Blow Me Away: A Mile High Matched Novel, Book 2

by Hovland, Christina

  “Ah…my Nadzieja. Always taking care of her grandchildren.” Morty’s cheeky grin spread even wider. “When will you let me take you out and show you a good time?”

  Was he…? Yes, he was hitting on the old battle-ax.

  Babushka waved him aside. “I am here for lunch, not romance.”

  “Ah, but my sweet, we have time for both.” He had the glimmer in his expression of a fox about to devour his victim. “Let me take you to my office. I’ll show you the time of your life.”

  One, ew. And, two, now there was no way Heather could leave. He’d have Babushka in a VIP room before Heather could count to ten.

  Babushka ignored his advances. “I vill have the steak. Medium. Vith vodka. The good kind.”

  “She always turns me down. Someday I will get through.” Morty winked at Heather. “For you, my dear?”

  Heather’s phone buzzed in her purse. She ignored it. The sooner they ordered their steaks, the quicker they could be out the door. “I’ll have the same. But water. Please.”

  “Coming right up.” Morty strode away, whistling along to Lady Gaga.

  “You see? This is how you do it.” Babushka sat taller.

  “Do what?” Heather asked.

  “Get a man.”

  Heather scratched at her ear, she couldn’t have heard that right. “Sorry?”

  “You play the hard to have.”

  “Hard to get?”

  “Yes. This is how you do it. I have decided I am a tiger.” The smack of Babushka’s napkin against the table was an exclamation point to her announcement.

  What on earth was the woman jabbering about now? “A what?”

  “A tiger. You know, a cheetah. A leopard.”

  Maybe the stuff they used to dilate her eyes had seeped into her brain. “I’m not following.”

  “Older woman goes after younger man,” Babushka explained.

  “A cougar?” Heather asked.

  “Yes. That is the one. I am cougar. Morty, he is ten years younger.”

  A waitress with two star-shaped pasties covering her nipples dropped their drinks in front of them. Babushka downed her vodka and slapped the empty glass on the table. Heather was seriously reconsidering her choice to have water.

  “If you’re so sure you’re dying, why start a relationship? Doesn’t that seem like a bad idea?”

  “Oh, ve vill have an entrance romance.” Babushka nodded briskly.

  A what? No, Heather didn’t want to know. But still… “Entrance?”

  “You know. He sees other vomen. Ve don’t get too close. Just physical.” Babushka waggled her bushy eyebrows and…ew.

  “An open relationship?”

  “See, you know these things.”

  Heather swirled the ice in her red plastic tumbler. “You’re really going to go after this guy?”

  “No. He comes for me. This is how it is. Next time he asks, I vill say yes. This is vat you do vith Jason. You say no, make him work for it, but vhen time comes, you say yes.”

  Not flipping likely.

  “Heather Reese,” a male voice called.

  “Yes?” She glanced up.

  Shit. Jase.

  Not happy-go-lucky, dancing Jase. Not the Jase who would be propositioning her for a tumble in a VIP room. Not with the way the blood vessel pulsed in his neck and the tips of his ears tinged red.

  No, this was furious Jase.

  Oh. Hell.

  8

  Chapter Eight

  “Dial it back.” Eli, Jase’s buddy, tightened his hand on Jase’s shoulder in the dusky strip club.

  Eli could dial it back when it was his grandmother lounging at Pistol Polly’s. With Heather Reese. In a fog-filled room with a woman in a G-string dancing on a stage.

  He closed his eyes and did a few deep breaths. Counted to twenty. The smoke. The lights. The flashes. Memories of another place hit him hard.

  But this wasn’t there. This was here.

  The blood that’d been thrashing in his vessels kicked even stronger. He might die of an aneurysm right there next to a poster of Kitty Wyn—the weekend headliner.

  The root of each hair on his head throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

  His friend forced him to stop plowing forward through the neon haze of the club. “Don’t do something stupid.”

  Like take-his-grandmother-to-a-strip-joint stupid? That kind of stupid?

  “Breathe, man,” Eli said in a low voice.

  Jase’s vision tunneled, but he took a breath.

  Things Jase could do? Take a breath. Defuse an underwater bomb. Fast-rope out of a MH-60S Seahawk. Arrange tulips into a goddamned masterpiece.

  Things Jase could not do? Control any aspect of his life, currently.

  “Babushka?” he asked as calm as he could.

  “Jason! You have come to join us for lunch.” Babushka slipped from her stool and wrapped him in a hug.

  Heather looked like one of the guys up front getting caught by his wife while he stuffed dollar bills into a purple G-string. Her lips round, her eyes mirrored his own shock when he’d stopped in to chat with his grandmother and she wasn’t at the cookie shop. So he checked Babushka’s location on her cell tracker and found it to be at Pistol Polly’s. Of course he hadn’t believed it could be right, but he had to check it out. Make sure her phone hadn’t been swiped. He hadn’t expected to actually find her here.

  Eli had come along…well, originally because they were stopping at Pistol Polly’s to figure out what was wrong with Babushka’s phone tracking app that said she was there. Now, apparently, he was trying to save Jase from strangling Heather.

  “C’mon, we’re going home.” Jase wrapped a protective arm around his grandmother and guided her toward the door.

  “Vat? No. Ve have steaks.” She pushed him away. Hard. “All you can eat for ten dollars on Tuesday.”

  His arm held firmer to get her to the exit. To sanity. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Vat? It is Tuesday. I got my eyes checked. Ve have steaks.” The way she said it made it sound totally logical. And yet…nope.

  “She had her eyes dilated at the ophthalmologist,” the traitor on the barstool chimed in. “She can’t see anything.”

  That made this better?

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” He dropped his arm from around his grandmother and stepped toward the table.

  On the barstool, Heather was nearly eye to eye with him. Nearly. She met his stare and didn’t blink.

  Of course she didn’t. She was a traitor.

  “I trusted you to take care of her, not bring her here.” He gestured to the bared breasts on the stage to make his point.

  “Okay, whoa. First of all, you trusted me?” She stood, planted her feet, and stared up at him. “You were too busy today. She needed help. I offered to help her, not you.”

  “This is crazy. She’s not working for you anymore.” And he needed a goddamned beer. At home. Once he got his grandmother out of there.

  “You think this was my idea?” Heather had the nerve to laugh at him. “Try again. She dragged me here. The driver your family hired for her brought her here when she couldn’t see. She doesn’t know any better. And we’ll leave after we’ve had our steaks because it’s important to her. I had to suck it up and deal with the atmosphere. You can, too.”

  He ran a palm over his hair. God, this woman infuriated him. “It’s important for my grandmother to have steak so close to naked women?”

  “They’re not naked.”

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “They’re just not totally dressed.”

  “You see? They fight so they can make up,” Babushka side-whispered to Eli. She smiled like a cat that robbed the dairy section of the Kwik E Mart.

  Eli with the stupid, smug-ass grin sketched on his conspirator’s face helped Babushka back on her barstool and pulled one up beside her. Then the bastard called over the waitress with the stars glued on her chest.

  It took
everything Jase had in him not to cover his grandmother’s eyes.

  “We aren’t staying.” He would hold his ground like the goddamned soldier he was trained to be. He didn’t give up when the desert sandblasted his face and the sun burned off the top layer of his skin. He sure as hell wouldn’t give up now.

  “Ve are eating a nice lunch, Jason. Now, apologize to Heather and sit.” Babushka gestured to the chair across from her—the one with the view of the stage.

  Now, normally, he could appreciate a good bump and grind. But for the love of all fucks, this was the most uncomfortable situation he’d been in since Afghanistan.

  “Hhhhrhmm.” Heather cleared her throat and continued to stare at him.

  “I think she’s waiting for that apology.” Eli took a sip of beer out of a Fat Tire bottle. The jack-wagon hadn’t even ordered him one.

  No way was Jase apologizing. He wasn’t wrong.

  He turned to his grandmother and got close enough so he knew she would hear. “It’s inappropriate that you’re here.”

  His grandmother patently ignored him.

  “For the record, Mr. Barge in Here and Pretend You’re a Hero, your grandmother can’t see anything right now. So, she’s not going to be tarnished by star-shaped pasties or a”—Heather glanced to the stage—“bedazzled lavender G-string.”

  He looked down at the finger she’d pressed between his pecs. She blushed and dropped her hand.

  She was right, though. He wasn’t a hero. Never had been. All the medals in the world and all the reassurance couldn’t change the fact that he’d never been, and never would be, a hero. He swallowed against that regret.

  “How long you think before they have kids?” Eli casually asked Babushka.

  Babushka scooted toward Eli. “Vedding vill be a vhile. Jason must apologize for yelling before they go on.”

  Heather’s cheeks blotched a pinker pink. If Jase wasn’t pissed as all hell at her right then, he’d probably find it cute. As it was…fine, it was still cute.

  “You think I’m going to do anything with this…this…jerk?” Heather asked. Now her cheeks blazed red.

  “Jerk?” Jase shoved his hands on his hips. “That’s the best you can come up with?”

  “If the name fits.” She climbed up on her chair and adjusted her sleeves. “Now. Where’s my damn steak?”

  * * *

  Jase took out all of his pent-up Heather frustration on the patch of drywall he drilled into the studs. He’d bought the entire building that housed his flower shop and his apartment. Unfortunately, between all the remodel expenses and ordering Heather’s new van, his savings were dwindling. He’d had to take over part of the construction himself, wrangling Brek, Dean, and Eli into helping so they’d stay on schedule and get everyone moved in on time.

  The fact Jase was remodeling the entirety of the building housing his flower shop was practically Brek’s fault. His wife’s, anyway. She’d convinced Jase to invest in real estate, buy up the building, and convert it into a wedding mecca. Eli’s catering kitchen would move in next to the flower shop, a bridal salon would go in on the corner, and Brek’s sister’s event planning office would be tucked in between. So far, all the brilliant plan had done was give him a backache from hanging drywall and a drained bank account from covering all the unexpected expenses.

  “And that’s the story of how we had kick-ass steaks in a strip club with Jase’s grandmother and his sort-of ex-girlfriend,” Eli said.

  He could take his backstabbing grin and shove it.

  Brek, who he would currently refer to as his ex-best friend because he found the whole situation hilarious, leaned against the finished wall Jase had just screwed in place.

  “I still don’t understand exactly why you told your family you and Heather broke up,” Brek said.

  “I think I can explain it,” Eli paused, studying the drill in his hand. “Since he’s been so pouty after his wife left, his family has been on his ass to meet someone. But he decided instead of just telling them he didn’t want to date, he would fib and tell Babushka that Heather broke his heart—which she didn’t. Babushka took out Heather’s van in retribution. Then Jase convinced Heather to actually tell his family they broke up—when they hadn’t—and now Babushka’s working for Heather.” He inhaled a long breath. “Then they went to the strip club.”

  That about summed it up.

  “And he agreed to buy Heather a new van, which now means we all have to hang fucking drywall,” Eli continued.

  Yes, that summed it up. Jase had really screwed himself.

  “You forgot to add that Babushka’s not allowed to play with Heather anymore.” Jase drilled the current screw about two seconds too long until it made a grinding sound. “Are you assholes gonna stand around or are you here to work?”

  “You know what your problem is?” Brek kicked off from the wall and held up a new sheet of drywall.

  “Bet you’re gonna tell me.” Jase wiped the line of sweat that’d dripped in his eyes.

  Eli tagged the extra drill. “I bet I know what it is.”

  The sheetrock slipped, and the turning screw burned against the pad of Jase’s thumb. “Shit.”

  “You have a case of the Heathers,” Brek said.

  Jase’s stomach turned over on itself. He did not have a case of the anyones.

  “That’s what I was going to say, too.” Their buddy Dean piped in.

  Eli went to work on the other side of the panel. “You should’ve seen them. He was ten seconds away from tearing off her clothes so he could practice his caveman routine right there.”

  He was not. Although, the thought of Heather without clothes didn’t piss him off as much as it should. Fine, it didn’t piss him off at all. It turned him all kinds of on.

  “Why’d you two fake break up, anyway?” Eli asked.

  The question was innocent, but it ticked Jase right the hell off. His breaths came uneven. The setup was fake, but the whole thing felt like a real breakup. “Sometimes shit doesn’t work out.”

  And sometimes the chick shuts you down before you have the opportunity to explore each other.

  Brek released his grip on the now attached drywall and took a swig from a plastic water bottle. “She didn’t really have a choice with Babushka.”

  Still, she’d indulged his grandmother in an afternoon that nearly made him stroke out.

  “You can’t really blame her for taking Babushka for steaks.” The last screw in place, Eli stepped back from the wall. “I mean, have you met your grandmother? If she wants steaks at Pistol Polly’s, she’ll find a way to make that happen.”

  “It won’t happen again. I forbid it. She’s coming back to work at the flower shop. She’s not allowed to work for Heather anymore.” And that would be the end of that.

  Brek chuckled. “You let us know how that ultimatum works out.”

  “I’m serious.” Jase kept his eyes fixed on the thin layer of dust on the concrete floor, unwilling to glance up.

  “Again, have you met your grandmother? Remember that time she convinced us to take the Lucas twins to homecoming?” Eli said.

  That’d been one of the worst nights of their lives. It’d involved the Golden Corral salad bar and pudding. Jase shivered and refused to think about it.

  Eli had that look on his face, the one he always got right before he said something that would make things worse. “You should probably apologize to Heather for being such a jerk at lunch.”

  The pulse in his throat throbbed. “I wasn’t a jerk.”

  “Eh.” Eli shrugged. “You kinda were.”

  Jase glanced to Dean. “You think I was wrong?”

  He held his hand up flat and made a yeah-kinda wobble.

  Well, damn. Maybe he’d overreacted with Heather. Maybe he should’ve given her some benefit of the doubt when it came to the extent of his grandmother’s manipulation.

  “You should make up so you can get on to the fun stuff,” Dean suggested.

  “I bet Heather�
��s great at the fun stuff.” Eli crossed his arms. “But, you know, if you’re not interested, I might be.”

  There weren’t enough expletives in the world right then. “Don’t fucking think about it.”

  “I suggest roses.” Eli tossed a drill in the air so it spun, then caught it.

  Roses.

  Yeah, he’d already done that.

  “Work on that apology, too.” Brek had the nerve to flash a grin.

  Jase opened his mouth to argue, but damn, he did owe her an apology. Even if it choked him.

  * * *

  Jase knocked on the thick wooden door of Heather’s apartment and waited.

  Nothing.

  His palms got sweatier with each moment that passed. Apologizing sucked.

  He shifted the box of chocolate in his grip and knocked again. “Heather?”

  Now, he was definitely more of a rose delivery man, but when it came to apologies, he figured he owed the girl what she wanted.

  More nothing. He glanced around the little foyer with the rickety table. She’d set the roses he—well, Babushka—had given her on that table. He could leave the chocolates and write a note. If he’d brought paper. Which he hadn’t.

  The door swung open and Heather glared at him. “What?”

  “Heather. Hey.”

  She blushed. “If you’re here to yell at me again, you should probably go.”

  “Who is that?” Dean’s wife Claire peeked from behind her. “Oh. Hi, Jase. You’re interrupting girls’ night. Heather was just about to convince us all to buy tickets to her senior citizens prom.”

  “You should go.” Heather started to close the door. She pulled it open quickly. “Hand over the chocolate first.”

  Still pissed. Good to know.

  “Oh, he brought chocolates. The plot thickens,” Claire said with a dose of drama.

  Jase shoved the chocolate toward Heather, sliding the box into her palm, his fingertips grazing hers for the slightest second. God, she felt good. “Why am I constantly feeling the need to apologize to you?” he asked, totally genuine.