Page 64 of Promise of a New Beginning
“No way. Blake Carter’s cousin? No wonder he was asking about you. Is she cute?” Rush asked.
“Beautiful. And smart. She’s a lawyer.”
“What’s she doing with you?” Rush teased.
Jack feigned punching his arm, and Rush pretended to punch Jack in his stomach. They were laughing as they approached the door to Siena’s loft, but Jack’s laugh was forced. Rush touched his arm.
“Jack. I was a real jerk to you, and I’m sorry. I know I said some horrible things. It’s just…you were the guy I always looked up to, and when you fell apart…” He shrugged. “My hero had fallen. You disappeared and I got pissed. And then I saw how mad Dad was, and I jumped on that train, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Rush. We all messed up. I just wish I knew why Dad was so mad.”
“Got me. He’s never said anything. He was real supportive of you until you disappeared, and then it was like a switch turned and he was like he is now.”
“Well, maybe he’ll find a way to tell me what he’s thinking. And, Rush, I wasn’t exactly kind in the way I handled things with you, either. Let’s just say we were both jerks and move past it.” Jack patted him on the back, and when Rush flashed the smile Jack hadn’t seen in two years and he heard laughter coming from inside Siena’s loft, he knew they were on the right path.
“Okay. Maybe you can forget that I said you were my hero. I’ll deny it if you ever say it in front of them.” He nodded toward the door.
“Jackass,” Jack teased.
The second they stepped into Siena’s loft, the room silenced. He could have heard a pin drop. Instead they heard their father’s loud footsteps descending the stairs right before the door swung shut.
“Where’s your father?” Their mother rushed to Jack’s side and touched his arm. “Are you okay?”
Jack placed his hand over hers. “Yeah, actually. I am.”
The door swung open, and his father stepped inside. He made a wide arc around Jack and his mother and joined the others at the table. Without a word, he laid a napkin in his lap and reached across the table for a dish of lasagna.
Jack’s mother pursed her lips and shook her head. She patted Jack’s chest, then took his hand, as she’d done so often when he was a boy, and they sat at the table. Siena and Dex exchanged a roll of their eyes at their father’s behavior, and Kurt, too passive to get involved, was probably taking mental notes to use in one of his thrillers. Sage lifted his beer bottle and smiled at Jack and Rush.
“To family,” he said with a wink.
Everyone except his father toasted, and it broke Jack’s heart to see his father alone on the opposite side of the Remington line.
Chapter Thirty-Four
SAVANNAH CLIMBED THE steps to her apartment, thinking about Aida and Jack. Now that she had Jack in her life, she felt transformed. It struck her that she was finally in a relationship where she wasn’t the only one doing the giving.It feels good.She shook her head at the thought.No, it feels great!She was less on edge. Their lovemaking wasn’t one-sided, and she felt herself changing as much as Jack was. She’d always thought she needed to be a man’s only true love, and what she discovered with Jack was that love came in different levels. She knew Jack loved Linda, but she saw the way he looked at her and felt the way he touched her, and she knew in her heart that regardless of what he’d felt for anyone before her, he loved her in a completely different way than he’d loved anyone else.
She hoped that Aida would find the same kind of true love one day and that at some point the right person would see Aida’s boisterous, flirtatious nature as a layer that they just needed to delve beyond and love her for it as much as for what lay beneath. Just as she’d seen Jack’s anger as a mask of pain and she’d known that below that pain could only be a passionate, loving man with a heart so big it just about strangled him.
She flipped through her keys on her way up the stairs.
“There’s my angel.”
She looked up and met Jack’s smile with her own.
“Jack. How did it go?” She rushed up the stairs and stood on her toes to kiss him. She’d been trying to push away the question that Aida had planted in her mind over dinner, and now that she was looking at Jack, the thought moved to the forefront of her mind.How did you get that scar and the ones on your back?Aida had wondered if it was something that happened in the military, but Savannah had noticed that he rubbed it when he spoke of Linda, and she’d have to be blind not to see the connection—and that’s what had kept her from asking him all along.
“Better than I’d expected. Let’s go inside and we’ll talk.”
Inside the apartment, Savannah poured them each a glass of wine, and they settled onto the couch.
“So it went well? Your family was receptive?”
“For the most part. Siena, Dex, and Kurt were very open and welcoming. Sometimes I forget that while I’ve been angry for two years, that’s my own little circle of life. For everyone else, life goes on as normal. They work, they hang out with friends, and I’m sure they have passing thoughts about me as their brother, but really, it was my life that was messed up, not theirs.”
“It’s hard to keep that perspective. I know that sometimes I get really wrapped up in a case and I can’t understand why everyone else isn’t feeling as conflicted or overwhelmed as I am.”And since I’ve fallen for you, I wonder why everyone else isn’t on cloud nine like I am.“What about Rush? I know how worried you were about him.”
Jack sipped his wine. “Rush…Rush was good. He’s in a tough place. He’s always tried to be the man our father wanted us all to be—and I don’t even know who that man he wants us to be is anymore. I’ve been thinking about it. We’re all good men, and we’ve always worked hard and done our best, and I always thought it was enough, but after tonight, I have to wonder…” Jack took Savannah’s hand and looked deeply into her eyes. “You’ve changed me, Savannah. You’ve given me strength to do what I needed to, and you’ve taught me to look beyond the hurt and anger. Tonight, when I looked at Rush, I saw his anger as something other than an attack on me, or hatred for what I’d done. Because of you, I understood where it came from.”
