I do not have any kind of crush on Jamie Gilbert-Cooper, Jessica told herself sternly.
He was her rescuer in a bad situation. Naturally, there would be some feelings of transference, like a hostage might feel for the Navy SEAL who saved her from a certain and horrible death at the hands of bad guys.
When her father picked up the phone, he wanted to know, immediately, why she was calling from a strange number. Her mother had started to worry an hour ago, and had been texting her. They were on speakerphone now, her mother denying she had been worried.
“I seem to be having trouble with the international phone plan I ordered,” Jessica said. “It might be better if you didn’t text me for a bit. I think I have to pay per text, and I’m not getting them anyway.”
She hated lying to her parents, but she hated the thought of them worrying even more. She told them, breezily, she had been dropped into an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Without mentioning she was in a private apartment, she described the room she was in to her home decorating channel obsessed mother.
“Send me a picture,” her mother said. “Or put some on Facebook.”
“Um, I will when I get my phone plan sorted out. I don’t want to use any data just yet.”
“Doesn’t the hotel have internet?” her mother insisted.
“Oh, it’s late here. I’ll try to do some Facebook updates tomorrow.” From the computer at the public library. That was on her list of must-sees. The New York Public Library. “I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Don’t go out by yourself!” her mother warned.
“Don’t worry, I’m ordering pizza.”
After listening to a long list of instructions from her mother about opening her hotel door to the deliveryman, she tried to hang up. But her mother had to give her quite a lengthy description of her father fiddling with a lock system for the house and her store that could be operated from a cell phone. Jessica was finally able to disengage. She wondered about her impatience. Was it because Jamie would be waiting for her with pizza? She couldn’t help but also wonder what he would make of an adult woman getting those kind of instructions from her mother.
Maybe Daisy and Aubrey were right when they weighed in that perhaps her life was too small.
Suffocating.
The word, popping into her head, stunned Jessica, and made her feel guilty. She quickly turned her thoughts in a different direction.
She had his cell phone. She had his security code. She could sign in and send a quick private message to her friends. Or she could have a quick look through his photos. It would tell her all kinds of delicious information about her host.
She was not that kind of person! Snoopy and deceitful.
One little look...
No! Before she could change her mind she took his phone back out to him. He pocketed it with a quick nod, as if it had never even occurred to him that she might have a peek at the information on it.
Did that make her trustworthy? Or just plain boring?
She retreated back to her room and to the bathroom. She stripped off her travel-rumpled clothes, and the water from the shower pounding down did literally wash away all her cares. Jessica was not sure a shower had ever felt quite as wonderful as this one. The hot water alternated, blissfully, between pounding, spraying and misting. She accidentally touched a button and was bathed in soothing light. And then, more purposefully, she touched another button. Music flooded the shower stall.
Coincidentally, it was Daisy’s first number one hit single, “Nothing is Impossible.”
As the water massaged her skin, and the music spoke to her as if Daisy was right here coaxing her to dream big, Jessica was aware of feeling not frightened and not put out, but finally, relaxed and safe.
But it was more than that. And it was more than the contortions of the water coming from that showerhead that were making her skin tingle.
She became aware she felt fully and completely alive.
The sensation increased as she stepped out of the shower and toweled off with deeply luxurious pure white Egyptian cotton towels, and then padded out to the bedroom and chose one of Jamie’s T-shirts to slip over her head.
Despite the crispness of it, it smelled of him: clean and spicy, fragrant in an exquisitely masculine way that made all her senses vibrate, as if the air itself had taken on a quality that stroked her.
Feeling life so intensely begged the question: How did she feel most of the time? Asleep? Operating on some kind of autopilot?
Was it a reaction to overcoming a crisis that was bringing her this sense of being exquisitely and intensely aware of everything? Absolutely every single thing that could have gone wrong had, and yet, here she stood, more than a survivor, life handing her completely unexpected gifts.
Or was it from being in Jamie Gilbert-Cooper’s space, surrounded by his things and his scents, his powerful energy permeating the very air she was breathing that left her feeling so aware? Perhaps when you had his kind of energy, you didn’t have to decorate a space to reflect who you were?
She had a thought even more troubling. Was this sensation of being so alive, so open to what happened next, so ready for the strange adventure she found herself in, a message from her life?
Aubrey and Daisy had been hinting almost from the beginning that Jessica was in a rut, was playing it too safe, was not open to the truly sensational experience that was life.
It was true. Since her fiancé, Devon, had died what she had wanted, more than any other single thing, was for life to feel safe again. But in this moment, she was aware she didn’t want that at all.
Jessica felt suddenly powerful, as if, just as Daisy’s music had suggested, nothing was impossible. As if she could change her whole life and her
