She smiled, slightly overwhelmed by his concern and his persistence but comforted too. “Thank you for trying to look after me. I promise you I’m fine.” When he raised his brow, she laughed. “I promise, if anything changes, I’ll reach out to her.” He shared a smile with her and the easy mood she’d awoken with slowly returned. “Thank you for comforting me last night.”
He tightened his arms around her. “If you want to see it as comfort, fine. But being with you was all about indulgence for me.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head and squeezed her with his strong arms again. “We’d best get up and get dressed. We have a lot of work ahead of us today.”
She gave in to his embrace before rolling over onto her back. He slipped from the bed, moving around the room to pull clothes from the chest of drawers. He left the room with a handful of folded items, leaving her to wallow in the warm spot he’d left on the bed next to her.
Yeah, it was time to get up and get back into the normal flow of things. But before she did, she would lie here for a few more moments and enjoy the scent of him on the sheets.
* * *
Jackson stood in front the coffee maker, sifting through recent events in his head. He’d slept with Aja—a euphemism for screwed like bunnies until their bodies demanded sleep. He’d found one more condom in his duffel, and they wasted no time putting it to good use.
Note to self: Pick up more condoms or you’re gonna be in trouble. Other note to self: If you think not having a condom at your disposal in this scenario is the potential threat and not the fact that you screwed—and apparently are planning to screw again—a principal in your case, then you’re worse off than you realized.
Jackson sighed into his cup of coffee. As much as he should, he couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about spending the night with Aja. Oh, he knew he should regret it. But he felt no remorse over giving in to the thing he’d wanted since he first laid eyes on her.
He didn’t know what to do with that. He should care; he should be ashamed for giving in to his need repeatedly. But as he remembered the taste of her flesh, the sensation of her coming as she rode him, all he could find within him was the renewed need to experience it all again.
* * *
Aja fiddled with the bandanna tied around her neck. With most of her wardrobe still sealed behind the police tape on her bedroom door, she was lucky to find enough clothing in her laundry room to piece an outfit together. Finding a bandanna she would usually wear on her head that actually matched the outfit she’d scavenged meant an angel was smiling somewhere near her.
She looked in the mirror hanging on the back of the guest bedroom door and assessed her appearance. With her hair down and the scarf artfully tied to rest comfortably inside the collar of her shirt, the bruised flesh on her neck was camouflaged. She looked like her normal self, even if everything about her world had upended so much over a short amount of time.
The sabotage on her ranch, the attack, it all felt so separate, so foreign. She could hardly reconcile herself with those terrible memories.
“Get it together, Aja. Fake it ’til you make it. As long as you act like yourself, no one will be the wiser. Not Jackson, and not anyone else.”
She stood in front of the mirror for a moment and thought about the counselor’s contact information sitting on her phone.
“There’s no time for that, Aja. There are too many things and too many people you need to worry about right now. You’ll be fine.”
Aja tugged at the bandanna one last time and decided it was as good as it would get. Playing in the mirror wouldn’t make it any better, so she should at least get downstairs and get her day started.
She made her way to the kitchen, took one look at the large empty space, and decided she was too tired to pull out the usual stops for breakfast. They were closer to the midday meal anyhow, so a large breakfast made little sense in her estimation.
She made herself a quick bowl of oatmeal, sprinkled a few raisins and cranberries for garnish, and poured herself a large cup of coffee. Breakfast was done.
She sat at the counter, savoring the first spoonful. Aunt Jo was right; all you needed was a hot meal to chase the cold away.Is that what chased the cold away for you last night?
Determined not to give the issue any more thought, Aja made it halfway through her meal and poured herself another cup of coffee. By the time she was sipping her second cup, she heard the familiar voices of Seneca and Brooklyn nearing her back door.
She walked to the door and leaned casually against the doorjamb, trying to exude as much normalcy as possible.If only normal was something I remembered how to be.
“Morning, ladies. How y’all doing?” Aja stood there forcing a wide smile on her face, attempting not to look strange—or worse, suspicious—in front of the two women climbing the few short stairs up her back porch.
Seneca and Brooklyn looked at her, then each other, a puzzling expression passing between them. “Morning?” Brooklyn asked as she stepped through the threshold. “You’re about six hours late on that one. The newbies met us in the stables this morning to tell us you’d be skipping our morning meeting and breakfast. Everything okay? This is the second day in a row you’ve been MIA.”
Aja chose that moment to walk back inside the house and sit in front of her coffee again. “With all that’s been going on, I needed a day off to veg and bake. You know how I get. Everything is fine. The security and construction crews are starting today. I needed to get a few things organized this morning before they arrived. We can have our daily meeting after lunch.”
Aja tried to smile and felt her lips tremor slightly as she pulled them into the false grin. Too afraid she’d give herself away, she dropped her gaze to the cooling oatmeal and picked up a spoonful. She busied herself with the act of eating the rest of it and hoped that would be enough to satisfy the two women standing in front of her.
“All right. We’ll get back to it then.” Brooklyn’s apparent acceptance loosened the uncomfortable tightness in Aja’s limbs. Lying to her workers—no, herfriends—was something she’d never wanted. But right now, it couldn’t be helped. “We came to check in, but I also needed the final blueprints for the construction foreman. You have them?”
Aja pulled her eyes from her bowl and turned her head to the right. “Yeah, they’re on top of the desk in the corner over there.”
Brooklyn didn’t move. Instead, both her and Seneca’s mouths hung open in shock. “What’s wrong?”
“The fuck, Aja. What happened to your neck?”
