“It’s always like that,” he replied instantly. “What else is wrong?”
My eyes snapped open. He sounded a little too sure of himself there. “Are you speaking from experience?”
His silence was fraught. I bolted upright in the chair. “You’ve been married before?” I attributed my unnecessary shout to my breakdown and gave myself a pass.
“No. I have. Not.” He punctuated his words with a hammer like he did when especially miffed, but I sensed something more behind this denial than his usual pissiness, so I decided to poke the bear.
“Are you lying to me?”
Over the phone came a bristling animal noise which, had I heard it while walking outdoors in the dark, would have made me wet myself.
“I. Will. Never. Lie to you. Never. Do you understand?”
Oh dear. Poking the bear produced unpleasant results. “Sorry. It just sounded like there was more to what you said.”
I don’t know how silence can vibrate with emotion, but his did. Finally after a few incoherent growls and grumbles, he muttered, “I was engaged once.”
That was like dangling a brand-new, catnip-filled feather toy in front of a cat. My ears perked up, my eyes narrowed, my tail started twitching. “What happened?”
“She didn’t love me is what happened,” he thundered. “She was only after my money!”
After a few moments I realized that sound in my ears was the pounding of my pulse. I breathed out slowly, feeling sick.
“It’s different with us,” he said more gently, guessing why I couldn’t speak.
“How, exactly?”
His voice turned vulnerable, almost boyish. “This time I know.”
Shot through the heart. Bullet to the brain. Fall from a forty-story building. With that one sentence, he killed me in a dozen different ways.
“Jax,” I breathed, trembling. “Oh God.”
“It’s ancient history, Bianca. I’m over it. I wouldn’t have even mentioned it if you hadn’t asked.” His voice took on a brisk, brittle quality. “And I’m the one who offered this deal, remember? This was my idea. So don’t blame yourself for anything.”
Oh, but I could. And I did. I blamed myself for ever thinking this would work, and for being a cold-hearted, cash-hungry mercenary.
For a moment I hated myself with the blinding fury I usually reserved for people who walk too slow and block the sidewalk.
“This is crazy,” I whispered, so full of guilt that if someone falsely accused me of murder, I’d confess and demand the electric chair. “We can’t do this.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell your mother? That you can’t get the money for her surgery?”
I went from anguished guilty person to outraged shouty person in two seconds flat. “That is so not fair!” I hollered, slamming my hand on the desk.
“Life isn’t fair,” he countered bitingly. “This is a business deal, Bianca. A good one for both of us. We’re not doing favors for each other. No one is getting taken advantage of here. We’re going into it with our eyes open, fully informed and consenting, with an exit strategy that’s painless and precise. Which is a hell of a lot more than most people can say about their marriages.”
God, the bleakness of that. Whoever she was, the woman he’d been engaged to had certainly done a number on him. That . . . man-eater.
It dawned on me that those scars on his jaw he said had been caused by a man-eating shark were from his ex-fiancée. What did she do, hit him with a pitchfork?
Pushing aside the knowledge that I myself had wanted to do that very thing to him when we first met, I threw myself headfirst back onto the desk.
Sounding worried, Jackson said, “What was that noise?”
“My head and the desk getting better acquainted.”
A low chuckle, and he’d officially cycled through every emotion a human can have in the course of a three-minute phone conversation. “Funny, I never pictured you as a drama queen.”
I never pictured myself as the bride of hot Frankenstein, either, but here we were. “So what’s the next step?” I said, recovering enough to attempt rational conversation.
“Do you own or rent your home?”
I wrinkled my nose at the phone. Now he was a Realtor? “Rent.”
“Give notice. We need to have you transferred to Rivendell by my birthday on the sixteenth.”
He made it sound like a women’s prison. “What about my things? Furniture, clothes, books?”
“Pack what you want to keep, and leave the rest. I’ll send over moving boxes and arrange for a storage unit. If your landlord charges removal fees for anything you leave behind, I’ll take care of it.”