Project Virgin (26 page)

He didn’t know why it felt as if he had.

She looked at him for a long time, her hazel eyes level on his. She reached over and took the handle of her bag from him, and he let her.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said, in her even, professional voice he decided he deeply loathed. He wasn’t Amos Burke, known eccentric, who required
careful handling. He wasn’t even that loser fiancé of hers.

You aren’t anything to her,
a voice reminded him, and he hated that, too.

“Michaela.”

“That was the most educational snowstorm I’ve ever been trapped in.” Her lips curved, but it wasn’t a smile. And it didn’t go near her eyes. “It’s also the only snowstorm I’ve ever been trapped in.”

“Don’t.”

That curve faded away, and still she
looked at him as if she could see all kinds of things in him he’d hide if he could, and Jesse would have given anything to do this differently. To be someone else. To forget about all the promises he’d made to himself and all the fury he’d carted around inside of him for the past three years.

But he couldn’t do it.

She wasn’t free and he wasn’t that guy, and no amount of standing around on a
sidewalk in downtown Seattle was going to change that. She’d betrayed her fiancé and he’d betrayed himself, and that was the only truth that mattered.

It was the only truth he could accept.

“Thank you,” she said again, softer this time, and Jesse had the sense she knew exactly what was going through his head. That she could read all those twisted things in him as easily as a street sign. That
she knew him inside and out, which was as silly as the rest of what had happened between them.

There was no wild fire. There was no
knowing
a stranger like that.

There were only excuses. Sex and lies and rationalizations to make sense of it all, to make people think they’d had no choice when choices were exactly what they’d had, and they’d made bad ones.

And if there was one thing Jesse refused
to tolerate, it was excuses. From himself or anyone else.

He didn’t say goodbye.

He walked away from Michaela like the total stranger he was to her and would remain, no matter that tightness in his chest. He climbed into the SUV and he drove away and he didn’t let himself look back.

No matter how it scraped at him—no matter that it felt like a whole lot more than a simple scrape, like it might
take him to his knees if he let it—Jesse didn’t look back at all.

‡

T
he drive back
to Marietta sucked.

Jesse had sorted out the problem at his job site with the usual mix of threats and promises and a few good beers, threw a different set of t-shirts and jeans into his duffel, and then headed back out toward Montana early on Thursday morning.

He told himself he was fine.
Great.
He’d
been telling himself that for two days. Because why shouldn’t he be great?

But there was no denying the fact he grew edgier when he hit his beloved Rockies. He was tense when he crossed the Montana state line. He moved into what could only be called a black mood when he sped past Missoula and then he found himself driving by that damned motel that didn’t even appear on the map, and he didn’t
know what the hell he was at that point.

Lost,
he thought a while later, though he knew exactly where he was. He knew these enduring mountains, this wide-open sky, as well as he knew his own hands and the things they could do. He knew the curve of the Interstate as it dipped toward Bozeman. He knew Montana like the native he was.

Geographically, he really was fine. He was a Grey and that meant
he had the map of his ancestors imprinted on his body at the genetic level. His people had walked across the top of this young country, those endless forests and rolling plains, to set themselves up at the foot of a mountain that never did produce the copper they’d dreamed about. They’d settled there instead of returning to their limited prospects in Boston and they were there still. Jesse had
told himself he was just carrying out the same old Grey family tradition when he’d left Billings at eighteen to set off for college with no intention whatsoever of returning, to his hometown or his father.

But the thing about most pioneers was that if things had been okay where they’d started—if they’d had decent fathers of their own, as an example—they probably would have stayed put. Jesse knew
he was no exception. And then it occurred to him, as the sun was setting and he passed the turn off for Big Sky and his grandparents’ place nestled there in the hills of the famous ski resort that had grown around it, that he’d let his father define every last thing he did. Why he’d left home for Seattle. Why he’d never returned, not even to a different part of Montana. Why he’d been determined
to build his own company, just like Billy had, but having nothing to do with the business he knew Billy had wanted to keep in the family and would have loved to one day pass on to his son.

Hadn’t Jesse chosen Angelique in part because he’d figured she was exactly the kind of woman two-bit Billy dreamed he could get, yet couldn’t? It had never occurred to Jesse that Billy
could
steal his girlfriend.
Had he been heartbroken all this time? Or was that just his pride, still smarting all these years later?

And all of that crap had gone down over Christmas three years back, but Billy had still ruled everything Jesse did. From how Jesse spent his holidays to how he’d handled his personal life ever since. And worst of all, to Jesse’s way of thinking, Billy had invaded his head in that motel room
with Michaela two days ago, too, making Jesse stop when all he’d wanted was to keep going.

Had he really thought he was betraying a sacred trust with himself by touching her?

Or had he been more worried that if he surrendered to a woman he couldn’t refuse, no matter what her relationship status, he would be forced to cede the moral high ground when it came to his stance against his father?

Jesse didn’t know what he hated more. That he had to ask himself the question at all—or that even when he did, he didn’t know how to answer it.

Though when he kept driving, straight past Marietta and headed east toward Billings, he suspected that deep down, he had a pretty good idea about the answer, after all.

It only took another couple of hours to reach the city he’d grown up in. Jesse turned
off the Interstate and drove through his hometown with the usual sense of disbelief he’d ever lived here mixed with amazement at how little it seemed to have changed in his absence. But this time, that peculiar homecoming feeling was tempered with something else he couldn’t quite define.

The city lights spread out before him as he headed toward his father’s house, obscuring the practical city’s
more industrial aspects or at least blurring them in the dark and giving them a ghostly, desolate beauty. It was quieter than he remembered it, this late on a weekday winter’s night. The refineries blew smoke against the hardscrabble city buildings, gleaming gold against the cold, while the snow-packed Rim rocks sat like solid and inevitable sentries, crowned with red-lit radio towers.

As he
drove through the looming walls of snow the snowplows had left behind on their last pass, he found himself grinning slightly, and it hit him. This was home, whether he liked it or not, this pragmatic, rough-edged town that could never quite transcend its working class soul. And much as he’d spent his life pretending otherwise, he hadn’t sprung into being when he’d set foot on the University of Washington
campus in Seattle. He’d been raised right here, a part of this matter-of-fact place hunkered down against the big sky and the wide plains. This was where he’d learned that some beautiful things weren’t necessarily obvious to the casual observer, that some things rewarded a little dedication and patience, like the sun reaching over the Rims in otherwise desolate winters. This was where he’d
learned what hard work was and how not to fear the doing of it, an inbred local reality that had set him apart from his college classmates and had served him well ever since.

Fight it he had, for years now, but this was where he came from. In a very real sense, he realized then, Seattle was who he aspired to be—but Billings was who he was, down deep in his bones.

He turned that over and over
in his head as he made his way along the mostly deserted streets toward his father’s house. It was the same house Jesse had grown up in, though Billy had renovated it several times over the years, so it was now very much in the height of the popular nouveau ranch style. High ceilings and alder wood and a grand two story stone façade that was Billy’s way of proclaiming his successes to his neighbors.

And then Jesse was sitting there in the driveway to this house he swore he’d never set foot in again, having no idea what the hell he was doing here instead of two hours west in Marietta, where he belonged. He had Michaela in his head like some kind of better angel, gazing at him with those bright hazel eyes of hers, making him wish he was the kind of man who could have claimed her when he’d had
the chance. When she’d wanted him to. When he’d been stuck here instead.

Suck it up, princess,
he growled at himself, and then he was out of the car and headed for the door.

The cold was a good thing. The cold felt like reason as it stung his exposed face, and he felt his tension ease down at least three degrees—to match the plummeting temperature, he imagined—as he rang the ostentatious bell
his younger sister Scottie, in her usual lawyer-sharp way, had once called
Dad’s mating cry.

And then the great door swung open, and Angelique stood before him, and there was no pretending he wasn’t standing here, doing this.

Jesse didn’t know who was more uncomfortable in that first moment, his ex-girlfriend or him.

She was staring at him in shock, so he had more than enough time to process
the fact that she wasn’t quite what he’d expected. Gone was the full face of makeup, and all the mascara that had always highlighted her pale blue eyes. Gone was the darker hair dye to call more attention to the contrast between its glossy blackness and those eyes. Her hair was a rich brown pulled back into a haphazard ponytail now, and her face was scrubbed clean. She was beautiful, of course—she
would always be beautiful—but this was an Angelique he’d never seen before, in cargo pants and a simple white shirt.

“Jesse,” she said, as if her voice didn’t quite work or she thought she might be seeing things. Then she cleared her throat. “What… What are you…?” She blinked hard, then stepped back into the house, beckoning him in. “Come in. Come in—I mean, if you want…” She looked over her
shoulder helplessly, then back at him. “Your dad is here. If that’s why…?”

The Angelique he’d known had never been at a loss for words. Then again, he’d made her so much the Wicked Witch of the West in his head he realized he’d half-expected her to be green and covered in warts. So maybe he didn’t know her at all anymore. Not really.

“You look good,” he said quietly. And she did, if different.
He forced himself to say the obvious thing, because it was true and because the only reason not to say it was sheer pettiness. “Happy.”

She swallowed. Hard. To her credit, she didn’t look away.

“I am,” she said. Then, in a rush, “Jesse, I’m so sorry that came at your expense. So very sorry. We both are.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “I appreciate that.”

Angelique took a breath. “If
there was a way we could go back and do this in a way that didn’t hurt you, we would. I want you to know that. No matter why you’re here.”

And he supposed he should be glad she didn’t regret that it had happened, only the way it had. Because maybe it would be worse to have been betrayed like this for something that didn’t matter. He opened his mouth to tell her that.

“Why
are
you here?”

That
voice was as familiar to him as his own. Jesse looked past Angelique, down the length of the great foyer that was all arched wood and skylights in sheer defiance of the dizzying Montana heating bills, to see his father for the first time in over three years.

Billy stood in the doorway to the family room, flanked by two little girls in pigtails and pouts, each of them clinging to one of his legs
and blinking toward Jesse with identically wide, shy eyes. The girls were adorable. Billy, meanwhile, looked exactly the same and yet older at the same time. He dressed like a man who was pushing fifty rather than sixty, in a dark Henley and that spiky dark hair of his, with a hint of a beard as an accent. Jesse supposed he was good-looking, though he hated admitting it. There was more grey in
the old man’s dark hair now, Jesse was pleased to note, and more lines around his eyes. And Billy stood there very straight and very defensive, a hand on each of his daughter’s heads, as if he expected Jesse to start swinging at any moment.

“No fatted calf, Dad?” Jesse asked mildly. “That hurts a little.”

“You want beef,” Billy replied in a similar tone—or maybe not a
similar
tone, Jesse thought
with some surprise, maybe it was
the same exact
tone, like he’d inherited it from Billy—“there’s a new hamburger place a few miles back down the road toward town. You’ll love it. It’s in a hotel where, bonus, they can also put you up while you take care of your business here. Whatever that is.”