As he lay there watching her, he wondered what she was like in her own element back home. He’d heard a couple of stories from college when they’d go out and Vanessa would convince his normally straitlaced sister to do something crazy, which didn’t quite match up with the woman he’d seen in the last thirty-six hours. He wondered if she’d calmed down after college or maybe was different because of the circumstances they were in.
As Lucie’s best friend, how much did she know about him? Did girls typically talk in depth about their families? He assumed they did. As far as he knew, girls talked nonstop about everything. But even still, Lucie would’ve only talked about the superficial stuff. Funny stories from their childhood, like when he and Reid ruined Lucie’s tea party when their G.I. Joes took her Barbies as POWs. (Hey, it wasn’t his fault. Snake Eyes was a highly trained government assassin who had reason to believe Ken was a secret agent working for the Russians.)
But all of that was just fluff. Lucie couldn’t tell Vanessa the most important thing about him, because even his baby sister didn’t know his secret. How could he tell her that their family—which they’d always thought was so perfect—wasn’t so perfect after all?
When his parents died in the car accident, Jackson’s life had been turned upside down. He’d just barely graduated high school and was set to go to Vegas with Reid so they could both pursue their careers in MMA. Instead, he found himself fighting to be the legal guardian of his thirteen-year-old sister. And soon after that, he found the paperwork tucked away in his parents’ lock box at the bank. Paperwork that shattered his reality.
After the initial shock wore off, Jackson had put it far back in his mind while he raised Lucie the best he could. Really, she’d made it pretty easy on him. She was a great kid, never got in any trouble, always got straight A’s, and didn’t date. But it still didn’t detract from the stress of being responsible for her during the most crucial years of her adolescence and having to learn real quick how to be an adult with a job and bills.
That’s why, when he got to Hawaii, he made the decision to live as simply as possible, only buying what he could purchase outright with cash and being responsible for no one but himself. And he’d been living quite happily that way ever since.
Vanessa stirred beside him, rubbing her nose with her fingers and twitching it like a bunny. He smiled and reached up to tuck the curl that had caused the tickle behind her ear. To his surprise, her face turned in to his touch, and she whispered his name. A feeling he couldn’t describe ran through him, knowing he was in her dreams. He didn’t have long to revel in the idea, however, because almost as soon as she said it, her eyes fluttered open.
“How long have I been out?”
“I’d say a couple of hours.”
She sat up like the blanket had scorched her. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I was out that long. I mean, I thought I’d take, like, a thirty-minute power nap or something.”
“What’s the big deal? So you took an afternoon nap on a beautiful beach. It’s certainly not a crime, V.”
“I realize that,” she snapped. “I’m just…not used to wasting so much of my day.”
“I’m gonna go ahead and state the obvious here. You’re a workaholic who doesn’t know how to unwind, even on vacation.”
“Technically, this isn’t supposed to be my vacation. I wasn’t supposed to be here until Friday, remember? Next week is my vacation. I still have work that needs to be done. I’m simply working remotely from a tropical island.”
“Yikes, that sounds like zero fun.”
She stood up and started putting her clothes on and gathering the picnic items. “Yes, well, not all of us can have jobs that allow us to be carefree surfers.”
He stood, too, and picked up his board. He didn’t think she’d be one of the people who made assumptions about a fighter’s life like it wasn’t a real job. “Just because I’m not in a training camp right now doesn’t mean that when it’s time for me to work I slack off and it’s all sunshine and roses.”
“Come on, Jackson. Your career consists of eating healthy and working out. Most people do that on top of everything else in their life.”
“Really. That’s all it is, huh?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure your workouts are tough; I’m just saying that for someone who’s as in shape and used to it as you are, you would have a fairly easy time doing it. It’d be like cross-examining a witness for me.”
“I’m flattered by your faith in my abilities, but it doesn’t matter how in shape I am or how many times I do a camp. Every workout feels just as hard as my first day training. They’re like that by design.”