“Yeah, OK, bye then,” I waved as she stalked slowly toward her prey.
“Hey there you are,” breathed a voice in my ear.
“Oh, thank god,” I sighed. His hands slid around me from behind, clasping together over my taut, swelling belly. I covered his hands with mine and hung there in his arms, loving how perfectly we connected. Finally I could slump against something solid. Something that would always hold me up.
“Edna gave us a present,” I said. “We are supposed to open it.”
“OK!” Jackson agreed. “Lay it on me.”
I held up the parcel for him to flick open the tape closure, then ripped the paper away. Carefully I flipped it face up, temporarily blinded by the sunlight reflected off the picture glass in the ornate silver frame.
“Hey wow,” he said softly. “That’s your mother?”
“It sure is,” I said, my voice slow with recognition. My mother grinned from the couch in my living room. She held one hand up with a martini, and the other arm was draped casually over the back cushion. Next to her, Aunt Winnie held up a matching glass, her ankles tucked primly under her bottom. Behind them, Marlon Brando stood mid-wave, a cocky, lopsided smile on his face.
“It looks like they’re toasting us,” he chuckled.
“I had no idea Edna was so sentimental.”
“Well, me either,” he admitted.
Biting my lips together, I silently stared into the photo, realizing how natural and lifelike it seemed. I could believe that they really saw us through the image, through time. It almost felt like this was a missing artifact, the one that tied them all together. The one that tied all of us together.
“Well I think this is the nicest engagement present we’ve gotten,” he said, kissing my hair tenderly.
I could only nod as my heart swelled. Everything was different, but everything was fine, just as Jackson had promised. Yes. Now everything was complete.
###
End of Book 4, “Beloved,” the final book in “Billionaire Brothers,” the complete serial.
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JACKS
Billionaire Brothers 2, Book 1
Meg Watson
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CHAPTER 1
“I want you to go over there and drop your tits on that guy by the door.”
“Melita!”
“What?” she whined, all innocent, her lips pursed in a cartoony O shape.
“Just…. quit it, please,” I sighed, barely able to hear myself over the southern rock blaring above our heads.
“Do it,” she commanded, her eyebrows raised in a straight, serious shelf of kohl black.
“I’m not doing that,” I muttered into my gin and Diet Sprite. Angling carefully away from the door and the hunk standing next to it, I positioned my cleavage over the table and tried to camouflage it with a bar napkin.
“You should totally do that!” she insisted as though she hadn’t heard me, plucking the napkin from my fingers and tossing it away. “It’ll be good for you! And me too! I can, like, live through you voraciously or whatever.”
“Vicariously,” I corrected her automatically. Apparently that word-a-day calendar app was starting to take hold. Sort of.
She shook her head, her shiny black curls dropping onto her forehead one by one.
“What?” she hollered against the music.
“Nevermind!” I yelled back just as the song finished. My voice punched out into the open air, and several people turned around to look at me like I had deliberately smacked them in the back of their expensively gelled heads.
“Christ, Melita, can we just go?” I said, gritting my teeth and lowering my voice to an appropriate level.
I ducked back toward my drink and hunched forward over my purse, wishing I could disappear. Crowds and bars have always made me feel conspicuous and dorky, and the skin-tight sheath dress she forced me to borrow before we left her apartment wasn’t helping at all. Every time I exhaled I could feel my own breath on parts of my cleavage I was sure weren’t supposed to be exposed.
“See, you’re too smart,” she nodded sagely, plucking her straw between her purple lips and sucking down another huge swallow of her drink.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She shrugged. “You’re all brain. Too smart for your own good with all your words, your big thoughts. You live up in there,” she growled, eyes narrowed, her dark grape fingernail describing a lazy triangle somewhere near my forehead, “when you should be living all down in there.” Her hand dropped dangerously close to my thigh and she pointed at my crotch with short, stabby motions.