by Avery Flynn
“I agreed to a second date because you made me laugh, and that was all she wrote.”
Not what women usually said about him, but wasn’t that a big part of why he was here in the middle of the farm belt right now? “How long have we been together?”
She tapped her red-tipped nails over the inner seam of her jeans, obviously thinking over the options. “Six months. Enough time to really get to know each other but not so much that we’ve gotten past the cow-eyes thing.”
“Cow eyes?” he asked.
“You know when you get that goofy smile on your face when you see the person?” She must have realized he had no clue what she was talking about, because her eyes widened. “Oh my God. You haven’t really crushed on someone before? With all of the women you’ve dated, you haven’t gotten the stupid cow eyes because just looking at the person makes you all gooey and happy on the inside?”
Frankie didn’t have to think about it. “No.”
“So what, you just banged ’em and left ’em because they were totally interchangeable?” she asked, her astonished tone taking some of the sting out of her words.
“Not even close.” He loved women, all of them. He’d just never been in love with one woman. Maybe it was a defect, a character flaw that had kept him on the field so much longer than almost anyone else in his orbit. He was the player who couldn’t retire even though it was way past time.
“Explain it, then.”
There wasn’t any judgment in her words, just an honest, straightforward curiosity that had the words coming out of his mouth before he could consider whether he should.
“I like women. I like the women I’ve dated. I was attracted. They were attracted. Sure, the physical had something to do with it, but the why of the attraction was different for each one. It could be their laugh, their weird drink order, or the way they saw the world. So, we’d go out a couple times, have sex, and everyone was satisfied. No one got hurt. End of story.”
Silence hung between them, filling the inside of the car like a third passenger.
About two miles later she broke it. “That was enough for you?”
“It was.” The last word being the operative one.
“And now?”
He let out a sigh. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
And he had miles and miles of road ahead of him to do that. Too bad that by the time they pulled off what seemed like the thousandth highway they’d been on that day and onto the darkened streets of small-town Antioch, he hadn’t figured out a damn thing. After an extra-long day on the road, the only sound in the car was the GPS as it took him through the sleepy streets until he pulled into the driveway of a two-story blue house with white shutters and a wraparound porch, complete with flowers hanging in baskets and a swing. Light streamed from the house’s windows, and Lucy’s shoulders relaxed, a small smile that looked a lot like relief curling her lips.
“I should warn you about Gussie,” Lucy said after they’d parked and he’d grabbed his duffle and her two suitcases from the trunk. “He’s a little excitable.”
Frankie was still trying to figure out who Gussie was—he’d thought her dad’s name was Tom—when the front door opened. A blur of black flew out from inside, making a beeline straight for him. By the time he realized the streak was a dog, it was already leaping into the air and going straight for Frankie’s balls.
Chapter Seven
There were many benefits to growing up as a Hartigan. One was the fast reflexes a person developed when they were one of seven kids. Dodging a dog who thought he was a missile was nothing compared to getting out of the way of a flying towel or book aimed at his oversized noggin by one of his siblings.
“Oh my God,” Lucy yelled. “Gussie, no!”
In a move of incredible dexterity, she intercepted the dog, scooping him up in midair and pressing him to her chest. The dog, which Frankie could now identify as a French Bulldog, since it was no longer gunning for his family jewels, must have realized who held it because he let out the happiest of yaps and began licking her face.
Frankie was still watching her when a man who looked like he’d just walked out of The Dad Catalog hustled out of the front door and down the porch steps.
“I am so sorry about that,” he said. “Gussie is convinced that we are in a state of siege, and he’s actually a German Shepherd charged with protecting us against any and all strangers.”
“Translation,” Lucy said as she did her best to avoid Gussie’s tongue. “He’s a spoiled dog who’s half evil.”
The somewhat-evil dog in question was still slathering his attention on Lucy with total love and devotion, oblivious to the insult sent his way by the woman holding him. She wasn’t helping her cause of getting the dog to stop at all, either, because she kept making kissy noises and talking baby talk to it in a low tone.
Lucy’s dad held out his hand. “Tom Kavanagh. You must be the fake-but-still-walks-around-my-daughter-naked date.”
Well, that was one way to put it. He dropped his duffel to the sidewalk so he could shake Tom’s hand. He’d meant it to be a friendly gesture. Tom meant it to send a message, judging by the fact that the man was trying to break his knuckles with the strength of his grip.
“Dad,” Lucy said, delivering a kiss to her father’s cheek as she passed them, still carrying the besotted dog. “He was wearing a towel.”
Tom’s aw-shucks smile didn’t waver, but his hold tightened. “You’re right, Muffin. My mistake.”
Then he turned, hooked his arm through Lucy’s, and led her into the house. Shaking his head, Frankie picked up his duffle and followed them inside. He sat Lucy’s two suitcases and his bag down in the large entryway. It was all warm woods and peaceful greens and browns in here, from the hard floor to the ceiling. Off to the left, a door opened into a room with a large desk, several diplomas on the wall, and a chair facing a love seat. Beyond the open door straight ahead of him, though, the house was a riot of bright colors and huge windows that looked out onto a vast, tree-filled backyard. It was almost like the spaces were inhabited by two different people.
“He’s got the look,” Lucy said, setting Gussie down on the rug and stared adoringly up at her.
Her dad nodded. “That he does.”
“What look?” he asked.
“The one where people are trying to mesh two very different decorating styles into one home,” she said.
Okay, he was guilty there.
“The front is my dad’s office. He’s a sex therapist, and the warm, calming colors tend to help his clients relax.”
“It’s true. There have been studies about the power a muted green can have on the psyche,” Tom said.
“And in here, nothing’s changed since Mom left, so it pretty much looks exactly the way it did twenty years ago.” She cut a knowing look at her dad. “Not that a psychologist would have anything to say about the meaning of that.”
“What it says,” Tom answered as he walked to the open kitchen and pulled a trio of mugs from the cupboard, “is that I hate to redecorate and your mom did a great job, so why mess with perfection?”
“You should go sit on your couch and answer that one,” Lucy said and gave her dad a hug before turning on the stove to heat the kettle already on it. “Hot cocoa or chamomile?”
The question just hung out there while Frankie stood staring at the two of them, feeling a lot like he’d walked in on the middle of a conversation that those two had been having for years.
“Frankie,” Lucy said, snagging his focus away from trying to unwind the dynamics between father and daughter. “Which one will help you relax more after the drive? Taking a mug out onto the back deck after a hell drive like we had is a family tradition.”
“Hot chocolate,” he said without hesitation, because chamomile tasted like a rookie firefighter’s damp socks. Not that he’d actually eaten a rookie’s socks, but that tea was exactly what he imagined them tasting like.
A few minutes later, he was o
ut on the deck, standing next to Lucy and her dad and listening to the bugs chirp or whatever it was out there making that noise—he was from the city, even if Waterbury wasn’t Harbor City—and drinking hot chocolate that hadn’t been made from an instant packet, and wondering how in the hell he’d been missing out on this fucking fantastic drink for his entire life.
“It’s a family secret,” Lucy said as her dad gave him the evil eye over the top of his mug of…wait for it…chamomile.
“What is?” he asked, wondering if he could get away with licking the inside of his mug just to get every last drop.
“The hot chocolate. It’s my mom’s recipe.”
There was something in her voice when she said it that made him want to reach out and…what? Hug her? He didn’t have the right. They weren’t friends, despite the strange circumstances they were in. They weren’t lovers. They inhabited some weird space adjacent to all of that, and it didn’t have a name or solid boundaries. So he kept his hands to himself.
They sat in silence for a while—or as close to it as you could get while all of the insects in the entire world, at least that’s what it sounded like to his city ears, chirped and buzzed—before collecting their mugs.
“I’m sure you two are tired from that drive today,” he said. “Muffin, your room is all ready for you.” He turned to Frankie. “I’ve got you set up in the room above the garage.”
“Dad, that’s not even in the house,” she said with a gasp, her big eyes going round. “We can’t put a guest out there.”
The older man shrugged. “I turned the spare room into a workroom for my fishing lures. There’s magnifiers, threads, and bobs everywhere. No one wants to sleep there.”
Lucy looked like she was about to argue, but Frankie took her hand, trying—and failing—to ignore the spark of attraction that sizzled up his arm when he did. Where did that come from?
“It’s okay,” Frankie said with a smile, ignoring the pang of disappointment. “That gives you some privacy to visit. It’s not like you see each other all that often.”
One of her eyebrows went skyward, but she didn’t argue. No doubt she saw right through his bullshit, because she always seemed to.
“Dad, we’re not having sex,” she said. “In fact, Frankie is temporarily celibate because he thinks his man-whore ways have limited his ability to form relationships.”
If the bugs or frogs or whatever they were in the woods were still chirping, he didn’t hear it anymore over the rush of blood in his ears. “I never said that was the reason.”
“You didn’t have to. But it’s true, isn’t it?”
Fucking A. This woman. “Maybe.”
“Now, that is interesting,” Tom said, stopping outside the French doors and, for the first time since they’d arrived, not looking at Frankie as if he were the barbarian at the gates. “I’d love to talk to you more about this. Are you an early riser? I could fit you in before my first morning appointment tomorrow.”
Oh yeah, because that’s what his Irish ass was about to do—talk about his feelings about sex. Somewhere, one of his ancestors rolled over in his Catholic grave at even the idea of it. “I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll be fine after a few weeks on the bench to get my head straight.”
“You should take him up on it.” Lucy hooked her arm in his and looked up at him as if she hadn’t just slid a shiv right into his tender parts. “He’s considered a national treasure in the sex therapy community.”
“I’m sure he is, but all the same…” He let the rest of the sentence drop, wishing like hell he was already in the room above the garage.
“Don’t pester him, Lucy. He’ll find his own way,” Tom said, his expression taking on some of its papa bear effects again as his gaze dropped to where she was touching Frankie. “And in the meantime, I’ll help you carry your bags to your room. Frankie, I’ll show you the door to get to the garage apartment on the way.”
Lucy didn’t look like she was ready to let it drop, but after a second she did and they followed her dad inside.
“This isn’t over,” she whispered under her breath before slipping her arm out of his, picking up her suitcase and heading off down the hall.
…
Not for the first time in her life, Lucy cursed her big mouth, which was almost as big as her ass and twice as troublesome. However, this time she was determined to keep it shut for at least as long as it took her to get from her old room to the garage apartment.
She’d considered apologizing to Frankie via text, but it seemed kinda cold. Plus, she’d have a much better chance of getting him to actually talk to her dad if she said she was sorry in person. It was a helluva lot harder to ignore her when she was standing right there as opposed to a text.
She just had to treat this as if she was talking to one of her clients so he’d understand the brilliance of her plan, and not as if she was talking to a guy who made her panties damp every time he looked at her, despite the fact that he’d probably seen more panties than she owned. Nope. That wasn’t factoring into her decision to tiptoe past her dad’s room as if she was fifteen again and go talk to a cute boy. Not. At. All.
By the time she climbed the stairs to the guest suite above the garage, she had a plan of attack. Really, this was for his own good. If there was anything a child of a therapist knew, it was the value of figuring out the reason why behind a behavior. Frankie just needed to do a deep dive and figure his shit out. Helping him do that would be a much better form of repayment than gas money for coming with her to the reunion.
Frankie answered on the second quick tap on the door. He was in a pair of loose shorts that hung low on his hips and nothing else. She shouldn’t look, but his brawny form filled the door and she didn’t have any other place to look. So she perused. She took in. Okay, she totally gawked—who wouldn’t when presented with that much hotness? Part of her knew she should look away. After all, the man had given up more than a week of his life to come to her reunion. He deserved some appreciation of the non-eye-fucking kind. Instead of eyeballing him like he was as gorgeous as the perfect pair of heels that were cute and comfortable, she should be keeping her eyes on his face and not his broad shoulders, reddish gold hair dusting his pecs, or the way his shorts left very little to the imagination about how very not little he was.
She was a horrible person, she knew that. However, she also knew that Frankie’s happy trail matched his ginger hair. That item of information would get stored away for future jilling off material.
See? Horrible person who should know better and is looking anyway!
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“No.” She steeled herself for the words she had to say. “I need to apologize, and I hate apologizing.”
His mouth wavered as if he was trying to stop a smirk from emerging. “I’m shocked. You seem like the kind of person who just loves saying she was wrong.”
From anyone else, the sarcasm would have scratched its way under her skin and down to her don’t-fuck-with-me marrow. But from Frankie Hartigan? The man couldn’t even do mockery without turning it into flirting. It would be annoying if she didn’t enjoy it so much. It was nice being the object of someone’s “A” flirt game. It wasn’t that men didn’t hit on her. They did. It was the type of men who made a move on her that made her dating prospects so poor. Suffice it to say that fat fetishists and guys who thought she didn’t have options and would go for their still-living-in-their-mom’s-basement asses tended to clog up her dating app inbox. But guys like Frankie? This was just FWC: flirting without consequences—especially since the man was on a no-sex diet.
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“No.” He grinned at her. “I’m enjoying it too much.”
Since sliding through the doorway while he blocked 90 percent of it wasn’t an option, she put one hand on her hip and gave him her best don’t-waste-my-time glare. It usually made her clients—even the fuming mad ones—step out of her way. Frankie just f
olded his arms across the wide expanse of his chest, totally unperturbed. Of course he did.
“May I come in?” she asked, resisting the urge the play with the hem of her shirt to give her hands something to do. “We need to talk.”
“That sounds serious.” He took a pivot step, giving her enough space to pass by him and walk into the room.
To distract herself from taking an extra sniff—and yes, she was still horrible, and no, there wasn’t anyone who could judge her more harshly than she was giving herself the side-eye at that moment—she looked around the room. It might be above the garage, but it was a great space, the back wall composed of windows overlooking the woods that in a few miles became a part of the Dogwood Canyon Nature Park.
The view outside was almost as good as the one inside the room.
Not that she was looking, because that was a very not-good idea. She liked sex as much as any other woman—maybe a little more compared to some folks—but making a run at someone like Frankie Hartigan wasn’t smart. Taking a few steps away from him meant getting closer to the bed, but it was better than standing next to him and having her pheromones going crazy.
“It’s about you talking to my dad,” she said, stopping a few steps shy of the bed. “I really think he could help. You’ve got to admit, you’ve gone from one extreme to the other.”
He snorted. “No offense, but I’m not talking about my sex life with your dad.”
What was it about sex therapists that freaked people out so much? It wasn’t like 95 percent of the population was allergic to orgasms and the kind of intimate connection that came from sex.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s his job, and he could help.”
“I’m pretty sure I can do that on my own,” he said and looked purposefully at the open door. “But thanks for stopping by.”
There was no missing that don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out dismissal, but she wasn’t giving in that easy. If she was that kind of woman, she wouldn’t have been able to get Harbor City’s most hated hockey player to agree to doing a series of visits to sick kids at St. Vincent’s Hospital. There was definitely a reason why Zach Blackburn called her B.B. after he finally agreed to her plan to start rehabbing his image so the team wouldn’t kick his tattooed self to the curb come free agency time. They both knew B.B. stood for Ball Buster. She didn’t give a shit. She embraced the nickname a lot more than the one everyone had called her since she was a kid—Muffin Top. Her dad hadn’t meant it to be mean and had given it to her when she was just a baby. He just had no clue what it was like to be a fat woman in society’s eyes—which brought everything back to the whole reason why the redwood of hotness known as Frankie Hartigan was standing in front of her.