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“You were right, you know,” I said. “I didn’t love him—Brody, I mean. It makes his death somehow worse, doesn’t it?”
“Jaye—”
“No, let me get this out. I need to tell you why I don’t think I’m capable of loving. Why you’re wasting your time.” I licked my lips, but my mouth was completely dry, so it didn’t help. “What I feel for you is stronger than what I’ve ever felt for anyone, but I need you to try and understand why you may not find what you’re looking for with me.”
The rain was coming faster and my shivers more violent, and Jack moved closer so he could hear me over the howling wind.
“Then tell me,” he said, his voice gentle despite the turbulence I felt inside my own body.
“My parents—” I gulped in a deep breath. “I didn’t tell you everything about my parents. You know the basics. You know the FBI accused them of smuggling stolen goods and worse things into the country. They used the dock in the little cove behind the house. I had no idea the magnitude of theirbusinesswhen I was growing up. Even when I was an adult.”
“I found some things while I was up at the cabin. Documents. The FBI never found the bolt hole they’d built behind the house. It’s built like a storm shelter into the ground about a hundred feet back, but it’s covered with leaves and brush. Dad showed me where it was.” I stopped feeling the cold the longer I spoke. “It was like a game, he’d said. A family secret. Just in case I ever needed to hide.”
I felt a jacket come around my shoulders and knew Jack had given me his, but he didn’t say anything. He just waited for me to get it all out.
“There are so many papers. Documents recording body after body that they used to hide smuggled goods. Most of them were military, shipped back from overseas for a proper burial. My parents had a government contract, so bodies in the state of Virginia automatically went to them for preparation before interment at Arlington Memorial. It made it more convenient for cover. Then they’d pretend to bury them and ship them off to another location for the buyer. Jesus, Jack. What do I do? How do I tell all those families their loved ones aren’t really buried where they’re supposed to be?”
“Christ,” Jack said. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” His arms came around me and I buried my face against his chest. He was always so warm. So steady.
“That’s not even the worst of it.” My voice was starting to fade, and I’d stopped noticing the tears running down my face. They only mixed with the rain. But my anger grew even as I thought of what else I had to tell him.
“They were traitors. Did you know that?” I looked him in the eye as the words rushed out, and he smoothed the wet strands of hair back from my face. But I didn’t want gentleness. I needed my anger.
“Those documents were records of each body that came through. American soldiers and spies that could have died by the same people my parents worked for. It’s like a nightmare.” My words spilled out faster and faster. “Their list of sins doesn’t even end there. There was a body in the bunker at the cabin. Gunshot wound to the head. A couple of years old by the looks of it, but not as badly decayed as it should have been because the bunker is climate controlled. So now I can add murder to the list, because who else could have put him there?”
My fists pounded against his chest, but he didn’t try to stop the violence erupting from the deepest part of me. He just held me close, his broad hand rubbing up and down my back.
I had to tell him the last of it. The part that would make him understand why things wouldn’t work between us. Why he couldn’t possibly love me.
“I wasn’t theirs, Jack.” The sob that broke out of me sounded more animalistic than human, and I saw the shock on his face before I tried to pull away. To hide. But he didn’t let me go no matter how I fought against him.
“Get the rest out,” he said. “You’ll feel better for it.”
“I wasn’t theirs,” I yelled. “Isn’t that enough? Do you know what it feels like to know your parents smuggled you into the country like diamonds or guns?”
I crumpled against him, and he picked me up where we were and sat down on the ground, rocking me back and forth like a child. We were both soaked to the skin, and the storm didn’t show any signs of letting up, but his arms were solid and sure around me.
“She’d been pregnant,” I said. “My mother. Pretty far along when something happened on a trip she and my dad took overseas. It was supposed to be vacation, but who the hell knows what they were really doing. She somehow got shot and lost the baby. They were there for weeks while she recovered, and part of the shipment of goods they were overseeing were the bodies of an American colonel and his French wife, along with several other unfortunate soldiers. And inside their bodies was more than half a billion dollars in heroin. The Colonel and his wife had a week old baby girl, and no one knew what to do with her. So my parents just took me, and told everyone I’d been born during their vacation in Italy. I always thought I’d been born in Italy.”
My teeth chattered as I choked out those last words, and I knew the symptoms well enough to know I was in shock. But damned if I knew what to do about it. I looked up into Jack’s eyes and saw the rage he was trying hard to contain for my sake. I looked away so I wouldn’t have to see the pity I was sure would follow.
“Look at me, Jaye,” he said, placing his hands on each side of my face and forcing me to look up. “You think you can’t love or be loved because you came from that? Fuck them. You should be jumping for joy that you don’t share their blood. Their sins aren’t yours. And dammit, I’m not going to stand by and let you tell me I’d be better off loving someone else because you have this clusterfuck of a shit storm about to explode around you. Do you think I can’t, or won’t, stand with you? If I’d go to hell and back again for you, then I sure as hell can take whatever Bloody Mary or even the goddamned FBI has to throw at us.”
My breath was coming faster and faster, and my vision clouded, either because of the tears or the rain, I couldn’t be sure.
“Jack—”
“I’m not finished, dammit.” His thumb brushed at the tears that couldn’t seem to stop falling, and despite the anger I saw in him, his hold on me was gentle. “I’m sorry about Brody. I’m sorry to the depths of my soul that you had to go through that. That you had to watch him die. But you can’t blame yourself because you didn’t love him. It’s not because you weren’t able to love him. You have the capacity to love more than anyone I know. It’s because you weren’tmeantto love him. That love belongs to me, Jaye. It always has. And you’ve always had mine.”
Something broke free inside of me as his lips took mine in a kiss that was years—decades—overdue. There wasn’t the gentleness of a first kiss, nor the awkward maneuvering and adjustments that had to be made until you became used to each other. It was just—right. There was no other way to describe it.
His fingers tangled in my hair and brought me closer, so our bodies were fused together in every way but the most vital. I cursed the clothes that separated us, and relished the heat that suffused my body as his teeth nipped at my bottom lip.
Someone moaned—probably me—and my arms and legs tightened around him as he coaxed my mouth open and his tongue stroked erotically against mine. His kisses trailed across my cheek and down my neck, where his tongue and teeth did something that had fireworks blasting behind my eyelids. My body felt so hot that it amazed me steam wasn’t sizzling from my skin as soon as the rain touched flesh.
“God, Jaye,” he whispered. “So long. I’ve waited so long for you.”
I’d stopped thinking the moment his mouth touched mine. My past and my parents no longer seemed as important. The bodies that waited for me at the funeral home could all go to the devil. Only Jack mattered. He’s the only one who’d ever mattered.
