Sweet Tooth: A Second Chance Romance

by Aria Ford

  I stood behind Brett and absolutely refused to let myself think about how close Amelia’s body was to mine, how I could, if I leaned fractionally left, bump against her. How her hair smelled. What I would do to just hold her in my arms right now.

  “It’s a neat project,” I said admiringly.

  Brett turned to grin at me.

  “Thanks, man.”

  Amelia’s giggle warmed my heart. I closed my eyes.

  Carson Grant. Stop it. You left her so you wouldn’t hurt her. Why would you want to go through that again?

  I had never expected to walk straight back into feeling this way about her, but it had happened. And now I had absolutely no idea what to do.

  I hadn’t been for therapy but I knew enough about myself and about other army buddies of mine to know that there were lots of rough edges. Lots of hidden wounds. I wasn’t really ready for a relationship. At least, I didn’t think so. But here one was, tantalizing, right before me and tempting me like hell.

  You hurt her once, Carson, I reminded myself. I wasn’t going to give myself a chance to hurt her twice.

  “I should go and check my mail,” I said tightly. Amelia looked up at me, big blue eyes questioning, and I forced myself to break the eye-contact.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “We’ll see you later.”

  “Later,” I said, my throat tight again, and hurried up the stairs to the lonely refuge of my bedroom. Before I got myself in any deeper.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Amelia

  The day went on with everyone minding their own business in an easy, familiar rhythm that stretched back to my childhood. Brett went to town for some things, Reese took the kids to a friend’s home and stayed for coffee with their mom. Carson went jogging and I took a walk. It was good to be out in the open.

  That evening, Brett appeared from the garage with a triumphant smile.

  “I have an idea,” he announced grandly. “Let’s do a barbecue. Like old times, eh, Carson?” he grinned.

  Carson groaned. “Am I going to have to compete with you over who can do the best grill again, Mr. Barbecue?”

  We all laughed.

  “Well, I plan to beat you,” Brett chuckled. He turned to me. “I got butternut squash for you, sis,” he added as an aside to me.

  “Oh, good.” I smiled, relieved. I hadn’t eaten red meat for years, and Brett’s success with barbecuing anything else tended to have limits. Reese had invented a dish for me last time I stayed that consisted of grilled butternut squash and a sauce she had yet to teach me how to make. My mouth watered at the thought of it.

  “Okay!” Brett sounded pleased. “We’ll have to go on the back terrace. At least it’s out of the wind.”

  “I bought some chestnuts,” Reese added, appearing from the sitting room, her handbag on her arm. “We can do those to start off.”

  “Whee!” Josh said. “My favorite.”

  Cayley patted her brother’s soft hair. “You’ve only had them once before,” she pointed out.

  “I still know it’s my favorite,” he insisted. I smiled at the naïve truth in amusement.

  You don’t have to have had something more than once to know it’s your favorite.

  That thought shouldn’t have made me think of Carson, but it did. I felt a delicious tingle in my belly at the memory of our time together. From the first night, I’d known he suited me. Limited experience aside, there are some things instinct just tells you. That was one of them.

  In ten years, it hasn’t been exactly disproved.

  I’d had several lovers but none of them had even come close to satisfying me the way Carson had in that year of being together.

  I smiled and listened to the kids as they recalled the last time they’d had chestnuts. It seemed to be the previous Christmas, when the family had gone to a German-style market. Hearing their talk made me feel excited about Christmas myself.

  “You look happy,” a voice commented. Carson. I looked into his warm gaze.

  “I am,” I said quietly. “It’s nice to spend Christmas here. Makes me nostalgic.”

  His eye caught mine before I could look away. “Me too.”

  I swallowed hard, rising excitement flowing in me. That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant—that I was nostalgic about us—but nevertheless I was not sorry he’d taken that meaning. It was also true.

  “I…” I paused, not sure what to say about that. His head moved closer to mine and I moved forward, not even aware I did so, so that my lips almost brushed his own.

  “Shall we move to the dining-room?” Reese asked, cutting through the tension. I blinked, seeing her standing beside me.

  “Okay,” I agreed. I felt dazed.

  In the dining-room, we all sat around the table. Carson sat beside me and I was conscious of his closeness without having to look in his direction. It was as if my body was aware of his every move, my skin tingling with his closeness and my body tense.

  Brett was outside on the terrace, making a fire in their grill and Reese sat opposite me, preparing chestnuts, assisted by the kids who seemed to have been possessed of a kind of Christmas fervor. They were singing carols and they sounded happy.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” Carson whispered.

  I nodded, seeing the look of fondness in his eye as he watched my brother’s two children enthusiastically rolling chestnuts in aluminum wrap.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “It makes me think of when I was a kid,” he observed, chuckling. “The excitement, Christmas morning…gifts.”

  “Looking up the chimney for Santa,” I laughed, before I could stop myself.

  He grinned. “You did?” his eyes were tender and I blushed.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why, but I always thought the guy might be stuck up there.”

  He laughed, eyes bright. “No way! That’s smart.”

  I squeezed his hand, without thinking about it. He drew in a breath. I let go.

  We looked at each other. Slowly, deliberately, he moved his hand so that it covered mine. I felt my heart tense in my chest, as if it would never start beating. As if this moment was all there was, and all time had stopped here on its shore.

  “Amelia,” he whispered.

  I looked into those eyes, noticed his pupils had narrowed with longing. My body melted. I leaned toward him, hand shifting in his to stroke his skin. He tensed.

  “We shouldn’t,” he hissed.

  I nodded. Closed my eyes. I didn’t remove my hand but I stopped stroking his wrist. He smiled at me when I looked at him.

  “Sorry,” I said shakily. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “No,” he said. “It was my fault. I just couldn’t stop it.”

  “Nor could I.”

  We both looked at each other, then I glanced down to where our hands lay on the table, still clasped. I looked about. Reese was out on the terrace, engaged with my brother in some complex discussion about the temperature of the fire for chestnuts. Josh was on the floor, making a race-car from leftover tinfoil. Only Cayley was at the table.

  I noticed her watching us, then look hastily away. She hadn’t looked shocked, or interested, or amused, as I might have expected a ten-year-old to be, seeing adults behave like we did. Instead, there was a softness on her face, almost as if she understood something momentous had happened for us. I sighed.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” I said, moving my hand.

  Carson made a face. “I guess not.”

  I nodded. When Brett came in, a smile of triumph on his face, we were sitting side-by-side, not looking at each other. He cleared his throat.

  “Two minutes before the first course arrives,” he announced grandly.

  “Chestnuts!” Josh cried. “Hurray!”

  “Let’s go see!”

  Cayley and her brother raced outside to stand around and watch the process of roasting chestnuts. Reese tried to keep them from touching the foil. Brett came and joined us at the table.

  “Right, Grant,” he
said, addressing Carson by his surname. “Are you ready for the challenge?”

  He laughed. “Okay…I guess.”

  We all laughed. Brett went on to outline his idea of a competition: they would each grill half the meat and compare the results.

  “How will we know who grilled what?” Carson asked reasonably.

  “We’ll put them in different pots as we’re done. And no cheating, mind!”

  I smiled. The friendly contest was just like something they would have done years ago, when they were friends at college and I was at home, watching the two of them interact. I had spent a lot of time around Brett when he was with Carson. I guessed it had been transparent, but it seemed neither of them realized my sudden intense interest in football had been to spend time with Carson.

  “Okay! We have to start together, or the first person gets a handicap,” Brett insisted. “Come on!”

  Reese appeared in the doorway with the chestnuts and ordered them both back to their seats, laughing at the rueful faces.

  “Like two kids,” she complained, grinning at me as we unwrapped chestnuts and transferred the steaming contents of the foil wrap to the table together.

  I nodded. “They were worse when they were.”

  She grinned. “I can imagine.”

  “We’re two kids,” Josh complained. “We don’t do that.”

  I laughed, and saw Carson guffaw with mirth.

  “That’s us told, bro,” he said.

  Brett hung his head. “Oh! How embarrassing…” he grinned.

  We all laughed. The next ten minutes were taken up with eating and enjoying roasted chestnuts. The spicy warmth filled my senses, drifting my mind back down the years to the magic of childhood Christmases. And the one holiday Brett and Carson spent together.

  When I looked up, Carson was watching me. His eyes had an expression so gentle that I felt I would melt, become all soft and melty like the chestnut I was eating. He was evidently thinking of the same time as I was, because he whispered to me.

  “Memories, eh?”

  I nodded. “So many memories.”

  We smiled at each other. The night was dark and close, the Christmas lights on in the corner and the air was redolent of cinnamon and cloves. My heart overflowed with warmth. My leg pressed against his and he didn’t move away. Rather, his leg stayed where it was, making my heart soar.

  As I forced myself to look away from his bright, merry gaze, I found myself wishing I could think of something—anything—that would bring down the barrier that ten years had built.

  I wanted to get back together with Carson: all I needed at this time was a way to do just that.

  End of Sneak Peek, click here to read the full story: Brother’s Best Friend Unwrapped

  Touch Me Doctor

  CHAPTER ONE

  Matt

  “Things are coming together,” I said, looking around my new office. “Still not perfect by any means, but it’s in good enough shape to start seeing patients on Monday. Wouldn’t you agree, Janelle?”

  “Of course, sir,” she said, standing in the doorway of my office. “It’s been ready for a while now. You just can’t see it because you’re too hard on yourself, Matt. You have been since I began working for you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, frowning. “Well, maybe I am. But maybe that’s what it takes, right? That’s what it takes to get things done the right way. High standards and an exacting eye are what it takes to succeed.”

  I sat down behind my new desk and ran my fingers over the rich mahogany wood. Janelle hovered anxiously in the doorway. I bit my tongue to keep from saying something I shouldn’t. Sitting behind this desk gave me all the power when it came to the relationship between doctor and receptionist. Taking advantage of that power dynamic was wrong. I would never do it, but sometimes Janelle made it so damn difficult. She’d been my receptionist for almost four years now and still didn’t seem any more comfortable with the role than on the day she’d started. It frustrated me, and I had to force myself not to take those frustrations out on her, just because she was my subordinate.

  She was so jittery all the time, always wringing her hands in front of her or else tucking her hair compulsively behind an ear. She always told me exactly what I wanted to hear, and although that was something every man wanted some of the time, no man wanted it all day, every day. It bored me and exhausted me, all at the same time.

  “It’ll be fine, at least for now,” I said in answer, standing and stretching before moving to my office window and peering out at the perfect mid-June San Diego day. “It’s all we’ve got to work with for now.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean what I said. What else could I mean?” My patience with her wore thin. I couldn’t keep the edge of annoyance from my voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she answered hesitantly, using that wounded bird voice that always made me cringe a little. “I can see how that sounded like a stupid question. I only meant—”

  “The study?” I interjected.

  “Well, yes, Dr. McCormack. The study was exactly what I was thinking about.”

  I nodded, not bothering to turn from the window and acknowledge the conversation Janelle tried to start with me. Of course she wanted to know about the study. As of late it seemed that the fucking study was all anyone wanted to talk about when it came to a conversation with me. Even the bartenders in my favorite restaurants asked me about it every time I came in, which only made me want to find new places to drink. I’d worked on nothing but the study for the last six months or so. Despite everyone’s interest in my work, the actual substance of my research would undoubtedly bore the piss out of 99 percent of the population. But for me, it was everything. I put all my efforts and passion into it after my life started to go to shit.

  The study in question was a pilot study on a cheaper sepsis-control protocol I’d been developing, and it had very much been my baby. It was an unusual protocol the seemed to go against the current thinking on the subject. Because of that, other doctors and researchers in the medical field were simply unwilling to get involved. They worried about tarnishing their academic reputations. That was where I and many of my colleagues differed, much to their closeted disdain and my chagrin. Many of them were all about the academia. They cared about it more than they did anything else and based many of their professional decisions on that fact.

  Unlike them, I was a private clinician and couldn’t care less about my academic reputation, whatever it may be. More than a few of my colleagues called me crazy, but all I cared about was developing a better, more effective treatment, and I wanted to make that treatment available to as many people as possible. It was the reason we became doctors, or so I had always believed, to help people, to make their lives better, and to save lives. It was my job to do that, and as far as I was concerned, getting my study off the ground was currently the best way for me to do that very thing.

  The problem was, the same thing that gave me the freedom to pursue studies like the sepsis-control protocol was also the thing that made it impossible for me to continue without the aid of outside funding. I wasn’t a part of some corporate, money-making machine. I wasn’t teamed up with a pharmaceutical company that would take my treatment and jack up the price. And I wasn’t one of those doctors with more money than God.

  I ran a small office, and I did so on my own. Obviously, I made more than the average working man, but a lot of that money went back into my research. What was left over wasn’t close to the kind of money required to fund my own project. That got into sums of money I could never hope to earn, given the choices I had made for my practice. And the bitch of it was, this situation was a sort of catch twenty-two. The only way I’d ever earn enough money to fund the study would be by completing the study successfully. Even by selling my treatment cheaply, it would still bring in massive amounts of money. But I didn’t have the money to get there.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I said, almost under my bre
ath.

  “I’m sorry? What did you say, sir?”

  “I said I don’t have time for this,” I repeated more loudly, even though I’d only been talking to myself the first time. “I said I don’t have time for this, and I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered uncertainly, trying my patience with her timidity yet again. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I—”

  “I didn’t mean you,” I interrupted. My fists clenched and unclenched at my sides to keep from unloading on her. “I was talking to myself. I don’t have time to worry about the pilot study or its funding. Not right now. If I can’t get that project off the ground, and it looks like I’m not, I’ll need to put all my focus and concentration into this practice. I’ll need to take on new patients, right? And I’ll need to expand my hours. If I have to spend day and night here working, then so be it. I’m not afraid of hard work, after all.”

  “Of course not, sir. I don’t think there’s a person alive who would question that. It’s just… well, aren’t you forgetting about one little thing?”

  I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, and I got my answer. The moment Janelle spoke the words that were, for her, about as close to a rebuke as she would get, both of us heard a sound rising from the waiting room. It sounded like a siren, and in a very real way, that was exactly what it was. After all, a siren was a beacon of danger, a signal that something in the world was amiss. That was exactly what the noise coming from the front of my offices was. Only instead of coming out of a machine, it came out of a little girl.