Mad About Moon

by Melissa Foster

  Chapter Two

  “HAIL, PLEASE KEEP your diggers out of the frosting,” Josie said the next afternoon as she stopped her son’s sneaky little fingers from dipping the bucket of his excavator into the bowl of white frosting they were using to decorate gingerbread houses.

  Hail grinned sweetly up at her in the way she’d never been able to resist and drove his excavator to the other side of the table.

  She dipped a spoon into the icing and handed it to him. “Spoons are fine; diggers are for dirt.”

  Her words fell on deaf ears as he shoved the spoon in his mouth, turned to the little girl sitting beside him, and said, “Use my digger and you can get a spoonful, too!”

  “I don’t think so,” Josie said, scooping another spoonful of frosting. “But please usually works.” She handed Emily, a little girl staying at the shelter with her mother, the spoon, and then she kissed the top of Hail’s head.

  They made gingerbread houses and cookies every Christmas, but the last place she thought they’d be making them the day after Christmas was in a women’s shelter. Then again, she never thought she’d lose everything she’d known for the past decade, reconnect with her siblings, or ever see Moon again. If it was even him. She had her doubts. She’d been such a nervous wreck, there was a good chance her eyes had been playing tricks on her last night.

  “I think I’ve eaten more candy today than I did on Halloween.” Tracey pushed a bowl of gumdrops toward the middle of the table.

  “We can thank Josie for that.” Sunny Yeun, who helped her mother run the shelter, popped a jelly bean into her mouth. Sunny had the shiniest black hair Josie had ever seen, and she wore round glasses, like Harry Potter, which were surprisingly stylish on her.

  Tracey and the three other women who were staying at the shelter said, “Thank you, Josie.”

  “Oh, stop. This is fun for me,” Josie said. The kitchen smelled like spices and happiness, and the festive music made it that much sweeter. “I’d do it every day if I could.”

  There was a time, shortly after she’d moved in with Brian, when she had baked nearly every day, when she’d envied gingerbread houses and their sugar-coated, frosting-laced world. She’d dreamed of a happy life within the delicious walls, where she’d wake up without a blanket of fear. A life in which her siblings were safe and her parents were so far away they could never touch any of them again. Eventually she’d learned to trust, and as time had passed, she realized her fantasies of a safe, happy life were no longer dreams, but they’d come true.

  “I’ll make these every day with you!” Hail said, drawing her back to the moment.

  She brushed his bangs away from his eyes and kissed his forehead, silently vowing to make next year better than this one had been. “And what would your teachers say after winter break, when you didn’t show up for school because you were too busy making gingerbread houses?”

  He giggled, shrugged, and went back to decorating his house.

  “That sounds like a pretty good life to me,” Tracey said as she pressed a peppermint into the frosting on the roof of her gingerbread house.

  Josie got up to take a tray of gingerbread cookies from the oven. She’d had to leave a lot of her belongings behind when they’d been evicted, but she’d kept her baking supplies, most of which had been gifts from Brian’s grandmother, who had taught her to bake.

  She set the tray down and began transferring the cookies to the cooling rack. “I thought you were excited about working at the Whiskey’s bar after talking to Sarah this morning?”

  She had felt a sting of disappointment when Sarah had called to speak with Tracey and not to speak with her. But Sarah had asked Tracey to pass on a message that she was giving Josie space to decide when they could speak again. Josie appreciated that. She wanted to take another step toward reconciliation, but after she’d nearly lost it last night, she knew she couldn’t do it with Hail underfoot. She was hoping to try again next week, after he went back to school.

  “I am excited,” Tracey said. “I’m also kind of scared. And are you sure you don’t want to do it? You worked at a bar.”

  “Yeah, and that ended so well for me,” Josie reminded her. She’d lost her job when Hail’s flu had lingered for two weeks and she’d had to miss work. “Besides, if I can manage it, I want to work during the day so I can be with Hail at night.”

  “That makes sense. I’ve been a waitress, but what if I screw up?” Tracey asked. “I don’t want to disappoint Bones or Sarah. They’ve been so good to me.”

  Sunny stuck a peppermint on the roof of Tracey’s gingerbread house and said, “You can’t disappoint them because they aren’t judgmental.”

  “You don’t know that,” Tracey said.

  “Actually, I do. My father is a Dark Knight. I spent years getting into trouble and rebelling against being protected so vehemently. I owe my life—and my parents probably owe their sanity—to Bones.” Sunny told them about how even after she’d given up on herself, Bones refused to give up on her. He’d shown up at parties she attended to watch over her, drove her home, and stood guard outside her place at night, keeping sketchy people from seeking her out. “Bones is the man. I was a rotten kid to him. I was snarky, and I ridiculed him for babysitting me. But he never relented. He was everywhere I was, and he didn’t try to scare me by telling me I was on a path to kill myself, or try to bully me into line. He was just always there, letting me run myself into the ground, and at the same time making sure that ground was too solid for me to dig too deep of a hole. Eventually he got through to me, and I realized I was running from the shame of the life I’d created. If not for Bones, who knows where I’d be today.”

  “My husband was like that,” Josie said. “More so before he became my husband, because by the time we got married I was eighteen going on thirty.” She glanced at Hail and knew she couldn’t say much in front of him because he’d hold on to every nugget and dig into it later, wanting to know the whys and hows of all of it. So she said, “He had a way of being around at all the right times, stopping me from making mistakes. He wouldn’t ever let me disrespect myself in any way.” Which, as a teenager who was hot for him and had tried—and failed—to seduce him, was very frustrating.

  “When you worked at the bar, did guys get handsy with you? That’s my other worry,” Tracey asked.

  “Guys hit on women at the grocery store and the gas station,” Josie said. “That’s just life. It’s up to us to put them in their place.”

  Sunny grabbed a cookie from a plate in the middle of the table and said, “The guys who work at Whiskey Bro’s won’t let anyone bother you. Trust me on that. Neither will Dixie, for that matter. She’s Bones’s sister, and she is one bada—” She glanced at Hail and Emily and said, “She’s a tough biker. You’ll like her. Besides, you could use some toughening up, Tracey. Maybe then you won’t let anyone hurt you ever again.”

  The buzzer sounded, indicating someone was at the front door. Sunny jumped up and said, “Be right back.”

  After she left the room, Josie said, “I hope you don’t feel like you have to take the job at the bar because of me or Sarah.”

  “I’ve been filling out online applications for stores around here since I arrived weeks ago,” Tracey explained, “and I’m still coming up empty.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve been doing the same.”

  “I’m grateful for the opportunity, and I want to take it. I just don’t want to have to dodge guys pawing at me. But it sounds like the Whiskeys try to keep that under control.” Tracey shrugged and said, “What’s the worst that can happen? If it’s uncomfortable, I’ll quit.”

  Sunny came back into the kitchen and said, “Josie, Jed’s here to see you.”

  “I don’t know a Jed.”

  “He’s a friend of the Whiskeys,” Sunny said. “He said he’s here on behalf of the Dark Knights. Sounds to me like Bones has put you under the DK umbrella of protection.”

  Josie rolled her eyes. “I don’t need to be pro
tected by them. It was bad enough when he sent Bullet after us. The guy terrified me. If it weren’t for his wife, Finlay, I’d have called the police. I’ll get rid of this guy. Be back in a sec.” She bent down by Hail and said, “Think you can behave for a few minutes, bean?”

  He nodded. His face was streaked with frosting, and his lips were sticky with sparkles of sugar from Sour Dots.

  Josie washed her hands and went in search of the guy who was about to get booted off the premises. She didn’t care how nice the Whiskeys were. She wasn’t a piece of property that needed protecting. As she entered the hall that led to the lobby, she saw the guy standing with his back to her, his hands in the pockets of his black leather jacket. He was leaning forward, reading something on the bulletin board, and she couldn’t help but notice the way his jeans hugged his hamstrings and ass. God, when did I turn into one of those girls? Ridiculous.

  She crossed her arms and said, “Hi. I’m Josie.”

  He turned, and his eyes connected with hers with the shock of a thousand volts, rendering her mute. Her mouth went bone dry, and her pulse sprinted. It was Moon, and he was even more rugged, more handsome, than she remembered. But it was his sharp, spirited, and somehow also piercing blue-gray eyes that beckoned her like an old friend. They stared at each other for a long silent moment, every interminable second pulsing with heat. She had the strange urge to run to him, and he must have seen it, because his eyes darkened with the savage inner fire she remembered.

  She finally managed to say, “Moon,” at the same time he said, “Jojo,” and her heart stumbled.

  “I wasn’t sure I hadn’t made you up last night,” he said, stepping forward.

  He was even taller close up, broader chested, his features more striking. The scar on his cheekbone called out to her. How many times had she touched it that night—the night that had felt like it had lasted a month?

  “Why are you here?” she asked too sharply, but she couldn’t help it. She was confused, startled, overwhelmed. She had fallen in love with Brian over a period of weeks, months, years. He’d cared for her, protected her, and made sure she had a wonderful life. But he hadn’t touched her until she turned eighteen, despite her efforts to seduce him when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…He was a good, smart man, who had wanted the best for her. With Moon it had been just like this, an electric attraction from the moment she’d first seen him. She’d never spoken to him until just days before her eighteenth birthday, when she’d tried again to get under Brian’s skin, and he’d thoughtfully, frustratingly turned her away…again.

  “I wanted to be sure,” he said.

  He flashed the boyish smile she remembered, softening his roughness. She’d told him that all those years ago, when she’d gone to the party to make Brian jealous, and she hadn’t looked away when Moon had pinned her with that stare.

  “Now you know,” she said nervously, struggling against conflicting desires to tell him to leave and the bewildering feeling that she’d found an old, trusted friend. A friend she’d once known intimately. How could the air between them still ignite this many years later?

  He took his hands from his pockets and slid one to the back of his neck, rubbing as if he had a pain there. His eyes became hooded, and he said, “I can hardly believe it. You said your name was Joanne. I had no idea you were Sarah’s sister. She’s been searching for you for months.”

  “I know. Sorry to cause trouble.” She glanced around them, glad they didn’t have witnesses to their uncomfortable, and equally enticing, meeting. “Joanne was the name I went by so my parents wouldn’t find me.”

  His expression turned serious. “Jojo, are you okay? Sarah said you have a kid. Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re fine. Thanks.”

  “But you’re at the shelter. Has anyone hurt you?” He rolled his shoulders back and said, “I’ll kill them if they did.”

  A nervous laugh slipped out, and a perplexed expression came over him, as if he thought she didn’t believe he could hurt someone, which was crazy. His tight T-shirt hugged his muscular pecs, and his leather jacket did nothing to hide his powerful arms. She lowered her eyes, involuntarily checking out his thick thighs. That was a mistake, because now her eyes were hovering around his package.

  She dragged her eyes away, and his low laugh drew her eyes back to his.

  They were both smiling. Damn, this was how it had all started that night. A look, a comment, and the next thing she knew they were walking away from the bonfire, away from the party, toward the creek. They’d talked for so many hours that night, she’d felt like she’d known him forever.

  She struggled to push that memory away and remember what he’d last said. Oh yeah, that he’d kill someone if they hurt her.

  “No one hurt me,” she said. “At least not on purpose. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, good. I’d like to help you out any way I can. Do you want to go someplace and talk?”

  She actually considered it for about three seconds. What am I thinking? I have a life to put back together. “I don’t even know you or what you’ve been up to all these years.”

  “Let’s talk. I’ll catch you up.” He waved to the couches in the waiting room.

  “I can’t,” she said quickly. “I’m decorating gingerbread houses with my son, Hail. He’s in the kitchen with everyone else.”

  “Good, because I brought him something.” He pulled a small rectangular gift box out of his pocket.

  “Geez, Moon.” That was so thoughtful. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “He’s a kid. It’s Christmas.” He shrugged. “Seemed like the right thing to do.” He glanced down the hall and said, “You know, I’ve never decorated a gingerbread house. Mind if I join you?”

  “Yes,” came out before she had time to think. She didn’t want to send him away, and she didn’t understand why, but she thought she should. He was a stranger, wasn’t he? Even if they’d been intimate once before?

  He arched a brow. “Seriously? You’d rob me of my first experience decorating a gingerbread house?”

  “I…It’s probably against the rules.”

  An arrogant and freaking hot grin slid across his face. “I like breaking rules. Besides, I have a gift to deliver to your little guy. That is, unless you want to rob him of this experience, too.”

  There it was, the sweet and sexy combination that had done her in the first time. “Maybe I need protecting from you,” she said with a laugh.

  “Trust me, Jojo, you don’t. Now, about those houses…” He stepped beside her, putting his hand on her lower back and bringing her down the hall with him as he said, “Is the kitchen this way? Because it smells delicious.”

  JED TOLD HIMSELF he was being pushy because he didn’t want to disappoint Sarah and Scott or Biggs and the other club members; he was a prospect after all. Every move he made would be judged by the members until they decided about his becoming one of them. But as they walked toward the kitchen and Josie went on about the shelter rules and regulations, he knew he was partially lying to himself. He wanted to prove to everyone that he was worthy of their trust, but mostly he wanted to prove himself to Jojo, the girl who had given him a glimpse of what he was missing out on all those years ago.

  She stopped walking with a worried expression on her face and said, “Moon, the women in the kitchen came here to find security, a sanctuary. Some of them escaped abuse, while others are just in a difficult place. I don’t know if this is okay or not. I should ask Sunny. You might scare them. Are men even allowed in here?”

  “It’s okay. I know all of that. The shelter was started by the family of a Dark Knight. Biggs assured me that this would be okay or I wouldn’t have come.”

  “Biggs? Now you sound like you’re just making up names to suit your purpose.”

  He laughed, eliciting a smile, which made him want to laugh again, just so he could see her beautiful face light up one more time. “Biggs Whiskey is Sarah’s fiancé’s father, and the president of the Dark Knight
s. His family’s been patrolling Peaceful Harbor for generations, and they’ve been keeping watch on the shelter since it first opened. If Sunny tells me to leave, I’ll go. No questions asked.”

  “Okay” came out just above a whisper. Then, in a stronger voice, she said, “Just don’t scare anyone. And don’t assume you know me just because we slept together once a hundred years ago.”

  She was so freaking cute, the size of a sprite but all bossy and in charge. He liked knowing the world hadn’t beaten that out of her. “I think I know who you were and that we had a lot in common, but I’m not fooling myself. I don’t know you as well as I’d like to.”

  With a curt nod, she said, “Okay,” and headed for the kitchen.

  He fell into step beside her and the space between them heated up. She pressed her lips together. He stifled a grin at the same moment she stole a glance at him—and she scowled.

  “Get that smug look off your face,” she snapped.

  “It’s not smug. It’s…” Happy? That sounded lame, so he said, “Come on, Jojo. You can’t deny that zing of attraction that’s still hanging around us.”

  “Shut up,” she snapped, and shifted her eyes away. “We’re not talking about that, or I’ll kick you out on your ass regardless of what anyone else wants.”

  “There’s the feisty girl I once knew,” he said softly, catching her glare as they entered the kitchen.

  The counters were littered with trays of gingerbread men cookies, large gingerbread sheets, and bowls of different types of candies, pretzels, and colorful frostings. Three women sat at a table decorating gingerbread cookies and houses. Sunny and another short-haired brunette sat at another table with a shaggy-haired little boy and an adorable redheaded girl. Their table was also full of festive creations. On the table beside the little boy was a treasure trove of toy construction trucks.

  He’d brought only one gift and he didn’t want to hurt the little girl’s feelings, so he shoved it in his pocket.

  “Jed?” Sunny said, and all eyes turned toward him. Silence fell over the room as Sunny came to his side, giving Josie a questioning look. “I see you charmed Josie.”