Page 89 of Lead Me On
“Hmph.” She snatched the beer from his hand and eyed him up and down. “Well, I suppose, considering the size of those hands, a woman can forgive a few flaws.”
Jane jumped in before Olive could explain her theory about the relationship between the size of a man’s hands and his “private pieces.”
“There’s nothing wrong with not drinking, Grandma Olive.”
“Thins the blood,” she replied, as if thin blood were the epitome of good health.
“No wonder you almost bled out from that cut the other day,” Jane muttered.
“Never been sick a day in my life.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “You were in the hospital with pneumonia last year.”
“Hmph,” Olive grunted in disgust. “That was asbestos poisoning from that dust I inhaled when they remodeled the supermarket.”
Well, there was nothing to say to that, but at least they weren’t discussing Chase’s privates.
“Say, did you see that new movie about that big robot?” Grandma Olive asked, and she and Chase fell into a ten-minute conversation about science-fiction movies, which ended with Olive hanging on his arm and laughing so hard she had to hold her dentures in.
Jane’s heart beat hard as she watched the scene play out. Mac put his arm around her shoulder. “If Grandma Olive likes him, maybe you should keep him around.”
“I was thinking just the opposite.”
“Good point.”
She leaned her head into his arm as the shade of the trees darkened into dusk.
“He’s a nice guy,” Mac said. “I like him.”
“Me, too. But I’m not sure he’s what I’m looking for.”
“I thought you might say that.” His arm squeezed her closer.
Jane sighed. Mac was good at that—offering silent comfort and no judgment.
“Sometimes, baby, you’ve got to stop thinking and go with your gut.”
She kept her eyes closed and her cheek pressed to his chest. It was good advice. Except that her gut had always been the thing telling her to run far and fast to escape her beginnings.
Now she had no idea what to do.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JANE WATCHEDthe office clock count toward five-thirty. She still couldn’t figure out if she was imagining the ticking of the second hand or if it had always made noise and she’d never noticed it before. There was a perfectly good digital clock on the computer. Maybe she should throw the ancient, ticking menace in the Dumpster out back.
Still, throwing it out wouldn’t stop time. The day was over. Her executioner would be walking through the office door sometime in the next half hour.
Jane could help Jessie, but she couldn’t save herself. She was resigned to that. There was no way to put that dirty little genie back into the bottle. All she could do was try to soften the blow and mitigate the impact.
Strange, but she felt fairly calm in the face of her worst fears coming true. Her pulse didn’t even quicken when she rose to knock on her boss’s open door.
“Mr. Jennings?” she said. “I need to speak with you.”
“Hey,” he murmured as he clicked around on something in his drafting program. Jane sat on one of the chairs in front of his desk and waited patiently. A few moments later he looked up, frowning.
“Jane, what’s wrong?”
She took a deep breath, clutched her hands together and leaped. “The reason I’ve been out of the office is that my brother was arrested for larceny. He’s going to plead no-contest tomorrow and start serving his nine-month sentence. Also, my stepfather is an excon. So is my real father. And before I turned eighteen, my name was Destiny Alexis MacKenzie. I changed it on my eighteenth birthday.”
