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He arches a brow. “He didn’t tell you?”
“Randall and I don’t talk much.”
“He wants to fuck you.”
If he wants to shock me, he’s failed. “He wants what he thinks I can give him.”
“You discount your beauty,” he states simply as if this is fact, not seduction. “Why?”
Somehow it’s both coming from him.
He thinks I’m beautiful and I can’t deny my pleasure at this confession, only with him it’s not a confession, I remind myself. He’s confident in who he is and sure about his thoughts and desires. Somehow that makes his declaration of my beauty mean more than it would from someone else. “Because I’ve known Randall for years. My father treated him like a son and yet he didn’t inherit.”
He studies me a long moment. “And now, more than ever, he sees you as a path to make his role in the family permanent.”
I don’t confirm or deny that statement. I don’t know Jax well enough to trust him with that kind of exposure on my part. I’ve said too much as it is but Randall just won’t give up and yet he walked away last night. He didn’t even know I left the hotel. It’s an odd occurrence, one I’d like explained for reasons that have nothing to do with Randall, not directly that is, and everything to do with a month of discoveries about my family.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I remind him. “What happened between you and Randall?”
He studies me a moment and I think he might resist my redirection, but he doesn’t. “He asked me to step into the lobby, and then he got a text message and left. I waited to have a word or ten with him but he never returned.”
A text message? That pulls me back to the oddity of Randall’s disappearance. What was that all about?
Jax continues, pulling me back to a better moment, the one here, with him. “I’d prefer to tell you that he was driven away by my wit and brawn—after all, I do like to impress a beautiful lady, but I can’t.”
“I don’t think you try to impress anyone,” I say, that observation one I realize now attracts me to him. I return to my thoughts a moment before, that confidence he exudes. He wears his own skin with pride, an enviable trait, when I wear my skin like an obligation, a reality I’m now beginning to face, to own.
He arches a brow. “Is that right?”
“Isn’t it?” I challenge.
“My father taught me that impressing others comes with a price. And that price is their power over us.”
He hits so many nerves with those words that I can feel them all prickling to life. “And yet you want to impress me?”
He leans closer. “In defiance of all that I am and all that I want to be, yes. I find I do. You interest me, Emma, and I don’t find I’m interested in many people.”
Heat burns a path up my neck and I can feel blood rush to my face and every part of my body. It would be so very easy to just allow this man to pull me under, and perhaps I will, but not yet. Not yet. “And you just left right along with Randall last night?”
“You left while I waited on Randall and,” he catches my hand and leans in closer again. “We’re here now. Perhaps, it’s fate.”
“You believe in fate?” I query, surprised that a worldly man such as Jax would believe in what amounts to superstition.
“I believe in karma and I’d like to think I’m deserving.”
It’s an odd answer that feels as if it’s two sides of the same coin. “I don’t,” I say and I don’t offer more but oh how I could. Oh how the past month has changed my perspective on all things life-related.
His brow arches. “You don’t believe in karma?”
“No,” I confirm. “I don’t believe in karma.”
“Do you know what they say about people who don’t believe in karma?”
There’s a crackle of unease inside me with good cause. I don’t need much of an imagination to conclude an answer that I don’t want to speak or hear.
“Jax.” At the sound of a woman’s voice, I expect Jax to turn, but he doesn’t.
“Yes, Rebecca?”
