Page 31 of Carry Me Home
Mrs. Belmont cleared her throat. “Charles, why don’t you show Todd the stables?”
Mr. Belmont looked relieved. “An excellent idea! Shall we?”
Todd twisted to look at Janie. His nose grazed her hair. “What do you think, Janie?”
And then I watched him slide his palm over her bare cleavage, fingers curving inward along the undercurve of her breast. He squeezed.
I saw red.
Janie’s expression went from distraught to shocked to furious. I had a feeling I was about to witness exactly what it looked like when Janie Belmont got her bad out, and as fun as that might be, I was too pissed off to wait for it.
“Remove your fucking hand or I will do it for you,” I said lowly, enunciating every word carefully so his single brain cell would understand.
“Janie and I are old friends,” he said. “Aren’t we, Janie? She’s fine.”
Wrong answer.
I moved on instinct. I separated his body from hers by brute force, putting my own in between them, and shackled his slim wrist with one hand. A pathetic squeal spilled from his lips as I twisted his hand to an unnatural angle, just shy of making it snap, and drove him to his knees.
“Are you fine, Janie?” I asked, turning my head to look back at her over my shoulder.
She exhaled and dropped her forehead to my shoulder blade. “I am now,” she said quietly.
In that moment, I felt it—the thing I had been missing ever since I was discharged.Purpose. Someone who needed me. It felt so fucking good.
“Janie,”I said, but she didn’t break stride as she made for the house like a woman on a mission.
I caught up with her as she pushed through the door. “Janie,” I said again. I caught her by the elbow and gently turned her to face me.
“Hm?” she muttered.
The glossiness of her dark eyes made me want to do things. Hold her. Rearrange Todd’s face. Possibly her parents’, too.
“What the hell was that back there?” I asked. I scanned her face, searching for answers.
“You know what that was. An entitled man-child put his hand where it didn’t belong and you corrected that for him.” She looked away, her throat bobbing in a hard swallow. “Thank you for that, by the way. I was going to stomp on his foot, butyour way was probably better.” She gave me a wobbly smile that broke my heart.
“You say the word, Ace, and I’ll break every bone in his body. But I’m talking about your parents. What the fuck was that about?”
“Oh.” She curled in on herself, one arm wrapped protectively around her waist, the other across her chest. “Todd Yates is a big lobbyist in the ranching industry. My dad will do anything to keep him happy. And my mother…appearances are everything. She believes you don’t make a scene. Ever.”
I stared at her. “So they were perfectly okay with him touching you like that without your consent? What the fuck.”
“They weren’tokaywith it,” she said defensively. “They didn’t know how to stop it without causing a scene or pissing him off.”
“Janie.”
“For what it’s worth, I was absolutely going to cause a scene.”
“I know you were, honey.” I pulled her into my arms and rested my chin on the crown of her head. “I know you were.”
For a moment all we did was breathe together. And then her hands dropped to my belt.
“Jack,” she whispered. “I still want to cause a scene.”
12
JANIE
