The trouble was, though, that it wasn’t just the way he was in bed that had been a surprise. Cal’s kindness and generosity in helping me make my apartment safe had been pretty unexpected as well. And as suspicious as I had been that he was just doing it to get me in the sack, I had to admit that seemed not to have been the case. Plus, the way he had listened to me — how kind and non-judgmental he had been when I’d told him about my stepfather — well, it was a side of Cal I would never have guessed existed in a million years.
I thought back to how angry Cal had gotten that day when he installed the locks and alarms in my place, when I had asked him if non-stop partying ever got boring. His response showed me that I had touched a nerve that was unexpectedly raw. It sure seemed like, contrary to the image he projected of being a guy that lived only to ride, party, and screw, he felt there was something missing in his life. And he wasn’t happy about admitting it, to himself or to me.
It was very possible that Cal Greenlee was not exactly what I thought he was. And admitting that scared me. I would have much preferred that he was the shallow bad boy he made himself out to be. It would be easier to forget him that way.
Because as nice as it had been to feel so protected, so cared for by him, it wasn’t something I could allow myself to get used to. I didn’t want last night to mean anything to me other than a temporary refuge. A port in the storm. Letting myself think otherwise was a recipe for heartbreak. And I had spent many years building up my defenses against heartbreak.
If Cal was just a shallow player, it would be easier to tell myself that his opinion of me meant nothing. That it didn’t matter if he thought of me as damaged goods after everything I’d told him.
If Cal was just a guy who had gone the extra mile to get laid, then it would hurt like hell, but I’d just wall that piece of my heart off again. I’d done it before.
But if he wasn’t?
Then I was screwed.
I was nervous as hell to see Cal again after the night and morning of unbridled, mind-bending sex we’d had, but in the end it wasn’t as scary as all that. Maybe it was because he ended up coming into Hammie’s that afternoon while I was working, so he was on turf that I was comfortable in, with my “working” face on.
As I was serving a beer to another customer, Cal came through the door and sat down at the bar for a beer.
“Hey, Doll,” he grinned, giving me that infuriating and panty-melting wink I knew so well.
“Hey, Romeo,” I tossed back at him. This was a routine I was comfortable with, a well-worn scenario I could play out with my eyes closed. I walked over to where he was sitting. “What can I get you?”
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “How about a tall glass of sexy blond rocker girl?” he drawled.
I fought the blush I felt creeping up my cheeks and reminded myself that there was a bar safely separating us. “You come all the way over here just to bug me, Greenlee?” I smirked.
“I did,” he nodded soberly. “But I don’t think you’re all that bugged. I think you’re happy to see me.”
“Think what you want,” I tossed back. “You gonna order a drink, or you just planning to sit there and take up space?”
“I’m just passing through,” he said. “Just thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing.”
My resolve to keep the flirtatious distance faltered a little, and I struggled to keep it up.
“I’m doing just fine, thanks.” I glanced over at a couple seated a few stools away, strangely self-conscious.
“We gonna see each other later?” he asked, a corner of his mouth lifting sexily.
“I don’t know. Do you want to see me later?” Sheesh, Andi, way to play hard to get. Any resolve I had tried to build up, so I wouldn’t just come running if he called, had apparently evaporated the second I saw him.
“What time do you get off work, Doll?” His voice lowered a couple more notes, and took on just a hint of the thick growl he sometimes used just before he stuck his face between my thighs.
I swallowed painfully, my panties moistening. “I’m here until six,” I said, fighting to keep my breathing normal.
“I’ve got some club business to take care of until later tonight,” he murmured throatily. “I’ll text you when I’m done.” It wasn’t a question.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. “Okay,” I finally stammered.
Cal stood up, and leaned toward me until his mouth was mere inches from my ear. “See you later, Doll. I’m gonna be counting the hours until I’m balls deep in that sweet little pussy.”
And with that, he turned and walked out of the bar, as I watched his muscular form and hot-as-hell ass and tried not to pass out.
A few minutes later, as I was absently washing glasses and trying as hard as I could not to think about Cal’s tongue between my legs, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, trying to contain my excitement that maybe his club business got canceled.
It was Seton. A rush of guilt flooded me as I read her text:
Hey, girl! You’ve been avoiding me! Let’s get together and talk about the shower!
As Seton’s best friend, I had offered to plan her baby shower, on the condition that she tell me exactly what she did and didn’t want. We’d worked out most of the details, but it was scheduled for next week, so we definitely needed to make sure everything was ready to go. Seton tended to be hyper-organized, and I knew that even though she was trying to be hands-off, she’d feel better if she knew everything was taken care of.
Sure, I texted back. When are you free?
I waited for a few seconds. Then:
Can you have dinner tonight? I’m dying to get out and do something!
I pulled in a deep breath and let it out. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Seton. In fact, she was right that we hadn’t seen each other hardly at all in the past couple of weeks, and I missed her. But how was I going to manage to act like everything was completely normal, and like the past week with Cal had never happened?
Well, I told myself, you’re just going to have to. Because telling Seton about this thing with Cal is not an option.
I started typing:
I get off work at six
Seton texted back:
Is Thai food ok? Meet at Thai Tanic at 6:15 or so?
Sounds good. C u then
“God, I’m already sooo ready for these babies to be out of me,” Seton complained good-naturedly, rubbing her belly. “I can’t even imagine how much worse it’s going to be three months from now.”
“I’m sure it sucks,” I said supportively to my friend. “If it’s any consolation, though, you look great.”
It was true. Somehow, Seton made maternity clothes look cute and fashionable. She was wearing her hair up in a perfect topknot today, and she had on a black cami and a black and tan striped maxi-skirt that showed off her baby bump adorably. She was definitely one of those pregnant woman you saw and hoped to God you would look like when the time came. If and when I ever got pregnant, I would probably gain like a hundred pounds and be a big, flushed, sweaty ball of grossness in a stained XXL T-shirt and oversized maternity pants.
“Well, I don’t feel great,” she grumbled. “But thanks.” She grabbed her chopsticks and delicately picked a piece of chicken out of her pad thai. I had chosen a kind of curry soup with just enough spice to make the beer I was drinking taste heavenly going down. I dipped my spoon in the broth and took a mouthful, savoring the flavors.
“So, I’ve heard back from most of the people on the invite list,” I told her. “Your mom RSVP’ed yes, by the way.”
Seton rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m pretty sure she’ll back out at the last minute. I can’t see her coming all the way from Scottsdale. And she hasn’t called me at all to tell me anything about coming up.”
“Okay,” I said, making a note on the pad I’d brought. I didn’t ask about Grey’s mom; I knew she had died when he was really little.
“What about the women fro
m the MC?” she asked.
“It looks like they’re all coming,” I said, looking down the list. “And Carly’s coming down from Denver. Your boss Jillian said yes, too, and most of the women you invited from the restaurant, except for Karen and Ann.” Seton worked as a sous-chef at a high-end restaurant in town called The Mockingbird.
“Oh, too bad they can’t make it,” she frowned.
“Here are the high school friends of yours who are coming.” I pointed at the list and she leaned over and scanned it.
“Wow, that’s more than I expected,” she said. “Looks like we’ll have almost twenty people. Gosh.”
We chatted about her baby registry, and what kinds of food she wanted at the shower. “Anything’s fine,” she said, “But just please no gross food things like a cake shaped like a baby coming out of the mom’s cooch, or that game where you have to smell the baby food and try to guess what flavor it is,” Seton said, wrinkling her nose. “I’m still really sensitive to food smells and images. It would be pretty embarrassing for me to hurl at my own baby shower.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess that’s probably frowned upon.”
“Oh, hey,” she said suddenly. “I meant to ask you, since we’ve only really texted the last couple of weeks. Did you manage to get your lock changed out? I should have had Grey give you a call to see if you needed him to stop by.”
A tiny warning alarm sounded in my head. “Um, yeah. I figured it out on my own. As it turned out, it wasn’t all that hard to do.”
“That’s good,” Seton said, taking a drink of her water. “You know, actually, you probably could have asked Cal to do it for you when you ran into him at our place. He’s really good at that kind of stuff. I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded.”
Shit. What should I say? If I just let the remark go and didn’t say anything, and then she found out later that Cal had come around, she’d wonder why I hadn’t told her about it. “Uh, actually, Cal did offer to help me, once he found out from you that I’d asked about it.” There. Maybe that would be enough.
“Oh? When was that? Did you run into him somewhere after I told him why you stopped by?”
Damnit. This wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. “Yeah…” I said, my eyes flicking toward the window. “He, uh, stopped by the bar a couple days later. To talk to Angus, I think.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and I heaved an inner sigh of relief. But it turned out she wasn’t quite done. “That was nice of him,” she nodded. “Did you take him up on his offer?”
Double shit. Well, it made no sense to lie about it. It was too risky. “Yeah, actually,” I admitted. “He came by last week and checked out my doors and windows and made sure the new lock was on right.”
“Oh,” she said, frowning slightly. “Huh. I ran into him a few days ago at the club. He never mentioned that.”
My brain was spinning crazily, trying to think of ways to change the subject, but I seemed to have lost my capacity to think clearly. “Oh,” was all I could manage to choke out. I grabbed my beer and took a long drink of it to stall for time.
“It’s funny about Cal,” Seton said, twirling her chopsticks in her noodles. “He’s been kind of different the last few months. Less wild and unpredictable, I guess, and more serious. Even Grey’s noticed it.”
“Oh?” I held my breath for a moment, not knowing whether to ask her to elaborate. On the one hand, I was actually dying to hear more about Cal from someone who knew him better than most people. Especially if it would give me some insight as to why he had reacted to angrily when I’d joked with him about his fast and loose ways. I was more interested in Cal and the mystery of what made him tick than I cared to admit, even to myself.
On the other hand, if I let Seton keep talking about Cal, there was a possibility that the conversation would veer back into territory that I really, really didn’t want to be going into with his sister.
In the end, my curiosity won.
“Huh,”I said, feigning nonchalance. “What do you think is the reason?”
“I don’t know.” Seton shook her head. “Then again, with Cal, sometimes he ends up reacting exactly the opposite way from what you’d think. When he first told me he was prospecting for the club, I was so upset. As you know. I was sure that being in an MC would make him into an even wilder and less responsible person than he already was. I was afraid he’d end up dead in some alley somewhere. But the weird thing was, the MC ended up changing him for the better.” She looked at me with a perplexed expression.
“Why do you think that is?” I prompted her.
“Well…” She thought for a moment. “The thing is, I realized later that prospecting with the club was the first time anyone had ever expected anything from him. All Cal’s life, even when we were kids, people just assumed he was gonna be this charming fuckup, so that’s what he was.” She shrugged. “But the club sort of brought out this strong side of him that I think was maybe there all along. It’s just no one ever gave him any real reason to pull his shit together and be someone who could be relied on. I think maybe Cal’s just someone who needed someone to expect him to stand up and show the best side of him.”
“That’s…wow.” I sat back and contemplated what Seton had just said. I knew from what she’d told me of her childhood that Cal, the youngest of the three Greenlee children, had been the golden boy of the family and the only one that their mother had seemed to really love, or even like. I knew, too, that he’d always been a charmer. I could only imagine what a little heartbreaker little five year-old Cal must have been like, with that dimpled grin that said he already knew you were going to forgive him, no matter what he’d done.
But I’d never thought much about how much he’d changed since joining the MC, or speculated as to why. Seton was right, though. Even I could see it. Since he’d become a Stone King, I knew he had been a better brother to her, more reliable and caring. Whereas Seton used to regularly complain about what a thoughtless jerk he was, I never heard her say that about him anymore. If anything, she would often mention little things he had done to help her and Grey out. Like picking up groceries for her if she wasn’t feeling well, or stopping by the house to unclog a sink if Grey was busy.
What if, I suddenly wondered, Cal was helping me and treating me so well because I was the first woman who ever expected better of him?
But I wasn’t, I argued stubbornly with myself. I never expected anything from Cal. I never asked him to do any of the things he’s done for me. I never told him I needed help. If anything, I’ve tried to refuse it.
But maybe, just maybe, a tiny voice inside me insisted, it’s because he wants you to think of him as a better man.
“Andi? Is something wrong?”
I startled out of my thoughts to find Seton peering at me worriedly.
“Sorry,” I stammered. “I just kind of got lost in my thoughts there.”
“No worries,” she said. “You okay, though? You seemed pretty out of it there for a minute.”
“Yeah, no, I’m fine. I’ve just got a lot on my mind lately,” I admitted.
“You want to talk about it?”
Shit. “No, that’s okay.” I shrugged, trying to give her a reassuring smile. “It’s nothing, really. Just life stuff.”
And then, in a desperate attempt to change the subject, I started telling her about our upcoming show in Denver, and thankfully Seton seemed to forget about my strange silence.
But as I drove back home after dinner, wondering how long it would be until I got a text from Cal, another wave of guilt washed over me at how I was deceiving my best friend. Before tonight, it hadn’t felt all that serious; I had mostly been able to convince myself that it was just a mostly-harmless secret — a one-time fling that she didn’t need to know about.
But tonight, sitting face-to-face across the table from her less than twelve hours after Cal and I had spent a crazed, passionate, frenzied night and morning together? When I was so sore from lovemaking that I could feel the memor
y of Cal’s hard length between my thighs even now?
When I knew that in just a few short hours, Cal would be back in my bed?
Now, I could no longer lie to myself.
When this whole thing between us was all over, it was likely to blow up in all of our faces.
I might lose my best friend as a result.
And I would deserve it.
15
Cal
CAL
I started spending most of my nights at Andi’s place.
It wasn’t something we talked about or decided, really. It just happened. The first night, I stayed over because she was scared, and ended up in her bed. The second night, I texted her after I got done with some business for the club, and arrived at her doorstep at eleven-thirty. We didn’t fall asleep until after three, our bodies exhausted and spent.
The third night, I just kind of showed up.
I told myself it was because I wanted to protect her from whoever was trying to terrorize her. And of course I was, in part. It seemed like it might be working, too. Andi hadn’t had any more calling cards since I’d been spending so much time with her. It was a pretty sure sign that whoever “they” were, they were still watching us. I didn’t say anything about my suspicions to Andi. I didn’t want her to worry.
But as much as I tried to tell myself that I was just trying to be a good guy and help someone who needed help, there was a deeper reason I kept showing up at Andi’s at the end of every day.
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