I stick the clipboard between my knees and show her my hands, which, while clean and neat, have yet to see a professional.
“So to speak,” she says.
“I don’t hold Tucker down,” I say. “I pay him at a level commensurate with his duties. See the difference?”
And god, this is crazy, but this tug of war over Tucker, it’s bringing back memories, too. Her cheeks are flushed from the sun and from the heat of combat, and her eyes are that warm hazel I remember so well. Now that she’s agitated, compelled to defend the underdog as she always will, her breathing is deeper, making the round swells of her breasts just that much more inviting.
I have to retrieve the clipboard from between my knees and anchor it casually over my lap to hide a growing hard-on, because I remember how arguments over Tucker used to end. Does she?
“You’ve always been determined to see his bad side,” she says. “But as his boss you need to drop your animosity.”
Do I? I think. And then, lecherously, What’s it worth to you?
“Look at what happened this afternoon. We wouldn’t have won most of those challenges without him. He was a steady contributor, and kind to Georgia.”
“You set the tone for that,” I say. “The others followed your lead, including Tucker.”
“Not true.”
“Oh, come on, Liv. Be honest. Tucker’s the kind of guy who’d hug her while skimming her credit card.”
She shrugs and her mouth flattens as she tries to hide a grin. I notice she doesn’t dispute the analysis.
“Talking about me?” says a voice, and of course it’s Tucker. He is languishing in the shade not five feet from us, leaning a tanned shoulder against the frame of an empty lifeguard chair.
This is being like hit with a déjà-vu stick—me and Liv, attempting to have fun or dig into a serious conversation, and Tucker inserting himself into the proceedings, no matter how unwelcome.
“As a matter of fact,” I say, “we’re debating your essential nature.”
“Yeah?” His eyebrows climb out from under his sunglasses. “Want to have one about yours?”
“Tucker,” Liv warns.
“About how you make promises and abandon people—”
“Right,” I say. “A dire family illness isn’t—”
“Stop,” Liv says with surprising authority, her hands on her hips. “Both of you. We’re attracting attention. May I remind you that we are teammates?” To Tucker she says, “I’ll fight my own battles, thank you very much. And get a grip. He’s your boss.”
“He wouldn’t fire me for an honest assessment,” Tucker says. “Truth to power, right, Finnegan? Or does Wakefield abandon that principle once we’re off the beach?”
“Please,” Liv says, in real distress. “This is not the time or place to be swinging dicks.”
“She’s right,” Tucker says.
“Yes, she is,” I say. And maybe this is part of the old pattern, too, but I hear myself add, “Which is why we should take this elsewhere. Marley’s. 8:30 tonight.”
“For what?” Tucker sniggers. “Karaoke?”
“I was thinking we’d torture our guts instead of our ears,” I say.
“Drinking?”
I nod.
“You sure you want to go that route, Finnegan? I used to be able to drink you under the table.”
“Let’s find out if it’s still true.” I turn to Liv. “You going to come and supervise us? Make sure we don’t murder each other?”
She makes a sound of disgust and gathers her belongings. “I’d sooner sit on a thousand cocktail forks.” Off she stomps, at least as much as a person can stomp while wearing flip-flops.
“Well, that’s unexpected,” I say to Tucker. We’ve both swung to watch Liv’s disappearing, swaying bottom. “What’ll we fight about if not her?”
Tucker seems equally mystified.
CHAPTER 10
FINN
M acho impulse was behind my challenge to Tucker, but as the time to meet him approaches, I become convinced it was the right move. Tucker has always pushed my buttons because he’s got Liv hoodwinked. I push his buttons because he sees me as a lily-livered interloper unworthy of Liv’s heart.
But Liv and I aren’t together anymore and I’m his boss now. It’s time we reestablish the power dynamics in a way he’ll respect, and that won’t get either of us thrown into jail. Otherwise, he’ll continue to undermine my authority, just because, and I’ll have no choice but to fire him.
I don’t like to fire anybody.
I especially don’t want to fire someone who reportedly has a mother and little brother depending upon his paycheck.
But drinking? Drinking is one language Tucker understands. And when I show up at the bar ten minutes early, from the glass on the table and the glint in his eye, it’s a language he’s already been speaking. Good news for me. I go to the gym now and have a few pounds of muscle on him, but in the booze department I’m a comparative non-practitioner.
In anticipation of the resort’s talent night, Marley’s is humming. Tucker has chosen an outside table with a prime view of the stage and dance floor.
He raises his glass to me and tosses back the amber liquid, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Have a seat, Finnegan.” When I don’t move, he says, “What’s the matter? Need the staff to dust your chair?”
“We have reservations.” I point to the one empty table on the patio, which I had set aside earlier.
“What’s wrong with this spot?”
I let my gaze rest meaningfully on the planter behind him, with the ocean just beyond that. Two easy places for him to ditch a drink, whereas my chair, notably, is surrounded by plain cobblestone. “Fool me twice…” I say.
He throws back his head in a laugh before scraping back his chair. “Wondered if you’d remember that night.” He follows me amiably to the other table, rubbernecking as two stacked blondes claim the seats we vacated.
“Now, isn’t this romantic?” I say, when we are seated with a candle flickering between us. “Whatever shall we talk about?”
“Let’s start with what we’ll drink after this round,” he says. Just then, one of the servers arrives with a tray and two shot glasses filled to the brim with clear liquid. Tucker gives her a wink. “I took the liberty of ordering us a starter. Vodka, Finnegan?”
“Nah.” I’m thinking of the bartender who dosed me with Tabasco sauce the other night. What are the chances one glass is filled with water and the other with booze? I’m not about to get into a Princess-Bride-type standoff with drinks. “If we’re doing this, might as well have a top-shelf headache tomorrow.”
I lift my hand and Reginald, who’s been awaiting my signal, glides out of the shadows. He shoos the other server away before setting down two empty glasses and a sealed bottle.
Appleton Estate 21. It’s a crime to drink rum of this quality in a booze-off, especially from a shot glass rather than a brandy snifter. But I’m trying to make a not-so-subtle point to Tucker. I think it works, because he looks impressed.
“Need anything else, Mr. Wakefield?” Reginald asks as I peel off the seal.
“Got an iron stomach you can loan me?”
“Afraid not.”
“Then I think we’re good.”
As Reginald nods and glides away, and I uncork the bottle, Tucker seems to find this hilarious. “So it’s true. You have learned a few things over the years.”
As I pour the drinks I try to assess him dispassionately. He’s smart, I’ve always known that, and he has matured into a good-looking guy. Dark hair, tall, and broad-shouldered, with that brooding disposition favored by certain women.
“Salud,” I say, and we toss one back. The copper-colored rum is rich and citrusy, with spicy undernotes. I hope tonight won’t turn me off the taste of nutmeg forever.
“Yeah,” I say. “I was pretty fresh-faced when we met.” Fresh-faced and idealistic. Ripe pickings for a guy who was willing to fight dirty to expo
se my naiveté to Liv. But then, from what Liv said, Tucker learned that at home, from a stepfather who made my old man look like a saint.
“I’ll say,” he replies. “I’ll never forget the time when…”
As he launches into a tale of my ineptness, I tune him out. Basically, the guy could talk for an hour without running out of Tucker-humiliates-Finn stories.
During my summer with Liv, in my quest to contribute financially while remaining invisible to my father, I worked as a day laborer. It was hard work with minimal pay and often worse safety conditions. Especially when I ended up working alongside Tucker.
Is he telling the one about how he tricked me into reversing the pump on the vacuum truck, so that I got sprayed by septic tank waste? Or the one where I was so busy moving hay bales, trying to show him I could keep up, that I didn’t notice he’d let the bull into the pasture? The way he tells that last anecdote, I nearly had my short-and-curlies parted by two tons of living beef.
The way he tells it isn’t that wrong.
“Yeah, pretty sad,” I say when he winds down. “But to give credit where credit is due, I owe a lot of my present success to you.”
His head rockets back and the smile falls from his face. “Oh?”
It gives me a thrill to see his smugness dimmed, however momentarily. “Yup.” I pour us another round. “You taught me a lot. Thanks to you, when I took over the company, I knew I needed to be more hands-on than I would have been otherwise. I made a point of hiring people who came from a practical background—life-smart, not just school-smart.” I lift my glass. “Here’s to you, with my thanks for making me the man I’ve become.”
For once he doesn’t have a quick comeback.
We sit in silence for a while, drinking another couple of rounds as the talent show gets under way. First up is a geriatric juggler. Then a cute kid on a mouth organ. Then a redhead in a sparkly dress. I cringe as her background music begins. I’m not plastered enough for the theme from The Bodyguard.
Tucker has other things on his mind. “Look at the tits on that thing. Course, they aren’t as spectacular as Liv’s.”
In the past, I wouldn’t have been sure how much of Tucker’s talk was designed to provoke, versus him being a truthful, kiss-and-tell bastard. Tonight I’m certain he’s talking BS because of what Liv said by the gate. Not only that, seeing her this afternoon on the beach, she treats him like a brother.
I decide to see how far he’ll carry his boast. “You and Liv an item?”
“What do you think, asshole. After you dumped her, she got lonely.”
Yeah, whereas Liv always amazed me with her lack of bitterness, he fails the test. He knows damn well I didn’t leave her. I felt torn in two when those suits showed at Ada’s door. Torn between duty and a promising destiny with Liv.
Duty only won because it had been given a month to live.
Not for the first time, I wonder if Tucker is the reason Liv turned on me, and if turning on me wasn’t exactly rational, it could be understandable. How strong would I have stayed if I’d been hearing this kind of garbage day in and day out?
The redhead is switched out for a tap-dancing family dressed like flamingos. I shake my head and pour another round. Imagine packing tap shoes and pink fluff for Jamaica.
“So tell me something,” I say. “Why isn’t Liv here with us? Nerm—” My lips are growing numb, so I have to begin again. “Nermally she’d be here making sure we don’t kill each other.”
“Not sure. Stuff to do. Call her mom.” He waves expansively. “Stuff?”
A snort escapes me. “Is this a technical term?”
“Very technical,” he assures me.
I ponder that for a while. “And another thing—why is she so quiet now?”
“She talks,” he says indignantly, as if I’ve accused Liv of bestiality, or crimes warranting similar revulsion.
“I know that. I mean…people in the company don’t seem to know her very well.”
“Aloof,” he says, pronouncing it with a little kick at the end, like a mini wolf howl. “You were looking for the word ‘aloof.’ So much for that fancy educumation.”
I shrug.
“She’s the same as she’s always been,” he says.
I shake my head, blinking when Tucker briefly morphs into two.
“’S true,” Tucker assures me. “Know what they call her behind her back?”
I ease back in my chair. “Do I wanna know?”
“Only if you like to laugh.” He waves me closer. Closer still. “They call her Miss Priss, or Miss Prisser. Also, the Livsicle.” When he chuckles, I get a whiff of his breath. It has to be thirty-proof, at least. “And Vinny in Drafting? He says if she was another four rungs higher, we’d call her Madam Ice President.” He goes off into hysterics that earn him knowing glances from the blondes.
“Stop,” I say, and hold up a flat hand, like a traffic cop. I am affronted on Liv’s behalf. “You’re supposed to be on her side. You should be defendering her.”
“I can be a friend,” he assures me, “and still know there’s an icicle up her tw—”
“Careful.” I’m on my feet now—swaying, but on my feet. I can feel the weight of curious stares, meaning I’ve probably crossed into the talking-too-loud stage of drunkenness. I drop my voice to a harsh whisper. “Don’t talk that way about her or—”
“Or what?” He widens his eyes in an expression of exaggerated fear.
“I’m gonna forget you’re an employee.” I rap the table with my knuckles. “Call you outside.”
Tucker snorts and points to the stars wheeling overhead, the ocean glimmering in the moonlight.
“The other outside.”
He leans back in his chair, his arms linked around his glass, his expression suddenly avid. “You want to take me on?”
I had been joking. Mostly. But suddenly I can’t see a reason not to. At my sides, my fists clench involuntarily. I’ll look like a coward if I back down. And in a way, this moment feels inevitable, like we’ve been working up to a physical confrontation for an entire decade. “Let’s do it.”
But the bastard has dropped his head, so that he’s not even looking at me. For some unfathomable reason, his watch is consuming all his attention.
“Am I boring you with my offer of violence?” I say.
“Not at all. But I think you’ve forgotten something.”
A sense of unease penetrates the liquor fog enveloping my brain. I’m three-quarters of the way to loaded. By Tucker’s increasingly slurred speech, I thought he’d been similarly affected. But that last sentence came out clear as a car alarm on a cold winter’s night. Has Tucker been gaslighting me?
I’ve just reached this conclusion when he slides his watch-bearing arm forward, so that it’s illuminated by the candle.
I blink.
There’s a mosquito on his forearm, riding the crest of flesh created when he pinched his skin. Her proboscis is deeply buried, her belly already a rich crimson.
Tucker smirks. “Better sit down, Finnegan. You’re looking a little wobbly.”
What I am is hot, which is always the first harbinger of a fainting spell. Even now I can feel my heartbeat slowing.
I don’t move, other than to reach out blindly and seize the neck of the bottle of Appleton. I hold the container to my forehead, taking comfort in its comparative cool. I try to remember the breathing exercises the psychologist taught me. Inwardly I’m chanting, That’s not my blood. That’s not my blood.
“Cool trick, huh?” Tucker says conversationally. “This guy I knew back in Springfield told me about it. See, this mosquito comes along and she thinks she’s pretty damn slick. She’s got thousands of years of breeding behind her, all designed to keep you from noticing what she’s doing, that she’s sucking your life’s blood out—the best of you—while you’re drinking in a bar in Jamaica, say, or off at school, trying to be the first in three generations to graduate college. But what she doesn’t know is this: when you grab her
e, just like this, she can’t pull out her sucker.”
Not my blood. Not my blood. “Proboscis.” My voice comes out faintly. “It’s called a proboscis.”
“You say ‘proboscis,’ I say ‘pretentious.’” He stares steadily at me, his eyes simultaneously threatening and mesmerizing. “The point is, the mosquito only thinks it’s getting away with something.”
I feel a wave of advancing nausea. My skin prickles, and my eyelids won’t obey the command to close.
“But soon her belly will be full and she’ll start to panic. A few seconds from now, she’s going to pop. Just think, Finnegan. Blood on my shirt, blood on my arm, blood on the tablecloth—”
“Yeah, I heard that story, too,” I say. “Only, turns out it was a lie.”
And somehow I find the will to move. While he’s got his one arm splayed on the table for demonstration purposes, and the other immobilized in the pinch, I tilt the bottle in my hand while shifting my weight to my back foot.
My aim is true, thank god. A small stream of liquor hits the candle and, because I paid for the high-test stuff, it readily ignites.
In the resulting flambé, several people at a nearby table scream. A server comes running and hastily takes the bottle from my hand. She upends salt upon the small scrap of tablecloth that was set alight, while another staff member advances with a fire extinguisher.
My nostrils register singed fabric. Maybe singed flesh?
Most importantly, Tucker scrambles backward, nearly overturning his chair in the process. There’s so much activity I don’t even track the mosquito as she wings her way to freedom.
“Bravo,” a familiar voice says to my right. “You saved me from having to slap him.”
“Liv!” I say happily.
She’s got her arms folded over her chest and Reginald behind her, his face as impassive as ever.
She addresses Tucker. “So in this scenario, am I the mosquito, the arm, or the blood? Never mind,” she says before he can open his mouth. “You two are drunk and you’ve outworn your welcome. Ergo, this evening is at an end.”
CHAPTER 11
Tropical Tryst: 25 All New and Exclusive Sexy Reads Page 152