Trouble Me: A Rosewood Novel (48 page)

As Rob lowered his lean frame onto the twill cushion beside her, Jade drew a breath to calm her heartbeat, which, from the second she found Rob and Hayley on her doorstep, had been pounding madly.

Her attempt failed, for just then Rob reached for her, his fingers cupping her chin. “We’ll talk, but first I need to do this,” he murmured, and lowered his mouth to hers.

His kiss was gentle and so very sweet. Jade felt those absurd tears well in her eyes again. Slowly, Rob raised his head and smiled with a tenderness that was as moving as his kiss. “I missed you, Jade.”

“Me too,” she whispered as happiness flooded her. She had a second chance; she couldn’t blow it. Taking his hand, she linked her fingers through his. “Rob, I have so much to tell you. But first: the petition you presented
to the school board—thank you. I can’t believe you did that for me.” She swallowed. “I was so scared that you’d never want to see me again after hearing about my column—”

“Shh.” He placed a finger to her lips. “I’ve already read a lot of your pieces. They’re great.”

“You read my articles? How did you get hold of them?”

He shrugged. “I guess I could have found them in your college paper’s archives, but your sisters saved me the trouble.”

“Jordan and Margot gave them to you?” The question came out a squeak of surprise. “When?”

“Monday evening. They tracked me down to the gym where I was working out with Scott and Emma and told me what was going on. Jordan gave me a whole packet of your articles she’d printed out. Jade, those pieces you wrote were damned good. You addressed a lot of serious topics that young people need to know when they start exploring their sexuality. And you did a great job answering readers’ questions. The tone was all you, sweetheart, a perfect combination of openness, humor, and understanding. You should be proud of yourself.”

If Jade hadn’t already been in love with Rob, hearing the clear admiration in his voice for her college-newspaper writing would have likely served as the tipping point. She leaned forward to nuzzle the warm column of his neck and breathe in his familiar scent.

“Yeah, but you may be biased.”

She felt the rumble of laughter against her lips and opened her mouth against his neck as if she might drink the joyful sound in.

“Guilty as charged. I’m utterly crazy about you.” He raised her chin to bring her mouth to his, kissing her more thoroughly this time, his tongue sweeping past her lips to dance with hers. She returned the kiss with a
matching fervor, glorying in the passion that rose effortlessly between them.

A part of her wanted nothing more than to continue kissing Rob until they were naked and rolling across her bed and he was entering her body in strong, powerful thrusts, each stroke bringing her closer to a shattering climax. And as she felt his pace quicken to reach his own release, as he drove as deep into her body as possible, she would clench him tightly, so tightly that it would feel as though they were one.

But for that union to be real, she had to give him more than her body.

Placing her hands on either side of his face, she ended the kiss with a caress to the five-o’clock shadow darkening the lean planes of his cheeks.

Lowering her hands, she said, “Rob, I need to tell you about Greg Hammond.”

She felt the shift in him, the wary tension that invaded. This is what her mother must have experienced tenfold, Jade realized, when she’d explained to Jade’s father about Dr. Myszkiewicz.

“Do you mean the guy who called you on Sunday?”

“Yes. The reason I got so uptight about him—so uptight that I decided it would be better to break up with you rather than reveal who he was—well, it’s that Greg Hammond is a private investigator. I hired him to discover the identity of the man I thought had been having an affair with my mom before she and my dad died.”

“Jesus, Jade.” There was no missing the shock in his voice.

She sighed. “Yeah. It’s a long, crazy story. Basically it’s this: Dad found a journal in which Mom wrote about a guy she called TM. He mistakenly assumed Mom’s lover was Travis Maher, so he fired Travis from Rosewood Farm. Then Mom and Dad died in the plane crash, and Margot came home. She rehired Travis because she
needed him to help run the farm or there would have been no way to save Rosewood from bankruptcy. Then she came across the diary in Dad’s office desk, and of course she reached the same conclusion that Dad had. Luckily, Travis didn’t have much trouble setting her straight, telling her what he couldn’t say to Dad. He’d have never fooled around with Mom for a zillion reasons, the first being that he’d been in love with Margot for years.

“Unfortunately, neither Margot nor Travis had any idea who this TM could be. So Margot showed the diary to Jordan, and that’s how I came upon it. I was in her closet looking for a ratcatcher—that’s a riding shirt we wear to horse shows,” she explained when he frowned at the term. “And I found it under a pile of clothes. Immediately recognizing Mom’s handwriting, I read it.”

“When was that?”

“About a week before you busted me at the Den. Reading my mom’s journal made me go a little off the deep end. The journal had other stuff in it besides what she wrote about TM, quite a few angry rants against me. It was all pretty upsetting, and when I’m upset I tend to get a bit self-destructive.” The corner of her mouth hitched upward at her massive understatement.

Before she knew what he was doing, Rob had lifted her across his lap. Wrapping his arms about her waist, he pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “You might have had just cause. Jesus, this is an incredible story. Go on, sweetheart.”

For a moment she remained silent and simply savored the care he was showing her. It felt so wonderful to be in the shelter of his embrace. She understood that the only way to earn the right to remain there was through honesty.

“I don’t know whether you knew my dad, but I guess I’m a lot like him. I couldn’t let go of what I read in
Mom’s diary. So after graduation, when I knew I was coming back to Rosewood, I decided to hire an investigator to find out once and for all who TM was. Enter Greg Hammond.”

“How’d you find this Greg Hammond?”

“Um, on the Internet.”

“What?” Every muscle in his body tightened in outrage. “Jesus Christ, Jade, you know what kind of predators are out there—”

“Greg was legit. I checked him out. And he’s a good guy, Rob, not creepy at all—I actually have an extremely reliable creep monitor. But the important thing here is, Greg
found
TM for me. That’s what the call on Sunday was about. He’d located him and wanted to know whether I wanted to arrange a meeting with him. Of course, the timing of Greg’s call couldn’t have been worse. I guess you overheard enough of it to get suspicious—”

“I was jealous.”

She leaned over to give him a quick hard kiss. “I forgive you. But I couldn’t tell you about Greg, because I knew you’d be upset and go all RoboCop on me. You’ve got to understand, confronting TM was, well, it was something I had to do. Too many questions had been eating at me for years. But, Rob, there’s another reason I balked at telling you.”

“And what reason was that, Jade?” he asked.

This close, she couldn’t evade the laserlike intensity of his gaze or brush off what she’d just said with some meaningless, witty remark.
Courage
, she reminded herself.

“Do you remember when I told you that I felt like you were boxing me in?”

At his slow nod, she felt her insides knot with the fear that, in spite of everything, she was going to screw this up with the next words she uttered.

“Well, in part I said that in order to push you away so you’d stop asking about Greg, but there was also some truth in it. Rob, this is the first serious, the first
real
, relationship I’ve had. Things between us became so intense so quickly, I panicked. Can you understand that?”

She waited for his response and, as the silence lengthened, her heart seemed to stop beating.

“Yes, I can understand. And you’re right, Jade,” he said quietly.

“What?” She shifted in his lap to stare at him. “I mean—”

“You’re right about how I would’ve reacted when you told me about Greg Hammond. I would have done everything I could to convince you not to go with him and meet TM. It’s possible I’d have been so bound and determined to prevent you that I’d have overlooked an obvious solution—that I accompany you both.” His mouth lifted in a half smile. “But even if I’d had the wits to suggest it, I’d have probably tried to browbeat you into agreeing. Stubborn as you are, you’d have refused.”

Jade smiled. “That sounds kind of like me.”

“And kind of like me.” His lips brushed her hair. “I’m sorry I was pressuring you. I haven’t had that many relationships either. But I do know what I feel for you and that it’s real—because I’ve been lucky to feel this once before.”

He brought his hands to her face and gazed deeply into her eyes. “I’m in love with you, Jade. I can’t help but want you in my life—and Hayley’s. Just tell me when I’m going too fast for you or crowding you. Hearing it may hurt, but I’ll try to understand.”

“Oh, Rob, I love you too.” Flinging her arms about his neck, she brought her mouth to his and poured all her joy and relief into her kiss.

His deep groan answered her. Then he was devouring
her lips with a passion that set her head spinning, whirling with happiness and desire.

At last they surfaced for air, both of them panting. Jade knew that her eyes must be shining as brightly as Rob’s.

His hand stroked her hair, toying with its ends. With a playful tug he asked, “So while I’m digesting all this, mind explaining what you meant by my ‘going all RoboCop’?”

She felt a blush cover her face, right to the roots of the hair he’d tugged. “RoboCop was my nickname for you. You may not realize it, but you’re a pretty terrifying figure decked out in your uniform, police cap, and aviators. But—and you’re the first person I’ve ever admitted this to—because of you I’ve harbored a secret crush on Peter Weller for years.”

He grinned and settled her back against the hard wall of his chest. “Remind me to come by in my uniform tomorrow. So tell me about this TM. Who is he? Did he admit to being your mother’s lover?”

“You won’t believe it. I didn’t. It turned out that the man Greg tracked down was Mom’s psychologist. His name is Tomasz Myszkiewicz. He’d been helping Mom deal with some of her problems—one of them being yours truly,” she added with a sad smile.

“You and your mom didn’t get along?”

“We did for a long time, but then things changed. She began acting as if overnight I’d turned into a scheming, vicious brat. What haunted me about her diary, besides the fact that she made it sound as if she’d found the love of her life in this TM guy, was the sort of things she wrote about me. I wanted to know what could have possibly made this man so special that he became the center of her life at Dad’s and my expense.” Her voice dropped. “My mom’s attitude before she died hurt a lot, but after finding her diary and reading and rereading
those entries, I came to loathe her. In my mind she was weak and careless with love. On Monday, everything changed. I learned how brave she actually was. The reason she wrote about Dr. Myszkiewicz as if she adored him was because he was helping her deal with the problems she’d come to recognize were destroying the most important relationships in her life. Rob, I bolted out of Dr. Myszkiewicz’s office intending to find you and tell you everything. I wanted to show the same courage it must have taken my mom to confess to my dad that she’d been seeing a psychologist.”

“You think he had no idea she’d been consulting a therapist?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It would never have occurred to him. They simply weren’t the sort of people to admit to having problems of any sort. For instance, my dad never faced the fact that they were living way beyond their means after he’d lost a ton of money in bad investments.”

“I didn’t hear from you on Monday.”

Jade shook her head. “No. Because I got a call from Ted Guerra, asking me to come to his office. When he informed me that I might be fired because of the articles I wrote, I didn’t want you and Hayley mixed up in the ugliness of the town’s latest scandal, one where I again had a starring role. And I was sure that after our fight you wouldn’t want to be involved with me. When Hayley didn’t show up to her lesson on Tuesday, my worst fear was confirmed—that you’d decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. Being fired from my job at school was nothing compared to losing you.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” His fingers slipped under her sweater to caress her bare skin, traveling up and down her spine, soothing the tension in her muscles until she felt like putty beneath his hands. “I should have come by last night. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more than
to see you and hold you in my arms like this, but I’d spent all afternoon at a multi-vehicle crash site, helping to pull out bodies—some injured and too many dead—from the wreckage. When I picked up Hayley at my parents’ place, her throat was still red and I knew I had to take her home and get her into bed or I’d risk her getting even sicker.”

She ran her lips along the length of his jaw. “You did the right thing. You’re a great dad.”

The corners of his mouth creased in a smile at her compliment. “Thanks. Hayley’s been everything to me. It’s amazing to have someone else to care about as much again, which is why it was a good thing I went home instead of coming here last night. It gave me a chance to telephone more parents about signing the petition we presented to the board, though it wasn’t hard convincing people to sign it. By then most everyone had read Eric Drogan’s editorial.”

“Eric Drogan? He was the man you were with at Roxie’s, right? He wrote something about me?”

“Yeah. You mean you didn’t read his editorial?”

She shook her head. “No. When Ted mentioned that there’d been something about me in the paper, I assumed it was negative. I couldn’t bring myself to read it.”

“It’s up on the paper’s website. I’ll show it to you later. By the way, Eric told me that he’d like you to do some articles for the
Courier
. And you’ll definitely want to look at the paper tomorrow. He was at the school this afternoon with a photographer to cover the board meeting. Should be quite a story. And if the photographer caught the expression on Nonie Harrison’s face when your sister Margot was talking to her, the picture should be priceless.”