Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 108165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“I can’t let you go because I don’t want to let you go. Sometimes, I am Baines. And sometimes I am Alisdair. And your stubbornness is most certainly Ada. I can’t stop thinking about you. And I can’t let you go. My feelings are far from pure, and they’re undoubtedly irrational. So that makes it my job to protect you … to save you. So here we are in a place I swore I would never be again.” He holds his hands to his sides in surrender for a few seconds before letting them drop. A white flag.
Frankie’s jaw works overtime. Jack can feel the intensity of her warring thoughts and flared ego. She is Jessica. She is him.
He waits.
She deflates an inch at a time, a slow surrender. “We’re in a tiny motel room with one bed. You might not want me up in your business, but I don’t have a choice because you won’t let me leave.”
“You’re right.”
Frustration continues to line her face even though her body is relaxed. She’s still ready for the fight that he’s not giving her. “I’m hungry,” she says gruffly.
“I’ll order dinner,” he replies with the utmost patience.
That patience seems to irritate her. “And I need to exercise. I have to burn off this energy, or I’ll lose my mind.”
“Okay.”
Frankie takes a quick breath as if she anticipated a rebuttal, but she releases it with more control. And her words lose their fight, but they’re no less sincere. “And my parents’ anniversary is in two weeks. I will be home for it. They made me promise I would end my ‘time away’ by then.” She pulls back her shoulders to show authority, to show Jackson she’s not asking for permission to leave in two weeks. It’s happening no matter what.
Jackson suspects his sister’s patience has an even shorter timeframe, so he returns several tiny nods even though he has no clue how to get to Archer Sanford in the next two weeks.
He steps closer to the bed.
“I think I owe it to my dignity not to let you use your body to persuade me to change my mind.”
He eyes her. “How would I use my body to persuade you?”
Frankie’s blue eyes inspect the length of his body as though she’s searching for the answer to this question. “I get …”
“Get what?” He slides his hands into his back pockets.
“Distracted.”
“My body distracts you?”
“The way you’ve chosen to mark yourself distracts me. You have many forms of self-expression, some rather subtle and nuanced. I find every one of them enrapturing.”
Jackson regards her with no discernible expression because he finds everything about Frankie equally nuanced. Intriguing. And unexpectedly disarming.
“You make an eloquent appeal. However, I just want to know if I take off my clothes, will you take off yours?”
The corner of her mouth quirks, and Jackson feels victorious. She’s strong, maybe even militant at times, but he’s her weakness. Everyone has at least one. He has several, and they’re all women.
“For an old man, you sure have a lot of sexual stamina.”
He shrugs a shoulder. “Making up for lost time before I die.”
“Lost time?” Frankie stands and slides her hands in the pockets of the prairie dress, holding it out to the side until it looks like a tent. “And this does it for you?”
“I think we’ve established what does it for me.”
Frankie grins. The real deal. She doesn’t attempt to restrain it as she points a finger at herself. “Me? I do it for you?” She’s teeming with confidence, even in the prairie dress.
Jackson’s wife struggled with confidence because an awful man beat her down. Jackson built her up, piece by piece. In the process, she made him human again. A lover. A friend. A husband. A father.
Two very different women. The man who married Ryn would not have known what to do with Francesca Holter. She wouldn’t have complemented him the way Ryn did. She would have challenged him in all the wrong ways. Jackson would have seen Francesca Holter as competition. He would have seen her as an equal in some ways—an overachiever with a chip on her shoulder and a complete inability to stay in a relationship. Their similarities would have been a toxic combination.
Not now.
“Your expressions,” she whispers. “They break my heart.”
Jackson shakes his head, trying to brush off whatever look she thinks is heartbreaking.
Frankie turns her back to him and slides the curtains another inch, letting the setting sun slash through the opening. “Let’s go out to eat.”
“If I thought it was a good idea for us to go out to eat, do you think we’d be sleeping in this motel room?”
“I don’t know. For every single thing I know about you, there are a hundred things I don’t know about you. I know you’re okay with sleeping in a garage and a shitty motel. I hope it’s out of necessity, but maybe you have an aversion to luxury. Maybe you don’t have a romantic bone in your body.” She chuckles. “Maybe you’re sexy and romantic on the surface by sheer accident.”