Page 47 of Her Property

Why not? Wouldn’t she be the best one to know how much it hurt?

Part of him wanted to show her how he felt. A big part of him. Maybe almost all of him. But maybe she was stacking a case against him for Alfred.

The bitter thought made him sick.Don’t be an ass, Colson. She’s trying to help.

“Jake,” Cat said, when he looked at her again.

God she was so gorgeous. He wanted to stop talking about this stuff—more than anything. He just wanted to reach forward and take her hand, bring her back to the bedroom and ask her to stay all night. And tomorrow too.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I think the reason Alfred has it out for you is because he was in love with your mother.”

Cat

Jake’s face had gone ashen when Cat told him what she knew had to be the truth. Alfred’s one true love—the one he’d confessed to Cat was the reason he’d never had children—was Jake’s mother.

Jake could have been Alfred’s son, Cat thought. If things had turned out differently.

But as Jake laid his palms flat on the surface of his table, she took in the long length of his forearm; the bulge of his bicep and broad shoulder; the arms that had lifted her into the bedroom and wrapped themselves around her as they made love. While Alfred was now silver-haired and portly, he’d been handsome and lithe in his youth—she’d seen photos. The two men looked nothing alike.

“It can’t be true!” Jake said, forming his hands into fists and then flattening them again. It was a thing he did when he was upset. The understanding that she was starting to recognize his idiosyncrasies felt like something sharp wrapping around her heart. She needed to detach herself from this situation, from this man. Nothing good was going to come out of falling for him.

Because that was what she was doing, wasn’t it?

“My mother was a teenager when she ran off with my dad,” Jake said. “That’s what my grandparents always told us. And it wasn’t Alfred who she ran off with. I remember…”

Jake trailed off, his face searching for the memory.

“I remember Alfred getting into a fight with my dad. We were so young, not in school yet, and we’d been staying with Gramps and Gran because mom and dad had another giant fight. I don’t know why Alfred was there in their driveway, but he and my dad were outside shouting at each other.”

Jake stood up and began pacing the kitchen. Outside, the rain had started up again—it began to ping against the panel of windows behind Cat.

“I was in the upstairs bedroom, staring out my window. It was raining like it was earlier today. Stormy. Gran pulled me away from the window when she saw me. I asked her why the man from the other house was there, and Gran said my dad had smashed into his mailbox. God, I’d forgotten all about this. I only remember the details because Gran and Gramps had a new mailbox a week later, and they moved it to the other side of the road to be away from the Jones’s. It’s still there today.”

Now that Jake mentioned it, Cat vaguely remembered noticing the two mailboxes at the end of the road. She’d thought it was odd—an inconvenience for the country mail delivery driver who couldn’t just lean out the window to drop the mail.

“Maybe they were arguing about your mother,” Cat said.

“No way. My mother hated the Jones’s family, just like Grandpa. Only Gran talked about wishing the rift between our families could be repaired.”

Jake was so tense Cat could see the ridge of muscles across his shoulders pulse through his shirt. Half of her wanted to tell him how pointless it was to hang on to all that anger. The other half wanted to tell him to give his head a shake and stop being pissed off about something he had no control over.

But who was she to talk? She saw Justin sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, the floodlights on, cars honking and revving their engines.

“Forgive me, Cat, please, it was just a stupid game.”

“Then why are we here?”she’d screamed. “Why aretheyall here? I’ll never forgive you for as long as I live!”

She’d never forgiven Justin or any of those kids for what they’d done to her. She’d held onto that rage and shaped it into a focus so sharp she’d given up three summers to study in back-to-back semesters just to catch up on the time she’d lost. She’d gotten through the two years of community college in one and a half, and done the same thing when she’d transferred to Ohio State. By the time she graduated with her first degree, she was earning better grades than Laura and law schools were head hunting her. She dated but always held herself back, and broke up with all her boyfriends before anything got even a hint of seriousness. She had been a fool, but she’d never be made a fool of again. She made sure of that because of that burning anger she hung onto.

So she couldn’t blame Jake for holding onto his. But that didn’t mean he had to keep doing it. Because in his case, his anger wasn’t going to fuel him through law school. It wasn’t going to give him the drive that got her into one of the top firms in New York.

His anger would only hurt him. It was standing in the way of his own dreams.

Idiot man.

“Jake, it makes sense,” Cat said. “It’s why Alfred is so irrationally angry. Why he’s doggedly pursuing the legal action against you.”

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