Four
In his West Street penthouse, Jaeger rolled out of his empty bed and padded to the kitchen, glancing at the Hudson River through the massive windows that were a key feature of the apartment. This place was ridiculously big for one person, but he liked returning to light and space and quiet after his trips abroad.
A lot of light, space and quiet, Jaeger thought. Thanks, Uncle Connor.
Connor had left everything he owned to his four adopted children, including property and equal shares in Ballantyne International, with its many subsidiaries, the most important of which were the exclusive jewelry stores around the world. Their childhood home, a brownstone on the Upper East Side, was also jointly owned by the four of them, but he and Beckett retained their own residences. Beckett had offered his place to family friends from London visiting the city for a month, so he was temporarily living in Jaeger’s apartment. Jaeger didn’t mind. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the room.
He liked this apartment, but its designer perfection was wasted on him. He was hardly here, and it felt sterile and cold. He preferred Piper’s relaxed bohemian style, a mishmash of old and new furniture, interesting art and the ordinary household items indicating people used the space, lived and loved there. An open book, a corked wine bottle, magnets on the fridge, a playpen in the corner...
God, she had a kid.
He’d met her yesterday, so he couldn’t exactly ask, but Jaeger wondered who Ty’s father was and whether he was in the picture. Were they together when he and Piper had dinner in Milan? Piper didn’t seem like the type to cheat on her man, but Jaeger knew how wrong he could be when he made assumptions.
He’d thought Jess would live past six weeks, never imagined she’d be a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. He’d assumed he and Andrea needed time to grieve and they’d find their way back to each other.
And he’d never believed that he could forget a chunk of his life.
God, he’d been so lucky. What if he’d forgotten more? What if he’d had no memories of his parents, his childhood, Connor... God, no memories of Jess? As it always did when he thought too long about his amnesia, panic bubbled and boiled. It was a couple of months of his life lost, but to Jaeger, it was symbolic of everything that went away.
Like his parents, Jess, Connor...those memories were inaccessible.
His body had healed quickly, but his mind hadn’t. He coped with the uncertainty by minimizing risk, particularly in his personal life. No relationships, no kids, no connections. He was never going to bring someone new into his life, since life had this habit of whisking away the people he loved.
Few people knew what it felt like when grief plunged its icy hand into your rib cage and ripped out your heart. He couldn’t even call it pain; it went beyond that. He’d had his heart replaced with an organ pumping cold regret, hot anger, crippling guilt and searing agony all at the same time. Those emotions gradually faded, but he remembered enough to want not to go there again.
Besides, even if he desired to revisit that madness—he didn’t; he’d rather have been stabbed in the eye with a red-hot poker—the nature of his work made it difficult to sustain a relationship. He dropped in and out of New York like a yo-yo, and his schedule could turn on a dime. If he received a tip from any of his numerous contacts around the world, he was on the next plane out, hoping to be the first to do the deal. He had no illusions about the loyalty of his contacts—they passed the same information to his rivals—but they generally gave him a head start, probably because he paid them a slightly higher commission than his competitors did.
International gem dealing was a cutthroat business, and Jaeger cut throats, metaphorically, very well indeed. He was ruthless, demanding and persistent. He liked his life, liked the opportunity to see places few people did, to meet with people from different cultures, to visit villages where time stood still. He liked the freedom his work gave him, and he loved the adrenaline of making a deal.
He’d never, not for a single second, thought he’d find the same adrenaline kissing Piper, someone he’d met before but whom he couldn’t remember, a woman with a kid.