Chapter 3

Elle

After Hattie leaves, Jonah and Madden are playing peacefully in Jonah’s new front yard, so I pack up a foil-covered plate of cookies and carry it over to Mrs. Wheeling’s house. Mrs. Wheeling is eighty-nine years old and has more energy than I do. When I show up with the cookies, she is making a lasagna for the family of a friend who recently died.

“Our new neighbor opened the jar of sauce for me,” she informs me. “I didn’t really need the jar opened, but I was trying to take his measure. He seems like a nice man. And it won’t be the worst thing in the world to have a man with biceps like that mowing his lawn out there.”

That’s Mrs. Wheeling for you.

“Which one is the new neighbor? There were three guys out there earlier.” I try very hard not to sound too interested, because Mrs. Wheeling will for sure pick up on it if I do. She was very kind to me for about a week after Trevor left, but ever since then, she’s been doing more to try to get me laid than either Hattie or Capria. I was totally unsurprised, the first time I was in her bedroom, helping her reach something on a high-up closet shelf, to discover that her two small bookshelves are filled with romance novels. And not the ones with white picket fences and beaches on the cover, either. The kind with heroes with bare torsos and swim trunks hanging so low they reveal glistening hip-dip.

“The Heathcliff one,” Mrs. Wheeling says, and my traitorous stomach swoops. I do so appreciate the merits of tall, dark, handsome, and broody. I have no intention of indulging myself in neighbor sex—too messy—but Mrs. Wheeling might have a point about the value of good-looking men on display in the yard. “Are you bringing him cookies, too?”

I nod.

“An excellent opening move.”

“It’s not a move,” I say. “It’s a gesture of neighborly warmth.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “You believe whatever you want to believe. Have you seen his biceps?”

“I haven’t,” I admit.

“You have a treat in store.”

“You could bring him cookies,” I tease.

“They’d call me a cougar,” she says, beaming with delight.

I ask after Mrs. Wheeling’s son in eastern Washington and daughter on the East Coast, and her grandchildren (who are too far away), and then I say goodbye.

“Have fun delivering cookies.”

I love Mrs. Wheeling.

When I reach the new neighbors’ yard, Jonah and Madden latch on to me like I’m the Pied Piper, even though they already had two cookies each at my house. They know that in all likelihood they’ll be able to sucker Jonah’s dad into giving them two more.

Even though I have Jonah with me, I knock on the front door. The Penske truck is gone—returned, I assume—and there’s a truck parked out front, a Ford F-150 four-door. Trevor used to say he was going to buy a Ford F-150—the two-door model—for his midlife crisis car. Too bad he didn’t buy one instead of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend.

One of these days, I won’t feel sick to my stomach when I think about Trevor’s betrayal. But today is not that day.

I think it hurts so much partly because it wasn’t just “someone else.” It was a very specific someone else, the someone else I’d always been afraid he really loved. It was as if I’d convinced myself the unpleasant events around me were only a bad dream, then realized I was awake after all.

But that was then, and I’m doing everything I can to get past it.

I catch my breath, square my shoulders, and shake it off.

Jonah opens the door and yells over his shoulder, “Dad!”

I can see a narrow wedge of the house, including the staircase, so my first view of my new neighbor is of his bare feet as he descends. Then the hems of his jeans. Then his thighs. Okay, yeah. Mmm. And then—

Even though I really don’t think you can tell that much about what a guy is packing under his jeans—because of the whole bluffer thing—I am staring. And maybe he’s bluffing, but…

That’s why it takes me a beat too long to meet his eyes (embarrassing), which is why I hear his intake of breath just a split second before I see his face.

Oh, shit.

My face goes flaming hot, and I’m not sure if it’s from shame or lust.

The guy standing in the doorway is Tall, Dark, and Broody. The Original Tall, Dark, and Broody, as in my rebound sex guy.

Dark eyes. Dark hair. Strong jaw, shadowed with late-day stubble. A body so built he fills my field of vision, a broad chest swelling under a soft cotton T, and those spectacular biceps, which deserve every ounce of Mrs. Wheeling’s praise.

The next set of images are memories, a wash of sensation as vivid as a dream in progress: him looming over me just before his mouth seals mine in a kiss, his body crowding mine against the brick wall of the alley outside the bar, the heat and size and thickness of him like a drug I can’t get enough of. His mouth, tasting of scotch, and his tongue, soft as velvet, stroking all my tender corners so by the end of the first kiss I am already thinking of all the places I want his touch. His callused hand pushing my skirt up, finding and tearing my underpants, his fingers sliding headlong through my slickness, the one he slipped into my core thick enough for me to clench around, but his thumb on my clit still nimble enough to bring me off in the space of ten heartbeats.

It’s possible I make a sound, nowhere near audible enough to be a moan or a whimper, more like a huff of surprise.

“Dad! Dad!” Jonah says. “Can I have a sleepover at Madden’s house?”

Tall, Dark, and Broody’s eyes haven’t left my face.

“Well,” he says. “We meet again.”