Not Quite Perfect (Not Quite Series Book 5)

by Catherine Bybee

  “Whatever works, bro. Tell me how the broker scrub meeting worked out.”

  Glen was happy to change the subject.

  Mary stared over the counter, her mind completely lost in all things dating. Not her dating, but Sister Mary . . . she really needed to stop thinking of her as a nun. As soon as Mary had hung up the phone, questions started popping up in her head like mini balloons about the heads of cartoon characters. Have they kissed? Has Mary Frances ever kissed a man . . . as in before she became a nun? Did she ever have desires when she was a nun? Maybe Mary didn’t want to know the answer to that one. But still . . . just because someone is married doesn’t make them dead. The whole idea of her pseudomom sitting across from a guy eating pie and giggling produced equal parts ewh and aah.

  Mary picked at her sandwich without tasting it.

  “I was wondering if I’d see you in here again.”

  Mary blinked out of her distraction and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, hi.” Darn, what is his name again? “Kent, right?”

  He gave her a full-watt smile. “You remembered.”

  “Of course. How is the new job?”

  “Bumpy, but it’s good. Lots of personalities at a law office.”

  “I bet.” She’d had clients who were lawyers before, they were a very literal fact-driven group overall. Emotions weren’t an option, so cracking through them, in Mary’s experience, wasn’t easy.

  “Are you going to eat that, or do I need to get you a bigger box?” Carla asked.

  “A bigger box, I think.”

  “So, Mary . . .”

  Kent was still standing behind her stool at the counter. The spaces on both sides of her were taken, not giving him room to sit.

  Carla picked up Mary’s plate and slid the sandwich inside the Styrofoam box.

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering if you’d like to go out this weekend.”

  She saw the question coming from a mile away. “Uhm, the thing is . . . I have plans.”

  A strangled smile stuck to his face. “Maybe another time then.”

  What did she want to say to that? She didn’t have a boyfriend, not technically, she wasn’t married. Kent was an attractive man. A nice man. “Maybe,” she found herself saying. To avoid more conversation, she dropped the necessary money on the counter and released her seat to the next hungry customer.

  “I’ll take you up on that,” Kent told her.

  Take me up on a maybe? “It was nice seeing you again.”

  Kent moved, but only a few inches, to let her pass. “I look forward to it.”

  The weight of his eyes followed her out.

  Mary struggled with what to wear, what to bring with her, what to expect.

  It was after ten thirty. Glen was due within a half hour and she hadn’t gotten dressed yet. She had clothes pulled out over her bed. Denim shorts? Cotton? Daisy Dukes or something to hike in? Flip-flops or sandals? Or should she wear sneakers?

  She pulled out tops for all the shorts and stood back to look at the mess. She tossed the Daisy Dukes on the floor. Too skimpy.

  Denim? She glanced outside, felt the warm rays of the sun through her window. She considered the amount of food Glen had offered her on their first date. The denim met the Daisy Dukes.

  Mary glanced at the time and compromised between hiking shorts and a simple cotton pair that hid a little more of her butt than the other choices. She shed her bathrobe and pulled on her clothes. In the bathroom, she pulled her unruly mess of hair back in a ponytail and applied a fresh coat of lip gloss. “Not bad.”

  She heard the doorbell downstairs and ran back into her room. Her new bathing suit, along with a wrap, was already tucked in a small bag. She tossed in the flip-flops and hopped into her white tennis shoes as she jogged downstairs.

  The bell rang again. “Coming!”

  After pushing through the plastic, she opened the door.

  Glen wore a dark T-shirt, cotton shorts, and a smile.

  “Where’s the swimsuit?”

  Her shoulders slid and she rolled her eyes. “In the bag!”

  “Better be.” Glen stepped over the threshold and pulled her close. “Hi.”

  He had a way of making her giddy. “Hi.”

  He kissed her. It was brief. It was hello . . . and it was hot!

  When he released her lips he pulled on the back of her hair with a tiny tug. “This could be fun.”

  “Do you have a line for everything?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows and then looked above their heads. “I thought this was suppose to be finished by now.”

  She stepped through the plastic and into her living room in search of her purse. “There was a delay.” She walked into her kitchen and kept talking. “If you look down, you can see where they cut in, but they didn’t have the jackhammer to pull out the concrete.” She found her purse next to her phone. “Which turned out fine since the insurance company wanted to come and take pictures of the damage.”

  “I’m glad your insurance is paying for all this.”

  She hurried back in the living room. “Oh, no . . . my insurance is only paying for new floors. The five grand for the plumbing fix is on me.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Tell me about it. I just hope once the plumber gets in there he doesn’t find more issues. Or I’ll be back to eating Chinese noodle soup.” She was teasing, but . . .

  She stopped in front of him and sighed. Sweater! “Hold this.” She shoved her beach bag and her purse into Glen’s arms and ran upstairs. “I need to grab a sweater.”

  Glen laughed as she ran away.

  She tossed a shirt lying on top of the sweater she wanted from her bed to the floor. The mess wasn’t really her style, but she’d get to it later. Her eyes landed on Glen’s dress coat from last weekend. Much as she hated giving it up . . . she removed it from the back of her door and brought it with her. “I believe this belongs to you. I probably should have had it washed.” She should have had it washed. How unthoughtful of her.

  Glen handed her back her bags and took his jacket from her fingertips and folded it over his arm. “But then it wouldn’t have smelled like me.”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Who said anything about me smelling your jacket?”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t?”

  She blinked a half a dozen times. “We’re not talking about this.”

  He chuckled as he walked her out to the car.

  Glen loved watching her laugh. He’d purposely rented a Jeep that didn’t have a top to make sure Mary got over any my hair has to be perfect issues from the moment she got in.

  As it stood, she held on to her ponytail and enjoyed the wind as he drove them to the pier.

  “Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”

  A parking attendant took the Jeep and Glen walked Mary to their next form of transportation.

  “A boat?”

  It was a charter with a dozen other passengers. “To get to Catalina.”

  Mary’s brows squeezed together. “Did I tell you I get seasick?”

  Oh, no! “You get seasick?”

  She held his stare and started to slowly smile.

  “Oh, I’ll get you for that.”

  She laughed with a shake of her head. “You’re too easy.”

  It took less than an hour to get to Catalina. Mary might have smiled when they were in the air, but she was beaming now. The sea agreed with her. They sat toward the back of the vessel, where the sides were protected by shields to ward off the wind.

  Two of the other passengers struck up conversations with them, from the weather to their occupations. Or, in the case of the other couple, what they’d done before retirement. They lived on Catalina full time and came to the mainland twice a month to shop.

  Mary told them she was a therapist, and Glen said he was a pilot.

  Mary watched him for a moment after he’d given half the truth to the
couple but didn’t elaborate about what he did for a living.

  They parted ways once they stepped onto the small island. “How about some lunch?” he suggested.

  “Let the feedings begin.”

  Glen took the liberty of placing his hand on her back as he led her through the dense crowd.

  Catalina was only eight miles across at its widest point with one main city populating it. The city of Avalon, for the convenience of tourists, was one hundred percent walkable. Which worked out well since the main transportation on the island was limited to golf carts and bikes.

  “We have an hour and a half before our next adventure,” Glen told Mary as they walked the small city filled with shops, restaurants, and tourist traps.

  “Did you have something in mind for food?” she asked.

  “Leaving that up to you. I picked last weekend.”

  She glanced around before grabbing his hand and pulling him into a Mexican restaurant.

  Mary liked her food spicy. She splashed hot sauce all over everything and didn’t break a sweat when she popped a jalapeño in her mouth.

  They had just enough time to walk to the launch ramp and grab a water taxi.

  The sailboat was large enough to have a small galley and a place for Mary to change. A crew of three waited to take the two of them halfway around the island to where only the sound of the waves hitting the hull would distract them. Mary emerged wearing a cover-up over the patches of red material Glen had all but burned into his memory.

  “If you two are ready,” the captain said once they were both seated.

  Glen rested his arm on the side of the boat and encouraged Mary to sit back. “You’ll love this,” he said so only she could hear.

  “Good thing I don’t turn green on boats or this day would have been ruined.”

  Glen placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her into his side. She fit, perfectly.

  The crew hoisted the sails and the material caught the wind. The wind also caught Mary’s cover-up and Glen was treated with an up close vision that a camera couldn’t do justice to. Mary tilted her face to the wind and the salt spray hit her closed eyes.

  They spotted a pod of dolphins . . . or did they call it a school? Glen didn’t know, and the two of them debated it for ten minutes before attempting to look up the information on their phones. But a signal was nonexistent, which had them both turning off their phones and putting them away for the duration.

  Mary removed a tube of suntan lotion from her bag and distracted him by running a generous portion down her legs and over her arms. “Did you hear what I said?”

  He almost said yes . . . then realized he had no idea what she’d just said. “No. I’m having a hard time hearing anything with you doing that.”

  She slid her arms out of her cover-up and let it drop around her waist, and Glen’s brain fried. She was beautiful, curvy in all the right places, slender in all the others. His mouth watered. “You have a picture in your phone.”

  He let his eyes drop for a nanosecond and promised himself a longer look when she wasn’t watching him. “It isn’t the same.”

  “It’s just a bathing suit.”

  “It’s not the suit.”

  Maybe it was the reflection of the sun off the water, but he swore she blushed. “How is it you’re not used to compliments?”

  She continued with the lotion, this time higher on her thighs. The tips of her fingers moving between the material and her skin.

  Lucky fingertips.

  “I don’t get them as often as you might believe.”

  He waited for her to struggle with the spaces she couldn’t reach, and took the liberty of removing the tube from her hand. “Then you either don’t wear a bikini when you’re swimming or you’re hanging out with the wrong men.”

  She pulled her hair over her shoulder and presented him with her back. Her skin was soft and warm . . . his hands covered her shoulders and rubbed the lotion in with slow, strong strokes. He figured as long as she was getting a massage out of the application, she wouldn’t realize how much time it took for him to apply the SPF 30. So he used his thumbs up the edges of her delicate spine and rolled the tension up her neck and back down. Mary stopped talking and moaned.

  That simple noise took his semi–state of arousal into high gear and had him sucking in a deep breath.

  Get ahold of yourself, bud!

  Talking to himself, in his head, wasn’t new. In fact, it was becoming a necessary part of dating Mary. He promised himself he’d take it slow, not scare her off. They had too many mutual friends and too much chemistry to push this fast.

  Mary was quickly turning to putty in his hands.

  “How about I lie down and you do that for an hour.”

  “Because we have an audience and I don’t trust myself to do this that long and remain a gentleman.”

  She passed a look over her shoulder of complete trust. “You surprise me.”

  He moved quicker to avoid his hard-on becoming more prominent. “Oh, how so?”

  “Let’s just say I didn’t think you’d be so careful with me.”

  “What did you expect?”

  She leaned back to say something in his ear when her arm brushed against his erection.

  He didn’t move a muscle and she delivered a knowing grin. “I expected you to think a little more with that.”

  “That has a mind of its own. I don’t always listen.”

  Mary’s hand dropped to his thigh. She nodded over the side. “The water’s kinda chilly, you know . . . if you need to cool off.” The woman loved to tease him.

  Instead of asking the crew to lower the sail, he took Mary by the waist, not allowing her to put that damn wrap back on, and slid her close. “I have a better idea. How about you sit right here until this goes away so I don’t embarrass myself.”

  She snuggled close. “Sometimes it’s nice to be a girl. We can be turned on and no one knows it.”

  He glanced down the length of her body and let his fingers resting at her side squeeze her hip. “Your nipples are straining . . . and it’s not cold out here.”

  He kept her arm from crossing over her chest. “Oh, no you don’t.”

  “I am cold,” she told him.

  “That was a lie.”

  She shivered, but there wasn’t an inch of gooseflesh on her exposed skin.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mary woke from her dream still feeling the roll of the ocean under her from the day she’d spent on the water with Glen. And she was aroused. Painfully.

  They’d returned to the harbor, caught the charter back to the mainland, where they’d enjoyed a casual dinner before he drove her home.

  He walked her to the door and kissed her like a lovestruck teenage kid, his hands just shy of rounding all the bases, before his strangled words ended their night.

  And Mary, as improper as she could be at times, didn’t take matters into her own hands and pull him inside. Instead, she waved good-bye and ended the night with a cold shower of her own.

  Only now, at two in the morning, she was hot and awake and completely frustrated. She flipped her pillow to the cool side, pounded it with her fist, and forced her thoughts away from the man whose smile made her body weep.

  “I’m going to have a talk with that man if he doesn’t step up!” Dakota’s words first thing in the morning would have been appreciated if they weren’t being delivered so early.

  “And what exactly would you say?”

  Dakota was moving around really well on the crutches. Walt and Leo were having a little father/son time bonding on a Sunday morning so Dakota could get the weekend scoop at the crack of dawn.

  “I’d tell him that you are not the one to make the first move.”

  “I can make the first move.”

  Dakota deflated that with a stare.

  “I could if I wanted to.”

  “How long have we known each other?” Dakota asked.

  “Six years.”

  “And how ma
ny times in those six years have you made the first move?”

  She cringed. “I was raised by nuns.”

  “It’s a wonder—”

  “Oh my God, I forgot to tell you,” Mary interrupted her. “Mary Frances is dating.”

  Dakota’s jaw dropped.

  “I know! That’s exactly what my reaction was. Dating, Dakota. Like having coffee and pie with a widower.”

  “Pie the night before and coffee in the morning kind of dating?”

  Mary couldn’t help but wonder if it was her BFF’s influence that had her asking the same question earlier in the week.

  “She denied that.”

  “You asked her?”

  “I was stunned. I asked her all kinds of things I probably shouldn’t have.”

  “I wanna meet him,” Dakota announced. “What kind of guy dates an ex-nun? How old is Mary Frances?”

  “Fifty-eight.”

  “That’s not that old.”

  “I know.”

  Dakota dropped a hand over Mary’s. “She’s probably a fifty-eight-year-old virgin.”

  That put things in a different perspective. “What a sad thought.”

  “Tell me about the guy.”

  Mary didn’t leave out one detail.

  Glen didn’t call from twenty-five thousand feet, he texted instead. Your wrap was in the Jeep. Truth was, he’d “accidentally” left it on the floor when he’d handed her back her bag. He felt a little like a panty snatcher when he’d curled the material in his hand and smelled her most of the night.

  You should probably toss it in the wash.

  That is NOT going to happen.

  It smells like suntan lotion.

  It smells like you.

  There was a dot, dot, dot on the screen, until finally . . . I like the image that jumped into my head.

  So did he. I have to check my schedule about next weekend. When is a good time to call on Mondays?

  Before two. Call my cell.

  We’ll talk tomorrow.

  Fly safe.

  I always do, sweetheart.

  “I’m leaving him.” Nina Golf sat across from Mary with her hands folded firmly in her lap, dark-rimmed sunglasses hiding the emotion in her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.”