The Acorn Tattoo: The Neverland Series Part 1 Anniversary Edition Read online

  The Acorn Tattoo

  The Neverland Series Part 1 Anniversary Edition

  Alyse Miller

  This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Cover design by Najla Qamber

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  Edited by Vicky Burkholder

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  Interior design layout by Rebecca Poole

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  Siren Press

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  All rights reserved.

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  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Also by Alyse Miller

  For JSP

  Chapter 1

  “I think I—hic—love you.”

  The words tumbled eagerly over Jake’s lips and spilled into the air like offbeat tap dancers, a graceful quintet momentarily tripped by an unexpected step. Jake grinned sheepishly and dipped his head, sending sandstorm blond locks tumbling across the deep hollow of his angled cheekbones. A second hiccup followed the first, and his head bobbed in tandem with the sound. Even with his face downcast, Claire could see the upturned curve of his lips pinched in his profile. He was grinning again.

  Claire and Jake had finished their picnic of fresh fruits and cheese nearly an hour before. Afterward, when the wine was empty, they lounged together comfortably under the brilliant kaleidoscope colors of the changing fall leaves. Together, they watched the sky turn from robin’s egg blue to cornhusk yellow. Jake had fallen quiet, as he often did—his back propped lightly against the crackled white bark and his long, nimble fingers plucking at the blades of sun-warmed grass that brushed against his knee, as familiar as if they were the strings of his guitar. Claire lay on her back inside Jake’s shadow, staring past his grinning profile to the sky. It was a spectacularly beautiful day in the simplest of ways—the kind that seems to want for daydreaming. The kind of day that was made of the stuff of dreams itself.

  Jake slid closer to settle on his side beside her and stacked one canvas-clad foot purposefully on top of the other. Then, as though he were sipping bravery from the wind, he inhaled a lungful of fragrant autumn air. He turned his face to hers, giving Claire the full view of chiseled cheekbones cut alongside wide lips and curved beneath uncertain brows and gleaming emerald eyes. A third hiccup shivered through the air, but Jake was quiet. It had been a sudden declaration and Claire’s breath caught in her throat. The tap dancers, still suspended, hovered patiently in the space between them.

  Claire might have thought the wine had tempted fleeting romantic thoughts to recklessness. Silly words on wine-soaked lips often fluttered out into the realm of things said too soon, or too often. She would have thought that had they come from anyone else’s lips. But Jake was a man of few words. It was as if he cared for them so preciously that every uttered syllable was polished one at a time and strung together in a melody of perfectly chosen words. Jake was, like the day itself, beautiful and dreamlike and vaguely surreal.

  As Claire studied Jake’s face, the lazy breeze yawned a tangle of silky hair across his forehead and buried one eye beneath the sandy desert of his hair. Without the paralyzing effect of both of his eyes locked on hers, Jake’s face was more tolerably handsome—only lightly skimming the edge of heart wrenching without plummeting over into the chasm of heartbreaking. He hiccupped again and inched closer, letting one arm slide across her waist so that his fingers found and then tugged playfully around a stray ribbon of her tousled red hair. His fingertips, surprisingly cool when they brushed against her skin, did not match the heat that pulsed through the sweetheart bodice of her pale yellow sundress where he lay against her. Claire felt her cheeks heat in rosy blooms despite herself. With Jake’s arms around her, his hands brushing across her skin, and eyes shining into hers, those five seemingly innocuous little words changed. They coiled and warmed into something deeper, thicker, and more masculine. Claire repeated them in her mind, words so delicious she could almost taste them. If it were possible, every inch of her body would turn as pink as her cheeks. If it were possible, she might be forever pink.

  A new grin spread across Jake’s face, this one even wider than the first. It was coyer and more teasing than the hiccupping, bashful ones that had come before. The perpetual curiosity that occupied his emerald eyes sharpened. It grew more insistent and intense in the space between his breaths and her blushes. Matching pinprick dimples pressed into each of his cheeks—one right, one left. He had a way of looking simultaneously innocent and mischievous at the same time. He was irresistible, even when she didn’t want to resist.

  “I mean,” Jake’s deep voice interrupted the quiet, stopped. He cleared his throat and propped himself up on one elbow. He pinned her effortlessly with those sparkling emerald eyes as his upper body towered over her. Claire was lucky she was lying on her back on the blanket of grass. Had she been standing she would have swooned to the ground in an instant. Jake hiccupped again, tucked his hair absently behind his ear, and kept grinning. One more blink and any residual bashfulness vanished from his eyes and his grin. “I mean, I love you.”

  Claire turned from pink to red. If she could still her fluttering heart, she could speak. “Oh, don’t be silly,” she tried to sound playful, but her words came out breathless and rushed and desperate. “You’ve only had too much wine.” She wobbled her empty wineglass playfully at him as some kind of wishful proof. It clinked clumsily against the empty bottle, first a note too hard and then a note too soft.

  “Nonsense, Claire Darling.” It was his nickname for her. Jake ignored the glass and lowered his face until it was close enough for Claire to see a tiny drop of honey billowing in a sea of brilliant green. Claire’s shadow stretched behind her as Jake leaned to cup her face gently in his hands. His deliberate movements were as smooth and graceful as silk. One warm hand slid to curl along the nape of her neck, the thumb resting lightly on the hummingbird beat of her pulse. The other still cupped on the curve of her cheek. Tiny fireworks sparked beneath her skin as Jake’s words closed the space between them.

  “I’ve only had but a thimbleful,” he whispered onto the waiting petals of her lips.

  And he kissed her.

  Chapter 2

  Claire had first seen Jake in the same fragrant coffee shop where they later spent their first date. The coffee shop was Claire’s haven. She often abandoned the fierce creativity of her downtown office in favor of the coffee shop’s cozy comforts and the unbridled imaginations of the artists an
d writers who favored out-of-the-way cafes over the busy, popular chains common in the city. In this quiet coffee shop, she could break away from the fast-paced demands of the other editors and photographers at the boutique fashion magazine she worked for in the city. She could simply sit, absorbing inspiration around her as she sipped sweet steaming mugs and shrugged away the melee of the world outside. For a barely-thirty, single girl living in the Big City, this was about as close to feeling like home as she could find.

  Ever since the day he brushed her sleeve as he passed beside her chair, clutching a bundle of books in one hand and the neck of a guitar in the other, Claire had been curious about the boy with the emerald eyes. He was easy to pick out in the dim coffee shop—wearing the same faded leather jacket and fingering his guitar. He had a line of pens tucked under the brim of his newsboy cap, and he would pull them out and push them in again at random as he scribbled notes on coffee-stained napkins. Sometimes he twirled them between his fingers before slipping them back into place. Mostly he sat perched on the edge of his chair with his eyebrows knitted together over closed eyes, lost in thought. On one particular evening, when he lifted his arms to pull on his jacket, Claire spotted a small tattoo inked near the curve of his hipbone. It was a tiny brown acorn with a smooth body and diamond-etched cap. She had thought it a curious tattoo, but from that night on, she had secretly called him “the boy with the acorn tattoo.”

  How she’d never noticed him before was a mystery. From the day she’d first seen him, her eyes could find him without looking. Sometimes, between scribbles in his tattered notebook—the one he carried around curled up in the back pocket of his faded jeans—he’d catch her watching. She’d snap her eyes away, praying he hadn’t noticed, but he was gracious, smiling a little to himself, and leaving her to blush in privacy. For many weeks, they never exchanged more than those stolen glances. Then one evening, the boy with the acorn tattoo was suddenly standing at her side, guitar hanging in his hand and pencil poking out of a dune of the desert bound under the newsboy cap. “Would you like to hear it?” he asked her casually, as if they’d spoken hundreds of times before. His voice was soft, low and calm, and had a faint lilt to it—a cadence she couldn’t place. “The song. It’s finished.”

  Claire’s mouth froze. The hundreds of carefully articulated greetings she had obsessively rehearsed over and over in her bathroom mirror escaped her entirely. Without worrying over her answer, he seized a chair from the next table, twisted it under his free arm, and sat down facing her. He was so close that his knees rubbed up against the side of her thigh. Claire struggled to regain her composure, and noticed, oddly, the contrast of the worn denim of his jeans against the dark linen of her skirt. She blinked at him—each blink a tightening of the coils in the drawbridge of her still-open mouth. As silly as it was, she had never seen him this close before, and Claire felt star struck. He was oblivious to her struggle and lured her in closer, his finger bent in an arching, beckoning motion that implied both she keep quiet and lean in nearer to him. The familiar, telltale heat was crawling up her cheeks, but Claire leaned in anyway. The boy with the acorn tattoo began to sing.

  For as low as it had been before, his voice was deeper than she expected it to be. It flowed like water toward her—soft, heavy, and slow—and carried her on a warm, rocking current, as if she sat beside him on a ship that was sailing deep into the midnight ocean along a path lit by the glow of stars on endless water. She listened to his song, hearing simultaneously every word and none, mesmerized by the way his mouth caressed each word as it breathed between his lips.

  Claire hadn’t realized that Jake had finished singing until his tongue licked across still lips. She peeled her eyes away from his mouth and slowly lifted her eyes to his. “You sound like the ocean,” she said dumbly, her words betraying her. She was surprised at how drowsy her voice sounded.

  The boy with the acorn tattoo cocked his head to the side, bird-like. “Do you like the ocean?” he asked curiously. His words, as sincere as a true southern gentleman, didn’t match his mouth, which was just the tiniest bit mocking. Claire blushed pink and nodded. For a split second, she was terrified she might have offended him, but gradually a slow grin spread across his face. He shook his head slowly from side to side, his grin widening with every turn. Looking away from her, he set his guitar on the table. His knees stayed firm against her thigh.

  “I’m Jake.”

  “Claire,” she returned, grateful the word came out with no other surprises. They spent the next several hours unaware of the strangers around them, each minute loosening the awkwardness bound between them until they were talking and laughing as easily as old friends. Jake strummed a few more of his songs for her, and every time Claire was whisked away on the same rocking ship as the first time he’d sung. Claire was utterly unaware of time passing, reveling in moment after moment of conversation. It was freedom; a feeling akin to what Claire imagined flying might feel like.

  “These songs are too sad,” Jake declared after a while, tapping his palm sharply against the strings to cut short the first notes of a melody. “Let’s write a happier one, shall we?” And, dismissing Claire’s feeble protests, he leaned behind her chair and laid the guitar over her, setting it down gently like a babe in a new mother’s lap. It was lighter than she’d expected, but then, she’d never touched an instrument before.

  “But, I don’t know how to play,” she protested, craning her head toward him. “Or sing!”

  Jake grinned down at her, green eyes twinkling behind a curtain of fallen hair that lapped across his forehead. Taking her hands in his, he placed her right hand on the sound hole of the guitar, and then wrapped her left so that her fingers rested on the strings that laced across the neck. His hands were warm on hers, with fingers long and lean and slightly rough on the end, as if they were tipped in sandpaper. They curved easily around her smaller ones, a full knuckle’s length longer than hers. Claire sat stiffer than the wood of the guitar, trying to relax around its slippery body that felt thin and fragile in her arms.

  Ever her contrast, Jake folded gracefully back into his chair, waiting and peering expectantly at her with his index finger crooked in the length of space between his nose and chin. Claire noticed that he had another tattoo—a tiny star—etched like an afterthought on the pad of the first lower knuckle of his pointer finger. Claire desperately wanted to know what they meant. In the meantime he looked positively serene, an undisturbed idol, as Claire gawked at him over the lump in her lap.

  “Oh,” he said casually, as if he’d remembered something only mildly important but not seriously so. He leaned forward. He produced a shiny red pick from his pocket and handed it to her, demonstrating a smooth, strumming motion over his stomach as he rested back against the chair. “Top to bottom, easy as pie.”

  Claire awkwardly tugged the pick over the strings. To her horror, the guitar belched out a grotesque noise. She wrinkled her nose at the sound. Jake laughed from his chair, a rich masculine sound that managed to vibrate off Claire’s heart. She slit her eyes at him, which only made him laugh harder.

  “All right, all right,” he relented, chuckling a bit smugly as he lifted the guitar from her lap. He flashed her that coy grin. “I’ll play. You sing.”

  As the next several weeks passed, Claire came to realize that his sheepish, teasing grin was Jake’s most honest smile. And of all his smiles, it was the one she treasured the most, peeking out from behind a disheveled mop of sandstorm locks and upturned beneath the most startling green eyes she’d ever seen. It was a grin both mocking and vulnerable. Giving this smile was an act of trust. That Jake believed in her enough to share this grin with her was something that Claire considered one of the most extraordinary triumphs of their budding relationship. She knew the value of earned trust—trusting someone, at least to Claire, was almost as exceptional as being trusted.

  Claire had begun to understand the secret meaning of Jake’s grin on their second date after she had confided to him previo
usly that she’d always been just a bit jealous of the boy who’d never grown up. He had surprised her that night with tickets to see the touring ballet, Peter Pan. And, while Claire gasped with excitement when two glossy tickets fell from the thick white envelope, the sheepish grin had been Jake’s only response.

  He had grinned again at the ballet the following week when, on stage, Wendy stitched Peter’s shadow to the sole of his shoe. Much to her surprise, Claire witnessed a small tear escape the corner of Jake’s eye and slide down his cheek, glittering for all the world like a tiny dot of pixie dust in the flickering in the glow of the stage lights. “Boy, why are you crying?” she’d whispered, biting her lower lip lightly to nip away the impulse to reach out and touch his tear.

  “Poor Peter, always chasing his own shadow,” Jake whispered. He laced his fingers through hers. His finger was damp from the tear and wetted her skin with a soft kiss. “Though honestly, I was always more jealous of the Darling kids.”

  “Yes, but wouldn’t it be an awfully big adventure,” Claire countered, “to stay young and free forever.” Jake nodded and gave her that sheepish grin. It was a thimble for an acorn, two small truths.