Games of the Heart

by Kristen Ashley

  I stared at him.

  I didn’t know how long he’d been divorced but it had clearly been a while. I did know he’d had lovers since and not a few. He’d not introduced his kids to one of his other women and if what he told me was true, that included the Vi he was talking about.

  But it didn’t include me.

  After a clear nightmare with his wife, to protect himself he started dicking around and unfortunately when he did that he dicked around with me.

  Obviously, he was done with that. Not kind of done as in not really committed to being done. One thing was crystal clear about Mike Haines. He loved his kids, looked after them and protected them. There was no way in hell he’d introduce them to a woman he wasn’t serious about with that serious being serious.

  “You need to be ready at six,” he carried on. “We’ll come by here and pick you up.”

  I continued to stare at him but I didn’t speak.

  So he prompted, “Dusty, did you hear me?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you gonna be ready at six?”

  I nodded.

  He held my eyes.

  Then, his voice softer and less bossy, he asked, “Do you forgive me?”

  I licked my lips.

  Then I pressed them together.

  Then I did what I’d always done. I made a decision on the fly based entirely on feeling and went with it.

  Which meant I nodded.

  I watched his tall, lean body relax and something about seeing it do that, a man like Mike exposing that to me meant the world to me. Because his being tense waiting for my forgiveness and finally getting it meant the world to him.

  “Right, honey,” he said gently, “then come here and kiss me.”

  God, I’d missed that. I’d had it a day and I’d missed it like I’d had it for decades and lost it for eternity.

  So I walked the three feet to him, right into his arms and I tilted my head back. Going up on my toes to kiss him, I didn’t get the chance.

  That’s because, his arms closing around me hard, his mouth slamming down on mine, Mike kissed me.

  And he did it thoroughly.

  My arms were tight around his neck and my entire body was alive when his lips slid along my cheek to my ear and he whispered, “You’ve made me a happy man, honey.”

  I closed my eyes and shoved my face in his neck.

  “You forget how to talk?” he teased and I grinned.

  “No,” I whispered. “But this is a lot.”

  “It is,” his arms gave me a squeeze, “you’ll get used to it.”

  God, I hoped so. I really, really hoped so. Because I hadn’t lied. If he hurt me again, I wouldn’t survive it. All the men before (not that there was a million of them but still) that I lost didn’t hurt as much as losing him did.

  He lifted his head and caught my eyes.

  “I wanna take you to bed, celebrate this extensively. But to do that would mean Rhonda, who blushed when she mentioned just talkin’ to your brother in bed, will come home to us on the couch or in whatever room you’re sleepin’ in and I don’t wanna do that to her and my guess is, you don’t either.”

  This wasn’t true. I wanted to “celebrate this extensively”. But I didn’t want to do that to Rhonda either.

  “I don’t either,” I told him.

  “I also am not gonna go,” he told me and I relaxed in his arms because I didn’t want him to go. He felt it and smiled a gentle smile so I knew he liked it. “So, you got a choice, camp out in front of the TV or talk.”

  “Will the talk be deep and meaningful?” I asked.

  “If you want it to be,” he replied.

  “I think I’m topped up on that for tonight,” I informed him and he chuckled.

  “Then it can be about nothing,” he offered.

  “Okay,” I accepted.

  “Except,” he started and I braced, “you gotta know one thing. Audrey will be at Reesee’s birthday party.”

  “Oh God,” I blurted and he grinned.

  “Not nice, you bein’ sweet, givin’ me another shot and me treatin’ you to trial by fire as payback.”

  He could say that again. Dinner with his kids and then his daughter’s birthday party with his ex in attendance.

  “At least tell me Vi won’t be there,” I demanded and his grin grew to a smile.

  “No, Vi won’t be there.”

  “Then I’m good. Your ex, I can handle. Some chick who you fell for, uh…no.”

  “She’s married.”

  “Uh…no.”

  “With a baby.”

  “Did I say no?”

  He started chuckling.

  Then he stopped abruptly, took one arm from around me and cupped my jaw in his hand.

  I held my breath at the look in his eyes.

  But he just repeated, “You made me a happy man, Dusty.”

  “Good,” I replied softly.

  “No, Angel, you don’t get it. I haven’t been happy, truly happy without anything fucking it up in eighteen years.”

  I stared at him feeling my lips part.

  “And tonight, givin’ me another shot, you made me happy. Truly happy without anything fucking it up.”

  I felt my throat clog and my nose sting and the word was husky when I repeated, “Good.”

  His voice was thick when he replied, “Yeah, it is.”

  I took in a stuttering breath.

  Then I asked, “Can we start talking about nothing before I start bawling?”

  He grinned again and whispered, “Yeah.”

  To that I whispered back another, “Good.”

  Then he led me to the couch. He flicked off the TV and we started out talking about nothing then we talked about bitchface Debbie’s antics and then before he had to get back home to his kids, we ended up talking about nothing again (with not a small amount of making out mixed in).

  As with everything I did with Mike, it came naturally.

  Chapter Eight

  Way Past Curfew

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Jerra, honey, Mike’s gonna be here in a couple of minutes.”

  Suffice it to say, I shouldn’t have taken my girl Jerra’s call while in the midst of preparing to meet Mike’s kids and go out to dinner. And I definitely shouldn’t have shared that I’d driven myself and my babies up to my childhood home and then approximately three and a half hours later reconciled with the guy I fell for who broke my heart, both happening in the expanse of two weeks.

  She was not as happy as Rhonda was when I told her Mike and me hooked up that morning after the boys went off to school. Rhonda was kind of a prude but definitely a romantic and clearly Darrin had shared his dreams about Mike and me with his wife. So I left out all the juicy stuff and definitely the Mike being a dick stuff. And I told her the whole thing cautiously because she’d just lost her husband and I didn’t want to rub my new relationship in her face however crazy it might be (not that I told her the crazy parts).

  I also didn’t share with her I knew she gave Mike the diaries or that Mike shared them with me. I probably would never go there. It shocked the shit out of me she had the gumption to take them to Mike in the first place. She was delicate always, now extremely. I was there to try to patch her up, not shatter her.

  But she was ecstatic about what I did tell her, like, off the wall, whacked out ecstatic. I’d been around her three times since Darrin died and she hadn’t been even close to that animated any of those times. Or, actually, pretty much any time I saw her in the twenty years she’d been with my brother.

  I thought this was good.

  Jerra, who had had several drunken orgies with me since Mike broke up with me, was understandably the opposite. She’d been riding my high that we hooked up then she rode my uncertainty when he closed me down then she plummeted with me when I lost him. She’d then commiserated with me when Fin called to let me in on what was going down and I had no choice but to put my life on hold and haul my ass up to Indiana to s
ort out Rhonda’s shit, help Fin with the land and prepare to go head-to-head with my bitchface sister. All of this on a farm that was a hop, skip and a jump from Mike Haines’s back gate.

  Now she thought I was crazy.

  “Hunter! Get this! Dusty has been back up in Hoosierland for about a day and she’s hooked up again with that fuckin’ Mike guy!” I heard her shout.

  “Jerra, please, I have to get ready,” I told her, sitting on the bed, holding my phone between my ear and shoulder and yanking on my kickass fawn suede cowboy boot. They were boots that I bought six years ago to wear on my babies but I loved them so much they never saw a stirrup. They might not have ridden the range but they did see a lot of barroom dance floors.

  “You’re fucking shittin’ me!” I heard Hunter shout back.

  “I wish I was but no!” Jerra shouted to Hunter.

  “Can you guys have your conversation when I’m not freaking out about meeting the two teenage kids of my on-again, off-again boyfriend? This being his title even though I’ve been with him in person for approximately thirty-two hours and who, incidentally, has not once introduced one of his women to his kids.”

  Jerra’s attention came back to me and I knew this when she asked sharply, “You’re freaking out?”

  “Uh…yeah,” I answered.

  “You never freak out.”

  “Honey, hello? I’ve been in love with this guy since I was twelve. And he’s never introduced his kids to any of his women,” I stressed. “And I think I told you how hot he is.”

  “Yeah, in detail,” she agreed.

  “Ergo, he’s had a lot of women.”

  “Wow, that’s kinda big,” she muttered, I fell back on the bed in exasperation and she went on, “Right, just at least tell me he had a good excuse for being a huge jackass.”

  “I can’t seeing as he didn’t have a good excuse, he had a bunch of them. I can’t even enumerate them. What I can say is that for a hot guy, he not only has awesome command of his hot parts, he also has awesome command of the English language. He used it and it worked on me. Mainly because he meant every word.”

  “He’d have to,” she kept muttering.

  Right, I had to give her something.

  So I did.

  “He told me every sign he was getting from me was that I was his dream.”

  Jerra perked up. “Oo, that’s good. What else?”

  My eyes went to the digital display of the alarm clock Rhonda had next to the bed in the guest room and my heart spiked as I shot to sitting on the bed. “Jerra! I can’t! He’s going to be here in five minutes and I have only one boot on.”

  “Oh, he’ll be late. They always are.”

  “Mike won’t.”

  “He will. They always are. The hotter, the later. Hunter was always at least half an hour late for every date. No other man would I put up with that but because Hunter was pretty and Little Hunter was big and pretty and Big Hunter knows how to use him, I put up with it.”

  I didn’t need for Jerra to start waxing poetic about “Little Hunter”. I knew all about “Little Hunter” and Big Hunter’s Olympic-class skills using “him”. If she started, she could go on for hours. I knew this because she’d done it. Often.

  Instead, I skirted that topic and informed her, “He was never late for a date with Debbie.”

  And I knew this because, back in the day, I paid close attention.

  “Euw, that’s just weird,” Jerra mumbled.

  “It was twenty-five years ago.”

  “No, I mean that he’d date Debbie.”

  I was with her on that one.

  “Back then, she didn’t dress like a scary lesbian and have one of those blue tooth thingie-ma-bobbies surgically attached to her ear,” I explained. I knew Jerra knew what I was talking about since Debbie had been down to my house in Texas (once), Jerra met her and it didn’t go well. Not the visit and not Debbie’s meeting with Jerra. Then again, this was Debbie. She’d rub the Pope the wrong way even if he was in a great mood. “She was actually really pretty.”

  “Beauty comes from within, sister,” she reminded me.

  She was right about that too.

  “Right, then he was a teenage boy, she was really pretty and she put out,” I told her.

  “That explains it,” she murmured.

  “Can I go now?” I asked.

  “Only if you promise a first thing in the morning phone call explaining the reconciliation and details about the meet the kids dinner.”

  “Done,” I agreed.

  She said nothing.

  “Jerra, I have to go.”

  “Are you sure about this, baby?” she whispered and I pulled in a soft breath.

  Then I let it go.

  Then I said softly, “He’s been unhappy for eighteen years, a bad marriage, babe. Really bad. And last night he told me I’d made him happy for the first time in those years. Truly happy without it being fucked up. He had issues. He took those out on me. He regrets it. And he apologized and explained them. So, yes, I’m sure about this.”

  “Okay,” she said softly back.

  “Now can I go?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she answered.

  “Love you, honey,” I whispered.

  “Love you too and miss you already.”

  “I miss you too, Jerra, babe. Later.”

  “Yeah, later.”

  I touched the screen and sighed.

  Then I bent and pulled on my other boot.

  Mike, having been married to a designer label whore of the worst variety, knew to phone me to give me the all important information that tonight was casual. We were going to The Station. Not the police one, the semi-nice restaurant that had popped up in one of the semi-nice shopping areas that popped up at the north end of town in the years after I’d been gone from The ‘Burg. I’d been there once before. The food was excellent. The dress code was jeans.

  So I had on a pair that were in the middle of my Jeans Fade Spectrum, a spectrum that was wide considering I owned a lot of jeans. Not nearly white with lots of fraying bits. Not dark either.

  I added a slash neck cream top that had a hem that smoothed over my hips and very long sleeves that had a small opening in the seam that hooked over my thumb. Over that I wore a drop belt made of a wide expanse of fawn suede that had a big, round silver buckle that hung low on my hipbone. I added a bunch of silver over the shirt at my wrists as well as at my neck and ears. I did subtle makeup and earlier that day I’d changed my finger and toenail color to a dusky, near sheer pink. I left my hair long at the back but pulled a hank of it away just at my forehead and pinned it about an inch back with little bobby pins painted cream, rose and brown. And last, I’d spritzed on perfume.

  I got up, went to the mirror over the dresser and surveyed myself.

  I was ready to meet Mike’s kids.

  “They’re here!” Rhonda shouted sounding as ecstatic as she had that morning.

  Okay, no. I wasn’t ready to meet Mike’s kids.

  But I had no choice.

  I pulled in a deep breath and exited the guest room telling myself kids liked me. Finley and Kirby liked me and they were Mike’s kids’ ages. And Hunter and Jerra’s kids liked me and they were six and eight. So there. Kids of all ages liked me. Mike’s kids would like me too.

  Shit.

  I started to walk down the stairs and saw Rhonda had the door open and Mike and his kids were coming through. Kirby was standing in the big front foyer. And Finley, my hot boy, cucumber cool older nephew, was leaning a shoulder against the double-wide pocket doors that led to the living room.

  Finley was killing me. Like his brother, he got his mother’s coloring, dark hair, blue eyes (though Kirb’s eyes were dark brown, like mine and Darrin’s). But he got his father’s everything else, tall, built, strong. The expressions on his face, the way he held his body, the way he moved were all his Dad.

  But I wasn’t thinking about that.

  I wasn’t thinking about anything, not even M
ike’s kids, both of whom looked directly up the stairs at me coming down them.

  No, my eyes were glued to the handsome blond man in the foyer as I walked down the stairs of my childhood home to go out on a date with Mike Haines.

  I’d wanted this was a ferocity that was consuming when I was an adolescent girl. I’d seen my sister do this time and again and I coveted it so much, seeing her do it was like a form of torture. I’d daydreamed of it day after day and night after night before falling asleep.

  And now, thirty-eight years old with my dead brother’s family and Mike’s kids by another woman looking on, I was doing it.

  And even with that time and our audience, finally having it, it was no less beautiful than I expected it to be.

  Because Mike was standing there wearing jeans as only Mike could wear them and that fabulous brown leather jacket. His gentle, warm, dark brown eyes were tipped up at me with a gentle, warm look on his face saying he liked what he saw. Not only that, we had an audience and I knew they’d melted away and I was the only person Mike could see.

  “Hey,” I said when I had one step to go.

  “Hey,” he replied then his arm came out my way as an invitation and I took it. I moved into its curve, it wrapped around my waist and my arm returned the gesture.

  This, too, came naturally.

  I was at his side, my neck twisted, my head tipped back to see his neck twisted and his head tipped down.

  “You look good,” he muttered.

  “Thanks, you do too,” I muttered back and his mouth twitched.

  Then he turned his head, I followed suit and I finally took in his kids.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  I wasn’t about his boy Jonas. Jonas looked a lot like Mike. He wasn’t the spitting image but he had his father’s coloring and his build. In fact, he was only maybe an inch shorter than Mike. And he had a lot of Mike in his face.

  I was surprised about his girl Clarisse. She had Mike’s coloring but either she looked like her mother (which would be disappointing since Audrey, in my head, looked like a she-demon with horns, fangs, acid green eyes and matted hair) or she was all Clarisse.

  She was out-and-out beautiful. So much so I’d never seen a girl her age that striking.