Free The Invitation by Jude Deveraux Page B

ninety-nine-year lease on the first two floors of the hotel, planning to lease a floor a year until it was all hers. When she’d first approached Jace Montgomery about renting the hotel, he’d asked for more than she had to spend, so she asked him how much per floor. Trying to keep from smiling, he had divided the rent into five equal parts. Then Jackie had asked for a discount for renting two floors. With a ten percent discount, she was able to afford both floors, and after six months she’d added the third floor, at a twelve and one-half percent reduction. The ninety-nine-year lease made her feel secure enough to spend all the money she had in decorating it, and now she was going to have to leave her pretty house.
    â€œI’ll start moving now.”
    â€œWhat is wrong with you?” William asked, putting himself between her and the door. “You’d think I’d jilted you in a love affair. I thought we agreed that we were going to run a business together. Was there any more between us? Something I didn’t know about?”
    Jackie sat back down, praying that she would be able to live through this day. Of course he was right. She was acting like an idiot. There had been nothing between them except what was in her head. He had known all along that night who she was, had known that she was old enough to be his…well, his older sister. He had known that she was his former baby-sitter.
    So that meant that everything, absolutely everything that she had imagined herself feeling, was all on her side. He had kissed her, but she had to be honest with herself: it wasn’t a kiss to set the world on fire. Well, maybe at the time she’d thought it was a great kiss, but in hindsight it was more of a friendship kiss. And what about all their talk? That had been normal too. If he wanted her awake he couldn’t very well have asked her boring questions about her second grade teacher.
    â€œWhy are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
    She was looking at him and thinking that this could not possibly work with both of them living under the same roof in the isolated ghost town. She would have liked to think that the town gossips would be up in arms, but the truth was that they would no doubt think of her and William as teacher and pupil, with no possibility of scandal. Jackie was sure this was the way William saw it, too. Jackie was his mentor, his hero, his teacher, the one who had shown him how to catch bugs, how to swing on ropes, how to hold his breath for a full minute. No, she was sure she would have no problem with William.
    The problem would be with Jackie herself. For the life of her she could not look at this gorgeous young man and remember that he was just a boy and that she was, by comparison, an old woman. When you feel that you are eighteen, it’s difficult to remember that you aren’t. Sometimes it’s a shock to look in the mirror and see the aging face looking back. Never again was a man going to say to her, “When you wake up, you look like a kid.” Now she didn’t look like a kid even after an hour spent putting on makeup. Oh, she looked good, and she well knew it, but she no longer looked eighteen and she never would again.
    â€œI think it would be better if you lived in Chandler,” she said in her best adult voice. “It would be better for…It would just be better, that’s all.” She did her best to keep her voice neutral. If you lusted after a man ten years younger than you, a man you used to baby-sit, was that incest?
    â€œIn order to start a business we must spend a great deal of time together, and I think it would be ridiculous to have to drive the forty miles back and forth to Chandler every day. What if we wanted to discuss something at night?”
    â€œTelephone.”
    â€œWhat if you needed help with the planes?”
    â€œI’ve gotten along rather well without you until now. I think I can continue to