Mistletoe & Hollywood (12 page)

I freaked out, as he knew I would. So he’d gently suggested I consider a concept like Max had done with the place in Hastings and regard Jack as an investor. It totally shut me up because the whole time Max had been talking, I’d been fantasizing what it would be like to do a similar thing with the Butler house one day. Jazz was studying Hospitality and Business. Perhaps she’d help. How would my brother Joey react, though?

Christmas Eve day, Jack presented me with airplane tickets to a Caribbean island. Apparently we were going halfway home for New Year’s Eve. That gift was tricky, because while it sounded incredible and I was super excited, I also knew Max would adore it if Jack spent New Year’s at Pier Nine, in Hastings. And I wasn’t sure, but I felt certain Charlotte and Jeff thought we were staying.

And that brought us up to today’s gift. To be honest, I didn’t know how he could top snow.

Charlotte sliced some fruitcake onto a serving plate and added some brandy butter on the side. “This is normally a decadent dessert,” she informed me with a wink. “But I say breakfast deserves a little something special today. Anyway, we have the Everseas and Nigel coming for lunch, as well as a work colleague of Jeff’s who lost his wife this year. Turkey’s already in, and we’ve a ton of food. So we need to save a bit of an appetite.”

“Smells delicious.” I inhaled deeply and walked the plate to the living room where we all settled by the fire. Our presents were all nesting under the boughs of the small elegant Christmas tree to the side of the fireplace.

Charlotte had been helping me the last few days with the finishing touches on my present for Jack, while Jeff had enlisted him to help rebuild one side of Charlotte’s chicken coop that had been getting weak. I couldn’t wait to see what Jack thought of my unconventional gift.

“Who’ll be Father Christmas?” Charlotte asked. She was holding a furry red hat trimmed in white wool.

I nudged Jack. “I’m assuming she means Santa. I have to see you in that.”

“No way.”

“I’ll do it,” Jeff said officiously and pulled it on. “It’s an important job.”

A vision of Charlotte and Jeff as grandparents to our children suddenly caught me by surprise. I remembered Jack’s words when making love to me, and warmth hit me straight in the womb. My insides flipped with emotion, and my eyes pricked. I reached for Jack’s hand and squeezed, causing him to glance at me quizzically.

Whatever he saw in my eyes had him turning fully toward me. He brought his hand to my cheek as I stared deep into his green eyes and wondered how on earth my life had ended up here in this room, with these beautiful people, and so much love and hope that my entire future seemed bursting with promise.

Jack watched me like he knew what was going on in my head. Like he’d been waiting for me to get there. Then he dropped his forehead to mine. “One day,” he whispered.

Charlotte perched herself on the wing chair, but not before turning the radio on low volume to caroling Christmas music.

“All right,” said Jeff and slid his eyeglasses down to the very tip of his nose to read a gift tag on a small package. “Dearest Mum, Merry Christmas, love, Jack and Keri Ann.”

I had helped Jack wrap the gorgeous scarf, like mine, but in soft blue-grey. Jeff handed her the package to open.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Charlotte gushed, brushing her cheek against the exquisite material. It looked incredible against her skin tone. “Now Jack, this is not some endangered species is it? It feels even softer than cashmere. There’s that endangered animal in the Himalayas, the Sha-something.”

“The
Shahtoosh
. Mum, you know me better than that. It’s vicuña. All responsible, I promise.”

“Well, thank you. It’s stunning.”

Jeff got a pair of fur-lined slippers and a dressing gown, for his “retirement,” from Jack and me. But personally from me, Jeff got a small fun hardback book that contained the craziest lawsuits ever filed in America, which he absolutely adored, and kept reading excerpts so Jack had to take over Santa duties. As expected, Jack looked cute as heck. Just what I wanted for Christmas.

I gave Charlotte an angel Christmas tree ornament I’d handmade from bleached oyster shells, Spanish Moss, and sea glass. She immediately hung it and saved the box to carefully pack it back into for next year.

Jack handed me a long wrapped poster tube, his face so full of boyish excitement, I couldn’t help grinning.

“Dearest Keri Ann,” I read. “All my love, Jack.”

I tore the paper off and opened the end of the tube, sliding the rolled up contents out. Pulling them open, I realized I was looking at site plans and architectural drawings and legal papers. “What is this?” I asked, confused.

Jack took them and helped spread them out on the coffee table, and then pointed to a bottom corner of a site plan.

Daufuskie Island, Lots 21 & 22, Waterfront, Butler-Eversea construction project.

“Oh my God,” I squealed. We were insanely in love with that island and had already amassed some pretty incredible memories there within the last six months. “Did you find a place on the island? Are you building?”

“We are,” he said, grinning. “It’s in our joint names, and I’ve found an architect and given him some of these drawings, but I need you to design your own studio space.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “Oops, sorry.” I grimaced, looking at Jeff and Charlotte, but they just laughed at me.

“Well?” Jack asked. “Good holy shit, or bad holy shit?”

“Good on one condition,” I said. “Jeff and Charlotte have to promise right now to come and visit us the moment it’s completed.”

“Of course,” Charlotte answered.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” added Jeff with a smile.

Jack gave a small grin. “So you love it?” I didn’t miss his flicker of concern.

It wasn’t an engagement ring. It was an even more extravagant and binding future. And it meant him in the Lowcountry and us together. I threw my arms around his neck, knocking off the Santa hat. “I love it!”

JACK SELECTED THE
next thick square package from under the tree. The package I had carefully placed there yesterday.

“For me.” He looked up at me. “From you.”

“Yep.” I was nervous. I had no idea what to get Jack that was meaningful to him. Figuring out gifts for people was always hard. But for Jack? Impossible. If the guy wanted something, he bought it.

He brought it over and sat next to me as he tore the blue and silver wrapping. Pulling the paper away, he revealed a thick scrapbook. I could tell he was confused. Especially when he opened the first page and staring up at him was a tabloid article with the words “Where in the World is Jack?” It was over a year old, right in the middle of his scandal with Audrey. He tensed next to me, his brow furrowed. I sensed Charlotte watching him cautiously from across the room.

“What is this?” he asked, his voice oddly raspy.

“Keep going,” I whispered.

He turned the page to where I’d pasted in a carefully handwritten sheet of paper, and his eyes scanned my words:

Standing in front of me was the most beautiful man I had seen in all of my twenty-two years on this planet. His rich dark brown hair, mussed up from the hat, stood up in a few places and framed a hard-planed face set with eyes the color of…

Well, I really couldn’t tell the color of his eyes in the shadows, but I knew exactly what color they were, a deep grey-green. I hadn’t been hiding under a rock for the last five years. And I certainly didn’t need to double check the tabloid magazine Jazz had been reading, which definitely did not do him justice, to know that standing in front of me, Keri Ann Butler, outside the Snapper Grill in Butler Cove, population nine thousand, and hundreds of miles away from his expected location in Hollywood, was none other than Jack Eversea.

“I still don’t understand.”

“Keep going, please.”

Jack smiled tightly.

Next were even more articles, but this time my addition to the time period was a note he’d left me and his shopping list he’d texted me that I screen grabbed and printed out. That was followed by some more of our bantering texts.

Then on the day of Audrey’s released statement about her and Jack’s breakup, I’d pasted in a copy of the receipt where he’d paid to have the floors done at my house, followed by a handwritten entry that made me blush to read it, describing our first kiss and first intimate moments.

Jack was pale and swallowed heavily. But he kept turning pages and reading. I’d put in the reports about him being seen in Savannah with Audrey, which was a painful time for both of us to remember. And for those pages, I’d put in personal recollections of Jack. I’d written about my conversation with my brother and his observation of how Jack looked at me.

Like you were the last chopper out of Baghdad, the last IV in the field hospital, the last funnel cake at the fair…

I just know that the way he was looking at you, he’s coming back someday.

There were reports of a massive showdown between Jack and Audrey, and Jack’s agent being fired. I wrote about my birthday, and seeing Devon, and how I’d felt meeting him. My worry for Jack and what his agent and Audrey may have done to hurt him. The fear that Jack wouldn’t come back, that what we’d felt was in my own imagination.

It was painful, especially when I got to the parts where he was in England, and there were photos of him with random girls. I bared my soul writing about the day I’d tortured myself with Internet pictures of him for hours and how Jazz had ripped the modem from the wall.

Jack was dead silent, paging through our intimately personal history, his hand trembling slightly, learning things about us, about me, that changed the memories captured by the tabloids.

But I’d also found, thanks to Charlotte, a few lesser circulated stories about his work on the movie and how there was talk of it being an award show nomination. In a crazy twist of fate, on the same day those stories had been published, I’d received my acceptance letter to SCAD. I pasted it in alongside.

I know I’ll think about Jack every day for the rest of my life. He changed me. He made me want more. Made me want to be more. Those are good things. I’m hanging onto them.

I talked about Colt asking me out.

Colt made me happy. He made me laugh. What was wrong with me? Was it still too soon, or was it that Jack Eversea was a fire that burned brighter than the sun, and I’d been seared beyond repair?

I pasted in the invitation to be part of the summer exhibition of Southern artists at the Westin on Hilton Head Island. And I pasted in a few photocopied pieces of Jack’s journal that he’d shared with me. The next page was a picture I’d taken of Jack riding a horse shirtless on the beach, and a picture I’d stolen from his phone of me from that same day.

On the day Audrey’s crazy lost pregnancy story broke, I added the newspaper story of the auction and how Jack had ended up in a bidding war for a student’s work.
Mine
.

And then came the tabloid pictures of us together. Some with less than savory headlines. With every one of them, I wrote a small anecdote of what we were doing on the day they were published. Funny or beautiful things Jack had said to me that I remembered, or tickets to things we’d done, a flyer for the cottage rental place on Daufuskie where we always tried to steal time together.

Even though I knew Jack had a copy, I added in the story that reporter Shannon Keith had written about Jack and me and how we met. Some of the final pictures were of us at the airport in Atlanta and at Heathrow where we’d landed and where the stupid photographers had yelled out disgusting things. I pasted our boarding tickets in and wrote
Keri Ann’s first flight across the ocean a
nd
The day Keri Ann learned what the word SNOG means.
There was a postcard from Hastings and finally a colored pencil sketch of a bull chasing a boy and a girl with a red scarf.

You are my star,
I wrote,
I’d follow you anywhere.

There were still pages left to fill at some point. I hadn’t even put in my first experience with snow.

The room was deathly quiet, and I realized Jeff and Charlotte had left. Jack was still holding the book, his knuckles now white, and staring at the last page so I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

Shit
.

Heart pounding with terror, I swallowed some moisture back into my mouth and slid off the couch to kneel in front of him. “Please say something.” I was barely able to form words.

“I can’t,” Jack whispered, still staring at the book. Then he carefully closed it and moved it off his lap next to him. His Adam’s apple bobbed roughly in his throat and his nostrils flared. A pulse beat visibly at his temple, and I realized he was trying to compose himself. He raised his face and his eyes were vivid and full, the green sparkling to depths I’d never seen. It was wonder, it was love, it was a thousand things I couldn’t name.

He reached out and took my face in his warm rough hands. “You,” Jack said on a choked up whisper, shaking his head slightly. Moments passed where we looked into each other, and he didn’t say anything more. Then his thumb brushed over my lips. “You,” he said finally, “make…
every…
single
…
thing
in my world beautiful.”