Getting Rough

by C. L. Parker

  Abby stabbed a piece of fried chicken breast with a fork and put it on the plate of the man beside her. “Thank you, I hope you like it.”

  “If it’s anything like the sandwich you made for me earlier, I’m sure I will.”

  “Let me guess,” the man interrupted. “You had the Abby melt?”

  I had no idea what an Abby melt was, but if it was anything like the manna I’d eaten for lunch, a more appropriate name would be something like the monkey spank or toasted orgasm.

  “Grilled turkey, bacon, and cheese sandwich?” I asked.

  “Yep! That’s the Abby.” He laughed as the sandwich’s namesake plopped down a dollop of mashed potatoes in front of him. “Best sandwich in town.”

  “He’s a little biased,” Abby said, passing the potatoes to Casey and picking up the gravy. “Of course he has to be if he wants to keep eating,” she said, laughing. “This is my Thomas. Thomas, meet Shaw Matthews.”

  “Shaw Matthews?” Casey asked. I was a little surprised no one had given him that information yet. When I nodded, he continued. “Cassidy’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Has she?” Putting the napkin in my lap, I shot him a disingenuous smile. “Huh. Well, I wish I could say the same.”

  Cassidy kicked me under the table, but I’d grown so used to it after all the board meetings we’d attended together that I didn’t even need shin guards.

  “And this,” Abby said, looking up at the straggler that had just entered the room, “is Mia Morgan.”

  Casey put the bowl of potatoes down and jumped up to pull out the seat next to his. Mia was short, with dark eyes and long brown hair, cute in an understated girl-next-door sort of way. Though the way she was gawking at Cassidy had girl-on-girl action written all over it.

  Cassidy gave her a welcoming smile, something warm and friendly. Something I’d never really seen from her before. At least not toward me. “Hi, I’m —”

  “I know who you are. You’re Cassidy,” Mia finished for her. Then she dipped her head and nervously took the offered chair as if she’d just realized how stalker-ish she’d sounded.

  When Cassidy looked taken aback, Casey jumped in. “Yep. That” – he paused – “is my Cassidy.” He regarded Cassidy in a way that felt almost intrusive to witness, like he was swept up in some moment the rest of us hadn’t been meant to see.

  A squirming Cassidy felt the weight of that moment and looked down at her lap, clearing her throat. It was enough to jar Casey from whatever fantasy he’d been playing out in his mind and bring him back to the present.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Abby. I sort of got swept up in a scene I had to get out or risk losing altogether.” Mia waved her hand in the air as if it was a silly excuse.

  “It’s okay, dear. We’ve just started, anyway.” Abby turned toward Cassidy and me. “Mia’s a romance author. She came to Stonington to do some research on a book she’s writing.”

  Cassidy nodded. “Casey told me there was a celebrity in town. He just didn’t tell me you were staying with us.” She gave him a disapproving scowl then returned her attention to the newcomer. “I can think of a thousand more romantic settings. What’s so special about Stonington?”

  Cassidy was a well-known agent who was surrounded by world-famous athletes on a near daily basis, so she wasn’t about to be awestruck in the presence of this woman.

  “Well, for one, it’s absolutely breathtaking,” the author began with a dreamy air about her. “And for two, my hero is a lobsterman.”

  When Mia looked at Casey and blushed, the polite smile Cassidy wore dropped and then reappeared again, the same but different somehow. “Oh. I didn’t realize lobstering was considered a particularly romantic vocation.”

  “Well” – Mia shrugged – “there are women here. Most of whom stay, so there must be something about a lobsterman that draws them in.”

  “There is. Money,” Cassidy said, quite bluntly. She pinched off a piece of biscuit and popped it into her mouth.

  “Hey now!” Abby said, insulted.

  Cassidy dropped the biscuit back onto her plate. “Sorry, Abbs, but you know it’s true.” She picked up her fork and pushed the green beans around on her plate. “So what kind of research are you doing, Mia?”

  “I’m just getting the layout of the town, but mostly I wanted to interview a lobsterman. Since I write fiction, I can take some creative liberties, but I like what I write to be as close to reality as I can get it. Makes it so much easier to put the reader in the moment if I can make them feel what I feel, see what I see, et cetera. You know?”

  “Not really, but maybe that’s because as a law graduate, I tend to deal with fact over fiction.” Ouch. Cassidy let that hang in the air, looking for all the world like the ice queen I’d known her to be in San Diego. “So who are you interviewing?”

  “Me,” Casey said, coming to Mia’s rescue.

  Cassidy snickered. “Since when do you like putting your life under a microscope?”

  “Since someone cared enough to ask about it.” Casey cocked his head to the side and met her with a challenging brow.

  That shut her up. Guilt radiated from Cassidy’s body next to me, and her attention went to the potatoes on her plate.

  Mia started explaining as if she was trying to get Casey out of trouble. “When I booked the room here, I asked Anna if she knew of any fishermen who might agree to talk to me. She’s the one who volunteered Casey to do the job.”

  “She did, did she?” Cassidy’s smart mouth rallied. I knew it would. She was never one to back down from an argument, even if it was one that no one else in the room knew she was having. I knew though. She and I had gone around and around like that for years now. No doubt, her mother would know, too, once she returned.

  Casey might as well have reached across the table with a stick to poke the hibernating bear when he said, “Since I had so much free time on my hands, I figured why not?”

  If those potatoes hadn’t already been mashed, they would have been well on their way to it in the manner in which Cassidy was stabbing them. Something weird was happening. Cassidy was acting like a wife who’d just caught her cheating husband red-handed. And Casey? I couldn’t tell if he was parading his mistress around or begging forgiveness for his infidelity.

  I figured it out when I caught an exchange I probably wasn’t supposed to see. While Mia was busy talking about the setup of the story behind Casey’s character in her book, Casey was eyeing Cassidy, and then those eyes slid to me before cutting back to her as if to say, You aren’t so innocent yourself.

  Part of me wanted to high-five him. Part of me wanted to defend her. But the biggest part of me wanted to pull her into my lap and tell him that he didn’t need to worry about what she was doing because she was my business now. Which was an asinine thought, of course.

  Mia finished up the rough outline of her story and Cassidy looked stunned. “Wow, so you’re pretty much writing Casey’s biography, huh? Which means my biography.”

  “Most of what he’s talked about is you, yes. You’ve been a very important part of his life, maybe even the center of it. But I would never think it to be okay to put you on display. Either of you. I apologize if it came across that way. It’s mostly how he thinks about things, the way he thinks about you, the outlandish adventures the two of you have had that I’d love to play off of. If that’s okay, I mean.”

  Cassidy softened. “Yeah, we’ve had some really great times. Huh, Case?”

  “God, yeah.”

  There was a moment of reflection behind her eyes and then she grinned wide and bright. “Hey, do you remember that time when we first went out on the boat?”

  “It was your first time, not mine,” Casey corrected her. “But yeah. How could I forget? You were such a brat. Always were.”

  Cassidy rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You deserved what you got and so much more.”

  “Oh, really?” Mia lit up like a golden ticket winner for Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. “Casey
getting what he deserves? That sounds like a fun story. Do tell.”

  Cassidy chuckled when Casey groaned. “You just told her all the highlights of the mighty, mighty Casey Michaels’s life, huh?”

  He gave her a “well, duh” look. “She’s writing a romance story. Why would I tell her something that makes me look like anything less than the hero?”

  Mia shouldered him. “Because it makes you a flawed human being like the rest of us. And because perfect imperfection is real and sexy.”

  Thomas guffawed. “I don’t know about sexy, but I’ll tell you the story, if he won’t.”

  Casey sighed in defeat before waving toward his father. “Go ahead. You tell it better than anyone else, anyway.”

  “Bet your ass I do,” Thomas said, settling in. “Around here, fathers take their sons out on the boat to teach them about lobstering at a pretty early age. The first time I took Casey out was right around the time he first started to walk. Wanted him to get his sea legs along with his land legs.”

  “Cassidy always threw a fit about it,” Abby added. “She was such a tomboy. Never was into the girly things. It drove Anna crazy. Whatever Casey did, she wanted to do, too.”

  “Because she wanted to be like me,” Casey said and laughed.

  “Ha! You wish! It was because I was competitive and had to prove I could do whatever you could do, and better.”

  Cassidy and I had butted heads more often than not, but I’d always respected and admired her competitive nature. Damn, thinking back on it, it had probably even been a huge turn-on for me. That and her ass. And maybe even her smart mouth. Those thoughts did absolutely nothing good for the bastard of a cock lying thick and hard on my thigh, or for the uncomfortable throbbing of the pent-up frustration needing a release, still.

  “Anyway,” Thomas continued his story, “I did that every now and then until he turned twelve, I guess, and that was the first summer he was going to start working. Well, Cassidy had had enough of being told she couldn’t go, so one morning, she snuck out of the house and onto the boat before any of the rest of us. We were way offshore before she decided to come out of her hiding spot, and by then, it was more of a hassle to take her back than to let her stay. Plus, we thought maybe it would teach her a lesson and she’d stop wanting to be such a pain in the ass.”

  “It didn’t,” she said with a cheeky grin.

  “So there we were, pulling in a trawl, when Casey pulled a shedder from a trap and decided it would be funny to throw it on Cassidy to prove how much of a girl she really was.” Thomas sat back, rubbing his very full belly. “He proved it, all right. That shedder —”

  Though I was sure it made me look stupid, I had to ask, “I’m sorry, what’s a shedder?”

  Mia answered, “It’s a lobster that has shed its shell and doesn’t have the hard one yet.” When Cassidy looked at her, impressed, Mia blushed. “Casey’s been teaching me a lot, I guess.”

  Casey threw his arm over the back of her chair and grinned wide and proud. “And you’ve been a very attentive student. It’s been nice to have someone take an interest in the things I love.”

  “Anyway,” Thomas said, getting the topic back on track. “That shedder got its pincher claw on Cassidy’s —” He stopped, seemingly looking for the word.

  “My boob,” Cassidy said with a roll of her eyes. She crossed her arms over her chest as if to hide them, but there was nothing doing with a rack like that.

  “Yeah, that,” Thomas said with a cough.

  Casey laughed, and even I had to admit it was pretty funny.

  “Laugh all you want, lobster boy,” Cassidy told him, setting that damn determined chin of hers. “I got even.”

  “She sure did.” Now Thomas was laughing. “Cassidy punched him square in the jaw and knocked him overboard.”

  I knew that punch. In fact, the memory of it sent a residual jolt of pain through my newly healed eye and I winced. Cassidy had given me a right hook when I’d insinuated that she’d sleep with anyone to get to the top. Of course I knew then that it wasn’t true, but she’d been taking nonphysical jabs at my personal life prior to my untoward comment, so I’d felt the need to get even. Childishly. Whatever. She should’ve minded her own damn business. Now, it seemed she was the one under the microscope.

  Thomas and Casey’s laughter at Cassidy’s expense was so loud I wouldn’t have been surprised if the neighbors heard them. Mia and Abby were slow to join them, but join them they did, like they’d caught a serious case of the tickle bunnies. A pouting Cassidy and I seemed to be the only ones immune. Though that might not have been true for me if the little swimmers housed in my nut sack hadn’t been revolting with pitchforks and torches.

  Once the moment passed and everyone seemed to simmer down again, Casey took a deep breath and wiped the corner of his eye. “It was the first time I ever noticed she had breasts. And I’ve been in love with them ever since.”

  “Casey!” Abby yelped, appalled.

  “Not Cassidy’s, Mom. Breasts in general,” he tried to cover, realizing too late that he was only making matters worse. “I mean…”

  “You’d best stop before you dig that hole any deeper, boy,” Thomas told him in true fatherly fashion.

  “Just don’t try that on me when we go out tomorrow,” Mia said, elbowing Casey in the ribs.

  Casey jumped, giving her a playful wink. “No worries, babe. When you’re with Casey Michaels, you’re in good hands. I’ll never let anything happen to you.”

  Cassidy sat up a little straighter. “You’re taking her out on the boat? I thought that was a no-chick zone?”

  “I’m making a special exception for Mia.”

  “Oh. So I guess that means I’ll have time to show you around town tomorrow after all, Shaw.” Cassidy smiled at me like we were the best of friends and this was a normal thing.

  It wasn’t, and I was lost. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You asked me to give you a tour and I told you I’d have to pitch in around here, but since Mia’s our only other guest and she’s going to be busy with Casey tomorrow, I can devote my full attention to you, now.”

  Yeah, she’d totally just made that up, but I got it. She was trying to make Casey jealous and she was using me to do so. It wasn’t cool. Not because it was mean to do that to him – I could give a shit about that – but because she was fucking with me. Plus, I wasn’t going to be a pawn that she used to make her boyfriend want her more than some other chick. Fuck that.

  Cassidy leaned closer to me, putting her hand on my knee and moving it up the inside of my thigh. My fucking cock went ape-shit crazy, and I knew if it were at all possible, the damn thing would’ve gotten down on its knees and begged her to touch it. You’d think that would be hot, but when my boys were as blue as they were and we were sitting in a roomful of people – which pretty much made it impossible to do anything about the shit storm she was stirring up in my pants – it wasn’t good.

  I swatted her hand away, still trying to be inconspicuous, since the last thing I wanted was to draw Abby’s attention to my predicament. But then to make matters worse, my refusal of her advances only made Cassidy curious, and she looked down at my lap to see the issue for herself. I might have even angled myself toward her and put my hand over the damn thing to make sure it was really defined for her. Hopefully, that would be warning enough. Then again, she was Cassidy fucking Whalen, the woman who seemed to thrive on making my life a living nightmare.

  Shit. She smirked with a devious glint in her eye. I knew my onetime adversary slash part-time lover well enough to recognize that look. She saw two birds and one stone, and she was going for the kill.

  Her hand was back on my thigh again, the pressure she applied a stark indication that she would not be moved. All the while, she continued to chat with the others at the table, a conversation I couldn’t concentrate on, or much less give a fuck about, because she was massaging my leg. Each move of her body as she was supposedly lost in conversation was only an excuse
to reposition said hand higher and higher until her knuckle was grazing the head of my cock.

  I held my breath, mentally willing myself not to come. Football stats, wicker furniture, clowns in full costume – none of them did the trick. Because now her hand was on top of my dick, slowly moving in a wave from fingertip to wrist. I tried to elbow her, but my attempt only caused her to grip me fully so that she held on. Goddamn, but the woman was a sadistic succubus.

  Tilting her head to look at me, she bit her lip in time with the stroke of my cock through my jeans. It was all over. My orgasm boiled to the surface, but I squeezed my eyes shut, might versus nature in a battle of determination. I was losing. I was losing so bad. And I was going to come.

  “Shaw, are you okay?”

  I jumped at the sound of Abby’s voice, hitting the table in my surprise and only barely saving myself the embarrassment of being a complete and total pervert in her presence. But at least Cassidy’s hand was back in her own lap.