Money, Honey

by Susan Sey

  “You’d better mean that. ’Cause I really do want the dog, the ring and that little fixer-upper. Not necessarily in that order, either.”

  He dropped his chin into the sweet curve of her neck and closed his eyes against the unexpected and mortifying sting of tears. It was everything he’d never let himself want, and she was not only giving it to him, but acting as if it were all her idea. What had he ever done to deserve such a woman? He drew back, looked into her eyes and was startled to find something uncertain and yearning buried deep under the bravado.

  “You’d do that?” he asked slowly. “Marry me?”

  “God, yes. What have I been saying all this time?” She rolled her eyes, but he didn’t miss the way joy started to edge out the nerves in them. “Do I have to ask you again?”

  “No,” he said. He could feel a goofy smile breaking free and spreading across his face, but he didn’t care. She loved him. The real him. The man he’d tried so damn hard not to be all his life. And she wanted to marry him. “I’ll do the asking this time.”

  He let her slide through his arms until her feet were safely back on the floor. Then he dropped to his knee in front of her and took her hands in his. When he looked up, she was beaming down at him, love and laughter warming her eyes, the beginning of tears sparkling on those long, long lashes.

  “Marry me, Liz. Marry me and I’ll give you everything you ever wanted. The house, the ring. Hell, you can even have the dog, as long as it doesn’t shed or drool.”

  She dropped to her knees and threw her arms around him. The scent of her was sweet and familiar, the weight of her in his arms was precious, and he knew suddenly that this was home. Anywhere, everywhere. Just in her arms.

  “All dogs shed and drool,” she told him, though her voice was thick with tears.

  “Seriously?”

  She nodded. “So do men.”

  “We do not.”

  “You do.” She swiped a hand at the tears running down her cheeks. “I love you anyway. I want to share my life with you.”

  Patrick smiled at her. “Is that a yes?”

  “Can we negotiate on the dog?” She sniffled inelegantly. He kissed her.

  “We’ll negotiate on the dog.”

  “I’m thinking Saint Bernard.”

  “Oh my Lord.”

  She smiled at him. “You want me to sweeten the deal? I’ll let you burn all my work suits.”

  “Liz. Darling. Polyester doesn’t burn. It melts.”

  “Whatever. Do we have a deal?”

  He kissed her again, and this time it was a promise. “Yes.”

  Keep reading for a special preview of the next romance by Susan Sey

  Money Shot

  Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

  Chapter 1

  BELLS JINGLED merrily as Mishkwa Island Park Ranger Rush Guthrie pushed through the jaunty red door of Mother Lila’s Tea Shop.

  “Coming!” Lila sang out in that wavery soprano of hers.

  Rush slid into the room, his back to the wall, his fingers hooked casually into the custom-sewn pocket in his jacket that concealed his Sig Sauer. He scanned the cozy, doily-splattered sitting space of his aunt’s tea shop with the calm, flat eyes of the professional killer he used to be. He’d come a long way since he’d landed on this island nearly two years ago, but not so far that he could walk into a room—any room—without performing at least a basic threat assessment. He wondered if he ever would.

  His cousin Yarrow sat behind the register. (Second cousin? Third, maybe? A couple of times removed? Rush never could figure that stuff out.) But she sat there, her chin propped on the flat of her hand, her black-painted fingernails flicking idly at a silver hoop that went clean through her eyebrow. Her eyebrow. That was another thing Rush couldn’t figure out. Why a kid with a perfectly serviceable face would want to perforate it? Between that hoop, the little stud in her nose, and the hardware dangling from her ears, the kid had a half-dozen extra holes in her head, easy.

  Yarrow looked up from the paperback she had open on the counter and yelled, “It’s just Rush, Grandma!” She gave him a smirk as he finished up his visual sweep. “So, any terrorists lurking in the tea shop today, Ranger Rush?”

  “Nope.”

  She lifted the lid off the teapot at her elbow and peered gravely inside. “All clear here, too.”

  The urge to smile took him by surprise. The kid was flipping him crap. How about that? It wasn’t so long ago that she wouldn’t have dared. Nobody would have.

  “Too bad.” He put on a frown. “I haven’t shot anybody all day.”

  Her eyes went round as lollipops, and she stared at him in shocked silence. “Did you just make a joke?”

  This was the part where he should have smiled, or even laughed. But normal conversation had a rhythm, a beat pattern. It went fast and if you missed your mark, the moment was lost. Rush’s timing was terrible. Had been for the last, oh, ten years. Give or take.

  He pulled off his knit cap and stuffed it into his pocket. The one that didn’t have a gun in it. “So, Lila called me?”

  His aunt glided into the room, tall and handsome as a ship in full sail with scarves and skirts swirling, her long gray braid swinging. Yarrow said, “Grandma. Rush made a joke.”

  Lila clasped her pretty, ringed hands together and beamed. “He did?”

  “It was about shooting people, but it was definitely a joke.” She quirked a brow his way. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t talk about shooting when I’m serious,” he said. “It spoils the surprise.”

  Lila’s mouth fell open. “Good Lord, he did it again.”

  They both gazed at him in wonder, then Yarrow leaned toward Lila and dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “I’m scared, Grammy,” she said. “Is this the apocalypse?”

  “No, dear. Of course not.” Lila patted Yarrow’s shoulder absently while she continued to study him. “It’ll rain frogs first.”

  A tiny trickle of unfamiliar warmth bubbled up in Rush’s chest as he stood in front of these laughing women. Together they constituted a full two-thirds of his family, and for just a moment the gift of them pierced his soul, sweet and sharp. The urge to laugh with them kicked in but as usual the moment had already passed.

  Yarrow broke the circle first, deliberately shifting out from under Lila’s hand, as if she’d just noticed it resting on her shoulder. The rejection sent a wisp of grief over Lila’s face but by the time she turned to Rush it was gone. “So,” she said brightly, “what are you doing here besides being unusually amusing?”

  “I have no idea. You called me, remember?”

  “Oh yes.” Lila came around the counter, slid a confidential hand into Rush’s elbow. He tensed automatically, then forced himself to relax. Jesus, Rush, he thought. She’s your beloved aunt. She’s not going to stick a knife between your ribs. “It seems my dear neighbor Mr. Barnes has his shorts in a knot over the compost again.”

  Rush glanced automatically toward Ben Barnes’s place next door. Midsixties with the build and endurance of a guy thirty years younger, Ben ran Mishkwa Island Outfitters in the summers and built birch bark canoes by hand in the winters. A pretty straightforward guy for the most part, but not overly patient with Lila’s kookier endeavors. Probably didn’t help neighborly relations at all that Lila had the kooky market pretty well cornered.

  “Ben doesn’t like your compost?”

  “Evidently not.”

  “He thinks it’s attracting Sir Humpalot,” Yarrow said.

  “Sir Humpalot?”

  She arched the brow without the ring. “Sure. Seven, maybe eight feet tall? Long brown beard, big rack?” She put her free hand to her head, thumb against her scalp, fingers fanned out, miming antlers. “Unsuccessfully humping the Dumpsters since September?”

  Rush blinked at her. The kid had nicknamed a rogue bull moose with sexual identity issues Sir Humpalot.

  He frowned down at Lila. “This kid needs to go back to normal school.”

/>   “Normal school. Pah.” Lila fluttered her fingers in the air. “She joined your little ski team, didn’t she? That’s plenty of interaction with her peers.”

  “More than,” Yarrow muttered. Rush felt for her. He’d spent years being the scariest bastard on the block, but even he was scared of teenagers. All those churning appetites and no sense of mortality to curb them. Dangerous as fuck. But Lila had determined they both required more human interaction, so suddenly Yarrow was sweating it out with the high school ski team on the mainland. And Rush? Rush was coaching it. Jesus.

  “As for her schooling,” Lila went on, “the child reads incessantly.” She smiled her earth-mother smile at Yarrow. “Don’t you, dear?”

  “You bet, Grandma.” Yarrow smirked at Rush and tipped up her paperback so he could see a half-naked couple on the cover clinched together in a swirl of purple smoke. There might have been a unicorn rearing up behind them in a phallic reference Rush didn’t want to contemplate in relation to his sixteen-year-old cousin.

  “I don’t know that romance novels count as mind-improving literature, Lila.”

  Lila smiled at him, her imperious face gentle. “Love improves everything, Rush. The mind included. You should try it sometime.”

  “What, romance novels?” Rush shrugged. “Not my thing.”

  “I mean love, and you know it,” Lila said. “You want to talk about people who ought to reengage with their peer group—”

  “Hey, that’s true,” Yarrow said, her eyes dancing with wicked glee. “Sir Humpalot gets more action than you.”

  Rush experienced a pang of nostalgia for the good old days when nobody dared screw with him. “I don’t date Dumpsters.”

  “You don’t date anybody,” Lila said.

  “Nobody to date. It’s December, in case you hadn’t noticed. Single women aren’t exactly thick on the ground this time of year.”

  “You didn’t date when it was July and the pretty hikers were all faking sun stroke and sprained ankles to get your attention,” Yarrow pointed out helpfully.

  “You didn’t get here till September, Cuz,” Rush said.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t hear things.” Yarrow lifted her thin shoulders. “People talk.”

  “About stuff that’s none of their damn business.” Rush turned to Lila, who was peering at him with a disconcerting intensity in those bird-bright eyes. He snapped his mouth shut. His misanthropy was showing, damn it. And he’d been doing such a good job today. Now he was in for it.

  “Rush. People aren’t talking about you out of malice. They’re talking about you out of love.” She rubbed her palm briskly up and down his arm. “They want you to be happy. We all do.”

  “I am happy.” His aunt gazed at him skeptically. “Happy enough, anyway.” She didn’t blink; she only arched one pale brow. “Okay, maybe not tra-la-la, baby-ducks-and-chicks happy but I’m doing okay. Honest.”

  And he was. Compared to the condition he’d been in when he’d arrived on Mishkwa the spring before last, he was doing fucking great. At least his brain wasn’t buzzing anymore. At least he didn’t wake up angry and leashed and whipcord tight anymore, his trigger finger ready for a quick day’s work. Something about putting a couple miles of cold, clean space between him and the next beating heart had dulled his sharper edges. Quieted the static that had lived inside his head so long he’d forgotten how blessed silence could be.

  Now if only he could find the inner voice that used to speak into that silence, he’d be set.

  “He did make a joke, Grandma,” Yarrow said, unexpectedly switching allegiances. Kid was a pot stirrer, no question.

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  “Tried to, anyway.” Yarrow turned to Rush. “Work really hard and the next one might be funny.”

  Lila gave his elbow a final pat. “It was his first try,” she said to Yarrow. “Let’s cut him a break.”

  Yarrow shrugged and went back to her book. Lila turned to straighten the sugar bowl and the honey bear sitting on the counter next to a blue-glazed vase full of wooden stir sticks and a fat little pot of creamer. Rush stood uncertainly in the middle of this hotbed of femininity and tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

  “So.” He cleared his throat and drew a battered notepad from his jacket pocket. “About Ben Barnes and the compost. Moose been around lately?”

  “Not here more than any other place in town.” Lila flipped the end of her long, gray braid over her shoulder. “Ben objects to me more than my garbage and we all know it, so let’s not get all legal about it.”

  Rush paused. “So then what am I doing here?”

  “We wanted to see you.” Lila gave him a lofty look down the length of her nose. “What, you had a more pressing engagement?”

  He ducked his head to look out the window at the fat, gray clouds tumbling down from Canada. Clouds that looked likely to steam straight across Mishkwa on their way to Wisconsin. “Weather’s coming,” he said. “Thought I’d turn that deadfall up on the ridge trail into firewood before it gets here.”

  Lila curled her lip. “Another lovely afternoon of battling nature into submission?”

  “Well, sure.” Rush liked his job for a lot of reasons but foremost among them was the number of days he spent working up a good, honest sweat with nobody for company but his chain saw. Plus, he got firewood. It was always nice when a huge amount of effort yielded a tangible reward. Unlike this endless interview with his aunt.

  “Rush.” Lila pinned him with eyes entirely too sharp for the soft curve of her smile. “First of all, you can’t fight nature. But second? You spend too much time alone.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” He held up his hands and backed toward the door. “Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”

  Lila followed him. “You haven’t even heard what I want yet,” she said, her voice dangerously reasonable.

  “The last time we had this conversation, I ended up coaching a high school ski team.” He groped behind him for the doorknob, unwilling to take his eyes off his aunt when she was in this particular mood. “The time before that, it was supervising a meeting of the Young Anarchists of America.”

  “That was the Young Politicos.”

  “Whatever. I signed my name to stuff. I’m probably on a half-dozen watch lists by now.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Rush. They’re children. Harmless.”

  Yarrow snorted and Rush wholeheartedly agreed. Lila ignored them both.

  “The point is, you have a duty to take your place in this community. The place that’s been waiting for you.”

  “What place might that be?”

  “There’s a full moon next week,” she said. “The coven is gathering here for esbat, social hour to follow. I think you should come.”

  He frowned at her. Stripping away all the traditional language of his childhood religion, this was essentially a request for him to come to church. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” She treated him to her warmest smile. “Think it over, Rush. Surely you can squeeze some pondering into your busy schedule of hiking and chopping things up.”

  Yarrow swallowed a chuckle, though when he looked her way she was reading her book with studied innocence.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” His hand finally landed on the knob, thank you, Jesus. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Then the knob twisted under his hand—from the outside—and years of training so rigorous it had replaced instinct took over. Lila leaned in to kiss his cheek, and Rush lifted her clean off her feet. In the space of half a heartbeat, he’d moved her three long strides to the counter where he could put both her and Yarrow behind him. By the time the door flew open with a sweep of wind and the frantic tinkle of sleigh bells, Rush had the women covered and his hand wrapped around the butt of his gun in his pocket. He’d domesticated himself enough not to actually draw the gun, but not so much that he wasn’t prepared to blow a hole clean through his new jacket.

&nbs
p; And whoever came through the door.

  Chapter 2

  EINAR OLSEN ambled through the door like an earthbound Apollo, all golden curls and chiseled cheekbones rubbed ruddy by the raw winter wind. He poked lazy hands toward the ceiling.

  “Dude,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling with wicked laughter. “I surrender. Don’t shoot.”

  Rush eased his finger off the trigger and willed his body to stop mainlining adrenaline. One of these days, his cousin was going to figure out that sneaking up on him wasn’t as funny—or as safe—as it had been when they were kids. Rush sincerely hoped that blessed day came before he shot the guy’s ass off. Lila would kill him.

  “Honestly, Rush,” Lila said from behind him. “Was that really necessary?”

  He gave Einar a hard look. “Yes.”

  She delivered a sharp poke to his kidneys, which he took as an invitation to stop squashing her against the counter. He stepped aside and she huffed out an exasperated breath. “You see now why I want you at esbat? I swear, you’re barely housebroken. You need to get used to people again.” She patted at the soft gray wings of hair over her ears and leaned around him. “Hello, Einar.”

  “Hey, Auntie.” Einar scooped Lila into his arms, delivered a smacking kiss to her cheek, then set her back on her feet. “You’re looking exquisite as always.”

  She swatted his arm. “Oh, go on. Sweet-talker.”

  “Hey, Einar,” Yarrow said, her eyes huge and adoring on their mutual cousin. Poor kid. He’d be worried about her if the entire female half of his ski team weren’t in love with Einar, too. It was going around, apparently. Like the stomach flu or something.

  Einar tossed her an absent grin. “Hey, little girl.”

  Rush winced. Even he knew better than to call a sixteen-year-old nursing a raging crush a little girl. Yarrow’s smile went brittle, but Einar had already shifted his attention back to Rush.

  “What’s this now?” he asked, his eyes still laughing at Rush’s stiff shoulders. “You’re coming to esbat this month?”

  Rush jerked one of those shoulders. “Maybe.”