Girl Next Door: The Complete Series

by C. C. Wood

  I blinked. “Patrick, really, I went into work at six this morning and it’s almost ten. I really need to get home and take care of things so I can go to sleep.” The thing I was planning to take care of was the crying jag I felt lingering in the pit of my stomach. What in the hell happened to ESP Patrick, who read my mood like it was posted on a friggin’ billboard? I guessed he was drinking a beer and watching a ball game, because I saw no trace of him when I glared up into Patrick’s face.

  “C’mon, Cat. Just two minutes. I’ll walk you next door, let you look at it, then put you in your car so you can go home. I don’t want to give Nat something that she’ll hate.”

  I sighed and nodded. Apparently, my willpower sucked. Well, I guess I should have already known that since lack of willpower was how I’d gotten into this mess. If I could have resisted Patrick’s handsome face and smokin’ hot bod, I wouldn’t be feeling lower than a cockroach right now.

  Patrick led me next door and into the kitchen, where he pressed a huge glass of white wine in my hand. Without thinking, I chugged it and poured a lot more. I would sip this glass so I would be able to drive home and not have to spend the night next door to Patrick, suffering. I followed him into the back of the house, where a little workshop sat in the yard. He opened the doors and turned on the light and I gasped. Sitting in the middle of the shop, taking up almost all the free space, was a king size four poster bed frame. The wood was glossy and stained a rich cherry color. There appeared to be hand-carved roses and vines on the headboard and winding up the posts. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship and I could tell it had taken many long hours to make such a gorgeous piece of furniture.

  He ran his hands along the foot board. “Well, do you think Nat will like it?”

  Dumbfounded, I nodded. His face dropped a little when I didn’t speak, so I cleared my throat. He needed to know exactly how special this was and to be warned that Nat would probably blubber all over him.

  “Patrick, Nat will adore this. It has to be one of the loveliest pieces of furniture I have ever seen. I do have to warn you though, that Nat’s a bit of a crybaby. You do something this sweet and thoughtful for her and she’s going to snot all over you.”

  His eyes widened then he grinned. “So she won’t think it’s too prissy or froufrou? I wanted it to be special, but didn’t realize that she wasn’t exactly a…” he paused, looking for the correct, well, least offensive, word.

  “Girlie girl,” I supplied.

  He nodded. “So she won’t hate it?”

  I shook my head and took a huge swallow of my wine. This was yet another facet of Patrick Hart that I liked. Actually, I realized with shock, it was a part of him that I loved. To put so much effort into a gift for his new sister-in-law, and to care so much that she would like it, was an incredible thing. It said a lot of things about Patrick’s heart, and all of them were good.

  Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. I downed the rest of my wine and prepared to make the fastest escape possible. Patrick was watching me closely again and I did everything I could to feign casualness. He shut off the lights and shut and locked the shop doors before leading me back into the house. As we walked I realized that I’d had a lot more to drink than I thought and that I’d drunk it all on an empty stomach. I’d never been able to hold my liquor, another running joke in my family. One glass of wine made me relax, two made me even clumsier, and three put me in a coma.

  When we walked into the kitchen, I eyeballed the wine bottle and realized that I’d actually drunk half of it! I examined my glass. The thing was huge. No wonder I was feeling a strong buzz. I also knew I wouldn’t be driving home tonight. Double shit, damn, and hell. I was going to have to sleep next door at Nat’s.

  Again, doing that annoying mind reading thing, Patrick spoke. “Cat, I think you’ve had too much wine. You shouldn’t drive home.”

  As much as I wanted to argue, stomp my feet, and tell he couldn’t boss me around, he was right. I glanced at the half-empty bottle again and decided, in for a penny, in for a pound. I poured myself another healthy glass.

  “I think you’re right. I’ll sleep at Nat’s tonight.”

  For some reason, this statement made him smile. I decided I really didn’t want to know. I imagined whatever he was thinking would just freak me out. I followed him into the living room and sprawled on the couch. My buzz was getting stronger and I was beginning to feel light and relaxed. Patrick stretched out next to me, drinking his beer. In my alcohol-induced haze, I realized that he was way too close to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull away. I liked being close to Patrick. I was sitting there, contemplating this thought, tracing circles on the microsuede couch, when Patrick spoke.

  “Cat,” he said.

  “Hmm?” I was so relaxed even the little hum in the back of my throat took effort. I took another drink of my wine. Wow, the glass was almost empty already. When had that happened?

  “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. I was too blissfully inebriated to understand what was about to happen.

  “You promise?” he asked.

  “Sure, Patrick.” My voice was quiet and a little breathy. I sounded a little like Marilyn Monroe. The thought made me smile dreamily.

  “Why did you break up with me?”

  I choked on a mouthful of wine and managed to swallow it down, coughing a little.

  “What?” My head was fuzzy, but not enough for me to forget that I really did not want to have this conversation.

  He studied me. “You heard me, Cat. And you also promised to tell the truth.”

  I glared at him. I didn’t have to tell him diddly-squat. I threw back the rest of my wine and stood up.

  “I think it’s time for me to go back next door, Patrick.” This grand statement was ruined when I listed to the side and almost lost my balance. Whoa, this wine was going straight to my head.

  “Tell me why you’re so scared, Cat.” He was being too persistent.

  I turned my back on him and paced in front of the fireplace, arms wrapped around my middle with one hand holding my now empty wineglass.

  “Tell me.” His voice was a whip, snapping straight into my soul. I felt the ball that had been lodged in my chest earlier break loose and work its way up my throat.

  I swallowed. I would not cry. I would not let him see me cry.

  “Tell me,” he roared.

  I snapped. My wineglass somehow left my hand without my permission, flying into the empty fireplace and shattering into a thousand tiny pieces. Tears filled my eyes and my throat closed up.

  “You really want to know, Patrick? Do you really?” This question was rhetorical. He’d already released the storm inside me and now he was going to get it all.

  I paced in front of the fireplace, arms wrapped tightly around my middle. “I broke things off with you, because I can’t trust you not to hurt me. You’re a good guy, no, a great fucking guy, and it was too easy to fall in love with you. The falling isn’t the problem, though. It’s what comes after.” My hands reached up and tugged at my hair in frustration.

  “It always happens. I meet a decent guy, someone who actually knows how to treat a woman, and he gets tired of me. I’m sarcastic, snarky, and sometimes just downright bitchy as hell. The deep-down nice guys can’t take it. They leave. They can’t deal with me. I try to be what they want, but they can’t or won’t stick around, no matter how much I twist myself up. The ones who are faking it to get into my pants turn into complete assholes then they leave, too. Though I’m usually not sorry when they do. Still, it’s the fact that it always fucking happens!”

  The tears were running down my face now, but I was too wrapped up in my angst to notice. “I’m pretty sure, Patrick, that you are the real deal. An honest-to-goodness nice guy. I think I like more about you than I have any other man in my life, hell, I think that I love almost everything about you, and that’s why I broke up with you. Someday, maybe soon, maybe a year
or two from now, you’re going to realize that I’m a pain in the ass to live with. I don’t mean to be, I try to be considerate, but I will always be the girl who makes sarcastic cracks or swears like a sailor. When you come to this conclusion, you’ll end it. It’s what happens, always. I just got tired of waiting around for the men in my life to make that decision. It’s easier on both of us if I end things before they get too complicated.” On this aspect, I’d accomplished an epic fail.

  He looked completely confused, then angrier than I’d ever seen him. In deliberate motions, he set down his beer and stalked toward me. His eyes were hard, like glass or ice, and so green I couldn’t look away.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said in a low voice. “You cut and run on me because you fucking love almost everything about me!”

  I was too far gone, with both emotion and alcohol to even flinch. I rose up on my tiptoes so I could yell in his face. “Yes, Patrick. I can’t do it. I can’t have a taste of that and then watch you walk away. It will kill me. I’ve had so much bad,” I said, thinking of my ex, Jeremy, “that I can’t have something good and lose it. When my insecure, abusive, asshole of an ex left four years ago, I knew, I knew, that I could never do that again. He fucking broke me, Patrick. You are nothing like him, but you have the power to hurt me more than he ever did. You could obliterate me.”

  I was sobbing now and I put my hands over my face. I had never cried like this. Not when Jeremy made me feel lower than spit, not even when he left me. It was as if four years of grief decided to burst out of me at once. I felt warm arms come around me, cradling my hunched body. Patrick’s hand pressed my face against his chest and he shushed me, gently stroking my hair. When my sobs didn’t calm, he scooped an arm behind my knees and carried me into the hallway, up the stairs, and into his bedroom. Gently, he laid me on the mattress and curled around me.

  Finally, after what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, I was able to get control of my emotions. I felt hollow, gutted. Patrick’s hands continued to stroke my back and my hair and it was so soothing that I began to feel sleepy. Between the alcohol and the high emotions, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Without thinking, I burrowed deeper against Patrick’s side and threw an arm over his belly and my leg over his thigh. Within seconds, I was asleep. What I didn’t know, is that while I dreamed, Patrick lay beside me, playing with a strand of my hair, until almost dawn. Then he too fell asleep.

  I felt something horribly sharp drilling into my temple, jerking me out of sleep. My eyes snapped open due to the pain and I yelped before I slammed them shut again. Not only was someone stabbing me in the temple with an icepick, they’d installed spotlights while I was sleeping. The room around me was so bright it made my eyes feel like they were going to fall out of my skull. I opened my mouth to moan in pain, but all that emerged was a funny croak. My throat and tongue were so dry I thought I must have swallowed a handful of sand.

  I burrowed my head under the pillow to block out the light and I woke fully. Then I remembered everything that happened the night before. Everything. I groaned. I’d told Patrick that I was falling in love with him, hell, I’d shouted it. So much for keeping my emotional distance.

  Now, the morning after, I was humiliated and hung over. I felt like complete shit. Slowly, I removed the pillow from my head and looked around. I didn’t see Patrick or hear him moving around so I slipped out of bed. I looked down and realized I was wearing a huge men’s t-shirt and my panties, and that was it. I shifted back through my memories of the night before. Even though I had been pretty tipsy, I didn’t recall changing my clothes and my memories were fairly clear. Yet another thing to be embarrassed about, I decided.

  I looked around the bedroom for my clothes. They were nowhere to be found. Shit, the sneaky bastard had taken my clothes. I walked over to his dresser and dug around for a pair of boxer shorts. I grabbed the first pair I came across, tugging them up my legs. Well, if he thought that taking my clothes would keep me from leaving, he was damn wrong. I looked around the room for my shoes, and saw them sticking out from under the bed.

  My head was pounding and I felt cranky as hell. I snatched up my shoes, cursing Patrick under my breath. I turned toward the door and stopped short. Patrick was standing just inside the door, holding two cups of steaming coffee in his hands. I was getting damn sick of him sneaking up on me. What was he, a ninja? Still, I did need coffee, so when he held the cup out to me, I snatched it out of his hand. The first sip almost scalded my tongue, but it also warmed my belly. I took another sip.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  Patrick drank from his own mug before answering. “Well, I’m not really sure.”

  I gripped my cup so tightly that I thought I would crack it. His face was so smug. I really wanted to smack him, but I knew that would end in a tussle. If we tussled, well that would end in something else that would also prevent me from keeping my emotional distance. I took another drink of coffee, feeling the brew chasing away the fuzzies in my head.

  “Seriously, Patrick. I will be leaving with or without my clothes. Tell me where they are so I can get dressed.”

  The smirk on Patrick’s face disappeared. “You will not be leaving, Cat, until you hear what I have to say. The last couple of times I’ve seen you, I’ve let you have yours, this morning, it’s time for me to have mine.”

  My hand shook. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear what Patrick would have to say. Maybe in a billion years, after my embarrassment dissipated, I could handle listening to his thoughts on the last few days.

  “I, um,” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what to say.

  Patrick waited patiently for me to stop stuttering. “Are you ready to hear what I have to say? You can leave after I’m finished.”

  It appeared there was nothing else for me to say. I walked back to the bed, put my cup on the nightstand, and sat on the bed with my back against the headboard. I crossed my legs at the ankles. Patrick looked amused at my attempt to be casual, as though he knew how hard it was for me to pretend and he found it funny.

  He moved to the dresser and placed his cup on it before he faced me. His face was no longer amused. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking and it was freaking me out. I cleared my throat but didn’t say anything. Finally, he walked to the end of the bed, resting his palms on the footboard.

  “I think I finally understand why you’ve been so pigheaded about us. I still think it was cowardly but I can’t blame you. There’s just one thing I want you to think about. I’ve known you for six months now, and every time we’ve seen each other you have demonstrated each of the characteristics you used to describe yourself last night. You make snarky, sarcastic comments, usually at someone else’s expense, sometimes your own, and I have often seen you be, as you said, downright bitchy. However, every time I’ve seen that, the other party seemed to deserve it. In the six months I’ve had the opportunity to be around you, you have always been yourself. Now, what I want to know is why you thought I wasn’t completely aware of who you are?”

  I knew this was true, but it had been my experience that most men didn’t mind my sarcasm early on in our relationship. Hell, some of them even found my biting comments entertaining. Usually that feeling disappeared after a few months. My quirks became a lot less cute then. I started to open my mouth to argue, but Patrick held up a hand.

  “Don’t answer that question. It was rhetorical anyway. I have another point to make. I asked you to keep an open mind when we started this. You didn’t. Before we even truly started, you were already planning the end. There’s a huge difference between wanting to take things slowly and being cowardly. From what I know about you, you are not a coward. You are so filled with life and I’ve never seen you back down from anything else. What about me, or any man, makes you want to hide?”

  He stopped speaking and looked at me. I waited, wondering if that was another rhetorical question. Patrick raised an eyebrow.

  “You mentioned something l
ast night, but I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol talking or if it was true. I’m guessing you were finally being honest with me. Who treated you so badly, Cat, that you gave up?”

  I licked my lips. “The story’s pretty typical, Patrick. My ex treated me like shit, he tried to isolate me, then, when I finally broke, he got rid of me. My personality, my attitude, was a challenge. He tore me down, got bored, and left me completely screwed up.”

  Patrick waited a beat, then asked, “Do you honestly think I would treat you like that?”

  I shook my head. “No, you would never treat me like Jeremy treated me. I think you have to be one of the best men I know.”

  “Okay, this is where I got confused last night,” he said. “If I’m one of the best men you know, what makes a good relationship with me scarier than a bad relationship with an asshole?”

  I blew out a breath. Last night, my courage had been bolstered by alcohol. In the bright light of day, I wasn’t sure if I could explain it without sounding completely nuts.

  “Patrick, you have to understand, a bad relationship, like the one I had with Jeremy, wasn’t that hard to leave behind. You are a nice guy, and it’s been my experience, that real, live nice guys prefer a woman who doesn’t throw attitude or make snarky comments on a daily basis. They can’t handle it. You were with Anya, you know how it felt when you were just being yourself and she couldn’t deal. I’ve been there, too. I don’t want to be there again, waiting for you to realize that I’m too much work, waiting for you to see that there’s something missing between us the way you did with Anya.”

  Patrick walked to me, nudged my legs over with his hips, and sat on the bed facing me. He leaned forward, putting his weight on his hand, his face close to mine. His eyes were warm.

  “Cat, I can’t make you promises about our future or where we’ll be in a year or even two, but I can promise you that, in the six months I’ve known you, not once has your tendency to make smartass remarks failed to turn me on. I told you that something was missing in my relationship with Anya and I wasn’t lying. I realize now she was playing me, but her actions were so passive that her play didn’t work. I need a challenge. You keep me on my toes and you make me laugh more than any other woman I’ve ever been with. I also think you’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever met. If one of us wakes up one day and realizes this isn’t working, we talk about it. That is another promise I can make to you. If this starts to go badly, I will talk to you and ask you to talk to me.”