Summer Kisses (316 page)

“Hey, you’re perfect to me.”

The words popped out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying—or considered how she might take them. But now that they were out there, hanging between them, Jack waited to see how she would react.

Lou’s mouth fell open, her stunned eyes locked on his. “I…”

When no more syllables followed that one out of her mouth, Jack began to get nervous.

Maybe it was the kids asking why he didn’t just marry Lou, maybe it was Miranda forcing him to assess his fucking feelings on an hourly basis, maybe it was being forced to date a bunch of women who couldn’t quite seem to compare to the one he’d left back home, but he’d started to wonder if all these years the reason why he’d never wanted to date anyone else was because he’d been suppressing feelings for Lou all along.

But he’d vowed he wasn’t going to pressure or guilt her into anything ever again. If there was going to be anything between them, it had to be because she wanted it, not because, as he’d said to the kids, she was too nice to say no.

But all it took was one look at her in that mouth-watering red bikini and his resolution went straight to hell.

“Lou, I’ve been thinking—”

His words broke her spellbound gaze. She jerked her chin down, focusing on the champagne. The eruption had slowed, but the flute she’d been using to catch it had overflowed onto the back of her wrist. “Oops!” She pulled the glass back and quickly retreated to the opposite side of the hot tub, turning her back on him.

Well, shit.

He filled the second glass and set the bottle on the lip of the Jacuzzi. “Cheers.”

Lou turned back to clink her flute against his, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Smooth, Jack. Very smooth
. He downed half his champagne in one swallow, trying to think of something,
anything
, he could say to get them back to normal.

If there was such a thing as normal anymore.

Lou sipped her champagne and sat down on the bench on the opposite side of the Jacuzzi, as far as she could get from him without leaving the water. She inclined her glass in his direction. “Not bad.”

The champagne. Good. Nice, safe topic. “You should try it when it’s chilled. Nothing but the best for
Marrying Mister Perfect
.”

The show did have its benefits. Fabulous house. Amazing experiences. The chance to sip champagne with Lou sitting a few feet away from him in a red string bikini…

He sighed. “I have to say, there are days when I almost love being Mister Perfect.”

“Of course you do. You have all the power.”

There was a bite to her voice. Jack didn’t know what he’d just stepped into, but that was Lou’s my-patience-is-up-someone-is-getting-punished voice. He had never once heard it directed at
him
—or anyone above the age of six.

“It’s not the power,” he began, but she cut him off before he could explain the drift of his thoughts.

“You said it yourself. You have gorgeous women fighting for your attention twenty-four-seven and not one single person is saying no to you. That’s heady stuff, but it isn’t love. That isn’t a relationship, no matter how much they try to brainwash you into thinking it is. It’s a game designed to play with people’s emotions and you’re the one holding all the cards.”

“Lou…” He tried to interject, but she talked right over him.

Maybe he should just let her get it out of her system. She’d obviously been bothered by this since day one. She’d spoken against the show before, but this was her first all-out rant. He might as well let her purge it all.

“They fawn all over you. They
adore
you, and you don’t have to do a damn thing! The producers picked you out as Mister Perfect, but from that moment on, your job was done. Every little romantic gesture is choreographed for you. Champagne chilled by the Jacuzzi—was that your idea? No. Of course not. Some producer thought it would be romantic. Why should
you
have to be thoughtful?”

“Just because I didn’t do it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have thought of it,” he said defensively. Though, to be honest, he’d never thought of leaving champagne chilling anywhere. A six pack of beer, maybe…

“Oh, please, Jack. Sell it to someone who doesn’t know you better. I’m not buying.”

She drained the last of her champagne. He reached out with the bottle to refill her flute then topped off his own. “I can be considerate.”

“You’re extremely considerate. Usually.” She took another swallow of champagne. “Sure, fine, you’re a prince among men, Jack, but you aren’t the hearts and flowers type. You never were. Not even in your perfect marriage with perfect Gillian.”

“I never said—”

“You love it here. I get it. But just because you love the way being here makes you feel doesn’t mean you love these girls. And it sure as hell doesn’t make this a realistic basis for a marriage. Do you have any idea the success rates of these shows? Sure the ratings are fabulous, but of all the seasons they’ve had only one—
one,
Jack—has ended in a successful marriage. And they’ve only been married a year. Divorce might be right around the corner and even if they stick it out it’s a fluke. You’d have just as much likelihood of finding your perfect mate in some pick-up bar.”

“I know.” Though he didn’t think he would have met Marcy in a bar. “You about done?”

“I am.” She sipped her champagne, then proved her statement a lie. “I just don’t want to see you propose to one of these girls, buy into all this bullshit, only to come home and realize your relationship was based on a photo op. She isn’t going to be competing for your love anymore, Jack, and then what are you going to do?”

“I guess I’ll just have to find another show with fawning females to feed my massive ego.”

Lou had been leaning forward as she ranted. With that, she sat back suddenly, so her back was pressed to the opposite wall of the hot tub. “Sarcasm. Lovely. I’m trying to have a serious conversation—”

“This isn’t a conversation,” he interrupted. “This is you being pissed at me for going on this show and
finally
saying something about it.”

“What was I supposed to say? You were martyring yourself for me. Going on the show
for me
, because we were so pathetic and codependent we
needed
this.”

“You practically talked me into it.”

“I know! And I was an idiot. Do you think I don’t hate that I threw you into this viper pit?”

“I came of my own volition.”

“And now, what? You’re falling in love? This isn’t real, Jack. At best it’s courtship, infatuation—that perfect phase when your beloved has no faults and all you do is stay up all night dancing or sipping champagne in a Jacuzzi.” She waved her flute and he realized it was empty again.

“Don’t knock sipping champagne in a Jacuzzi.” He caught the hand waving the flute and stilled it to refill her glass.

“It isn’t
love
.”

“Lou. I know that. For all the stupid things Miranda says, she’s right about one. It’s a process. It’s an experience. No one ever calls it a romance.”

She looked down, studying the bubbles fizzing in her glass. “I just still don’t understand why you’re doing this. Why do you have to fly a thousand miles and make a spectacle of yourself on national television looking for love when everything—” She abruptly cut herself off.

“Lou? When what?”

When everything you need is right in front of you.

Lou frowned at the treacherous champagne that had nearly made her spill the embarrassing truth of her infatuation with Jack. She didn’t think she’d had that much, but those couple glasses had gone straight to her head. Her thoughts were swirling like a whirlpool, making her feel dizzy and off balance.

It had to be the champagne’s fault. There was no other way she would have slipped and come so close to revealing her feelings. Not after the disaster of last time. It certainly wasn’t that she wanted Jack to know how she felt. It couldn’t be.

“Lou?”

“Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

“I don’t want to fight either, but I also don’t want you bottling everything up. You can always yell at me when I’m being an idiot. I know we tend to talk about schools and work and the day-to-day stuff more than the emotion stuff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.”

“We seem to always end up fighting when we try.”

Probably because whenever they tried to talk about emotional stuff, Lou was spending half her energy trying to conceal her feelings from him. She hated that deception, the tension of always living right on the edge of discovery.

“Let’s talk about something else.” She scrounged for a safe topic. The memory of that damned picture from the supermarket swam up in her mind. “You were in a tabloid last week,” she blurted out.

Jack visibly flinched. “Damn. What did it say?”

“I didn’t read it. The picture on the front was of you kissing a pretty blonde with a caption about auditioning new mommies.”

He cringed. “It’ll blow over soon, right?”

“I think you have several more months of hell in front of you, Mr. Perfect. The show hasn’t even aired yet. The worst is yet to come. Kelly says everyone harasses Mr. Perfect and the girls while it’s being aired because they all want to know who you picked.”

“I didn’t think people really cared that much about reality TV.”

“That’s because you live under a rock.”

“Hey,” he protested defensively.

“It’s not my fault you have no awareness of pop culture. Reality TV is huge, Jack. Like epic, gazillions of people watching it, huge. I bet one of the reasons the producers picked you is because you’re so clueless.”

“Hey!”

“It’s a compliment. You’re a doctor with two kids who does crossword puzzles in his spare time and makes me watch those awful CSI shows. There’s no reason why you should have known about reality TV. Though anyone with half a brain would have looked into it before they signed on the dotted line.”

“I read the fine print. I just underestimated the scale of it.” He swallowed more champagne. “You know, even if I didn’t know what I was getting into, I might still sign that contract again, knowing what I know now. It has been an intense and bizarre experience, but I’m kind of glad I’m doing it.”

Lou didn’t want to hear how glad he was he’d done it. The show was dismantling her life piece by piece and he would do it all over again. Lovely. “Just wait until it airs. That’s when the real insanity begins.”

He grimaced. “When does it end?”

“When you get married? Or maybe when you announce you’ve broken up with your fiancé. Or maybe never. I don’t know. Kelly’s the expert.” Lou tipped up her glass and found it empty again.

Jack reached behind him for the bottle, angling it to see the little that was left. They’d nearly polished off the entire bottle. “It’s a crime to leave it. Gimme your glass and we’ll split the rest.”

Lou stood and waded through the hip-deep water to Jack’s side. He wrapped his hand around hers, holding the flute steady so he could splash the last bit of bubbly into her glass. He set down the bottle and picked up his own refilled glass, still holding her hand. His hand slid down to her wrist and tugged gently until she sank onto the ledge beside him.

“To the end of the insanity,” he murmured, clinking his glass against hers.

Lou leaned her shoulder against Jack’s, sipping champagne. It was a gorgeous night. Fairy tale perfect. It wasn’t’ hard to see why Jack liked it here. All of the aches from the day had long since washed away.

Her jealous raving aside, this had been a pretty fabulous day. It could almost have been one of
Marrying Mr. Perfect
’s dream dates. Jack had been attentive and considerate—without any producers there to coach him along. That familiar twinkle had lit his blue eyes, which crinkled around the edges when he laughed at TJ’s attempts to mimic a gibbon.

What girl wouldn’t fall for that?

If Lou had been a Suitorette on the show, she would have been a goner—even without knowing in advance what a great guy Jack was. She could just picture those laser-blue eyes locked steadily on hers as he drank in every word she said over a candlelight dinner. A string quartet would be playing in the background—or maybe, since it was Jack, an old Allman Brothers track. He would ask her to dance and they would sway slowly to the bluesy growl of the song, pressed so tight against one another she could feel his every heartbeat. His hands would press against her spine, pulling her even closer until she was molded against him…

“It wasn’t perfect, you know.” The low rumble of his voice startled her out of her daydream.

“Sorry?”

“My marriage to Gillian. You said it was perfect. It wasn’t.”

Lou would have blushed, but her face was already rosy from the hot tub. She’d said a lot of things she shouldn’t in the last half hour. Her head was starting to feel distinctly fizzy. She wasn’t sure of half the things that had traipsed out of her mouth without permission. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

“No. It’s what you think. I want to know what you think, Lou. No more censoring yourself so you can tell me what you think I want to hear, okay?”

And what if she was censoring herself to tell herself what she wanted to hear? Did that honesty have to extend to owning up to her own desires?

Lou swallowed the last of her liquid courage and set aside the empty flute. “Okay.”

“No marriage is perfect. Not without effort, anyway.” He rolled his shoulders, rubbing again at the back of his neck.

“Here. Let me.” Lou shoved his shoulder until he shifted to give her his back. She pressed her fingers against the muscle of his neck and he groaned.

“Perfect. Just keep doing that.”

She worked his neck, shoulders and upper back in silence for a few minutes, but now that he’d opened the topic of his marriage to Gillian, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d always had this idea in her head that Gillian and Jack had been one of the great love affairs of all time. She couldn’t compete with Juliet for Romeo’s attention. Even if Romeo had lived, he would have always loved Juliet more than any other woman in the world, wouldn’t he?