Burn for You

Three hundred people laughed. My face went molten hot.

Jackson chuckled. His arm squeezed tighter around my shoulders. He said, “Well. Maybe for the first hour it was for the food.”

Who is this chuckler? I thought wildly, my heart galloping but the rest of me frozen stiff. This crowd pleaser? This . . . flirt?

At that moment, he tilted his head and sent me a sly wink.

He winked.

From my peripheral vision, I saw several camera flashes. Sweet Georgia Brown, I was being photographed grinning at Jackson Boudreaux like the village idiot.

I looked back out at the faceless crowd. Cold sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades. My smile stayed plastered firmly in place.

Jackson said, “I want y’all to visit Bianca’s in the Quarter before month’s end. Will you do that for me?”

The crowd made more noise. Jackson nodded, and then he said some other things I was too discombobulated to recall. Then a man came onstage and shook Jackson’s hand, and Jackson led me off by the arm, smiling and waving good-bye to the crowd.

The moment we were out of earshot of any guests, he dropped my arm and snapped, “You can stop smiling now, for Christ’s sake!”

“Oh thank heavens,” I said sarcastically. “For a minute there I thought I was living in an alternate universe where you actually had a good side.”

He swung around and stood in front of me. We were outside the tent, off to the side of one of the openings where waiters were still coming and going, glaring at each other in cold semidarkness while the auction began inside.

He snapped, “You’re right. I don’t have a good side. The person I was in there is a fabrication, the Jackson Boudreaux who likes people and enjoys the spotlight and feels right at home in a fucking penguin suit.” He ripped off his bowtie and threw it to the ground. “But that guy knows how to work a crowd and raise money by the fuckload for a charity that helps a lot of soldiers in need.”

He stepped closer and growled, “And that guy is willing to do whatever’s necessary to keep his end of a bargain with you and promote your restaurant and act like we’re on good terms, even when it’s painfully fucking obvious you’d rather be pushed off a building than have my arm around your shoulders!”

Normally this was the part where I’d lose my temper and tell him to kiss my grits or some other silliness. But I realized like a slap across the face that the reason he was so angry was because he was hurt.

He was hurt because he thought I hated him.

That he actually cared what I thought about him left me breathless.

After a moment I said, “Just to be clear, I would rather have your arm around me than be pushed off a building. That is definitely preferable to death.”

He stood there staring at me, breathing heavily, blue eyes glittering, the pulse pounding hard in his neck. The scars on his lower jaw moved as a muscle flexed beneath them.

I said, “Also to be clear, I don’t hate you. You said that earlier, but it’s not true. What I feel when I’m around you is usually irritation, I admit that, but only because you’re always acting like you just escaped from a zoo.”

Aside from his chest, which rose and fell in irregular bursts, he didn’t move. He stayed still as a statue as I continued to speak, his intense gaze never leaving my face.

“And even if that was an act in there, I admire that you would do all this”—I made a gesture encompassing the tent, the scurrying servers, the side of the house with all its rented ovens and equipment—“in memory of your friend who passed away. And to raise money to help others like him.”

My gaze fell to his jaw, to those mysterious white lines that almost looked like claw marks. What had it taken for him to shave off his beard and put those on display?

What had made them in the first place?

And why would he have taken my advice?

My voice softer, I said, “And to shave and wear a penguin suit and say such nice things about my restaurant, even if you didn’t mean it.”

He said flatly, “If I didn’t mean it, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

And the other part? I wanted to ask. The part about only staying the first hour for the food, suggesting you’d stayed the rest of the time for me?

But that was too dangerous. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answer.

Instead I said, “I’m not comfortable in front of large crowds. That’s why I was stiff. I was surprised that you put your arm around me and that you were acting so differently, so that contributed to my general weirdness, too, but to be honest I was also very moved by what you said about your friend and hadn’t quite recovered when you called me up.”

Hoping the answer was no, I asked, “That part wasn’t an act, was it?”

Jackson swallowed. He shook his head. “I loved Christian like a brother. We went to college together. That’s why I adopted Cody. He’s Christian’s son.”

So I’d been right about Cody not being Jackson’s biological son. What a beautiful thing that he’d adopted his dead friend’s child. I didn’t dare ask where Cody’s mother was, so instead I studied Jackson’s face.

There were so many layers to this man—compassionate, complex layers beneath that thorny exterior. He was quick to snap and snarl, but just as quick to get his feelings hurt.

Maybe he had to grow that thorny skin to protect a tender heart? Maybe whatever happened to his face and whatever made him talk with such bitterness about his family business changed him?

Or maybe I had a vivid imagination.

Either way, his delicious smell was teasing my nose, he was standing a little too close, and he was looking at me in that odd way he did, the way that made my heart pump faster and my palms sweat. I had to go somewhere else, fast, so I could think about what the Fanny Hill was happening to me, because I was pretty sure it wasn’t only the cold that had my nipples hardening.

In a crisp, businesslike tone, I said, “Well if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work before Claudia discovers I’m still gone and has a stroke.”

Then I hurried away over the lawn toward the house, telling myself I really couldn’t feel Jackson’s gaze on me as I went.

Only I could.

And it was fire.

By midnight, the auction was over, the guests had left, and a team from the rental company had arrived to strike the tent and tables. Claudia was so relieved the event had gone well—and only deviated from her schedule by twelve minutes—that she hugged me. All that was left for me to do was find Rayford, who had promised to drive me home.

But I hadn’t seen Rayford in hours.

I didn’t feel comfortable skulking around the house in search of him, so for a while I lingered in the kitchen, assisting the strike team with loading the plates and glasses back into their crates and packing up the rest of the kitchen equipment. When that was done, I decided to give the kitchen counters a good scrubbing because I couldn’t stand leaving a kitchen a mess at the end of the night.

It was while I was in the middle of scraping burned food off the stove that I felt someone watching me. I turned to find Jackson standing in the doorway, a bottle in one hand and two highball glasses in the other.

He said, “Since you like Boudreaux Bourbon so much, I thought you might want to try something special.”

He lifted the bottle, a beautiful piece of cut crystal filled with an amber liquid so dark it was nearly brown. The gold label read, “Heritage 30 Year.”