Chapter Nine
“Yo! Stokes! God damn, boy, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”
Noah flinched when something hit the back of his head. “What the fuck?” He whirled to face his assailant, who stood with his gloved hands on his hips and a smirk playing around his mouth. “I was working.”
“You were daydreaming. And that thing you’re holding will slice off your fuckin’ foot if you’re not more careful.”
Noah flipped the guy off and got back to work. He had been drifting. But he was also exhausted, which didn’t help. After stumbling into his apartment Friday night, he’d been disappointed to discover he was wound up on too many levels to sleep. Every square inch of his skin seemed to crawl. His ears rang. His legs were restless.
And of course, he was hornier than a boatload of sailors.
Celibacy did not agree with him. Not one bit. But he’d endured it as a sort of detox from his old life in California and up to this exact point, it hadn’t been a real hardship. But the night before, it had been exactly that.
And had only gotten harder.
He’d tried everything—cold shower, hot shower, ten miles on the stationary bike in the corner of his small space, huge glass of bourbon—and all these things after he’d jacked off not once, but twice, to the thought of pressing his too-eager lips to the back of Yoga Lady’s neck. It had been maddening and frustrating. And he still couldn’t even manage an hour or so of fitful dozing before he had to get up and meet his crew for a long day of yard maintenance.
He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the bandana he kept in his back pocket, pissed that his hand shook as if he had the world’s worst hangover. He supposed he did, in a way. A Yoga Lady hangover, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was damn close to killing him. He had to let it go. But he had no idea how to do it. Everywhere he looked he could see some part of her—either in her sexy dress, or in her minimal exercise gear. Her eyes, her lips, the set of her jaw, the fall of her hair, the length of her legs—he was obsessed beyond all reason.
Plus, he was still convinced she was married to some rich asshole and had only been playing out of school the night before, getting back at him for some ill-chosen tumble at a convention with a stranger or a quick-and-ugly with his secretary. Men still did that. He’d know. Half of the women he’d serviced in his former life confessed they were only doing it to get back at their husbands.
God, man. Get a grip already. Get two. They’re on sale.
For the next three hours, Noah went about his assigned business—weeding gardens, trimming hedges, blowing grass clippings off sidewalks. But his mind never left the long, porcelain line of her neck, the deep red of her short fingernails, the raw panic in her eyes over the necklace which had held what looked like a man’s wedding ring.
Something about that memory made him pause, mid-clip. He stood, the dangerously sharp tool he used gaping open, along with his mouth. Realizing this before the crew boss caught him again, he closed the shears around the green frond destined for death, then went on down the row, opening and closing the thing without even paying close attention to what he was clipping off.
He finished and did a quick phone check behind the truck. This particular boss had a thing about the guys always ‘chasing pussy on their phones’ as he put it, rather poetically, Noah thought. Which meant he couldn’t afford to get caught looking at his, since he’d already taken a water bottle to the back of his head earlier. He had another thirty-five minutes to his shift so he found some make-work he could do without thinking, spreading the last of the mulch around some trees and shrubs. The minute he was able, he jumped behind the wheel of his third-hand truck, plugged his phone into the cigarette lighter charger and did an internet search for something that had hit him like the proverbial bolt of lightning earlier.
Once he’d figured out who the hot, if somewhat bossy blonde had been—Evelyn Fitzgerald, the woman who would technically be his boss come Monday—he’d had a quick flash of insight combined with a random memory and realized just who his mystery Yoga Lady might be. It only took a couple of minutes to find what he was seeking. He held on to the wheel with one hand and thumb-scrolled down an article titled Beer and Wine Distribution Mogul, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist Ethan Connolly Dies in Private Plane Crash over Texas.
He’d had a few widows on his client list—women who began as regulars to the bar where he danced who’d actually been among the first in line for his direct attention, once Drake had determined him ready for such a thing. One in particular had been in what she called the ‘early stages of grief’, which had not, if he remembered correctly, damped her libido one iota. If anything, she’d been insatiable.
But those had been early, heady days of his life as…whatever the fuck he wanted to call it. He’d been called a male escort, gigolo, Bringer of Extreme Fantasy with Happy Endings…but he’d been a common prostitute. He’d taken money—an inordinate amount of it—in exchange for having sex, paid a portion of it to his pimp and pocketed the rest.
Sweat clouded his vision and his phone screen went dark when he tried to muscle past the fury rising in his throat at the thought of himself then. One thing he did recall about his horny widows—they sometimes wore their dead husbands’ rings on necklaces. Just like Yoga Lady had done the night before. He’d put the thing back on her himself.
Which had brought him here—reading about Yoga Lady’s dead husband in an article from almost three years ago. He’d been in California when it had happened, at rock bottom after getting busted for possession of way too many bottles of prescription pain killers and summarily fired from his bar dancing job. He’d been so sick of having sex with strangers for money he’d been methodically collecting the pills from the medicine chests of his various ‘clients’ with a serious eye towards chasing every single one of them with a liter of Jack Daniels on the beach.
Something in him had made that strange connection and sure enough, there she was in a photo, dressed in something incredible and no-doubt designer, on the arm of her tall, gray-haired, slim and super-handsome hubby. Dear Jesus, but she was a goddess, an exquisite picture of feminine perfection to his eye—strong, smart, savvy, fit, tall—all his favorite things in a woman.
She was obviously in mourning for a man who’d been almost fifteen years her senior, wealthier than God, never been married, and, according to one of his many rich and famous friend quoted in this Wall Street Journal article, never happier than when he’d met and wooed the young saleswoman in his San Francisco-based distributorship. Noah wiped his eyes free of sweat and touched the phone screen again, eager for more details.
Gayle.
Yoga Lady had a name and he’d found it.
Gayle Jackson Connolly.
Noah sat in the stifling hot truck for so long, scrolling around and finding out as much as he could of her horrific personal tragedy, that when he looked up, the rest of the crew had gone and the owner of the obnoxious McMansion where he’d been working was glaring at him suspiciously from her front door. He gave her a friendly wave with a shaking hand, thanks to the heat and his lack of food intake in the last half a day, before firing up the rebuilt engine and driving out of the gated neighborhood toward his apartment.
He ate two bananas and downed nearly a gallon of Gatorade standing in his kitchen, phone in his other hand, eyes darting down the screen, reading yet more about his new obsession. When, after reading through an industry-based article about the crash, he realized that Ethan wasn’t the only Connolly to be killed, his hand shook so hard he dropped the device and slid down the cabinet until he was sitting on the cracked linoleum, staring into space.
Finally, he got control of himself, picked the phone up and did one final search for ‘Gayle Connolly’ in recent beer-industry press.
“Bingo,” he whispered. He read through the information, his eyes widening in shock when he had to accept he might just be running into the beautiful, tragic Gayle a lot sooner than she might think.