Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense)(31)

It’s close, too. My shoulder almost rubs up against Jack’s as he stretches his legs out in front of him.

“Seat belts,” Uncle Rod says before Jack closes the door.

Jack eases the car out of the workshop and stops. Uncle Rod stands behind us, waving. I turn and lean my arm out to wave back, and Jack beeps the horn.

As Jack navigates the twisting turns to the base of the hill, he says, “He loves you.”

“Yeah. He’s a lot like my dad.”

“You okay? You’re choking up.”

“I miss him.”

“Yeah, I do, too. I think he liked me. I liked him.”

“He did like you. I know dads are supposed to be all creepy about their teenage daughters but he always encouraged me to go out with you more.”

Jack lets out a deep sigh. “Your family is so cool. My father hasn’t ever been anything to me but an * pushing me around and telling me what to do. He liked you before the accident, I guess. He said you were ‘really solid’, whatever that means.”

I snort. “Yeah, that’s what a gawky teenage girl wants to hear. You’re really solid. Who talks like that?”

“A pompous * that thinks he’s somebody important because his dad was.”

“Your grandfather?”

“Yeah.”

Jack stops at the base of the hill and takes a long time looking before he pulls out.

“Should I put in your mom’s address?”

“Not yet, let’s just drive a bit. I know the way. I’m pretty sure Arizona is in a westerly direction.”

“We’ll be in Ohio soon.”

“Yeah.”

“You never talked about your grandfather. Did you know him?”

“Yeah, he died when I was eight. I think my dad was waiting for it before he divorced my mom. It was like six months later.”

“Did they fight?”

He shrugs. “Yes, all the time.”

“What about?”

Jack goes quiet for a minute. “Me.”

“You?”

“She wanted him to spend more time with me. She fired all the nannies he hired, stuff like that. I don’t think she liked having servants and stuff. I don’t like it, either. It’s sick how people treat you like you’re better than everybody just because you have money. It was the worst in the Army.”

“In the Army? I though they were all about orders and stuff, who cares if you have money, that kind of thing.”

Jack laughs. “Right, unless your dad has senators and congressmen on speed dial. I got a six-month deployment to ‘combat’ where I was about five hundred miles from any actual fighting, acting as a gopher for the higher-ups. It was an office job. After that I was rotated around between foreign posts. I kept putting in for something in the States but they always turned me down.”

“Why?”

“You know why they kept me overseas.”

“I mean why’d you want to come back to the States?”

“It’d be my best bet at slipping off to see you. If I was already here, I might have been able to pull it off. If I left Germany on leave and flew here he’d know, even if I hitched a ride with the Air Force.”

“Jack?”

My throat tightens when I even think what I’m about to ask.

“Yeah?”

“Has there been anybody else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, a girlfriend. You’ve been away for ten years.”

“No.”

“What? Seriously?”

“I said no. Nobody else.”

I stare at him. “You’re lying.”

“I am not, I swear on… I don’t know, something.”

As we come to a stop at a red light, I turn in my seat, lean over, and wait. Jack turns to face me, a curious look on his face. Before he can say anything I close the distance and press my lips to his.

When I pull back he says, “Does this mean—”

“It means I’m giving you a chance. I don’t know if I can do this, Jack.”

I sink back into the seat and fold up on myself. My whole face itches. The itching spreads down my neck to the scars on my shoulder, down my side, and I close my eye to stop myself pointlessly scratching, clawing at my face with my nails.





Jack





I settle back into my seat and try not to grin, or let her see my hands shaking on the wheel. I feel like a gawky sixteen-year-old again. She kissed me. I don’t know what this is, but I want more of it. I want her to just open up completely and let me have her.

Ellie draws back and folds up on herself again, like leaning over to kiss me was a great strain and now she has to recover from it. It makes the veins in my forehead pulse to think about the way her appearance pains her. I want to throw my arms around her but I know that’ll just make it worse, and she’ll pull away.

So, I drive. The light turns green and off we go.

The Corvette shifts like a dream. I take it easy; I don’t think Ellie can handle spirited driving right now. All that stuff we talked about is pretty heavy.

Took me a while to figure out what her uncle was getting at with that question about Jessica. When he said that, it pushed on some cranks in my head, turned wheels that had gotten gummed up with dust and become sticky. The coffee helped shake them loose, and now the gears are turning.