“What if I have a bad day and I need to talk it out?”
“Find a good therapist, but first call and cancel our date.” She didn’t have room for any more issues. Clifton finding himself was as much issue as she could handle in one lifetime.
“Okay, no pleasantries. None.”
“We can still be pleasant.”
“Pleasant without the intimacy of conversation. Got it. More rules?”
“How do you feel about experimenting?”
He backed up a little, but only enough to cock his dark head. “With?”
“Things.” All the things she heard the girls talk about on the phone. Well, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them.
“I want the definition of things or it’s a no-go. Things is too vague and could lead to things I’m not good with.”
She couldn’t possibly list all the things she wanted to try, all the things the girls talked about on the phone. His sudden acceptance had caught her off guard. “I can’t define them all right now because I don’t know them all right now. I only know I’d like to try some things....”
“And I can say no to these things.”
“You absolutely can.”
“Can I try some things?”
“Define things.”
“How about we leave the thing-thing open-ended?”
“Deal.”
“Is there more?”
“No hard feelings when it’s over. If one of us gets tired of the other, just say the word done.”
“Is that like our safe word?”
“Call it whatever you like, but that’s the word we’ll use, and no one leaves with hard feelin’s. Sometimes things just run their course, and I understand that perfectly.” Like marriage. Hers had run its course. She’d run Clifton’s course. But wow, she was being very “lover in the afternoon,” wasn’t she?
“Deal. So how often are we doing this?”
“Am I allowed to call the shots?”
“Am I?”
She laughed, even as she wondered if she was a shot-caller. This bold half of her, while invigorating and exciting, was still waffling. “Let’s just say, we can be free to let the other know if the mood has struck—and if it doesn’t strike. We both have lives and children and responsibilities.”
“Okay, so now that that’s settled, I have a favor to ask you, our—” he wiggled his eyebrows “—deal aside. And you can say no, but if you do—I’m just throwing this out there—I’d be crushed.”
Ripples of pleasure raised goose bumps of delight on her forearms at the contact of his hand along the curve of her hip, stroking, discovering. “Dramatic,” she teased, moving her hands from his wrists to place them at his waist. Testing the waters, learning his body.
“Will you help with the house? I need serious help with everything from fixtures to paint. Top to bottom.”
But that would put them together much more than just on an air mattress. Could she be his lover and his interior decorator? Did that sound too much like the ingredients for a bad romance novel?
In that moment, Jax looked a little helpless, trumping the glow of accepting her crazy offer, trumping her hot-and-bothered hormones. “Look, Em, I really need some feminine input. If I’m not careful, Maizy will grow up with a pool table and a sixty-inch flat screen for furniture. I want Maizy to love where she lives, want to come home from school to it every day like I did when I was a kid. My sister, Harper, always helped with stuff like that, but after she died, we lost our feminine influences.”
His sister? She thought he only had brothers. She put a hand on his arm and squeezed it. “I had no idea, Jax. I’m so sorry.”
Brief flickers of sadness played around his eyes before he erased all evidence and gave her another Hawthorne smile. “It’s okay. It’s been almost two years, but Harper was a terrific aunt. She loved Maizy, and Maizy loved her. She was the only female influence in her life, and even though she was only four when Harper died, she remembers her. She misses her—she misses doing girl things, which is why when you met me for the first time, I had a barrette in my hair. I try. But there are areas I suck in. All I can think is, Harper would know what color to paint the bathroom. She’d know how to situate the silverware drawer. I’m sort of drowning here. All the girls talk about is how good you are at stuff like this, how you know all the places to go for good deals. That’s why I originally asked you to help in the first place.”
Her heart squeezed tight in sympathy for Maizy. Maizy’s mother was obviously gone, and now to find out her aunt was, too? How had so much tragedy befallen one small child of six?
She wouldn’t ask. It was none of her business, but all Maizy had were three men at the helm and a house that, if Jax’s description of the interior was accurate, looked like a bomb had gone off. There was little convincing needed as far as Em was concerned. “I’m in. No further explanation required.”
Jax smiled then, changing the color of her world in an instant. “So when?”
“When what?”
“When do we, you know...”