by Julia London
“Harry? Thank God! Harry, it’s me!”
“Me,” he repeated uncertainly. “Who is me?”
“Lola! Your roommate!”
Harry winced. “Jesus, Lola, it’s two in the morning—”
“I know, I know, and I am so, so sorry, Harry. Please don’t hang up—I didn’t know who else to call!”
“Why are you calling anyone at this time of night?” he asked irritably, and rubbed his eye. “Look, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Harry, please—I need your help,” she said frantically, and when she did, he heard that unmistakable crack in her voice—the sound of a woman about to cry.
He mentally shook the sleep off his brain. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ll think it’s so stupid. I can’t even—”
“We can discuss how stupid it is when the sun is shining. What’s going on?”
“Can you please come get me?” she asked weakly. “I was going to walk all the way, but . . . well, did you see my shoes? My feet are killing me! I’m not Bear Grylls. I can’t do this.”
She was definitely not the survivalist Bear Grylls. “Why are you walking home? What happened to your ride?”
“I had to get out of there, Harry. I didn’t know it was that kind of party.”
“What kind?”
“You know.”
No, he didn’t know, but whatever it was, he didn’t like the sound of it. Dammit. Damsel in distress. It was guy code—you couldn’t turn your back on women or children or animals when they needed help. “Okay. Where are you?”
“Thank you, thank you. I’m at the hardware store at the bottom of Juneberry Road. The one with all the pinwheels.”
“The what?”
“The pinwheels. You put them in your yard—”
“Right, yeah, pinwheels.” He would have said it was the place with all the riding mowers out front. “All right. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
“Thank you so much, Harry! I really owe—”
“Hold tight,” he said impatiently. He hung up the phone and went in search of pants.
Ten
Well, this was super embarrassing.
Lola was sitting on a riding lawn mower, her feet propped up on the steering wheel, and her shoes, her fabulous, way-too-expensive shoes, on the ground beside the mower. How could shoes that cute be that lethal?
When she saw headlights coming down Juneberry Road, she knew it was Harry. She watched as his silver truck coasted to a stop into the parking lot, the headlights pointed at her. She leaned down to pick up her traitorous shoes and stood up on the running board of the mower. The headlights blinded her—she couldn’t see the truck or Harry. She gave a weak wave.
That wave was followed by the sound of a truck door closing, and then, like a spirit in a ghost movie, Harry emerged from the blinding light of the head beams. He was wearing a hoodie, sandals, and shorts, his hands in his pockets. He walked to the mower and looked her up and down as she stood on the runner. “Are you okay?”
No, she was not okay. She’d been through a harrowing night, and if she hadn’t thought he’d recoil or think her weird, she’d have thrown her arms around him for coming to her rescue. Instead, she shrugged sheepishly. “I’m okay.”
“That’s good.” He yawned. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I can never thank you enough, Harry. I mean that.”
“Okay.” He gestured toward the truck. “Let’s go.”
She clutched her bitchy shoes to her chest. “I never have to ask for help. Usually, I’m the one picking people up in the middle of the night.”
One of his brows rose above the other.
“I don’t mean . . .” She shook her head and pressed a palm to her forehead. “Forget it. I don’t know what I mean.”
“It’s okay, Lola. Come on.” He looked at her shoes. He extended his hand, palm up, and gestured for them. She put the implements of torture in his hand, then stepped gingerly off the mower.
She followed him to the truck, hopping on bare feet across the lot. She went around to the passenger side of the truck, but Harry said, “Over here.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve got some tools on that side. Over here.”
She went around the front of the truck to the driver’s side. He was holding the door open. “Get in,” he said, nodding.
Lola ducked under his arm and slid in, pausing underneath the steering wheel. The passenger seat was full of papers, blueprints, a metal box, a leather tool belt. The back seat had what looked like a bunch of rebar iron. “I don’t—”
“Console,” he said. “I would have moved stuff around but I was too tired. Move over.”
Lola slid on top of the closed console. There was no place to put her feet, really, and her dress was sliding up her thigh, but she managed to perch on top of it. Harry got in and shut the door. She was pressed against him now, her thigh wedged between his side and the console, and her bare arm against his shoulder. He was warm. Hot. A furnace that was going to blister her skin every place they touched.
He reached over her to deposit her shoes on the passenger seat, his arm brushing against her chest. “Sorry,” he muttered. He smelled clean—spicy soap clean. An image of him in a shower, rubbing some man soap all over his naked body, popped uninvited into her head.
Great. Now her cheeks were flaming. She glanced down . . . at the rolled up blueprints, and the Green Bean coffee cup she was straddling in the cup holder.
Harry put the truck in gear, his arm moving against her bare thigh—no matter what she did, she couldn’t keep her dress from sliding. He started a slow turnaround and said, “You wanna tell me what happened?”
He sounded brotherly, and Lola suddenly wished for Ty or Ben to magically appear and threaten to kill someone on her behalf. “No, I don’t want to tell you what happened, because you’ll think I’m an idiot if you don’t already. But I feel like I owe you an explanation since you so graciously came to get me, and I thank you so much—”
“You said. What happened?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you—it was a swinger party.”
Harry jerked his gaze to her. And then he laughed. Quite roundly, too, as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. His head fell back and the cab of that truck filled with uproarious laughter.
“It’s not funny.”
“Of course it is,” he said jovially. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not kidding!” she insisted. “Maybe technically it wasn’t a swinger party, but it was definitely a sex party. Everyone was there to hook up! Men and men, and women and women, and men and women. Or any combination thereof.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know about all the combinations, but yes, everyone was there to hook up. And there was a lot of cocaine.”
“Yikes,” he said as he pulled onto Juneberry Road.
“Yeah, yikes,” she said, catching herself on his shoulder when he gave the truck a little gas, so that she wouldn’t fall backward into the rebar. “I’m not into that,” she said flatly. “I thought cocaine went out with big hair and the eighties.”
“I don’t think so,” Harry said, smiling as if he found that amusing.
Lola was very serious. She could not think of a single person she knew who ever did cocaine. “And then there was this guy who thought I should want to hook up with him. He got super handsy.”
Harry’s smile faded. “Not cool.”
“So not cool. You want to know what’s really sad? I didn’t even get it at first. People were floating off to bedrooms, and I thought, okay, they’re going off to talk. But then this guy said, ‘Looks like it’s you and me, sweetheart,’” she said, mimicking his voice, “And then started getting pretty adamant about it. Asshole.”
He’d been more than adamant—he was a pushy drunk and Lola was still shaking a little. He’d been a big man, too, almost as big as Harry, and he’d put his hands on her, groping, trying to convince her wi
th his whiskey-soaked breath that he could definitely show her a good time, as if that qualifier would be the magic that would cause her to consent to his clumsy advances. He’d scared her. She’d wanted only to get out of there, but the first mistake she’d made was not knowing quite where she was, thanks to her gleeful chatter with Nolan all the way there.
“So what’d you do?” Harry asked.
“Well, first I panicked. And then I almost hyperventilated when I couldn’t find Nolan. But then I found him—on the lap of a man.” Relief had washed over her nonetheless . . . until Nolan opened his mouth to speak. “Unfortunately, Nolan had partaken in whatever was being passed around, because when I asked him to take me home, he tried to answer, and he started giggling, and he could hardly slur two words together. And when he started looking around for his keys, I realized he was the last person I would get into a car with. So I just . . . I just walked out,” she said. “I walked right out the back door and down the street.” She’d thought it couldn’t be very far. Maybe four or five miles at most? “But I didn’t know quite where I was, and after a couple of blocks, my super cute shoes turned into machetes and started hacking away at my feet.”
Harry didn’t say anything. She looked at him in the darkness of the truck cab, trying to read his expression. “For what it’s worth, I did try to get a cab,” she added. “But get this—they don’t operate after midnight in this stupid little village.”
“Good to know,” he said.
“And I would have called my friend Mallory, who was supposed to be there by the way, but she lives with her parents. I didn’t want to be the girl calling the house at two in the morning, you know?”
Harry slanted a look at her that felt withering even in the darkness. “So you called me at two in the morning.”
Lola winced. “Okay, I know, I know. I didn’t want to be that girl with you at all,” she said, slashing her hand through the air for emphasis. “But by then I’d made it to Juneberry Road, and I thought, it can’t be that far, right? I’m sorry, Harry. I am so sorry. I swear it won’t happen again. Scout’s honor,” she said, holding up three fingers.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to throw the Scout’s honor sign if you’re not a Scout,” he pointed out. “Are you a Scout?”
“Then I’m swearing it on the grave of someone important. You can choose the important person.”
He smiled and propped his wrist on the steering wheel. “It’s okay this time, roomie,” he said congenially, and patted her knee. “Just please don’t make a habit of it.” The dazzling smile he flashed her after a dismal night made Lola feel a little woozy. See, that was how you lured a girl into one of the back bedrooms at a party. There should have been a sign hanging somewhere in that party house—Don’t be gropey, be sexy! Be so sexy that the girl sitting next to you is forced to look out the passenger window or risk drooling all over your shoulder!
Lola looked out the window.
“Sounds like your night really sucked,” Harry said sympathetically.
Lola snorted. “You have no idea.”
“I guess the only bright spot was hanging out with Amy Schumer.”
Lola shot him a dark look; Harry laughed. “Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand. “I couldn’t help it.”
They reached the lake house a few minutes later. Harry parked, opened the door, and got out.
Lola grabbed her shoes and purse and inched her way across the driver’s seat, but Harry was still standing in the open door. “You know how to ride piggyback?”
“Excuse me?”
He pointed to the ground. “It’s gravel from here to the door. Unless you want to walk barefoot, you’re going to have to hitch a ride.”
Lola glanced at the door. He was right; she couldn’t bear the thought of her blistered feet on gravel. She scooched over to the opening and stood up on the running board. Harry presented his back.
She put her arms around his neck, then her legs around his waist.
He grabbed onto her thighs and hitched her up her like she were a backpack, and walked across the drive. Lola tried desperately not to think of all the other reasons she might wrap her legs around a guy like him, but she couldn’t keep all the ideas from slipping into her thoughts. One would think that after her awful evening, the last thing Lola would do now—exhausted, embarrassed, still a little shaky—would be to imagine this man on top of her. But that was exactly what she was doing. He was so firm and so strong, and he smelled so enticing. Oh yeah, it had been a while. She was thankful the walk across the drive was very short, because she might have done something really stupid to top off this ridiculous night—
“Are you nibbling my ear?” he asked incredulously.
“What? Is that your ear?”
Lola was suddenly on her feet again. Harry frowned at her as he fit the key into the door. “What is the matter with you?”
“Sorry!” she said, throwing her hands up. “But you smell really good.”
“Hmm,” he said, and pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Well then. Crisis averted.
Harry was long gone the next morning when Lola finally roused herself from bed. She padded into the kitchen for a cup of joe, and noticed that the kitchen was as sparkling clean and neat as it had been the first day she’d shown up here and thought the house had been closed for the season.
She made some coffee, found her purse, which she’d fairly thrown across the living room when she’d come in last night, fished out her phone, and called Mallory.
“Hola!” Mallory said cheerfully.
“Hey, where were you last night?” Lola asked. “I thought you were going to the party.”
“The party? Oh, that’s right. I forgot to text you. I was going to come, but Dad wanted to go out for dinner and talk about the candy shop. He’s all about profit. Gah,” she said, as if that were unreasonable. “So how was it? Did you have fun with Nolan? He’s so much fun!”
“No, I didn’t have fun,” Lola said grumpily. “It was a big party with a lot of drugs and a lot of people pairing off for sex. There was no Amy Schumer! It wasn’t even a cool house. And there was a guy who wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Mallory gasped. “Tell me!”
Lola filled her in on her horrific night. When Lola had finished, Mallory said, “That’s so weird. I thought Nolan was on the wagon. Didn’t I tell you he was on the wagon?”
“Nope. He’s not on any wagon, Mallory. In fact, he was run over several times by the wagon last night by the look of things.”
“So how did you get home?” Mallory asked. “Cabs stop running after midnight. Did I tell you?”
The list of things Mallory had neglected to tell her was getting quite long. “You didn’t, but I discovered it soon enough. I had to a call a friend.” And then she’d nibbled his ear like a drunk girl character in a Saturday Night Live skit. The sad thing about it was that she hadn’t been drunk. Nope, what she’d suffered was just a plain old-fashioned lack of impulse control.
“A friend?” Mallory chirped. “Have you been holding out on me, Lola?”
“He’s not that kind of friend. He’s a guy who’s staying here for a few days. Just passing through.”
“Ah. Hey, come into East Beach later. I’ll buy you a latte to make up for not being there last night.”
“Nah,” Lola said, casually examining her blistered toes. “I’m going to stay in and work today. But I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow?”
“Great,” Mallory said.
When she’d hung up, Lola stretched her arms overhead and decided it was time to get to work.
She’d managed to draft two rough chapters by three o’clock, at which point, she was feeling a little bleary-eyed. Her girl had just ventured into Home Depot to buy some body-cutting tools. That seemed as good a place as any to quit for the day.
Lola wandered into the kitchen and looked around for something to eat. She thought of Harry coming to her rescue. When her gaze landed on a bowl of apples
, it occurred to her that she ought to do something nice for him. She was going to make him an apple pie. The man always seemed so hungry! If she wasn’t mistaken, she still had some steaks in the freezer, too, courtesy of her brother Ben, who had driven out one day to bring some of her stuff.
It was perfect—she would feed the man to thank him for rescuing her last night.
She hoped he was coming back for the weekend. She did not want to be alone in the house with a full apple pie.
Eleven
Harry pulled into the parking lot of Taco Tornado, but he didn’t turn off his truck. He stared at the blinking neon taco dancing on the roof. While it was true that he was so hungry he could eat his arm, he didn’t think he was hungry enough to choke down a pink-slime burrito.
He backed out of the parking lot and headed to the lake house. If he could just get through one more night on junk food, he’d make a run to the grocery store tomorrow and treat himself to a really good meal at the Lakeside Bistro. Maybe, if he was lucky, Lola would let him have some more of that mac and cheese.
But Harry grimaced when he stepped out of his truck; even on the drive he could smell something delectable. Surviving on frozen entrees was doable as long as there wasn’t any other food in the house. He opened the door and stepped inside, put his briefcase and hardhat down, and looked toward the kitchen. There was the source of the torture, clearly visible from the kitchen bar: a pie.
“Oh hey!”
Harry noticed Lola then. She was standing on a wobbly wicker chair, reaching into a cabinet above the fridge.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back tonight. Do you like wine?”
“What?”
“Wine,” she said again.
She was wearing a skirt and T-shirt, and her hair was tied in a messy knot at the nape. And as she reached overhead, her breasts were clearly outlined against her shirt. They were the size of oranges.
Damn, even breasts were beginning to remind him of food.