JACE-2(Lane Brothers, Book 3)(3)

That one word freezes the blood in my veins, but I fight through the feeling and my continuing dizziness in an effort to get out of here before I do something stupid like tell him how startlingly attractive he is.

That would be…terrible, because, while I’m not a dog, I am definitely just a plain Jane type of woman and so not even close to his league.

“Um, I need to go,” I breathe, feeling my adrenaline spike when my hand closes over the door handle and pushes down. “I have to get to back to work.”

I want to say I manage to turn the handle gracefully and make an elegant escape. Nope. What happens is, I fumble with the handle under my sweaty pam and all but fall out of that office, stumbling to the empty elevator on liquefied legs.

It’s only as I ride the car down, slowing my breaths enough to ease the pounding in my aching skull, that I know why I’ve run so fast. I recognize those startling, penetrating eyes.

They belong to an event in my past that almost destroyed my young heart, an event that set me on the path to self-preservation and the need to keep myself separate from anyone or anything that can hurt me.

Those eyes belong to Lucian Jasper, the love of my girlhood and the same boy—man, who’d broken my heart so callously I still feel the sting of tears when I think of it.





Chapter Two




“Oh my God! What the heck!”

Yeah, I think, dragging my apron over my pounding head and slinking my way to the kitchen door, wishing like hell I can just go home and fall into bed.

At this point I feel like only a good three-day coma can take care of the vile sickness tearing its way through me. After the shocking revelation of exactly who I’d been faced with had finally calmed enough for me to make my stumbling way to my next bus, I’d made the half-assed decision to call Mel, my supervisor at Jasper’s—how could I not know, not even suspect that the company I cleaned for belonged to him? —and quit.

Yeah, so now, on top of being sick as hell, I’m short a source of much needed income and really not feeling it as far as tonight’s shift goes. But I can’t afford to let Bill fire my ass, so instead of going home, I’m dying over the flat top, praying for the next two hours to speed by.

“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?”

I turn to my potbellied boss and give him the stink eye while keeping an eye on the burger I’m grilling.

“I had to run to work in the rain. I think I caught a cold.”

“That quick?” he asks skeptically. “You’re not on the rag?”

I hear a muttered curse from the counter and grit my teeth. Bill, the archaic fool, thinks that any time a woman gets sick it’s due to ‘the monthly bleeding curse’—his words, not mine.

He’s a real prick about a chick getting her period and seems to think that if you’re in ‘that condition’, you shouldn’t be handling food.

“Yeah,” I mutter, disguising a giggle behind a hacking cough when I see his eyes bug so hard I wonder how he keeps them in his head.

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? I could have saved myself the bus fare up here and already been in bed.

“When?” he croaks, making me wheeze on a laugh.

Fucking chauvinistic moron.

“When I left work.”

“Okay, okay,” he mutters, running a hand through his thinning hair. “You…go home. I’ll handle this.” He groans, getting rid of the burger I’d been frying and grabbing a fresh patty.

Five minutes later I’m smiling as I grab a bus and fall into the plastic seat, hoping to get home and medicated before my brains start leaking outta my ear.

No such luck. The minute I shuffle into the door I hear Ben yelling some seriously vile obscenities for a kid his age, and I walk in in time to see him hurl my mother’s ceramic cat at Randy.

Why this shocks me, after everything the little snot has done lately—

“Hold it!” I yell, grabbing his arm before he can volley another of the precious cats at Randy, who is now cowering behind the sofa. “What the fu—hell are you doing!”

Ben’s young and a lot smaller than me, but I’ve learned in the last few weeks that with this all-consuming anger he’s got bottled up inside, he’s freakishly strong.

I’m just barely a match for him on a good day, but tonight, being so sick—I can’t even say why it’s hitting me so harshly, except that I’ve been tired for weeks—I am no match for his tantrums.

I’m on the ground and protecting my head before I can blink. Ben going wild on top of me, his little fists flying as he yells that he hates us all, me most of all.

I let him keep at it, my mind frozen with shock, chanting one thing over and over. Never show him negative emotion. The therapist had drummed that into me the first day after seeing the way my baby brother treated me.