Fix You (15 page)

             
She was starting to appreciate all those smiles, too.

             
They were turning onto her new street when she fell silent, struck with a sudden pang of homesickness. This new mansion of hers wasn’t home – not yet – and even if she hated Dylan for what he’d done, she missed what they’d once been. An unshakable fear about her new life left her longing for her old one…even if it had been a lie.

             
“You okay?” Chris asked as the truck slowed and turned up the rutted tracks of her drive. “You got quiet.”

             
“Just thinking,” she said, which wasn’t a lie.

             
He seemed to accept that. “Your kitchen will be here Tuesday, which gives us all day Monday to strip out the old. Since you and your sister want to cut costs, you guys are gonna have to help me. So get plenty of rest tomorrow, because…”

             
She tuned him out. They had just crested the last rise, the lot opening up in front of them, and her eyes went straight to the little silver coupe that was parked beside the fountain. “What the…”

             
There were too many people standing in the shade of the dogwood over by the cottage. In a fast scan, Jess picked out Ellie, her brothers – all four of them, including Tam – her dad, and…

             
Dylan.

             
And a blonde who could only be his submissive mistress.

             
“
Stop the truck
!” she hissed, and Chris slammed on the brakes. She caught herself with her hands on the dash, then disengaged her seatbelt and flung open the door.

             
“Jessica - ” Chris said, but she leapt down to the grass and set off at a furious, marching walk.

             
A flash of movement alerted her to her mom, Jo and Delta approaching from the house. Her eyes stayed on the scene beneath the tree, though, and as she drew closer, what she was looking at began to make sense. Dylan had a hand pressed to his jaw, his shoulders curled, spine crooked, his blonde clinging to his arm in a fretful way. Randy was drawn up to his full, impressive height, the rest of the guy’s flanking him, their gazes swinging wildly between him and Dylan. Punches, she knew, had been thrown. Or at least
a
punch: Dylan’s pose was unmistakably injured.

             
“What’s going on?” she demanded when she was close enough, and all heads swiveled in her direction.

             
Dylan, his chiseled face screwed up with pain as he clutched at his jaw, was the first to answer. “He
hit
me.”

             
She came to a halt, hands on her hips, and glanced at her father. “Why?”

             
“Couldn’t help it,” Randy said with an unapologetic shrug. “I saw his face and my hand just snapped out.” He demonstrated, miming a punch through the open air, and Mike and Tam failed to suppress chuckles.

             
Jess’s gaze moved over her disapproving older brother, then flicked back to her cheating husband, his mistress’s manicured fingernails digging into his arm as she clung to him. “Does it hurt badly?” she asked.

             
His eyes narrowed.

             
“’Cause I hope it hurt like a son of a bitch.”

             
More than one of the guys sniggered and Dylan’s frown became dangerous. Jess braced herself for another tirade about her immaturity, but wasn’t prepared for what he did ask. “Where have you been?” He glanced toward the driveway and Chris’s truck. “I came to pick up Tyler and you weren’t even here.”

             
Tyler! She hadn’t even thought of him when she’d come charging up. Oh…what kind of a horrible bitch did she look like in her son’s eyes? She searched for him, slammed with guilt, and found him sitting on the stone bench beneath the tree with Ellie, who had a protective arm draped across his shoulders. He watched them all with wide-eyed interest, and she couldn’t decide if he was terrified, or scrambling to keep up with the adult conversation. Either way, he’d watched his grandfather hit his dad.

             
Swallowing hard, she turned back to Dylan. “I had an errand to run; I left him with a whole house full of people. He wasn’t alone.”

             
“Neither were you.” His tone was accusatory, and again, he looked to the driveway.

             
Jess twisted around and saw that Chris was out of his truck and standing with a hand braced against its hood, watching them. Incensed, she whirled. “Oh, are you kidding me? The company I keep isn’t your business anymore,” she snapped. “You lost the right to care when you took up with - ” She glanced at the blonde, at her unremarkable, generically pretty face, the stricken terror on it, and knowing Tyler was present was all that stayed her vocabulary. “
That
,” she finished with a snarl. “You chose
that
over us, so just shut up, Dylan!”

             
Beth arrived, flustered, Jo and Delta flanking her. “What
in the world
are all of you doing?” she asked like they were all eight and trying to play football in the house – the memory her tone brought to Jess’s mind.

             
“Dylan and his toy were just leaving,” Jess informed her, and watched her mother’s eyes go round with shock.

             
“Jessica,” Dylan said, his voice becoming low, silky, and hateful. He didn’t yell and rant and rave; he was serpent-like when he was furious, and she was realizing she loathed that about him. There was nothing red-blooded and vital about him. “We came to pick up Tyler, and we’re not leaving without him.”

             
We
– he and his twenty-two-year-old little slut. Jess looked at the girl, at her slow blue eyes, and was filled with absolute contempt for her husband. He wanted to take their son – the precious boy they’d made together – and introduce him to the embodiment of his perverse sexuality. She wanted her father to hit him again for that. She wanted to do worse – wanted to choke him and claw him.

             
“Will all of you excuse us?” she asked, sparing the others a glance. “Ellie, will you take Tyler inside?”

             
Everyone moved away. Tyler resisted, fussing and whining about wanting to be with his “Daddy” until Mike picked him up and carried him, sobbing, into the cottage after Ellie.

             
Jess clenched her hands, nails biting into her palms, until they were as alone as they were going to be.

             
Dylan’s gaze was murderous. His plaything looked ready to faint.

             
“You can’t do this,” he snarled. “You can’t keep me - ”

             
“If you wanted to spend time with him,” Jess cut him off, voice becoming high and wavering with her fury, “then you would have come for him alone. You would have taken him to the car show. You would have hugged him and tried to tell him that his life isn’t crumbling around him even though that’s what it feels like.”

             
“Jessica - ”

             
“Shut up! Don’t you dare bring your sex toy here to
my house
, in front of
my family
, and pretend you came to see Tyler. This had nothing to do with him! You will not use
my baby
to play house with your whore!”

             
She shouted the last, chest heaving, furious tears clouding her eyes. This – bringing his mistress to her oh-so-tender and terrifying new start, using Tyler for cover – was the final straw.

             
Dylan looked ready to argue, but she heard the crunch of gravel behind her and watched his eyes move away from her face, up over the top of her head. He swallowed. “You’re a petty bitch,” he accused, still staring at a point above her.

             
“Get off of my property,” she said through her teeth.

             
He complied, turning away and drawing his mistress with him, but he shot her a parting glare over his shoulder. “Your property for how long? How do you expect to pay the mortgage?”

             
She watched him go, insides roiling, hating him all the more for being right. How
was
she going to pay the mortgage?

             
She turned, intent on going into the cottage to begin the arduous process of consoling Tyler…and walked straight into Chris.

             
“Oh!” Strung out, she startled when she collided with the solid wall of his chest, catching herself with her hands against his abs. They were hard and lean under her hands, unyielding. And she snatched away from him as his hands closed around her upper arms.

             
“Whoa.” He steadied her back on her feet, but didn’t let go of her. “You alright?”

             
Jess tipped her head back, blinking furiously at the burn of unwanted tears that lingered in her eyes, and stared without comprehension up at his face, backlit by the sun, lined with concern. After what had just occurred, after her husband’s cruelty, she didn’t trust or understand even the slightest kindness from a man who didn’t know or care about her.

             
“Fine,” she lied in a strangled voice and tried to duck out of his grip. “Please let go of me. I need to go check on my kid.”

             
His fingers loosened, but he didn’t release her, frowning down at her instead. “Jessica - ”

             
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “He calls me that and I hate it!”

             
“Okay, Jess,” he amended, and his hands dropped away. “I’ll see you first thing Monday morning, okay?”

             
“Sure.”

             
She left him standing in her driveway, too concerned about Tyler to even begin to interpret the look her contractor was giving her.

**

              Just before midnight that night, Jo lay in bed, propped on two pillows, listening to the chirrup of crickets through the cracked window, flipping through a
Southern Living
by the light of the nightstand lamp. She scanned the glossy pages, only half her thoughts devoted to the upstairs of the mansion and ideas for blending Victorian and southern décor – as per Jess’s request – while the other half kept replaying the day’s scene on the driveway. Only, in her imagination, it was Tam with a new blonde on his arm, and her heart lying like so many bits of broken glass around his feet.

             
Even thinking such a thing left her squirming with guilt, and she dropped her magazine to the side, glancing over at Tam who was stretched out on his stomach beside her, eyes closed, not asleep yet, but resting.

             
Lurking, more like, because his eyes popped open, alert, almost neon in the lamplight. “Is this required reading?” he asked, voice muffled against the back of his hand, a smile curling the corners of his mouth.

             
“Jess wants input, so I have to, quote, ‘learn something about homemaking.’”

             
Tam chuckled. “How brave of her.”

             
“I know.” She slapped the magazine down on her nightstand and sighed. She was sore, the muscles across the tops of her shoulders and arms, the back of her neck, exhausted from reaching up over her head all day to strip down wallpaper. And today had only been the beginning – she was going to be sore and bruised for months to come. She was also going to be a dirt-smudged, grungy, totally unappealing wife for those months.

             
Her horrifying mental picture returned, and she glanced at Tam, at his unconscious smile and the way he watched her with an attention that most people found unnerving. A question came hurtling up her throat before she could squelch it. “Are you bored with me?”

             
His dark brows scaled his forehead, then he pushed up on his elbows. “
What
?”

             
Jo felt a hot flush climb up her neck and bloom in her cheeks. She turned her head away, staring down at her sheet-covered toes. “I’m sorry. I’m just...”

             
The sheets rustled as he sat up and put his back to the headboard beside her. “Joey,” he said, “that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever asked me.”

             
“I know!” There was a note of desperation in her voice. “It just…it just came out and I couldn’t stop it. That thing with Dylan today…”

             
“Ugh,” Tam groaned, and slid down so he lay flat on his back, rolling his blue eyes to the ceiling. “We’re not having this conversation again.”

             
In the silence of their little cottage – no siblings, no parents, no barriers to their lives as married adults with a toddler sleeping across the hall – they lay without touching, Jo kicking herself and Tam fantasizing about beating Dylan Beaumont’s ass.