Chapter Eleven
I ran through the door at precisely 11:28, having ditched out of work fifteen minutes before my lunch hour officially began. One of the tellers quit unexpectedly, so I’d been pre-promoted from the cursed assistant position to a real girl with my own station. At eleven o’clock, however, while listening to yet another female customer in my line wax on about the Greek god that was my husband and how he made her want to eat at the Blue Banana every day of the week and how lucky I was… I’d looked down to see that my phone had 2 percent battery left because I couldn’t find my charger that morning and my Skype interview was at eleven-thirty. I was going to have to go home, and pray that my laptop (still in its case) was working.
“Please, please, please,” I chanted as I jogged up the stairs with Ralph on my heels, sweating through my silk blouse that hopefully they wouldn’t be able to see.
I gave a quick look around my bedroom just in case the phone charger that was always plugged into the outlet by my bed had made a reappearance. It hadn’t. Really?
“Aunt Ruby, you are seriously pissing me off!” I yelled. “Quit hiding things!”
I yanked open my closet door and grabbed the laptop case leaning against the wall, thankful to feel weight inside. The way things went missing in this house, even though I’d never taken it out, it was a fifty-fifty shot.
“Cord, cord, where’s the—” My fingers closed on it, and I hurriedly hooked it up, plugged it in, set it up on the side of my bed and knelt on the floor. I drummed my fingers ever faster as it cranked to life, mentally willing it along. I had just clicked on the Skype app and brought up my webcam, when the call came in.
I stared at myself wide-eyed.
I looked like a clammy, deranged freak. Eyeliner was bleeding south, my hair was sticking up on top and looked sweaty at the hairline, and there was a pile of dirty laundry behind me.
“Shit!”
I swiped under my eyes, shuffled on my knees to the left so that the background was a bookshelf, and attempted to smooth my hair. And clicked Accept.
Three people filled the screen. Three people who looked much more put together than I did, sitting at a table instead of a bed and not covered in a sheen of perspiration. I put on my best professional smile.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good morning,” said the middle one, a blond lady with a perfect twist on her hair. Morning? Oh yeah, it would be nine-thirty there. “We’re so glad we could make this interview finally happen,” she said. “We’re anxious to get our team put together and really hope that you’re a perfect fit, Lanie.”
“Thank you,” I said, tilting my head, remembering Carmen’s words of advice to sell myself. “I feel that I am. I—”
I saw Ralph’s head in the small screen with me at the bottom right before I registered him next to me. Before his extraordinarily large tongue came across my face.
* * *
On my way back. Should be there around 3ish.
It was a text from Nick after I got back to work. Like I needed more stress after the interview from hell. I didn’t text back. I was feeling grumpy and irritable and noticing stupid things like he didn’t add the word home after back.
My hormones had to be ape-shit out of control or something. Of course this wasn’t home for him. It was a job. He was being paid for this. It wasn’t really my home either, and when it was all said and done and we won this ridiculous game, I was going to have to figure out what to do with Aunt Ruby’s house.
On the crazy chance I actually pulled off the ghetto interview with Ralph making his cameo appearance, and I made the cut on the California job…and they went for my proposal of starting in two months because of the important project I was currently on (thank you, Carmen), I would be leaving not only Louisiana but Texas too. Should I close the house up and leave it vacant for a place to come home to? That didn’t feel right. Leaving Aunt Ruby’s home vacant and unloved just didn’t feel right. I could rent it, but finding renters in Charmed that I could trust not to screw me would be tricky from across the country.
Even if I just went back to my old life in Louisiana, the decisions remained the same. And it all gave me a sick, sad feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t explain. The only thing becoming increasingly obvious was that it was no longer just about the house.
Thank you, Carmen, again.
I pulled up to the house and felt my belly tighten at the sight of his truck in front. Yeah, that complicated thing we were trying so hard to avoid? It was knocking on the door and peeking in every window.
Ralph met me at the door, all wiggles and tongue, moving me a good two feet in his gusto. I had to admit I’d learned to enjoy his presence. He was part of our merry little dysfunctional family—for sure he fit in as well as we did. I’d miss him once he was gone. Assuming he ever was. Tilly had kind of gone radio silent.
“Hey,” came a voice from the stairs, and I looked up to see Nick descending, wearing jeans and pulling down a white T-shirt as he went, giving me a flash of perfect abs. The knock against my chest wasn’t just about that, though. “I just got here, was changing clothes.”
So I saw.
“Hey,” I said, deflecting Ralph. “How was the drive?”
“Same,” he said. “How was work?”
“Work.” I swallowed hard and sank onto the couch. “I had my interview today.”
He stopped in his progress to the couch to join me, his feet faltering just for a second before he continued on.
“The Skype one?”
“Yep.”
Nick sank onto the opposite end, sitting sideways to face me as had become our way at the end of each day. The move tugged at me. I didn’t realize that I’d missed him.
“So?”
I looked at my hands. “I don’t know. I wasn’t very impressive.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, kicking my foot.
“No, seriously,” I said, chuckling. “I had to come here and use my laptop and Ralph joined me.” Ralph thumped his tail from across the room at the mention of his name. “So it was kind of a comedy of errors. We’ll see.”
Nick gave me a long look I couldn’t really read. “Guess so,” he said finally. “What if you did impress them, though? What then?”
I looked away. At the TV, the wooden bowl on the coffee table, my fingernails. “I told them I’m on a special project at work so I wasn’t available for two months, so if I still somehow miraculously make the cut—”
“That’s brilliant,” he said, a grin pulling at his mouth. “Makes you look important and needed.”
I smiled. “That was the plan. And Addison’s graduation?”
And her mother?
Stop.
“Awesome,” he said, his eyes going warm with memory. “And hard to believe. Damn, it seems like that girl was just starting kindergarten.” He sat up and pulled out his phone. “Come see.”
He scrolled through pictures as we sat shoulder to shoulder and I looked at a beautiful, young, smiling female version of him. Some just her, some with her mom, and some of just him.
“Who took these?” I asked, bumping against him.
“Addison stole my phone at one point, so lord only knows what she—
That thought was addressed pretty quickly.
A moment caught of Tara and Nick, her arms wrapped around his waist as she gazed up at him and he looked down at her. He didn’t have his arms around her, just his hands on her arms, but it still—I just—if I had nuts to be kicked, that would be the feeling that stabbed straight through me.
He hit delete, and another one came up right behind it, this one with her hands on his face like she was about to kiss him. To his credit, he was frowning. But I had to get up or stop breathing, so I rose to my feet.
“Lanie, that—”
“Is none of my business,” I said. “It’s your family.”
“Family?” he said, laughing shortly. “No. Addison’s my family. Tara acts like that when it suits her. When the mood strikes her or it makes a good appearance. Family doesn’t stay in Lake Tahoe partying when their ten-year-old daughter is in the hospital with appendicitis.”
“So—how old were you when Addison came along?” I asked, forcing the nut kick down.
“You’ve been dying to ask that, haven’t you?”
“Kind of, yeah,” I said.
Nick smiled and rubbed at his eyes. He looked exhausted. I felt bad about springing the dance on him, but after seeing that picture I was a little less remorseful. Okay, so some of the nut kick still lingered.
“Seventeen,” he said.
“Wow,” I said, grinning. “You were a naughty boy.”
“I guess,” he said. “It was a crazy time, and Tara and I were so—” He made a circled crazy motion with his finger. “Off the charts. Couldn’t get enough of each other. Couldn’t think straight if we wanted to.”
Oh, good. That was such a fun fact to get back to.
“It wasn’t a great moment at first, for anyone, as you can imagine,” he said. “But by the time Addison got there, Tara’s parents had softened on me. They—they knew their daughter. She was as flighty then as she is now, and I think they looked at me and saw stability. A hard worker. Someone who wasn’t going to wake up and book a flight to Bali on a whim. Or buy two thousand dollars’ worth of new clothes because I had a bad day.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
“They had money,” he said. “They have money. And Tara was spoiled with it, to the point that she became reckless and didn’t care. By the time her parents began to care, she was who she was. No amount of scolding or cutting her off mattered. She—has a way. She has a charm. People love her no matter what she does. No matter how she treats them.”
“And this was the love of your life?”
It fell out of my mouth before I could vet it, and the sharp gaze that met mine told me it hit a mark.
“You know that person that you can’t forget, that taught you everything you know about love now and can still knock you on your ass even though they are toxic for you?”
My breath caught in my chest. The way he spoke those words, so passionate, so full of hate and love and anger and sadness and irritation, it hurt me. It physically hurt me. No one had done that to me with words before, and he wasn’t even talking about me.
“No,” I said, the word not being much more than a whisper.
He blinked and swallowed hard. “Sorry, I forgot you said you’d never been there.” He raked a hand through his hair, making it stick up. “Well one day you will. And it makes you do and think things you never thought you’d be so stupid to do.”
“That’s why,” I said, finding my voice. It came out a little rougher than I intended, but that was okay. I was ticked. The pictures. The gut-stabs. I forgot you’d never been there. One day you will. A burn built behind my eyes, and that made me even madder. “Love makes people stupid. I prefer to keep my wits about me.”
Nick’s expression changed and he closed his eyes. “Your mother.”
“For one.”
“Lanie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I—okay. Point taken.”
All the ire was sucked right out of me, like air released from a balloon. The look in his eyes pierced my insides more than the other things had.
“So,” I pushed out, my voice croaky. “Addison?”
“Addison came along and we gave it a good shot,” he said. “Tara tried, I’ll give her that. She still tries. But her demons and her habits run deep. She still runs when she gets stressed and maxes out credit cards when she’s sad. Thankfully, Addison never picked up any of that.” He blew out a breath and his jaw tightened. “She’s so far the other way, so rebellious against the wealth that is her birthright, that she’d marry a street singer and live in her car just to prove a point.”
I sat back on the arm of the couch. “What? Did she?”
Nick shook his head. “No, but she’s sporting this new boyfriend and that’s exactly what he does. And she eats that shit up like candy.”
“It looks like she’s okay with her mom from the pictures,” I said.
“She is, to a point,” he said. “For show. In small doses.”
“Did you tell her what you’re doing?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Oh yeah. That was fun.”
I slid back down next to him. “And?”
“Got accused of—let’s see, selling out, being no better than Mom, prostituting myself.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah, that was my personal favorite,” he said.
“Does she not get that you’re doing this for her?” I asked, biting my tongue to keep from adding the ungrateful little shit.
“She does, and she apologized,” he said. “After a while. I think it was Tara who actually told her to quit acting like a brat and show some respect.”
“You told Tara?”
I don’t know why that bothered me but it did. Especially after the touchy-feely picture. I wanted to go right into those pictures and pull her off of him. Carmen’s words rang in my head about Katrina.
To show her just whose man he was and to keep her grimy hands off.
Good grief.
“There wasn’t much alone time with Addison,” he said. “It was either tell them both or not at all.” He gave a face shrug. “Surprisingly, Tara was supportive about it. Acted like a model mom after that.”
Imagine that.
“I’m beat,” he said, patting my leg and getting up. “And hungry for something bad for me.”
I could teach him how to make baked apples. It was happy food. Aunt Ruby had taught me that, although the way I made them quickly in the microwave would probably not pass muster. For either of them. Man, those two would have liked each other.
“But I’m gonna go pass out instead,” he said.
“Um…”
He stopped and turned around. “We have something to do, don’t we?”
“We do.”
He grimaced. “How much of a something?”
* * *
“Okay, did Lanie fill you in on everything?” Carmen asked.
We were at a picnic table next to a display of pies, eating ridiculously small slices given as samples. Townspeople milled, the air was thick with the aroma of raw honey everywhere, and music thumped inside the town hall building next to us. It was the annual Honeycomb Dance that kicked off that “famous” Honey Festival the highway sign bragged about.
I had changed into a cute sun dress that flattered my figure and made my boobs look amazing. It had stopped him in his tracks halfway down the stairs. It was dirty pool. I knew that. But those photos of his ex-love of his life in his arms, mixed with remembering being the one in his arms just the other day, had me all over the damn place, zapping from one live wire to the next.
He hadn’t exactly gone grungy Farmer Bob, himself. Nick looked drool-worthy in dark jeans and a black, untucked long-sleeved shirt rolled up to show the perfect amount of forearm. He might have been wiped out, but he sure faked it well.
And that’s what we were all about, after all.
“Alicia’s a spy, the Bowmans are in on it, and we need to molest each other in public,” Nick said, ticking the items off as if it were a grocery store list.
“Pretty much,” Carmen said, separating her tiny pie from the tinier drizzle of honey. “I mean, make it look married, not first date horny, but yeah.”
Not first date horny. She had no idea.
“God, is there nothing in this town that isn’t dripping in this crap?” Carmen said, wiping the honey essence from her plastic fork.
“You don’t like honey?” Nick asked. “Is that legal here?”
“Not really,” she said. “Another reason I don’t fit in.” She winked at me. “I won’t even grow flowers in my yard because I don’t want bees around.”
“Wow,” Nick said. “You are the black sheep.”
“Well, tonight I’m faking it, kind of like you,” she said with a small smile. “So go make it look good.”
Faking it. Right.
“All right, sweetheart,” I said, smiling up at him and squeezing his bicep, which almost made me do it again. “Are we ready to go be sexy?”
It was like a first date. With some kind of weird permission to push the boundaries. Everywhere we stood, every conversation we had with others, involved Nick’s hands on my body in some way. He’d play with the ends of my hair, his fingers brushing against the sensitive skin of my neck and shoulders. His hands would run up and down my bare arms, or he’d have a hand at the small of my back, one finger making maddening little circles that more than likely a married woman would not notice. I, however, could zone in on every touch like a drone, and didn’t remember half of what anyone said.
I loved it. It was a bad idea to love it, and I knew that, but it was like being Cinderella at a ball. I knew I had limited hours left of such physical intimacy before we went back home and to our separate rooms, and I was loving every second of his hands on me.
And my hands on him.
Because that was just as much fun.
I pointed out the Clarks, and made sure we were always in Alicia’s line of vision. Katrina Bowman was the center of attention as usual, in a low-cut pixie dress that almost didn’t have a purpose, but so far she had kept her distance. Carmen talked with us some, but made sure she was never in one place too long. I didn’t blame her. I knew she was an out of place butterfly in this situation, and just who she was avoiding.
Three different people made comments about the boob flashing, thankfully by hearsay and not by personal witness. All of which I was able to laugh off and tone down.
I was feeding Nick a piece of Key lime pie for Alicia’s benefit, and enjoying running my thumb along his bottom lip and watching his eyes go dark, when Mayor Dean walked up with Alan. And by walking up with Alan, I mean that Dean walked up and shook Nick’s hand. It was Nick’s expression that alerted me something was about to happen when Alan came up behind me and slid his arms around my waist.
“Hey, sexy,” he said, pulling me back against him.
Recoil and repulsion put my whole body in motion. That, and the murderous look on Nick’s face. I had about two seconds to wonder if it was jealousy or just plain dislike that fueled his step forward, but Dean put a hand on his shoulder at the same time I gently pulled Alan’s hands off me.
“Easy, big guy,” Dean said. “He’s just messing around. No harm done.”
I instantly wrapped my arms around Nick’s waist and pressed my chest against him to get his attention back. We didn’t need a cock fight tonight. I’d already done enough of that with the battle of the boobs.
“Hey,” Alan said, laughing, holding both hands up. “Don’t shoot. I was just getting a hug from the party girl.”
“Party girl?” I said, chuckling. “Hardly. I tend to find the corners like this one and hope no one finds me.”
Hint.
“Oh, I’m not talking about this party,” Alan said, winking. “I’m referring to you showing off that beautiful rack of yours at mine.” He shook his head as his eyes landed unabashedly on my chest. Like now he had that right, because they were community property or something.
“Alan,” Dean admonished, looking at me apologetically. “Dude, come on, let’s move on.”
“Why?” Alan asked, grinning at us all. His eyes were a little overly red.
“Because maybe you’ve had a little too much of something,” Dean said, his eyes scanning the room and then coming back to me. “Sorry, Lanie.”
“We can go talk to Frosty for you,” Alan said.
The look in Dean’s eyes kind of broke my heart. As much as an asshole that he was during their divorce, and even some of their marriage, he still held a torch for her. An unhealthy and twisted torch maybe, but still.
“Why don’t we just go find your wife,” Dean said with a smile, turning Alan with ease and guiding him along. “See y’all later.”
I looked up at Nick and he gave me a downward glance as I was still wrapped around him.
“Thank you for not sucker punching him,” I said.
He ran a finger along my cheek that felt decidedly real. Breathtakingly so. Then he pulled my arms free and turned me around so that I was in front of him. He draped an arm over my chest in a hug from behind, his other arm around my waist, pulling me against him with my ass up against—oh my.