But he didn’t move, instead took her hands in his and spread them out to her sides, looking her over with a low groan.
“What?” she asked.
He took a long, purposeful breath. “I was unprepared for the sight of you in my shirt, showing off your long legs and your pretty cherry-red toenails.” His gaze dragged back up her body. “Nowhere is safe to look. You’re so beautiful, Luna.”
She bit her lower lip, never quite seeing that herself, but hell, if he wanted to believe it, who was she to disavow him of that notion?
“You still don’t know what to do with a compliment,” he said, looking amused.
She shrugged. “I was born with commitment issues mixed with trust issues. Sometimes I think my commitment issues and trust issues have gotten married and had babies.”
His laugh was rueful. “Same. But somehow with you, my fears fly out the window. Luna . . . I know I’m leaving, and that my job keeps me gone a lot, but I’m thinking of making Sunrise Cove my home base.”
She blinked. “When did you decide that?”
“I think maybe it’s been in the back of my mind since the day I arrived.” He gave another short laugh, like he was surprising himself. “But I didn’t let myself really believe that it could work until this very minute. Which doesn’t make it any less true.” He met her gaze. “So if you ever decide you want to be with me, we could make it happen.”
“It?” she whispered.
“Us. And it’ll be good, I promise.”
Wow. She drew in a shaky breath before nodding.
He smiled and nodded back. “Now let’s feed you.”
In the kitchen, she turned to the fridge, but he caught her and lifted her onto the counter, where he kissed her stupid. Pulling back, he smiled into her dazed face. “Cute,” he said. “Oh, and before I forget, there’s a message on the farm’s Facebook page. Someone complaining about the fact that we’re going to have snakes at Founders Day. I located the problem. There’s a typo on the flyers around town. ‘Snacks’ somehow autocorrected to ‘snakes.’”
“Oh my God.” She whipped out her phone and went to Facebook. Finding the typo, she sighed. Then made a new post:
ATTENTION
There will be no snakes at Founders Day! There was a typo on the flyer that said we would have snakes. We will NOT have snakes. We will have snacks. (Not that we have anything against snakes. In fact, snakes are awesome!) So, to summarize: NO SNAKES at Founders Day.
Jameson read the post over her shoulder, a hand running lightly up and down her arm. He laughed softly, kissed the shell of her ear, and then proceeded to cook her a quesadilla.
She watched, feeling like a silly, smitten kitten. She was in his shirt, which still held his delicious scent and body heat. She’d just had the best sex of her life, and everything in her world felt good. She and Willow were okay. Founders Day was coming together, everyone was working as a team, and she had an honest and good man in her life.
When he handed her a plate, she took a bite of yummy, gooey, perfect quesadilla and moaned.
His eyes darkened a bit. “That’s a sound I usually have to work hard for,” he murmured.
“Well, you’re almost as excellent in the bedroom as you are in the kitchen.”
He choked on his quesadilla. “Almost?”
She grinned.
He smiled, but didn’t say anything. Unusual even for him. She watched him stop eating and realized . . . something was off with him. And if she thought about it, maybe something had been off for a few days now. How had she missed it? She blamed the orgasms. “What’s wrong?”
He stepped between her legs and ran his hands up her bare thighs.
“Oh no,” she said. “I recognize the distraction technique. I live the distraction—” She broke off on a soft moan when he lowered his head and nuzzled that soft spot just beneath her ear, giving her the shivers of the very best kind. “Don’t even try it.”
She felt him smile against her skin. “But distracting you is so much fun.”
She set her hands on his chest and gave a nudge so she could see into his eyes. “Just say it, Jameson. Whatever it is. I can take it.”
He paused, and oh dear God, déjà vu. She’d been a part of this dog and pony show and she knew what came next. “You’re dumping me.”
“What?” Looking horrified that she’d jumped to that, he leaned back into her. “No. Are you kidding? Luna, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Then what? What’s wrong? Is it about the books? Our numbers?”
She watched him draw a deep breath. “I’ve run and rerun the numbers,” he said. “The ticket sales are coming along, but unless we bring in a profit of at least fifty K during Founders Day, we’re not going to make that balloon payment.”
“We could still do it.”
He cupped her face. “I love that about you. Your ability to hope and believe in something that’s intangible, something that can’t be balanced at the end of a spreadsheet. It makes me feel like there’s more to life than I’ve been living. But—”
“But what? Because maybe the event’s going to be better than we can imagine.”
“Maybe. But I haven’t been able to get a bank interested in giving us a loan. I’m worried that without your grandfather at your back fudging the monthly numbers as needed, without him floating us on this, I’m not sure it’s possible.”
Luna felt herself go still with shock as she replayed the words that couldn’t possibly mean what she thought they meant, and pushed him away from her. “Fudging numbers? Floating us?”
Jameson scrubbed a hand down his face before meeting her gaze. “I never wanted to have to tell you, but this is what Silas did for you, Luna. He funneled money into the farm when you needed it, via the line of credit the bank closed down after his passing.”
“Wait.” She slid off the counter and stared at him, unable to quickly process the words suddenly. “What?”
“I know, it sounds crazy. And it was. It went against everything he’d ever taught me to do.”
Luna actually staggered back against the counter like she’d taken a hit. It certainly felt like it. “I never asked him for help. In fact, I never ask anyone for help, for this exact reason. I never wanted to be beholden to anyone, especially him.”
Jameson reached for her, but she shook her head and lifted her hands in the universal “stop” gesture, unable to handle him touching her right now. Turning away, realization after realization bombarded her. Silas had let her think this job had come to her on her own merit, but it hadn’t. He’d let her think she’d earned the job of farm manager, but she hadn’t. He’d let her think she was succeeding, when she hadn’t done that either.
“I know what you’re thinking, Luna.”
“That he was a liar? That he pitied me?”
“Silas didn’t do pity. He loved you.”
“That’s another lie.” She whirled to face him. “If he loved me, how did he justify not telling me who he really was? Or how he let me think I was succeeding, when in actuality, I wasn’t? And while we’re on this, just exactly how badly was I not succeeding?”
Jameson hesitated, damn him. “Tell me.”
His voice when he spoke was very gentle. “First, you have to understand that farming in general is in trouble, not just Apple Ridge. It’s nearly impossible to make a decent profit at this. Second, I handled all of Silas’s business accounting. All of it, except this farm. He always insisted on doing it himself.”
She stared at him. “Because you wouldn’t have approved of him cooking my books?”
“I didn’t approve of him letting you think one thing was happening, when it was another entirely.”
She calmly nodded, even though she felt like screaming. “How long did you know?”
“Not until last season’s taxes. He accidentally left the farm’s forms accessible to me. But even then I had no idea how much he’d been doing behind the scenes. I didn’t know until I got here and recognized the shoe boxes of receipts and put it all together.”
“So just how bad was it?”
He shook his head.
“Jameson.”
He studied her for a beat and then sighed. “If you put all the numbers into a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet would actually turn blood red and your laptop would blow up.”
“Oh my God.” She took a step back and sank onto one of her chairs. She had a hand on her heart, which had just been handed back to her in a box with a shiny ribbon made of betrayal. Her grandfather had been cooking the books because she’d been that big a failure, just as her parents had always thought. “I’m such an idiot. I actually believed I was running the farm on my own merit, that Silas believed in me as a manager. That you and me . . .”
“We’re real, Luna,” he said softly. “You and me.”
“Maybe, but you holding back the truth makes everything all the messier, and deeply affects my ability to trust you.”
“Luna—”
“Don’t.” Her ego had just been kicked and destroyed. “Show me what he did.”
He looked pained. “You don’t need to see it.”
“Oh, I need to see it.”
Jameson reluctantly opened his laptop and typed something on the keyboard before turning it to face her. “Okay, so here are the numbers with the money he funneled into the accounts from the line of credit as needed. And here are what the real numbers would’ve been without that.” He paused while she looked at the shocking discrepancies and felt sick to her soul.
“Tell me again you don’t think that man loved you,” he said quietly.
“I don’t think lying is love.” There was a lump in her throat she couldn’t swallow. Or breathe past. “So is this why you’re here? I mean, you could’ve hugged your fifty percent to your chest at night from anywhere. Or hell, sold me out to the investors.” At his silence, she turned and looked at him and, to her shock, caught him mid-grimace. “Oh my God. There’s more.”
“Do you remember when I told you there are things you don’t know about me?”
“Yes, but you said you weren’t a murderer and that you recycle.”
His smile was mirthless. “You never pushed me for what I really meant.”
He was right, and she cursed herself. “I guess I was afraid to look too closely because I liked you too much.”
He winced a little, presumably at her use of past tense. “Silas asked me to come here and stay for two months. To look out for you and make sure you were okay, and to help steer this, whichever way you decided you wanted this to go.”
And the hits kept coming. “And you didn’t tell me that why?”
“I made a promise, and I couldn’t break it, not to Silas. Not even for you.”
Noble, she thought. But she didn’t give a shit about noble at the moment. “You just did.”
“Because it no longer felt right to keep it. Because even though you’re doubting that this between us is real, it is, Luna. More real than anything. So much so that I couldn’t let it go another day without telling you everything.”
She wasn’t going to be moved by that. Where she’d been warm before, now she felt only cold. “But you’re only here because Silas sent you here to babysit me.”
He shook his head. “You’re missing the point. You know what my job is, Luna. And Silas taught me everything I know. But for you, he was literally doing the opposite of all of that. He broke his own ironclad rules for you. He wanted to know you were going to be okay.”
“Without him manipulating things from behind the curtain, you mean.”
He looked pained. “Yes.”
“And you want me to believe that was love.”
“Just because love doesn’t come the way you think it should doesn’t mean it’s anything less than love.”
Luna narrowed her eyes. “The way I think love should come is without lies. And speaking of lies, you knew all this, the whole time, and you kept it to yourself until now.”
“Luna, I owed Silas. I owed him . . .” He shook his head. “Everything.”
She let out a mirthless laugh. “A promise to a dead man. That was more important to you than being honest with me.”
“At first, yes,” he said, surprising her with his honesty.
Shaking her head, she turned away.
“Luna, look at me. Please?”
It was the “please” that did it, not that low, husky voice of his, she told herself. Reluctantly, she met his gaze, hers undoubtedly filled with everything she was feeling because she was shit at hiding that.
“I don’t make promises lightly,” he said quietly. “In fact, I’ve never met a promise I couldn’t keep.”
“And yet you promised me I could count on you for your honesty. You told me I could trust you.” Even worse, her greatest fear had come to life—she’d been dependent on someone, grandfather or no. And now she was also dependent on Jameson, or at least her heart was. Stupid heart. Scared and anxious about how very much she felt for him, maybe more than she’d ever cared about another man ever, she closed her eyes. When would she learn? Right the eff now, she decided. “You know what, Jameson? I can’t do this.”
“This?”
“Us.”
He looked stunned. “What are you talking about? You’re going to end our relationship over an argument?”
“No. I’m ending this relationship that was never a real relationship since relationships are built on trust. And I don’t think I can trust you ever again. In fact, I know it.”
“Okay, yes, I held some information back because of a previous promise,” he said. “A promise that I kept out of love, by the way, but—”
“No.” She remembered him sitting in her office closet to work, his knees up to his ears, reassuring her it was going to be okay. But he’d lied about that too. Because nothing was okay. Feeling like her whole world was crumbling in on her, she shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
“The facts are never wrong. Facts that I gave you because I think you deserve to have them.”
Everything was falling apart, and worse, her heart felt . . . broken. “It’s too late. It’s all too late.” She turned away and then whirled back, because apparently she wasn’t quite done being furious. “You know what kills me? You made me tell everyone the truth about Silas leaving me fifty percent of this place. ‘Be honest,’ you said, and yet you’ve been lying from the beginning.”
“And believe me, I’ll never forgive myself for that,” he admitted. “But before you get on the soapbox, I wasn’t in this alone. You kept plenty from me.”
She gaped at him. “Like what?”
“Only just about everything of yourself.”
She shook her head, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I opened up,” he said. “I shared things with you that I’ve never shared with anyone else.”
“I did the same.”
“You gave me the bare minimum, while holding back everything else, like the most important parts of you. Those you kept to yourself. So no, Luna, I didn’t break your trust, you never trusted me to begin with.”
Shocked, she stared at him. “That’s not true. I . . . sh—sh—shared with you.” Shit. She’d actually tripped over her tongue trying to say the word “shared.”
He gave her a get-real look that put her on the defensive. “Okay,” she admitted, “maybe not my whole life story, but my life story isn’t something I like to revisit. I lived it once, why live it again?”
“It’s called opening up with the person you sleep with every night. Instead, you managed me, just like you manage the farm. You managed every little nugget you gave me of you.”
For some reason, it was that which amped up her panic and anxiety more than anything else. Had they slept together every night . . . ? She thought back, to all the long, dark, delicious hours they’d spent in her bed exploring each other. Her bed, her shower, her kitchen counter, the floor in front of the fire . . . Damn. What had she been thinking? She’d let him into her bed and then into her heart, which kicked hard at the realization. Worse, the fear was closing her throat now, mostly because he was right on the money. She had tried to manage him. Hell, she managed everyone. He wanted her to open up? She had no idea how, any more than she knew how to share the load, or let him in. She also had no idea how to say it was all too much. So instead her mouth said, “I’m done with this right now.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Let’s get some sleep, and in the morning we’ll—”
“No. There is no more ‘we.’” Somewhere in the back of her spinning brain she was well aware it was the worst thing she could possibly say to him, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
He sucked in air at the words, then his eyes went hooded as he nodded. And with his usual calm and grace, he said, “Understood.” He headed to the door, then stopped, his hand on the handle. “If it means anything, I’m sorry, Luna.”
She hugged herself and nodded. And then in the next beat, he shoved his feet into his shoes and grabbed his jacket, pulling it on over his bare chest before walking out of her life.