stomach nose-dived while her heart fought for a way out of the captivity of her chest. Permanently? How, in the name of the good man above, would she survive his sexual napalm living in a community as small as Plum Orchard?
* * *
Jax shoulder bumped Caine Donovan, his longtime friend and old college roommate, before dropping down on a stool at the breakfast bar. “This—” he craned his neck to indicate the enormity of what Caine called the Big House “—is some shit. That guy that used to come visit you all the time in college left you all of this? Your best friend, right?”
Caine smiled, his grin easy as he leaned forward on the breakfast bar and sipped his beer. “Yep. Landon Wells, and yes, again. Technically, he left it to my fiancée, Dixie, but I scored big because I’m smart enough to marry her. He also left us something else. Something that’s gonna blow your head off. It’s one of the reasons I called you when I heard you were moving into your aunt’s place. You need something to do with your time since you sold the business. Your brothers told me you’re a total shithead lately.”
Jax was still reeling after meeting one Emmaline Amos up close and in person. The woman he’d seen across the town square when he’d been here two months ago, signing the papers to take possession of his aunt’s house.
When she’d run from the square that night and straight into him after seeing a picture of what he’d heard through Plum Orchard’s gossipy grapevine was her husband dressed in drag, her vulnerability, her raw humiliation, had touched a nerve.
Soft and sweet, her dark hair falling over her shoulders like silk, she’d caught his attention then and stuck like glue to his mind’s eye since.
Today, when she’d used that tone with him, under the guise of some good old-fashioned Southern decorum, it did something funny to his chest. It was like telling him to go straight to hell while she smiled that cute smile.
She was hot and sweet, and she’d tried pretty hard to maintain her composure, leading Jax to believe she remembered him from that night, too.
“Jax?” Caine nudged him across the marble countertop.
“Sorry. Got a lot on my mind. So what’s gonna blow my head off? Like this palace isn’t enough? You have a camel, man. There’s a camel in the backyard.” He still couldn’t believe it.
Caine chuckled. “That’s Toe, by the way. You’ll need to know that when you come work for us. He actually likes people—especially people who need a swift kick in the ass.”
He didn’t want to do anything but renovate his aunt’s house and hang out with his daughter, Maizy. Jax stiffened, cracking his scratched knuckles. “I don’t need a job, Caine. Since I sold the company, I’ve just been catching my breath.”
“And driving Gage and Tag crazy,” Caine said, but this time, he wasn’t grinning or coaxing or doing any of the things everyone did to try to get him motivated to get off his ass.
The mention of his two younger brothers, who were also part of the “get off your ass or at least get laid” brigade, made him chuckle. “Speaking of asses, they don’t know theirs from their elbows.”
Caine hitched his jaw in the direction of Jax’s hands. “Well, neither do you, if the Band-Aids on your fingers are any indication.”
Both of his brothers were skilled carpenters; both had offered to come and renovate their aunt Jesslyn’s house. Because they’d declared parts of it were unsafe, and the last thing those two knuckleheads wanted was anything to happen to Maizy. They loved Maizy as much as he did.
So, because he had nothing but time on his hands, he’d been trying to help with the renovations. Or making shit worse, as Tag said. He and their sister, Harper, were the brains of the family, Tag and Gage, the brawn, Gage always said.
Except there was no more Harper—she was dead. He clenched his fist and shoved that memory to the farthest region of his mind. “So why don’t you tell me why you’re plying me with beer, pal. What’s with all the secrecy?”
Caine shoved a bowl of tortilla chips at Jax. “Didn’t you get the message I left you? I called the house phone and left a message with Gage when I couldn’t get you on your cell.”
He smiled—because even when Maizy ruined something of his “on accident” she was still damn adorable. “Maizy spilled apple juice all over the damn thing—it crapped out. What message?”
“The one about Call Girls. I left the number.”
“Call Girls?” It hit him all at once. That’s how Maizy had gotten her hands on a phone number that, according to her, belonged to a store where you could “buy girlfriends.” His always-in-a-rush brother must have taken down the most minimal of information and left it on his desk, hoping Jax’s psychic abilities would link Caine to Call Girls.
Oh, shit. He’d fucked up and the stern teacher’s voice Emmaline Amos had lambasted him with hadn’t been without warrant.
“Yeah. Call Girls’ is the phone-sex company Dixie and I own. Someday, I’ll tell you how that crazy shit went down. Until then, that’s what this is about. I need someone to write some encryption software for security purposes. We want to tighten things up and branch out while we do. You’re the biggest tech geek I know. When I heard you were moving to Plum Orchard, you were the first person I thought of.”
“Maybe I’m not connecting the dots. Call Girls is a phone-sex company you own? Here in Plum Orchard? How the hell did you make that happen? I only visited during the summers, but people aren’t exactly progressive here. Not progressive enough to have a phone-sex company.”
Caine grinned. “Money talks in the PO. Landon made a lot of money. The town, and all he offered it with all that money, made up for their disapproval. He made sure of that before he left this place. So whaddya say? I’ll hook you up with your own office over at Call Girls, which is in the guesthouse, by the way—this way you can get out from under Tag’s and Gage’s feet while they fix that beast up, and it’ll give you something to do while Maizy’s in school.”
“I don’t need a job.” He needed his sister—alive. Since she’d been killed almost two years ago, he couldn’t keep his head in the software development game. Every time he thought he might go back to work, the memory of Harper, the other half of his geeky brain, kept his fingers as far away from a computer as he could get.
She’d been his sounding board, his right-hand man, or woman, as she’d often reminded him, and he couldn’t seem to focus on the intense kind of details government security contracts required.
Caine clapped him on the back. “Well, this job needs you. If you can create software for the Defense Department, you damn well can do it for something as rinky-dink as a phone-sex company. It won’t use up a lot of your brainpower, and you won’t be moping around, ruining perfectly good pieces of two-by-fours by measuring them wrong. I’ll give you your own office and everything. C’mon... You can even eavesdrop on the girls’ phone calls,” he joked with a wink.
“I don’t need an office to develop software. I can do it from home.” That he was even considering Caine’s offer shocked him.
“Nope. You don’t need an office, but I’m gonna give you one anyway because you need to get the hell out from under Gage’s and Tag’s feet before they hack off your fingers. And then you won’t be developing
