I arched a brow at him because he knew me very well. He knew way more about me than his brothers did. He knew how to make me sigh, and make me moan, — I shook my head of the naughty thoughts I was having.
"Yes, please come with us, Jess. You work so hard. I'd love the opportunity to pay you back."
Carter looked at his father. "Except I'm paying, so I'm paying her back."
Alex grinned. "Yes, right, of course."
No, was on the tip of my tongue. "Yes, of course, that would be lovely." I was shocked at myself, but what was done was done. "I'm going to go set up for a little post-walk massage for you Alex. You can meet me out on the terrace,” I said as I hurried away from them and into the house to catch my breath.
As I got the equipment I needed, and carried it out to the terrace, my head was a whirl with what just happened. Carter just tried to give me a car. And it wasn't some little cheap junker like my little heap. It was an expensive little sports car. It probably still had a lot of miles to go on it. I wondered what it would be like to have that kind of money to just give away a car.
I chastised myself for not accepting the gift, because I probably could have taken it and traded it in for something that would work better for me and Tanner. Of course, then I have to explain why I'd turned in his kind gift for a more boring sedan.
Ultimately, it was better that I had refused the gift. Besides, I wasn’t sure it would've been appropriate for me to take a car from a man that I wasn't in a relationship with. During our trip to Mexico, he tried to give me a few gifts, but I refused those as well, mostly because I only wanted to take my memories of him, and not have some trinket to ruminate over.
Except for Carter, the most a boyfriend had ever given me had been a “gold" necklace that had turned my skin green. The gesture was sincere, but it was nothing like what Carter had just offered. A car! I couldn’t even wrap my head around it.
As I waited for Alex to join me on the terrace, I made a quick call to Reggie. "Alex and one of his sons have invited me to dinner. I can still say no, but they are insisting it's a treat for me. Would it be a hassle to ask you to watch Tanner tonight for a little while longer?"
"You know it's no hassle," Reggie said, with an exasperated tone that suggested she didn't like that I felt like I was putting her out by asking for her help. "Little Tanner and I will have dinner and then he and I are going to go get some ice cream."
In the background Tanner yelled, "Ice cream. Yay! Can I have chocolate chip?"
"Of course, you can little man," Reggie said.
"I appreciate this Reggie. And I'll be sure to be home in time to give Tanner his bedtime kiss."
Once I was off the call, I began to feel guilty. I told Reggie that I was going to dinner with Alex and Carter, because it was a gift they wanted to give me, but I knew deep down that I wanted to go on this dinner for me. I wanted to spend time with Carter and rediscover the man he was or had become since I'd known him four years ago. I wanted him to look at me the way he had just before he kissed me and the other day and when he saw me in my swimsuit.
It was so dangerous to want all that because it would only lead to frustration since I couldn't go beyond the yearning. And yet I couldn't stop myself from wanting to have just that little sample. It was selfish. Selfish because while it seemed like Carter was willing to rekindle our past, I wasn't going to go there and so it wasn't fair to him. But it was also selfish because I had a little boy at home, and my priority needed to be him, not in satisfying an emptiness I’d been feeling inside me since the day Carter and I parted four years ago.
9
Carter
I watched as Jess scurried inside, like she was uncomfortable being with me. I hated that. Even if we weren't as young and carefree as we were four years ago, why was it that she was so skittish with me?
"It's one thing to tease my physical therapist, it's another thing to look at her like a sexual object, Carter," my father said, his tone, one of displeasure, which was unusual for him. "It's not like you to openly ogle a woman."
Perhaps it was time to tell my dad the truth. "This is not the first time I've met Jess."
My father's expression was confused. "I know you met her the other day."
I shook my head. "No, I mean I met her before. Four years ago, on that cruise I took to Mexico."
Similar to my grandmother, my father's brows shot up. "Really? Because the two of you don’t really acting like —"
"She's worried because you're her boss." That wasn't completely true. The reasoning for her avoiding me now was that she worked for my father, but I don't believe it was the reason why she acted like she didn't know me. There was something more going on here, and more and more I was worried that it involved whoever this Reggie person was. I'd been hoping that he was just a friend or roommate, but I had to consider that he was more than that to her. That would explain why she wouldn't take the car. Or why she wouldn’t go out to dinner with me alone.
"What does that have to do with anything?" my father asked.
“She's afraid she might get fired. I guess it must be inappropriate to be involved with the boss’s son."
My father's eyes studied me. "Involved. Do you mean you had dated?"
I was an open book, and I loved my father, but I wasn’t not so sure I wanted to share the intimate details of my relationship with Jess four years ago.
I decided I'd explain it like I did for my grandmother and Andi. "It was basically a shipboard romance, but I'd always regretted letting her go. There'd been something about her, but we had agreed that we wouldn’t share personal information. Instead, we just had a great adventure through Mexico."