“And counting?” he suggested. “I don’t know whether to say congratulations or not. I doubt in your childhood dreams you fantasized that some day you’d marry your prince and divorce his ass as quickly as possible.”
His words startled a laugh out of her and Nicole shook her head, her body losing much of its tension for real this time. “No,” she agreed. “That was never in my agenda.”
Jake nodded and peered out the window again, trying to figure out how to ask about the furnace, the blocked doors, the gas grill and the fireplace. It was trickier to ask about. It wasn’t like he could say, “So have any near explosions lately?”
“Have you been married?”
He glanced to her with surprise at the question and shook his head. “No.” Jake glanced out the window again and then admitted, “I got close once, though.”
“What happened?” she asked curiously.
“My family,” he muttered.
“Your family?” she prompted.
“Yeah,” he said, thinking back to that time. He almost stopped talking then, but realized that his situation wasn’t all that dissimilar to her marriage and admitted: “My family has trouble with boundaries. They were concerned and . . . looked into things.” They’d looked into her mind, but he could hardly say that. On the other hand, Jake didn’t want to flat-out lie to her if she was a possible life mate. It didn’t seem a healthy way to start. Sighing, he said, “And through their looking into her, they found she was more interested in my money than me.”
Jake sensed Nicole glancing sharply toward him, but continued to look out the window and simply waited.
“Really?” she asked finally as she braked at a stop sign, and he heard the suspicion in her voice.
“Really,” Jake assured her solemnly, turning to meet her gaze. “She’d already taken two men for their money; one in a palimony suit, one in a divorce. I was to be victim three.”
“But your family saved you from that,” Nicole said quietly and shifted her attention back to the road. As she turned onto the cross street, she said, “You’re lucky.”
Jake frowned at the soft words and admitted wryly, “I’m afraid I didn’t see it that way at the time. I was just pissed at their interference when they confronted her and sent her on her way.”
“Why?” she asked with surprise.
Jake shrugged. “I was in love . . . and sure that it was different with me, that she loved me and they misunderstood what had happened in the first two relationships.” He grimaced and glanced to her to admit, “I was young and foolish then I guess.”
For some reason his words made her laugh. Raising his eyebrows, he asked, “What?”
“Jake,” she said on a laugh, “I know Marguerite said you’re older than you look, but you look twenty-five. How old were you then when you were so much younger? Sixteen?”
He smiled crookedly, remembering only then that he looked much younger than his fifty-eight years. Well, that was a fly in the ointment, wasn’t it? She now probably thought she was older than him. Certainly, she’d addressed him just then with the condescension of someone who thought they were older if only by a year or so.
“Well,” Nicole said now. “You’re very lucky your family intervened. It saved you a lot of heartache.”
“Oh, I still got the heartache,” Jake said dryly, recalling that time in his life. He’d been thirty-eight and the advanced age hadn’t made the heartache any easier to handle, and he suspected that heartache was the reason he’d never let anyone close again. Shrugging that aside for now, he said, “What they saved was my bank balance.”
Nicole smiled slightly and shrugged. “Well at least that insult wasn’t added to the injury.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience,” he said mildly, hoping to get her to tell him about the incidents Marguerite had told him about.
“Yeah. Loads of it,” she said, and then shrugged as if shaking off a bad cloak and said more cheerfully, “On the bright side, I had enough sense to go for counseling so I don’t wind up a nasty and bitter man-hating divorcee.”
“True,” Jake agreed. “I gather in divorce one partner or the other often goes crazy and does stupid things.”
“That’s what the gas guy said,” she said, her mouth tipping at the edges.
“The gas guy?” he asked.
“Yeah, I had a little trouble with the gas grill when I first moved back.” She shrugged and added, “And the furnace, and the fireplace and the doors.” Nicole grimaced and waved those worries away. “I had a run of bad luck for a bit, but it’s all good now.”
“Right,” Jake said quietly, pretty sure that Marguerite had told him the truth about her near misses after all. So, Nicole was in danger and did need looking out for, and she was a possible life mate for him as well, which was no doubt why Marguerite had put him on the job. Who better to look out for his possible life mate than himself, right?
Jake peered at her solemnly. Short, voluptuous, pretty with a nice smile, big brown eyes and long blond hair. Obviously, her father wasn’t Italian. Not with that long golden hair and the last name Phillips. He knew for sure the mother was Italian, though. She was the sister of Marguerite’s cook/housekeeper, Maria.