CHAPTER TEN
After loading hay in the barn all day, Noble stood in the shower, washing the sweat and filth off his body and rolling the ache from his shoulders under the hot spray. He dried off and dressed, ignoring the pangs of hunger gnawing his gut. He strolled into the kitchen, where mouthwatering scents assaulted him as he watched his mom pull a pan of golden-yellow cornbread from the oven. She turned and placed the pan on the opposite counter to cool and Noble crept to the stove like a cat burglar. He lifted the spoon and dipped it inside the stockpot of bubbling chili. As he was lifting the steaming, spicy mixture to his mouth, his mom smacked his arm, sending the spoon back into the pot.
“It isn’t time to eat yet.”
“But I’m starving.” He pressed a hand to his growling stomach, flashed her the most pathetic expression he could muster, and quickly retrieved the spoon and shoved it in his mouth.
“That’s what you get for skipping lunch,” she chided, jerking the empty spoon from his hand. “I fixed a perfectly good platter of roast beef sandwiches at noon. But someone was too busy to stop working and fuel his body. So, now that same someone—you—will just have to wait until dinner’s on the table.”
Yeah, he’d skipped lunch, all right, but not to keep working. The whole time he’d been stacking the heavy bales of hay, the flirty conversation about doing this job in a thong that he and Ivy had shared hammered him. Like a fucking twister, images of the lacy, saturated scrap of silk he’d torn from between her legs had swirled through his brain. He hadn’t come in for lunch because his dick had been hard enough to drive railroad spikes through cement.
“I was just trying to pick up the slack. Nate’s doing what he can, but until he finishes physical therapy and builds back some muscle mass, the heavy lifting has to fall on the rest of us.”
“And it frustrates him something fierce. That’s why he’s so cranky.” Nola scowled. “But you already know that. I just wish you could find a way to block that connection you boys share, because Nate’s surly mood is rubbing off on you, too.”
Noble nodded. He knew his disposition was shitty of late, but it wasn’t a byproduct of his twin’s annoyance. He was turning as snarly as a bear with a sore tooth because he hadn’t bounced back yet. Noble still hadn’t sought comfort with his warren of bed-bunnies since returning from Vegas…three blue-ball-inducing months ago. Oh, he’d thought about sex, thought about it all the damn time. But the only woman he ached to drag beneath him was long gone.
Subconsciously licking his lips, Noble could still taste Ivy’s tart cream.
Dammit! I’m in a no-boner zone.
Noble quickly redirected his thoughts and willed his thickening cock to take a nap. Still, he knew his efforts were only temporary. He’d jacked off in the shower ten minutes ago, but it hadn’t done a damn bit of good. He still burned for Ivy, and it was scaring the fuck out of him.
Noble scrubbed a hand through his still-damp hair and exhaled. “I’ll try and sweeten up for you, Ma.”
His mom glided across the room and crooked her finger with a conspiratory smile. “I have something that might sweeten you up. Take a peek.”
Sidling in beside her, Noble peered down at the pink cake box. “Sweet Flours?”
“The new bakery’s grand opening was today. Wait until you see what I brought home for our dessert.” She eased back the lid and carefully lifted out an elaborately decorated cake. “It’s a chocolate mousse. I saw it in the display case and started salivating.”
The second the scent of creamy butter and rich cocoa hit his nose Noble’s mouth began to water. Unexpectedly, he wanted to grab a fork and dive into the fancy cake.
“I’ll take a slice of that now and eat my chili after.”
“I might just have to join you.” Nola chuckled. “It’s crazy. Like you, I’ve never been that gung ho for sweets, but I’m craving them all the time now.”
“Did you crave them when you were pregnant with any of us?”
Nola shook her head. “No. I only wanted spicy food. Though with you and Nate, I craved ice cream every once in a while.” She strummed a hand over the bump camouflaged beneath her shirt. “Guess this little guy is already taking after his big brother.”
“Sounds like you’re going to be a regular customer of Sweet Flours from now on.”
“No way. I’d be as big a house by the time this little guy is born.”
“Something smells good in here, Momma.” Norman entered the kitchen and strode straight to his wife. He wrapped his arms around her and peered over her shoulder. “What do you have there? Oh, my. That looks delicious.”
“I know, right? The new bakery opened,” his mom explained. “I couldn’t help indulging in a bit of guilty pleasure.”
Noble was all about guilty pleasures, but his didn’t involve cake. The familiar talons of useless yearning clawed up his spine. As he ambled toward the kitchen table, Nash and Norris raced into the room and plopped down into their chairs.
Noble polished off two heaping bowls of his mom’s spicy, thick chili and three slabs of corn bread slathered in butter. When the first bite of the moist, fluffy chocolate cake hit his taste buds, his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. He hadn’t tasted anything this sinfully sweet and addicting since he’d latched his mouth to Ivy’s pussy.
You’re one masochistic son of a bitch, aren’t you?
Noble bit back a snarl and devoured the moist, rich cake in silence.
Thirty minutes later, he was driving down Main Street toward the Hangover.
The pink awning of Sweet Flours caught his eye, as well as the older gentleman cleaning the glass door front.
Must be the owner…or one of them.
Noble tapped his brakes and pushed the button to lower his window so he could welcome the man to Haven and compliment the awesome cake he’d had at dinner. But just as he slowed to a stop, the man tucked a roll of paper towels under his arm and stepped back inside the building.
With a shrug, Noble pulled into an empty parking spot in front of the bar. He strolled inside and handed Gina the bag with chili and corn bread that his mom had asked him to bring the couple. After his mom’s massive attitude adjustment and finally cutting Nate from her apron strings, she and Gina had formed a bond of friendship.
Nola didn’t even seem to mind that two remained shacked up long after Nate’s broken limbs had healed. Of course, their unmarried cohabitation provided plenty of fodder for the gossipmongers in town. The Grayson family ignored the rumors spawned by narrow-minded people with hollow lives.
“Nola didn’t have to go to all this trouble.” Gina opened the container of chili and inhaled deeply. “Oh, hell! This smells delicious.”
“It was, and she’s a mom. Taking care of family is what she does.”
After setting a mug of beer down on the bar in front of him, Gina quickly glanced over her shoulder. “Nate’s probably still in the shower cleaning up from work. I’m going to run back to the kitchen and keep this warm so we can eat when he comes down. I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time. I’m gonna sit here, drink my beer, and relax,” he announced as she scurried away.
The bell above the door—the one Nate had finally fixed after Gina’s abduction—jingled. Glancing toward the sound, Noble felt his blood run cold. Inwardly cursing, he watched Trudy and her sexually inept husband, Calvin, enter the bar. The deceitful tramp was wearing a skimpy red dress. One wrong move and the wardrobe malfunction she’d suffer would be worthy of an arrest for indecent exposure.
Noble didn’t remember ever seeing them in the bar before and briefly wondered if Trudy was on reconnaissance, looking for another unsuspecting dick to fuck with.
“Oh, Cal, you naughty boy. Stop.”
Her shrill shriek felt like icepicks being shoved in his ears.
Cal, a.k.a. naughty boy, removed his hands from her ass.
“We’re in public, lover boy. You keep touching me like that, I might have to find a dark corner so you can put me out of my misery, my big, strapping love machine.”
Noble inwardly snorted and took another drink of beer.
“Why, isn’t this just the cutest little rustic bar you’ve ever seen, lover boy?” Calvin issued a noncommittal grunt. “Let’s sit at that table over there. I think it might actually have been wiped down in the last decade.”
If Gina had been within earshot of the viper’s derogatory comment, Trudy would have had an up-close-and-personal introduction to Martha.
“Oh, my stars,” Trudy exclaimed. “Mr. Grayson…is that really you?”
Noble briefly closed his eyes and bit back a low, suffering groan. Forcing a tight smile, he turned and gave Trudy a curt nod. “Mrs. Clarkson.”
Trudy hurried his way, dragging the love machine with her as she flashed Noble a seductive smile. She quickly erased it as her husband moved in beside her. “Cal, sugar, this is Mr. Grayson. He’s the man I told you about who laid the pipe and fixed that terrible leak of mine.”
Oh, she’d been leaking all right…puddling all over the place. Unfortunately, laying his pipe in her was the biggest mistake of Noble’s life. Well, the second biggest. His first was leaving Vegas without Ivy’s phone number.
When Calvin flashed him a grateful smile and extended his hand, guilt, slick and oily, sluiced through Noble’s veins.
“Pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Grayson. Trudy speaks very highly of the work you did. I can’t thank you enough for helping get that mess fixed.”
Noble wanted to tell the man that he hadn’t fixed a damn thing, and that his wife was still a horny hot mess who took adultery to a whole new level. The polite response should have been you’re welcome but he couldn’t even force those proper words over his lips. The things he’d done to the man’s then fiancée were morally wrong on every level. Like an evil, living-breathing demon within, remorse came to life. It took all the willpower Noble possessed not to confess his sin and tell the poor schmuck his wife was a first-class slut. If Trudy were a man, he would have already knocked the deceitful bitch on her surgically augmented ass.
Then an idea hit him, one that would completely annihilate Trudy without him lifting a finger. He sent the couple a feigned friendly smile.
“No need to thank me,” he assured before pinning Trudy with a blank expression. “To be perfectly honest, laying that pipe was anything but memorable. I’d completely forgotten all about it.”
Her eyes grew wide, then quickly narrowed to fiery slits.
The plastic smile adorning her face morphed into a bitter, arctic sneer.
Nostrils flaring, Trudy pinched her collagen-injected face up, like a sun-dried prune.
Noble was having too much fun to stop. “I’m no plumber, mind you, but don’t be surprised if that seal eventually stretches so wide anything you shove up in it just falls right out.”
“Oh. Right. Right.” Calvin nodded, confusion written all over his face. “I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.”
“Someone definitely needs to, that’s for damn sure.”
Trudy’s face was a brilliant shade of hellion red. Seething, she squeezed the straps of her designer purse, no doubt wishing her hands were wrapped about Noble’s neck. He simply smirked and arched a brow, daring her to say something…anything, so he could bust her lying, cheating ass in front of her husband and save the blissful idiot years of embarrassing gossip.
Then in the blink of an eye, Trudy’s rage vanished and a cloying sweet smile spread over her artificially puffy lips.
“Yanno, Cal, baby. I don’t really feel much like a cocktail after all. Take me home, toss me into that big o’l bed of ours, and take me hard, daddy.”
Noble’s stomach pitched.
A lewd grin split Calvin’s face. “Let’s go, sugar lips.”
The poor fucker nearly tripped over his own two feet as he rushed his bitch of a bride out of the bar.
As the door snicked shut, Noble closed his eyes and exhaled a deep breath.
“Who or rather what the fuck was that?” Gina asked, stationed behind the bar again.
“That’s our new dentist, Calvin Clarkson, and his wife, Trudy.”
“Alrighty then. Does old wifey-pooh know Halloween was almost four damn months ago? Seriously? What the fuck was she wearing?”
“Desperation. And I seriously doubt her peroxide-infused brain cells comprehend anything besides fucking.”
Gina narrowed her eyes and studied him before a disapproving frown tugged the corners of her mouth down. Leaning over the bar, she kept her terse tone low and poked her finger to his sore shoulder. “Noble Grayson! I can’t believe you fucked the new dentist’s—?”
He held up his hand. “Don’t! I just ate a fantastic dinner. Don’t say another word or I’m liable to puke it up all over your bar.”
“How could you?” Gina hissed. “She’s married.”
“Not at the time, she wasn’t. I didn’t even know about Calvin until after the fact. Then I was so pissed I wanted to liposuction all the saline from her body with my fists.”
“Ouch!” Gina cringed then smirked. “I know what I’m getting you for your birthday.”
“What’s that?”
“A fucking blow-up doll. Maybe it’ll take the edge off and you won’t be so knotted up that you decide to shove your cock into something like that.”
“Ha. Ha.” Noble rolled his eyes as Gina’s sweet laughter flowed over him.
The sound warmed him and confirmed that the problems she’d suffered after her abduction were in the past. Ever since Nate’s accident, her mood had done a one-eighty. One night when he was visiting Nate at the hospital, Noble had learned what had precipitated the change in her demeanor.
“When she found me busted and bleeding in the field, she told me something inside her shifted,” Nate explained. “She’d been suffocating under a shit-load of guilt that suddenly took a backseat to what had happened to me.”
“Guilt? What the hell did she have to feel guilty about?”
“For not fighting Victor off.”
“That’s crazy. He’s three times her size.”
“I know, but she felt responsible that he’d been able to overpower her so easily. She confessed that she wasn’t good enough for me, or couldn’t love me the way I deserved, and that she didn’t want me wasting my life on a woman who couldn’t even give me children—”
“Wait,” Noble interrupted “Why can’t she have kids?”
Nate exhaled heavily and closed his eyes for several long seconds. “She was married once…and pregnant. Her ex was a mean son of a bitch. They fought and he got physical again. She not only lost the baby but had to have a hysterectomy to save her life.”
Noble’s heart sand all the way to his stomach. “He beat her?”
Nate nodded.
“Motherfucker. Do you know who he is…where he lives?”
Nate nodded grimly. “When I get out of here and healed—”
“I’m going with you. They’ll never find the body, either.” He blew out a big breath and nodded. “Tell me the rest.”
“When Victor had her, Gina said she knew she was going to die before she could tell me how much she loved me. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but she’d still convinced herself that even though she really did love me, we wouldn’t be together forever.”
“Because of the baby thing?”
“That and our age difference. Her occupation…her unladylike mouth,” Nate said with a crooked grin.
“But you like her unladylike mouth, don’t you, you little perv?”
“No. I love it.”
They shared a good laugh before Nate continued.
“When they were loading me into the helicopter, she stood in the field and watched it fly away, thinking she’d never see me alive again. It ripped her apart.”
“No doubt, but how did that solve the shit with Victor for her?”
“Because when that prick kidnapped her, he mentally tossed her down into the same dark, helpless, and hopeless hellhole that her ex had kept her in. After we rescued her and she was back home, she said she tried to shake off and pull herself out but old tapes kept playing in her head. That and the fact that she knew she’d have to say goodbye to me one day kept dragging her back down. So she did the only thing she knew would protect her. She shut down…wrapped herself up tight in a victim blanket. Instead of talking to me about her fears, she pushed me away…again. That’s what started our fight the day I got hurt. Standing in that field not knowing if I was going to live or die was like a slap to the face with a mortality stick. It was her wake-up call. She told me that when the helicopter disappeared from view, she realized that life is short and precious, but loveis fragile and the rarest gift in life.”
Noble pondered his brother’s words for several long seconds before breaking out into a cold sweat.
“When she was finished telling me all the secrets she’d been keeping, I tugged her into this hospital bed, tucked my good arm around her, and told her I was never letting her go.”
As Noble sat on the barstool, drinking in the sound of Gina’s laughter, watching her blue eyes twinkling with glee, he was damn grateful that she’d had that life-altering epiphany.
“What’s all the racket about down here?” Nate asked, taking the stairs one at a time, like a toddler, munching on a piece of cake.
“Goddammit, Nate!” Gina barked. “That coffee cake was for our breakfast in the morning. Please tell me you didn’t eat the whole damn thing.”
Grinning, he shrugged. “Okay, I didn’t eat the whole damn thing. I’m not a total bastard. I left you a piece.”
“A piece? That’s all? One lousy piece?”
Noble chuckled at her irritation. “You hit the new bakery, too?”
“Fuck yes, I did.” Gina narrowed her eyes on Nate. “But I may not ever hit it again if Mr. Sweet Tooth over there is going to hog all the goodies.”
“Hey! I let you have one of the cinnamon rolls this morning.”
“Let me! Let me?” Slapping on her bitch wings, Gina rounded the bar and stomped straight into Nate’s personal space.
“Knock it off, you two,” Noble warned. “You know what happens every time you get into a damn fight.”
“Oh, this isn’t a fight,” Gina assured, snatching the piece of coffee cake out of Nate’s hand. “This is a discussion that I’m ending right now.”
Locking her eyes to Nate’s, she shoved the wedge of cake into her mouth. A muffled but satisfied moan rumbled from the back of her throat. “This is…almost better than sex. I’m going to have to buy more tomorrow.”
“Now you know why I couldn’t stop eating it.” Grinning, Nate crossed his arms over his chest. “I rest my case.”
“In six months, everyone in Haven is going to need Weight Watchers,” Noble scoffed.
“You don’t understand,” Gina said, pausing to swallow. “One taste of this—”
“Oh, I already know. Mom bought a cake from there this morning. I’m staying far away from that place or I’ll end up looking like Harvey Hays, bless his waddling, self-centered, prick-assed heart.”
“We tried to tell you he was a—”
“Fuck it. It doesn’t matter anymore,” Noble interrupted, struggling to thwart memories of Ivy from surfacing. “You wanna play some pool?”
“Sure, but not for money. You’re a fucking shark.” Nate grinned.
“Pussy.”
“He’s not a pussy. He’s a stud,” Gina corrected, wrapping her arms around Nate’s waist and aligning their hips.
“Don’t worry. I’ll save my money so we can eat coffee cake every day. But just remember, you’re all the sweetness I need in life.” Nate flashed her a sensual smile before claiming Gina’s lips in a long, passionate kiss.
Noble looked away before gripping his beer and standing. “I’ll meet you in the back when you’re done swapping spit.”
He hadn’t intended his voice to carry an angry growl. He clenched his jaw and asked himself for the umpteenth time how a girl he’d spent one fucking night with had sucked the desire for any other woman clean out of him. And oh, god, how that woman could suck! Memories of her soft lips, the blistering, wet heat of her mouth, and the sinful swirl of her tongue as she glided up and down his pulsating cock seared his brain. The feel of her buttery-smooth skin beneath his fingertips…the sound of her kitten-soft moans and keening cries of ecstasy, along with her infectious laughter uncoiled inside him.
Being haunted to this degree by a woman he couldn’t call, text, or even find was driving him batshit crazy.
It’s official. I’m losing my goddamn mind.
With beer in hand, he strode to the back of the bar. After snatching a pool stick off the rack, Noble started taking out his unrelenting frustration and sexual anger on the cluster of colorful resin balls.