“Christ.” He takes the two pills sitting on the nightstand and swallows them dry.
A hard sniffle is my attempt to stop crying. “I could drink the whiskey for you.”
“Get out.”
He continues to be a terrible patient, arguing every time he needs medicine, growling because he’s clearly in pain, demanding whiskey along with brandy and finally tequila.
Mrs. Fairfax bustles in to clean his room and the rest of the house. She leaves promptly at noon, the same way she does every day. “I don’t take care of invalids,” she says on her way out the door. “Don’t get paid to do that.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Beau Rochester
God save me from crying females.
Jane with her gorgeous wide doe eyes. I can’t believe how close she came to going over the side of that cliff. My body is made of salt and water, made to beat against these Maine rocks. She’s fragile. Slender. Young. The fall could have killed her.
My mind supplies that image for me. Every time I close my eyes, it’s not my own fall that I see. It’s hers. She could have gone over the cliff—and then what?
It would have broken me to see her hurt, or worse, killed.
I’ve gone far too deep with this girl. The sex was wrong. Inappropriate. Definitely taboo to ever touch the nanny, but it was only supposed to be sex. An approximation of sex. Touching and kissing. Fucking her mouth. Does that count as sex?
Now I’m feeling things for her I have no business feeling.
And she’s clearly feeling them, too.
I know what happened out there. You pushed me back onto the ground and let yourself fall instead. The only reason you have three broken bones is because of me.
What was I supposed to do? Let her fall?
She stood in my room, so proud and so strong. She’s made of twigs, really. Twigs and leaves and whatever weight fills the air. She’s delicate—but she made me take my pain medicine. I hate feeling groggy. I hate losing control. And I’m losing control to Jane.
I’m alone in the room now, but for how long?
She’ll be back, taking care of me, nursing me back to health, and I’ll fucking fall in love with her. It’s a disaster. I need to fix this—for my sake and for hers. She’s nineteen with dreams of her own. She doesn’t need to be saddled with a bastard like me and my millions of secrets.
The world already looks a little more hazy from the meds.
At least my leg throbs less.
I pick up my phone. Mateo. That’s who I should call. My old friend would give me shit about falling off a cliff, but he’d help me. Probably.
Unless he’s shooting some commercial.
Instead I scroll to the bottom and dial Zoey Aldridge.
She makes me wait ten rings before answering. I can imagine her in her black-lacquer apartment, nails clicking against a glass tabletop while she watches her iPhone ring.
“Hello, Beau.” There’s that sultry voice I remember.
“Zoey.”
“Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again. After I got your parting gift. In the mail.”
She’s pissed. Of course she’d be pissed. I didn’t feel like meeting her just to break up, so I sent her something pretty from Tiffany’s. Not like she returned it.
In the silence that follows I can hear her calculating her next move. It’s sweet, actually. Being with someone I can understand. Not like Jane with her dark eyes and mystery.
“I broke my leg. In three places.”
“Is that your way of saying you miss me?”
“It’s my way of inviting you to Maine.”
“If you want me to fuck you with your leg broken, you can think again.”
“I did miss this,” I say with a laugh. It’s the same way you miss the rough open seas. Not because they were pleasant, but because it’s all you knew. “Pick out a present. Send me the link. And get on a fucking plane.”
“You’re a bastard, Beau Rochester. Everyone told me.”
“Everyone was right.” Zoey Aldridge is a beautiful woman, but I don’t want to fuck her. I can’t imagine ever doing it again. The terrifying part is that I can’t imagine ever wanting any woman who isn’t Jane again. That’s untenable. It won’t do. That is why I need Zoey here, a wedge between us. I need to push Jane away, because I’m already too close.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jane Mendoza
Turns out that Paige’s private school has a counselor on staff, so we schedule a Zoom call. The counselor sends a note beforehand that Mr. Rochester should plan to attend. When I mention it to him, he growls a threatening and creative use of swear words.
The first counseling session ends up being helpful for both her guilt over Mr. Rochester getting hurt and her reluctance to do schoolwork. The woman asks gentle questions about why she feels safer holding a paintbrush than a pencil, without judgment. We make an appointment for her to meet with Paige online once a week so they can work through some of this together.
I’m heating up the dinner that Mrs. Fairfax left when the doorbell rings.
A woman stands on the step, a man in a suit holding an umbrella over her head. She looks only vaguely familiar in a blonde-and-beautiful kind of way.
I’m sure we’ve never met.
A limo waits behind them. I stare at them, struck for a moment between the differences in our arrivals. Me, in an economy Toyota Prius with Walmart luggage in the freezing rain. Her, with a chauffeured driver, her no-doubt Louis Vuitton bags in the trunk.
“I’m here for Beau,” she says with a kind, sympathetic smile.
“Like a doctor?”
She scrunches her nose, as if embarrassed for me. “We’re together.”
Oh. Oh. I’ve been here for three months now, and I’ve never seen him go on a date. That doesn’t mean he’s not with someone. He could have a long-distance relationship. Hell, he could have gone to New Hampshire to see her late at night, and I wouldn’t have known about it.
“Right. Let me just…” It seems weird to let a stranger into the house when we aren’t expecting her. I mean technically she could be a thief. Though I don’t know why a thief would have a Tory Burch trench coat. Seems unlikely you’d hire a limo for a theft. “Let me check with Beau.”
And I proceed to close the door in her face.
“What’s going on?” Paige asks as I walk by the kitchen.
“Nothing, sweetheart. Be there in a minute.” I head up the stairs, feeling like an idiot times a hundred. I’m muttering to myself—excuses, denials. Reasons why I closed the door on someone who is most likely a treasured guest. “There’s a child in the house. You can’t be too careful.”
I open Beau’s bedroom door to find him typing away on his laptop.
“We said no work,” I say, standing there like an outsider. In so many ways, an outsider. Why did I ever think we were like a family? What kind of insane adrenaline rush made that thought run through my head. Mr. Rochester, and I will call him Mr. Rochester from now on, is my boss.
“You said no work,” he says without looking up. “I can type just as good sitting down as standing up. The hydrocodone makes it so I can tell people to get their heads out of their asses.”