Loving Jackson (Wishing Well, Texas #10) - Melanie Shawn
Chapter 1
Jackson
“Darling, true happiness comes from living life, not letting life live you.”
~ Josephine Grace Clarke
“I thought they hated each other,” I whispered under my breath, turning my head toward my little brother Travis. We were standing in the middle of a group of at least twenty people and I didn’t want the rest of the onlookers to hear my observation.
“Foreplay,” Travis explained.
Foreplay. I wouldn’t have minded engaging in some of that. It had been over a year since I’d had play of any kind, fore or otherwise. Work had been all-consuming.
I crouched down, getting a better angle to capture a moment I’d never thought I’d witness: Bentley Calhoun down on one knee asking Maisy Turner to be his wife. Full disclosure: I only knew it was Maisy because my brother told me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to tell which one of the Turner triplets it was, Maisy, Melody, or Madison. They were identical and I’d never been able to tell them apart.
It had been over three years since I’d been back to my hometown, but if memory served, Maisy and Bentley had been about as friendly as a nest of yellow jackets since grade school. It seemed a lot of things had changed while I’d been away.
The last time I’d come to visit, all of my eight siblings had been single. Now five of my seven brothers and my little sister had all gotten married, and a couple of them had even started families. I was an uncle. It was crazy.
I’d returned to my hometown of Wishing Well, Texas the night before, and hadn’t even had the chance to put my bag down when my brother informed me that he’d volunteered my services for the second time in the past week.
The first time was when he called three days ago to let me know that Mia, his very pregnant wife, was in desperate need of a cinematographer. Her D.P. (director of photography) had fallen through for a documentary project she was producing called What is Love?
Technically, Travis had asked if I could step in, but since he’d couched the request as a plea for help—so his wife wouldn’t be stressed to the point it could hurt the baby—there was really no way I could turn him down.
I’d gotten the call on the final day of production of a grueling six-month project, a biopic being shot in Cambodia. Before that I’d been on location in the U.K. for two years working on an epic fantasy trilogy. And that was after I’d spent a year in Australia shooting a nature documentary. All of those had been back to back. I’d jumped from one project to the next.
I didn’t start my next film for two weeks, and I’d planned on heading somewhere tropical for a much-needed vacation. But instead, I’d booked a flight home.
The second time I’d been roped into doing his bidding was to record his best friend’s proposal for posterity. That request was the reason I was crouched down on the blacktop of my elementary school this hot Texas morning.
A bead of sweat dripped down the back of my neck from the punishing mid-morning sun bouncing off the asphalt. In the back of my mind all I could think about was that I should be in bed sleeping. Or better yet, on a beach somewhere with a drink that had an umbrella. But my brother needed me, so here I was.
I moved to the left, trying to get the perfect angle for the exact moment that she said yes, and he picked her up in his arms and swung her around as the crowd erupted in cheers.
I’d worked on a dozen nature documentaries and witnessed the mating rituals of a multitude of species ranging from cute to cannibalistic, disgusting to dangerous.
Male humpback whales sing to attract their mates.
Male giraffes drink the urine of females before mating with them.
Male nursery web spiders bring corpses of prey wrapped in silk as offerings to the females before getting it on.
Male praying mantises are lured by the female’s pheromones and may or may not get to mate before the female bites their heads off.
Male honeybees die after mating because their reproductive organ is torn off and left in the female.
The human species was no less fascinating to me. It boggled my mind the lengths males would go to just to spend the rest of their lives with a female. It had never made any sense to me.