by J. L. Berg
“Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint a fan, would we, Declan?” Logan said over his shoulder to his good friend.
Declan just shook his head and chuckled, standing to greet us. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kara,” he said in a voice that oozed sex appeal.
Kara’s blush spread even further. “Can I get your autograph?”
“Uh…sure. You got anything for me to sign? I’m afraid I don’t really carry anything like that.”
She dived into her purse and rummaged around, looking for something, but she only found a pen. Nothing to write on. “I have a pen. You could sign me,” she said with a giggle.
I heard Colin choke on his laugh as he had been sucking down his beer. Declan gave a half-grin, but he handled it like the pro he was.
“That’s very sweet, but I gave up signing body parts a long time ago,” he said, holding up his wedding ring as an explanation.
“Of course. I was just being silly,” she answered, fumbling now and looking highly embarrassed.
Didn’t this girl just go on a date with me? Next to Declan James, I was suddenly chopped liver, not that I was jealous. It actually made my life a hell of a lot easier.
Declan reached down and grabbed a napkin off the table. He took the pen from her hand, and he scribbled something on the napkin. When he handed it back to her, she thanked him. They took a picture, which of course caused a domino effect, and he had to take many more pictures with several other women who were suddenly brave enough to come over.
After about fifteen minutes, he politely thanked them and said he was going to join his buddies for a beer. He sat back down, and everyone, thankfully, dispersed. The conversation Logan, Kara, and I had been having started to come to a close. Just as Kara and I were about to say our good-byes to everyone and join our coworkers again, Logan caught someone’s eye over my shoulder and cursed.
“Motherfucker!” Declan joined in.
“Is that my wife?” Colin asked.
I turned to see my sister and her two best friends entering the bar. I lost interest immediately when I saw who was walking behind them.
Mia.
She was dressed in a short skirt and fuck-me heels, and I had to brace myself against the wall for a second to recover from the impact. Mia had always been beautiful and sexy in a natural way. She was never overdone but never plain either. Tonight though, she was dripping sex from head to toe, and I wanted to kill every man in the bar who was eyeing her as she walked in.
She wasn’t mine though. I had no right. My hands fisted at my sides, and I took a cleansing deep breath that did absolutely nothing to calm my nerves. I tried to turn back and start another conversation with Logan, but he was now entirely focused on Clare. He stood frozen in place, completely mesmerized, as he waited for her to join him. When Clare reached his side, she grinned, and he whispered something in her ear, which caused her to blush.
“Funny meeting you here, handsome,” she whispered.
“My night just got much, much better,” Logan said.
Yuck, I really didn’t want to witness sexy time between my sister and her husband.
Declan and Colin were engaged in similar acts with their wives—eye-fucking the shit out of them and whispering God-only-knows-what in their ears. I looked over, and Mia and Liv were casually leaning over the bar, waiting to buy a drink. She glanced over at Leah with a grin. It died immediately when her eyes found mine, and her face fell even more when she saw me standing with Kara.
Shit, she thinks I’m on a date. I needed to get out of here. Nothing good could come from this.
“Goober!” Leah said, finally realizing my presence.
“Hey, Leah,” I said.
“I didn’t know you were going to be here! I thought we were just crashing our husbands’ night out. To what do we owe the pleasure?” she asked, settling herself on her husband’s lap.
Declan looked mighty happy with his new arrangements for the evening. His hand was caressing up and down Leah’s bare thigh. I shuddered and looked away. It was like being at a family get-together, but instead of playing Parcheesi, everyone had decided to make out instead.
Gross.
“I showed up with a few of my coworkers. This is Kara,” I said. “We should probably head back. You guys have a nice evening.”
“Hold up!” Leah said.
I paused. Damn, I knew I wouldn’t get off that easy.
Leah could smell bullshit like a shark could smell blood.
“Why don’t you and Kara join us?” Leah asked.
Now that the offer had been extended, I knew it wouldn’t be refused. One glance at Declan’s number one fan, and I knew we were staying. Two additional chairs were added, and then we were settling in and ordering drinks as Mia and Liv joined us.
“Mia! Look who’s here!” Leah said with an evil gleam in her eye.
I hated Leah right now. Family or not, I wanted to strangle her.
“Hi, Garrett,” Mia said meekly.
I reciprocated. “Evening, Mia.”
Clare’s eyes flew up to mine, and I could see the apology written all over her face. I had no doubt that she remembered who Mia was and how much she had once meant to me and in her Logan-frazzled mind, she’d forgotten that we were both now sitting at the same small table. Together. Clare knew how uncomfortable this situation was for the both of us.
The table was silent. Had it not been for the loud noise of the bar and the wailing voices from the karaoke going on behind us, I was fairly certain I could have heard a pin drop.
This isn’t awkward. No, not at all.
“So, who’s singing first?” Leah asked loudly, clapping her hands together.
We all groaned.
The question was followed by a handful of, “No,” and “Hell no.”
“Oh, come on! It’s karaoke night and no one is going to sing? Come on! Anyone? Clare? Oh, I know! Mia, what about you? You need to do something crazy tonight, especially in that outfit! Get your ass up there and sing.”
I glanced over at Mia, and her eyes were wide.
“I don’t think so,” she answered.
“Oh, come on! Why not?”
“I can’t sing,” she answered.
I laughed out loud. “Lie,” I blurted out.
Mia’s eyes heated in anger, and I felt a bit of triumph. Good, feel anger. I’d been living waist-deep in the shit for years.
“The girl I once knew would have gotten up there and sang her heart out at the first chance.”
“So, Mia…what do you like to do when you aren’t being all prim and proper and shit? I asked, fiddling with her hair.
We were sitting on the grass and sharing a crappy slice of pizza.
“Why do you keep calling me Mia? It’s not my name, and I don’t curse. It’s not polite,” she said, exasperated.
I knew she wasn’t really frustrated though. The curve of a smile on her face said otherwise.
I grinned, ignoring her comment about my language. I pulled a piece of pepperoni off my pizza and tossed it in my mouth. “Neither is Amelia. It’s too formal and uptight for a teenager. Mia is more your style. I like it.”
“Hmm…” was all she said.
A silence fell between us as she picked at her salad. I’d skipped the salad. She should have, too. Salad from the school cafeteria was scary.
“I sing.”
“What?” I said.
“You asked what I liked to do. I like to sing.”
The grown-up Mia gave me a hard stare, and then she slowly rose from her chair. Everyone at the table cheered and hollered at the accepted challenge. I just gulped in fear. I was a fucking fool. I didn’t want to hear her sing. It would end me.
Maybe she’d lost that talent. Maybe it’d gone away with age, and she now sucked at it. It could be true. I hadn’t heard her sing since she returned. She hadn’t let out a hum or an absentminded chorus, not one single note, as she’d cleaned the floors.
She walked over to the corner where
the stage was set up. She huddled in close with the DJ, who was standing under a banner that proudly boasted he had every song ever known. She bent over the book of songs, and then she finally pointed and nodded, having made her decision. After the person in front of her finished singing Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You,” Mia quietly took the stage, and I stopped breathing.
The lights all pointed toward her, and a few males, who would be dead soon, hooted and howled as she wrapped her slender fingers around the microphone. She gave me a pointed look right before the music kicked in, and “The One That Got Away” by The Civil Wars filled the bar. She was seeking her revenge on that stage. I’d pushed her and forced her up there, and this song was her way of throwing it back in my face.
As soon as she sang the first note, the entire bar went quiet.
I heard Clare whisper, “Holy shit.”
Mia went into the first verse, her seductive voice owning every note like it was hers. This was not normal drunken karaoke singing where patrons cringed and wished the person up there would pass out. This was a performance, and everyone in the bar was mesmerized.
If anything, her talent for singing had only grown with age. Her voice was fuller, sexier, and she owned the stage as she took full possession of the song. Bewitched, the men were hanging on her every note. Every woman in the place wanted to be her as she took hold of the mic and sang the high notes effortlessly.
My eyes never left hers, and I was up and out of my seat before the last note roared from the speakers. Unfortunately, so were several other men. As soon as she stepped off the stage, a handful of suitors met her at the bar, all trying to get her attention with offers to buy her drinks.
She smiled and laughed and I felt my hands cramped from the hard fists they were making. I shoved them in my pockets and pushed through the crowd of adoring fans.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink, sweetheart?” a jackass in a suit said smoothly.
She blushed and opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, I grabbed her arm and pulled her from her spot at the bar.
“Garrett!” she yelped in surprise.
“Can I speak to you?”
“What? Um…sure,” she replied in guarded hesitation.
I wrapped my hand around her waist, trying hard not to think about how good that felt, as I pushed us through the heavy crowd. My possessiveness of her didn’t go unnoticed by many of the other men, and they quickly backed off.
Good.
I guided us toward the hallway which led to the kitchen and back door. It was fairly quiet.
“What the hell is this about?” she yelled.
Touching her had been a bad mistake. My hand was on fire, and I was about to lose any ounce of restraint I had left.
I shoved her against the wall, and she sucked in a breath.
“Do you enjoy driving me crazy?” I asked. My hands tightened around her waist as I pressed my body against hers.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
Her voice was husky, and it gave me memories of that same voice crying out my name while I came deep inside her.
“Don’t you? That little show up there wasn’t for me?”
“No.”
“No?”
My hands slid lower, and a slight moan escaped her lips as her eyes lost focus. My attention shifted, and I found myself transfixed on her mouth. She had the most perfect lips, soft and pouty and made for kissing. She saw me staring, and she stopped breathing in anticipation. I moved in to kiss her. I needed to remember what it felt like to live, to feel my heart beating in my chest.
And then, I remembered everything she had taken away from me.
She can’t mean this. She would never do this.
Those words haunted me. I pushed away with an angry growl as she sank against the wall.
“Go home, Mia,” I barked over my shoulder as I stalked away in anger.
Anger was my true love and my only soul mate.
Chapter Seven
~Mia~
After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke in a tangled mess of sheets to the sound of thunderous banging coming from my front door. I glanced at my clock with fuzzy eyes and saw that it was barely eight in the morning on Sunday.
Who the hell was bothering me this early? Sunday mornings were sacred and precious. I would sleep in, drink coffee, read for hours, and enjoy doing absolutely nothing.
Why was someone bombarding my solitude?
And why is that person knocking so damn loudly?
I threw on a sweatshirt, which was three sizes too large for me since it technically wasn’t mine, and I ran downstairs to see the person I would be yelling at. I pulled the door open and found a very angry Garrett on the other side.
“What took you so damn long?” he asked harshly. His eyes moved around me and started to roam my living room.
“I was asleep,” I answered shortly, folding my arms over my chest.
“Alone?”
“What? Yes—not that it’s any of your business.”
He barged past me and headed for the kitchen. Moving around the room like he owned it, he opened my dingy white fridge that had seen better days and started pulling out eggs, cheese, and bacon. From the cupboard, he picked out the bag of coffee I’d just bought from the specialty shop down the street, and he started a pot.
“What are you doing?” I asked, stunned by his display.
“Making us breakfast. I’m starving.”
“You came over here to make me breakfast?”
“No, I came over here to take you to get a dog. The breakfast is just an added bonus.”
I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table, tucking my feet underneath me, as I watched him. He turned on burners, and he began to scramble eggs. I’d never seen him cook before. That was something we’d talked about when we discussed moving in together and getting married—who would do the cooking and who would clean. We’d joked that we would live on macaroni and cheese and ramen for the rest of our lives and eat off of paper plates to keep from having to do dishes.
Obviously, he’d learned to cook more than those two dishes. Someone had taught him how to cook, or he’d learned on his own. I didn’t want to think about someone doing all the things I was supposed to do with him.
“I never agreed to a dog,” I said with a touch of annoyance in my voice.
“No one ever gave you a choice. You moved into this house by yourself. You need some sort of protection.”
“I don’t want to adopt Cujo,” I huffed.
“I didn’t say you had to adopt a snarling, man-eating dog. But you need one that will be attentive and bark if it senses an intruder.”
“And a security alarm won’t do that?” I challenged.
“I like dogs better,” he answered plainly.
“Then, why don’t you have one?”
“My place is too small, and I’m a guy.” He shrugged.
He’d never really mentioned his place, but considering how quickly he’d gotten over here the other night, I was assuming he lived close. How close, I didn’t know. The thought of him being just streets away at night sent my heart into double-time.
Garrett threw some bread in the toaster and continued to mix the eggs. He grabbed a handful of cheese and sprinkled it on top before turning off the burner. He glanced over at me, and his eyes lingered on my legs tucked neatly beneath me. My shorts were mostly covered by my sweatshirt, so it looked like I was bare underneath it. From the way his eyes heated, I didn’t think he’d actually taken the time to look at me until now.
“Is that my sweatshirt?”
I looked down and immediately blushed. “No, it’s my sweatshirt.”
“You mean, it’s a sweatshirt you stole and never gave back,” he corrected.
It was one of the few things I had taken with me when I left home. I had been leaving the life we planned, but I’d still wanted some pieces of him. So, I’d granted myself pictures, my necklace, and this sweatshirt. I
hadn’t deserved more than that. I wore it all the time, and I’d completely forgotten I had it on when he came rushing in.
I needed to change the subject. “So, are we going to talk about last night?” I suddenly took a great interest in my fingernails. I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I stared at the chip in my purple nail polish while waiting for an answer.
“Nope,” was all he said as he dumped the eggs equally on two plates.
After he buttered the toast, he brought everything over to the table and chose the seat across from me. The food he dropped in front of me smelled delicious, and my stomach growled in response.
“Okay.”
I didn’t really know where to take the conversation from there, so I chose silence—awkward, long silence. It seemed to be the thing we excelled at nowadays. We used to spend hours, days talking, and now, we could barely speak a sentence without digging ourselves into a hole.
“Look,” he finally said with a huff, “I got jealous. It was a dick move. It won’t happen again. I want to be your friend, Mia, or at least I’m trying to be.”
He was being nice. What he really meant to say was, I’m trying to be your friend despite everything you did to me.
I finished my eggs and took a final bite of my toast. “Friends?” I asked.
“Friends,” he confirmed. “And friends do things like take friends to choose a furry companion. So, go upstairs and get ready. I want to be there when they open.”
It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It was a forced smile, but it was still something. I nodded and rose with my plate in hand. I rinsed it off and placed everything in the dishwasher. I could feel his eyes on me as he finished eating. Without saying another word, I finished up in the kitchen and raced up the stairs to my room and shut the door, locking it behind me.
How could I be friends with him? How could I be around him and not want him? I’d just agreed to a terrible idea. Friends? What the hell was I thinking?