Jump Start. Lisa Renee Jones

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Not even an “I love you.” Just thinking about the man scrambled her brain cells. Even her parents had been devastated over the loss of Bobby. They’d loved him like a son. Jennifer had loved him. Had, she reminded herself.

      Jennifer set the drink down on the marble-slabbed bar that separated her from Marcie, but not without a loud clunk that slopped the icy concoction over the sides. “What did you say?” she managed in a froglike croak, sickly and pathetic.

      Marcie simply stood there, looking pale and kind of pathetically like Jennifer’s croak moments before. Willie Nelson filled in for her, singing some sad Texas song that added insult to injury after the bad joke. Right. Bad joke! Nervous laughter bubbled from Jennifer’s throat, and she picked up her drink again.

      Marcie was a great many things. A true friend, proven from the day they’d met at age eleven, twenty years ago on the school bus. Jennifer had tripped and busted her lip in front of the hottest guy at Burnet Junior High. The hottie had bubbled over with loud laughter, and the crowd had joined in. Marcie to the rescue, she’d smack-talked the jerk into shame, and turned the joke on him. Yes. Marcie was a friend. What Marcie was not…was funny. She’d never had that comedic timing thing so many people had.

      “Bad joke, Marcie,” she said, so relieved she couldn’t even be angry. She’d kill Marcie after she finished her rare, but much-needed, alcoholic beverage. She sipped delicately before adding, “And this is not the way to get me into that lime-green dress you want me to wear.”

      Marcie’s hazel eyes glistened with trepidation. Recognizing the source of that trepidation as having nothing to do with her comment about the dress, and everything to do with Bobby, dread twisted in Jennifer’s stomach.

      “Please,” Jennifer said, her hand shaking as she set the drink down again. “Tell me you’re joking. Tell me Bobby is not coming to the wedding.” Just his name seemed to vibrate through every one of her five foot five inches.

      “I wouldn’t joke about Bobby,” Marcie said, suddenly not only finding her voice, but her feisty redheaded attitude. “And the dress isn’t lime. It’s yellow-green, the color of communicative healing in meditation, which is how I want my relationship to be and why I’m happy Bobby is coming. You need to heal. To deal with Bobby once and for all.”

      Emotions assailed Jennifer, a whirlwind of memories wrapped in prickly thorn-covered roses. “I do not need to heal!” She’d moved on seven years ago when Bobby had. She’d followed her dream, gone to vet school, and opened a small Hill Country office, albeit settling for a condo, not the cottage by Lake Travis she and Bobby had wanted. Instead her parents had sold their pet shop franchise and bought a lake house. Which she visited. Which was enough. She liked her condo. She liked her life.

      “You don’t even date,” Marcie said.

      “I date!” Okay. Not recently. But a girl could only take so many Nightmare on Elm Street, bad nights out. She pursed her lips, allowing anger and indignation to wipe away the Bobby memories blasting through her brain. “I can’t believe he has the nerve to show up here after being gone for all this time.” She paused for a heartbeat, and made an irritated sound. “Like he gives a damn or something.”

      “He does care,” Marcie said. “I need you to know I’ve been communicating with him.”

      Marcie might as well have dropped a sledgehammer on the bar because that admission shook Jennifer so deeply it darn near rattled her teeth. “You’ve been communicating with Bobby and didn’t tell me.” It wasn’t even a question. It was stunned disbelief.

      The “feist” in Marcie’s feisty faded. “Yes,” she said softly.

      “How long?”

      “Several years now,” Marcie said, dropping her bombshell.

      Had her heart stopped beating? Had the room gone utterly silent? “For several years?”

      “He does care,” Marcie repeated. And then, softening her voice, she added, “He worries about you.”

      Jennifer stared at her. Then she looked away, arms folding in front of her, memories refusing to be shoved away. Even after all these years, she could remember their first kiss as if it was yesterday. Bobby had moved from San Antonio, and like herself, was attending the University of Texas in Austin, or they might never have met. They’d met on the university campus—Jennifer walking her golden retriever, Bobby walking his German shepherd. The dogs had become fast friends; she and Bobby had become fast lovers. Her fingers raised to her mouth, remembering their first kiss, then dropped with that bittersweet memory.

      The sound of snapping pulled her out of her reverie. “Hello?” Marcie said, fingers in front of her face.

      Shaking herself mentally, Jennifer refocused on Marcie. Bobby had become like a big brother to Marcie; they were close. Of course they talked. Jennifer didn’t want to be selfish—that Marcie felt she had to hide her relationship with Bobby said she had been.

      “I’m sorry,” Jennifer said, meaning it. “This is your wedding and if you want him here, you deserve to have him here. And I’ll wear the yellow-green dress with a smile.” Just don’t press me to deal with Bobby, she pleaded silently.

      Marcie seemed to read between the lines, a look of understanding sliding across her face. “Thank you, Jen,” she murmured.

      Reaching across the bar, Jen squeezed Marcie’s arm and plastered on a bright smile that didn’t quite make it to her eyes. “Two short weeks and you’ll be a married woman.”

      Marcie all but glowed as she glanced across the crowded room to where Mark Snyder, her fiancé, chatted with a table of customers. Mark and Marcie, the two M’s, often joked about. The two lovers. “Yeah,” Marcie said in the midst of a dreamy sigh.

      Mark looked up as if he felt Marcie’s eyes on him and then motioned for her to join him. Obediently, Marcie darted from behind the bar. Jennifer sighed in relief, happy to have a few minutes alone.

      Grabbing her purse, she decided she’d go freshen up. A little mascara, a dab of powder, and she would have a new mind-set. Her plan intact, she swiveled around on the bar stool and started to slide off.

      The minute her feet hit the wood floor, she was stopped dead in her tracks as she crashed into a rock-hard chest. She stood stunned for a long moment as strong hands, familiar and warm, settled on her arms and sent an electric charge pinging around inside her, awareness instant, hot. Her body knew what her mind desperately burned to reject. Bobby Evans was standing in front of her. Touching her. The scent of him, rawly male, intensely masculine, and so damn arousing, insinuated into her senses. Seeped through to her bones.

      Slowly, her eyes traveled upward, taking in his towering six-foot-three frame—first sliding over denim-clad hips, then a soft black tee, a broad defined chest and finally his longish, fair hair that framed intense blue eyes. Those eyes now connected with hers. The impact was nothing shy of a head-on, steam-engine collision. Hot and hard. Just like his body and their sex life.

      He was older now, a man fully developed and now thirty. Time had served him well; he was bigger, broader and even more appealing than before—tanned with fine lines around his eyes that spoke of experience, depth. And a life she hadn’t been a part of.

      “Hey, Jen.” His voice was a deep baritone; his tone, intimate. Familiar. The same tone he’d used when he’d whispered naughty things in her ear during lovemaking.

      She СКАЧАТЬ