by Sophia Gray
“Annie!” he said as the name popped back into his head. “Hey, how are you?”
She waved a hand. “Not bad. I’m only back in town for a few weeks before heading back East.” Her gaze was expectant.
He wracked his brain. She was a model, right? Or maybe she wanted to be a model. Finn couldn’t quite remember which it was. He knew Annie never stuck around long and liked to be entertained while she was in town. She had the cutest butterfly tattoo on her back…and yet, for all that, he had absolutely no inclination to ask her out.
“That’s cool,” he said, taking his change and plunking a portion of it in the little tip container at the front of the counter. “Stay safe.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. For a second she looked dumbstruck. Then she gathered herself back together and leaned across the counter. He knew what she was doing—they both did. Usually this kind of thing worked for him. Aggressive women with simple needs, he had once said, were a godsend. “Oh, uhm…I am clocking out in like, three hours. Maybe I could swing by the pool hall later?”
He gave a nod. “That’d be cool. I’m sure Speed or Titan or someone would love to see you. I won’t be there. I’ve got a previous engagement. But it was nice to see you again.”
Annie looked shell-shocked, but not nearly as much as Cora did. The pretty redhead stared up at him like she hadn’t quite seen him before. He gave her a grin. Her jaw hung open for a few moments before snapping shut, and she turned away from him. It was easy to watch her walk away. He didn’t care how much those jeans had cost her; they were worth every little penny.
Did she know how pretty she was? Probably. A woman like Cora couldn’t look into the mirror and not know exactly what she looked like. Even in simple clothes, with her arms crossed she seemed to command the entire attention of the Deli. Or at the very least, the attention of Finn. She waited in silence for her order to come up before plucking it off the counter and heading back out to her table.
A minute later he plopped down next to her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, figuring she’d prefer the direct approach to beating around the bush.
“She wanted you to go out with her.” She dragged her pretty nails through her prettier hair, and he had the singular pleasure of watching it all fall back around her face. He found himself wondering if she looked better with it up or down. Down she looked softer, which was a lie. Very little about Cora Anderson was soft. With it up, he had been able to see every bit of her face.
He laughed in amusement. “Ohh, I’m sure she wanted a whole lot more than that.”
“Well, why didn’t you?” She hadn’t touched her food. Instead she was watching him with those clever eyes.
He took a moment to push his straw out of the wrapper and plunk it into his cup. The grate of plastic on plastic sounded louder than it should have. He took a long drink of cold soda before he finally shrugged and shook his head. “I didn’t want to.”
“You have before. I could see it in the way she watched you.” Her tone wasn’t quite accusatory, but it rode the line pretty close.
He nodded. If this were another woman he might have lied, but it had been made very clear to him that this particular woman did not forgive deceptions, even the polite kind. “We did. She is some kind of model. Does a lot of work for resort pictures, I think. You know the kind they splash all over traveling websites to make it look like only pretty people have fun at those places? She’s one of those. She comes back here between jobs because she’s got a sick aunt or old grandmother or something. I dunno.”
“A model?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “A model. Why?”
Her mouth was hanging open again. He sat back in his seat, puffing his chest out with pride. Is that what it took to get her to look at him? Turn other women down? He could do that. Hell, he could do a lot of that if it meant she gave him her undivided attention.
“I don’t understand.” She plucked at her sandwich wrapper. A few flecks of white crabmeat fluttered against the table. She plucked them up and set them in a neat pile on the edge of her napkin. He didn’t have a ruler, but he was pretty sure they formed a perfect line. “You should have gone with her.”
“Are you telling me I missed out?” He unwrapped his own sandwich and took a bite.
“That’s not what I meant. I mean…you are the kind of guy who would have jumped on that opportunity. I fully expected you to…go for it.” She waved one hand dismissively, crossing and uncrossing her legs as if she couldn’t get comfortable.
“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on her knee to steady her movements. “I know you don’t think a lot of me, but give me some credit. I don’t jump on every offer that’s thrown my way.”
“I can hardly give you much seeing as how you’ve admitted to sleeping with her before.”
“Yeah.” He held his gaze on her until her eyes caught his. They were like a smoky sky behind polar ice caps, frigid and glorious. “But that was before I met you.”
For a moment, she stopped breathing. Her lips parted in an oval of surprise, and her gaze lingered on his mouth as if she was trying to focus on what he’d just said. “Me?”
His hand splayed across her knee, the palm cupping her leg as he swept his thumb over the inner seam, dancing across the denim that was clinging to the roundness of her thigh. He felt the muscle twitch beneath his touch, and a thrill went through him. That small response did wonders for his pride. She wanted him, he was sure of it.
“What are you doing?” A light breathiness ruined her normally demanding tone.
“Touching you,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”
Her eyes fluttered as his thumb skipped another inch forward. He could almost feel the heat of her through the cloth. It was too easy to know she was damp inside her pants. He wanted to roll them down her legs and show her just how good he could be. He was just beginning to form the words to ask her to spend the afternoon with him when she reached down and gripped his wrist, halting his progress.
“Yes, I do. I want you to stop.” There was no breathlessness this time. Only the cool certainty he now associated with Cora. Her eyes, however, were filled with something he hadn’t expected: a dollop of fear. “Please.”
He pulled his hand back slowly. Finn was a lot of things, and he broke a lot of rules. But making a woman he liked, and even respected from time to time, afraid of him was not something he enjoyed. “All right. I’m sorry.”
Her gaze lingered on his face again. She looked like a doe who had spotted a hunter. “You’re right. I really don’t know a damn thing about you.”
“I’d like you to.” The offer was genuine, and he hoped he sounded it.
“That’s a really bad idea.” She shook her head and repeated, “A bad idea.”
“So what’s the problem?” He wanted to know. Despite what his uncle and probably a large portion of Carson thought, Finn did not pursue every woman, and he certainly did not get every woman he pursued. Plenty had told him no, and he had been more than happy to take his charms elsewhere. So why Cora? What was it about her that had him continuing to try?
She took a long swig of coffee before answering. “Would you prefer them alphabetically or chronologically?”
“Is there that many?”
“Of course there is. We can start off with the fact that you are exactly what I shouldn’t be getting involved with. If I were a kinky coed with aspirations of getting my picture taken for a living, then you would be my first choice. But I’m not. I’m a businesswoman who has very clear goals in mind for my future, and you simply aren’t in them.”
“I’m not asking for a marriage proposal.”
She held up one hand. “Well, that’s certainly one of the problems.”
He frowned. “You want me to want to marry you?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not you in particular, Finn. However, I no longer wish to be involved with a man simply for the fun of it. I want commitment, building for the future, all of that. Ex
plain that one away all you want, but you can’t deny that we have a far more important task at hand.”
He didn’t need her to explain that one. Understanding swamped him, and he took another healthy bite of his sandwich. “Oliver.”
She nodded in agreement and opened the bag of chips that had come with her meal. The crinkle of plastic filled the silence that spread between the two of them. It wasn’t until after she finished her second chip that she said, “Yes, Oliver. There is something going on with him. I’m sure of it.”
He had to admit he was sure of it, too. “He doesn’t talk to me as much as he used to.”
“What do you mean?” She dumped her chips into a neat little pile next to her half-eaten sandwich and plucked at them without much appetite. He hated to see her not eat. He wondered if Oliver’s text had been true. Could she not cook? Sure, she had money now, but he knew she hadn’t come from wealth. How had she not learned to cook?
He pushed his own nearly finished sandwich aside and opened the cookie he had gotten in lieu of chips. “I mean he used to come by and sweep up the shop, or learn something about cars. Uncle Bill had taken him in first. He’s like that with kids, did the same with me. I was okay with it because Oliver seemed like a cool kid, and before I knew it he was my friend. We’d spend a few hours there more days than not, yacking about everything while fixing something.”
Her chin dipped just a little. “Part of that is my fault. It’s part of the agreement we have with the department that he comes directly home from school.”
“No,” he said, tilting the cookie at her in offering. “That’s not it. He was coming by less and less before you showed up. He was getting distracted and everything. I thought he was just bored, maybe a little distracted because of that girl he had been talking about. But I dunno. This goes beyond being girl crazy.”
She lifted a brow and broke off a small piece of the cookie for herself. She ate it with slow mouse-like nibbles, as if eating smaller pieces meant she could savor it. “Girl crazy? Is that similar to being boy crazy?”
He laughed and pushed the rest of his cookie toward her. She eyed it for a moment before shrugging and picking it up. “Yeah, a little. Just tends to be stupider when it’s a guy.”
She smirked at him and tilted her head to the side so her hair made a curtain of color on one side of her face. “I find myself wondering just how stupid you have been for a girl.”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he teased. It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The small amount of comfort they had gained in the sharing of a meal and talking about Oliver had evaporated in a snap.
“Fair.” She finished off her own food and crumpled the paper up. “So what are we going to do?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I mean, I could keep sleeping in the car, making sure he doesn’t skip out on you.”
“How is that working for you?” she asked, crossing her legs, comfortably this time.
“Terribly,” he admitted, reaching up and rubbing the back of his neck. “Backseats were a lot more fun when I was a teenager.”
The chair scraped as she stood up and plucked the garbage off the table, then plunked it in the outdoor container. She used a napkin to sweep the crumbs into her palm and sent them chasing after the other detritus. “What other options do we have?”
“We could put a car alarm on his bedroom window.” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of the body shop. “I have like thirty of them.”
“That seems a little extreme.” She plopped herself down in the plastic chair and began to arrange her things back into a neat little order. He wondered if she liked to organize everything just so. Probably. She seemed like one of those type A personalities. “Besides,” she went on, “I’m fairly sure that’s against my temporary lease.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. We could download one of those apps to his phone that let us know when he’s not where he should be.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, clearly not comfortable with that. “I…I don’t know. I understand the why. I just don’t think I agree with the how. It feels a little like I am trying to control my brother.”
He nodded. “I get that. You want him to be free. You also want him to be the good kid.”
“Yes,” she said, conviction making the words into a prayer. “I do.”
“Problem. He’s already proved he isn’t being the good kid. He’s done some stupid shit and worse, he’s gotten caught doing it. That’s hard. So we will put the app on his phone. He’ll have to know about it.”
“Well, we don’t want him to think we are spying on him.”
“We are, a little bit, but yeah. Besides, he’ll see the app on his phone anyway.”
Cora sighed. “I’ll agree to the phone thing, not the car alarm. How are we going to tell him?”
“Together,” he said. He hefted himself out of his seat and stood up. He wanted to sit here all day and talk with her, maybe find out what it was that had taken the light out of her eyes and made light teasing into something that made her freeze up. He wanted to, but knew that pushing right now would only get her guard up again. “I’ll still swing by and check on things.”
“Deal.”
Chapter 9
Cora
Cora’s work had been finished before Finn even showed up at the Deli. It continued to be a mixed blessing. Cora never enjoyed feeling useless, and when she realized just how competent her people were without her, feelings of uselessness were setting in. She sent out a few e-mails to people at the company, congratulating them on a fantastic job and offering some ideas about how the next week should go, but she had the sneaking suspicion they weren’t ultimately necessary.
What was she supposed to do with the rest of the day? It was shaping up to be a warm afternoon, meant for having lunch with friends or getting her nails done. She glanced down at her hands and decided she didn’t need to do anything about her nails just yet, and it wasn’t as if she had any friends she could call upon to waste a few hours in idle relaxation. Finn, she realized with bemused horror, was the closest thing she had to a friend around here. Well, there was Wes or Speed or whatever name he was going by now, but he was probably being a small-town businessman somewhere. Possibly with Finn, who had returned to his own job but promised to come by later that evening to handle Oliver’s cell phone.
It felt good to have help. At work, she might have run things, but she relied on the people around her. She had a knack for utilizing their strengths and skills and placing them with the projects that worked for what they could do. Her entire life had worked that way, when she thought about it.
Even her romantic life, she admitted to herself as she perused her e-mail. There were a few from men that she had gone out with, wondering if they were going to see her again. She sent each of them a similar response of “I’m out of town handling family stuff, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Can I get you anything else?” a voice asked as Cora hit Send for the last time that afternoon.
It was the pretty girl, the model. The smile on her face, Cora decided, was like an empty decorative tissue box. Pretty, but lacking anything of substance. A very nice decoration to top off a well-wrapped package.
“No, thank you.” Cora slid her laptop away and laced her fingers over the remnants of her lunch plate.
“Okay, then.” The girl started to turn away. Her hair made a pretty fan behind her as she moved. It was surprisingly graceful, but Cora thought it was intended to be. A primal little move from one woman to another that said “I’m hot, and I know it, and that guy we were both talking to? He knows it, too.” Cora resisted the urge to smirk.
“Annie,” Cora called out, making the other woman skid to a stop. “Our mutual friend explained to me that you are a model?”
Annie blinked, her luminous brown eyes taking on a careful but friendly look. It was the pleasantly guarded expre
ssion a woman might have if she was expecting to talk about something she liked that other people didn’t. “I’ve done some photography work.”
Cora nodded and motioned to the empty seat on the other side of the table. “You go across the States to do it?”
“Yeah,” Annie said slowly, but she couldn’t quite stop herself from continuing on, “I work for a company that works with the resorts in the New England area. I mean, it’s not a lot of work, and the pay is crap, but I like it.”
It was clear the girl liked her work. As she talked about it, her eyes took on a tender shine and her shoulders squared out beneath the cheap apron she had to wear for the eatery. For the first time, Cora got to see real pleasure on the girl’s face, and it suited her well. If she looked half this pretty beneath harsh lights and quick camerawork, then she’d go far…so long as she was given the opportunity.