Unbuttoned

by Maisey Yates

  He didn’t take his eyes off Carly as he walked across the graveled area. Everything in him felt tense, tied up in knots. And none of it mattered anymore. Their confrontation, all the things she’d said. It just sort of evaporated. And it left her. Just her. And she was the only important thing.

  He presented the man in front of the tank with his ticket and collected his ball. He looked at it, at the target, and then back to Carly. “What are you doing, Carly?” he asked.

  There were hundreds of eyes on her, on them. It was a spectacle, no mistake.

  “I thought it was time I put myself out there a little bit. It’s for a good cause and all.” She smiled at him, a real smile. No reserve. No snark.

  “You’ll mess up your pretty hair.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just image, after all.”

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” he said, his throat so tight now he could barely speak. He looked down at the ball in his hands again.

  “Oh, but wait just a second before you dunk me.” Carly put her palms flat on the bench and pushed herself up into a standing position. “While I have everyone’s attention, I wanted to do something.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Making an idiot out of myself,” she said, her voice low enough for only him to hear, her blue eyes glittering with tears. More public emotion. All for him. Then she straightened and went back to making her announcement. “I just wanted everyone to know that I am in love with Lucas Miller.”

  There were some cheers, and a lot of laughter. Carly waited for the roar to calm down, and then continued.

  “I’ve spent the past . . . decade really, caring more about what everyone else thought of me than what I thought of myself. And then Lucas . . . helped me find me. And in the process, helped me stop being so afraid. He taught me that love is worth it. And that laughing, having fun, being comfortable in your own skin is more important than being respectable. And that’s all.” She sat back down. “Dunk me, Miller.”

  He dropped the ball at his feet. “No way.”

  “Yes. I’m making a big gesture. Don’t steal my gesture. And it’s for charity.”

  “I bought my ticket already.” He rounded the back of the dunk tank and climbed the ladder and up onto the bench. “I love you too, Carly.”

  “Even after what I said?”

  “What about what I said?” he asked.

  Carly put her hand on his cheek, her thumb sliding over his skin. “You were right, though. I was scared. So I ran. I ran just like I did six years ago. I put walls up between us because I’ve always known, Lucas. I’ve always known that you could be the man who meant the world to me. And it terrified me. To know that someone could own that much of me. To know that one person could be everything.”

  He looked at her face, at the pure, unveiled emotion shining from her. “But the thing is, Carly, you’re the woman who means the world to me. And I’ll never take you for granted, I’ll never betray your trust. I understand what it costs you and I would never, ever do anything to violate that.”

  Carly smiled, a tear sliding down her cheek. A happy tear this time. And now he knew she would let him wipe it away. He moved his thumb over her damp skin, erasing the trail the drop had left behind. “I believe you.”

  “My life hasn’t had a lot of happy moments,” he said. “But this one is so close to perfect, the rest don’t seem to matter as much.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in for a kiss, which brought a roar of cheers from their spectators. Everything fit. For once in his life, everything just fit.

  “Ready to take a chance with me, Carly Denton?” he asked, kissing her cheek, her forehead.

  “More than ready,” she said.

  And then he held her tight against him and pushed off from the bench, submerging them both in the cold water below.

  When they came back up to the surface, she was laughing. “What was that for?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil your grand gesture, but I didn’t want you to make it alone either. We’re in this together. We can look like idiots together, and laugh at the whole world.”

  She kissed him, her lips slippery, cold over his. “I guess you could say we’ve made a pretty public spectacle now,” she said, resting her forehead on his.

  “Yeah . . . we did. Are you okay?”

  “I’ve never felt better in my life.”

  “Great. Now let’s get out of this water. I’m experiencing shrinkage.”

  She slapped his shoulder. “You’re such a man.”

  “Yeah, but you like it.”

  “I do.”

  He lifted her into his arms and she clung to his shoulders while he got them both out of the tank. He deposited her slowly back onto the ground. “You need shoes,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I can be barefoot for a bit.”

  “Well, Carly Denton, there you are,” he said, brushing his thumb over her freckled cheek. “You’ve been hiding for a long time.”

  Carly’s heart felt like it was going to burst. Looking at Lucas, at the love in his eyes, made her feel strong. It made her feel brave. It made her feel like she didn’t have to hide.

  “Freckles and all,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t still put on makeup and nice clothes and high heels.”

  “I have no issue with that. I think you’re beautiful no matter what you wear, or don’t wear.”

  She pulled his hat off of his head and put it on her own before putting her hands on his cheeks and pulling him down for a kiss. “Same goes. You’re a man worth making a fool of myself for. You’re a man worth the risk. A man worth staying with. Always. I mean, if you want to deal with a woman with a supersized amount of neuroses and a shoe collection that may someday take over the tri-state area.”

  He grinned, that Lucas Miller grin that always made her toes curl. “You know, I think I’m up for it.”

  Lucas put his arm around her and they walked away from the crowd, out toward the parking area. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Somewhere private. Because as thrilled as I am that you’re all right sharing our relationship with the public, I’d like to be alone with you too.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Not just for that,” he said, his smile wicked. “I’m going to ask you a question.”

  Carly’s heart fluttered. “Oh, really?”

  “Something to do with you letting me love you. With you loving me. With us facing this head on instead of running away from it.”

  “You know what?” she asked, her throat tight, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I bet you I’ll say yes.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Lucas,” she said. “It’s the strangest thing. I always imagined that if I fell in love it would take something from me. Make me weaker, because it’s what I saw in my mother. I don’t feel weaker. I feel stronger. I feel more myself than I ever have.”

  “Well, that’s good, Carly, because I love who you are, and I would never want you to be anything or anyone else.”

  “You make it so I’m not afraid to be myself.”

  “Do you know what you make me feel like, Carly?”

  “What?”

  “You make me feel like being myself is enough. I’ve always questioned it. I wasn’t enough for my mother, I wasn’t enough for my father, but you make me feel . . . good enough.”

  “You’re so much more than good enough, Lucas Miller.” She put her hand on his cheek, her heart overflowing. “You’re perfect.”

  Epilogue

  Lucas sometimes wondered if Carly Denton reserved that facial expression particularly for him. He’d never seen her make it at another person. When she smiled at him, it made her eyes glitter with mischief, her cheeks flushed as if she’d just
run barefoot through a field.

  She smiled at other people, but not like this, never like this. And no one else could make him feel like she did with just one look.

  Right now, he thought he was going to burst with that feeling, watching Carly, smiling, floating down the aisle in a white dress, pink flowers in her hands.

  “What are you doing here, Lucas?” she asked, an impish smile on her face.

  “I’m here to marry you,” he said.

  “Oh, good, because that’s what I got dressed up for.”

  “This is a pretty public display,” he said, taking her hands and pulling her to him.

  “Good.” She put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him. “Let’s give them something to talk about.”

  “You weren’t supposed to kiss me yet,” he said, looking over at the pastor who was waiting for them to get down to the business of vows.

  “Yeah, but I live dangerously.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. After this, I say we go get some french fries.”

  “You live on the edge.”

  “I know,” she said, “I know. See if you can keep up.”

  “I’d love to.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book, like all my books, was a collaborative effort. I owe many thanks to my agent Helen Breitwieser, who believed in this series when I was ready to give up on it. My editor Katherine Pelz, for her insight and excitement. And my tireless CP, reader, brainstormer and friend, Jackie Ashenden who is always on call to read my work and listen to me angst. Special acknowledgment given to coffee, without which I would not get out of bed in the morning.

  Keep reading for a special preview of Maisey Yates’ new novel

  UNEXPECTED

  Available from InterMix August 2013

  Chapter One

  So, when are you getting married?

  “So, Kelsey, when are you getting married?”

  Kelsey fought the urge to stab her own thigh with one of the fancy forks that her sister had selected so carefully for her special day. She could see the question forming in all of her well-meaning relatives’ eyes before the words made it from their mind to their lips.

  Well, Aunt Addy, I’ve set the date for date for five years from now. With any luck, I’ll have sunk my claws into some unwitting victim in just enough time to pick out china patterns.

  “Someday,” she said, pasting a smile on her face. One she hoped looked happy and not like she was contemplating homicide.

  It was such an idyllic setting. Her family’s Eastern Oregon ranch, the field bright with new grass and yellow flowers. And she was as miserable as she could ever remember being.

  She looked back up at her aunt, who was contemplating her a bit too carefully.

  Don’t say on the shelf. Don’t say on the shelf.

  “You’re nearly on the shelf, dear,” her aunt said with a chuckle.

  Kelsey eyed the fork. “I like the view from up here,” she said.

  She was thirty. Thirty wasn’t old. Thirty was just starting to come down from the post-college, young professional club scene. Thirty wasn’t even remotely ready to shackle yourself to someone until divorce did you part. Or so she’d heard. She hadn’t made it to the divorce. She hadn’t made it down the aisle. She’d made it into the bedroom she’d shared with her then-fiancé to find him doing some very inappropriate things with another woman, but no one was giving her any credit for that.

  She’d been too young then anyway. There were a lot of women who married older, and statistics suggested those marriages were likely to be more successful anyway. She knew that. Heck, she clung to that.

  But something in the water in her rural Oregon town had compelled most of her friends to get married right out of high school. The other stragglers had been caught up sometime before their mid-twenties had hit and she felt like the odd one out in a big way.

  Even more now that the last of her younger sisters had just done the deed. At twenty. Bitch.

  Okay, she didn’t really think her sister was a bitch. But she was feeling a little bit bitter the longer the reception wore on. Plus, the bridesmaid dresses were yellow and she looked horrible in yellow. Kailey knew that and she’d picked it anyway.

  “You look...I was going to say great but you actually look really grumpy.”

  Kelsey looked over her shoulder and up at the broad frame of her very best, and last single, friend, Alexa Lambert. “Thanks, Alex,” she snarked. “Shouldn’t you be over trying to catch a bouquet?”

  “Hell no!” Alexa, dressed in black pants and a black top, looking so out of place, sat in the chair beside her.

  “Avoidance, huh?”

  “Why do you think I moved across the country? To get away from this kind of thing. Honestly, none of my friends in New York are married yet. Shacking up, maybe. But married, no.”

  “I moved.”

  “To Portland. Glamor central,” Alexa said wryly.

  “I want to be close enough to visit still. All my sisters started having babies and...”

  “Yeah, the baby thing doesn’t get me gooey like it seems to do for most women. I’m avoiding babies.”

  Kelsey wasn’t in baby avoidance mode. Babies did make her gooey. She wished they didn’t. She wished that holding her niece and smelling her baby-soft head didn’t make her stomach cramp with the worst kind of futile longing imaginable.

  “I’m not anti-marriage I’m...without and fine with it. That’s all. Somehow that makes me ‘on the shelf’.”

  She didn’t need to get married. She had bad taste in men anyway. But what she did want, and what made all of this an awful tease, was a family. Children. She wanted crayon pictures all over her fridge and juice stains on her carpet. Okay, she didn’t want juice stains on her carpet, but she was ready to deal with it.

  She thought about the brochures buried in her desk back at her house. Brochures she’d stuffed in a drawer six months ago and tried to forget about. Artificial insemination. The chance to have what she wanted, without the part she didn’t want.

  To have her own child. To feel her baby move inside of her.

  Her OB GYN had reminded her just recently that her fertility wasn’t getting better with age. Yet another person out to make her feel like the world was passing her by while she worked and aged. Except her doctor had a valid medical point. A scary one.

  She looked at all her nieces and nephews, running around in the grass, barefoot, filthy, and adorable. Her sister Jacie was hugely pregnant and trying to chase her three-year-old son, who was holding a dirt clod and most likely had evil intentions.

  Kelsey envied her in that moment. So much she nearly choked on it.

  Alexa leaned forward and hooted, effectively breaking her out of her moment of self-pity. “On the shelf? Sounds like something a maiden aunt would say.”

  “It was my maiden aunt.”

  “Figures.”

  “Doesn’t it?” She looked down at her hands. Even her French manicure was yellow-tipped. She looked like a freaking daisy. “It’s worse because of the whole Michael thing.” If she’d never been engaged maybe they would all just assume she didn’t want to get married.

  No, that wouldn’t really help. But it would have helped her. It would have made her feel less...like a failure.

  “That was, like...five years ago.”

  “Six,” Kelsey said. “Six years ago.”

  “I’m sort of glad it didn’t work out,” Alexa said.

  “Why is that exactly? Don’t make me take back that other half of our best friends heart necklace.”

  “Because he was a jackass, who was screwing another girl behind your back.”

  “Kinda in front of me at the end.”

  Alexa nodded. “But also, I think if you would have gotten married that long ago you would have put me in a bridesmaid dres
s that was even worse than the one you’re wearing now. That’s one point for marrying older. Better fashion sense, minus the Cinderella Princess complex.”

  “True that,” Kelsey said, leaning forward, resting her arms on the table. “I’m happy.” She didn’t even convince herself.

  “Clearly.”

  “Well, I’m happy when I’m not sitting at the family table, by myself, fielding questions from well-meaning relatives. I have a career. I get to work from home. In my PJs. I win the game of Life.”

  “This is probably why you haven’t met a guy.”

  Kelsey smacked the table with her palm, sitting up straighter. “That and I don’t need one. I’ve been there. Done that. Didn’t make me happy, did it?”

  “No. Because he was a jackass.”

  “Yes he was. But my point is, I’m living my life. I’m not buying into this whole ‘your life doesn’t start until your trip down the aisle’ thing. I’m living in the here and now, baby.” Except you aren’t. You’re living in the someday, wishing for things you don’t have because you’re too afraid of what your family might think.

  “Have you been drinking?” Alexa asked, one eyebrow raised. “When you start calling me baby I assume you’ve been drinking.”

  Kelsey frowned. “There’s no alcohol here.”

  “Your sister really does hate you.”

  “She doesn’t. I’m happy for Kailey. I am. I just...”

  “Wish you were happier for you?”

  Wasn’t that too keen of an observation? “Darn skippy.”

  “Ah look...bouquet toss!” Alexa said, false enthusiasm all the way.

  “I’m staying over here. It would be adding insult to injury to get up there and try to mow over a bunch of teenagers to catch that thing. It would completely negate the cool facade of disinterest I have going on.”

  “Is that what you have going on?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I have going on.”

  “Ah. Yeah, I don’t believe you,” Alexa said, her lips curved into a smirk.