Burn For You

29

My gaze fell to his jaw, to those mysterious white lines that almost looked like claw marks. What had it taken for him to shave off his beard and put those on display?

What had made them in the first place?

And why would he have taken my advice?

My voice softer, I said, “And to shave and wear a penguin suit and say such nice things about my restaurant, even if you didn’t mean it.”

He said flatly, “If I didn’t mean it, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

And the other part? I wanted to ask. The part about only staying the first hour for the food, suggesting you’d stayed the rest of the time for me?

But that was too dangerous. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answer.

Instead I said, “I’m not comfortable in front of large crowds. That’s why I was stiff. I was surprised that you put your arm around me and that you were acting so differently, so that contributed to my general weirdness, too, but to be honest I was also very moved by what you said about your friend and hadn’t quite recovered when you called me up.”

Hoping the answer was no, I asked, “That part wasn’t an act, was it?”

Jackson swallowed. He shook his head. “I loved Christian like a brother. We went to college together. That’s why I adopted Cody. He’s Christian’s son.”

So I’d been right about Cody not being Jackson’s biological son. What a beautiful thing that he’d adopted his dead friend’s child. I didn’t dare ask where Cody’s mother was, so instead I studied Jackson’s face.

There were so many layers to this man—compassionate, complex layers beneath that thorny exterior. He was quick to snap and snarl, but just as quick to get his feelings hurt.

Maybe he had to grow that thorny skin to protect a tender heart? Maybe whatever happened to his face and whatever made him talk with such bitterness about his family business changed him?

Or maybe I had a vivid imagination.

Either way, his delicious smell was teasing my nose, he was standing a little too close, and he was looking at me in that odd way he did, the way that made my heart pump faster and my palms sweat. I had to go somewhere else, fast, so I could think about what the Fanny Hill was happening to me, because I was pretty sure it wasn’t only the cold that had my n*****s hardening.

In a crisp, businesslike tone, I said, “Well if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work before Claudia discovers I’m still gone and has a stroke.”

Then I hurried away over the lawn toward the house, telling myself I really couldn’t feel Jackson’s gaze on me as I went.

Only I could.

And it was fire.

By midnight, the auction was over, the guests had left, and a team from the rental company had arrived to strike the tent and tables. Claudia was so relieved the event had gone well—and only deviated from her schedule by twelve minutes—that she hugged me. All that was left for me to do was find Rayford, who had promised to drive me home.

But I hadn’t seen Rayford in hours.

I didn’t feel comfortable skulking around the house in search of him, so for a while I lingered in the kitchen, assisting the strike team with loading the plates and glasses back into their crates and packing up the rest of the kitchen equipment. When that was done, I decided to give the kitchen counters a good scrubbing because I couldn’t stand leaving a kitchen a mess at the end of the night.

It was while I was in the middle of scraping burned food off the stove that I felt someone watching me. I turned to find Jackson standing in the doorway, a bottle in one hand and two highball glasses in the other.

He said, “Since you like Boudreaux Bourbon so much, I thought you might want to try something special.”

He lifted the bottle, a beautiful piece of cut crystal filled with an amber liquid so dark it was nearly brown. The gold label read, “Heritage 30 Year.”

My eyes widened. “I thought that stuff was an urban legend!”

Jackson moved from the doorway to the large marble island in the middle of the kitchen and set the bottle and glasses down. He’d removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. I still couldn’t get over how different he looked, though his hair was trying its hardest to return to its former state of disarray. Several unruly dark locks flopped over his forehead in an appealing, boyish way.

He said, “It’s an orphan from one of only a few dozen barrels made with this particular mash bill. An experiment that was ended when my father opened the barrels after ten years and declared it s**t. The rest of the barrels were sold to a competitor for blending, but one was misplaced, found in the back of the rickhouse a few years ago. Turns out the mash bill was perfect, but it needed a lot longer to age than the other recipes.”

I heard my mother’s voice telling me, Some caterpillars need more time to turn into butterflies than others when I asked her why, at fifteen, I didn’t have boobs like all my friends. Like the Heritage 30 Year, I was a late bloomer.

It was both strange and strangely comforting to find I had something in common with a rare, expensive liquor.