Nothing But Trouble

by Amy Andrews

  But that was the Y chromosome for you.

  More than anything, CC blended. He was surrounded by people a lot of the time. Not as much as he was during his NFL career, but still enough. Friends and colleagues as well as the hangers-on and people who either wanted to give him stuff or wanted something from him.

  A lot of egos.

  So, to have someone on his team that was there for him when needed, but happy to fade into the background when not, was a godsend. In fact, CC had become so much part of the furniture of his life that no one really noticed her.

  Until she spoke. And then people listened. Because she just didn’t speak unless it was necessary. And, petite or not, she was as immovable as a brick wall when it came to his schedule.

  Her borderline OCD had come in real handy for that.

  And the thought she would be gone in three months beat like hummingbird wings inside his brain. In his arrogance, he’d just assumed she’d always be around. That she wouldn’t actually leave when her time was up. The knowledge that she was going to leave sat like a burr beneath his skin, and Wade knew he had to use this time in Credence to try and convince her to stay.

  Wade shook his head as he stared at Arlo. “Leave my PA alone.”

  That goddamn uniform made women stupid. He’d seen it firsthand. Probably not CC who, thanks to five brothers, failed to be impressed by anything overtly male. But he wasn’t taking any chances. Wade didn’t want that kind of attention on his PA. That kind of male attention. She was here to work, not hook up.

  “Oh…” Arlo frowned. “Sorry, are you two…?”

  “Nope.” Hell no. No way, no how, no siree.

  “So she’s single?”

  “Yep.”

  “So then…you wouldn’t mind if I…”

  Wade did not like the way Arlo had let his sentence drift off like that. Full of possibilities. “Hell yes, I would.”

  “But…” Drew was frowning now as well. “You just said there’s nothing between you?”

  “She’s my PA. It’s strictly business between us—that’s it. That’s all it’s ever been. But she’s here to work, not play.”

  “To be fair, dude,” Tucker interrupted, “I don’t really think you get a say in what she does in her free time or who she does it with.”

  Wade snorted. “That’s nice that you think she has free time.”

  The three guys looked at each other and started to smile. “What?” he demanded.

  “So you don’t want her,” Arlo clarified, “but you don’t want anyone else to want her, either.”

  Wade sighed. It was like explaining stuff to a two-year-old. Times three. “At the end of the summer, she’s leaving my employ for good and going to SoCal to live. I don’t give a rat’s ass how many dudes she sleeps with on her own dime.” An unfortunate little stab in his chest confused the hell out of him, but Wade plowed on. “I do care when it’s on mine.”

  “So, that’s a no to me asking her out?” Arlo said, an expression of faux disappointment fixed to his stupid face.

  The sudden thought of Arlo, of any of them touching CC, any man touching her, was extremely discomforting. Like ants marching under Wade’s skin. “Touch her and I’ll break your fingers.”

  Arlo chuckled. “I’m the chief of police, dude.”

  “Then you can arrest me afterwards.”

  All three of them laughed again in a smugly superior way, which was starting to piss Wade off. Tucker placed another beer in front of him. “Here you go, man. Shall we drink to denial?”

  “Screw you all,” Wade said. But he drank anyway.

  Chapter Nine

  A week later, CC was sitting at Ronnie’s farmhouse table, surrounded by neat stacks of paper, color-coordinated pens, and Post-it Notes, an open can of Red Bull at her elbow. This had been ground zero for the GCC—Grow Credence Committee—for the past seven days. CC spent her mornings here with Ronnie, Wilburta, and George, plotting and planning, while Wade helped out around the farm. In the afternoon, they traveled back to Tara together to work on the book.

  “It’s had over six hundred and fifty thousand views on Facebook,” Ronnie said, blinking at CC over the top of her laptop screen. “Fifty-two thousand shares. Almost two hundred thousand likes. And the comments.”

  “Oh no.” CC reached across the table and pushed the screen with a firm click. “Do not read the comments.” That shit could be toxic, and she wasn’t sure if Ronnie’s Southern sensibilities were ready for the less-than-subtle art of trolling. “All that matters is the video has gone viral, we’re fielding calls from interested women and the media, and we’ve thus far had over a hundred confirmed as coming.”

  Ronnie grinned. “Success.”

  “Yeah.” CC grinned back, her foot absently stroking George’s fur. The animal had parked himself at her feet about five seconds after CC had sat down and stayed. “Success.”

  It was a relief. CC had managed to talk the council into doing something quick and simple, using just an iPhone and some editing to present Credence’s case to the country. Something slicker would have cost more money and taken too long. This had taken half a day of CC’s time and about half an hour of editing. The video may have been a little on the hokey side, but it was full of heart, with everyone from Don to Bob and Ray and Annie plus a bunch of Credence bachelors throwing out the welcome mat.

  And it’d been a hit.

  Which meant forward plans were well underway. Buses were leaving central Denver at midday next Friday, and so far they’d managed to place all the confirmed single women in Credence households, including surrounding farms. Even Ronnie and Cal were taking in two. Bob’s helper almost had the boardinghouse to rights, and the whole town had pitched in to furnish it. Just as they’d pitched in to help with the welcome party planned on Friday night and for the cookout by the lake the next evening.

  They’d set themselves an impossibly tight schedule, but the town had risen to the occasion, and the buzz it had created was tangible. Everyone was talking about it.

  “A paper from New York called this morning,” Ronnie said as she reopened the lid of her laptop, clicking to the FB video again.

  CC glanced up from the spreadsheet she was working on. “An interview?”

  She shook her head. “They wanted to know if we could book them into the local hotel for three nights.”

  CC snorted. Of course they did. The media were pretty much all the same—we want to do a story on you but you’re going to have to pay for it by putting us up and letting us have an all-access pass.

  Blah. Blah. Blah.

  “I hope you told them to take a hike.”

  The truth was, Credence didn’t need the publicity. The video had gone viral, and they had enough eager women willing to come and check the town out without being plastered all over the news as some kind of weird curiosity.

  “Told them the same thing I told the others. They’re welcome to come, but they’re going to have to sleep in their vans.”

  CC laughed. “Good.”

  Ronnie grinned. “Wade’d be proud.”

  Which focused CC’s brain firmly back on the man in question. Thankfully, she’d had no more dreams about the guy, and she was just about over her embarrassment and dwelling on it a hundred times a day. But reading through Wade’s pages yesterday afternoon had caused a different kind of consternation she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.

  Wade had reached the point in his memoir—which he was telling chronologically—about Jasmine. He’d written precisely half a page and moved on. His brevity spoke volumes, and it had been niggling at her. She’d never asked Wade about it before—she didn’t talk about her private stuff, he didn’t talk about his—but she’d Google-fued the bejesus out of it when she’d first started in his employ and knew the basics.

  Nude pictures of a sleeping Wade early in his NFL care
er had been sold to a tabloid by his then-girlfriend. His first Super Bowl ring, all new and shiny and prominent, had been obvious and perilously close to a part of his anatomy that some online media outlets had chosen not to pixelate.

  Wade had taken the tabloid to court over it and won, but…removing pictures from the internet was like trying to chop the head off the Hydra.

  His silence on the subject, the way she had to brief any media even fifteen years down the track that the topic was off-limits, was understandable. But surely his memoir would be the perfect place to explore the incident? Not only for catharsis, but to give his side of the story? Tell all and put the whole sleazy tale to bed for good.

  Not to mention how the inclusion of this incident might make the book more attractive to readers. Especially for someone like her, who wasn’t a diehard NFL fan. Readers bought memoirs for intimate details of the subjects’ lives, and CC thought something like this was fair game. In her opinion, women would go nuts for the full story.

  And that was, after all, what Wade had wanted her here for. To help and advise him as he wrote the book.

  CC flicked a glance at Ronnie. Maybe if CC understood more detail about what had gone down, she’d know whether to push it or not with Wade. But was it appropriate to ask his mother about it?

  In the end, she decided it was.

  “Ronnie…”

  “Yes, darlin’.” Ronnie looked up from the screen absently.

  “I know this isn’t any of my business, but…do you know what happened with Jasmine?”

  “Oh.” Ronnie sat back in her chair, her hand fluttering at her neck a little, obviously surprised by the question.

  “It’s just that…Wade only wrote a half page about the whole incident yesterday, and I kinda think he should go deeper. I think people reading his memoir will be expecting some more in-depth reflection.”

  Ronnie shrugged. “He doesn’t talk about it to anyone, Cecilia. Certainly not me or his father. I can’t see him opening up about it to potentially hundreds of thousands of readers.”

  “So you don’t think I should push him on it?”

  “You can try, but…”

  CC nodded. “It’s been fifteen years. You don’t think he should have dealt with it by now?”

  “She hurt him deeply. He loved her, and she betrayed him.” Ronnie’s lips flattened. “He was going to ask her to marry him, you know? He’d shown me the ring.”

  Oh. Well. Fuck. CC hadn’t known that. Obviously it had been serious with Jasmine if he’d been all set to marry her.

  A spurt of something hot and dark bubbled through CC’s veins. Why would a woman squander that kind of commitment from a man she supposedly loved?

  “I was thrilled,” Ronnie continued. “Wade had been sowing his wild oats a little too much for this Texan momma. Made it a little hard for me to hold up my head in church, he did. But then Jasmine came along, and she was a lovely young thing. A little immature, but Cal and I really liked her.”

  CC asked the question that had always bugged her. “Why’d she do it?”

  “I don’t know, Cecilia.” Ronnie shook her head. “I think she had some student debt and she thought Wade would see it as a bit of a lark.”

  A lark? To have his junk spread all over the internet? Could anyone be that naive?

  “Why didn’t he take her to court? Not just the tabloid?”

  “The court case was a bit of a circus. I don’t think he wanted to repeat the experience.”

  CC nodded. Which was probably the same reason he didn’t want to write about it. “So you don’t think I should push him?”

  Ronnie leaned forward on her elbows, regarding CC seriously for a moment. “I think…it might be good for him, mentally, you know, to at least get it all down. Even if it doesn’t make it in the final cut? I’ve always fretted that he bottled too much up during that time.”

  Yeah. CC was starting to think that might be true. And maybe the best way to sell it to Wade? Write it, all of it, and then decide whether to include it at the end.

  George, hearing a distant drone of an engine, lifted his head and cocked it to the side and barked.

  “That’ll be the men.” Ronnie stood. “Land sakes…time got away from me. They’ll be wantin’ their lunch.”

  It was on the tip of CC’s tongue to suggest that the men were perfectly capable of making their own lunch, but that wasn’t the way things were done in Ronnie’s household. She might be on the city council, but on the farm it was all home and hearth.

  “I’m fixing some hoagies, you want one, darlin’?”

  “Sure.” CC stood. “I’ll help.”

  Ronnie waved her down. “No, darlin’, you keep going with that spreadsheet. It won’t take me long.”

  The dog barked in agreement, and CC sat again as the rumble of motors pulled up outside and switched off. The sound of water running in the mudroom came next, then Cal and Wyatt entered moments later. Cal had struck up a compromise with his sons, because being inside was making him as restless as a caged lion. They’d agreed he could come out with them, get some air, but he wasn’t allowed to do any work. So far he was sticking to the agreement, but apparently only because the brothers were playing hardball.

  Wade entered a couple of seconds later, and her heart gave a funny little leap.

  It hadn’t stopped leaping in her chest at the sight of him playing farmer. She wished it would, because frankly, it was really freaking inconvenient. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him hot and sweaty and accomplished-looking hundreds of times. It was exactly how he looked each time he’d run off a field after a game. But there was just something so damn male about this kind of hot and sweaty.

  In jeans and a T-shirt, the smell of hay and sunshine clinging to his skin and hair, dirt on his jeans, a ten-gallon hat hanging from his fingers. He looked less athletic, less polished.

  Less jock. More…rough and raw and ready. More me Tarzan, you Jane. More…Cro-Magnon.

  Like he could toss her over his shoulder, throw her down in a haystack, and—Whoa! Jesus. She was turning into a sexual deviant. Or at the very least a sexual idiot.

  That’s what too much farmer porn did for you. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start salivating wildly every time Wade pointed the car in the direction of the farm.

  Cal kissed his wife on the cheek, his hand sliding onto Ronnie’s butt as he did so. She laughed and batted it away. “The children, Cal.”

  “Yeah, Cal,” Wade said, “the children.”

  Wyatt rolled his eyes at his brother, and CC laughed as Cal ignored all of them and continued to snuggle Ronnie from behind as she made the hoagies.

  A pang of something that felt very much like jealousy slammed into CC’s chest. What she would have given to have had parents like this growing up. Openly affectionate, plainly still in love after all these years. Instead of a father who hadn’t wanted any of them and a mother who’d never quite gotten over his desertion. Who’s grief had manifested itself in a severe case of female helplessness with a side of emotional manipulation.

  Seriously, if they’d owned a fainting couch, her mom would have spent most of her life draped upon it.

  “Let me just make some space at the table,” CC said, springing up to quell the swell of emotion rising in her chest.

  “I’ll help.”

  CC glanced up, surprised that Wyatt had spoken. She knew he was capable, she’d heard him joking around with Cal and Wade, giving as good as he got. But he’d barely said boo to her this past week. In fact, he’d barely looked at her and radiated awkwardness whenever she said hi or smiled at him. Wade had told her his brother had always been shy around women, but this was DEFCON-level awkwardness. This was socially crippling.

  This was Raj from The Big Bang Theory. Without the magic bullet of alcohol.

  “Thanks.”

  He nodd
ed before quickly looking away, but CC took him speaking directly to her as a win, as Wyatt finally relaxing around her enough to communicate.

  It was a shame, really, because Wyatt was a decent-looking man. He was probably a touch taller than Wade, but not quite as broad through the shoulders. His legs and arms were more lanky than sculpted, and his face was…homey, his features plainer than Wade’s and weathered from years of outdoor work. It was like Wyatt had been the prototype and Wade was the polished product.

  He reached for the nearest pile of papers, stacking them on the ones next door, then stacking both of them on top of the next.

  “Careful, bro,” Wade tsked. “You’re a braver man than I am, messing with CC’s system. If you get the colors out of order, she gets all twitchy.”

  “Oh, jeez, sorry…” Wyatt looked at the papers in his hands as horrified as if he’d dropped them in the middle of a hog wallow.

  CC was getting twitchy watching Wyatt mess up her beautifully ordered piles, but she quelled the irritation. “It’s fine.” She smiled at Wyatt. “Your brother likes to exaggerate.”

  He still looked stricken but relaxed a little and said, “That’s what all the girls at high school said.”

  CC let out a burst of surprised laughter. So did Cal. Ronnie chided Wyatt and Cal for their lack of decorum.

  Wade grinned, completely unconcerned by his brother’s dig. “Change the subject all you want, but I can see CC’s eye twitching from here. Admit it, woman, you’re a neat freak.”

  “I like things to be tidy and ordered, that’s all,” she said as she absently tapped the pile of paper against the table to line up all the edges.

  Jeez, there were worse things a person could be.

  Wade quirked an eyebrow, looking pointedly at the papers in her hand. “You’re Monica Geller.” He turned to his brother. “You should see her desk, you could take an appendix out on that thing.”

  “Unlike yours, which is buried under sports magazines, hundreds of bits of random paper, half of them scrunched into balls, all types of sporting paraphernalia, several coffee mugs leaving dirty rings everywhere, and two hundred empty Nerds boxes.”