All or Nothing (22 page)

“I should be frightened by how reasonable you make it sound,” Jen muttered.

Zach grinned. “It's an art. Or a gift. Doesn't much matter. What we need to do here is make the whole scheme more plausible. There's doubt because you never talked about me before, because they didn't know you were seeing someone and suddenly here I am and we're all serious. All we need to do now is go to the next step to bring this scheme to a finale.”

“At the altar of the church.”

“You've got to admit that it has a certain panache. I mean, why break up in the car, quietly and without witnesses? If this is a great passion we share, then we should end it with a flourish.”

“But we don't share a great passion.”

“Is that right?” Zach parallel-parked with astonishing speed, and put the car in neutral.

His hand was on her cheek, his fingers warm and strong, his lips on hers before Jen knew what he was doing. She gasped. At that, he angled his head and deepened his kiss, coaxing her to join him.

It was a sweet kiss, unexpectedly sweet, and his tenderness caught Jen off guard. Why didn't she expect him to be a gentleman? She found her eyes closing, found herself responding to his caress.

And why not?

Wasn't she supposed to live a little?

It was just a kiss.

If ‘just' could be said of a kiss from Zach. His tongue touched hers and she reciprocated, liking the feel of him, the smell of him, the weight of his hand on her shoulder. She put her hands on his shoulders, felt the strength of him, felt his fingers slide into her hair. She was dizzy with his kiss, lost in sensation.

It had been a long time since Jen had kissed a man.

Really kissed a man.

She hadn't kissed anyone since Steve.

And she had never kissed Steve like this. Everything was spinning, everything was boiling or churning or otherwise riled up. Yet Jen, queen of self-control, just wanted more.

This guy was bigger trouble than she'd feared.

She pushed Zach away at that realization, one hand in his chest. He didn't let her push him far, just pulled back a bit and let his gaze dance over her. His eyes were gleaming with satisfaction and he was smiling a smile that warmed her to her toes. He slid his fingertip up her cheek, then tucked her hair behind her ear.

She felt cornered, but not entirely in a bad way. She liked how he looked at her, the admiration in his gaze making her feel attractive for the first time in a long while. She liked the heat in her veins. She liked the way he kissed, and the way she felt warm and tingly afterward.

But this was just a joke.

And that look on his face wouldn't last if they did more than kiss. Jen knew better than to get involved.

Well, she knew better than to get
more
involved.

Zach cleared his throat. “What was that you said about there being no passion?” He winked at her, then glanced over his shoulder. “I think we fogged the windows,
honey
.”

“Maybe they're just dirty,” Jen said hastily. She reached for the door handle.

“Where are you going?”

“We've broken up,” she said, feeling only a need to run. She didn't even know exactly where they were, but it didn't matter. She had her transit pass: she'd figure it out. “I told you—I'm dumping you.”

“Not so fast. You owe me...”

“You just collected whatever I might have owed you, and you got a turkey dinner, too.” Jen got out of the car and slammed the door before he could say something persuasive.

Zach rolled down the window. “But we have to make it look good, Jen.”

“We did. It's over, Zach. Have a nice life.”

“Hey!” Zach shouted after Jen as she strode away. She didn't look back. People turned to look. He sounded, to Jen's surprise, angry, but that must just have been because he wasn't getting his way. “What about Roxie? You haven't even met her yet.”

“Give her a kiss for me,” Jen said. When Zach swore, she was afraid he would get out of his car to follow her and darted down a side street. Her heart was pounding when she heard tires squeal.

Once around the corner, she ran, making sure she'd be out of sight by the time Zach got the car out of his parking spot. Three streets later, she ducked into a shop and hid in one front corner like the chicken that she was. She saw the Neon drive past and her breath caught, but Zach didn't see her and he didn't stop.

Jen waited but he didn't drive by again.

She knew she should have been relieved. But if she'd gotten what she wanted, why did she feel so disappointed?

* * *

Jen had disappeared, just like that. Zach drove up and down and all around for forty-five minutes but he didn't even catch a glimpse of her.

And he was mad, madder than he could remember being in a long time. Of course, they'd been close enough to the old North End that it would have been comparatively easy for her to give Zach the slip, but still. He liked his plan. He liked the elegance and showmanship of it. He wanted to follow it through. He wanted Jen to be awed by it and to agree to it.

She wasn't supposed to have run screaming into the afternoon at the prospect of taking her own scheme to the next level. (Okay, she hadn't screamed, but still.)

She wasn't supposed to be blind to the brilliance of his master planning.

She wasn't supposed to be immune to his kiss.

Maybe he really had lost his touch.

Maybe his timing was off.

Maybe he wasn't going to let this go easily. No, Zach was right and he liked Jen and she liked him—he could tell by the way she kissed. He wasn't a dope with women and had never had any romantic issues in the past—at least not beyond the usual one of girlfriends wanting to get married, which was really not a life goal of Zach's, and him not wanting to do so.

(He would not reflect upon the irony that he had been the one to suggest a fake wedding as a culmination to the fake date with Jen and that she had turned him down flat. And bolted. Better not to go there.)

Zach was certain that he couldn't be responsible for this particular romantic failure. After all, it had never happened before that he'd kissed a woman who had kissed him back and then she'd run.

No, he had been cheated of triumph by another variable.

He had been cheated by this Steve guy.

Whoever Steve was.

This Steve guy had messed up Jen and the shadow of those events, whatever they had been, was still spooking her. The obvious resolution was to (a) find out what Steve had done, and (b) do whatever was necessary to banish his memory.

It seemed pertinent—at least belatedly—to Zach that no one had ever really answered his question about Steve. Being a carnivore couldn't have been the worst of it, especially as Jen herself ate chicken and fish.

Come to think of it, it had almost been as if Jen had been avoiding his question. That was the kind of thing she would do, if she didn't want to talk about something, Zach was sure of it. Change the subject and evade the topic.

Fortunately, he had other sources of information. Cin's plan had been for Jen to find a man like Steve, because Jen's mom had hated Steve, which meant that the best place to obtain more information about Steve was from Jen's mom.

Zach was not going to be cheated of a great moment—and a bunch more great kisses—by some jerk in Jen's past. He thought of how Jen had smiled in her grandmother's kitchen and how laughter had transformed her.

This was his new mission. He chose to accept it. He would make Jen laugh, he would persuade her to follow his plan and by the end of it, by the final scene at the church altar, she'd be happy and ready to go on with her life.

Job One was to find out more about Steve. Zach drove home to Roxie as he dialed Directory Assistance on his cell.

Lo and behold, Natalie Sommerset had a listed number.

The gods were with him.

* * *

Jen was certain she hadn't seen the last of Zach Coxwell. He wasn't the kind of guy who took no for an answer. He'd be back, to argue his case, to try to charm her into agreeing with him. He'd been quite excited about his revision of Cin's plan, after all. Jen couldn't imagine him letting it go.

It was only a matter of time.

Jen was determined to be ready for him. The ruse was over. They were done. She didn't want to see him again. (Well, not officially, anyway.) And she was ready to tell Zach so, bluntly if necessary.

But it seemed that she had called it wrong.

Even though she worked two doubles that weekend—Friday and Saturday—and served brunch on Sunday, even though she glanced up every time the pub door opened, she never caught a glimpse of Zach.

She was sure she'd find him leaning against the door when she emerged from the kitchen with a tray of turkey dinner specials.

She was positive he'd be sitting at the bar, sipping a beer with a perfect head of foam, every time she came into work.

She was certain she'd step off the T and find his little red car idling as he waited to give her a ride home (and a piece of his mind besides).

She sat facing the door of the break room, convinced that he'd appear in the doorway just as she was putting a forkful of turkey special into her mouth.

But Zach didn't show.

Jen couldn't make any sense of this. It was impossible that she'd read him wrong. He was stubborn. He was used to getting what he wanted. He wouldn't give it up that easily.

But then, she'd read him wrong before. He didn't have a flashy car, did he? He didn't just buy things for show, then forget them and buy something else, did he? And he hadn't wanted her to meet his family as his part of the deal.

Maybe she
didn't
know what kind of a guy Zach Coxwell was as well as she thought she did.

Maybe that was why she was curious about him.

No, that couldn't be it.

He must have had family commitments that kept him away for the weekend, although it seemed unlikely that he'd get caught up with family after what he'd said about them.

At that, she started to worry. Maybe Roxanne, his dog, was sick or injured. She halfway thought about calling Zach to find out.

Maybe Zach was sick or injured. Maybe his past had jumped him from behind again and he'd come out with more than a shiner.

She had to visit the yarn store to calm herself down at that thought. She strolled the aisles and fingered the wool and lost her heart to something that could be relied upon to not leave her weeping in a month.

There were a pair of socks in the window of the shop, a pair of socks obviously intended to be worn with Birkenstocks because they had a little cable on the heel that would only show with Birkies. Jen worked her way all around the perimeter of the shop before she could bring herself to really look at them. It was as if she was stalking socks.

Then they were there, right in front her, as soft as a cloud. She touched them and knew that she was a goner. The little cable was even more darling with closer scrutiny, the wool used in the sample showed more variations of greens than she'd thought possible. It was heathery but not fussy; earthy but not boring.

These socks were perfect for Natalie.

Jen hesitated. A pair of socks was a big time commitment: she would have to survive at least another week to finish them.

If she knit furiously.

But her mother would love them, and Christmas was coming, and Jen—filled with a new found appreciation of her family and what they'd done for her—wanted very much to make a pair of socks like this for her mom. Her mom had stood by her and supported her, and taken her to chemo and to radiation and had half-carried her home afterward. Her mom had let her move back home and had loaned her money and never nagged about it.

Maybe Natalie was an angel after all.

When Jen learned that the scrumptious heathered yarn came in a blue, the battle was lost. Blue was Natalie's favorite color. Jen picked up the pattern and the wool and the needles she'd need and paid for it all before she could change her mind. Before her shift that Saturday afternoon, she'd cast on the first sock and had begun to knit like a crazy woman.

Maybe there was a different kind of insanity running in her family.

Jen vowed she would get the socks done before she died, even if she had to knit in the hospital, in the radiation waiting room, in the bathroom while she upchucked everything inside her, in the doctor's office, in palliative care.

Because that was the great terror of Jen's life: that the big C would come back and this time it wouldn't be vanquished and that all the things in her life that she had left undone would never be finished. She didn't want to leave that kind of legacy.

Which was why she knit small fruit.

It was why she had no wool stash, like other compulsive knitters. She'd given all of hers to Teresa when she'd been diagnosed and had never bought more than she needed since. It was too risky. It was an investment that might not pay off. It was betting on a future that might never come.

These socks were the biggest project she had undertaken in over two years. Jen knit at night, she knit in the morning, she knit before her shift and after it and during her break, and slowly, steadily, a sock developed beneath her busy fingers.

By the time she was heading home late Sunday afternoon, Jen had turned the heel of the sock. She was thinking she might finish the first one, but couldn't count on the second.

She was, however, ready to admit that she'd been wrong about Zach's determination to see her. The most probable explanation was that he'd bailed on her, that he'd found another woman who was easier to get along with, that he'd been distracted by a wink and a smile, that he'd thought she was too much trouble (or too slow to jump into bed).

Just like Steve.

Which should have meant that she was relieved to have seen the last of him. It would give her more time to knit.

Instead, Jen found it all a bit depressing. Had she ever met such an unpredictable man? It was kind of interesting to never know what would come next, if occasionally frustrating.