CHAPTER ONE
Wake-Up Call
Adelaide
New Orleans, Louisiana
Rolling over, I squinted against the sharp ray of sunlight that escaped through a break in the blinds. I groaned, pulling the pillow from underneath my head and throwing it against the window, effectively bathing the room in darkness again. With an exaggerated yawn, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and ran a hand through my matted hair.
Pulling the alarm clock from my nightstand, I held it close to my face and groaned louder as my eyes adjusted to the red glare. “Fuck!”
10:45 A.M.? How the hell did I sleep the whole morning away? Where the hell was Savannah? For that matter, how the hell did I even get home? Damn it, my head hurt.
All I remembered was leading a conga line to Dancing Queen, slamming lemon drop shots out of what looked like a snorkel, and a limbo contest, which I was pretty sure I won if the ache in my lower back was any indication.
Hopefully, I didn’t do anything to embarrass DuBlanc Fishery last night.
Yawning, I stretched again, and a strange scratching brushed against my ass. I stopped cold. Where were my pajamas? I always slept in pajamas.
I’d just shifted again when I heard it. Soft snoring. Stealing a side-eyed glance, I took in the well-defined tattooed form of a man’s back.
Oh God. Oh fuck. Think, Addie, think.
Limbo. Dancing Queen. Who held onto my hips? Who held the snorkel while I shot vodka? I closed my eyes and fought to remember.
“Deep breath, Snow White, close your eyes and shoot that motherfucker!”
No! There was no way I was that stupid, even drunk. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid. I just needed to look. I was sure we were both wearing underwear. Grabbing the top of the blanket, I counted down from three. Once I hit one, I lifted the blanket and took in two very naked bodies.
So naked. Extremely naked. Naked, naked.
Okay. So, we were naked. So, I slept with some random man. One night stands happened, right? I just needed to rip off the other Band-Aid and ask his name. Then I could kick him out before Sav got home.
Pushing myself onto shaking elbows, I peered over his inked shoulder, quickly closing my eyes. Counting to three again, I forced them open and fought back nausea as I took in the trimmed dark beard, wild onyx hair, and familiar dark lashes that fanned out over what I knew to be pale, icy blue eyes.
I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.
But I wasn’t fine. Fine had a new meaning.
Absolutely fucked.
***
Fifteen minutes wasn’t too long to sit in your own driveway, contemplating how a bottle of vodka had just ruined your life, was it?
I’d been in impossible situations where a positive outcome seemed as likely as a choir of angels flying out of my ass, but this wasn’t just impossible. This was the worst thing that could’ve happened. Babs’ famous cure-all for everything emotional hadn’t only failed me; Vodka had bitchslapped me into the next decade.
I didn’t simply limbo my way to a purple beaded necklace with green plastic trophies hanging off it. No, I limbo’ed my way to being flat on my back underneath him.
Well, from the memories coming back in broken pieces, I’d been on top most of the night.
Bile gathered at the base of my tongue, and I slapped my hand over my mouth, willing the vomit to stay down. Resting my head against the seat’s headrest, I closed my eyes and attempted to scratch the images out of my head with a mental Sharpie. Every time I came close to blacking out his face, karma focused on him even clearer as if to say, “Behold, bitch, the end of life as you know it.”
Pressing the heels of both palms to my eyes, I made a last-ditch effort to rationalize what I’d done wasn’t such a big deal. I’d been upset. We were adults. Alcohol had been involved. Everyone knew when combined, all three were the trifecta of unholy stupidity. And unholy stupidity caused me to act like an unhinged slutty toddler.
That’s me, the Pied Piper of the Hoochie Playgroup, leading them down the path of debauchery with a snorkel and a limbo stick.
Besides, only a child would sneak out of her own house with mismatched clothes and hide out at Starbucks, waiting for the biggest mistake she’d ever made to get the hell out and go home. Avoidance wasn’t chickenshit; it was smart offense.
When a linebacker three times your size headed straight for you on the field, you didn’t bang pots and pans together to call attention to yourself. No, you ran like hell in the other direction.
And besides, I really liked chai lattes.
Now, here I sat, wondering how to set fire to my sheets from outside the house. I needed to get rid of all evidence before Sav got home, then scrub my skin raw in the shower. It never happened if there wasn’t any trace of it, right?
Can one bleach one’s own vagina?
A sharp rapping on the window pulled a scream from my throat as I reached for my pepper spray.
“Relax, crazy girl, it’s me,” Savannah called through the window, motioning with her finger for me to roll it down. Once I hit the button, she crossed her arms over her chest and sucked a breath in through her teeth. “Ads? Why have you been sitting in our driveway for twenty minutes?”
Deny. Demand. Deflect.
“Have you been spying on me, Sav? Don’t you have anything more useful to do with your time?”
A slow grin pulled across her face. “Nope.”
“Fine,” I threw the door open and stomped toward the house. “If you must know, I went to the office to meet with a client.”
She met me at the door with her index finger crooked over her mouth. “Mmmhmmm, I see. This early on a Saturday?”
“Yep.” Rushing through the foyer, I eyed the stairs and prayed I could still run faster than my sister. I’d reached the third step before she decided to turn into an amateur detective.
“I see. And is this new client important? I mean, I assume if you met with them on a Saturday, they must be worth the time.”
“Yes, Savannah. They were important. No reason to go into the office for mediocre accounts.” I managed two more steps before she bumped into the back of me and grabbed the base of my shirt.
“I see. Well, did you explain to this big client why your bright pink shirt is on backward and halfway tucked into your yellow shorts? Or were you going for the drive of shame Marshmallow Peep look?”
“Can you say anything other than, “I see?’” I clasped my fingers around the banister and glared at her over my shoulder. Refusing to back down, she scratched her chin and cocked her head. Dubois women were notoriously stubborn and equated giving in, to admitting defeat. I arched an eyebrow, and Savannah arched one back. I narrowed my eyes, and my sister winked at me.
I’d had enough. “Why don’t you say what it is you’re dying to say before you blink that contact lens across the room?”
“Now, I’m not one to gossip, Ads…”
“You? Never.”
“But I’ve been back from Pope’s for over an hour. Your bed looks like a family of raccoons have been foraging for food in the sheets.” Sing-songing the last few words, she grinned and darted around me, taking the stairs three at a time. “And I’m betting the big, hot raccoon left something behind.”
“Savannah!” Panicked, I chased her up the stairs and fell in behind her as she threw open the door to my room, exposing what could only be described as a sex-tastrophe. Abandoning my reserved and calm demeanor, I stumbled against the wall and surveyed my own personal hell.
Four condom wrappers. I covered my eyes and peeked through my fingers, but they still mocked me. Four? What the hell had I become, the Energizer Whore?
“Ads, who did you bring home last night?”
And there it was, the question I knew she’d inevitably ask. The logical, adult thing to do would be to come clean to my sister and utilize her evil brain for the pure purpose of getting me the hell out of this mess.
But logic waved bye-bye to me when I shot Smirnoff out of a purple rimmed snorkel. Once that happened, the spiral of disgrace started to spin, taking out everything and everyone in its path. My head pounded, my back hurt, and God help me, my vagina felt like it’d been beaten with the limbo stick. Logic had left the state of Louisiana.
“His name is Jim,” I blurted out without half a thought in my head.
Peering underneath the bed, Savannah bent down and tugged a piece of material until it dislodged and wrapped around her hand. Whistling low, she held it by the sleeve and twirled it around her finger. “Jim seems to have wandered off without his shirt. Tell me, Adds, what’s Jim’s last name?”
“Le”—stopping myself, I wiped a line of sweat that beaded across my forehead and glanced around the room frantically, finally landing a passing glance on Babs’ antique rocker—“LeChair.”
“Le—Chair?” Repeating the word again phonetically, she sauntered up to me and held the black graphic t-shirt up to my face. “Never heard of it.”
“God, Savannah, are you that uncultured? It’s French. It’s pronounced La—Share.”
“I think you’re full of shit.”
“I think you’re—full of shit.” Fidgeting, I willed the t-shirt away from my sight.
She dipped her chin, continuing to stare at me with accusing eyes. “Nice comeback.”
I hated myself for giving her the satisfaction of a reaction, but I had enough shit to deal with without my sister playing a losing game of “Who’s Been in Addie’s Bed.”
Holding her by the wrists, I backed her toward the door. “This conversation is over.”
The moment she reached the threshold, she dug in her heels and grasped the doorframe. “Hey, I’m all for Party-Addie, but maybe you need to calm down on the drinking if you’re gonna do weird-ass bedroom stuff like this.” With a shit-eating grin, she leaned down and picked up the purple snorkel and yelled through the top with a muffled voice. “My sister is a super freak!”
I couldn’t resist the chance to screw with her. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Savvy. I had a lot to drink last night. I’m not really sure where that thing’s been.”
Savannah’s eyes widened, and she blinked a few times before ripping the snorkel from her mouth and hurling it across the room. “That’s fucking disgusting, Addie,” she mumbled while scrubbing her tongue with her palm. “You need therapy.”
Remembering the whole reason for my impromptu outing in the first place, I snorted. “I need something. After you’d left yesterday, a courier came by.”
“Proposal on the new boats?”
“Petition for divorce,” I answered matter-of-factly. “Roland served me.”
“He what?” Savannah’s eyes flared with a shiny glare reserved only for her deep-rooted hatred for all things Roland. “Fucking Shit Stain! I’ll kill him!” Pacing the hallway, she clenched her fists by her side and tightened her shoulders. “No, killing him is too easy. I’ll blow his dick off with Pope’s gun and feed tiny dick sandwiches to the whole country club.”
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already entertained Savannah’s threat. Roland would be icing down his balls with frozen bags of peas for weeks if I let Bam-Bam loose on him. However, in the end, what happened to us was the only foreseeable ending. Roland and I were over. Even if he dumped the jailbait stripper and begged for my forgiveness, I wasn’t the same woman who ran crying from Sugarbirch. It took ten years, but I’d finally outgrown Roland Christopher Bordeaux III and the life he’d planned for me.
“No, no one is making Roland eat his own dick, Sav.” Sighing, I sat down on the disheveled bed and gripped the edge of the mattress. “This isn’t a bad thing. Roland and I should get divorced. I just wish I’d been the one to file for it.” I shrugged and chewed the inside of my cheek. “This just feels like settling for a new life when it’s what I wanted all along. Even in a divorce, Roland is still calling the shots.” My eyes blurred as I glanced up at my sister. “When do I get to call the shots, Sav? I mean look at this room. I can’t even call the shots and stop myself from sleeping with…”
“Jim LeChair,” she finished for me as she grabbed my hand.
Staring at my ugly yellow shorts, I bent my head, and a tear fell onto my bare thigh. “Jim was a mistake, Sav. A huge mistake, and I don’t know how I’m going to face him now.”
Slowly, she sank next to me. “Maybe Jim feels just like you. Maybe he just wants to know after last night you can still be…” Kicking the purple tube across the room, she patted my hand, “snorkel buddies.”
As the plastic tube hit the wall and bounced back, I frowned. The way I handled the entire situation was the old Addie. It was the Addie that didn’t deal with her problems and just smiled, pretending they didn’t exist.
Where did that get me?
“I’ll talk to John,” I said, attempting to hide the wobble in my voice.
“Jim.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Him too.”
***
Monday morning, I sat in the truck another twenty minutes before stepping foot in the office. Savannah had already slammed the door and rolled her eyes at my immobility, but I didn’t have space in my jumbled head to worry about what she thought. Every few minutes, she’d peek through the blinds of the front window and shake her head.
What? You’ve never seen a grown woman hide out in her truck at nine a.m.?
After a rather involved pep talk that included repeated “You can do this” and a few “You’re both adults,” I walked through the front door of DuBlanc Fishery like a woman marching to her execution. Only I hadn’t caused war, incited a riot, or even planned treason. No, my guilt stemmed around being horny, drunk, and stupid.
Crossing from the safety of outside to the unpredictability of indoors, I stood with my briefcase in hand and a death grip on my purse. As her laptop chimed and lit up with a recently downloaded game, Savannah grinned and dangled her fingers in a half-hearted wave.
“Hola, sis. Did you run out of gas?”
“I was on my phone on a conference call,” I lied.
Concentrating on her game, she reached in her purse and held my cell phone above her head. “This phone?”
Stomping across the room, I swiped it out of her hand and glared at her. “You’re a dick.”
“Was your conference call with Jim?”
“Who’s Jim?” From behind me, a deep baritone voice slid across my raw nerve endings and spiked my temperature.
Stiffening, I refused to look at him as I made my way to my desk. “No one.”
“He’s Addie’s sex-crazed boy-toy.” Savannah managed a grin before taking a long swig of her Diet Coke.
Slicing a heated look across the room, I swear if my arms were long enough, I’d have strangled her. “Will you shut up?”
“Actually, I’d like to hear more about this Jim.” A sudden lack of sufficient air forced my eyes to travel up strong jean clad legs and settle on the broad chest coated with a red t-shirt that seemed to hug him. A familiar, unwelcome feeling settled over me and seeped through my skin to sink hard and low in the pit of my stomach. Memories of my face pressed against that chest as I collapsed on top of him flashed through my head.
“Stop it!”
Zep’s eyebrows pinched together, his expression hard. “I didn’t do anything.”
“No, I wasn’t talking to you.” Shit, this wasn’t going anywhere like I’d planned.
Amusement played on his lips. “Oh?” Leaning down, he placed both hands flat on my desk and shifted forward. “Were you talking to “Jim?”
“Who?” The minute sea salt and spice hit my nose; more flashes blazed through my mind of my legs wrapped around his waist. I shook my head to force the memories out, but they just kept coming, each one more explicit than the last.
“We’re going to talk about this whether you like it or not, Snow White.”
Bristling at his tone and force, I threw a file I’d picked up back on my desk and jumped to my feet. “We have nothing to say. You want to talk? Talk to Savannah. She loves to talk…never shuts up.”
Storming into the kitchenette, I slammed coffee mugs and spoons around like they were doing hard time in prison. After pouring a hot cup of coffee, I wrapped my fingers around it, praying for warmth to counteract the ice in my veins.
The kitchenette door slammed, and I smelled him before I heard him
“You want to freeze me out, Adelaide, fine. You stand there with your back turned and pretend it didn’t happen, but don’t you fucking dare make up some bullshit story about some other guy named Joe.”
“Jim.”
“What-the-fuck-ever. I know you, Adelaide Dubois, and you’re not going to bed-hop no matter how mad at yourself you are. It’s not your style.”
“How the hell would you know what my style is, Zep? I haven’t talked to you in thirteen years,” I retorted, curling my hand around the spoon.
“You talked plenty Friday night. Actually,” he growled, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and prying the spoon out of my hand, “you moaned more than talked. And it wasn’t so much a variety of words as it was my name. Just as I remembered it.” Pressing his lips against the outer shell of my ear, he dug his nose in my hair. “Only this time, it didn’t end, Addie. You screamed it over, and over until I thought the neighbors would call the cops.”
Jerking my hands to my ears, I tried to cover them. “Enough! Please stop it!” I couldn’t hear the truth. In my own little make-believe world, Jim LeChair was a nameless, faceless man who I’d never have to see again.
But Zep was having no part of my fantasy. Tearing my hands from my face, he placed them palms down on the counter, covered with his own. “That’s not what you said Friday night. In fact, I think your exact words were, ‘Oh, Zep, don’t stop…’”
I snapped back to reality with his taunt, and whipped around, shoving him in the center of his chest. “What the hell do you want from me?”
My pathetic shove did nothing but cause him to readjust his footing as he pinned me against the counter, his hand weaving through my hair. “I want you to admit to yourself that you did exactly what you wanted to do. You asked me to touch you. You wanted me to touch you. I want you to admit that you woke up and didn’t panic because you’d slept with some random guy, Addie. You freaked out because you realized you slept with me, and then you fucking bolted like you always do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Adelaide. It’s your MO. Thirteen years ago, shit got dicey, and you couldn’t handle staying around and working through a bump in the road, so you split. You ran off to Shreveport and married the first douchebag who offered you anything.”
“I didn’t run! I went to—”
“Then you woke up, and the same feelings came back, and you didn’t know how to handle them.” Zep’s calm and controlled demeanor vanished as I watched Saturday morning replay on his face. He blew out a hard breath, and his jaw ticked before he pressed harder against me. “How long did it take you to get dressed and peel out of the driveway once you realized it was me next to you, huh? Fifteen seconds? Maybe thirty? Do you know how much that fucking sucked to wake up and have you gone again?”
“Zep…”
“I know that bastard hurt you, and I’m sorry you went through what you did, Addie, but it’s no reason to put me through this kind of bullshit twice. In thirteen fucking years, you’ve never left my mind. Have you ever wondered why everyone from our class is either married with kids or divorced except for me?”
Unable to speak, I simply shook my head.
“It wasn’t from lack of trying, trust me. No one measured up. We’d get to the part where she’d give me the marriage or hit the road ultimatum. Something inside me could never make that commitment. I was a dumbass, you know. I knew you were married…had been for years, but shit, Addie, you can’t settle for what’s acceptable when you had perfect.”
What? What the hell was this? Zephirin LeBlanc never married because of me? All this time, he waited for me?
Drowning in information overload, I gripped the counter behind me, and glanced up. “I’m not perfect, Zep.”
“No, you’re not,” he admitted, releasing his hold on me. “You’re really mixed up, Addie.” A hint of sadness crossed his face as he rubbed his hand across his jaw. “I’m not Jim, or Joe, or your dirty little secret.” Backing away, he cursed low under his breath and reached for the doorknob.
“Where are you going?” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded desperate.
He paused at the door, one hand on the knob. “Back to work.”
Strange panic filled me, and the words spilled out before I could stop them. “Maybe we could talk about this at lunch?”
A resigned smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “No thanks. I have a date.” Opening the door to the office, he slammed it behind him.