Jacked Up (24 page)

“And kiss her. Girls like that.”

Nolan laughed. “Well aren’t you just the expert? Do you want to come and do it for me?” He tickled her stomach. “Huh? Huh?”

Asher laughed, shoving his hands away.

The lightness of the sound matched his new mood.

* * *

EVE
saw Nolan immediately in the restaurant. He was sitting in a booth by the jukebox, his head down as he studied the menu. Her palms felt sweaty and her body tingled at the sight of him. It hadn’t been that long, but she had been certain she’d lost him forever. Just seeing him there, willing to talk to her, made her realize how badly she wanted to keep her marriage. Keep him.

Armed with a stack of papers, she marched over and slid into the seat across from him. “Hey. Thanks for meeting me.”

“Hey.” He studied her, not quite smiling, but not frowning either. “You look tired.”

“I am.” She was weary but she was hopeful.

“I’m sorry for the other day. I’m sorry for just bailing on you like that. I should have stayed and talked about it. But I was just caught off guard . . . it hurt me.”

Eve felt a pang of regret. “I know. I’m sorry, too. I never cared about the postnup. That was my father’s idea. I know you were never motivated by money.” She opened the manila folder she had all her documents in. “So I wanted to do this.” She held up the agreement and tore it in half. “Gone. I don’t need some legal document to trust you.” She was tempted to shove it over the candle burning on the table, but with her luck, she’d set the restaurant on fire.

He nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate that. I would never in a million years take anything from you that was yours.”

“I know.” Her throat felt tight and tears were threatening to form, but she forged ahead. “So, I wanted you to be the first to see this.” She put her resignation letter in front of him.

“What . . .” He scanned the paper then looked up at her in astonishment. “You’re quitting your job?”

“Yes. I’m not happy there. You know it, and I know it. I was just afraid before. But you and me . . . it taught me that taking risks sometimes brings the greatest rewards.”

His gaze dropped to the paper and she suspected she’d disarmed him. When he looked up, his own eyes were a little damp looking.

“I’m proud of you,” he told her, his voice rough and low. “I think this is great. You deserve so much more happiness.”

She nodded, touched, but wanting to get this all out before she lost it. “And then there’s this.” She flipped through the stack to the papers from her real estate agent. “I listed the condo for sale an hour ago. I need to downsize my mortgage now that I won’t be taking in a biweekly salary.”

“Your condo? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The market is recovering and I should turn a profit. It’s too much for me at this point in my life, and it’s a little, well, too perfect.”

He shook his head. “No, no, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. That was so rude of me. I was just upset. Please don’t sell the condo unless it’s what you really want.”

“It is. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little terrified that I quit my job, but I want a smaller place, something that I can make homey instead of a designer showcase.” She took a big breath. “Which brings me to what I will be doing for a living. Evan is sponsoring a car for me. I’m going to hit the local circuit and see if I can crack into the national level.”

His face split into a grin. “No kidding? Eve, that’s awesome!”

“Thanks. I may suck and fail miserably, but I’ll never know unless I try, right?”

“Exactly. God, that’s fantastic. We break up and two days later you have your whole life rearranged. I’ve just been laying on the couch feeling sorry for myself.”

“Did we break up?” she asked before she lost her nerve.

“Can I get you a drink, sweetie?” the waitress asked, her pen over her pad.

Seriously? “Um, just an iced tea, please. Thanks.”

“You got it.”

Eve refocused on Nolan, trying to read his expression. “Because I’m kind of hoping we didn’t break up. I love you. I really, really do, and I don’t want to worry anymore. I just want to live my life. With you. Not perfect. Not tidy. But happy.”

There. That was it. Her whole speech. She didn’t have anything else to say that wouldn’t just muddy the waters.

But Nolan wasn’t saying anything. He was just staring at her. She swallowed nervously.

“If we did break up and you want it to be that way, I had papers drawn up for you to look at . . .” Eve was sweaty. She felt a little sick. A lot sick. But she wanted him to know that she wanted to respect and honor his wishes. “I wanted to make this easy for you because I know I haven’t made anything easy.” She pulled the final papers out. A divorce petition. “I don’t want . . .” She forced herself to shut up. It didn’t matter what she wanted.

Nolan picked up the papers and glanced at them. Then he ripped them in half. Then again in quarters. “I don’t want a divorce, Eve. What I want is you. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Relief had her gripping the edge of the table. “Really? Are you sure?”

“I asked you that on our wedding night and you said yes. Now my answer is the same. Cupcake, I’ve been in love with you since you took out that target at the fair five times in a row and handed out stuffed animals to kids like it was nothing. A chick who shoots and makes my heart race? I was sold.”

The waitress appeared with her drink. Lord, the woman had bad timing.

“I love you, Eve.”

The waitress’s eyes went wide.

“I love you, too.” Now she was crying like the girl that she was.

Nolan stood up and said, “I hope you’re not really hungry.”

“No.” Eve shook her head.

“Grab your papers.” He threw a twenty down.

“What . . .” The waitress looked confused.

Eve shoved the papers in her purse. Then shrieked when Nolan picked her up into his arms.

“It might not be the threshold, but it’s a BBQ joint, which is even better.”

She grabbed his cheeks and kissed him. “Strongman, you are hot.”

“Let’s go home and do it in your bedroom before it gets sold.”

Eve laughed. “I have something to show you. A new tattoo on my thigh.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You don’t have to ask me twice.”

* * *

NOLAN
stared at Eve’s inner thigh and started laughing. “Cupcake, you crack me up. I can’t believe you did that.”

She went up on her elbows, her hair flowing over her naked chest. “I wanted you to see that I’m not halfway into this relationship. I’m all the way in.”

“I appreciate the visual reminder.” Her old tattoo had a new companion. It now read:
NOLAN’S DINER. OPEN 24 HOURS.

It was a nice little block, like a real diner sign. He bit it, then sucked her warm skin into his mouth. He loved her sense of humor. He loved her.

“I’m about to be all the way in, too,” he told her, moving up over her body. He had planned to suckle her clit a bit, but he found he couldn’t wait. He wanted inside her.

When he pushed inside her wet and welcoming body, Nolan paused, wanting to study her, capture the perfection of the moment. His wife was beautiful.

Her finger came up and traced her name over his heart.
I love you
, she mouthed silently.

And nothing else mattered.

* * *

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Erin McCarthy’s new contemporary romance as she returns to Cuttersville, Ohio

Coming in 2013 from Berkley Sensation!

PIPER
Tucker heard the footsteps on the hardwood floor of the parlor and smiled. “Lilly or Emily, whichever twin you are, it is bedtime. No more glasses of water, no more back rubs, no more excuses.”

She turned, expecting to see one or both of her eight-year-old cousins she was babysitting. Well, they technically weren’t her cousins, since they were the children of Piper’s father’s ex-wife and her second husband, but that was too complicated for a town like Cuttersville, Ohio. They just called each other cousins.

Only it wasn’t cousins coming into the room, biological or otherwise.

It was a ghost.

Dang it. Piper had been hoping to spend the whole weekend in the house without seeing a single dead person, and here she’d only been there for three hours and already a spectral woman was staring at her. The entity wore a poke bonnet, a dusky mauve gown with a braided pelisse, and button boots. Young, her shadowy face was free of lines or blemishes, and the eyes set in that pale, ethereal frame were deep, thick black. Funeral black. Filled with sorrow. This ghost was Rachel, a woman who had died nearly a hundred and fifty years before of an opium overdose after bludgeoning her indiscreet fiancé.

Piper knew the story about Rachel from her Aunt Shelby, her father’s ex-wife and the owner of the house. Piper knew that’s who she was seeing because she’d encountered the murderess a half-dozen times or more since childhood.

“Hi, Rachel. Is there something I can do for you tonight?” Piper fought a sigh. Seeing the pain on the vision’s face, sensing her sorrow and confusion, always made Piper feel a little sick to her stomach. Guilty that she was the one ghosts came to, and yet she didn’t know what to do to help them.

Rachel didn’t move, but the sound of a foot stamping on the floor echoed around the room, ringing loudly in the quiet dark. The one lamp Piper had been using to read a gardening magazine flickered off and back on.

“What’s the matter? If you’d tell me how to help you, maybe I could.” When she was a kid, ghosts had actually talked to her, unless her memory was playing tricks on her. She could swear she’d had whole conversations with the people who had appeared in front of her randomly and without warning. But now they never said anything, not Rachel, not the other various spirits she saw around town.

In her teens, Piper had taken to begging them to leave her alone, to go away and bug someone else, but now that she was older, she couldn’t bring herself to shoo a soul who’d been restless for more than a century. Piper still wanted to be left alone. She still wanted to be normal, to blend into the town and into her family, until no one remembered she had ever lived anywhere but Cuttersville.

Seeing ghosts was her secret. But she didn’t yell at them anymore.

Arms stretched out, reaching for her. Eyes beseeched with aching intensity.

“Tell me how to help. I don’t understand what you want.” Piper gripped the back of the sofa she was sitting on, her throat closing up. She remembered what it was like to feel lonely, vulnerable. Before Piper’s father had taken her in when she was eight, she had been unwanted and unloved by her stepfather, and sometimes it didn’t take much to drag all those feelings right back up to the surface.

“She did it.” The words came from Rachel even though her lips didn’t move. Even though the sound seemed to flow and ebb and surround Piper like a cloud, misty and shifting.

A clap of thunder made Piper jump on the couch. It had been threatening to rain all day, and she figured this was appropriate timing. “Who did what?”

This was why she hated being the weirdo who attracted more ghosts than a graveyard on Halloween. Most days she didn’t even do all that well with people who were still alive. She certainly had no social skills when it came to the dead. And she couldn’t exactly invite Rachel to sit down and have some iced tea and tell her all about it.

“She did it.”

Okay. Piper needed a little more to go on than that.

Before Piper could ask for clarification, a knock on the front door had her sitting straight up. “Geez, oh Pete.” Would anyone else like to startle the heck out of her? She was not a jumpy sort, but she didn’t like being caught unaware.

Clutching her chest, she stood up, patting her pocket to make sure she still had her cell phone. Rachel was already dissipating. The spirit didn’t like Shelby’s husband, Boston, and made a hobby out of tossing plates at him from time to time, but as far as Piper knew, no one had actually seen the ghost but her. Rachel wouldn’t appreciate a visitor.

The clock on the wall glowed ten-oh-three and Piper hesitated as she headed for the door. It was awfully late for anyone to be stopping by, and Boston and Shelby had gone to Cincinnati for the whole weekend.

A quick glance through the peephole showed a man’s head, too distorted for Piper to identify him. His head and shoulders looked rain-soaked, which earned some sympathy. But while Piper was compassionate, she wasn’t a complete idiot.

“Can I help you?” she called through the door, hand on her cell phone button in case he axed his way through to her and a call to 911 was needed.

“Shel, it’s Brady. Let me in, damn it. I’m drowning out here.”

Brady. The name brought a rush of pleasure she wasn’t all that sure she was entitled to.

“Brady?” she said in astonishment. Glancing down at her pajama shorts and tank top, she grimaced. Not exactly what she wanted to be wearing when encountering the man of her childhood dreams, but she opened the door anyway. “What are you doing here?”

“Standing on the damn porch . . .” Brady Stritmeyer locked eyes with hers, his expression surprised. “Hi, uh, sorry, I thought you were Shelby. Is she or Boston here?”

He didn’t recognize her. That was a little deflating even as Piper reasoned Brady hadn’t seen her in twelve years, since she was all of eleven years old and he had been eighteen, preoccupied with getting out of Cuttersville.

“They’re in Cincinnati for the weekend and I’m babysitting the twins. I don’t think they were expecting you.” Piper moved to the side. “Come on in out of the rain.”

It had been more than a decade since she’d seen him in person, but over the years she’d seen photos of him from visits Shelby and Boston and the kids had with Brady in Chicago. She’d always had a crush on him. Always thought he was good-looking. But in the flesh he had a presence that a picture couldn’t express.

A head taller than her, he had short, dark brown hair and a rangy, muscular frame. Droplets of water trailed down his temple and dripped off his stern chin. She couldn’t see his eyes in the hazy darkness of the porch, but she knew they were green. Many a pubescent fantasy of hers had been built around those green eyes.

“This is really embarrassing,” he said with a half smile. “But you obviously know who I am and I don’t recognize you.” He stepped into the house, glanced around the hallway, turned back to her, and shrugged. A charming grin flashed at her. “I was thinking about faking it, but you look like you’re already onto me.”

“That’s okay. You’ve been gone a long time.” And never once in twelve years had he come back to visit. Piper wondered why he had now, without even calling his family first.

She tucked her long hair behind her ear and leaned on the door she closed. “I’m Piper Tucker.”

His eyebrow shot up. “Little Piper? Danny Tucker’s daughter?”

When she nodded, he ran his eyes over her, looking a little more closely than she was comfortable with. He smelled like rain, his shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor, and God, she did not want him to see in her face that she’d once cared about him. Wanted him to sweep her off her feet and make her his wife, with the sort of vagueness toward details that thirteen-year-olds are so good at.

“Damn,” he said. “You’ve done some growing since the last time I saw you.” He held his palm out in front of his waist. “You couldn’t have been much more than this tall when I left.”

Plucking at her tank top, trying to pull it lower over her stomach, Piper gave a nervous laugh. “Well, I was only eleven and I was always kind of short.” Puberty had come late for her, which the pediatrician had speculated could have been the result of poor nutrition in her early developmental years.

“It looks like it all worked out for you in the end. You turned out just fine, Piper.”

Well. That was probably meant to be a compliment, but it landed on her ears offensively. Like while he wouldn’t go so far as to call her pretty, she should be lucky she hadn’t turned out plain old ugly either. Piper had never had any illusions about her attractiveness. She’d always been gangly and awkward, with eyes too big for her head. A head that had been bald from age six to nine, with hair long enough to ruffle not appearing until she was nearly eleven.

No, she’d never been beautiful like her stepmother, Amanda, but hearing Brady’s offhand remark drew out a vulnerability she hated. It lived in her all the time, those deep-rooted childhood insecurities, but most of the time, she ignored them. Having them rise now made her frustrated.

“Thanks,” she said briefly, afraid to say anything more.

Brady popped his head into the parlor. “Damn, this place hasn’t changed one bit. A new couch, maybe, but everything else is the same. So, the kids all asleep? Is Zach in his room watching TV? I’ll go hang with him for a while.”

“He’s actually spending the night at a friend’s house. At fourteen, the idea of spending the weekend with his little sisters and a babysitter was just too mortifying, I guess. He’ll be around during the day tomorrow.”

Brady was wandering into the parlor, so Piper followed him. He had pulled a doily off an occasional table and was twirling it around on his finger. “Well, at least this way I won’t have to sleep on the floor.”

Piper crossed her arms over her chest, distracted by the way his jeans clung to his backside. “What do you mean?”

“I can sleep in Zach’s bed tonight.”

It took her a second, but when his words filtered through her brain, Piper bit her lip nervously. “You’re spending the night?”

“Yep. It’s too late to go to my grandmother’s. I don’t want to wake her up. And I don’t get along with my father, so I’m not exactly welcome there. My sister Heather moved to Cincinnati when her husband couldn’t find a job here.” He held his arms out, doily included, and smiled, a charming, confident smile. “Sorry. You’re stuck with me.”

Oh, Lord. That’s what she was afraid of.

A completely innocent slumber party with Brady Stritmeyer.

That was called a cruel irony.

* * *

BRADY
set the doily down as Piper gave him a very forced smile. Clearly, she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of him spending the night. He wasn’t sure why it mattered. He was thirty years old—it wasn’t like he needed her to cook for him or anything. Maybe she’d planned on painting her nails or waxing her bikini line and couldn’t if he was hanging around.

But even if he had another place to stay, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere. It was fascinating to watch Piper, to study all the changes twelve years had brought to her face and her body.

Jesus, her body. She had just that right combination of curves that told a man this was definitely a woman, without being overblown and distracting. Her little cotton shorts were hugging her round ass, and despite the fact that she kept crossing her arms over her chest, he had seen the outline of her full breasts. Caught a glimpse of her taut nipples.

And when she’d first opened the door, and the light from the hallway had hovered behind her, all that hair had tumbled down over her shoulders and breasts and he’d felt a kick of sexual awareness. An instant attraction.

Now that he knew it was Piper Tucker, the hair amazed him even more. He remembered her as a shy little girl clinging to her father, her bald head covered with a hat all the time. No wonder he hadn’t recognized her.

Piper was a sensual, exotic woman now.

“Sit down with me, Piper, and tell me what you’ve been up to for the last twelve years.” Brady dropped onto the couch and patted the seat next to him. He would behave himself now that he knew who she was. He was confused enough about his life without dragging someone else into it, and Piper was too young for him anyways.

Not to mention that her father was bigger than he was.

Yet it annoyed him when she sat in the chair across from him, instead of on the couch. She crossed her legs and hugged them to her chest and shrugged.

“Well, you know, there was middle school and high school. Then college. Now I’m one of the two kindergarten teachers at the grade school.”

“Hey, that’s cool. You must like kids if you teach school and still babysit on the weekends.”

“Well, Boston and Shelby are like family, and I love Emily and Lilly. I like spending time with them. And it’s only the first week in September, so school’s only been in for two weeks. I’ve had all summer to rest.” She gave him a shy smile that challenged his decision to be nothing more than an affectionate cousinly sort to her.

Women in Chicago didn’t smile like that. At least not those he worked with day in and day out at the marketing firm. Professional women were confident, aggressive, independent. He liked that.

But he liked that smile on Piper’s face, too. More than he should.

“How are your dad and mom?” he asked. He’d seen Amanda a few years back when she’d been visiting her father in Chicago, but they had talked mostly about the city, what were the good restaurants to hit, and Brady’s job. Amanda had only briefly mentioned that Piper was in college, and Brady hadn’t given much thought to what was going on back here in Cuttersville.

It felt odd to be back home, in a house that hadn’t changed, even as everything around it had. Brady had thought that he would be swamped with emotion when he came back after his self-imposed exile, but really so far he’d felt nothing but a mild sort of pleasure and curiosity.

“Great. My dad’s looking at a good crop this year, and Amanda sort of has her hands in everything. She raises pure-bred poodles and is president of the PTA at my brothers’ school.”

That was kind of a humorous image. When Brady had first met Amanda fifteen years earlier, she had been a bored rich girl. “No kidding? And what about you, Piper? You living in town now? Got a boyfriend or a husband or anything?”