The Taming of Jackson Cade by Bj James

Author:Bj James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2001-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

“Drat!”

Jackson heard the too familiar word tumble from his lips and looked from the tie that defeated him to the startled gaze he saw in the mirror. Startled because for once he was thinking of a woman other than one who had haunted his thoughts by day and his dreams at night.

With a will of its own, the image of Haley Garrett had filled his mind for days…with a constancy that left little room for thoughts of anyone or anything else. Except now, with the formal tie. And like everyone of a certain station who’d been a child in Belle Terre, Jackson’s thoughts turned to Lady Mary and her dictum on formal dress.

He’d been eight when he joined Adams and Lincoln in the twice-weekly classes of deportment the elderly lady conducted in the aged and faded townhouse that had belonged to her family for more than a century. Irascible Gus Cade insisted his sons learn the meticulous ways of Belle Terre society. And learn they did, if they knew what was good for their backsides.

“Even how to tie a dratted tie. When it will behave.” Hearing the only word of irritation Lady Mary allowed herself, Jackson smiled. An act as rare in the last week as the hen’s teeth Jesse liked to speak about.

Hen’s teeth segued into wildcats and scratches. And with more frequency than he wanted to admit, Haley was there again, filling his mind. Leaning closer to the mirror, he inspected the nearly healed marks left by her nails. Marks that generated curiosity. Too much curiosity, especially among his brothers. And, of course, Yancey would drop by in one of his rare visits to River Trace when they were at their flaming best.

“Wildcat,” he murmured what had been his steadfast and unrecanted answer to the fiendish teasing of both family and friends. Unrecanted and not a lie, for in the more than seven days since he’d seen her, he’d come to realize that the name fit her as well as Duchess. “A fighter as well as a lady.”

He hadn’t forgotten the deep wells of terror and panic her eyes had become when she’d turned to fight. But that she had turned to fight, not folded—that was the telling element.

“You screwed up, buster,” he told his own grim image in the mirror. “The first woman to get past the barbed-wire fence erected around your heart, and you screwed up.”

Suddenly too angry to deal with the stubborn tie, he jerked his hands away and left it to dangle over the precise tucks of his formal shirt. Lincoln had the right idea. Tonight another Cade would follow his tradition, seeking out Lady Mary, listening as she tied their ties and scolded. Even though she wasn’t fooled for a minute. Lady Mary, better than any, knew how well she’d honed away the rough edges of Gus Cade’s half-wild sons.

“Lady Mary it is,” Jackson muttered as he turned away from the mirror and picked up his jacket.

“I swear, boy, if you keep talkin’

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