But then I fought through the haze of his sexiness and how the closeness of his body heat was doing things to me to focus on his words.
Mistake. Or maybe my saving grace.
Because every word out of his mouth only pissed me off more. “I’m crazy? I’m crazy?” My voice went up about an octave. I shoved my chair back and stood up so that he could no longer tower over me, looking down his stupid gorgeous nose at me.
I glared at him. “I know this might be incomprehensible to your little pea brain, but I am a full-grown woman who knows her own mind. Yes, I know what I’m here for. Yes, I know what I’m getting into.” I briefly glanced around the room, the sturdy, aged and stained floorboards and wallpaper, and thought of how my own mother might have once walked through this very same room.
My eyes flashed back to Rafe. “Your family kept me down my whole fucking life. I’m not going to let any Jackson tell me what I can or cannot do ever again.”
Rafe’s brow crumpled, like he was confused. “What are you even talking about?”
God, boys could be so obtuse. If he couldn’t connect the dots, I wasn’t going to spell it out for him.
I put a finger in his face. “I’m here to get what’s owed to me. What I deserve. What my family deserves. And you are not going to stop me.”
Rafe just shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what this place is—”
I scoffed at that. This place had used up and spit my mom out as an impoverished single mother with zero support. And Rafe thought I didn’t know what this place was? I was pretty sure he was the one who needed an education on the Oleander’s history and what really went on here.
But no, that would require him actually listening and maybe, just maybe, being willing to admit he wasn’t a master of the universe who knew everything. Something I was pretty sure no one in his family had ever, ever done. So, I wasn’t holding my breath. Rafe had proven to me long ago that he was a Jackson through and through.
Rafe’s brows drew together. Oh, I was really frustrating him now. That was the face he got when he wasn’t getting his way and he didn’t like it. This was almost fun.
“Fallon, stop it, this isn’t funny. This isn’t like stealing a candy bar from the corner store when we were kids. I’m not joking. This is serious. You shouldn’t be here.”
You shouldn’t be here. Dagger to the heart. Because, oh right, he’d rather have fucked some other woman last night. The delicate little fainting blonde.
Fuck him. Fuck Rafe Jackson, that he still had any ability to hurt me. I felt my eyebrows rise to my hairline. I got right in his face.
“No, Rafe, you’re right. You thinking you can tell me what to do certainly isn’t funny. At all.”
He huffed out a breath through his nose like an angry bull, the spots on his cheeks getting even brighter. “You aren’t even trying to listen to me. I’m trying to protect you—”
At my loud scoff the spots in his cheeks turned even redder, though I seriously wouldn’t have thought that was possible at this point. He was going to light on fire any second at this rate. Still, I couldn’t resist poking the bear.
“God save me from the ‘protection’ of anyone with the last name Jackson. I’ve seen how your kind protect—you only protect your own, even when to the world it looks like charity. I know the truth.”
Like giving the poor little housekeeper’s daughter a “scholarship” to prep school because Rafe’s father felt guilty about not choosing her mother during the Initiation. Instead, he doomed her to a life of just above poverty, all for the privilege of cleaning up after him and his wife for the rest of Mom’s life. The least he could do was provide her daughter—a bastard daughter fathered by some known or unknown friend of his—with an education.
Either that or Rafe’s mom was terrified my mom would spill her guts about Rafe’s dad and what went on in the Oleander. Mama H theorized that if Mrs. Jackson would have had her way, Mrs. Jackson would have run us out on a rail the second she found out about any of it. But Rafe’s dad put his foot down, and she’d come up with the idea of paying for my school as a means of leverage and silencing Mom instead.
Until Timothy died. Then Mr. Jackson stopped giving a shit about everything, apparently. And Mrs. Jackson got rid of me like she’d always wanted.
Rafe stepped back from me, looking baffled. “What are you talking about?”
Now I really did want to laugh. He hadn’t known? It had tormented me, wondering if he’d been in on it, if they’d ever told him—if he knew his “best friend’s” education was being paid for by his own parents as an insidious form of manipulation. After all, who could fault them for such a generous act? If anyone knew of it, they’d think I should shut my mouth and be grateful.