Exclusively Yours

by Shannon Stacey

  “LFD?”

  “Oh, left for dead.” She stopped walking and when he looked back, her eyes were almost as wide as her goggles. “It’s just an expression. I just make sure nobody stops to take a leak or have a drink or something alone. But it’s dusty as hell, and since this is your first time, you get to be in front.”

  “Great, now Terry can hate me for making her eat dust, too.”

  “Kevin will ride drag today. Usually he sticks close to Pop, but we’ll be taking it easy today. Plus it rained a little during night, so it won’t be bad.”

  “But, shouldn’t—”

  “You’re procrastinating. Quit talking and get on.”

  He watched her climb aboard the ATV and settle herself onto the passenger box he’d installed just for her. It gave her a nice cushioned seat with a backrest instead of having to sit on the rear rack, but she didn’t look all that appreciative. Instead she looked like she was scooting her way to the gallows like a sexy, pink-clad condemned woman.

  Two hours later, sexy was no longer the adjective that came to mind when he thought of Keri Daniels. Stubborn, maybe. Pain in the ass? Definitely, if it could be counted as one adjective.

  At her first glimpse of the hill up to the Bear Paw scenic picnic area, she’d let go of her handholds and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her body against his back. It wasn’t as sexy as he’d imagined, though, because every time he tried to hit the throttle, Keri gave him the Heimlich.

  “Relax, babe. It’s not that steep.”

  “There are ruts. And a big rock!”

  He tried for a soothing voice, but it wasn’t easy with both of them in helmets. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I promise.”

  He eased into the throttle and she screamed, squeezing him so hard he almost lost his breakfast. With a sigh, he flagged the others around. One by one the family went by, most of them laughing as they did.

  Joe tapped Keri’s knee and pointed as Bobby went around them on his little 50cc machine. His nephew, aware he had an audience, took the hill as though an Olympic gold medal was waiting at the top. Keri’s grip relaxed as she watched him, and Joe took a deep breath.

  Then Terry stopped. If Keri wasn’t clinging to him like a freshly dried sweater, he’d have been tempted to jump over and stuff a sock in his sister’s mouth, but he was helpless to stop whatever verbal jab she was about to deliver.

  “Ma made her blonde brownies,” Terry told Keri. “But they’re at the top.”

  Then she took off in a fishtail of dust and gravel, powering up the hill.

  “That bitch,” Keri said. “She knows those were my favorite. But when I said they were to die for, I didn’t really mean it literally.”

  “Come on, babe. You just watched the kids go up it just fine. Who do you think taught them to ride?”

  “Mike.”

  Ouch. “Oh ye of little faith. No blonde brownies for you.”

  “Isn’t there another way up?”

  “Nope. But hey, if you tough it out, I’ll let you sleep in the big bed tonight.”

  That got her attention. He could tell by the way her head swung around, her helmet visor smacking the back of his helmet. Again. “If we don’t die going up this hill, you’ll let me sleep in the bed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She was quiet for a second, then transferred her death grip back to the box handles. “Okay. Whether I’m in the bed or in intensive care, at least I won’t have to sleep on that damn bunk tonight.”

  If he’d been alone, Joe would have punched it, banking the corners and launching off rocks, but instead he drove sedately up the smooth inside of the trail like his mother. By the time they reached the top, gear and people had scattered everywhere while Ma and Terry unpacked the coolers.

  He pulled up next to Kevin’s machine and killed the engine. Keri managed to knee him in the kidney and elbow him in the side of the head as she climbed off, but after narrowly avoiding hiking the quarter of a mile up the hill, he didn’t mind. After pulling off his goggles, gloves and helmet, he set them on the front rack and turned to help Keri.

  She’d beat him to it. Standing there with her hair mussed and dust coating her face, helmet tucked under arm, she took his breath away. Her eyes were lit up and the smile meant either she was that thrilled to still be alive or she’d actually had a good time.

  “I get a brownie and the bed,” she said.

  Like an idiot, Joe reached out and cupped the back of her neck and kissed her.

  Flash. “Say cheese!”

  “Any chance he’s taking a picture of Kevin?” she murmured against his mouth.

  Joe pulled back. “Since Kevin’s not doing anything but staring at us like a moron, probably not.”

  “Joseph, stop kissing that girl and get the hibachi set up!” his father yelled from across the clearing.

  Every head turned their direction, and the blush glowed through the smudges of dirt on Keri’s face.

  “If Terry hides my bug spray,” she said, “you’re buying me more.”

  Joe went to unstrap the little grill from his father’s front rack while Keri walked to the edge of the picnic area. The view from the top of the mountain was amazing—they could see across the river into Vermont—and he wished he’d brought her up here for the first time alone.

  Preferably late at night, when the moon was full, the woods were quiet and Keri was wearing very little clothing. They could spread a blanket over the grass. Make love under the stars.

  Better yet, they could make love on the ATV. It was an idea that had had him sleeping on his back for a while last night. Joe looked at his machine, pondering the best position for—

  Whack. “Not in front of your mother.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” Joe protested, rubbing the sore spot. When his pop cuffed somebody in the back of the head, he didn’t do it half-assed.

  “Since you ain’t got a math book handy, you carry that grill in front of you and think about cold showers.”

  Nothing got by the old man, so Joe did as he was told, taking the hibachi over to the flat slab of granite they always used for their cookouts.

  Kevin slapped a box of hot dogs down on the rock. “What the hell was that?”

  “A kiss. It’s something guys like me do with girls we like. But don’t worry, someday you’ll find one drunk enough to let you try it.”

  “Funny. But in case you haven’t noticed, our sister’s bitchy enough without you making out with public enemy number one in front of her.”

  “Keri’s not public enemy number one. That would be Lauren. Then Tina, Keri’s boss. She’s definitely number two. Evan’s pretty high on the list right now, but he’s only been on there three months. I guess I’d put Keri in a solid tie for the third slot.”

  Kevin snorted, tossed the hot dogs down and walked away. Joe didn’t blame him. All the stupid banter in the world couldn’t cover up the fact he’d just kissed Keri Daniels in front of his whole freaking family.

  What the hell was he thinking?

  Terry had the blonde brownie in her hand, ready to offer it like a high-calorie olive branch, when Joe kissed Keri.

  It crumbled in her hand.The only thing keeping her from tossing the whole bag of the blonde, brother-kissing bimbo’s favorite dessert to the crows was the fact her mother had baked them. While the RV had a nicer-than-most kitchen, baking was still no easy feat.

  She turned away, shoving brownie pieces into her mouth. She’d stopped at the bottom of the hill with full intentions of saying something mean—maybe something about the machine rolling over backwards. But the fear on Keri’s face had been so profound she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Now she wished she had.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Terry swallowed brownie and tried to smile at Steph. “Nothing, why?”

  “I don’t get why it bothers you so much if Uncle Joe hooks up with Keri again.”

  “They’re not hooking up. And what part of nothing didn’t you unders
tand?”

  “You were making the same face you made when Dad came home to pack his stuff.”

  She shoved the mangled remains of the brownie into her mouth just to buy herself a second to think. “After they broke up, Uncle Joe was pretty unhappy for a long time. I don’t want him to go through that again is all.”

  “Maybe they just weren’t ready, but now that they’ve grown up and done other stuff, they’ll realize they love each after all.”

  How had she given birth to a hopeless romantic? “She has a life and a big-shot career in Los Angeles. She’s not staying, and if they hook up, as you call it, he’s going to end up hurt again.”

  “Whatever,” Steph said, and Terry said a silent prayer of thanks for the teenage attention span.

  She watched her daughter walk over to where the boys had set up a makeshift racket-less game of badminton. It didn’t surprise her at all one of her nephews traveled with a battered birdie. Between the four of them, they could produce almost any bizarre item on demand.

  By throwing herself into preparing a barbecue in a clearing on the side of a mountain, Terry managed to avoid standing in one place long enough for anybody to initiate a conversation. And she didn’t miss the fact Keri was managing to do the same.

  No matter how much her family wanted to welcome Keri back into the fold, Terry couldn’t be open-minded about it. She was Joe’s twin—nobody empathized with him as keenly as she did. Maybe they’d forgotten the days—years—Joe had locked himself in his office with his computer and a case of beer.

  In the beginning, he’d tried to feed her some bullshit about the alcohol breaking down the wall between the logical and the creative sides of his brain. In reality, all it did was break down his relationship with his family.

  She’d never forget the day Joe quit drinking. He’d taken a swing at Kevin—not in a brotherly way, but a real, rage-driven swing that had busted his nose. That was the end of it. He’d quit cold turkey and never looked back, even during the darkest days of the Lauren incident.

  But Terry was afraid Keri was Joe’s Achilles heel, and she didn’t want a rerun of that particular episode.

  “Have you figured out how you’re going to come between them this time yet?” her mother asked. She was standing next to her, her hands full of condiment packets.

  Was she always this freaking transparent? “I didn’t come between them the first time. Keri did. And she’s no good for him, Ma. You know that.”

  “What I know is that you feel like your life is out of control, so you’re going to control your brother’s.” She dumped the packets in the center of the picnic table.

  Dozens of bitter retorts backed up in Terry’s throat, but she swallowed them all. “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe you’re more worried about her leaving you again than Joe.”

  Or maybe Ma needed to spend a little less time watching those Dr. Self-Improvement Du Jour shows.

  “Have you and Evan made an appointment with a counselor yet?”

  Speaking of self-improvement. “No. I’m calling a divorce lawyer when I get home.”

  “Not that I know anything about making a marriage stick after all these years, but you could try talking to him before you divorce him.”

  “He’s divorcing me, Ma.”

  “Not if you talk it out.”

  Sure, because a woman couldn’t hear I’d rather be alone than married to you often enough. “Maybe we could have talked about it if he’d told me he was unhappy. We could have tried counseling. He chose to walk out the door instead.”

  “You should—”

  “Stop,” Terry snapped. “Please, Ma. Can’t I just enjoy the scenery like everybody else?”

  When her mother put out her arms, Terry had no choice but to surrender to the maternal gesture.

  “It just makes me sad,” she said quietly against Terry’s cheek, “that you won’t fight for him. I know you love him.”

  And she did. But she didn’t have the strength to drag Evan home and then spend the rest of her life wondering every single day if that would be the day he left her again.

  “Sometimes love’s not enough.”

  Keri had gone twenty-four hours without phone, email, or texting for the first time in as long as she could remember. Probably years. As wired for communication as she usually was, she’d expect to be going through some kind of withdrawal—some shaking, maybe twitching fingers. Phantom texting.

  Instead she felt relaxed. Relieved. She could understand fasting a little more if that was how people felt after going food-free for a day.Detoxed.

  The low pitch of Joe’s voice drew her attention to where he stood talking to Kevin. They were talking about something on Kevin’s ATV, and she watched them through the corner of her eye, trying not to be obvious.

  A skill Joe obviously hadn’t mastered. Kissing her in front of his family? What was that about? Hell, he shouldn’t have been kissing her at all. Not that she really minded, but still.

  What did it mean? The man had spent an entire night alone with her in a secluded cabin and kept his hands to himself. Now, with his mother and Terry in the audience, he felt a pressing need to plant one on her?

  If she’d thought it strange her body instinctively remembered the locker position, it was downright disturbing to learn her libido had a memory like an elephant when it came to Joe’s kisses.

  As soon as his lips had touched hers, her neck had tingled in anticipation of his mouth moving south. Then her nipples got all perky because they were the next step on the journey.

  After that…well, the warm and fuzzies kept moving on down until Bobby’s camera had interrupted. But all through the burned hot dogs and chip crumbs, her mind kept wandering back to making love with Joe.

  It had taken a few tries to get it right, but practicing hadn’t exactly been a hardship. Whitesnake blaring from the Granada’s speakers. The sweet tang of Boone’s Farm on Joe’s lips. Their laughter when an elbow or a foot hit the car horn.

  And then, the doing of it. How every single time he would always pause at some point and, with the restraint causing his muscles to twitch, he would stare down into her face and say, “I love you, babe.”

  “Stop staring at my brother’s ass.”

  Busted. Unable to do a damn thing about the flush blooming on her neck and cheeks, Keri glared at her former best friend. “Where’s my brownie?”

  “I ate it while you were making out with Joe in front of his nieces and nephews. Oh, and our parents.”

  “Ah, the darling of the Drama Club takes center stage again.” She’d made out with Joe and one kiss was not his definition of making out. “Are you going to take cheap shots at me the whole time?”

  Terry shrugged. “You can leave any time.”

  “I have a job to do.” And if she didn’t do it, she’d have no job at all.

  Terry rolled her eyes and walked away, which was fine by her.

  “Pack it up!” Leo bellowed, and everybody moved.

  When everything had been bungee corded back onto the four wheelers, it was time to don their gear. Thankfully, Keri managed to get her helmet buckled herself so she was spared Joe’s knuckles brushing her jaw.

  She climbed up onto her seat, then held her breath as Joe settled between her thighs.

  “Hold on, babe!”

  Keri gripped the handholds molded into the passenger box, but once they started down the hill, she started sliding. It wasn’t the first time since they left the campground she’d found herself pressed up against him, crotch to ass and breasts to back, but it was different this time.

  He’d kissed her. Kissing, which would, if left unchecked, lead to more kissing, then necking, and then…

  The machine leveled out at the bottom of the hill and she scootched her way back into her seat. It didn’t help. There just wasn’t enough room to get the kind of space she was looking for.

  Determined to distract herself before she did something stupid, like forget his family was behind them and g
o for the reach-around, Keri tried to concentrate on the scenery.

  Trees. More trees.

  Oh look!

  A tree.

  Then he hit a bump and the machine bounced, bucking her right back to where she’d started—plastered up against Joe. Her helmet smacked his—again—and she let go of the handles to wrap her arms around him, her palms pressed against the flat of his stomach.

  The ATV stopped so fast their bodies jerked and Joe did some kind of sideways hop to get off the machine. “You want to drive?”

  “No.”

  “Slide forward. It’ll be fun.”

  With a pronounced sense of foreboding, she did as he said. Anything had to be better than having his ass between her thighs.

  By the time Joe realized just how bad a mistake he’d made, it was too late to do anything about it.

  He’d needed Keri’s thighs to stop squeezing his hips and her hands to stop hanging out mere inches above the fly of his jeans. In a panic, he decided to put her in front of him.Really. Bad. Idea.

  If he’d taken thirty seconds to consider the ramifications of her ass resting between his thighs, he might have just given her the machine and walked all the way back to the campground.

  “What do I do?” she asked, and he tried to focus on the fact he’d just made himself a passenger on seven hundred pounds of machine the driver didn’t know how to operate.

  “Uh…push on the throttle with your thumb, but—”

  Their helmets smacked as the ATV surged forward so fast she almost wheelied. Keri made a choked yelping sound while he yelled at her to stop over the roar of the engine and grabbed the handholds so she didn’t dump him off the back.

  Just as suddenly, the machine stopped and he yanked his head to the side to save them both another whack to the helmet. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say gently.”

  Laughter and whistles from the back of the pack made her stiffen against him. “I can’t do this.”

  Joe turned and waved the others by, not missing Terry’s dark glare at the side of Keri’s helmet or the kids’ snickers.