by Avery Flynn
It was past time for him to figure this shit out. He needed a reset, a change of priorities. He’d step back from the scene for a few weeks and maybe then he’d figure out what was giving him this itchy little feeling that things weren’t just off, that he’d missed something important. That was it. A temporary powering down of the small head to power up the big head. There was a reason why fighters didn’t fuck before a big match. Women messed with a man’s head. So he’d enter a little player rehab for a few weeks, just him and his right hand.
Yeah, but he wasn’t one for spending a lot of time by himself. Could be a twin thing or that he was just a people person in general, but even the idea of three weeks with only himself for entertainment gave him the cold shakes.
The waitress picked that moment to stop by, and he nearly grabbed his bill back from her to tear off the section with her number on it.
Get a grip, Hartigan.
He stilled his hand in time, but that had been damn close.
“Thanks,” Lucy said as she handed over the exact change plus tip.
Lightning struck for the second time in five minutes: he’d be Lucy’s date to her high school reunion. It was the perfect plan because, as awesome as she was, she wasn’t his type. There wasn’t any teasing flirt to her. She was blunt, ballsy, and definitely not the kind of woman to relinquish control even for a second. However, she was fun as hell, and that was just what he needed to keep him busy and out of trouble. And the fact that she was definitely not into him was a bonus.
Lucy stood up and set her purse on her chair, then started to put on her jacket. Adrenaline jolted him out of his seat.
“You can’t miss your high school reunion,” he said, louder than he meant. “You owe it to yourself to go show them that their bullshit couldn’t hold you back. You already have the killer job, and I have the perfect solution for dealing with people giving you shit.”
“Really?” she asked, not even slowing in the process of getting her suit jacket on. “How’s that?”
“I’m gonna be your date.” He straightened to his full height of six feet, six inches. “No one gives anyone I’m with a hard time.”
Lucy laughed—loud enough to make the people around them turn and look—and smacked her hand to the table.
Damn. His ego was as big as he was, but it had taken about all it could take in one night.
“Very funny,” she said, wiping away a tear of laugher from her eye and catching her breath. “But I’m not going to drive with you out to Missouri for my high school reunion.”
Now that was a haul. “Why aren’t you flying?”
That question wiped the smile off her face. “Have you seen how people my size are treated on a plane?” She gave him a slow up-and-down. “You of all people should understand that those little seats are uncomfortable unless you’re a Smurf.”
She wasn’t wrong. Every time he’d take his seat, he had to pretzel himself up to fit, and then the jerkwad in front of him always tried to tilt his seat back, right up until he saw the pissed-off giant behind him. Really, not flying made sense.
“So we drive.” He shrugged. “How long could it take?”
“A day and a half.” She picked up her purse and slid the strap over her shoulder.
He could make that work. “Good thing I am on forced vacation.”
“You’re suspended?”
“No.” That would be easier to take. Then there would be an actual reason why he couldn’t go to work, rather than because of some bullshit rule. “I haven’t taken any of my required off-time, and the HR department freaked out. Don’t make me sit home and be bored. Seriously. I don’t do time off well. Last time I built a deck.”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
She was back to looking at him like he was a moron. He wasn’t dumb, but he was not someone who should ever be left alone with a hammer and nails.
“I had to pay an ungodly amount to have someone come in and demolish what I’d done and build one that didn’t try to defy the laws of physics.” He gave in to the sense of urgency flooding his system. “Come on, have pity on me. Let me be your date.”
Lucy didn’t just look at him, she seemed to look right inside him. He wasn’t a man who squirmed, but he did anyway. If she gave her clients that kinda look, he couldn’t believe that they didn’t just shut the fuck up and change their behavior immediately.
“Why do you want to do this?” she asked, suspicion thick in her tone.
Because he was running away from ghosts of women past. He needed to clear his big head, and celibacy was a helluva lot easier when there wasn’t temptation involved. Lucy was a great girl, but she wasn’t the kind that he needed to worry about moving his zipper. She was, without a doubt, a total ballbuster, and he wanted to keep his family jewels intact. “You saved me from a boring night at Marino’s. Let me return the favor.”
She narrowed her big brown eyes at him and pursed those full red lips of hers. He was holding his breath without really understanding why and didn’t let it go until Lucy’s mouth turned upward in a bemused smile.
“Fine,” she said, chuckling as she shook her head. “Frankie Hartigan, will you go to my high school reunion with me?”
Chapter Three
Lucy added a dab of green paint to the canvas in front of her, took a sip of white wine from a small plastic cup, and tried her hardest to keep her red mouth shut. It was a losing battle. She knew it. Judging by the curious looks her best friend Tess, who sat next to her at paint and sip night, kept sending her way, she knew it, too. Glancing left, Lucy spotted her other besties, Gina and Fallon, sending her questioning looks. She pressed her lips together and turned her focus to her canvas again. It was supposed to be a tranquil creek flowing through a hilly landscape underneath a smog-filled sky—the leader of their weekly paint and sip night, Larry, was an odd duck, to put it mildly.
“What is going on?” Tess whispered. “Why are you so quiet?”
On her other side, Gina and Fallon leaned in closer. Lucy had two choices. The first was to fake a sudden case of deafness. The other was to try to bullshit her way out of telling her friends the truth. Both had an equal chance of working. Her girls knew her too well. They knew she saved all her secret-keeping for her clients and let all of her shit fly in the wind.
A counselor she’d seen in college told her that she used TMI as a defense mechanism. She’d told the counselor to go fuck himself. Yeah. He may have been onto something there.
She swished her paintbrush in the plastic cup of water she’d been warned a million times not to mix up with her plastic cup of wine. “I’ve decided to go to my high school reunion.”
“Okay, so this should be when you should be telling us everything and psyching yourself up,” Gina said, narrowing her eyes at Lucy. “Instead you haven’t made a single comment about the dead birds falling from the sky in Larry’s sample painting.”
“I’m taking someone.” There it was, out there. That should end the questioning…if she lived in an alternate universe.
Gina, Tess, and Fallon stopped painting and turned to her in unison, their eyes wide. Then they all spoke at once.
“Who?” Fallon asked.
Tess burst out with, “You’ve been holding out on us!”
“Tell us everything,” Gina said, clapping her hands excitedly but forgetting to put down her paintbrush first, so they all ended up with little dots of gray on their smocks.
Lucy couldn’t give them a hard time about their surprise. She was still in shock herself. For years, she, Tess, and Gina had considered themselves the undateables—really, they had novelty T-shirts made up and everything. Lucy was the designated fat friend. Tess, the introvert who couldn’t say six words to a member of the opposite sex unless they were “I am Groot”—twice. Gina wasn’t what anyone would call conventionally attractive. They’d banded together and formed a little alliance. Now Gina had a big ol’ rock on the ring finger of her left hand. And Fallon? Well, she spent her days in scrubs
as an ER nurse and her nights in shlubby joggers, keeping the same suffers-no-fools attitude twenty-four seven.
Needing fortification before making her announcement, Lucy shot back what was left of the discount-aisle wine in her cup. “I’m going with Frankie.”
There was a beat of silence before the words came flying at her from all directions at once.
“Frankie who?” This from Tess who, present company excluded, loved her plants way more than people. She gasped. “Not Frankie Hartigan, right?”
Fallon let out a groan. “Oh my God, no.”
“How did that happen?” Gina half asked, half squealed.
Larry cleared his throat and sent their little group a look that said shut up now. That was Larry. He loved them for being regulars while hating them for it at the same time. He liked his studio to be an oasis of quiet creativity during paint and sip nights. Lucy and her crew—like 99 percent of the other customers—came to gossip, drink, and giggle.
Lucy dropped her voice to a very un-Lucy-like level of quiet and gave her friends the lowdown on what had happened at Marino’s the other night. They sat with their heads close together, paintings all but ignored, during the entire story, letting loose with a few heartfelt mumbles about what a total jerk the salad guy was and quiet agreement from Fallon that her brother should never be set loose with power tools if the goal was to build something rather than cut someone out of a wrecked car.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Tess asked once story time ended.
No. Not in the least. In fact, it was beginning to feel like a very, very bad idea, going by the cadre of nervous butterflies doing the Watusi in her stomach. “It’ll be fine. He’s going as my fake date and giant-sized-asshole deflector.”
Gina tapped the end of her paintbrush on the tip of her pronounced nose. Thankfully it was the non-paint-covered end. “You’ll be in the car with Frankie—alone—for two days?”
“A day and a half, really.” Of being squashed in her Toyota Prius with a man who had the ability to melt women’s panties with a smile. Of course, he wouldn’t melt her panties because they were bigger than those of his usual targets—let’s face it, they were much bigger—and made of steel, which was what happened when one had crushed on the wrong kind of guy and been burned, hurt, or ignored too many times to ever do it again. “Eighteen hours to be exact.”
“Oh, that changes everything,” Fallon said, all but rolling her eyes at Lucy. “Look, I love my brother, but just be careful.”
“He’s a sweetheart,” Gina said, always the one to stick up for the underdog.
Fallon snorted loud enough to draw Larry’s glare again. “No, he’s a man-whore. I love my brother to death, but that doesn’t change who he is. He can’t commit.”
“Maybe Lucy will change him,” Gina said, her voice going all soft and loopy. “A road trip is so romantic.”
And that is what happened when a woman fell; she started believing that it was possible for everyone. But that was not what Frankie had in mind. Sure, they’d had fun, but she knew how to spot attraction in the opposite sex, and Frankie definitely didn’t see her that way. She was a size twenty in a size zero world. She was smart, healthy, motivated, and ambitious, but that didn’t change the way people looked at her and the assumptions they made based on her size. Time to nip Gina’s pie-in-the-sky dreams for her road trip now.
“It’s twelve hundred miles spread out over two days. It’ll be eating fast food in the car, a night in a cheap hotel, and probably a speeding ticket or two,” Lucy said. “Romantic is the last thing it’s gonna be.”
Even if she couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like.
…
Poker night at the house Frankie shared with his twin Finn was serious business—when it came to beer and bragging rights. The betting was limited to pocket change, and the jokers were always wild. He, Finn, and Ford were already two hands in when Fallon came through the door after a long shift in the ER, still wearing those god-awful clog shoes and a surly expression on her usual makeup-free face.
“Are you insane?” she asked without any other form of greeting. “You can’t take Lucy Kavanagh to her high school reunion.”
Frankie flinched. The brotherly shit-talking around the table stopped in an instant.
Fuck-nutters.
He’d been hoping to get out of town before anyone in the Hartigan clan found out about his plans in order to avoid a trip to Judgementville, population his pain-in-the-butt sister Fallon. With a family as into each other’s business as theirs was, he should have known the chances of getting away clean were somewhere between null and never gonna happen.
Frankie dropped his cards on the table, face up—at least he had a whole lotta nothing in his hand anyway. Finn laid down his cards, and Ford gathered them all up and started shuffling. Both of his brothers looked from Fallon to him, shit-eating grins on their faces, ready for the show—all his suddenly mute brothers were missing was the popcorn. Smug jerks.
There really wasn’t a point in denying his plans. “Why not?”
“Because she’s my friend.” Fallon yanked out a chair, put her jar of quarters on the table, and sat down.
Non sequitur alert. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Frankie, I love you,” she said as Ford started dealing. “But you can’t make Lucy part of your ever-changing harem. She’s not like your other women. She’ll take it personally. You may not realize it, but under that eats-nails-for-breakfast persona is a total softie.”
Annoyance had him bouncing his knee under the table. “I don’t have a harem.”
That got a round of disbelieving chuckles from the table. Assholes. He was related to a bunch of assholes.
“Well, I don’t.” He loved women, what was so wrong with that? He dated many of the women he was attracted to, and while getting to date number three rarely happened because there was always another woman out there who caught his eye, no one walked away orgasm-free or heartbroken. Everyone knew the score going in. He was nothing if not honest and up-front. And what had he gotten for that honesty? A reputation as a guy who was good for only one thing. That was starting to really piss him off. “Anyway, if I did, Lucy wouldn’t be part of it.”
“Why’s that?” Finn asked as he picked up his cards.
He glanced down at his cards and found another crapfest. “She’s not my type.”
Fallon snorted and threw two cards on the table facedown in the universal sign for hit me with two fresh cards. “You mean she isn’t all boobs, ass, and tiny waist, weighing in at under one hundred and twenty pounds.”
“That’s not it,” he said, not bothering to keep the pissed-off edge out of his tone.
His sister should know him better. He was an asshole, but not that kind of asshole. The truth was, Lucy would eat him alive. People might say firefighters were adrenaline junkies who rushed into danger when others ran away, but every one of them had finely tuned survival instincts. He knew just where that line was, and for some reason Lucy Kavanagh set off every warning bell he had. That hadn’t stopped him from thinking about her at inopportune times—like in the shower when he was taking care of his morning hard-on—but that only reinforced that his dick could not be trusted at the moment.
“Really?” Fallon asked. “Then what is it?”
“I’m on the bench, so no woman is my type.”
Ford laid his cards facedown on the table and gave Frankie the cop stare down he’d been practicing since birth. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve benched myself.” Finn, Ford, and Fallon all stared at him like he’d grown another head. Guess he was going to have to spell it out for them. This wasn’t going to be weird or awkward at all. “I’m taking a break from sexual activities.”
“Did you catch something?” Finn asked.
They might be twins, but it was definitely fraternal, not identical. While Frankie had rarely met a risk he didn’t want to see if he could survive, Finn was th
e kind of guy who never did anything by chance. Of course he’d figure Frankie had blown off protection, which he did not do. Ever.
“No, I do not have an STI.” He bit out each word at his brother.
Fallon eyeballed him. “Did you fall down and break your boner?”
Frankie flipped his sister off. And to think that question came from the registered nurse in the family, who had to know that wasn’t possible. At least he didn’t think it was. Fuck. He was not going to Google that. Some things a man didn’t need to know.
“Then what is your thinking here?” Ford asked.
“Let’s just say I’m expanding my horizons, and this three-week break from work might be the perfect time to take a break from other things, too.”
Everyone sat in excruciating silence for all of about five seconds before Fallon let out a huff of disgust. “Franklin Delano Hartigan, you shithead.”
“What the hell is that for?” he asked. Not that he wasn’t, but he did like specifics.
“That’s why you agreed to go to Lucy’s high school reunion,” Fallon said, shaking her head. “I’ve been trying to figure it out since she told me, and now I understand. You shallow jerk of a man, you think that by spending a week in the constant company of an extra-curvy woman that you’re taking yourself ‘out of temptation’s way.’” She air quoted the last bit sarcastically.
“That’s some bullshit,” he said before he could think better of making the admission. His lack of attraction to Lucy had more to do with total non-compatibility rather than physical attraction. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Everyone just stared at him, their cards ignored. Why had he opened his mouth? He should have just let his family think that he was the same kind of asshole as the piece-of-shit at Marino’s giving Lucy a hard time about her cheeseburger. It would have been a helluva lot less awkward.
“So, you find her attractive?” Finn asked, sounding a lot like their scientist youngest sister, Felicia, when she was in the middle of gathering data for a study—except instead of getting information on ants, it seemed like Finn had focused in on his twin.