She'd never seen anything like it. She gaped. "How is that even possible?"
"Don't ask me, ask him." Jake pointed as the heavy wooden front doors heaved open, and a tall, handsome man walked out.
In the distance, Jennifer could only glimpse him, but still, something warm stirred inside of her.
"Is that ... is that him?" she whispered.
"Mark Callahan," Jake said. "Yep."
Jennifer swallowed hard as Mark strode closer, waving at Jake, and then, her.
He wore a white button-up dress shirt and black pants.
He had a look of casual elegance about him, refined, masculine features that drew Jennifer in right away.
There was just something about him she couldn't place, something that took him from being a regular kind of handsome to something otherworldly.
Maybe it was his hard shoulders, his strong jaw, the sexy glint in his eyes ... or maybe it was how his expression told her a story about someone deeply curious about the world, but that curiosity had been stifled by darkness.
How could she tell so much from just a glimpse? Never had she felt so naturally attuned to someone before, and they hadn't yet said a word to each other.
She wanted to know his life story.
She wanted to share the next chapter of that life with him.
Jennifer swallowed again, her eyelids fluttering to try and get her head back on straight. She had to think, to keep herself focused, before her mind went wild like that again.
When Mark approached, he gave her an easy smile, one that spoke of warmth and secrets. She wanted him to press those lips to her ear and whisper sweet nothings, to share what it was about him that made him so alluring.
"Jennifer." He said her name as if testing the sound of the word. There was something uncertain about the way he said it, and yet there was an innate authority to the way he stood and spoke. Together, he contradicted himself.
"Mark, it's good to finally meet you. Jake speaks highly of you," Jennifer said.
Was she supposed to shake his hand? Hug him? Kiss him?
Jennifer's mind and body sent mixed signals all over the place, leaving her staring at Mark like a hot mess. She wanted to touch and hold him, to tell Jake it was time for him to go so she and Mark could have a bit of alone time ...
But it seemed Jake got the message all on his own. He cleared his throat. "Time for me to go. Good luck you two."
Jennifer blinked, and whatever spell trapped her in Mark's eyes faded away. "You're going to leave me here, just like that?"
He laughed. "You say that like it's a bad thing. My wife's waiting for me at home. I have a feeling you can handle Mark just fine."
Mark gave an awkward look. "I think we could use some time to get to know each other. Come on, let me show you around."
"See ya," Jake said, and Jennifer waved. A moment later, he was driving back down the road they came on and disappeared into the trees.
Now that she and Mark were alone, a subtle warmth moved through her, a mixture of excitement and expectation of what would happen next.
She bit her lip when she glanced back at him, finding him looking her up and down as if he liked what he saw.
She felt exactly the same about him. Never had she met anyone so sexy before.
Jake had been handsome, but compared to Mark .
.. it was like he was the perfect male specimen brought to life for her personal pleasure.
But Jennifer blinked away those kinds of thoughts for now.
She couldn't deny how much she was attracted to him, how badly she wanted him right then and there.
Right now, though, she had other concerns on her mind that were more important than sex .
.. like learning more about the man who was to be her husband.
Learning more about his body, and his skill at making love ... well, that would have to come in time, wouldn't it?
Mark offered her his arm, and she took it, carefully. His touch warmed her right to the core, and when she locked her arm through his, a sense of safety overcame her. As if, by being by his side, the universe promised that no harm would ever come to her again.
She smiled up at the mansion hidden in the trees—no, the mansion that looked like it was made to blend right into the forest. "Jake said you made this place?"
"I designed it and oversaw the creation, but I'm not exactly an artisan or builder," he said. "But I still have pride in its appearance as if it came from my own hands. I suppose you were shocked to come here and find yourself in what looked like the middle of nowhere."
She smiled sheepishly. "Just a little. I thought maybe this had been a whole big joke ... and that Jake had driven me out here as a prank."
"It's nothing like that. Just a vision brought to life," Mark said. "The mansion is built to blend seamlessly into the environment ... for all intents and purposes, the exterior is the environment."
Now that they were closer to the front door, it was easier to see that it was a structure, not a collection of oddly shaped trees.
But it was the details that made it blend in perfectly: the stone steps to the front door that looked like a natural arrangement of rocks, the way the trees right next to the building were arranged to hide the walls with a natural landscape of leaves.
It made her wonder even more about Mark. Jake had mentioned something about this place being a fortress ... why had he gone through such effort to make a building that invariably must have taken months if not years of careful preparation and planning to get perfect?
Mark welcomed her inside, the front door opening into a house that looked far more like the type of home that she was familiar with: cabinets and chairs, tables and couches, even though the decorative accents on the interior were still natural themed, like leaves and wood.
And still, despite the familiarity, the fact that she was stepping into a mansion with an entranceway the size of her old apartment in Portland ... that was a wholly new experience to her.
It was like walking into a whole new world, and it was Mark who brought her here.
"It's beautiful," Jennifer said. They walked through the living area with front windows designed from smaller pieces of class, an amber, emerald, and crimson mosaic of individual leaves.
"This is your new home."
"What inspired you to build a house in such a remote locale?"
She wasn't going to say it out loud, but from her experience with wealthy people, a lot of them preferred living at least near the city so they could have anything and everything at their convenience.
Jennifer supposed that some people were just rich enough that they could live wherever they wanted and not have to worry about trivialities such as where their food would come from.
Mark offered her a warm smile, one that heated her up inside her core. His lips called to her, wishing she would just place her mouth on his and forget about all of her worries. The troubles that brought her here in the first place.
"I admit, the forest has always called to me ... call me a country bumpkin, but I've never been one for big cities," he explained. "Too loud. I need to live somewhere that I can hear the wind whistling in the breeze, the wolves howling in the night, the uninterrupted music of the birds."
It was like he plucked the words right out of her heart and whispered them right back to her. "You don't want to be suffocated by cement skyscrapers or choke on vehicle fumes," she said. "You want to be in the wild, where you can be wild and free, like the animal in your blood."
Something flickered in Mark's eyes. Excitement, maybe. Or uncertainty.
Maybe those were her feelings.
She bit her lip and looked down. "That's how I feel when I'm in the wilderness, at least. Born in the trees, my mom always said, though she definitely gave birth in a hospital."
They laughed together. "In that case, you really might be at home here. The grounds are lovely. You'll want to go for walks, I imagine."
"Grounds?" Jennifer laughed. "We're in the woods."
"The trees are a fence. You'll see when—"
Jennifer's phone started ringing, interrupting Mark.
She was going to put it on silent, but then the high-pitched birdsong that was her mom's ringtone started to play.
Crap. She was hoping to settle in, meet Mark, and get back to her mom when she had a better reading of her situation.
Her mom was going to raise hell, and now Jennifer had to quell the flames.
Her guilt over just up and leaving would demand with it.
She shook her phone with a sigh. "I'm sorry, I need to take this."
"Take all the time you need. You have no reason to rush with me," he said.
She offered him a small smile before placing the phone to her ear and wandering from the living area and into the kitchen, which was just as large and elegant. "Hey mom, I hope Lily hasn't been driving you crazy, she does that sometimes," Jennifer tried with a laugh.
"You know very well that I'm not calling because of Lily," Arabelle said. "When you told me you were sending Lily to bring me home from the hospital today, I thought it was because you finally saw that I was right, or at least that you'd gone out to have some fun for yourself."
"You know I couldn't do that, mom."
"I saw that you signed the papers, and Dr. Carlton told me that my first treatment comes tomorrow. What did you do? How are you going to come up with all that money?"
Jennifer bit her lip. She was in a custom-built mansion that was designed and owned by the man who lived in it.
Mark was amazing, and he seemed like a genuinely nice person.
If she asked, she had the feeling he would help her—especially since they would be married any day now.
But those were the same reasons she couldn't ask him.
"Lily isn't giving you trouble, is she?" Jennifer said.
"Jenny! Lily is the one who told me you were up to no good. Said your apartment was all emptied out, the people at your jobs told her you had left, and you're not answering your texts."
Right, Jennifer forgot that she gave Lily a key in case of emergencies. They'd only used it once before.
Jennifer sighed. There really wasn't any getting out of this. "Mom ... you need to follow the doctor's instructions perfectly. I have enough for the first four payments, which is more than enough time for me to sort out the details of my plan."
"But you do have a plan?" Arabelle said. "One that's not going to end up with you working yourself to death?"
Tears pricked in Jennifer's eyes. Talking to her mom about life-saving medicine like it was optional always drove her crazy.
In Jennifer's mind, there were no options.
Her mom needed this treatment, and Jennifer needed to make it possible, because she needed her mom, and she couldn't live in a world where she didn't try her hardest to make sure that happened.
"Yes, I have a plan."
Silence stretched between them, all but Jennifer's sniffles and the birds whistling in the trees just out of the nearby window.
The song eased a bit of the tension in Jennifer's heart, but it wasn't enough to soothe her worries altogether.
When it came to Mark, Jennifer didn't really have a plan because she didn't know what was going to happen between them.
Working three jobs wasn't going to cut it.
Nor was trying to fund the treatment through donations.
So while Jennifer didn't know exactly how she was going to get the last $92,000 she needed to pay for her mom's treatment, coming to Marhan as a mail order bride still seemed like her best option.
But how was she going to explain that to her mom without her exploding?
The answer was she couldn't. Not yet, at least.
"You better start explaining, Jenny," Arabelle said, "because according to Lily, it looks like you moved out of your apartment."
"That's because I did." Jennifer bit her lip.
She could just say that she was planning to move in with her mom permanently to save on the cost of rent and put that toward the medicine instead—which was true, to an extent—but Arabelle would see through the lie.
"To get the money for your treatment, I had to get a bit creative, mom.
I'm not in Portland right now, I'm in Pennsylvania. "
"That's so far away ... hon, what are you up to?"
"What matters is that I'm hopeful I'll be able to find a way to cover the treatment. You'll just have to last a few days with Lily until I can find a nurse. Can you manage that?"
Arabelle laughed. "Yes, but as punishment, I will be sharing as many embarrassing stories as possible, starting with the time you were a little girl at the supermarket—"
"All right, all right, mom!" Jennifer laughed, "I'm glad you're still in good spirits. I have to go. We'll talk again soon, hopefully when I have more news."
They said their goodbyes, and Jennifer hung up. She leaned into the wall, not realizing until then just how much she'd been relying on it to keep her standing and steady. She felt like she could topple under her guilt ... she should have told her mom the whole truth, but she couldn't.
Even to herself, she sounded like a gold digger.
But she didn't want to blindly take anyone's money.
She didn't want to get married just for that reason alone, either.
If she was going to marry Mark, it would be because she actually liked him.
When the time was right, she would ask him to help her find a way to raise the funds.
She wasn't going to ask for a gift. She wouldn't expect anything from him at all . ..
But whenever she thought of Mark, the thought was swiftly followed by her imagining his strong arms around her, holding her close and telling her everything was going to be okay.
The survival rate of her mother's kind of lung cancer was only roughly 50%. They caught it before it spread from Arabelle's lungs, but it was still bad. She didn't like the odds of 50/50 that she'd never hear her mom's voice again.
So there were times where she thought it wasn't going to be okay.
But maybe, with Mark by her side, there was a chance that things would be okay. Just how he managed to make her feel that way ... well, she couldn't explain that yet.
For now, Jennifer wiped her eyes, gave herself another minute to calm her breathing, and then went back to join Mark in the other room.