“You look pretty,” Jake said, glancing up at her after he had thoroughly rinsed the last item he was placing in the dishwasher.
Her dark hair was brushed, and she was wearing it loose and down around her shoulders. She had on a pair of jeans, and a simple pink top. If she was wearing any makeup at all, it wasn’t enough to notice.
“I’m sure you mean I look acceptable instead of pretty,” she snipped. “Now that I’ve washed the streaks out of my hair and taken out the nose ring.”
“Wow,” Jake teased. “You’re right. I hadn’t noticed the streaks and nose ring were gone.”
“Right,” she said, flipping her hair back over one shoulder. “Like I believe you didn’t notice.”
Jake didn’t push the issue. He grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and motioned toward the garage door leading off from the kitchen. “Ready?”
Danielle followed him across the kitchen in her usual brusque huff. Jake opened the door and allowed her to go through the door and into the garage first. She looked back over her shoulder at him as she walked into the garage.
“Do we have to take the puke-mobile, or can we take the Corvette?”
“Lady’s choice today,” Jake told her.
The smile didn’t quite make it to Danielle’s lips, but Jake could see the smile in her beautiful green eyes.
He’d take an almost smile.
As often as possible.
Chapter 13
Alicia was sitting up in bed on Sunday night, pretending to read the novel she’d been trying to finish for weeks. At midnight she was still wide awake. Possibly because she hadn’t been able to keep her mind from wandering across the street. She’d even peeked out her window a few times at Jake’s bedroom window. What could she say? Old peeking-out-the-window-at-your-neighbors habits die hard.
She was also having trouble getting her mind to shut off thinking about the unexpected twist life had put in her finally-got-my-act-together mind-set. Jake’s new life with his daughter had been her safety-net reason for why Jake living right across the street wouldn’t affect her at all. Now, with Dani deciding to like her, that safety net was gone. And now that she’d agreed to be Dani’s swim coach . . .
Alicia jumped when the phone rang.
When she saw the name come up on the caller ID, she groaned. More Alfie angst was the last thing she needed. And determined to get Alfie off the phone as quickly as possible, Alicia grabbed the phone and said, “I can’t believe you’re calling this late on a Sunday night, Alfie. It’s midnight. You know I have to work tomorrow.”
“I have to work tomorrow, too,” Alfie reminded her, “and this will only take a minute. I called to tell you Gwen has changed her mind. She wants me back.”
“Don’t you mean Nursezilla?” Alicia said. “The wretched woman you swore would never get another chance to make a fool of you again?”
“I judged Gwen way too harshly,” Alfie said. “She was only second-guessing herself. But now she wants me back, and I’ve asked her to move in with me.”
“Are you insane!” Alicia yelled. “The woman just broke up with you yesterday. And today you’re asking her to move in with you?”
“I expected that reaction from you,” Alfie said, “and I’m sorry, but I’m going with my gut feeling this time.”
“This time?” Alicia wailed. “You always go with your gut feeling, Alfie. That’s the damn problem!”
“What has your thong twisted too tight tonight?” Alfie said right back.
A beep sounded through her phone.
Alicia held the phone out and looked at the name “Jake Sims” that came up on her caller ID.
Jake?
Jake!
“Do whatever you want,” Alicia said in a panic. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Excuse me?” Alfie said.
BEEP.
“I said do whatever you want,” Alicia repeated. “Now, good night!”
BEEP.
“Is that your line beeping?” Alfie wanted to know. “Who would be calling you at this hour?”
“It isn’t my line beeping,” Alicia lied. “It must be yours.”
“Maybe it’s Gwen,” Alfie said and clicked off.
Alicia answered the beep but she answered too late. She jumped up from the bed and hurried across the bedroom. When she pulled back her front bedroom window curtain, Jake was standing at his bedroom window across the street, staring right at her.
Alicia held the phone up and pointed to it.
Two seconds later, the telephone rang.
“Is this the late-night phone sex hotline?” he asked in a husky voice when she answered.
Alicia let go of the curtain and smiled into the phone. “Yes, it is,” she said as she walked back across the bedroom. “That’s why I didn’t answer a second ago. I was busy with another customer.”
He laughed. “I won’t keep you but a second,” he said. “I saw your light was still on and I wanted to thank you for whatever you said to Danielle that made her lose the streaks and the nose ring.”
“Dani’s a good kid, Jake,” Alicia said as she flopped across the bed on her stomach. “Just give her time to come around.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Oh, and I also wanted to warn you that Tish was fishing for information at the cookout last night.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Alicia said. “Tish told me she was going to ask your version of what happened between us after you and I left the hospital. What did you tell her?”
Jake said, “I reminded Tish I wasn’t your type.”
“Good boy,” Alicia praised.
“Good boy?” Jake repeated. “We both know that isn’t your opinion of me, Alicia.”
“True,” Alicia said. “But I need you to be bad, Jake. Remember? Bad boys aren’t my type.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m dead to you now.”
“Completely,” Alicia said.
The lie hung in the air for several seconds.
Gut instinct told Alicia something else was on Jake’s mind, but she didn’t want to go there. He had to know there wasn’t anywhere for them to go under the circumstances. So why make things any worse? Living across the street from each other and pretending their fantasy night never happened was going to be hard enough. And being just friends wasn’t possible now. Unless a sudden memory lapse made him forget who had been screaming “God, Jake, yes!” from his front foyer floor last Friday night.
Best to end the call before things headed in a dangerous direction, Alicia decided, and so she said, “Well, thanks for letting me know you held up under Tish’s interrogation.”
He said, “I guess the real test is going to be when we end up at one of our neighbors’ houses at the same time. And you do realize that will happen sooner or later.”
Is that what Jake had on his mind?
Was he worried she couldn’t hold up under the pressure?
“I can handle being around you if we’re in the same crowd,” Alicia assured him. “I’ve always been good at pretending.”
“As in your Housewives Fantasy Club, you mean?”
Ack! My fantasy fetish is what got me into this mess!
But Alicia decided maybe she could use her preference for fantasies to her advantage. “Yes,” Alicia said. “I’ve always preferred fantasies to real relationships. Fantasies are safe. With fantasies you never have to worry about messy real-life problems getting in the way.”
There! That will shut him up, Alicia thought.
Until Jake said, “Sounds good to me. When do we start?”
Alicia laughed. “Start what?”
“Our fantasy relationship,” he said. “I was your first fantasy crush. It only seems fair that I should be your first fantasy relationship.”
Common sense told her to hang up, but Alicia was too intrigued by his suggestion not to play along. “I guess you might say a fantasy relationship would be perfect for our situation.”
“I think so,” Jake said.
“As long as we agreed to keep things strictly on a fantasy level, of course,” Alicia mentioned.
“Absolutely,” Jake said. “I’m no more interested in a real relationship than you are.”
“And if we only had a fantasy relationship,” Alicia mused, “you could still devote your time to Dani, and I could still devote my time to my business.”
“Exactly,” Jake agreed.
“Except, of course,” Alicia said, “for the one stolen hour every night that we put aside for our own guilty pleasures.”
“Expound on the guilty pleasures part,” Jake said. “What do you mean by guilty pleasures?”
Hang up the phone! common sense yelled.
But Alicia said, “Walk back to the window and find out.”
“Who said I ever left the window?” Jake teased.
Alicia left the bed, walked back to the window, and pulled back the curtain. Jake was standing right where she’d left him. Like most golf course communities, their houses weren’t that far apart, even with the street between them. Front lawns in Woodberry Park were basically nonexistent, leaving large backyards leading down to the cart path that circled the golf course.
The light from his bedroom made it possible for Alicia to see Jake clearly. His muscled chest was bare and he was wearing a pair of sweatpants. She smiled thinking that the only way he could look any better was if the rest of him was as bare as his chest. And why not engage in a little harmless over-the-phone flirting? He’d just confirmed he was no more interested in a real relationship than she was.
Cell phone to his ear, Jake said, “What does the front of your T-shirt say? I can see something’s written across the front, but I can’t read the words from here.”
“See no evil. Hear no evil. Date no evil,” Alicia said.
“Evil, as in bad boys?”
“How perceptive of you,” Alicia said.
“And what are you wearing beneath your no-evil T-shirt?”
“Body lotion.”
He groaned, hand to his chest, feigning a heart attack.
Alicia laughed.
“Now that’s pure evil,” he said. “Torturing me with that image.”
“Okay, I lied,” Alicia said. “I’m also wearing a lacy, black thong.”
“Prove it,” he dared. “Pull the T-shirt off and show me your lacy, black thong.”
“Give you a sample of your first guilty pleasure, you mean?” Alicia taunted.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
“Until tomorrow night then, Jake,” Alicia told him.
She disconnected their call.
She pulled her T-shirt off.
And she let Jake look—but only for a second.
“You are such a tease!” Jake said, laughing.
He turned his cell phone off, walked away from the window, and tossed the phone onto his bed. But he couldn’t keep from grinning. Alicia’s playful side was one of the things he liked best about her. Yet, she was also confident and straightforward—the exact opposite of Carla, when Jake thought about it.
He’d met Carla at a photo shoot for Sports Illustrated, him the Rookie of the Year, Carla and several other supermodels the window dressing. She’d reminded him of a sad little girl, and he’d gone out of his way trying to make her smile, just to see if he could. One month later they flew to the Bahamas and eloped. One month after the wedding, Carla found out she was pregnant with Danielle.
And after Carla?
Truthfully, there hadn’t been anyone special in his life after Carla. He’d dated lots of beautiful women, sure, but he’d never been interested in any of them. After the last few weeks he’d spent living in Woodberry Park, however, Jake was beginning to realize how much he’d been missing not having a special someone in his life. His neighbors were all happily married, sharing a life together, raising their kids. He truly envied all of them. And despite Alicia’s bravado over preferring to remain unattached, Jake suspected she was also envious of their neighbors.
He hadn’t told Alicia, but his conversation with Tish had gone a bit further than what he’d let on. When he’d reminded Tish he wasn’t Alicia’s type, Tish had told him not to think badly of Alicia because she was being so cautious. And after Tish explained why she’d made that comment, Jake had already decided if he ever came face-to-face with Alicia’s ex-husband, the conversation he had with the jerk would not be pleasant. Was it any wonder that Alicia preferred fantasies to real life?
That’s what had given him the idea of proposing a fantasy relationship. Aside from the fact that a fantasy relationship was all they had to offer each other at the moment, the anticipation of calling Alicia every night to explore their fantasies together was a huge turn-on for him. And he wasn’t going to feel guilty over not feeling guilty about his attraction to Alicia—if that made any sense. As Joe had pointed out, being a good father didn’t mean you had to stop being a man. Those were two separate roles in life.
But with Danielle’s surly attitude?
Jake feared if he didn’t have something to look forward to at the end of the day, he’d be sending Danielle back to LA by the end of the week!
Chapter 14
On Monday night, Alicia was waiting for Jake when he called. In her sexiest voice she said, “Hey, Jake.”
“No other customers tonight?” he teased.
“No,” Alicia said. “I’m all yours for the next hour.”
“About this hour limitation,” Jake said. “I don’t remember how we arrived at only one hour a night.”
“Are you implying that you don’t think I can turn you on in only an hour?” she teased.
He laughed. “Are you kidding? You turned me on just now when you said, ‘Hey, Jake.’”
“Then what’s wrong with our hour arrangement?”
“Well,” he said, “like now, for instance. According to my watch, we’ve already been talking almost two full minutes. And if we deduct those two minutes from our hour, that leaves us only fifty-eight minutes of phone sex time.”
Alicia said, “And your solution to the problem would be?”
“We have talk time first,” Jake said. “And we don’t start timing ourselves until we get down to serious business.”
“A little conversational foreplay, you mean?”
Jake said, “I was thinking more along the lines of a little getting-to-know-you-better time.”
“And who do you want to get to know better?” Alicia asked. “The real me? Or the fantasy me?”
“The real you during talk time. The fantasy you later.”
“Okay,” Alicia said. “This is obviously talk time. So what do you want to know about the real me?”
“Everything,” Jake said. “But let’s start with your family. Tell me about them.”
“One word,” Alicia said. “Dysfunctional.”
“Even a dysfunctional family is better than no family at all,” Jake mentioned. “How dysfunctional?”
“Well, let’s see,” Alicia said, “shall I start with my hypochondriac mother who has always turned a blind eye to my father’s infidelities as long as he maintains her affluent lifestyle and provides her with excellent health insurance? Or do you want to know about my father who is currently seeing a woman my age?” Alicia paused. “And I shouldn’t leave out my twin brother, who was on the phone last night when you called telling me he’d asked the woman who dumped him on Saturday to move in with him on Sunday.”
“I’ve always heard twins are close,” Jake said. “Are you and your brother close?”
“Sometimes I think we’re too close,” Alicia said and sighed. “Alfie lived through my teen obsession with you, Jake, and he’s been in a snit from the moment he found out you were moving to Woodberry Park. He’d throw a fit if he knew we were even talking on the phone.”
“I guess that means Alfie is another person on the list of people who can’t know about us,” Jake said.
“Sorry,” Alicia said, “but yes. Alfie’s on the list.”
&n
bsp; “Okay, you win,” Jake said. “Your outlook on the home front sounds about as dismal as mine.”
“Give Dani time,” Alicia said. “She’ll come around.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Jake said, “but to tell you the truth, I’ve never felt like more of a loser in my life. I look at the disappointment on her face and it kills me. I hate myself for not fighting harder all these years to be involved in Danielle’s life. I just kept telling myself it would be better for her and for Carla if I stayed in the background.”
The desperation in his voice didn’t go unnoticed.
Alicia said, “Maybe you should tell Dani what you just told me. Explain things to Dani from your point of view.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to make excuses in order to make myself look better. I was on the receiving end of a conversation like that from my mother when I was a kid. She told me my father divorced her and threw her out on the streets before I was born. She told me how her life was a mess. And she told me how she was doing me a favor by turning me over to the state and letting strangers raise me. All I heard were empty excuses. And I hate to admit it, but empty excuses are all I have to give Danielle.”
“Do you have any contact with your mother now?”
“I hear from her now and then,” Jake said. “When she’s between men and low on money.”
“And your father?”
“That’s part two of my life story,” Jake said. “Sure you have time to hear it?”
“Yes,” Alicia said. “This is still talk time.”
Jake said, “My father actually came to Chicago to see me shortly after I made Rookie of the Year. He was a farmer from a small town about an hour from here where he and my mother both grew up. The part about my father divorcing my mother was true. But she walked out on him. He never knew she was pregnant. I assume she didn’t tell him because she knew she’d have a fight on her hands if she tried to keep a man like Daniel Sims away from his child.”
He sighed and said, “My father finally put two and two together twenty-some years later when he saw a young rookie named Sims being interviewed on TV. He told me it was like looking at himself in the mirror.”
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