Eye of the Tiger

by Melanie Greene

  "And quiet reigned for another morning," she said.

  He gave her a quick kiss. "I'm going to hit the shower. Coffee's made, and Charm and I grabbed some croissants while we were out."

  "My heroes."

  "Heroes? I'm the one who did all the work."

  "But Princess Charming made you leave the house while I slept in."

  His next kiss was longer. "Fine. At least I get half credit."

  She ran lips down his salty neck. "Want company in there?"

  "No. Yes, but the croissants are warm."

  He knew every one of her weaknesses, and catered to them. It floored her. "Perfect man."

  Leaving him to his shower, she made the bed and headed down. The dog, collapsed on the ottoman, licked her hand once before falling back to sleep, so Nat rounded the counter into the kitchen. Evan had left her favorite mug next to the bakery bag, and she filled it with coffee before sitting on a barstool.

  The bag was taped shut, but it wasn't until she saw his handwriting on the folded-in side that her heart started skitter-tapping around. He'd left her limericks in silly places before, but something about the glint in his eye when he'd evaded her shower offer, his careful handwriting on the bag, or the discussion she'd been gearing up to broach lately threw her into overdrive. She had to wipe her eyes before she could read the first line.

  You think that I'm serious never

  And my rhymes a bit silly (though clever!)

  But I got you this ring

  'Cause Nat, here's the thing:

  I need you beside me forever.

  She found two croissants but no ring in the bag. Charm's tags jangled as she trotted over to lick Nat's ankles; they'd discovered the dog was remarkably attuned to their moods. Looking up, she saw Evan descending, still in his jogging shorts, and beaming at her tears.

  "Where's the ring?" she asked, which was the rudest thing imaginable, but he laughed.

  "You were supposed to put cream in your coffee," he said, reaching past her to tug the teaspoon out of the napkin. Green ribbon tied the gold band to the silver handle.

  Her eyes filled with more tears. He had her laughing, too. Princess Charming milled around their legs, surely confused. "So?" he asked.

  She shook her head, untying her ring. "I thought I was going to be the brave one this time. You always beat me to it."

  And as he watched her slide on the ring, as he understood her meaning, she heard a hitch in his breathing. “Really?”

  They kissed. She was wiping away tears, and their fingers tangled, and she nodded. "Yeah. Yes. Of course I want to spend the forever with you, Evan. I need to. I need you."

  "And you were going to propose?"

  She nodded. "Except you always beat me to the good stuff."

  His smile could sustain her for a month. "Want to see if you can beat me to the shower?"

  She couldn't, but chasing after him for the rest of her life outranked running away every time.

  Thank You!

  I hope you’ve fallen for Natalie and Evan, as I did when writing them.

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  Ratings and reviews help me grow as an author, and I appreciate all of your feedback. Please take a moment to review me! Bookstore ~ Goodreads

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  Not done with me yet? Read on!

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  My ‘also by’ page has links to the rest of the Roll of the Dice series, as well as my other books. My ‘about the author’ page has links to my newsletter, website, and social buttons. I’d love to connect with you!

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  Happy Reading,

  * * *

  Melanie

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve been a writer all my life, but now I have readers. Thank you, readers, for making me not just a writer, but an author. I love your reviews, your comments on social media, your questions about what will happen next to my characters!

  My first readers for every book come out of my writing communities—I found my critique partners Michelle and Brandie and Temple while we were all in the nest at West Houston RWA, and they’re vital to me even now they’ve taken flight. I’m propelled through my workdays thanks to the fun and the unbeatable crowdsourcing of the Toastie community (Black Gold Coffee! Genius.)

  The backbone of the Roll of the Dice novels is friendship, and way back in ’88 a bunch of us signed ‘LYLAS’ in each other’s yearbooks, promising to be Friends 4Ever. The monthly brunches and virtual ties to those who have left Houston prove that I’m lucky enough to write from experience about long-term friendships. (Sorry for stealing so many of your names.) (If I haven’t yet stolen your name, sorry for stealing it in future books.)

  Marilyn, knowing you’re impatient to read my books cheers me when writing feels like a gloomy gig. Sandra, knowing you will be one of my first readers inspires me to dig deep with my prose. You’re both angels on my shoulders.

  My family loves me. I can never return the favor well enough, but I can tell the world that their support of my career is unflagging, enthusiastic, and a source of magic in my life. Thank you.

  Excerpt from Let the Good Times Roll

  Evan’s sister Chloe made life difficult for Evan and Natalie. Read on for the first chapter of Let the Good Times Roll, a companion novella featuring Chloe. She hasn’t spent all those years in New Orleans single-mindedly working. She meets Gabe at a mutual friend’s Christmas party, and it’s not just his delicious gumbo that keeps her going back year after year.

  Chapter 1

  Fumbling for a firm hold on the sweating six-pack, Chloe Lee blinked at the stranger who answered Wendy's door. He was hot. Hot enough to short out her celebrated synapses.

  He crouched to catch Penny, Wendy's Yorkshire Terrier. She knew it was Penny because the pup featured in at least a dozen of the shots on her new boss’s screensaver. For the same reason, she knew the guy snuggling Penny up next to his glowing skin and flowing hair wasn’t Mac. Wendy's husband was a barrel-chested black man while Hot Guy was lanky and light and at least a decade older.

  Retreating a step, she double-checked the house number on the lintel. The house was just as described: sunflower-yellow shutters and a porch deep enough for rocking, cream clapboards wrapping three stories high to the mansard roof. Blinking white Christmas lights cast a stars-and-shadows light on the cobalt ceiling of the porch.

  Brandon’s hand on the small of her back pressed her forward again. Penny was rubbing her red and green tartan-ribboned head against Hot Guy’s chest, tugging his oxford askew, but Chloe had ahold of herself now. Instead of watching how Penny kept taunting her with flashes of Hot Guy skin, she said, “I’m Chloe. Are we early?”

  Of course Hot Guy had dimples and a lopsided smile. “Nah, everyone’s out back.”

  Of course he had a slow Cajun lilt to his voice.

  Her date stepped around her. Maybe she’d been too rooted. Maybe he was rude as hell. She counted it against him anyway, because life was too busy to waste on people she had to evaluate for signs of decency. He shook Hot Guy’s hand. “Brandon Glover.”

  “Gabriel Babineaux.”

  Of course he had a sexy name. She ignored the way his tongue rolled over all his vowels. Chloe handed him the beer, took Penny, and followed Brandon over the threshold. “Are you Wendy's butler?”

  Two dimples. “More like her houseboy. I live out back.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, down the narrow hallway. Now the door was closed, she could hear voices and zydeco music floating into the front room, and the lure had snagged Brandon.

  “Cute dog,” he said. “Is that a live band?”

  Gabriel nodded. “Some friends of Mac’s. They have a gig later tonight but they like to stop here for a bit whenever they can. For the annual party, I mean. Your first year, right?” He’d turned back to Chloe, seemingly as uninterested in Brandon as Brandon was in Penny.

  She smoothed back the Yorkie’s tiny ears and worked the ribbon back down towards her scalp, hooking her pinkies into the loops to fir
m up the knot. “It is. I’ve only lived here a few months. Well, six now, I suppose.” She crouched to let the dog hop out of her hold.

  “You must work with Wendy.”

  Looking up at him—long legs, of course he had long legs, long and slim and denim like the denim loved his thighs—she quirked her head. “How’d you know?”

  He reached down to help her up, and didn’t let go. “Gentle, dexterous hands. Mac and I about had our fingers nipped off when we were trying to fix Penny’s decoration earlier.”

  His own were a rough mess, long, the backs dusted with gold-red hair and some flecks of color in the creases. “Are we playing fortune teller?” she asked, pulling her smoother, darker fingers from his. “Because yes, I’m a pediatric neonatal specialist. And you must be a painter.”

  They were walking again, and he deposited her beer on top of a stack of drinks in the kitchen. Brandon was long out of sight in the back yard beyond them. Gabriel stuffed his fists in his jeans pockets, nodded once. “You diagnose me correctly, doctor.”

  “So you took up residence here through Mac?” Mac was a photographer, and from Wendy's stories, he moved in New Orleans’s artistic communities. He always knew someone, or someone who knew someone, and those someones were always doing interesting creative things.

  Another nod. “We taught together for a bit. When they bought this place, I was about ready to give up the classroom, so I set up the guesthouse as a studio. They’re good to me.”

  Chloe took in the shelf-lined sitting room which opened, via French doors, to the patio. A few people chatted on the low long couches, and the stone-topped coffee table was crowded with cans and glasses. Wendy's bookshelves held few books; the ones on display served to visually separate the accumulation of framed photos, small sculptures, and the occasional basket of yarn. Wendy was a superpower of their profession, one of those college-at-sixteen, doctor-at-twenty-three genius types, and she’d taken over as head of neonatology at the hospital before many of her age peers were done establishing themselves in a specialty. Chloe had expected stacks of journals and some heavy tomes—an explosion of the literature cluttering her own sitting room—instead of this minimalist and peaceful aesthetic. She wanted to bask in it, or snoop for evidence that Wendy wasn’t such an outlier. Instead she followed Hot Gabriel outside.

  Brandon, who was also good looking, if in the generic way of many men in her age bracket, shimmied her way when she cleared the crush on the patio. He handed her a plastic cup of wine and tapped it with his longneck. “Cheers.”

  “Thanks.” She sipped. “What is this?”

  He shrugged. “I just asked for red. Is it okay?”

  She had ordered burgundy at their last dinner, so it wasn’t so presumptuous an assumption. But he could have asked. “It’s fine.”

  There were dozens of people in the yard. The multicolored Christmas lights that lined the fence and wrapped a few trees flashed almost in time with a trio of musicians playing button accordion, frottoir washboard, and Cajun fiddle. She couldn’t deposit her drink anywhere convenient, so she kept hold of it as she gestured Brandon to follow her over to where Wendy was swaying at the edge of a painted plywood dance floor.

  Her boss hadn’t impressed her right away. Her credentials were great, of course, but Chloe’d worked with wunderkind before. There were three residents under twenty-three during her pediatric internship with Emory, and while she served her neonatology fellowship at Louisiana State University, her housemates’s thirty-year-old best friend garnered a National Medal of Science nomination. All the early-to-college doctors were smart and driven and proficient.

  But so was Chloe. So were plenty of people she knew. Being good at the job didn’t translate to being good at administering a department full of not just other neonatologists, but also specialists, neonatal nurse practitioners, staff nurses, and occupational and physical therapists.

  Her second week on the job, Wendy invited her to coffee and asked her to lay out the differences in the standard of care between Atlanta and New Orleans. “We’ve returned to what could be called normal operation after Katrina. Part of my process of rebuilding is to examine the things we do because they’ve always been done that way, and make sure they’re the best ideas, not just the go-to ones. So—and I’m telling Philipe Dluski the same thing—if your experience suggests that we could make better use of ECMOs or change a therapy routine, I want to hear about it.”

  Philipe Dluski was the other new guy, a respiratory therapist. The hurricane had scattered staff, some permanently. In the aftermath, Wendy was promoted and, in time, she hired Chloe. Her years at LSU had given her a strong attachment to the area. The levees breaking also broke her heart, which she determined to mend by relocating south.

  “It’s like you think your actions now can erase the past,” Ben said when she told everyone she’d found a promising job opening. The lash of her twin’s words stung more than if all the rest of their siblings said the same thing in unison.

  They were quiet, letting Ben be the one to tell her that heading to Louisiana after the hospital reopened was no more useful to the city than her becoming an expert in persistent pulmonary hypertension was to the sister they’d lost before she was two months old.

  She didn’t let them stop her. Well, if they’d put effort into it, she wouldn’t have let them. They backed off when she asked Ben if he was afraid he wouldn’t always look like the Perfect One without her around as counter-example. And living in even a denuded New Orleans was theoretically amazing, but much of Chloe’s time was spent at the hospital or asleep. The periodic all-nighters in the NICU weren’t as easy on her at thirty-eight as they’d been in her early days. But she wouldn’t trade her career for any other.

  She introduced Brandon to Wendy, who danced a curtsey in acknowledgement of his greeting. The man always on Wendy's screensaver slid between them. “You’re Chloe, right?”

  “Mac. Charmed. This is a great band. I hear you’re responsible.”

  His smile was light and welcoming. “I saw you talking to Gabe. He blames everything on me, even the good things.”

  “Oh, you met Gabe?” Wendy looked past her, then over her own shoulder. “Where did he get to?”

  “I think he’s at the bar. And, Mac, he also blamed you for Penny’s lopsided hair bow. I guess I have to believe everything else you say about him now.”

  “I like her.” Mac slipped an arm around his wife’s waist. “I’m glad we got her over here at last.”

  “You messed up Penny’s bow?”

  Mac bumped his hip against Wendy's until her mock-glare transformed into an eye-roll. She bumped him back and pulled him into a two-beat slide along with the chorus. “I’m sorry, beautiful.”

  “It’s okay. I fixed it,” Chloe told them.

  Brandon took her hand. “Want to dance?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, leaning back at arm’s length then jerking her in his direction. It was either fling her arm out towards her boss’s husband, or pull it in towards herself. Chloe had fast reflexes, and was trained to use them to preserve others ahead of herself. She cradled the glass of red wine against her white sweater.

  “Oh holy crap!” Brandon released her. “You splashed me.”

  Mac offered his pocket square. It was the same red plaid as Penny’s bow. She checked out its smooth sheen. “Is it washable?”

  “I think so, sure. Doesn’t matter.”

  She waved him off. “It's not something I can just blot up, regardless. This sweater is toast.”

  Wendy asked, “Do you want to change into something of mine? That has to be cold.” Indeed it was. Despite the space heaters, the air had an insidious nip which turned her damp torso clammy.

  “I've dealt with bigger messes.” They both had, though usually in scrubs or lab coats. “And news flash: they call you Widdle Wendy for a reason.”

  “They do? Who does? Are they here?” Mac’s eyebrows lifted in clear delight.

  Wendy muffled him with a
narrow palm. “Chloe made that up. She's too new to have heard about my nicknames.”

  “Well, not that one, anyhow. My point still stands. You're several sizes too petite for my needs.”

  “You can have one of my shirts,” Mac offered.

  “I feel like Goldilocks. Her shirts are too small, and yours are distinctly too big.” Mac was wide, tall, bulky. Like a superhero after the training montage.

  “Sounds like you're in search of a baby bear.”

  Chloe turned and sized up Gabriel Babineaux, from his full grin down to his canvas shoes. It did appear he was a closer match to her than the other residents at this house party.

  “And somehow you're a cub in this scenario?”

  Wendy laughed. “Oh, Gabe, be wary. Didn't I warn you Chloe is loaded for bear?”

  Later, she’d ask her boss why she went about warning others about her. Before that, she needed a fix for the wine stain plastering her top to her bra.

  “I promise, I left my ammo at home. At the other side of the park, or the forest, or wherever Goldilocks is supposed to live,” she said. “And if you're sure you don't mind, I'd appreciate the loan of a shirt.”

  “Don’t mind one baby bear bit,” he said.

  Brandon, having snatched Mac’s handkerchief from him, was mopping at the five or eight droplets of wind on his designer sweatshirt. He jerked his head up, though, when Gabe unbuttoned his placket. “What are you doing?”

  “Your date’s a mite more exposed than she might prefer.” Gabe removed his shirt, gesturing at her chest.

  Talk about exposed. The tannins in the red wine no longer stopped her from sipping. Hot Guy appeared unbothered by the cold, and he held out a calm hand for her cup. “You done with that?”