“But—”
I cursed under my breath. “There’s always abut. Why is there abut?”
“Just hear me out.” She looked up at me again, tears swimming in her eyes and a sad smile on her lips. “Thebutis that I don’t need you, and I’m not saying that to push you away. It’s just the truth.”
My chest felt like it was about to cave in, but if there was one thing I’d known about Jacqueline Calhoun since the very first moment I’d laid eyes on her, it was that she really didn’t need me. “I respect that. In fact, I admire it.”
Her eyes searched mine like she was trying to see if I actually understood. “I can take care of myself. I’ve always taken care of myself.”
“I know that too.”
She lowered her chin in a curt nod and averted her gaze again. “That being said, I can’t sit here and pretend like I could bring anything to the table in your world.”
I frowned. “Jesus, Jacque. That’s not?—”
“It is,” she cut in, her voice firm, but not harsh. Just factual. Naturally, that made it worse because she wasn’t wrong. “Your family isn’t like mine. They don’t operate the same way. Everything is strategic with you, a calculated move to advance either the company or the name.”
While I wished it wasn’t true, I didn’t argue because I couldn’t. So I just sat there, feeling like a tool.
“They marry for reasons other than love,” she said quietly. “So far, your brothers have gotten lucky and found it anyway, but every last one of them was willing to live with someone he didn’t love for the rest of his life and their wives agreed to it too.”
As soon as the L-word rolled off her tongue, it hit me like a punch to the chest. The rest of it blurred, but that one word kept ricocheting around my brain.
“What that means is that while I can take care of myself and I don’t need anything from you, I can’t offer them anythingeither,” she said, continuing without knowing that she’d already broken me. “I can’t offer you anything that fits into that world.”
Jerked back to reality by that little nugget of wisdom, I stared at her and the only thing I could think was that she was wrong this time. So completely, unbelievably wrong.
“You don’t have to offer them anything,” I said. “Why would you even think that?”
“Because that’s how it works, Jesse. You can’t just say that I don’t have to bring anything to the table and will it to become true.”
“Yeah, okay, but that’s not what I’m doing,” I countered. “Because that’s not how it works. You really don’t have to offer them anything.”
“I would have to, but it’s more than that.” She lifted her gaze back to mine. “If I was absolutely convinced that you’d be happy with someone normal for the rest of your life, then maybe it wouldn’t matter so much. Maybe you and I could take the chance, but I’m not convinced. I honestly don’t think you would be happy. For now, maybe, but not forever.”
Normal. Fuck, what a joke. Nothing about her has ever felt normal to me. Nothing about this either. Being with her? Really not normal.
I wanted to tell her that. The words filled my throat and pressed at the back of my tongue to tell her that none of this shit she was worried about mattered. Not my family, or their expectations, or what everyone else had done. Not any of it.
The only thing that mattered to me was her. Her happiness.
Love.
The word jumped back into my mind and I really, desperately wanted to say it. Just to put it out there. Right now, there was nothing I wanted more than to tell her how I felt. Let her know that she was it for me.
If I thought she was ready to hear it, I’d have done it. Just laid it all out there for her, but I swallowed it back instead. Jacque really believed what she was saying about me and about my family, and after finding out how her own mother had been treated, I couldn’t even blame her.
The Westwoods in Europe had been terrible to them. The more I learned, the more sick I felt. It wasn’t just the inheritance. Obviously, that had been a huge injustice and the court case had been nasty as fuck. Some of the stuff Nate had said had come out during that trial had been awful.
She was sitting on a lifetime of trauma caused by people I was related to. Clearly, it would take more than just some pretty words to make her believe she was wrong about us, in general, but also just about me.
I couldn’t blame her for what she thought about me either, though. WhileI’dfelt the changes happening inside over the last couple months, she hadn’t—and a few months ago, she would’ve been right. I would’ve gotten bored sooner or later.
But saying any of that now would only wreck whatever fragile balance we still had, so instead of simply laying it all out and pleading my case, I dragged in a breath and did the one thing that felt even harder.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “Then tell me how to fix it.”
“Jesse…” She trailed off, somehow looking even sadder as she shook her head and started fidgeting with her hands again.
