Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
Jack thought the people who liked money best were the ones without it. He'd spent his life straddling the two, the money running out like a trickle and in time with his adolescence so that by the time he was old enough to make it, he was hungry for it. Stripped of its trappings and trimmings, thank god, when it came later but the school had fitted and shaped him to hold it with all the arrogance of a ruling class centuries before.
But her reply lilted instead of grounding itself in the rocky reality of what death meant and Jack was surprised to find that it mattered. Blue eyes were very clear in the sunlight and without the rime of the better of a bottle reddening the rims and he wasn't granite and stone so both the surprise and the mattering, it showed. "Another day. If you want my secrets dredged from the bottom of the river, if I wanted to tell them, chess wouldn't be the precursor. A game of chance, perhaps." His smile rumpled, embittered. Chance was a gamble and he'd ridden it to the edge, certain it wouldn't come to it.
Easier was neither motherhood nor turning back the clock. And if there'd been a moment during proceedings when he'd admired Cat - whether it was the lithe way she took back control or the blade of her tongue it was now that it stood out in bas relief. Sacrifice. Cat wasn't a saint, but the statement was practically prayer.
"I meant the very elegant way of demanding I be forthright." He hadn't meant the chess game and she laughed like so much dispelled assurances. He rose from the chair, then, peeled himself from out behind the table and came toward her. "I think you mistake dislike for a sense of self-preservation. I don't think a goddamn thing lasts if you're determined to see what's underneath it." His voice was warm, amused and when she put her hand to the doorkob and spouted an introduction to her sister, Jack laughed then.
"Cat, just because today was about whether you like them or you don't, I have every intention of trying to get you into bed another one. Whether I succeed or fail, your sister won't be that brand of personable you're determined I dislike and I think I do. Find frighteningly sexy, actually. " He leaned forward, into the hum of spices and he kissed her cheek as brief as business but as punctuation, the smell of faint smoke and the warm faint presence of a cologne that was woods and earth in proximity.