I pressed my lips together, resisting the urge to argue because this wasn’t just an opinion for her. It was history, herlived experience that had shaped the way she’d moved through the world all her life. But still. “You’ve spent a bit of time with Jesse and his brother, Will. Did they really strike you as the same kind of vindictive assholes as the other cousins?”
“They always seem different at first,” she said quietly. “I’ll admit that both Jesse and Will were friendly enough, but it was Eliza who invited us in, darling. Not them. Don’t forget that.”
I glanced back at the kitchen, toward the stupidly thoughtful breakfast Jesse had sent and the little note attached to it. Honestly, he didn’t strike me as the type to shun anyone, but surely not for something like that.
“I just—” I started, but then stopped.What am I even trying to prove?
That the man I’d known for all of five minutes was somehow the exception to a decades-long family dynamic? That seemed awfully convenient.
“I’ll be careful,” I said finally. Neither of us would win this argument until Jesse himself proved one of us right and the other wrong. Until then, this was the only thing I could offer to ease her mind. “I promise, Iwillbe careful.”
Mom was quiet for another beat before she sighed again. “That’s all I’m asking. Just watch your back and don’t get too involved. I know how tempting it is to get caught up in them, the riches, and the glamour, and the charm. But bear in mind that they’ll always keep you at arm’s length. You’re not one of them and they’ll never let you forget it.”
At those words, I felt ice slowly seeping through my veins. We wrapped up the call not long after, the conversation drifting back to safer territory, but the ease I’d felt earlier never quite returned.
All the Westwoods care about is legacy. If you don’t fit their mold, you’re out.
The sentiment echoed through my mind a few times, but I wasn’t blind to the fact that Jesse Westwood was hardly the poster child for fitting a mold. The man practically tripped over his own chaos on a daily basis.
He was reckless, impulsive, and completely unfiltered. Definitely not the polished, calculating figure my mom was describing.
Yet…
He now worked for W&S under his brother. Even if it sounded like he’d had a pretty good thing going for himself in Miami. He’d dragged me into a fake relationship because that same brother had asked and the only explanation he’d offered was that his family needed this.
On the other hand, it was also true that he’d run here all the way from the museum last night—in the rain, no less—to check on me. Part of my brain tried reasoning he’d only done it to get in my pants, but I knew that wasn’t true.
When he’d arrived, he’d come simply because of Thomas and his concern for me after the altercation. As I thought of the look on Thomas’s face when he’d seen me, my stomach twisted. It had been such a relief to see Jesse after that. To know that he’d seen it go down and had cared enough to come after me.
Surely, that had to mean that he wasn’t like the rest. I pressed my lips together, shaking my head and deciding I was absolutely not thinking about that today. Grabbing the last bit of croissant still sitting on my plate on the coffee table, I took a bite, but where it’d been perfect and fluffy before, it tasted like nothing now.
Is she right?The question burst through from the back of the mind.Surely not. She can’t be. Not about the Jesse I’ve been getting to know.
And yet, I knew I had to keep my eyes a little further open from now on. Jesse might seem like the exception, but the ruleexisted for a reason, and despite the evidence to the contrary, I couldn’t fool myself into believing that he wasn’t like the rest of them at all.
CHAPTER 25
JESSE
My sleuthing paid off.
I waited in the breakfast area of a mid-range hotel in the inner city, sipping extremely mediocre coffee and wearing sunglasses indoors. While I knew I probably looked suspicious as hell, I didn’t care if people thought I had something to hide.
It was true. I had several things to hide, actually. One of them being that I might be falling for a woman I’d spent the better part of a week convincing myself I couldn’t have. Another being that I was currently hunting down her ex-fiancé like a deranged but well-dressed bloodhound.
While I was drumming my fingers against the table, scanning the room for the tenth time, I finally saw him. Thomas Germain. I recognized him immediately, but I actually looked at him properly this time.
Now that I knew who he was, I couldn’t deny that I was curious. He was tall, but probably at least half a head shorter than me. I wasn’t mad about that. With sandy, curly hair that hung across his forehead and made him look like a douche, and thick-rimmed glasses sitting on his nose, I had no idea how he’d landed a girl like her.
Sure, he was put together in that academic,I read non-fiction books for fun and judge people silentlykind of way. But still. That didn’t seem like Jacque’s type to me at all.
Sitting with a couple of people who looked like colleagues, he seemed far too comfortable for a man who had, in my professional opinion, committed a cardinal sin. He’d stolen her dog. That was unforgivable.
The fact that a woman like Jacque had committed tomarryinghim and then he’d walked away from her? Now that was just fucking stupid. I had never been the marrying type but even I could tell Jacque was special.
I didn’t hesitate to stand and saunter over to their table. While I didn’t have a plan, I did have vibes and that would be all I needed. Guys like him always got freaked out by guys like me. The confidence made them uncomfortable—at least, that was what Alex had once told me.
We’d been teenagers talking about lunchroom drama, but I supposed it was just the same shit, different day. When I reached them, I kicked out the empty chair beside him and sat down, spreading my legs out ahead of me and folding my arms.
