by Avery Flynn
Natalie shook her head. “Nada.”
She glanced over at the clock. Fifteen minutes until go time.
Olivia bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from groaning out loud. She was used to shit going south fast—what Sweet wasn’t?—but this was ridiculous. “Too many coincidences for me.”
“Yep.” Miranda nodded. “I think someone is trying to submarine the fundraiser before we even get a chance to train volunteers.”
It would’t be the first time. The Sweets hadn’t exactly been welcome in Salvation since…oh, since the town had been founded. Cattle thieves. Moonshiners. Rabble-rousers. The family was guilty on all counts. But Olivia and her sisters had been on the up and up since birth. Well, her sisters had been. Olivia had embraced the Sweet family crazy.
“Who would do it?” Natalie asked.
“Isn’t that the million-dollar question?” The list was long—with Mateo and his “usual” with the uptight Salvation mayor right at the top of it. He hadn’t been shy about his opposition to the fundraiser even after he’d agreed to help. Add that to the blowup last week and he made for a decent suspect.
“We need to cancel.” She sank down into the closest chair, wishing she could sink below the floorboards. So much for her grand plan.
“Don’t cancel. Postpone.” Natalie grabbed her clipboard from behind the bar and hustled over to the table where Olivia sat contemplating her latest failure. “Call it a rainout and say that you’ll reschedule the volunteer training.”
As far as believable excuses went, it made sense. Still, the abject failure of the day had her trigger shy. “What makes you think anyone will show up next time?”
“Because you won’t give them a choice.” Miranda sat down beside them. “You busted your hump to get something put together in two weeks. Imagine what you could do with a couple more?”
If she could turn the fundraiser into the event of the year in Salvation, there was no way the people in town could stay away. She just had to give them something they couldn’t get anywhere else. She needed to use her Sweet-inherited flair for the extreme for good and everything would work out.
“I could call in some favors from my friends in Harbor City, get some great raffle prizes.” Her modeling days had left her with a phone filled with contact information for some of the coolest photographers, artists and creative types in the industry. “Maybe Steffano would agree to do a makeover in between his styling gigs.”
Natalie began forming a list of possible giveaways on her clipboard. “See, this is a good thing.”
It was, but Olivia couldn’t shake the itchy feeling at the back of her neck that something more than freaky coincidence had happened to sink the fundraiser, and she was going to find out exactly what—or who—it was.
Olivia pushed open the front door of The Kitchen Sink. The diner was packed, extinguishing her last flicker of hope that aliens had kidnapped every single citizen of Salvation and thus explaining why no one had showed for the volunteer meeting.
Ruby Sue looked up from her perch on a stool behind the cash register. “Oh good, you brought me one of those growly things.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind putting this up here?” She put the wide-mouth growler down by the register, next to the sign warning those with bad attitudes would be charged a pain-in-the-butt fee.
“What fool would have a problem collecting change for a good cause?”
“Every other person in Salvation.” What had she been thinking, trying to throw a fundraiser that would get the town to stop crossing the street to avoid rubbing elbows with the Sweets? Maybe Mateo was right. Maybe this was more than she could do.
“Volunteer meeting didn’t go so well, huh?” Ruby Sue asked, but the sympathetic look on her face said she knew the answer to that.
“It didn’t go at all. No one showed up.” Failure formed a lead weight in her stomach.
Ruby Sue shook her head. “Idiots.”
“That’s one word for them.” She pinched her lips together before she gave the dozen or so other words that would fit the close-minded, gossiping, grudge-holding people in her hometown.
It would be one thing if she or her sisters had ever actually done anything to raise the town’s hackles, but it had been like this for as long as Olivia could remember. She and her sisters had been born in the backseat of her parents’ Chevrolet parked in front of the Stop and Sip. Salvation’s citizens had taken that as proof that this generation of Sweets was just as trashy as the moonshine runners, naked protestors and possible DMV arsonists who’d come before. The whole situation sucked.
A couple approached the register, bill in hand, and Olivia made her way over to the pie case. Two pieces of pecan pie were left. Finally, something was going right. One for her and one to bribe some information out of Mateo. She’d bet her designer stilettos that he knew who the head of the snake was, and just how she could chop off its head.
“Hey, Ellen.” She smiled at the waitress beside the pie case. “Can I get these two to go?”
“Sure,” she said. “Just let me take a couple of sweet teas out to table four and then I’ll get them wrapped up for you.”
“Thanks.” She settled down on the stool and took out her wallet. Her last ten dollar bill until her first Sweet Salvation Brewery paycheck came in tomorrow, but the pie was a necessary expense.
“Hope you’re not planning to snarf down both of those,” an all too familiar voice said from behind her. “You know how the camera puts on ten pounds.”
Turning, she faced Salvation’s mayor and number one Sweet family hater, Tyrell Hawson. “Thanks for the advice.”
“Just trying to be helpful.” He curled his lips back in what he probably thought of as a smile. “Maybe you can help me out now.”
She leveled a hard stare at him and raised one eyebrow. “How’s that?”
“Forget your fundraiser, go back to L.A. and take your sisters with you.” He said it all with the soft, good-natured delivery of a guy just trying to do her a solid.
His words sank in, each one slicing open the wounds from childhood. The parents who didn’t want their kids playing with those Sweet girls. The whispers. The stares. The hell of growing up a Sweet in Salvation. She’d never understood how someone could think they knew everything about her and her sisters just because of their last name.
“Why do you hate us so much?” She didn’t mean to ask, and God knew Tyrell was the last person she should have shown even the slightest bit of weakness.
He narrowed his eyes and every bit of fake good ol’ boy vanished from his round face. “Because this is a good town—an honest, God-fearing town filled with hardworking people—and we don’t need your kind around here.”
“What kind is that?” Anger flooded her veins, burning with decades of frustration. She stood up, towering over the shorter mayor and enjoying how he shrank back. “Someone like Miranda, a business genius who brought back the Sweet Salvation Brewery from the edge of disaster and saved the jobs of dozens of people in Salvation? Someone like Natalie, who could make efficiency more efficient and gave up a thriving business to grow a local company? No, it can’t be them, so it must be me. I’m just a retired model who was on the cover of a dozen magazines.”
“But those days are long gone for you, aren’t they girlie?” he snarled. “Now you’re just a porn star.”
Her heart stuttered to a stop before starting again with a frantic rush that sent her pulse pounding through her body.
He couldn’t know. There was no way. Her name hadn’t been attached to the photos her ex had posted. There’d been speculation and gossip, but no confirmation. It had been the one positive of the whole Larry shitstorm, but it sounded like her ex had gone and revealed that it was her.
Tyrell puffed up his chest and leered at her tits. “Oh yeah, the town is going crazy this afternoon about the naked pictures of you all over the internet. Some tabloid TV show broke the story today. What a slut bimbo move on your part. What did you thi
nk would happen when you took those kinds of pictures?”
That she was sharing something with the man she’d thought she loved. That he’d never break her trust by sharing the pictures. That the last thing Larry would ever do was share the photos on a revenge-porn site. Yeah, she may have been naïve, but she hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, and she sure didn’t deserve to be called a bimbo slut by a jerk like Tyrell.
“You bastard.”
His face turned six shades of red and a sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. “If anyone’s paternity should be questioned, it would be that baby your sister is carrying.”
She lifted her hand lightning fast and swung it with furious speed. Her palm cracked against the mayor’s chubby cheek, sending him reeling back.
“Now that’s a Sweet for you,” he snarled, one hand pressed to the palm print on his face.
White-hot fury zipped through Olivia and she jabbed a finger hard into his shoulder. “You ever talk about my family like that again and I will do a helluva lot worse than slapping your sorry ass.”
“A publicly expressed direct threat.” Triumph lifted his volume and his mouth curled in a smug smile, probably the most sincere one he’d ever had. “I have witnesses.”
Olivia looked up. Everyone in The Kitchen Sink was staring at her, some with mouths agape and others with I-knew-this-would-happen looks of barely restrained superiority.
Fuck. She knew better than to take the bait—but she had. Inhaling a deep breath, she turned on her heel to face the pie case and regain her bearings.
Ellen, her eyes round, pushed a white to-go bag across the counter to Olivia. “Your pie.”
If it had been anything else but Ruby Sue’s pecan pie, the temptation to say to hell with the consequences and use the bag to whack the pompous mayor over the head might have been too strong to deny. There was more on the line than just her anger though. She had to find a way to make Salvation accept her family, or her niece or nephew would be sentenced to the same sad childhood she’d had.
Still, she couldn’t deny it soothed her a little to see Hawson flinch when she grabbed the bag off the counter and took a step toward him before turning and walking out of The Kitchen Sink.
Mateo popped open a beer and carried it to the couch, where he sat down and rested his bare feet on the coffee table. The baseball game was already in the second inning on the big screen that dominated the living room, the dog was asleep under the coffee table, snoring louder than the thunderstorm earlier that day, and the Yankees had just scored.
It was as close to heaven as he usually got, but a restlessness made his toes itch. The crack of a baseball bat hitting one out of the park followed by the crowd’s cheers blasted out of his sound bar, filling the large living room up to the cathedral ceiling.
He downed the beer in a series of long gulps and padded into the kitchen for another. Too many of his buddies had come home only to get lost in a bottle, so his rule was one and done, but a couple of drinks was the only thing that numbed the fidgety need to move that had taken up residence since she’d come back.
Olivia Sweet.
He should have known he was doomed the night she’d half slid down that muddy drive in time to watch him pull her car out of the muck. She’d stood there in rain boots and yoga pants that clung to her ass for dear life and declared she wasn’t going anywhere. Since then, if she wasn’t dogging his steps, she was haunting his nights or making his bathroom smell like wildflowers and strawberries. He couldn’t shake her—real and dressed or imagined and naked.
Sliding his hand beneath the elastic waist of his basketball shorts, he curled it around his half-hard cock and wondered what it would be like if he actually touched her like he used to. She had melted in his arms in the veterans’ center. Her skin had been so soft and her mouth so willing… God, the damage they could do to each other with enough time and condoms. He brought his hand up and down the shaft, picturing the curve of her neck and the creamy flesh of her tits that had been visible above her shirt’s neckline. How many times had he jerked off to her three Sports Illustrated covers, remembering how she’d felt underneath him? Too many to count, and he was about to add another without even the aid of seeing a picture of her in the world’s tiniest white bikini.
Just as he got a good rhythm going, the dog barked and scrambled out from underneath the coffee table as if he’d been goosed by a fireplace poker. A second later, the sound of a car making its way up the driveway filtered in through the open kitchen windows. Cock at half mast and wearing only his basketball shorts, he wasn’t exactly ready for visitors. Not that he ever was. Hand still holding position, he watched the vehicle approach until the security lights near the parking pad illuminated Olivia’s yellow Fiat. His cock jumped in anticipation.
The dog whined and pawed the front door.
Mateo gave his hands a quick rinse in the kitchen sink before making his way over to the door, walking more bowlegged than normal. He glanced through the window. Instead of walking around back to the cabin, she was heading right for his front door.
Grabbing the newspaper off the entry table, he closed the distance to the door and positioned the newspaper in front of his loose basketball shorts. It wasn’t the greatest boner camouflage but it was better than opening his door with a flag pole in his pants.
Putting on his best leave-me-alone snarl, even though everything below the waist was happy as hell to see Olivia, he jerked open the door. “What do you want?”
Seemingly undeterred by his less-than-cheerful greeting, she marched up the stairs, her hips swaying with each forward step. “Hello to you to.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.” He eyeballed the paper bag in one hand and a growler of beer from Sweet Salvation Brewery in the other. Armed with goodies and wearing a bright-blue tank, a filmy floral skirt and a honey-I’m-home smile, she looked as if she’d expected the warmest of welcomes. Maybe she’d hit her head at the fundraiser volunteer meeting this afternoon before they’d called the whole thing off.
“My God, you are prickly. If after the day I’ve had, I can still be almost civil, then so can you.” Not that it seemed to bother her one iota.
“What happened to you, break a nail?”
“I wish.” She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “My scumbag ex posted private pictures of me to a revenge-porn site and now some shitty tabloid TV show got wind of them and is sharing them with the world—including the entire population of Salvation, which is gossiping about that trashy Sweet triplet as we speak.”
A tidal wave of white-hot rage rushed through him. No one deserved to have that happen to them. It was a violation and it was wrong, but it wasn’t always illegal. “You’re not trashy and your ex is a real asshole.”
“Nothing I can do about it now, so I’ve brought comfort food.” She held out the bag, showcasing The Kitchen Sink’s logo on one side. “I brought two slices of Ruby Sue’s pecan pie, but if you don’t want one of them, I guess I could share it with the dog.”
She plopped down on his porch, her skirt fluttering down to rest midway up her toned thighs, and took out an individually wrapped slice. Inhaling deeply, she closed her eyes and made some sort of sound that made him think of all the things he could do to her to get her to make it again.
The dog, traitor that he was, happily did the waggle-butt dance over to her side.
People had ended up with black eyes in mad scrambles for the last piece of Ruby Sue’s pie. Letting a dog slurp it up was like Photoshopping his ugly mug onto a Victoria’s Secret model. He couldn’t let that happen.
“You’re not really going to give that to the dog.” Just saying the words was like getting a sharp jab to the sternum.
Olivia looked up and the security light picked up every blonde highlight in her hair, giving her a halo when he knew damn well that woman had horns. “Why not?” She batted her eyelashes at him. “It wouldn’t hurt the cute little doggie.”
The animal in question was in some sort of blissf
ul nirvana state sitting hip-to-hip next to Olivia. His eyes were closed and his nose was going a mile a minute.
“But it’s Ruby Sue’s pie.” He could practically taste the sugary sweetness on his tongue. “You can’t waste that on the dog.”
Olivia flipped her hair over one nearly bare shoulder dusted with freckles. “So invite me in.”
Now that way lay trouble. “What are you, a vampire that needs an invitation?”
“Worse. I’m a Sweet.” She gave him an exaggerated wink. “But a big tough guy like you couldn’t be afraid of having little ol’ me in your house, could you?”
Want slammed through him with the power of a fifty-caliber rifle. Every taunt that came out of her beyond- kissable pink mouth was a promise that couldn’t be fulfilled, but damn if it wasn’t the only thing he could think about.
Olivia couldn’t believe she’d actually made it through the front door without busting into frustrated tears or going on a rant about what had just gone down at The Kitchen Sink. Finally today, something was going according to plan. Now if she could just work this right, she’d actually get Mateo to help with the fundraiser that the mayor was trying so damn hard to ruin.
And if she could manage to keep her attention on her goal instead of Mateo’s cute butt, she might actually get what she needed.
She followed Mateo into his gourmet kitchen that would have looked right at home in Architectural Digest. Large windows spanned both walls, giving anyone inside a front-row seat to the natural beauty of Burnett’s Hill. In contrast with the warm woods and greenery outside, everything inside was cold and modern—stainless-steel appliances, black granite countertops and dark, nearly black cherry-wood cabinets filled the large space. Strong, intimidating and immense, just like the man who stood on one side of the large kitchen island eyeing her warily.