The Bride Said, 'Finally!'

Jake sighed. “Bottom line, Melinda doesn’t have a maternal bone in her entire body. She cares about money and appearances and finding another husband whose only goal in life is to make her happy, and that’s it.”

“So in coming to me you’re trying to head Melinda off at the pass.”

Jake nodded, more sure than ever now—from Jenna’s sympathetic reaction to his dilemma—that he had been right to come to her. “Unfortunately, clothes aren’t all she needs.” Jake looked at Jenna seriously. “Alex needs a crash course in being a lady before her mom gets back.”

Jenna made a face, no longer quite as eager to help out or get involved. She went back to polishing off her redfish. “Can’t you get your mother to help with that?”

Jake shook his head, knowing that as much as he loved his mother, and he did, that she was long on lecturing and interfering and short on patience. “My mother is not the one for the job,” he said firmly. “You are.”

Jenna looked at him as though he had lost his mind. Finished with her entrée, she got up to see what else was on the side table. Jake stood up, too.

“Think of it this way,” he said as Jenna helped herself to very small slivers of chocolate cake, praline cheesecake and warm peach-and-blueberry cobbler. “You’d be doing something for me I desperately need.” Jake settled on just the chocolate cake. “I’d be doing something for you that you desperately need. We’d be helping each other.”

They returned to the table in silence. Jenna shook her head in silent censure, even as she enjoyed her dessert. “After the way you treated me—” she said, as if unable to believe his gall.

Tired of taking all the heat for what had happened between them, Jake angled a thumb at his chest. “Hey! I’m not the one who got cold feet and refused to elope at the last minute!” In fact, he still felt if Jenna had just gone off with him then, they would be married today.

Jenna rolled her eyes as she got herself a cup of coffee. “We were caught, suitcases in hand, by your parents!”

Jake discounted that with a shrug. “We still could have gotten away,” he said levelly, pouring his own cup of coffee. “What would they have done? Chased after us?” He mocked her with a lift of his brow. “I don’t think so. That’s way too undignified for my folks.”

As for the rest of the complications, they had thought about everything. Jenna was underage, but she was also just a couple of weeks away from her birthday. As long as she went willingly with Jake, and they didn’t cross any state lines, and waited until Jenna was legally of age to actually consummate the marriage, then they wouldn’t be breaking any laws. Of course, if they married without the permission of her guardian their marriage would have been technically invalid. But they had that covered, too, deciding if they just waited until after Jenna’s birthday to return to Laramie that no one would kick up a fuss about what was more or less a “done deal” for nearly three weeks. They recognized that his family’s lawyers could easily take care of any legalities, even if it meant another quickie ceremony.

Jenna sighed. “Okay, so maybe there wouldn’t have been a car chase or some big scene at the justice of the peace, even if your parents had managed to figure out exactly where we were going as well as physically head us off before we got there.” She waved a lecturing finger beneath his nose. “But your folks still would have tried to convince you to have our marriage annulled when we returned and my big sister probably would have done the same thing.”

“So what?” Jake argued right back. “If we had already been married, a baby potentially on the way, my parents and Meg both would have backed off, if only to avoid an even bigger scandal than just us running off and getting married.” He knew Meg. She cared about Jenna and wanted her to be happy. And he knew his folks. No way would they want any grandchild of theirs born out of wedlock, or Jake taking advantage of a young innocent girl. In fact, it was their training on that fact that had kept Jake from ever making love to Jenna in their younger days. Even at the very end, when she’d been willing, he had insisted on waiting until they were actually married. And, truth to tell, as much as he still wanted to make love to her, he still didn’t lament that fact. He was glad he had treated Jenna with respect, glad they had waited until they were old enough and or the time was right. The truth was, as much as they had wanted to be married then, they hadn’t been ready for it.

“Your parents didn’t approve of me, Jake. Not from day one. They didn’t even want us being friends.” She looked at him steadily, all the hurt she had felt, then and now, in her clear blue eyes. “Over the long haul, a marriage between us never would have worked and you know it.”

Jake reached across the table and covered Jenna’s hand with his own. “All I know is that we let our relationship go,” he confessed huskily, “and I’ve spent every day since regretting it.” He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life the same way, and if he were right in his assessment of her feelings, Jenna didn’t, either.

Jenna jerked her hand from his. She pushed away from the table angrily and vaulted to her feet. “If that were true, you would have come after me then. You would have called, tried to see me. Something. Anything—”

Remembering how miserable they both had been, Jake pushed to his feet, too. “I wanted to,” he said roughly, going after her.

“Then why didn’t you?” Jenna squared off with him, tears glistening in her eyes.

Jake clasped her shoulders. “Because I couldn’t,” he told her with a weariness that came straight from his soul. “Not without destroying your life. And that of your sisters.”

Chapter Two

Jenna stared at Jake in raging disbelief. What did he think he had done in abandoning her, if not ruin her life?

“My parents said if I pursued you in any way, they’d use our reckless elopement as proof that Meg was not a proper guardian for you and your younger sisters. They said that in even asking you to marry me, as young as you were, given what had just happened to your folks, that I was taking advantage of you in the worst way. You and I might view the situation romantically, but it was quite possible Meg and the police would view the situation as my parents did—as simply running away. They reminded me that if the authorities stepped in to help locate you that you could have been deemed a juvenile delinquent just for attempting to marry without your guardian’s permission. And that I could be put in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, whether Meg agreed with the court’s decision or not. They said if I wasn’t strong enough or mature enough to walk away while you and your sisters put your lives back together that they would do ‘the right thing’ for me. They promised to do everything in their power to see the courts removed Meg as your guardian, split you and your sisters up and put the youngest two—Dani and Kelsey—in foster care.”

Jake shoved a hand through the tousled layers of his inky-black hair. “You would, of course, have been legally free after your eighteenth birthday to do what you wanted. But for Dani, who was sixteen-and-a-half at the time, and Kelsey, who was fifteen, it would have been devastating.” Jake paused, his eyes filled with a mixture of regret for all the time they’d lost and compassion for what they’d been through. “I couldn’t do that to you. There was no doubt in my mind my parents would follow through on their threat. They really thought they were doing the best thing for you and your sisters. And knowing how devastated you all were by the sudden loss of your parents, I began to think maybe my folks were right, that I was wrong to take your youth from you like that, that you deserved the same chance to go to college and be a normal teenager that I’d already had.” Jake shrugged, pain sharpening the handsome lines of his face. “So I walked away from you, and didn’t look back.”

Doing her best to absorb all he had told her, Jenna felt for a chair and sat down. Jake slid a chair over and sat down in front of her, so they were sitting knee to knee. “You should have told me what was going on,” Jenna said, trembling.

Jake leaned forward and took both her hands in his. “How would that have helped you?” he asked softly. “To be told you needed to choose between being with me and the continued welfare of your sisters? Do you think that would have made you feel better to be put in a situation like that, after all you’d already been through?”

Jenna sighed. Of course it wouldn’t have. If he’d told her, made her choose, it would have torn her apart, and caused even more stress and heartache for her and her sisters.

Jake shook his head, recalling. He searched her eyes as he continued filling her in. “I wanted to fight my parents—you don’t know how much—but at the same time I had to be realistic about the odds of success. I was only twenty-two. I had not yet inherited the trust fund from my grandparents. I didn’t have the means or influence at that point in my life to help keep you and your sisters together on my own. Plus, you know the age thing, the fact I was four years older, finished with college, and you were still in high school had always been an issue. It’s not much of an age difference now, of course, but back then…well there’s a big difference between being in high school and being in college.” Jake sighed and ran a hand through his hair, “As mature as you were, there were times when I did feel I was pushing you to grow up too fast, so the two of us could be together the way we felt we were meant to be. So I felt guilty for ever asking you to elope with me. I felt like I’d been really unfair to you.”

Jenna saw the regret shimmering in his eyes and knew this was true. “I knew you were incredibly vulnerable, that you weren’t in any state of mind to even be thinking about taking such a monumental step. But at the same time I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to help you then, how to make it better, except by loving you.”

“Which you did,” Jenna said softly, recalling how good and warm and safe he’d made her feel in the first dark days after her parents had died. Jake had been there, holding her when she cried, attending the funeral with her, helping her take it one day, one moment at a time. Even now, she didn’t know how she would have made it through those first dark days if he hadn’t been there.

Jake swallowed hard. His hands tightened over hers. “But when we were caught, suitcases in hand, and when I saw your doubt, when you called it quits before we’d even gotten all the way out of Laramie, and said you had changed your mind, you didn’t want to elope with me, I knew you probably did need to be with your sisters more than me. That you needed the chance to grow up, free of any serious entanglements or pressures from anyone else—the chance I’d already had.”

Jenna recalled the euphoria she’d felt as she packed a bag, sneaked out of her house and met up with Jake in the Laramie High School parking lot, well after midnight. Then the humiliation and dismay when she realized his parents had followed him to the secret rendezvous. She only had to look at Patricia and Danforth Remington’s faces as they stepped from their Mercedes to know they were dead-set against her marriage to their only son. “Of course I had second thoughts,” Jenna defended herself hotly. It had been natural to back out of the elopement at that point. Withdrawing her hands from Jake’s grasp, she pushed back her chair, got up and began to pace. “I’d just lost my parents. I wasn’t going to willfully separate you from yours, which was what a hasty marriage to you would have done. So yes, of course I called it off.”

Jenna swallowed around the growing knot of emotion in her throat. “When you said you’d call me as soon as you could, I believed you, Jake.” She hated to think how many hours she had sat by the phone, just waiting for it to ring. How many nights she had gone to sleep with it in bed beside her. “I didn’t expect you to walk away from me forever,” Jenna murmured as she went to the window and turned her back on Jake. She’d thought—hoped—they’d continue to see each other and wait a few years. Hoped with time his parents would come to know her and realize how much she and Jake loved each other and change their minds, even endorse the marriage. She shook her head as she stared out at the dark Texas night. “I thought you’d come back for me as soon as you got things straightened out with your parents,” she confessed in a low, choked voice. “I thought we’d figure things out together.” Arms folded in front of her, she whirled around to face Jake. “Instead, I never heard from you again—not one word, not ever, until today!”

Jake grimaced and stood. “I thought I was doing what was best for you and your sisters in walking away. I thought I was being selfless and gallant. If it helps to know—I’ve regretted it ever since.”

Jenna glared at him, her heart thudding in her chest. “Not enough, apparently, to stop you from getting married to Melinda that same summer,” she shot back.

Jake stepped closer. “It was a mistake, a rebound thing. Although,” he amended with a frown, “I didn’t know it at the time.”

Jenna, who’d eventually had her own rebound fling, equally disastrous, understood that. But just because she understood it didn’t mean she was willing to trust him again. Now or ever. “It still doesn’t answer my question, Jake.” Hands on her hips, she regarded him contentiously. “Why did you come to me for help with Alex? Why now?” Why hadn’t he left well enough alone? Yes, she was hurt, but it was a hurt she had recovered from. This new hurt was something else indeed.

Jake blew out a weary breath. He looked deep into her eyes and said firmly, “Because I want us to be friends again.”

“Friends.” Jenna studied him carefully, knowing with the two of them it had never been platonic. “Or more than friends?” she asked bluntly.

Half of Jake’s mouth slanted up in a slow, sexy smile. “You choose.”

Jenna lifted her brow and, her eyes holding his all the while, challenged dryly, “You sure don’t ask for much, do you?” Even if, in his dark blue sport coat, casual khaki slacks, light blue shirt and tie, he was as sexy as ever in that distinctly blue-blooded Texan way.

Jake closed the distance between them and clasped her hands between the two of his. “Tell me you don’t want the same thing and I’ll go away,” he whispered, his warm callused palms caressing the backs of her hands. “But if you do—if you have it in your heart to repair our relationship and at the same time help me with my little girl—” Again, that slow sexy smile that always turned her knees to water. “I’ll owe you, for a long, long time.”

WASN’T THIS what she had wanted? For him to come crawling back to her on his hands and knees? Okay, six plus years had passed, but he was still back. Eligible—handsome as ever. And he was offering to make all her business dreams come true, to boot. So what was wrong with this picture? Why, despite everything, did his incredibly presumptuous proposition look and sound so good to her? Why was she suddenly so willing to forgive him for taking her heart and stomping it to pieces? It wasn’t like she was still in love with him—or would ever love him again.

Jenna looked him square in the eye, determined to let him know where they stood before things progressed any further. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

Jake merely grinned at her, as if to say: I wouldn’t make bets on that if I were you. Shrugging, he held her gaze and retorted dryly, “I didn’t expect you would. It may surprise you to know that making love with me is not usually part of my business deals.”

“Let me guess. But in our case, you’d be willing to make an exception.”

His deliciously mischievous grin broadened all the more. Jake rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, allowing finally in a deep, sexy murmur that sent shivers coasting up and down her spine, “We never did have that wedding night.”

Jenna flushed despite herself as she reminded him, “We never had the wedding, Jake.”

“Then, sure.” Jake spoke as if now were a different matter entirely.

“We won’t now, either,” Jenna continued flatly. Figuring this had gone on long enough—much more of it and she’d be fantasizing about his return to her life in a romantic sense, too—Jenna pushed past him. Wishing all the while, as she glared at him, that he didn’t have the power to rile her so. She didn’t need this kind of all-encompassing emotion in her life. She didn’t need him. And if she had her way, and she planned to, she never would again, either.