by Linda Seed
It wasn’t that he found mothers less attractive. Hell, a woman could have six kids and still be hot as hell, in his mind. But to him, the best kind of relationship was a casual one. No expectations, no responsibilities, just fun. Just two people enjoying each other’s company—and each other’s bodies.
But the whole no expectations, no responsibilities thing got shot to shit when you brought kids into the mix. When it was just two adults, you could put people’s feelings at risk. Adults knew what they were getting into and knew what was at stake. But kids? Breaking a kid’s heart just wasn’t okay.
And the only way you could be sure not to break children’s hearts was to avoid getting involved with their mothers.
If he’d met her when she was single? That could have been a hell of a lot of fun.
The other night, he’d told himself that spending time with an uncomplicated nine might be just the thing to get his head straight. So he’d called Jasmine, a woman from Morro Bay he’d dated a few times, and they were set to meet at Ted’s—Cambria’s dive bar—tonight.
Now, there was an uncomplicated woman.
If Jasmine couldn’t get his mind off Delilah, no one could.
Of course, it wasn’t enough for Roxanne to call Delilah and beg her to come home for Thanksgiving. When that didn’t work, their mother called, too.
Delilah was at the beach with the kids, sitting on a blanket and watching Jesse and Gavin chase each other with pieces of driftwood, when the call came in.
Earlier in the day when she’d talked to Quinn, the sky had been a clear blue. But now, a light fog had rolled in, shrouding the world in soft gray. Delilah was bundled up in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, but the boys were shirtless, romping around in shorts and bare feet, oblivious to the chill in a way only children could be.
Delilah held the cell phone to her ear and shaded her eyes with her hand as she watched her children play.
“No, Mom. I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving. I thought Roxanne would have told you that.”
“Well, she did. But I thought, that can’t be right. Surely you want to be with family right now. Delilah, honey, don’t you want—”
“What I want … what I need … is some time to myself to sort things out. Just me and the boys.”
“But, Delilah, we love you. We only want to support you. We only want what’s best for you.”
Delilah felt the swell of love and guilt—two things inextricably linked when related to her family—and let out a sigh. “I know that, Mom. I really do. But this is what’s best for me. And for the boys.”
“Oh, but the boys need their grandfather right now, especially. They need a man in their lives, sweetheart. They need a role model now that their father—”
“Can we maybe not talk about Mitch?” Delilah said.
Her mother was silent, but of course, that couldn’t last.
“Delilah, I’m worried about you.”
“Well, I’m worried about me, too.”
“That’s why you need to come home. Not only for Thanksgiving. If you and the boys could just stay here for a while, until you get back on your feet …”
“I’m on my feet, Mom. I’m standing. And I need to keep right on standing, for the kids’ sake and my own. Don’t you think I want to just be taken care of for a change? Don’t you think I’d love that? But …”
But if I let myself go, if I let myself just give in and fall apart, I’ll never be able to put myself back together again.
“You have your pride,” her mother said knowingly. “That’s what this is about.”
“Partly,” she admitted. “And partly it’s about the fact that I’m not broken, and I don’t need to be fixed.”
“Well.” Jeanette Ballard was hurt—Delilah could hear it in the single syllable. “I would think you would want to see us just because you love us, not because of whether you are or are not broken and in need of fixing.”
Delilah felt a surge of guilt for what she’d said and how she’d said it. “I do love you, Mom. I love all of you. So much. But I need some time to work things out on my own. You can see that, right?”
When Jeanette didn’t say anything for a while, Delilah was sure she was gearing up for further argument. Instead, she relented. “Of course I can, honey.”
Delilah felt so relieved she nearly collapsed onto the blanket as the pent-up tension within her eased. “Thank you.”
“We’ll miss you.”
Damn it, she was starting to get teary-eyed, and she hated when that happened. “I’ll miss you, too.”
“Call me. Not just when you feel obligated. I want to know what’s happening with you.”
“I will.” That was partly a lie. Delilah would call her mother when she had good things to report, but not when she was struggling. Not only didn’t she need her mother’s pity, she also didn’t want to lay the burden of her problems on her mother’s shoulders.
And the truth was, she was managing. She and the boys had enough money, finally; they had their health; they had this beautiful place to renew themselves and wait out the holidays.
Delilah took in a deep breath of ocean air and tried to be grateful.
Sometimes, it took a lot of trying.
When Quinn showed up at Ted’s that night, Jasmine was already there, seated at the bar and sipping something from a highball glass.
He took a moment to admire her before she noticed him. Tall with long, shiny blond hair in a cascade down her back. An athletic body encased in a dress as tight as an Ace bandage. Muscular calves leading down to feet nestled in four-inch heels. As he looked at her, she turned, saw him, and let a slow, predatory grin spread across her face.
At the sight of him, she plucked the cherry out of her drink by the stem, put it in her mouth, and bit down in a way that, somehow, seemed obscene.
“Quinn. Have a seat.” She pulled out the barstool next to her and patted it with her manicured hand.
Jasmine. God. He hadn’t seen her in a while, and she looked just as good as he remembered. Had he thought she was a nine? Right now, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember why he’d deducted the point.
As he sat down beside her, he reflected that she smelled exactly like her name.
“Hey, Jazz. How’ve you been?”
“Lonely. You?”
“Pretty much the same.” He gestured to Ted, the bar’s owner, for one of whatever she was having. Ted brought it over and smacked it down on the bar with a very Ted-like grunt.
Quinn took a sip. An old fashioned. He tried not to wince at the sweetness of the cocktail. He’d have preferred his whiskey straight up, but ordering the same as what she was having had seemed more smooth and flirtatious, somehow.
They made small talk—she asked about his work, and he asked about her brother, who was an acquaintance of Quinn’s. Somewhere during the conversation, he felt her hand on his thigh, which caused an immediate physical response higher up.
When she slid her hand along his leg and squeezed, giving him a grin that suggested far more interesting things to come, he reflected that the evening was working out very well, indeed.
He swallowed the rest of what was in his glass, put the glass down on the bar, laid some money next to it, and said, “So. You want to get out of here?”
They were barely in the door of his place before Jasmine started taking off his shirt. He pulled off her dress, and before they’d even gotten to the bedroom they were tangled up in one another, a jumble of arms and legs and hands and naked skin.
It was around then that he realized it was all going to hell.
Which was a puzzle, really. How could a situation like this, with Jasmine looking the way she did, possibly go wrong?
Delilah, that was how.
Her face kept popping into Quinn’s head at inopportune moments. Like the one when Jasmine put her hand down his pants.
It wasn’t that he imagined he was with Delilah instead of Jasmine. It wasn’t as if he thought Delilah would somehow
disapprove or judge him—and it certainly wasn’t as if she had any right to do either of those things even if she were here, and even if she wanted to.
Instead, he kept thinking of her—that was all. Her face, her voice, the sound of her laugh kept popping into his mind like a snippet of music you couldn’t get out of your head.
Goddamn it.
“What’s wrong?” Jasmine paused and withdrew her hand, and it was only then that Quinn realized he’d uttered the curse out loud and hadn’t just thought it.
“Ah … nothing. Nothing. I just … I’ve got something on my mind that happened earlier, that’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“Oh. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, no. Just keep doing what you were doing, and I’m sure it’ll go away.”
She slid her hand inside the open fly of his pants again, an event that, under normal circumstances, would have caused his brain to shut off entirely. But now, it wasn’t working that way.
He just couldn’t get his head in the game.
Jasmine reclaimed her hand, stood back, and put her fists on her hips. She was standing there in just her bra, her panties, and the four-inch heels. God help him.
“Something’s really bothering you,” she said. “You know, Quinn, we could just talk. We could just discuss whatever it is that’s upsetting you. It doesn’t have to just be sex.”
But for him, it did just have to be sex. With Jasmine, that was all it could be or ever would be. They had zero in common except for their attraction to each other. But that didn’t mean she deserved to be treated like an object rather than a person. It didn’t mean she deserved to be with him while he was thinking about someone else.
“I’m sorry.” He raked a hand through his hair. “I guess I’m not in the right head space for this.”
“You think?” She raised one sculpted eyebrow.
She plucked her dress up off the floor and pulled it over her head, wiggling her hips a little as she slid it down into place.
“Look, it’s not you,” he said.
“Clearly.”
She picked up her purse, fished her car keys out of it, and went to the front door. As she let herself out, he said, “I’ll call you.”
She turned back and looked at him. “No, you won’t.”
Chapter 10
None of it was Delilah’s fault. Hell, she wasn’t even there. She didn’t know Jasmine, and she barely knew Quinn.
But none of that stopped him from being pissed off at her.
When the day of the hike came, he showed up at the parking lot at the trailhead feeling grumpy and out of sorts. Delilah had ruined his chance for no-strings sex, and a man couldn’t let that stand.
“Hi, Quinn.” Delilah waved to him as she got out of her car, which was parked next to his day-to-day car—he hadn’t brought the van this time. The boys piled out of the back seat, jumping around with the enthusiasm of puppies.
“Hey,” he said. Grunted, really.
“The boys are excited,” she said. “I guess you can see that, though.” Delilah looked excited, too—she was bright-eyed and cheerful, her face lightly flushed in a way that made her even prettier than usual.
For some reason, that annoyed the hell out of him.
“Quinn! Quinn! Mom says I have to stay on the trail this time, and I will, I promise,” Jesse said. “We have sunscreen and bug spray and bottles of water and some energy bars, because your website said to bring them.”
“We brought some for you, too.” Gavin pulled an energy bar out of his little backpack and waved it.
Ah, shit. His impulse was to snap at them that he could bring his own damned energy bars—which he would hardly need for a hike of this length—but how could you snap at a little kid who brought you food? It was impossible. Which meant he couldn’t even keep a good grump going, as much as he wanted to.
“Thanks, Gavin. Jesse. That was really nice of you.” He accepted the energy bar Gavin had offered him. “I’ll just tuck this away for later.” He slid the bar into his own pack.
“The weather is perfect, isn’t it?” Delilah tipped her head back to face the sky. “Look at those clouds.”
“I’ve seen clouds,” Quinn said.
“Oh.”
Delilah looked puzzled, and why wouldn’t she be? It had been a dick thing to say.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“I just want to get started so we can be back on schedule. I’ve got other appointments.”
“All right.” But he could see that he’d dimmed her glow, and he felt like shit about it. Nobody should ever dim Delilah Ballard’s glow. Her asshole ex had done that, and Quinn didn’t want to do it, too.
“Sorry,” he told her. “I’m just in a bad mood. Hey, guys.” He turned to the boys. “Who’s ready for a hike?”
Delilah had started the outing feeling pretty good—the outdoors, some exercise, happy kids—but Quinn was obviously in a pissy mood, and that was making her start to question the whole thing.
“Are you sure everything’s all right?” she asked him.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”
The words themselves were okay, but the tone behind them wasn’t. Definitely pissy.
They started the hike heading east into the hills south of Big Sur. The trail was narrow, with brush and wild growing things on either side of them.
“Watch out for poison oak,” Delilah called to the boys, who’d gone up ahead of her.
“That’s not poison oak,” Quinn said. His tone suggested a schoolmarm who’d had enough of someone’s misbehavior.
“I didn’t say it was,” Delilah responded. “I said they should watch out for it.”
Quinn grunted something back at her.
“Look.” She stopped where she was, planting her feet and glaring up at him. “Should we just cut our losses and go back to the car? Because I’m paying you for a delightful hike, and your attitude is decidedly … undelightful.”
He stopped and turned to look at her. “I don’t have a dictionary handy, but I don’t think undelightful is a word.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin—stubble that made him even more insanely sexy than he was without it—and raised his eyebrows in something that might have been conciliation.
“So. Do we quit, or not?” Delilah asked.
“No. I’m sorry. I’ll snap out of it.”
The fact that there was something for him to snap out of made her worry about him, just a little.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. Yes.”
“Okay …”
“I’m putting on my professional guide persona now. It’s fine. It’ll all be fine. Hey, boys!” He called ahead to the kids, who were quite a distance up the trail now. “Wait for me, okay? And, ah … that’s poison oak right there to your left. Stand back from that, would you?”
Quinn knew he was being an ass, and he didn’t want to be. Hell, he was working right now, and he usually avoided being an ass to even the worst of his clients. And the Ballards weren’t that. They’d followed the instructions on his website to the letter, and they deserved better from him than what he was giving them.
Since the source of his angst was his unwanted attraction to Delilah, he decided to focus on the boys instead.
He trotted up the trail to where the kids were standing. Then he knelt down at their level and pointed at the poison oak he’d warned them about.
“See that? See how it’s got the three leaves together, and it’s kind of red? That’s something you don’t want to touch. It’ll make you itchy and give you blisters.”
“I know. Mom told us,” Jesse said. “She showed us pictures and everything.”
Gavin nodded solemnly.
Good clients, Quinn reflected. They’d done their homework.
“Okay. Let’s keep walking and see what other interesting things we can find,” he suggested.
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br /> By the time they were twenty minutes into the walk, Quinn had needed to bring Jesse back onto the trail twice when he’d wandered into the brush to look at something, and Gavin was already complaining that he was tired.
So, thinking of creative solutions, Quinn picked Gavin up, raised him over his head, and settled the boy on his shoulders. That would solve the tiredness problem. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do about Jesse’s wandering.
Then a solution presented itself.
“I want to ride up there,” Jesse said.
“Tell you what,” Quinn said. “If you stay on the trail for the next fifteen minutes—no stepping off—I’ll give you a turn.”
“Really?” The kid perked up, his eyes going wide.
“Sure. Let’s see if you can do it.”
After that, the kid stayed on the trail like he was glued to it, and Quinn congratulated himself on his ingenuity.
Delilah observed all of this from a few paces behind Quinn and the boys.
A few thoughts hit her, more or less at the same time: one, Quinn was a natural with kids, and two, Jesse and Gavin should have been doing all of this with Mitch instead of with a man they’d just met.
Instead, Mitch was probably at some Paris cafe right now eating fancy French food with his girlfriend. Unless it was the middle of the night in Paris. Who knew? Delilah was in no mood to figure out time zones.
Why had it been so easy for Mitch to walk away from his family? If he didn’t love Delilah anymore, that was fine. She was an adult—she could take it. But how had he walked away from his sons?
Quinn was so easy with the kids, joking with them, talking to them like he was truly interested in everything they had to say. And the boys looked so happy they were glowing.
The fact that they were so starved for positive male attention made her want to fly to Paris and throw her ex off the Eiffel Tower.
“You okay?” Quinn glanced back at Delilah and asked her the same thing she’d asked him not long ago. Maybe his bad mood had rubbed off on her.