“No. No, of course not.”
“Jake?”
Again the slight wince, and I felt guilty. I’d forgotten that he didn’t like me to use his name.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. A flush spread over my cheeks. How could I ask him anything so intimate? But I had to know.
“Are you going to sleep with me?”
He opened the door with a blank face. I couldn’t read his eyes. Did he still want me? I needed to know.
“Please—”
“Not right now, Lacey. Now, I need you to go to sleep.”
Sleep. As soon as he said the word, it was like a command. A yawn rose from my chest, and my eyes watered sleepily. I rubbed one eye with the back of my hand.
He set me down in the bed, and the covers were on top of me before I could even reach for them. He tucked the blanket in around my shoulders. God, it was soft. And warm. So warm…
“Sleep,” he said. And then, the last thing I heard from him before I passed out completely. “You’ll need your rest.”
***
I woke up before he came into the room. The blankets around me were so soft. The room was dim, the only light was a thin stream of lamplight from the hallway.
Beautiful, I thought in a daze. The painting in this room across from my bed was lit slightly by the hallway light. It was a pastoral scene, one of the old masters. Lambs on a hillside. They reminded me of the farm back in Iowa.
A hand pushed the door open and I blinked again sleepily. It was Jake in the doorway. Jake, who’d fed me pancakes this morning. I smiled.
He was holding something, and as he came closer to the bed I saw what it was. A dress, a long evening dress. It was blue and silken, flowing over his arms like a waterfall.
“Waterfalls are white,” I mumbled. That was something I’d learned while painting. Water isn’t blue, really. It’s every color of the rainbow. All it does is reflect the world around it.
“Are you awake?” Jake asked. He sat down next to me on the bed and lay the dress on the foot of it.
Ha. A dress. He’d brought me a dress. But of course, he couldn’t know that I didn’t wear dresses. I never wore dresses.
“I wanted to take you out to dinner,” he was saying.
“Dinner?” I blinked. His eyes shone green even in the dim light. I blinked again.
“Yes.”
All of my senses came back to me in a sharp flash. I sat up in bed, my hands still clutching the covers.
“What—what time is it?” I asked. My mouth felt like cotton.
“It’s seven o’clock.”
“At night?”
Jake raised his eyebrows, and I yanked the covers off of me, not caring if he saw my robe open up. Then I remembered. He was supposed to call.
“Did you call them?” I asked, panic still choking my throat.
“Call who?”
“My work. To say I wasn’t coming in.”
“Oh, right. No. I’ll call them now if you like.”
“What?!”
Oh my God. My boss would be furious at me. Not Casper, although I’m pretty sure he’d be wondering why I had left the back door open and taken off without saying goodbye. But my boss at the diner… she was much, much less nice.
My mom told me not to say anything bad about anyone else if I could help it. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
So I never talked about my boss much.
I was pretty sure, though, that the man standing in front of me with a sexy smile had just cost me my job. And, mean boss or not, it was the best job I had.
“How could you?”
“What?” Jake frowned slightly, cocking his head. I tugged on the covers, but he was sitting on them. I couldn’t get out of the bed.
“You let me oversleep and you didn’t even call up my work to say that I was sick!”
“I thought you needed your sleep.”
Argh! He sounded so… so reasonable! Like I was the one who was crazy!
“I need a job more than I need my sleep,” I said, explaining it to him slowly.
“For what?”
For what. He really said that.
“For what? For money. Hello?”
“I already wrote you a check for your rent,” he said, tilting his head. I tugged again at the covers but they held tight. I blew air between my teeth.
“That’s not… I have to have a job!”
“Why?”
“Well for one, that money won’t last forever. And what will I do when it runs out?”
“I can write you another check,” he said, squinting at me like I was an alien species. God, he was so handsome. A stirring inside of my body made me even angrier at myself. And at him. Mostly at him.
“That’s not what I want!” I cried.
“What do you want?”