Rules of Entanglement (18 page)

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Shoot.”

“Where did you get the idea for your rules?”

She stiffened in his arms and the lazy patterns she’d been drawing on his chest with her nail stopped. “I told you I won’t talk about it.”

“So you did.” He continued stroking her arm until he felt her relax again. “What’s the deal with the starfish?”

“Sea star.”

“Whatever,” he said, feeling a wave of déjà vu.

“But they’re not fish, so it’s inaccurate.”

“Well, they’re not stars, either.” He immediately wanted to smack himself upside the head. He was making light of something that obviously held meaning for her. He wouldn’t like it if she made fun of him for inking his body with flowers.

To his surprise, though, she let out a short giggle and a, “Touché,” yet again keeping him on his toes. Every time he thought he knew what to expect, she proved him wrong. He liked that.

“So what’s the story?” he asked.

“Why does there have to be one?”

“Every tattoo has a story. Even if it’s, ‘I got bored, walked into a parlor, and pointed at the first pretty thing I saw.’”

She didn’t respond for five back and forths of the hammock. He figured it was another topic not up for discussion.

“In high school, we had a unit on ocean life in science. The teacher talked about all different types of sea creatures. So many of them had features that were truly remarkable, but when she got to the sea stars I became fascinated with them.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re small with soft, vulnerable underbellies, so the tops are tough with tiny spines that protect them from predators. And if that isn’t enough, they’re able to drop one of their arms—literally leave a piece of them behind—so they can escape. It takes a long time, but eventually they grow a new arm to replace the one they lost.”

She’d only listed facts. No different than reading a paragraph out of a
National Geographic
article. And yet, it wasn’t hard for him to read between the lines. “You relate to them.”

Jax felt her tense briefly, and then relax herself piece by piece, like it was an exercise she practiced often. “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”

He thought as much. Her admission was a crack in her resolve to push him away. But he didn’t want a hairline fissure. He wanted her to open to him completely. To trust him with her secrets so that maybe she could unload some of them and feel a little lighter for doing so.

Who the fuck are you kidding? You’re the pot to her kettle.

Taking a deep breath, Jax said something he’d sworn to himself he’d never say to anyone for as long as he lived.

“I was adopted. It’s the reason I moved here—to find my birth parents. It took several years, but eventually I learned that my birth mother got pregnant by a man staying on the island for business for several months. He left somewhere in her third trimester and never came back. So she gave me up for adoption. I found out she died from some sort of infection the year before I came here.”

“Jackson, I’m so sorry. Lucie never told me.”

“That’s because she doesn’t know. No one does.”

Her head angled up so she could look at him, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He couldn’t. A deafening silence surrounded them. Even the waves seemed to pause and the palms above them no longer swayed as Vanessa processed the fact that his own sister didn’t know the most vital piece of information about him. The sound of his heart beat in his ears, its tempo increasing the longer she failed to respond in some way.

“I don’t understand. Why would your parents have kept it a secret from her?”

“They kept it a secret from both of us. I didn’t find out until after the accident when I found the adoption paperwork.” He let out a mirthless chuckle. “Of course, how I didn’t come to the conclusion on my own I’ll never know. Physically speaking, I’m nothing like them and Lucie.”

Her brow furrowed. “After all these years, why haven’t you told Lucie?”

“In the beginning, I didn’t want to add more to the pile of crap she already had to deal with. She’d just lost both of her parents at a crucial age and wound up being raised by her barely legal older brother. Saying, ‘Oh by the way, I’m not really your brother,’ didn’t feel right. I mean, I couldn’t even wrap
my
head around it, so how could I expect her to?”

“But it’s been more than fifteen years since your parents died, so why not tell her later?”

Jax scrubbed his free hand over his face and then shoved it under his head as he let out a heavy exhale. “I don’t know. Every time I thought about telling her I just…couldn’t.”

His throat closed up and the stars began to blur. Swallowing hard to get past the lump, he blinked a few times until the world came back into focus. He hated talking about this. Hated how weak it made him sound. But he couldn’t expect Vanessa to let him in if he stayed locked down like Fort Knox. So he sucked it up and continued to verbalize the things that until now had only lived in his head.

“I guess I felt like I’d already lost my status as a son to my parents. Lucie’s all I’ve got left in the world. She means everything to me. I couldn’t handle it if she didn’t think of me as her brother anymore.”

“Jackson, look at me.” When he didn’t move, she palmed the side of his face and coaxed him to turn his head. “Lucie would never in a million years look at you any differently than she always has. As her big brother who took care of, protected, and loved her with all his heart.
That
’s who you are to Lucie, no matter what your DNA says.”

His knee-jerk reaction was to argue with her—or at least agree to disagree—but the conviction of her statement stared back at him from the depths of her eyes. So instead he dipped his head and captured her lips for a kiss meant as a thank-you and a punctuation mark on the topic. He didn’t regret opening up to her, but now he needed some time to let the open wound scab over.

Vanessa settled back into his side, tucking her head between his neck and shoulder again. The hammock was close enough to their privacy fence that he could reach it with his fingers, so he gave them a tiny push, closed his eyes, and tried not to think about what he’d just revealed about himself to a woman he barely knew.

He didn’t know how long they lay like that, but he guessed it was long enough for her to fall asleep. She hadn’t moved and her breaths were even. So he was lucky he didn’t accidentally flip them over when she spoke unexpectedly.

“
NCIS
.”

Jax gave his heart a minute to regulate and made a mental note to spank her later for nearly causing him to go into arrest. “What’s
NCIS
?”

“It’s one of those crime dramas on TV. You know, like
CSI
, but it’s based on the Navy unit.”

“Oh, right. What about it?”

“That’s where I came up with the idea for my rules.”

His eyes flew open, but he didn’t move a muscle. Now she had his attention. The question was, how much would she open up to him? He genuinely wanted to know what made her tick. Why she was so caught up in her rules that she refused to even bend on them most times. Not wanting to push the issue, he remained quiet and waited for her to reveal more.

“See, the main character’s wife had these rules that she liked to use. He thought it was cute and endearing. But then she was killed, along with their only daughter, and he became a tortured individual who carried on her rules and then added to them over the years. By the time the show starts, he already has some forty plus that he teaches his agents as life lessons.”

“So you saw the show and liked the idea so much that you made up your own?” He might not know her very well, but what little he did know of her didn’t match up with such an impulsive act. “No offense, V, but that seems a little extreme.”

“Yeah, well, when you’ve had an entire bottle of tequila by yourself after having a particularly shitty conversation with your mother, lots of extreme things tend to sound surprisingly normal.”

Very carefully, Jax situated himself in the hammock on his side so he could look into her eyes as they talked. With her head resting on the inside of his bicep and their bodies naturally falling into the middle, they were as close as they could get without removing the sheet covering her from breasts to hips.

He tucked a stray curl behind her ear and let it glide through his fingertips. “From what I understand, every girl goes through a time in her life when she butts heads with her mom.”

Her bitter laugh made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and the tone in her voice was flat with a knife’s edge. She stared straight ahead at his chest, but he knew she saw something else. Something in her past. “I would’ve given anything to have the stereotypical misunderstandings and petty fights over what I had.”

Initially, it’d been simple curiosity about what made her tick that prompted his questions. Then it turned into a challenge because she refused to tell him and made him agree to ridiculous stipulations. Later, the incident at the gym left him unsettled about the reason she reacted so strongly to him punching a guy who deserved it. But now something that felt a lot like the need to protect spread through his chest.

The warning bell sounded in his head. It was the bell that told him he was about to end the playful wrestling session he’d been having with Vanessa and step into the cage with her demons.

He always listened to that bell.

It warned him when things were about to get too serious. When there was a chance he was walking into a situation he had no chance of winning. And right now it told him if he went any further, there was a damn good chance he’d get beaten to a bloody pulp.

He
always
listened to that bell.

Jackson used his finger under her chin to angle her face up to his, then waited patiently for her to meet his gaze. Looking into her haunted green depths, he decided the bell could go fuck itself.

“Tell me.”

…

His eyes were in shadow, yet she knew their intensity matched that of his command. A command that reached into her very core and knocked on the walls she’d constructed around her past. Was she really considering letting him in? A virtual stranger?

“Hey.” Jackson’s fingers trailed a soft path over her cheek before tunneling into her hair just enough to give his thumb the freedom to continue a back-and-forth caress on the side of her face. “It’s okay. Nothing you tell me leaves this hammock. I swear it.”

People had said similar things to her before, but their words had rung hollow in her ears, whether they’d meant them or not. She’d learned at a young age that just because people made promises didn’t mean they would keep them.

But Jackson’s declaration was different. He said it with such strength and sincerity. It was then Vanessa realized he was no stranger. Despite only knowing him for three days, she felt she truly knew him. Not in the sense of knowing all his habits and favorite things. But more in the sense of knowing who he was as a person. Without a doubt she knew he was loyal and honorable. And no matter if they ended up despising each other tomorrow, he would never repeat anything she told him tonight.

Focusing on the hollow of his throat, she took a shaky breath and a leap of faith.

“My biological father left when I was six and my sister, Kat, was barely three. I don’t remember him, and my mother never talked about him other than to bitch about the debt he left us in. She worked three different waitressing jobs to try and keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. But she wasn’t a robot, and it was only a few months before the stress and lack of sleep started to really get to her. That’s when one of the girls she worked with introduced her to coke.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It kept her awake and gave her tons of energy, but it also gave her an addiction, and sometimes scoring another bag took precedence over that week’s groceries.

“By the time I was eight she’d abandoned the workforce for a lucrative career as a stay-at-home prostitute for her dealer. So instead of her having to worry about a babysitter, all her Johns came to our apartment at all hours of the day and night. I can remember Kat and me playing with our toys on the living room floor as they snorted their lines before taking care of business in her bedroom.”

“Damn. That had to have been a nightmare for you and your sister.”

“No, not really. Those were the times when things were still fairly decent. I mean, even though my mom was drugged-out more often than not, she was still pretty conscientious of her kids. For the most part, she wasn’t too bad at taking care of the essentials, and she never let any of her clients go anywhere near us. But then she married Carl.”

“Who’s Carl?”

“Originally he was one of my mom’s regulars. For years he tried talking her into leaving her dealer-pimp for him, but since he wasn’t much better off than we were, my mom couldn’t justify it. Then his grandmother died and left him her house and a ton of money. Needless to say, the next time he made the proposal, my mom had a change of heart.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“So what happened after you moved in with him?”

She shrugged her shoulder, not knowing how to put her past into words that wouldn’t cause him to look on her with pity. “On the plus side, my mom stopped hooking. But the longer we lived with Carl, the more controlling he became. And when he drank—which was more often than not—he liked using his fist if he thought anyone even looked at him wrong. I did my best to keep Kat out of their way. It wasn’t often, but if Carl set his sights on her, I’d provoke him so I got the brunt of it. I made sure we got to school, stayed on her to get good grades, and signed us up for any activities that kept us out of the house as much as possible.”

“Sounds to me like your sister was extremely lucky you were there for her.”

“But I wasn’t. Not always.” Vanessa swallowed, trying to prevent her throat from closing up. “My senior year, Carl was arrested for possession of cocaine. He had some priors so they sentenced him for six years. We were finally safe. That was a good eight months. Kat even started coming out of her shell more.”