Home To You by Robin Kaye Page A

was talking about. The one on his shoulders was doing just fine; the one in his pants was definitely aching. “No—” He felt as if he should say more, but what? “I’ll be outside if you need anything. I have work to do.”
    “Oh, okay.” Her voice wavered uncertainly as he closed Kendall’s door behind him.
    *
    It was a difficult task to work up a sweat outside in the mountains of New Hampshire in January, but Jax accomplished it. He was unloading lumber from Jaime’s Tundra pickup, and the last thing he wanted was to slow down. If he did, he would have to talk, and talking wasn’t something Jax was interested in—not even to his friend Jaime, and definitely not about himself.
    There were so many unknowns in his life right now, talking about them made his head ache worse than it already did.
    Jaime came around the tailgate and leaned against the side of the truck, his gloved hands stuffed in the pockets of his Carhartt jacket. “Where’s Kendall?”
    “She went for a hike up to the ridge.”
    Jaime nodded and looked in that direction, spotting Kendall’s tracks in the snow.
    “How long ago did she leave?” Jaime probably had a better notion of that than Jax. Jaime was a good tracker, and Jax knew damn well that he could tell from her footprints how long ago she’d taken off.
    “I don’t remember.” His sense of time was so severely skewed, he couldn’t even go there. It could have been a few minutes or a hell of a lot longer—he didn’t know, and it was driving him insane.
    He followed Jaime’s gaze and stared at Kendall’s footprints and the path she’d taken toward the ridge. A second later, the image of her in her negligee eclipsed everything else. He wished the vision of her hadn’t been branded on his brain, but he couldn’t unsee it. He’d tried. He’d been trying for a week. It hadn’t worked yet.
    “I managed to get just about everything on your list and avoided Ernie’s questions over at the hardware store. Where do you want me to put the receipts?”
    Jax slid the sheets of plywood onto the frozen, snow-covered ground. He grabbed the stack, rested it on his steel-toed boot, and walked them over to lean against the wall under what was left of the porch roof. “Just total what you spent on the lumber and groceries you brought over. My wallet’s inside on the dresser in my room. Take whatever I owe you; there’s plenty of cash.” If he was wrong, Jaime would tell him and he’d figure out how to get more. There was a lot more where that came from—or at least he thought there was. For a man who’d neverhad to worry about money, he had spent an inordinate amount of his life doing just that. He had a lot of money but no real life. Looking back now, he saw what a waste of time it had been.
    When he’d come to, alone in the hospital after the accident, he hadn’t ached to see his bank account balance or how the market closed that day. No, he ached to see the people he loved—his sister, Rocki, and Kendall’s parents, Grace and Teddy, who had unofficially adopted them after their parents’ deaths. He remembered searching his mind, wondering if he’d forgotten someone. A woman, perhaps? But when he’d closed his eyes, the only female’s image that had come to mind that day had been the face of his late mother—so clear, so real, as if she’d come to him in his dreams. The shock of it sent him bolting upright into a sitting position. The blare of medical equipment and the movement had split his screaming head in two, and then the nurses were there, holding him down.
    “But—” Jaime tore off his gloves and ran a hand through his too-long sandy brown hair and lifted an aristocratic brow, his looks at odds with his demeanor.
    But what? What had they been talking about? Money. Right. “Leave the paperwork on the dresser. I’ll look at it later.” Not that it would make a bit of sense to him. Still, that didn’t stop him from trying. Who knew? Maybe his mathematical talent