Dangerous Curves Ahead: A Perfect Fit Novel (6 page)

“I didn’t sleep with her.”

“Well, just because you didn’t fuck her doesn’t mean you weren’t cheating.”

He flinched, stunned by her profanity. “It was wrong but I did it to send you a message. To show you that if you didn’t appreciate me, I could find another woman who would.”

“Oh, you sent a message all right. It was loud and clear and it was telling me to get the hell away from you.”

Jack shut his eyes for a moment. “I’ve screwed this up. I know you need more time but I’m not going to stop, Ellis. I went through some stuff but it’s over now. You know we belong together. You know you were meant to be a lawyer. This little store. This move back to Durant is just a phase, and I’m not going to stop until I make you see that.”

“Get out!”

Little store? Just a phase? He still had no clue when it came to her and she wasn’t about to waste her breath explaining it to him. Maybe she should thank him, because without his betrayal she would have never been brave enough to go after her dreams.

“Fine. I’ll go, but it won’t be forever.”

*   *   *

Her chest was still heaving twenty minutes later. She couldn’t believe he wanted her back. Just when she was finally over him, just when her self-esteem returned, he came back to turn her world upside down. She tried to push him out of her mind as she went back to work. But the words
asshole
, and
shithead
, and
butt face
wanted to pour from her mouth like she had some kind of man-hating Tourette’s syndrome.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” Belinda called to her. She quickly made her way around the counter and grasped Ellis’s shoulder. “Ellis what happened? Did we get robbed? Are you hurt?” She looked around the shop, seeing that everything was in its place.

“Jack” was all she said.

“What?” Belinda frowned. “If you tell me Jack was here I’m going to scream.”

“He was.” Ellis nodded.

“Where’s my knife?” Belinda let go of her to rummage through the drawer. “Oh these will work nicely!” She held up a pair of heavy-duty box-cutting scissors. “I bet you I could cut his balls off with these. Slimy bastard.” Belinda continued to mumble. “I can’t believe he had the nerve to show up here after what he did to you.”

Belinda knew every sordid detail of her life with Jack. It was Belinda she went to after she broke up with him. Belinda knew every harsh word he had said to her, things she couldn’t even bring herself to tell her mother, because she was embarrassed that she had let it go on for so long. It was Belinda who’d given her the strength to open this store.

“Give me those.” She removed the potential weapon from her friend’s hand. Ellis didn’t really have time to be a witness in a murder trial, but she was glad she had a friend willing to maim for her. “He’s gone now. He won’t be back.”

“He better not be.” She turned to face Ellis, her expression saying a thousand words. “What did he want?”

“To get back together.” Ellis never thought that Jack would come crawling back. She never thought she would hear him apologize, either. Throughout their two-year relationship she’d often wished she could hear him say he was wrong. He finally did. It was just a little too late.

“How do you feel about that?” Belinda asked warily.

“There’s no freaking way.” Ellis shook off her lingering anger. “He’s the same asshole he always was. He thinks I’m playing a game. That I opened this store just to get at him.”

“But this is your dream. You worked too damn hard to get it.”

“I would die before I gave this place up.”

“Hey.” Cherri walked in for her shift nearly an hour early. “What’s going on?” she asked after seeing the look on Ellis’s face. “Have we been robbed?” She, too, looked around the store to see if anything was out of order.

“No. It’s worse. Jack showed up,” Belinda informed her.

“No way.”

“Yeah,” Ellis said. “I’m feeling somewhere in between murderous and bummed.”

“Well then, I have the perfect solution for that.” Cherri smiled. “Tonight is trivia night down at Bagpipes. We can get tipsy, show off how smart we are, and bad-mouth Jack-ass all at the same time.”

“That sounds like fun. I think we all deserve a little downtime.” Belinda looked at Ellis. “What do you say?”

Ellis hadn’t been out anywhere with the girls since she’d opened the store. It was time she went out and let her hair down. It was time she forget all about her little encounter with Jack.

“I say Bay Breeze me.”

Chapter Five

“When the hell did you start going to trivia nights?” Mike asked his best friend Colin O’Connell over the loud music and dozens of conversations at Bagpipes Pub.

It was the first time they’d hung out since he’d moved back to Durant. He hadn’t seen Colin for almost a year, which was not the norm for them. The two of them had been inseparable in college and before that … Mike didn’t have a lot of friends. He had his mother, his sisters, a few girls here and there, and the flower shop.

His father had walked out on the family the day before Mike turned thirteen. The day Mike ceased being a kid. He became the man of the family, waking up at four in the morning to help his mother and two sisters out at the shop while his older sister took a job in a nursing home to help make ends meet. When Mike’s father left he didn’t just take himself. He took most of the money in the bank account, leaving his wife with only five thousand dollars to raise four kids.

It was flower shop, school, and home for Mike until he turned eighteen and his mother made him go away to college. It was there he met Colin, who had moved from Ireland on a student visa. They were both slightly homesick, had similar childhoods filled with work and single parents. Of course, they immediately took to each other and spent every day of the next four years doing things they shouldn’t have. Colin had come home with Mike on breaks when he couldn’t get back to Ireland, which was most of the time. He had worked in Mike’s family’s flower shop over the summers, broke bread with them on Thanksgiving, and till this day still sent Mike’s mother, Margie, birthday presents. The two had been more like brothers than friends, which was why Mike felt guilty about not seeing Colin as often as he should. Yes, they were both busy. Mike was up to his neck in crime while Colin worked as a restoration expert specializing in antique furniture. Mike always thought it was funny that his big, profanity-spewing friend had such a love for dainty old furniture, but his love showed in his work and he had the extensive clientele to prove it. Still, going nine months without seeing his best friend was far too long, and so when Colin suggested trivia night Mike agreed.

“When I hit thirty,” Colin responded to Mike’s question in his slight brogue. “One day I turned around and all the girls at the bar were babies. And instead of wanting to take them home I wanted to tell them to put on a goddamn sweater.” He took a long swig of Guinness. “My sister is twenty, for fuck’s sake. I feel like a pervert.”

“You’re getting old.” Mike grinned at his friend. He was beginning to understand what Colin was talking about. They were about to be thirty-three. Staggering home after last call didn’t seem so appealing. Waking up next to a girl who was barely out of her teens, even less so. “But why trivia night?”

“You see, my friend”—Colin playfully slapped him on the back—“on trivia night you’ve got more of a variety for people-watching.” He pointed at a gaggle of middle-aged women sitting at the bar. “Soccer moms. They’re a fun group, come every week, usually spend their days up to their elbows in shit and driving the carpool. So when they get a chance to come out they get raunchy. They’re loud. They flirt like slags and they know more useless shit than anybody else here. I try to get on their team at least once a month.”

Mike shook his head at his friend’s perceptive evaluation of those women. Colin had mellowed out a lot in the past few years. The man who was never afraid of a bar fight was now hanging out with soccer moms and limiting his alcohol intake. When had his friend grown up?

“So whose team are we going to be on tonight?”

“Well.” Colin scanned the room. “Those frat boys over there are out. They don’t know shit and are usually drunk off their asses before the fourth round starts. See if you can find some elementary school teachers or something. They know almost as much as the soccer moms, and they hate losing.”

“What the hell do elementary school teachers look like?” Mike searched the room, passing his eyes over multiple groups of women. All he could picture was his fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Larson, who wore cat-shaped earrings and had a mole on her chin with a hair growing out it. He shuddered. He didn’t think he could spend the whole night on a team with women like that. But he would if he had to. Colin, it seemed, played to win, and Mike owed him this.

“Look for girls in their twenties that look kind of sweet but serious. They usually aren’t the ones with their tits hanging out.”

“You should have been a cop.” Mike glanced at his friend before he continued to scope out possible elementary school teachers and potential teammates. He saw lots of women, but a flash of red caught his eye. Something, a pull, he couldn’t describe it, forced him to focus on the woman who was wearing it.
Ellis
. She was sitting on the other side of the bar with a pink-colored drink in her hand. “I should have known.”

She looked up at him as if he’d called her. Her eyes widened with surprise as they connected with his. He wanted to turn away, pretend like he hadn’t seen her. The woman irked him but he just couldn’t look away. She kept popping into his mind, every day, and he was sure that attraction had nothing to do with it. He found her sexy—but he found a lot of women sexy. It was the fact that he couldn’t recall where he knew her from. If he knew, he could then put her out of his mind and focus on something else. Somebody else.

Not wanting to be rude to the woman who had been nothing but rude to him, he nodded his head in acknowledgment, expecting her to do the same.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Brat.” He found himself smiling, knowing that his earlier thoughts were wrong. She wouldn’t be so easy to put out of his mind. He had made that mistake already.

“Huh?” Colin asked, looking in Ellis’s direction.

“Ellis.” Mike shook his head at her immature gesture. She was next to the same redhead and blonde she’d been with the day of the robbery. Both her friends were staring at him with interest. It made him wonder what exactly Ellis had told them about him. He quickly thought back four years ago to the women he had dated. Michelle, Dina, Rachel, Kara. He remembered them all. Not one of them lasted more than two months. There was no woman in between. He had never been with Ellis.

“Who?”

Mike didn’t return his attention to Colin. He was too distracted by Ellis, who was giving him that impish grin of hers.

“The brunette in the red.” The only woman in the world who could irritate the hell out of him and yet make him want to get closer. He turned to Colin, thinking that his friend might be able to help. “Do you know her? She says we met four years ago but I don’t remember her and now every time I see her she busts my balls about it.”

“Her?” Colin took a long look at Ellis. “I’ve seen her around town a couple of times but I don’t have a clue who she is.”

“Neither do I. But I know her from somewhere.” He grimaced before taking a sip of his beer. “She knows what kind of underwear I wear.”

Colin shrugged. “You probably slept with her.”

“I didn’t.” Ten years ago that might have been true, but now he knew it wasn’t.

Colin studied Ellis the same way he appraised a piece of furniture, with his head tilted to the side. “I guess she’s a little on the chubby side for you but it’s possible. Those soft girls are good for a tumble once in a while and she looks like she’d be a good one to tumble with for a couple of hours. Very fuckable.”

“Watch your mouth,” Mike warned his friend, immediately wishing he hadn’t. What did he care if Colin made a comment about her? Mike barely knew her, and the little he did know was a big pain in his ass. But she still deserved some respect.

“You got a thing for this girl, Edwards?” Colin raised a brow at him and then looked over at Ellis once more.

Mike’s eyes unwillingly followed. She was laughing at something one of her friends said, enjoying the company of the two women he’d barely noticed last week. Even across the darkened bar he could see how brightly her face was lit up. Her head tilted backward, her mouth slightly opened. It made him want to be in on the joke.

“I don’t have a thing for her,” he denied, although the image of her in nothing but red panties appeared in his mind more often than he would like to admit. “I barely know her.”

Colin placed his hand over his heart. “I, Colin O’Connell, never thought I’d live to see the day that Mike ‘Lady Lover’ Edwards would be sweet on a girl. I’m bloody well touched.”

“What man talks like that?” Mike shook his head. “You sound like your grandmother.”

“I love my granny.” Colin finished his dark beer. “And don’t change the subject. You always talk about your conquests with me, and now your mouth is shut tighter than a nun’s legs.”

“There is nothing to talk about.” Mike was getting slightly irritated with Colin’s sudden inquisitiveness. It made him wish he’d never said anything about Ellis in the first place. She was just a woman. A woman who didn’t even like him.

“Fine. We won’t talk about your girlfriend anymore. But the blonde sitting next to her is fair game. Come on.” He stood up. “Let’s go be on their team.”

Mike knew that spending the next undetermined amount of hours with Ellis was a bad idea, but his brain couldn’t stop his body from getting up and following his friend across the pub.

*   *   *

Ellis watched Mike get up from his seat across the bar. He was probably here to pick up women.
Do men still do that? Do women still let that happen?

With Mike they probably did. He had that way about him, that smile that made him seem like a badass and good guy at the same time. She tried to keep her attention on her friends but like a magnet he drew her eyes wherever he went in the room. This was supposed to be girls’ night out. She was supposed to be relaxing, forgetting about men altogether. Forgetting about Jack. She hated that after six months the sight of her ex still bothered her. It wasn’t because she still loved him. It was the fact that she’d spent so long with a man who built himself up by putting her down.