Sugar on the Edge (3 page)

Now… I’m normally a polite, sweet, Midwestern girl. It takes a lot to rile me up, but having these reminders of my failures thrown into my face gets me a little irritated. “Back off, Casey. While I appreciate your concern, I’ve got this handled.”

She blinks at me in surprise, because I think this may be the first fight we’ve had as roommates. Out of my core group of girlfriends, Casey, Alyssa, and Gabby, I’m the least likely to get irritable with anyone. Some would even call me a pushover.

“Fine,” she grumbles. “But it was just a small bowl of pasta I was offering.”

Taking a deep breath, I let it out slowly. Gentling my voice, I say, “I’m sorry. I appreciate the offer… I really do. But I’m one of those people that just have to do it on my own. You should know that about me by now.”

Casey nods her head grudgingly, because she does know that. In the four months that we’ve been roommates, she’s come to know me well enough to know that I have a streak of stubborn pride about a mile long and just as wide. It’s why I haven’t told the douche bag photographer to piss off, because yeah… while I need the money, I more importantly need him to know that he can’t rattle me. My days of being rattled are over.

My phone chimes from inside my purse and I sit the apple down on the counter, wiping my fingers on my jeans. Pulling it out, I see it’s a text from Brody.

My heart instantly lightens.

Brody and his fiancée, Alyssa, run The Haven, a nonprofit, no-kill animal shelter where I volunteer. I love animals—dogs in particular—so much that I spend all of my free time there helping out. With three jobs though, that time has been less and less, and I feel my soul starting to starve. My love of dogs has been long standing, stemming from one, single event that happened when I was just six years old.

I was out playing in the woods that surrounded our house in Clearview. We lived out in the country, so Mom usually pushed me out the door in the morning while on summer break from school and told me not to come home until dark. I was with our family’s dog, Petey, who was a Lab. I had gotten lost and couldn’t find my way back home, and Petey kept me safe and warm throughout the night. I don’t know if it was my child’s imagination, but as I sat huddled at the base of a tree, I thought I heard coyotes, bears, and lions coming at me from all directions. Petey would growl periodically, his eyes searching the darkness around us. He would lick me every so often, assuring me that everything would be okay. I snuggled into his warm fur, clutching my arms around him tight, and I knew that I was safe.

The search party found me around dawn the next morning, and Petey was hailed as the town’s local hero. He even won a medal.

Since then, I’ve found myself happiest when I can be around dogs. While I can’t afford one on my own, if I can ever get out of this butt load of debt, I’m going to have five at least.

Brody’s text is to the point.

Got any time tomorrow to help? Alyssa has to go to Raleigh to pick up a horse.

I shoot a quick text back.

Not sure. I may have new job to start. Text you later.

I stare at my phone for a moment, slightly depressed I can’t give him a simple “yes.” I’d much rather be up to my elbows in dog slobber than cleaning some rich asshole’s house, but that can’t be my priority right now.

You could just accept the job we offered you
, Brody responds.

Yes, that would be the simple solution, but I can’t do that either. There’s no way I can let Brody and Alyssa put me on the payroll for The Haven. It’s a perfectly permissible thing for a nonprofit to have paid employees, but I also happen to know that adding me to the overhead will cause even harder work for Alyssa and Brody to have to raise money to support said expenditure.

No, my time at The Haven will always be as a volunteer and while their offer meant the world to me, I had to sadly decline. Just as I do once more.

I love you two for it, but my answer is still no
, I text.

His response is immediate.
Stubborn.

I laugh, because Brody has no cause to be lecturing me about stubbornness. After spending five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, he returned to the Outer Banks a broken shell of a man, that stubbornly refused to let people into his life and refused to believe that he was worth anything. But for the help and love of a good woman—that would be Alyssa—Brody would still be mired in darkness.

I’ve become especially close to Brody and Alyssa over the last several months, Brody in particular. Ever since he fell in love with Alyssa, and told his family and closest friends his secret about doing time for someone else’s wrong, he’s become a completely different person. He’s warm, humorous, and fiercely protective of those he cares about. I’m just lucky that I happen to be in that circle, and the long hours we spend together caring for the animals has created a closely bonded friendship between the two of us. He once told me that he recognizes inside of me the same pride that he once held before he went to prison, and it was drained out of him. That made me sad and happy at the same time. Sad that Brody suffered, but happy that he compared me to himself, because as every one of his family and friends can attest, there’s no one more respected than Brody Markham.

Looking up at Casey, I say, “How about giving me this guy’s contact information so I can call him?” Might as well nail down this job and hope it gives me some measure of peace that I’ll have some extra income coming in.

“Sure,” she says as she pulls out her phone from her pocket and flips through her contacts. When she finds what she’s looking for, she holds her phone out for me to see.

I dial the number as I flip my gaze back and forth between her phone and mine.

He answers on the fourth ring, just as I was expecting voice mail to pick up.

“What?” is all he says, but his English accent is clear in just that one word.

“Um… Mr. Cooke?”

“Gavin,” he grumbles into the phone and if I’m not mistaken, his voice is a little slurred.

“Uh… yeah, this is Savannah Shepherd. My roommate, Casey Markham, said you wanted me to call.”

There’s silence on the other line for a moment, and then he says irritably, “Who told you to call me?”

“Casey Markham… your realtor? She said you might want me to clean your house?”

I hear him hiss through his teeth, and he sounds even more irritated. “Fuck… yeah, I forgot about that. Look, I’m in the middle of something and can’t talk. Just be here tomorrow at ten, and we can discuss the details.”

“Ten in the morning?” I ask, just to clarify, because I have another house I have to clean starting at eight, and I don’t know if I can be done in time.

“Of course, ten in the morning,” he says, clearly exasperated at my question. “Do you clean houses at ten at night?”

“Sometimes,” I answer automatically, and I can tell he doesn’t have a comeback. “Look, Mr. Cooke…”

“Gavin,” he butts in.

“Gavin,” I acknowledge. “I have another job at eight and not sure I can be there by ten. Can we possibly—?”

He cuts me off. “If you want the job, be here at ten. If you don’t, don’t be here at ten. Choice is yours.”

He then hangs up the phone on me, and I’m stuck listening to dead space.

Putting my phone down, I glance up at Casey, who is watching me intently. “He really is an asshole.”

“Told you,” she says, while nodding her head up and down. “What did he say?”

“Told me to be there at ten if I wanted the job and then hung up on me,” I say as I start flipping through my contacts. I pull up the number for Grace Banner, the woman whose house I clean every Thursday at eight. “Guess I better see if I can be at her house a little early tomorrow.”

“Great,” Casey mutters as she watches me dial Grace’s number. “You’re trading in one douche employer for another.”

As the phone rings, I cock an eyebrow at her. “I’m not trading just yet. Looks like I’ll have two douche employers for a while until I can cut one loose.”

Casey nods at me in commiseration.

Boom, boom, boom.

The pounding in my head causes me to open my eyes slowly, because I know the sunlight filtering through the shades is going to hurt like a motherfucker.

Boom, boom, boom.

Christ, it seems to be getting louder, and I’m regretting polishing off that last half bottle of Macallan last night. I rub my eyes, which are caked with sleep, and turn my head to look at the alarm clock. Fuck… it’s only ten o’clock in the morning, and I was hoping to sleep past the majority of my hangover.

Painkillers… that’s what I need right now.

Gingerly sitting up and swinging my feet out of bed, I hesitantly put my fingertips to my temple and try to massage the pounding away.

Boom, boom, boom.

Fucking hell. That’s someone banging on my door, which causes the actual pounding in my head to skyrocket. Lurching out of bed, I stumble out of my bedroom, down the flight of stairs, and into the kitchen with my eyes only open to half slits because the sunlight isn’t helping the pain either. I manage to crack my hip against the counter, letting out a string of curses as I make my way to the front door.

Boom, boom—

I swing the door open forcefully and glare at the person standing there. “You better have a good excuse for pounding on my fucking door this early,” I snarl.

“Mr. Cooke? You told me to be here at ten,” the person says… a woman, I can now glean, even though I’ve yet to fully open my eyes.

Squinting at her hard, my eyes still blurry, I can make out a young woman with dark brown hair and unrecognizable facial features, as I’m sure I still have drunk goggles on. “I did?”

“Um… yes, to talk about cleaning your house,” she says quietly. Even in all my hungover glory, I don’t fail to notice that she takes a small step backward.

My mind is blank for a moment, and I have no clue what she’s talking about. Clean house? Ten o’clock?

Then it sinks in… this is the woman my realtor recommended. It’s vaguely coming back to me that she called last night and we arranged a time to meet this morning.

Scratching my stomach, I open my left eye up a little bit more to take a better look, and she starts to come into better focus. Pretty girl… beautiful actually. Not in the sunny, bright way that is Casey Markham, and not in the luscious, centerfold way that is my ex, Amanda. But in a fresh, wholesome kind of way. Long, brown hair with some red glints in it, soft brown eyes, lightly tanned skin, and full lips. As a writer, I’d stereotype her as the girl next door. She’d be the classic character that would immediately get ravaged by one of the monsters in my books, just for the sake of ravaging a fresh innocent.

Taking a step back, I manage to open both eyes and clear my throat. “Sorry, I forgot, but come on in.”

She looks at me for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip and clearly indecisive about whether she should accept my invitation. I don’t wait around for her decision, instead giving her my back and walking into my kitchen. I hear her step inside and softly close the door.

Busying myself with making a pot of coffee, I watch out of my peripheral vision as she hesitantly steps into the kitchen and stands as still as a statue. I don’t turn around to look at her but ask, “What did you say your name was again?”

“Savannah,” she says softly. “Savannah Shepherd.”

After I put a filter in the machine, I scoop out some coffee, putting in extra to make it strong enough to help chase away this hangover. I take the pot and turn to fill it in the sink, giving her a quick glance. “Well, Savannah Shepherd, Casey told me that you do some house cleaning on the islands. Thought you might be interested in doing my house as well.”