Carter (Bourbon & Blood Book 3) (2 page)

“I don’t have any shoes,” she said.

“You had them last night,” he shot back. “You’ve got pretty good aim with them, too. Besides, I don’t think those mile high heels would be the best fashion choice with your current ensemble.”

She glanced down at the baggy t-shirt and sweats, tugging the pants up and folding the waistband over again, and then another time for good measure. They still drug the floor. “Probably not,” she agreed. “But I really loved those shoes. They made me feel tall.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that was probably the bar you were dancing on,” he offered as he grabbed his keys off the table by the door. “You didn’t keep your shoes on long enough for them to do that.”

Opening the door, Carter took one look at the steps and then looked back at her. The iron steps were treacherous under the best of circumstances. With the rain from the night before, her bare feet and pants that were long enough to trip both of them, he just scooped her up in his arms.

She smacked his chest. “Put me down!”

“No,” he said, and kept walking.

“I can walk, Carter. This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to be carried just so you can feel like a he-man!”

“I feel like a he-man regardless.” He couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face. She was so tiny and yet so prickly—like a rabid little hedgehog. “I’m carrying you because if my driving you home would be the height of humiliation for you, winding up with a concussion at the bottom of my steps would probably be even worse. Especially since I happen to know you’re not wearing any panties under that getup.”

She blushed, her cheeks turning bright pink. “Speaking of which… where are my panties? I found the dress hanging in the bathroom, but the panties are nowhere to be seen.”

“You really did throw up a lot. It went everywhere,” he said. “As for the panties… I need a souvenir, don’t I?”

“Forget it. Just get me back to my car so I can put this whole mess behind me,” she said through clenched teeth. Her jaw was so tight it was a wonder the muscles didn’t simply snap.

Reaching the bottom of the steps, he didn’t put her down, but continued to carry her until he reached his truck. Opening the door, he deposited her on the ancient and cracked vinyl seat in a repeat of the previous night’s actions. He walked around to the driver’s side and was climbing behind the wheel just as she reached behind her and dug out one high heeled shoe that was protruding from the seat.

“I don’t guess the other one is in here, is it?” she asked.

“It might be. I’ll poke around later and see if I can’t find it,” he offered. “Of course, I can’t exactly bring it to you, now can I?”

It still stung. Hell, he knew his reputation. It had never bothered him before. Why it was pissing him off now was a mystery. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. Yes, he did know. He wanted her. Somehow, without him realizing it, Josephine Marcum had become one of the sexiest women he’d ever met. Beautiful, smart, feisty as hell, and all bundled up in a petite, curvy body—yeah, he was sunk.

“If you find my shoe, just bring it to the library… discreetly, of course,” she said primly.

He couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face at her tone. She’d be a wildcat if she ever let loose, he thought. “I like that.”

“What?”

He was poking the bear, or the wildcat in this case. “Your librarian voice, all prim and proper… sitting there in my pants. Not a stitch on under them, and still on a moral high horse tall enough to kill you if you fall.” The glare he received in response to that made it completely worthwhile.

“I really don’t like you.”

Carter smiled wider. “Then maybe you should give me back my pants.”

As they pulled onto the road, she made not a sound. But if looks could kill, Josie Marcum would have laid him out in two seconds flat.

They’d reached the end of Main Street, where it connected to the highway that would take them back to the scene of the crime when Josie began to flail about in the seat. Carter turned toward her just as she managed to unbuckle the seatbelt and slide all the way down to the floor. She was tucked under the dash like a stowaway.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“My parents!” she hissed back at him in a low whisper. “They’re coming this way!”

Carter looked up and saw them through the intersection. They were facing them, but with the sun so low in the sky he doubted they would have seen her. “You don’t have to whisper. The truck’s engine is loud enough that they couldn’t hear you if even if you yelled… which you do seem to do an awful lot.”

“Carter, I can’t let them see me like this!”

The desperation was real. She wasn’t being melodramatic or carrying on for effect. And it wasn’t embarrassment either. This was something else altogether.

“Why, Josie? Just tell me why.”

She looked up at him and the hurt he saw in her eyes was almost too much to bear. “Because I can’t disappoint them. Ever. They saved me and everyone in this town knows it. If I don’t live up to that, Carter, I’ll never live it down.”

“What the hell does that mean?” he demanded, coasting through the light after it changed. William Marcum gave him a wave, but there was little warmth in his smile. Of course, Carter knew he hadn’t done a whole lot to endear himself to the local ministerial association. The bastard son of a drunken criminal and a girl who should have known better, everyone in town had expectations of him but none of them were good.

“It means that everyone in this town looks up to them. They always tell Mommy and Daddy how good it was of them to bring me home, what wonderful people they are to have adopted a child from such a horrible place… If I embarrass them—.”

Frustrated, he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “Fucking hell, Josie! They’re not going to send you back!”

“No,” she agreed. “They won’t. But I don’t ever want them to wish they had.”

He hated Fontaine in that moment. Josie being adopted was no secret. And over the years, he’d heard the talk often enough. Everyone always told her how lucky she was, how grateful she ought to be. But what that really boiled down to was people saying she’d gotten lucky and had been giving something she hadn’t earned or didn’t deserve. Ultimately, they were saying the same thing to her that they always said to him.
You’re not good enough
.

“Your parents love you… and you don’t put conditions on that,” he said softly, reaching down to help her up out of the floor.

“It feels like there are conditions,” she admitted. “Make good grades. So I did. Make better grades. So I did. Don’t date that boy because he’s trouble, so I didn’t. I’ve never once gone against the things they’ve told me to do… until last night. And you see what a disaster that turned out to be!”

“It doesn’t look so bad from here,” he answered. “You’re more than where you come from, Josie Marcum.” And so was he, even if no one would ever believe it.

J
osie rolled
onto her side as the phone buzzed on the night stand. She smiled as she saw the name on the screen. In the week since he’d rescued her, nightly phone calls and daily texts had become a thing.

“You have the wrong number,” she said as she answered.

“How can you be sure?” he replied suggestively. “You don’t even know what I want yet.”

But God above, she wanted to. “Behave, Carter.”

He chucked. “Where’s the fun in that, cupcake? But since you won’t misbehave with me, I guess I’ll have to.”

He didn’t mean it. She knew that. Carter flirted the way most men breathed, it just happened whether he intended to or not. Deciding to move the conversation to safer waters, she asked, “What wonderful things did you find at that auction in Florence today?”

He sighed. “The house had been picked pretty clean by the time we got there. Got a few windows that Savannah will probably have me turn into something crazy… we did manage to get a real pretty mantle, but I think that’s just because the damn thing was marble and no one else wanted to carry it. Thank God we made Emmitt go.”

She giggled at the idea of Emmitt attending an auction surrounded by antique dealers. Carter’s mountain of a cousin terrified most people, but he’d always been kind to her. He’d taken excellent care of every stray she’d ever carried up to his door and there’d been more than a few over the years.

“So you have to give me all the details,” she urged.

“About the mantle?” he asked. “It was heavy as shit. What other details do you need?”

If he’d been in front of her, she would have smacked him for being obtuse. “About Bennett and Mia Darcy!” she said. Rumors had been swirling all over town about the two of them. Their secret engagement, the family feud between the Darcy and Hayes clans, it was the stuff of romantic dreams. And now the daring rescue with Bennett pulling Mia to safety after she crashed her car in a flooded creek. It was definitely swoon worthy.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “Bennett pulled her out of the water. That’s all I know. That’s all I want to know.”

“You don’t think it’s romantic?” she asked. “He saved her… after all those years of pining for her, he risked his life—.”

“Bennett is a Boy Scout, Josie. It could have been Samuel Darcy in that damn creek and he would have pulled the son of a bitch out. That’s just who Bennett is. Don’t be reading more into this than there is. It’s not a romance novel. It’s not one of those damn Lifetime movies you love.”

“You don’t have an ounce of romance in your soul, do you?” Josie demanded. “You can’t tell me that Bennett doesn’t still have feelings for her.”

“I’m sure he does,” Carter agreed. “But it’s not my fault he’s a dumbass.”

“Carter, I’ve seen them… Out in public, when they run into each other. It’s like the air is just charged around them. You have to see that they belong together?”

He sighed again, this time sounding more than a little irritated. “What I see is that she broke his heart once. She walked out on him without a backward glance, and given half the chance, she’ll do it again. I’m not going to be Team Mia, Josie. Ever.”

He was unreasonable. “And people think Emmitt is the sourpuss! Clearly they’ve never heard you on this subject!”

T
he last thing
Carter wanted to talk about was Mia Darcy. He’d gotten used to his nightly phone calls with Josie, of talking to her while he pictured her laying in bed wearing something white, innocent, and still sexy as fuck. It bugged the hell out of them Mia Darcy was now fucking that up too. She was in Bennett’s head making him crazy. The whole family was in an uproar over it, but no one said anything to Bennett. No. They came to him and had
him
talk to Bennett. Or distract Bennett. Or try to talk some sense into Bennett. He was done with it all.

“Dammit, Josie, can we not just talk about something else?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, and from the clipped tone of her voice he knew she was pissed. Lord she could go from rainbows and kittens to daggers and bullets in two seconds flat.

Since there was no hope in hell of putting that cat back in the bag, he decided just to poke it and see what happened. “You could tell me what you’re wearing.”

“Ooooooh!”

And there it was. He’d rendered her speechless, left her hissing, spitting, clawing and probably throwing shit. His work was done.

“Listen here, Carter, I’m not one of your floozies! I’m not chasing after you. I’m not sleeping with you. I’m not having phone sex with you!”

“I didn’t ask you to,” he pointed out reasonably. “I just asked you what you’re wearing. It’s supposed to get cold tonight, Josie, and you’re so little that it wouldn’t take much to turn you into a popsicle.” She was probably going to key his truck. No. No one would bother, he reminded himself. Hell, they’d have to find a spot that was more paint than rust.

The sound of her taking deep breaths and counting slowly made him grin. “I don’t know what makes you fly off the handle like that, darlin’. I really don’t.”

“I ought to change my number,” she said. “I swear you just enjoy pissing me off.”

He didn’t even bother to deny it. “You do look awful cute when you’re mad… want to snap a pic and send it to me?”

“No. I don’t. And I’m wearing something hideous,” she said. “Thermal, even. Something so unsexy it’ll mark me for life!”

He didn’t laugh at that. “Josie, haven’t you figured out by now that it’s not what you’re wearing? It’s just the fact that it’s you.”

She sighed then. He could hear her flopping back on the bed, the springs of the ancient iron bed bouncing. Lord did that give him filthy ideas. She’d sent him one picture of her laying on that bed, fully clothed, nothing even remotely suggestive about it but it had fueled more fantasies than the Playboy magazines he’d stolen from Emmitt as a kid.

“What are we doing, Carter? I think we’re friends and then you say things like that… I just don’t know what to do.”

“We are friends,” he replied, kicking off his boots and laying back on his own bed. He stared up at the ceiling and wished with everything in him that she was there with him. “But we’re not just friends, Josie. Or at least that’s not what I want us to be.”

“Carter—.”

“Don’t say no,” he urged. “Just think about it. If you decide it’s not worth the risk, fine… I’ll never bring it up again. But you wanted fun, Josie. Your words, not mine.”

“I know that,” she answered.

“I can make it fun, Josie.” He’d use every damn thing he’d learned. It wouldn’t be just fun. It’d be unforgettable. Carter knew that if he could get her in his bed once, he could keep her there, at least long enough to get her out of his system.

“
If
,” she began, “I agreed… it would have to be a secret. I won’t be just another name on the list.”

“There is no list,” he replied. Half the women he was rumored to have slept with were nothing more than friends, and the other half, well, he hadn’t broken any promises to anybody. “And I don’t give a damn what any one thinks but you. I can be as discreet as you need me to be.”

“I have to think. I’ll let you know,” she said.

Which meant he’d overplayed his hand and would likely never hear from her again. Fuck.