Watch Me Fall(11)

Mission accomplished. Now she could get the hell out of here. Only, she didn’t really want to. It was nice to be in the company of people she didn’t want to strangle. At home, there was nothing but Julie and Doug festering on the couch.

Jared excused the girls from the table, and they ran off for bath time. Starla watched them go with a strange desperation. Left alone with him, what other kind of weirdness was going to come up?

She didn’t want to wait around to find out. Standing, she began to clear the dishes from the table, but of course, he wasn’t having it.

“Hey, sit down. You cooked. I’ll clean up later.”

“I tend to make a gigantic mess. Really, let me help.”

“No. Sit. Do you want a beer?” he asked over his shoulder as he headed back toward the kitchen with his hands full of dirty dishes. Starla dropped back into her seat and stared glumly at her wrapped finger. It still throbbed despite the ibuprofen she’d taken soon after he’d played doctor for her. She was utterly torn, but as usual, she knew the right thing to do. It was just so damn hard for her to do it.

“Thanks, but I’d better not.”

This was why she preferred to know what was expected when she agreed to meeting up with someone. But this whole thing had been her idea, hadn’t it? She shot out of her chair again, too restless to sit still. Jared stood in the kitchen scraping food remnants into the disposal, and her breath caught again at the way his jeans fit the delectable curve of his ass. God, she could imagine sinking her fingernails into that.

“Are you sure?” he asked her.

“I should probably go.”

He flipped a switch on the wall, and the disposal growled to life. Turning to look at her, he leaned his hip against the counter and wiped his hands with a dish towel. “I feel bad that we haven’t had much time to talk. You’ve been in here working the whole time.”

Yeah, but you look so insanely gorgeous right now, and your eyes are so blue, and if I stay, if I stay… I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself.

Not that she had to worry. He had kids—how to explain to them that Daddy’s new “friend” stayed the night? He wouldn’t let it happen. She was safe.

Keep telling yourself that.

“All right. Maybe one beer.”



***



The girls were snug in bed, bathed and dressed in their jammies with one story read—that was all Jared had allowed them; otherwise, they would’ve kept him up all night. But they hadn’t wanted him to read the story. They had both wanted Starla to read it for them. Amazing how they’d both taken to her. Jared had never thought he would see the day both of his girls agreed on something. He’d been ready to tell them not to bother her, but she’d taken the storybook from him and given it a shot. He should have warned her it would be more a case of the girls reading the story to her than vice versa. She handled it like a pro.

Now, the two of them sat out on his deck at the patio table, beers in hand, stars bright above. He loved it out here for the simple reason that you could see every star in the sky, watch for meteors, and contemplate the vastness of the Milky Way stretching above. No town noise, no distant traffic, nothing but the sounds of nature…at least when his neighbors didn’t have the volume cranked up.

Starla nursed her beer carefully, one knee drawn up to her chest and the other bent around. He liked it when she gazed up at the sky; he could admire the graceful lines of her neck.

“So, you weren’t kidding,” he said when the conversation had lulled. “You’re a great cook. How did that come about?”

She turned a little smile on him. “Did you think I was lying?”

“Nah. Just curious.”

“Well, let’s see. Lots of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ when I was growing up, for one. Any girl old enough to reach the counter was expected to pitch in. I learned a lot.”

“You come from a big family?”

“Six sisters, four brothers.”

He’d been taking a drink, but at her words, he nearly choked on it. Wiping his chin, he turned an incredulous look on her. “You’re kidding.”

Chuckling, she shook her head but didn’t look up from the bottle that suddenly seemed to have her full attention. “Nope.”

“That’s…unusual. These days, anyway. Are you oldest, youngest, or in the middle?”

“Toward the back. Eight in front of me, two behind me. My mother pretty much had a baby a year while she could.”

“Wow. Must’ve been crazy growing up in all that. I have one brother, and I don’t think a day went by when we weren’t torturing each other.”

“Let’s just say I was on my own from the day I turned eighteen. Not because they put me out, but because I wanted out. My family is religious. Like…really religious.”

Jared didn’t know what to say, but he knew he’d better tread carefully. Looking at her, one wouldn’t take her as the religious sort, but to point that out might be offensive to her. Religion and politics were the two subjects he absolutely refused to debate with anyone. He and his ex-wife had decided to raise their daughters in church and that was pretty much the extent of his involvement with any of it.

“And you?” he prompted, waiting for her to tell him her thoughts on the matter before he made any assumptions.

“Sick of the whole thing by the time I was ten. Then my brothers and sisters started marrying and breeding, and I realized that was expected of them. And of me. I could express my feelings on that in two words, but you guys just came from church, so I’ll let you use your imagination.”

“Fuck that?” he supplied. She turned big eyes on him and burst out laughing.

“Yes. Exactly. Thank you.”

“Starla, I take the girls to church because it’s something their mother and I want them exposed to—but then I want them exposed to a lot. I want them to make up their own minds. It’s my hope that they’ll grow up to live a full life, and to me that involves finding their own way, making mistakes, and learning from them. Trying different things, discovering what works. As for myself, I can take it or leave it. So don’t worry about offending me at all.”

“Whew,” she said, blowing out the word as if a weight had come off her shoulders. “I’m glad to hear you say that. People who don’t cuss make me fucking uncomfortable.”

He grinned, holding out his bottle for her to clink hers against it. “You can be yourself. It’s all good here.”

“Because I wasn’t sure if we could be friends,” she went on teasingly, holding his gaze now with more directness than he’d seen from her all night. Something about those eyes, somehow simultaneously sweet and naughty, did things to him. Dirty things. He began to wonder if he wasn’t…waking up. After a long, dark, cold hibernation.

“Can we?” Shit, don’t jump the gun here, guy.

“I’m good if you are.”

“That’s settled, then. We’re friends.”

“Great,” she said cheerfully. “So, as your friend who can’t offend you, can I ask you something?”

“You can ask,” he drawled. “Doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”

“How about this, then? I throw out one word, and you elaborate upon it in whatever way you see fit.”

“Sounds like I might need another beer for this,” he said with a groan.

“Maybe.”

He already knew what word—what name that would be. Dammit. “Only if I get to do the same thing to you.”

“Deal.”

“Do you want another?”

Starla glanced down at her almost empty bottle before setting it aside on the patio table. “Um, sure. Yeah, I’d better.”

Heading back inside to the fridge, he tried to formulate a preemptive response. Macy. Jesus. He could babble about her all night. What she’d meant to him, what it had done to him to lose her. It was pretty deep material for new friends to peruse, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to tell Starla all of it. Play it cool, blow it off? She would see right through him if he tried those tactics, but it would have to do for now.

He wrenched open their bottles and returned to the deck, handing one to her before reclaiming his chair. “All right. Shoot.”

“Shelly.”

Immediate shame fell hard and heavy on his chest. Of course, of course Starla was curious about his ex-wife, and not so much his ex-girlfriend—while said ex-wife had never even crossed his thoughts. The woman he’d said vows to, the woman he’d promised to love and cherish and protect until his dying breath. And she wasn’t even a blip on his radar now except where Ashley and Mia were concerned.

“Okay,” he said, finding his voice strangled and taking a drink to soothe the guilt. “Shelly.” The beer bottle was cold in his hands. And he felt like a cold bastard when he said, “I never should have married her.”

Silence stretched out between the two of them, filled with only crickets and frogs and the lowing of a distant cow. True to her ground rules, Starla didn’t say anything, but he felt her looking at him.

“From her hospital bed, Macy told me to get out of her life. I didn’t want to, but I listened. Shelly…she was a rebound. Simple as that. We were careless, and she got pregnant. I thought marrying her was the right thing to do, the right thing for the daughters we knew we were having. Hell, maybe it was—I don’t even know. Maybe we should’ve tried harder to make it work for them if not for us. For a while, we did. But when everything you have is built on a lie, the truth comes out eventually, whether you want it to or not.”