Page 109 of Lead Me On
Prison tattoos and all, he was the best man she’d ever known. The best man. So what the hell had she been running from for so long?
* * *
CHASE WOKE LATEon Sunday morning, bleary-eyed from a rough night. His dad had called him at ten, obviously drunk, to offer some new ideas about how to get Jessie clear of murder charges. Chase had reminded him that Jessie had already been cleared, then listened to his dad reminisce about his mother for a little while before hanging up.
That call had kept him awake until two in the morning. Now it was 9:00 a.m. and his eyes felt gritty and swollen. He felt as if he had a hangover, though he could judge only by the way his employees looked after partying too hard. They always looked like shit, and he definitely felt like it.
Groaning, he let his head fall back to his pillow, wondering why the sun was so insistent on crawling across the top of his bed.
Then he heard it. The faint beep of his phone. He sat up and glared suspiciously at his empty bedside table. Why wasn’t his phone there? Jesus, maybe he really had gotten drunk last night. Maybe he’d thrown caution to the wind and downed those two bottles of beer in his fridge, then passed out in an embarrassingly low-level stupor.
He finally identified his jeans as the source of the beeping and snatched them off the floor to dig his phone out of a pocket. When he saw the missed call on the screen, his exhaustion disappeared like a bad dream.
Jane.
Sunday morning seemed an odd time for a booty call. Maybe she was calling for something else?
He hit a button and held his breath while the phone rang.
“Chase?” she said, and the sound of her saying his name made him smile. Ridiculous.
“Hey, Jane.”
“You sound tired. Are you okay?”
Chase stretched and collapsed back onto the mattress. “I’m still in bed.”
“Oh. I…see.”
Was she picturing him naked? He was sure as hell thinking of her nude body stretched out next to him. Damn.
“Late night?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you go out?” Her voice sank a little.
Chase smiled. “No, I stayed home and moped around, missing you and wondering when you’d call.”
“Look, you don’t have to be a smart-ass. You can go out all you want. You don’t answer to me, obviously.”
“I wasn’t being a smart-ass, Jane.”
He heard her breathing for a moment before she said, “Oh.”
Stretching again, he rubbed a hand over his stomach. “So, did you call to find out if I was cheating on you?”
“You can’t cheat on someone who’s not your girlfriend.”
“Mmm-hmm. So you won’t mind if I hook up with the new check-out girl at the grocery store? She’s cute and she’s been checking me out. Ha! Get it?”
Jane didn’t laugh.
“She always shakes her head over my pile of frozen dinners and asks why I don’t have a woman cooking for me.”
“Shut up, Chase. I just wanted to talk to you, all right?”
“All right. Meet me at The Stube for breakfast?”
