A Man For Marley

by Arianna Hart

  Although, it was his fault she hadn’t slept well. No, that wasn’t fair, it was her own fault, her body’s fault that she tossed and turned all night, frustrated and achy. She had never felt like she just wanted to chuck all her inhibitions and follow her body’s lead before, and she wasn’t sure she liked it either.

  That wasn’t exactly true. She was sure she would enjoy going to bed with Hunter, if that scorcher of a kiss was any indication. She just wasn’t so sure she would like herself much the next day. Marley pushed harder on the steps, trying to get rid of the image of his chest that seemed to be burned into her brain.

  She had always held people who nonchalantly hopped in and out of bed in varying degrees of pity and disgust. Her mother, who couldn’t live without a man, she pitied. She had always felt somewhat superior to her; after all, Marley never had any trouble showing a man the door. In fact, more men had seen the outside of her door than the inside.

  It wasn’t that she was a prude; she was just very selective. A little voice in her head accused her of being too selective, but she pushed that aside. There was nothing wrong with getting to know someone before sleeping with them. The fact that she had found very few men worth getting to know at all, never mind to go to bed with, meant she was right to be cautious.

  Her reaction to Hunter was merely a result of her overlong sexual drought. And maybe if she kept repeating that bit of nonsense, she might just believe it.

  Getting off the stair machine, she went to the weight bench and worked her arms. At five feet two inches tall, everything she ate went right to her hips.

  The fact that she was naturally curvy didn’t help much; neither did her weakness for junk food. A regular workout was part of her routine, otherwise she couldn’t fit into her pants, and that was unacceptable.

  She was working on her abs when the phone rang.

  Grabbing a towel, she ran for the phone. Who would be calling at eight o’clock in the morning?

  “Hello?”

  “Ms. Sullivan?”

  “Yes, this is she.” Telemarketers didn’t call this early in the morning, did they?

  “This is Mrs. Lindstrom, Mr. Haas secretary. I have been trying to get in touch with Mr. O’Malley, but he doesn’t seem to be answering his cell phone, and I don’t have another number for him.”

  “Oh, well, he probably hasn’t had a chance to get a phone line yet, he just moved in yesterday. I could take a message for you if you’d like.”

  “Please. Would you tell him that the couple that bought his father’s house have expressed an interest in closing by the end of the month? All Mr. O’Malley needs to do is clear out the remaining items from the house and sign some papers. Everything else has been taken care of.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell him. Does he need to contact you?”

  “Only if he has questions. Otherwise, once the house is cleared out, we’ll send in the cleaning crew and schedule the closing.”

  Marley hung up the phone with a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t want to see Hunter again so soon after their encounter last night.

  She still couldn’t believe how wanton she had been.

  Or how much more she wanted to be.

  Was that the real reason she didn’t want to see him? Because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle it? That was ridiculous. She could control her response to him; he was just a man. A good-looking man who could kiss the life right out of her, but still just a man.

  She would take a shower, then slip a note under his door telling him what the lawyer had said. A little voice whispered 'coward' but she pushed it aside and headed for the bathroom.

  —

  Hunter woke up to the sound of water running in Marley’s apartment. He could hear everything from his spot on the floor. Since he had no furniture, there was nothing in his place to help muffle the sounds coming from hers. Not that his imagination needed much help.

  She had to be in the shower. Naked and wet. He imagined the water sliding over her skin, between her breasts, and down her thighs. He imagined his hands, then his mouth following the same path.

  His imagination had taken on undertones of porno flicks ever since he met Marley. He had never been so frustrated in his entire life, and the cause of it was naked on the other side of a very thin wall. His body had been painfully erect since he caught her staring at him last night. She had looked...hungry, and he wanted her to take her fill. When she had responded to his kisses with more passion than he could have asked for, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. Stopping him just as her breasts spilled free had sent him back down to earth with a thud.

  Thinking about her breasts wasn’t helping his condition any. He might as well take a shower, a cold one, and see about getting some furniture. A sleeping bag was great for emergencies, but sleeping on the floor was going to get old really quickly.

  He was still shivering from his cold shower when he heard a noise in the hallway. Wanting to catch Marley before she went anywhere, he wrapped a towel quickly around his waist and ran to the door.

  Marley was crouched low with a note in her hand, a brief flash of guilt crossing her face.

  She looked as fresh as a daisy in a white T-shirt, khaki shorts and sandals. Her hair was confined in a braid, and she didn’t have any makeup on. If it weren’t for her devastating figure she wouldn’t have looked old enough to get into her own bar.

  “Oh, hi. I, uh, didn’t realize you were up already. I was just going to slip this message under your door on my way out.”

  She was looking studiously at his face. He could see the color rising in her cheeks, and perversely her discomfort made him more at ease.

  “I’m up, so why don’t you just come in and tell me about it instead of leaving the note?” Hunter walked away towards the bathroom, leaving the front door open in invitation.

  “I hate to bother you when you are obviously not dressed for visitors,” she called from the threshold.

  “I can’t hear you, you’ll have to come in.” Hunter chuckled at the slamming of the door, but he heard her feet moving into the room, so he knew she hadn’t left. He quickly slipped on his jeans, but purposely left off his shirt. It worked last night; maybe it would work again today.

  “I got a call from the lawyer’s office today.”

  “Oh, what did he want?” Hunter moved closer to her, close enough to smell her fragrance. Today he could detect the smell of soap and shampoo as well as the raspberry scent she wore.

  “The couple that bought Seamus’ house wants to close by the end of the month. All they are waiting on is for you to finish clearing it out,” Marley said.

  “Oh, so soon?” Hunter felt the burgeoning desire drain right out of him. He didn’t want to go back to the house. It was hard enough when Pops had been alive, but now that both he and mom were dead, it was going to be sheer hell.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Marley asked, looking at him sympathetically.

  “You probably should, since you’ll have to go through my mother’s stuff to see if there is anything you want.” Hunter jumped at the chance to avoid going back to the house alone.

  “Okay, do you still have keys? I have a set that Seamus gave me in case of emergencies.”

  “Yes, I still have the keys on my key chain, if you can believe that. I’ve mostly stayed in motels, RV’s, and in the truck since I moved out. I never bothered to get a place of my own because I’d never be there to enjoy it.”

  “You mean this is all you have in the world?”

  Marley indicated the meager possessions in the apartment with a look of horror.

  “Yup, if I needed anything else, I kept it at home, Pop’s home. I guess I’ll have to get a storage unit now.” Hunter tried to shake off the feeling of dread that had come over him at the mention of the house.

  “Let’s get going, this isn’t going to get any easier, and I’m sure you have work to do at the bar. If we hurry we may be able to get most of it done this weekend.”


  Hunter pulled on a Winston Cup Racing T-shirt and grabbed his wallet and truck keys.

  Hunter followed Marley out to the street. He didn’t know what was left in the house, but he was sure all of his mother’s things would still be there. After she died, Pop had refused to get rid of any of her stuff, and Hunter had been too wrapped up in his own grief to argue with him. Her clothes had still been in the bedroom closet, her medicine still in the bathroom, even her cosmetics still on her dresser.

  How was he going to deal with all of that? How could he just throw away his mother? His father hadn’t been able to do it, why was he the one getting stuck with the job?

  “When Seamus knew he was going downhill, he started to get rid of some things. It might not be as bad as you think,” Marley said quietly from her side of the cab. Hunter wondered if his thoughts were that transparent.

  “What sort of things did he get rid of?”

  “Mostly furniture. Some stuff is in the basement of the bar. The things that he’d sold or given to people were picked up the week of the funeral. What’s left is mostly your things. There are also some boxes of your mother’s; pictures, letters, things you might want to give to your children someday.” Marley’s husky voice soothed his jangled nerves, until she mentioned children.

  “I’m a long way from having children. I need to get my career off the ground first, then when I have enough money to support my wife I’ll get married and have kids. That isn’t going to be anytime soon though.”

  “I don’t mind if you leave stuff you might want later downstairs in the storage units. It will be there for you when you are ready for it.”

  “What about you?” Hunter asked, curious.

  “What about me?”

  “When do you think you’ll settle down and have kids?”

  “Not for a few years yet. I want to wait until I have enough money to buy a house, and to weather any lulls in the business. I don’t want to take any chances of over extending myself and losing either my house or the bar.”

  “What about a husband?”

  “Well I plan on getting one of those eventually, too.” Marley gave him a strange look.

  “What I mean is, don’t you think your husband would want to be part of any house you buy, and the bar?”

  “I don’t see what one has to do with the other. The bar will be mine, and mine only. At least it will be if you stick it out and sell it to me in six months. If everything goes well, I’ll be able to make enough money to put a big enough deposit down on a house all by myself. With the money Seamus left me, I won’t have to mortgage my life to afford the bar, so I might be able to get a house sooner than I thought.” She appeared quite pleased with the prospect.

  “So you are telling me when you get married your husband will have no say in the bar?” Hunter asked incredulously.

  “Why should he? He wouldn’t expect me to go into his work and tell him what to do. The bar is my safety net, and once I get my hands on it, I’m never letting go. If something were to happen and this husband walked out on me, as long as I had the bar I’d be okay. If I signed over half the bar to him, or something like that, when he left I’d be out of luck.”

  “Why do you think he’d leave? If I—“ Hunter didn’t finish his sentence. He was about to say, if I could get you into bed I’d never leave, but that wasn’t true. He wanted her in his bed, but he’d still leave when the six months was up. Wouldn’t he?

  “Men always leave,” Marley said, looking out the window, ignoring his verbal slip.

  “That’s not true. My parents were married for twenty-five years before my mother passed, and Pop still loved her until he died.” Hunter’s voice caught on the last part.

  “Seamus was an unusually good man. I’m sure there are others out there, but not the majority. The only way a woman can stay on her feet is if she doesn’t lean on someone’s shoulder.” Her lips were set in a tight line, and she still refused to look at him.

  “Why do you have such a bad attitude about men? Did some jerk break your heart, causing you to hate all men?” Hunter asked figuring she must have gotten burned in the past.

  “Where do you get off making an assumption like that? You don’t know anything about me.”

  “It’s a logical assumption. You have a bad attitude about men. Usually man-haters are either gay or have been burned badly. I’m hoping with all my heart you aren’t gay,” Hunter said, trying to lighten the mood.

  He reminded himself that he appreciated her coming with him and decided it really wouldn’t be a good idea to piss her off.

  “No I’m not gay, and I don’t hate men. I just don’t trust them.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It could be because I never knew my father. He left before I was even born, from what I could piece together of my mother’s ramblings. Or it could be that every man she picked up at work after that left her as soon as they got what they wanted; be it sex, money, or a place to stay for a while. Or maybe it is because by the time I turned fifteen my mother’s boyfriends were hitting on me as soon as my mother turned her back. Heck it might even be because my mother kicked me out of the house my senior year of high school because one of her boyfriends couldn’t take no for an answer and she blamed it on me when she caught him trying to stick his hand up my shirt,” Marley snarled at him.

  So much for not pissing her off.

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I guess you had some pretty bad experiences as a kid,” Hunter felt like a jerk.

  “I don’t want your pity, I lived through it, and I learned to stand on my own two feet.”

  “What did you do when your mother kicked you out of the house? How did you live?”

  “I had some money saved up to leave as soon as I graduated anyway. I used that to pay for one of those cheap hotel rooms you can rent by the week until I finished out the last month of school. After I graduated I got a job as a live-in nanny, and I worked for Seamus on the weekends.”

  Hunter knew there must be more to the story.

  “What happened to the nanny gig? Couldn’t stand the kids?”

  “No, the kids were fine, it was their father,” Marley said a look of distaste screwing up her beautiful face.

  “I know I’m not going to like the answer to this, but what happened with the father?”

  “The father was some sort of music industry executive. He was gone most of the time. His wife, number three, was one of those women who works out every second she isn’t in the spa. One day when Plasti-mom was getting wrapped in seaweed, her husband came home early from a business trip. He started telling me how beautiful I was and how he could get me started in modeling because he had the contacts, yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile he is following me around the house trying to corner me. I was doing my best to push him away without getting fired when his wife came in the door and caught him red-handed. No pun intended,” Marley said wryly.

  “That’s not good. So what happened? Did she smack him for hitting on the teenage nanny?” Hunter could feel anger burning in his chest.

  “No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t. In an amazing case of déjà vu, she blamed me and fired me on the spot, leaving me out on my butt once again.”

  “Oh, man! That sucks. You really have had it rough.” Hunter couldn’t help feeling sympathy for her.

  “No worse than many others I know. Like I said before, I survived and I’m stronger for it. Does this radio work?” she asked, changing the subject.

  Hunter said nothing as she turned the radio up and fiddled with the dials. He had a lot more than cleaning out his father’s house to think about now.

  Chapter Six

  Marley remained silent for the rest of the ride to Long Island. Her temper, once spewed, died quickly. She was grateful that Hunter didn’t venture any further conversational tidbits. She couldn’t believe she had poured out her life’s story to him. She should have kept her mouth shut, but it ticked her off when he said she must have gotten burned.

 
Marley looked out the window at the residential neighborhoods they were passing through. Seamus didn’t live very far out on Long Island; they would be there soon. She didn’t want to think about going through Seamus’ things. He had been her best friend, her mentor, so much more than just a boss. He gave her a chance when no one else would. Gave her a home when she was literally reduced to sleeping on the streets. The thought of going through his possessions, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of, was terribly uncomfortable for her.

  By the look of desolation on Hunter’s face when they pulled into the driveway, it was no walk in the park for him either. She heard him take a deep breath before he opened the door, and she saw a look of pain cross his face as he looked at the doorknocker with 'O’Malley' engraved on it. Any lingering anger she may have felt dissolved at his obvious pain.

  “My grandfather gave this to my parents when they bought the house. He said he had brought it over from his house in Ireland,” he said, running his finger over the tarnished brass.

  “Then let’s be sure to take it with us when we leave. That’s not something you just let go of, that is a part of your history.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Let’s get this over with. Why don’t you start with my mother’s stuff, and I’ll clear out my things, then we can both go through Pop’s stuff.”

  “You know, everything is boxed up, we don’t have to do this right now. We can take the boxes back to the apartment and go through them later.”

  Hunter shrugged wordlessly, his lips compressed into a thin line.

  Marley was surprised to see so much anguish on his face as he looked around the nearly empty house.

  Seamus had sold off or given away many things, and had hired people to box up the rest. She hadn’t thought Hunter would care about the house since he had only been home a handful of times in the last ten years, but maybe she was wrong.

  “I have to see how much there is, I might need to hire a mover to get all of this out.”