The Temporary Wife - By Jeannie Moon Page 0,12
her emotions. She wrapped her arms around herself, and a moment later, Jason’s arms were around her, too. Pulling her in, he pressed her head against him and whispered into her hair. “Please don’t cry, Meg. Please.”
“Grace didn’t have to live this way. Why do I?”
“We’ll keep things as simple as possible. Are you going to keep working?”
She nodded. Sniffled. “I want to. If everyone at school doesn’t hate me.”
Curled against him, she felt calmer. His hand ran rhythmically up and down her spine, and his warmth took away the chill that had been with her for days. “No one’s going to hate you. I can’t think of anyone who hates you.”
“Your brother. Your parents. Grant.”
“Grant was your boyfriend?”
“Uh-huh. I liked him a lot.” More tears leaked out because she was sick that she might have hurt him, that she might have lost a good man for this “marriage.” “You’re not seeing anyone?”
“No one serious. Not like you.” His breathing was deep, his heartbeat steady. “We’ll be okay, you know. We always got along.”
“We’re different people, Jay. Going back isn’t an option.”
“True. We’ll have to move forward with what we have. Do our best to be friends and make a home for Molly.”
Meg leaned back and examined his face. He was so handsome, her heart did a little jump every time she looked at him. At first glance, he may have looked like your garden-variety pretty boy, but if you looked closely, there was nothing ordinary about Jason at all. His bone structure was regal, his skin perfect, and his hair soft, but it was when you looked in his eyes that you saw the fire. Inside him was a supercomputer, an intelligence that was logical, focused, and could best be described as a force of nature. It never stopped, and when he was growing up, Jason had had to learn to deal with all the noise in his head. It hadn’t been easy.
She remembered summer nights when they were teenagers that they would take off to an empty field on the estate. It was fairly secluded and overlooked the beach. They’d lie on their backs and count stars and talk about their dreams. For him, computers were like art. He saw machine language and circuitry like van Gogh saw paints. Meg loved listening to him on those quiet nights. The stars were overhead, the water lapped at the shore, and he shared himself with her. He knew about everything and he talked about what he could do to make the world better. He’d hold her on those nights, his strong arms wrapping around her and protecting her from an outside world that wanted to pull them apart. They were going to save the world together and love each other forever.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
Meg couldn’t tell him, of course, but she could come up with a variation. Something that wasn’t quite the truth, but wasn’t a lie, either. “I was wondering why you aren’t married or at least involved with someone.”
It was his cue to release her and sit back in the chair. “The company’s gotten huge, and I work all the time, sometimes eighteen hours a day. There’s not a lot of time for anything else. It’s my whole life.”
“It’s a big enough company that you could delegate some things, couldn’t you?”
“I guess, but work is really what I’m all about. I never had time for anything more than casual relationships.”
Casual, Meg thought. As in, “these are women I sleep with.” Nice.
Clicking the pen, Meg started flipping through the second stack of papers and initialing in the appropriate spaces. There was one section on visitation with Molly, and it looked like after the divorce, he was leaving any visitation schedule to her discretion. “You don’t want something more formal when we have to decide on custody of Molly?”
“I figured I’d leave that up to you. I trust you.”
That was good, because with everything that had happened in the past, she was having a hard time trusting him, even though, at this point, Jason was all she had.
Meg finished signing the papers and set down the pen. It was done. “You’re sure they’re going to back off?”
“They won’t have a choice once the adoption gets started.”
“I don’t understand why they’d want a small child at this stage of their lives.”
Jason stood and held her coat while she slipped her arms in the sleeves. A paralegal gathered the papers, nodded, and left the room. “It’s not like they’d raise