Turn My World Upside Down: Jo's Story (32 page)

“I used to feel that way,” she said, hating that her voice sounded as tremulous as she felt. “I always figured that I’d stay single. After what happened with—” She stopped, shrugged, and let it go. “Doesn’t matter. I just never wanted what other women wanted. I had my job. My family. That was enough.” She lifted her face into a soft kiss of wind and welcomed the warm air. “But it’s not anymore. Now I want more. Now, I want it all.”

“I can’t give you that.” He folded his arms over his chest as if holding himself in place.

“Why the hell not?” Jo swallowed past the knot of emotion jammed in her throat.

“Because I don’t do relationships. They’re too damn painful and I’m not trying it again.”

“What’s this ‘again’ you keep talking about?” God, how was she still standing?

He threw the shop towel onto the ground and stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets. “Remember, once, you asked me if I’d ever been in love?”

“Yeah.”

“I proposed to her. Bought her a ring.”

Jo winced, realizing that the one thing he wouldn’t do for her, he’d done for someone else. Someone who hadn’t wanted him as much as she did.

“I loved her kid, too,” he said, and his eyes softened
in memory. “A boy, about four. She was the widow of my best friend. He was military, killed on a mission.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“It started just as me looking out for her and Davey. Told myself I was doing it for Dave—my friend.” He smiled grimly. “But things changed. I loved her. Loved that kid. And when I asked her to marry me, she said yes. A month before the wedding, my friend came back. Alive.” Cash sighed. “He was in black ops. Military. Went on a covert mission, was listed as dead. Turns out, he was just being held in some sinkhole. He escaped and now he wanted his life back.” His gaze locked on Jo. “She threw the ring at me, said, ‘See ya,’ and left without looking back.”

Jo’s heart ached for him. She knew how he must have felt. Knew what family meant to him. And for him to come so close to having what he’d always wanted only to lose it again must have been awful for him. “Okay, you were hurt. And I’m sorry. But for God’s sake, Cash. She loved her husband and she got a miracle.”

“I know that.” Cash looked at Jo and read sympathy and understanding in her pale blue eyes. The same eyes that had haunted him for days. The eyes that kept him awake at night. The soft jasmine scent of her shampoo drifted to him on the wind and he dragged it into his lungs, trapping it there, holding her close the only way he could now.

Every instinct he possessed urged him to grab her, to bury his face in the curve of her neck and feel the warmth of her steal through him. But he couldn’t. It was already too hard. Harder than it should have been. On both of them.

He focused instead on old pain to keep him from causing new. “I knew it then, too. Didn’t seem to help much. She’d said she loved
me
, too. Still she left. Ripped my heart out to lose her and that boy, Jo.” He steeled himself to meet her gaze. To not look away. “I thought I’d found a family. I hadn’t. No way in hell am I going through that again.”

Jo stepped up to him, laid both hands on his chest, and he swore he could feel her pulse beat right through the palms of her hands. “I’m not asking you to go through that again, Cash.” Shaking her head, she stared up at him and said, “I’m not talking about
leaving
you. I’m talking about
staying
.”

“For now.” He wouldn’t believe. Not again. He’d spent most of his life waiting for people he loved to stay—yet they always left.
Always
. No reason to believe anything had changed.

“You know,” Jo said, taking a step back, lowering her hands. “I just realized something. This whole time, I thought
I
was the one stuck in the past. But it was never really me, Cash. It was
you
.”

He rubbed his chest, still feeling the imprint of her hands. “I’m not
stuck
anywhere,” he said, not sure anymore if he was trying to convince her—or himself.

“Sure you are,” she said on a choked-off laugh that sounded as if it had scraped her throat in its escape. “I tell you I
love
you and you tell me no thanks, because you don’t want to be hurt if I leave you?”

It sounded stupid said out loud like that, but damn it, Cash had the scars to prove that the pain was real. And what he felt for Jo Marconi was so much more than he’d ever felt before—the devastation when he lost her
would be that much more, too. And just like that, his resolve strengthened and his heart iced over, despite how much he wanted her. “I don’t have to explain myself to you, Jo.”

“No, you really don’t,” she said, sniffing just a little and blinking back what he feared was a sheen of tears in her eyes. When a strong woman cried, she could break a man—and Cash felt his insides shake.

“I actually think I’m starting to understand something about you.” She tipped her head to one side and that ponytail swung behind her head, rippling in the wind. “All those women you’ve been with. They all left and you think that proves something, don’t you? That no one will stay.”

“You think it doesn’t?” He kept his gaze off that fall of hair that he wanted to touch so badly.

“I think you spend the night with lonely, unhappy women. I think you
deliberately
choose to sleep with women who would
never
stay with you. That way when they do leave, you’re safe.” She looked up at him, forcing his gaze to meet hers. Forcing him to see what this was doing to her.

“I think they leave because you give them nothing to stay for,” Jo said softly. “They weren’t women to you, they were
causes
.”

“You’re wrong.”
But she’s not
, his brain whispered. The women he’d slept with in the past had all been unhappy. He’d told himself that he’d lived the way he had to protect his own heart. But
had
he been sabotaging himself all along? Making sure that he’d
never
stumble on happiness?

“See,” Jo said, tapping the toe of her boot against
the dirt, sending up tiny dust clouds. “I don’t think so. I think you set yourself up to fail. I think you
like
being alone. Because that way, you never have to
try
. Even the woman you loved was still in love with someone else and you can’t forgive her for that.”

“Bullshit.” His chest was tight, his breath coming in strangled gasps. Her words pushed through his mind and added to the chorus of everything Grace had said to him just the day before. Truth?
No
.

Shaking her head, she gave him a smile filled with regret. “You have one-night stands with women you’d never be interested in for the long haul. Then you hold up their leaving as proof that relationships don’t last.”

“Really?” he reminded her. “Well, I slept with
you
, too.”

“The exception that proves the rule,” Jo said. “And even then, you kept expecting me to get up and walk away. When I didn’t play the game as expected, you practically
threw
me out, with all that talk about ‘healing’ me, just so you could stay in charge.” The toe of her boot stopped tapping and she swung her head to the other side, the ponytail keeping time. “You’re cut off, Cash. You won’t let
anyone
in.”

“I’m not cut off from everything. I’m a part of this town,” he said, trying hard now to show them both that he wasn’t as cold and distant as he was suddenly feeling.

“No you’re not.” She drilled an index finger into his chest. “You stay out here, away from everyone. Even when you’re trying to help—with stunts like the Money Fairy—you do it anonymously. You don’t want to step in and have people count on you. You think
they’ll all let you down, so you make sure they never get the chance to actually do it.”

The music from the workroom soared around them. The ducks on the lake squabbled and squawked and the wind pushed through the trees, rattling new leaves like silken wind chimes.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Cash sighed, stepped around her and stalked toward the workshop. He couldn’t stand there looking at her and
not
touch her. He couldn’t listen to her and not want to defend himself. And damned if he could think of a way to defend his position at the moment.

Naturally, Jo stayed just a step or two behind him.

“I know
exactly
what I’m talking about and we both know it.” She grabbed his arm, her strong fingers digging into his flesh as she jerked him around to face her. “You’re hiding, Cash.”

“Then I’m not doing much of a job,” he pointed out. “
You
keep finding me.”

“You know what I mean.”

Yeah, he did. And a part of him knew she was right. Fine. He had kept himself separate from the town. From the people who might have been his friends. And the women in his life had never meant anything more to him than a few hours of shared pleasure.

But he had reasons for living as he did.

“And what about Jack?”

“Huh?” He blinked down at her.

“He’s just a little boy, Cash,” she said softly, her voice strained. “You became his friend. He
cares
about you. And now you’re shutting him out, too. Why?”

“God, Jo, I could have killed him.” Guilt swamped
him, pushing aside everything else. “I was careless. He was curious and he could have
died
. It’s better to just—”

“Leave?”
she asked, her voice even softer now.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said, shifting his gaze to hers, hoping to read understanding there.

He didn’t. And that fact jabbed at him. Had he done to Jack exactly what adults had done to
him
when he was a kid? God. When had life gotten so damn complicated?

“See, Cash? You leave, too.”

Reaching out for her, he took her by the shoulders and let himself relish, just for a moment, the feel of her beneath his hands again. Then he let her go. “This is
my
choice, Jo.
Mine
. I’ve never had a relationship that worked out and I’m not going to experiment with you.” That was true enough, though except for Diane, he’d never really
tried
to have a real relationship. “I thought we could be friends. Fine. We can’t. So this is where it ends. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You really are an idiot, Cash.”

“Thanks very much.”

“So
what
if things go wrong?” she asked, and her impatience fired a spark of temper in her eyes. “You work through it. You shout, you fight, you make up. That’s
life
. It’s messy. It’s dangerous and it’s
painful
. Nobody’s happy all the time, Cash. If you were, you’d get locked up in a rubber room and shot full of Thorazine. For God’s sake, I was
raped
. My father had an affair while my mother was
dying
. Jack’s a little boy and his mother
died
. Shit happens.

“The way you survive is leaning on the people you
love. Don’t you get it, Cash? Love’s a risk, but it’s the only one worth taking.”

Taking a chance, she held out one hand to him, hoping he’d take it. Hoping he’d believe in them—believe in
her
enough to risk his heart.

He stared at her for so long and so hard, Jo thought that maybe she’d gotten through. Maybe her words had battered away at the wall he’d erected around his heart, his soul.

She understood the fear of pain. Understood wanting to avoid it. But damn it, she was Italian. She could
never
understand turning down a chance at
love
.

“I can’t do it.”

All the air left her as her empty hand fell back to her side. “Can’t or won’t?”

“Doesn’t matter.” A shutter dropped over his eyes, and instead of the pain she’d felt in him a moment ago, now there was just cool detachment. “See, I’d rather lose you now, than later.”

She reached up and snatched her hat off, wanting to throw it to the ground and jump up and down on it in frustration. Her emotions were raw, chafed, and sore. In just a few minutes’ worth of talk, he’d battered a tender heart and ruined a perfectly good daydream of happily ever after. Finally, though, she welcomed a slow burn of anger, warming the chill inside. “Why are you so damn sure you’re going to lose me?”

“Because I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved—except Grace. I want you, Jo, but I won’t risk it. Not even for you. Because if I did and lost you anyway, the pain would kill me.”

“You’re an idiot.”

A sad smile curved his mouth briefly. “You’ve said that before.”

Tears made him blurry, but she fought them back, refusing to let him see her cry. Her mouth worked as she battled for control and she didn’t speak again until she was sure her voice wouldn’t break as neatly as her heart had.

“Yeah, but this is the first time I’ve really meant it.” Sadly, she turned for her truck and paused with one hand on the door handle. Turning to look back at him one last time, she whispered, “I guess Mike was right after all. You
don’t
deserve me.”

At the Stevenson job, Hank Marconi stood back to take a long look at the cement slab being poured. His sub-contractor, Reilly Concrete, didn’t need any help, but Hank preferred keeping an eye on things.

Maybe, he thought, if he’d been paying closer attention over the years, he might have been able to find a way to help Josefina earlier. If he’d opened his eyes, he might have noticed that there was something going on between Cash and Jo without having to be told by a ten-year-old boy.

But, he thought, folding his hands atop a shovel handle and resting his chin on them, like Grace always said, things happen when they’re supposed to. He wasn’t sure he believed that entirely, but it was more comforting than sorting over your mistakes.

“Henry?”

Surprise jolted him, but he straightened up and turned around, already smiling as he watched Grace approach. Amazing that just hearing her voice could make him feel like a teenager again. His palms went
damp, his heartbeat quickened, and his stomach jumped with excitement.

He walked to meet her, holding out one hand to help her make her way across a minefield of construction tools. She was small and perfect. From her neatly styled hair to the designer shoes on her tiny feet. He was a lucky man and he knew it. He’d found
real
love, twice in a single lifetime.