Read Loving Jessie for Free Online

when I came to live with him, so he took me with him. School was out, so Reilly was home a lot. He and Matt were best friends, and I guess maybe they felt sorry for me, because they let me hangout with them quite a bit.” Her mouth curved. “I probably drove them nuts, but they never made me feel like I was in the way. I know it sounds weird when you consider the age difference, but I felt like we were friends.” “Sometimes age doesn’t matter,” Lurene commented.
    “I guess not.” Her movements suddenly brisk, Jessie brushed the spilled salt off the edge of the counter and into the palm of her hand before dumping it on Matt’s empty plate. “Anyway, we stayed friends. Of course, I didn’t always see a lot of them. But there was always a sort of connection there. The summer after I turned sixteen, Grandad bought Ermingarde for me. Matt and Reilly rebuilt her from the ground up. Well, Matt, mostly,” she corrected, smiling. The smile widened suddenly, her eyes bright with laughter. “I’m surprised I lived through the summer. I was so excited about getting my first car, and a cool car at that. I must have driven Matt crazy, hovering around, asking what he was doing, asking if I could help, asking when I could drive her.”
    “Sounds like a nice guy,” Lurene said. “I’m surprised you didn’t fall madly in love with him.”
    “No, it was always—” Jessie caught herself, swallowed the words that had so nearly escaped and shook her head. “I always thought of Matt as a friend. I guess he is very attractive, but I never really thought of him as a man.”
    The bell over the door jangled as a family of five pushed into the café. Lurene straightened away from the counter to go get menus for them. “Honey, you’d better get your eyes checked, because what just walked out the door is definitely one hundred percent man. And a prime cut, at that.” She grinned and fluffed her artfully bleached hair before picking up a stack of menus. “If I hadn’t sworn off the species, I’d be tempted to see if he’d liketo park his shoes under my bed. Of course, I’m not sure how much I’d like waking up next to a man prettier than I am.”
    Frowning a little, Jessie slid off the stool, and reached for her glass and Matt’s plate. It was ridiculous to let Lurene’s comments bother her. She knew Matt was attractive. Of course she did. You only had to look at him to see that he was attractive. Except she’d never really looked at him that way, and it made her a little uncomfortable to think about it now.
    She shook her head as she carried the dishes through the swinging door into the kitchen. It was stupid to even think about it. What difference did it make whether Matt was an Adonis or a troll? He was her friend, and he was home.
    When he was growing up, his family had lived in a tidy ranch-style home on a block lined with other tidy ranch-style homes in a tidy middle-class neighborhood. His father had been a loan officer at the Millers Crossing Savings and Loan. His mother had taken the traditional role of housewife. She’d kept the house clean and cooked regular meals. His father had worn a suit and tie to work every day, paid the bills each week, mowed the lawn on Saturday and made sure the car was taken in for service at regular intervals. They had the requisite two children, both boys, born a sedate five years apart. On the surface, everything had been almost abnormally normal.
    Matt wasn’t sure how old he’d been when he’d realized that normal mothers didn’t nip their way through half a bottle of vodka a day, and that normal fathers didn’t come home at the end of the day and take a belt to their children.
    He rarely thought about it anymore, but, when he did,he knew he owed his survival—mental, emotional and maybe even physical—to his older brother. Gabe had been the one person he could count on. Gabe had always been there for him, so maybe it made sense that, when he needed a place to hole up,