Jackson Stroud didn’t just believe that; he counted on it. Guilt. Anger. Pain. Longing. The motivations were often so deep-seated that they were difficult to name. But Jackson—Jax, to people who thought they knew him well—knew what made people tick, or at least he figured it out more quickly than the average Joe. That knack had served him well these past four years on the Dallas police force. Not as well in his so-called “personal life.” Despite the best efforts of the older ladies at his church to set him up with perfectly lovely women, he’d never been able to turn off the drive to figure people out long enough to make a real connection. Certainly not long enough to settle down. He’d accepted ages ago that he was not the settling-down type. “Okay by me,” he muttered to himself in the darkness of his truck cab. That just meant there were no broken hearts in his wake when he moved on. Jackson Stroud always moved on.
