by Claire Adams
It was impossible for it not to be, not after the way he’d kissed me. Before Scott was gone, I felt too guilty to really let myself think about that kiss, but holy hell, now that I could think about it, it was hard to stop.
I’d kissed and been kissed plenty, but never quite like that. In fact, after kissing Pacey, I didn’t know whether any kiss would be able to compare ever again. The man kissed like a damn machine, with his whole body and all of his considerable focus.
The touch of his lips had electrified me, exhilarated me, made my heart race a million miles an hour and had skyrocketed my levels of arousal to something typically reserved for when I was already in bed with someone.
If that was what kissing him was like, sleeping with him would probably have to be preceded by the signing of indemnity forms and a warning label. WARNING! Death by mind-blowing orgasm probable.
Somehow, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy that let his lips write checks that the rest of him couldn’t cash. And man, the check that he’d written that night had me all hot and bothered again, two days later, and just by letting myself think about it for a minute.
I also didn’t think that I was alone in this insane attraction. The way he looked at me, the way he’d kissed me up on that hill, the fact that he’d clocked Scott for me even when I wasn’t there to see it, all of those things spoke to at least some kind of attraction on his part.
I just wished I had his number so I could thank him personally for defending my honor. As caveman-like as it was, and as much as I generally hated the fighting type, this was different. And from the sounds of things, he hadn’t resorted to solving anything with his fists straight off the bat.
But I didn’t have his number. All I had was his name and—light bulb moment—the name of his business from when he’d come in to deposit his check.
After scarfing down my pathetic excuse of a breakfast, I set up my laptop on the coffee table in the living room and pulled up Google to use it for what it was used for best: stalking. No, not stalking: research.
Typing in the name of his business, Nelson and Johnson Landscaping, I came across a surprisingly well-designed website, and listed under the ‘contact us’ page, two numbers appeared. One for someone called Thomas Johnson, a bear of a man with pitch-black, closely cropped hair and even blacker eyes based on the picture beside it, and then my heart skipped a beat.
Next to that picture was another, and it was of the man who featured in my dreams and kissed like he’d been designed especially for it. Pacey. With a mobile number and an email address listed underneath.
I grabbed my phone and programmed it in, my thumb hovering above the call button for a minute before I took a deep breath and punched down on it. One ring became two, then three, then-.
“Pacey Nelson speaking.” God, that voice. It stole my breath, and my tongue was suddenly tied in a hundred knots. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Crap, he was going to hang up if I didn’t manage to find my voice.
Time to man up, Juliana!
“Um, hi. Yeah. Pacey?” Finding my voice didn’t necessarily mean finding my brain with it, apparently.
“This is Pacey. Who is this?” He sounded curious now, the hint of annoyance when he’d asked if anyone was there now gone.
“It’s, uh, it’s Juliana. From uh—”
“I know who you are, Juliana.” Amusement colored his tone, but there was warmth there too. “What can I do for you?”
How to lead into it? Deciding a direct approach was best, I continued. “I wanted to thank you for punching Scott.”
Or just blurt it out; smooth move, Jules. Pacey laughed, and just like it had the first time I’d heard it, I had the sudden urge to make him laugh as loudly and as often as I possibly could.
“My pleasure,” he said. “Wish you’d been there to see it?”
“Hell yeah,” I replied, then felt immediately guilty for how bloodthirsty that sounded.
Pacey didn’t seem to think anything about it, though. He laughed again, confident and friendly when he said, “I think I can arrange a repeat performance if you’d be interested in that?”
“How’s tonight for you?” I blurted out again. Why wasn’t my mouth working properly?
Soft chuckles answered my question before he did. “Let’s give Scott’s face time to recover, shall we? How about dinner instead?”
Holy crap! The hottest guy I’d ever seen in real life was asking me to dinner. Me!
My grip on the phone tightened, and my heart did a wild, celebratory flip. I wanted to say yes, to scream it from the rooftops, if I was being honest with myself.
Stone Mountain was a small town though, as I’d been reminded of just that morning. If I went out that night with the guy who punched out my ex the night before, I would be fanning the gossip flames with an industrial strength wind machine.
No doubt we’d be stared at and talked about for weeks and weeks to come, I just didn’t feel up to that.
“Juliana?” he prompted when I took so long to give him an answer.
“Can we take a rain check again? I think it’s better for me lie low until the gossip mill grinds itself out. You know how it goes. I’m really sorry, I—”
Pacey interrupted my apology gently. “You know that there are places we can go that aren’t in the public eye? You have nothing to apologize to me for; I understand that you don’t want to be seen out with the guy who punched out your ex so soon after it happened.”
“Can you read my mind?” Stupid mouth! From the moment I’d met this guy, it was like questions just popped out of it without my permission.
He chuckled again, and I heard a soft sigh. “No, but my deductive reasoning skills are decent. So what do you say? Dinner tonight at my place? Seven?”
“Okay,” I agreed. Like I was ever going to be able to refuse that invitation. “Text me your address?”
“You got it,” he said. “See you tonight, Juliana.”
The way he said it was like a promise, and damn if I didn’t spend the rest of my Sunday prepping and primping to be ready for whatever that promise might’ve entailed.
Chapter 15
Pacey
Juliana had managed to surprise me yet again. I stared at the phone in my hand after she hung up, entered her number in my contact list, and texted my address as requested. I’d expected she would hear about my altercation with the douche, but I hadn’t thought she would act on it.
She was assertive, a quality I both admired in a woman and added to the growing list of things that I liked about Juliana. She was going to be worth all the effort I was putting in, I could tell. I was well aware that I was pursuing her like a dog in heat, but I wanted her more than I’d wanted anyone in a long time.
Having her in my house and so close to my bed was probably going to be distracting as all hell, but I was hopeful that our night would end there anyway. As I looked around my bedroom, where I’d just stepped out of the shower when she’d called, I realized I probably needed to clean up a little before she came.
My stuff was orderly and my bed made, but it’d been a while since I’d actually cleaned. Since I was busy with—or should’ve been busy with—renovations, there were plenty of sheets hanging everywhere, tins of paint standing around, and tools covering most surfaces.
It looked like chaos, organized chaos to me, but I doubted Juliana would want to eat dinner with a set of screwdrivers on the table next to her. I started there and spent most of the day getting the place ready for human habitation of the female variety.
Tugger was the only person who regularly spent time there other than myself, and most of the time, he brought even more stuff with him that I had to deal with. Straightening up was not something I had to worry about when it came to him.
Once I deemed the place passable, if only just, I headed to my fridge and realized that it was filled with take-out containers and not much else. There was milk for coffee, because with my sleeping patterns, there was only a small amount
of blood to be found in my caffeine stream most mornings—not the other way around. I also had a couple of beers left, but I’d need more soon.
My freezer was stocked with a few bottles of Jägermeister, tequila, and vodka for when Tugger and I decided to stay in or play drinking games when the game was on, plus a couple of boxes of odds and ends. But all things considered, I would need to go grocery shopping if I had any hope of putting anything decent together for dinner.
While I was at the grocery store, I stocked up on all the random shit I never bought, including fresh produce and paper towels, leaving with more stuff than I knew what I was going to do with, but it felt good.
Weirdly good. It felt oddly normal. Like I wasn’t stuck in some kind of haze anymore. I didn’t know what to make of that feeling, so I decided to table it for later thought.
First, I had to come up with what I was going to make for dinner. Which was pretty much when I remembered that I couldn’t cook for shit, which was why I never did it.
When I’d made that invitation to Juliana, I’d somehow forgotten that I was a disaster waiting to happen in the kitchen. I was trying to follow a recipe I’d found online for Thai green chicken curry, but despite the precision of my measurements and timing, it didn’t take long for smoke to start coming out where it shouldn’t have been, alarms to start ringing, and the distinct smell of something burning in the air.
My kitchen wasn’t large. It was comfortable, with the original wooden cupboards and marble tops. There was a scuffed kitchen table that could seat eight people and had come with the house, though I doubted I’d ever used it. Pots and pans hung in no particular order near the stove, courtesy of Jess, and most of the cupboard space was unoccupied.
I had the bare minimum of cutlery, crockery, and kitchen appliances, with a microwave, toaster, and coffee machine being the lone items that sat on the counters. This was the first proper dinner I was trying to cook here, and it was for damn good reason if the smoke and acrid, burning smell filling up the air was anything to go by.
Holding a dishcloth to my mouth and nose, I threw open the bank of windows over the sink and turned off the oven and all the burners. I didn’t even know what it was that was burning. It felt like it was everything.
I was in the middle of a full-on kitchen meltdown when I heard coughing behind me. Waving some of the smoke away, I turned to find Tugger standing in the doorway, his black T-shirt pulled up over his nose and his hand waving in front of his face.
“I didn’t know we’d descended into the arsonist portion of whatever self-deprecation funk you’ve been in,” he said, coughing some more while he laughed.
“I’m not in a self-deprecation funk,” I protested automatically, then grabbed two beers from my fridge and fled the smoky kitchen. Tugger followed me to the entertainment area around the side of the house, kicking out his feet after lowering his body into a lounger in the shade next to the pool.
Passing him his beer, I tried to decide where I would order take-out from for dinner. Fuck it; I was going to burn my damn house down if I tried cooking again. I knew what my shortcomings were, and cooking was right up there on the list.
“So, why were you trying to burn down your house?” Tugger asked, sliding his aviators over his eyes as we stared out over the pool in the afternoon sun.
“I wasn’t,” I grumbled. “I was trying to cook.”
“You lose your take-out menus or something? Forgot how to use your phone to call in?”
“Ha ha, asshole,” I said, dryly. “I’ve got a girl coming over for dinner tonight, if you must know.”
For a second, I wondered if Tugger had heard me, then he sat up slowly, turned in the lounger so he was facing me, and slid the aviators down the bridge of his nose with his middle finger to give me a long look. “You have what now?”
“You heard me. Got a girl coming over, and thought I’d cook. Guess I forgot how badly I suck at it,” I admitted.
Tugger pressed his lips into a thin line to keep from busting out with laughter, but he couldn’t quite keep his lips from twitching up just slightly, or stop the crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “You have many talents, brother, but cooking ain’t one of them.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for pointing that out to me. I missed it. I thought chicken curry was supposed to smell like that.”
“None I’ve ever heard of,” he smiled. “Want me to call Jess to come help?”
“Nah, I’ve made peace with take-out,” I told him, raising my beer to my lips for a long pull.
Tugger paused and narrowed his eyes slightly as he took me in. I ignored his look. I didn’t need him reading into anything.
“Bullshit, you’ve made peace with take-out. You resigned yourself to it—there’s a difference.” I started to flip him off, but he held out a hand to stop me. “None of that. Look, I’m no Jess, but I’ve learned a thing or two over the years. Let’s go see if the air in the kitchen is breathable yet; I’ll help you put something passable together.”
He rose from the lounger, grabbed his beer, and marched back into the house without waiting for my answer. I sighed. I wasn’t getting out of it now. Tugger and I were cooking.
Great, I thought sarcastically. He was so going to read into this.
By the time I got to the kitchen, Tug already had his head stuck in my fridge and was pulling things out at an alarming rate.
“Think you can handle chopping?” he asked without removing his head from the fridge. “I mean, without losing a finger or something?”
“I know my way around a knife; you know that.” It wasn’t usually for the vegetables and salad stuff that he was piling on the counter next to me, but the basics had to be the same.
“Sure, I know,” Tugger grunted, grabbed a few more things and then proceeded to pull a couple of pots from the hooks they probably hadn’t moved from since his wife had hung them there.
“What’re we making?” I asked, suspicious of starting yet another dish that might be too complicated for us to achieve without calling in Jess as reinforcement. I was not in the mood for Jess’s version of the Spanish inquisition.
“Lasagna, salad, and garlic bread. Classic and basic unfuck-upable if you’ve made it as many times as I’ve helped Jess with it.”
“Helped Jess?” God help us if he hadn’t actually made this by himself before. Salad I could do; garlic bread had to be possible. Decent lasagna? I didn’t see us pulling that off.
“Oh, ye of little faith.” Tug smirked at me over his shoulder, then launched into a mini version of a Jess inquisition. He’d learned more from her than just how to make lasagna, it seemed. “You know, I can’t remember a time when you brought a girl home for dinner.”
“I eat, you know. I’ve had plenty of girls for dinner.”
Tugger laughed, shaking his head. “I see what you did there, but seriously, when was the last time you actually brought a girl here?”
“Here?”
“Yeah, and don’t try to bullshit me,” he said. “You know what I’m asking.”
“Fine.” Keeping my eyes on the cucumber I was slicing, I tried to think, but it wasn’t necessary. I knew the answer to his question. So did he. “I haven’t brought a girl here for dinner before.”
Tugger let out a low whistle, then turned to me with interest burning in his eyes. “Who is she, then?”
“She’s just a girl I’m trying to bag; don’t overthink it,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure exactly how true that was anymore.
“Then why bring her here?” I should’ve known he wasn’t going to let me get away with it.
“It’s complicated. The gist is that it’s a small town, and she doesn’t want the gossip that will go along with being seen with the guy who punched out her ex last night. So I’m just putting the moves on her from home this time.”
Tugger threw up a hand. “Back up there, did you say you punched out her ex last night? What the hell?”
“You remember the guy I told you about who st
ole my beer?”
“Yeah, something about cultivating your sensitive side by not punching him,” Tugger said, sounding puzzled. “You rethink that sensitive side?”
“Something like that,” I started, then recounted the story while we cooked. Well, he cooked, I chopped and threw things in a bowl.
As it turned out, Tugger really had managed to cultivate some serious skills, and I was impressed with what we managed to put together over the next hour or two.
“Thanks, bro,” I said, once we were done with the food and setting a table outside instead of in my dusty dining room. Tugger slapped me on the shoulder.
“No problem. Think I could get a beer for my efforts?” he joked.
A quick glance at my watch told me that Juliana was due to arrive soon, and I smelled and likely looked like my earlier kitchen disaster. “Not today. I owe you one, though.”
Tugger shrugged and smiled. “You don’t owe me a thing. Just try to have fun tonight, okay?”
His smile was too genuine, his expression too sincere. It made me feel like he could see the uncertainty I felt over Juliana. I fucking hated being looked at like that, so I flashed him a lewd smile and waggled my eyebrows. “You know it.”
“You’re an ass,” Tugger sighed, but he was still smiling by the time he got into his truck.
As soon as he was gone, I hauled ass to the shower and started wondering what other surprises Juliana might have in store for me tonight.
Chapter 16
Juliana
The address Pacey had texted led me to a nice-looking house in a good neighborhood not far outside of town. What surprised me about it was that it was a neighborhood known for great family living with wide sidewalks, big trees, yards with play equipment, and the best elementary school in town.
It wasn’t that far away from my place, but I’d chosen my location based on proximity to work and the places I frequented, and I couldn’t help but wonder why Pacey had chosen the location that he had. Although, he wasn’t from here, so maybe he didn’t realize what kind of neighborhood he was living in until he was already there.