Or the dimple on his left cheek when he grinned.
Estúpido.
But while he made my pulse stutter, he didn’t view me as anything other than the annoying little sister; we were familiaafter all.
The only “unattractive” part about Jason was that he was beginning to lose his hair early to male-pattern baldness. Despite it being unpreventable and inevitable, it was an extremely touchy subject and one which Jace refused to acknowledge. He was incredibly self-conscious about the fact he was losing his gorgeous, thick locks at just twenty. It was also a factor in our demise.
The final straw with Jason came when I was seventeen. It was Jason’s last weekend at home before moving to the city and the three of us were at Darren’s place drinking and playing board games. Monopoly, to be precise. As always, competitive spirits flared, and tempers heated when Darren and Jason teamed up to take me down. The more we drank, the worse their teasing got, as did my rising sass.
When Jace landed on a property of mine with a hotel sitting pretty on it, I stood and leaned across the table to jab a finger at him. “Ha! Put that on your dick and suck it.”
“Back off, Jacquelyn,” he growled, purposely calling me by my full name because he knew I hated it.
Darren’s snicker pushed my rage higher. “No.”
“Jax,” came Jace’s bark of final warning.
I scoffed and held out my hand. “C’mon, old man, pay up. Or can’t you afford it? Want me to rub your bald spot until you shit out enough paper money to cover it?” The spite-laced taunt was designed to be a joke, but it offended him more than I anticipated.
Through my laughter, Darren sucked in a shocked breath and choked down a curse. Jason reddened with rage, jumped to his feet, and dug his fingers underneath the monopoly board.
“Would you just stop being a bratty little bitch for once in your fucking life!” he roared, while markers, cards, houses, and money rained down around me.
My jaw fell slack in absolute shock. Thoughts froze in my mind and refused to form a comeback. Pain like none other tore through my chest. I struggled to breathe and sat locked to the spot as the echoes of his words burned through me like a hot iron. They seared so deep that the wounds still hadn’t healed to this day.
“What the fuck, bro!” Darren yelled, snapping to his feet and gunning for Jason. Jace met him head-on, hands clenched and chest heaving.
Darren fisted the front of Jace’s shirt and cocked a hand back ready to punch Jason’s teeth out. “If youevertalk to Jax like that again, I will punch your fucking lights out. You got that,brother?”
Jace’s regret-filled eyes cut to me. I saw his realisation and the horror that chased it. I saw the remorse and the guilt but fuck him; we were done. With one last scathing glare, I curled my lip in disdain, then turned on my heel and stormed out of the house. As the door slammed closed behind me, I vowed to make Jace pay for what he said; I pledged to never speak to him again.
The resounding ripples of those memories induced a shudder that snapped me back to the present. The one where Jason looked me over as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
Mine narrowed sharply, and I steeled the shutters around my heart to buffer me against the ever-present ache associated with Jason Malone.
“¡Carajo! [Shit!] Jason?”
TWO
JACE
After a moment of glaring at me blankly, totally thrown by my new appearance, the world unpaused. As the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place, Jax’s initial surprise morphed into agitation. Her eyes narrowed again, and she slammed her hands savagely onto her hips.
“¡Carajo!Jason?”
I fought the urge to crack out a laugh.There’sthe Jax I remembered. Well, her attitude anyway. Visually… Holy Mother of Christ, she had changed. My last memory of her was a giggly, annoying as hell, seventeen-year-old kid who vaguely resembled the voluptuous woman standing before me now. This new Jax was a league away from the one I’d treated like a piece of shit the last time we spoke.
I’d regretted my venomous words every breathing moment from the instant they burned from my mouth. There wasn’t anything I could say to make her understand how remorseful I was about the whole thing. The fact that I’d taken her position as the only daughter in our families and used it to crush her spirit, purely because she had bruised my ego, was so far out of line it was despicable.
After breaking her heart so bad that I swore I heard it fracture, I was shocked to see her here tonight. Never in a million years did I think she’d come here voluntarily. Maybe Darren hadn’t told her I’d moved back to town; that would explain her lack of initial recognition. Although, I hadn’t recognised her right away either, because, hot damn, I hadn’t expected…that.
“My friends call me Jace.” I smirked to try to break the tension, then I indicated to the barman. “Put hers on my tab, mate.”
I turned my attention back to the brown-eyed, caramel-toned beauty and eye-fucked her all over again, this time slower than the first. “Je-sus, Jax, you’ve changed in the last three years.”
I wrapped my hand around my glass to quell the urge to reach out and run my hand over the lush curve of her hip. After three years in purgatory, I wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her. Hostility rolled off her in thick waves, and I watched on high alert as she reached for her shot of tequila, half expecting it to end up on my face.
I followed her every movement as she shook salt onto her hand, licked it, downed the shot, then sucked on the lemon with a grimace. A calculating smile tugged at her lips as she discarded the rind. When her eyes met mine, something lingered in them that unsettled me to the core.