Nex

by Cheryl Douglas

“You should invite her up to the cottage this weekend,” Mac said. “We’re all going, and Seb and Brody said they could make it too.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised my brother, the world-famous poker player, would be in town. I hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks, and he hadn’t said anything at the time about coming home. “When’s Brody getting in?”

  “Sometime Friday,” Ryker said, reaching for his beer. “He said he’d stop by the office to see us when he gets here. Apparently, he’s going out with an old friend Friday night, but he’ll meet us up at the cottage on Saturday. You should definitely come. Bring Jaci.”

  I’d love to bring Jaci, but I suspected meeting my loud and boisterous family on a first date would scare her away. Not that she hadn’t met them before at the bar, but being in a social setting, as my date, was different.

  “I think we’ll just keep it low-key,” I said. “Dinner on Saturday night. She probably has to work on Friday night, and I’m not sure about her plans for Sunday.” Something with me if I had my way. She’d agreed to one date, but I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with that and I hoped she wouldn’t be either.

  “You got a picture of her?” Zane asked. “I wanna see what this chick looks like.”

  “She is not a chick,” Mac said, frowning at her son. “She is a lovely young lady.”

  “Actually, I think I do have a picture here,” I said, scrolling through the images on my phone.

  I’d taken a selfie of us when she landed in my lap after I tugged on her wrist, catching her off guard. She was laughing, flashing her dimples, and her bright blue eyes sparkled with amusement. Any time I needed a reminder of why I’d sworn off other women, all I had to do was look at that picture.

  “Here she is.” I passed the phone to Zane, who held it between himself and his brother.

  “Holy shit!” Cole exclaimed. “She’s hot! Look at that rack!”

  Mac’s jaw dropped before her cheeks turned pink. “Pardon me?”

  “Uh, sorry, Mom,” Cole said, looking sheepish as he handed the phone back to me.

  At fifteen and sixteen, those boys were the next generation of Steele brothers. God help all the innocent females who would cross their path.

  I tried to hide my smile as I slipped the phone back in my pocket, knowing Mac was still pissed with her younger son. “So what brings Brody back to town?” I asked Ryker, trying to change the subject to save my nephew from another tongue lashing. “Just coming to visit the fam?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryker said, smiling at Mac when she passed him the bread basket.

  That single look made me understand what Seb had been talking about the other night. Even though none of us had ever been big on commitment, Ryker’s marriage reminded all of us of what we’d been missing by staying single.

  “I got the feeling that friend he’s having dinner with on Friday night is a woman. Could be she’s the reason he’s back.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised. Wherever Brody went, women and trouble usually followed. “You see Seb lately?” My brother’s melancholy mood at the bar last night had been bugging me. It wasn’t like him to be moody or introspective.

  “A couple of days ago,” Ryker said, popping a bite of bread into his mouth. “Why?”

  “He seem okay to you?”

  Mac frowned. “What’s wrong with Seb?”

  Since she and Ryker had been together twenty years, she was like a big sister to all of us, and when something went wrong, she expected to be kept in the loop.

  “I don’t know that anything’s wrong,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. I didn’t want to bring the wrath of a concerned Mac down on Seb. “He just seems to be getting tired of the single life. He said something about maybe settling down someday soon.”

  Nudging her shoulder with mine, I said, “It’s your fault, you know. We all see how good this guy has it with you.” I raised my chin in Ryker’s direction. “And we all wanna find our own Mac now.”

  “Good luck with that,” Ryker said, reaching for his wife’s hand. “There’s only one Mackenzie, and she’s all mine.”

  “Guys, please,” Zane said, rolling his eyes. “We’re trying to eat here.”

  I knew my nephews liked to give their parents a hard time, but I’d never seen them happier than they’d been since Ryker and Mac got back together. “I don’t think anything could slow you two down,” I said, looking at their near-empty plates. “Did you guys just inhale all that food or what?”

  “We gotta go soon,” Cole explained. “Our friends are picking us up. We’re going to watch a ball game.”

  “Cool,” I said, taking a mouthful of pasta.

  “Uncle Nex, will you tell Mom and Dad I’m not too young to get a tattoo?” Zane asked.

  Shit, I wasn’t touching that one. We all had gotten our first tattoos when we were in our late teens or early twenties, but it was a big decision, and I could understand why Ryker and Mac wanted their son to wait until he was older to make that call.

  “Don’t drag him into this,” Ryker warned. “Your mother and I said no, and the answer is no.”

  “How old were you when you got inked?” Cole asked.

  “Uh…” If I told him the truth, his parents might be pissed, but I’d promised my nephews and myself I’d always give it to them straight. “I think I’d just turned eighteen.” My eighteenth birthday, to be exact.

  “In other words,” Mac said to Zane, “older than you. Legally old enough to make his own decisions, not that you’re magically blessed with common sense when you turn eighteen.”

  “Mom, everybody’s getting tats now,” Zane said, pushing his chair back and crossing his arms. “It’s art. A form of self-expression.”

  I couldn’t disagree with the kid, but I wouldn’t want my son committing to something like that at Zane’s age. My son? Where the hell had that thought come from? Kids had never even been on my radar before. Maybe it was the talk I’d had with Seb about settling down or it could be breaking bread with Mac and Ryker. Either way, the idea of kids wasn’t making me break out in a cold sweat. Huh. I must be maturing.

  Lost in my own thoughts, I was startled when Zane and Cole jumped up when a car horn honked outside. They shook my hand, kissed their mom on the cheek, waved at their dad, and promised not to miss curfew before they were out the door.

  The phone rang, and Mac glanced at the call display. “It’s my mom. There was an issue with a delivery at the bakery today. I asked her to call when they sorted it out. Would you guys excuse me? I won’t be long.”

  “Take your time,” I said, polishing off my pasta. “I’m not going anywhere ’til I get a piece of that chocolate cake over there.”

  She laughed as she set her hand on my shoulder while getting up. “Who do you think I made it for?”

  Ryker watched his wife rush out of the room to take her call, a smile splitting his face.

  “I know I don’t have to ask, but things are good between you two again?” I snagged my beer, which Mac insisted on pouring in a glass, as I observed my brother. He was the oldest, the father-figure in our family, and the one person in the world I respected more than anyone else.

  “Better than it’s ever been,” Ryker confirmed, grinning. “I never would have asked for that separation, but I have to say, almost losing Mac helped me realize I can’t live without her. My life…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense without her, man.”

  Jaci popped into my head, and for the first time ever, I was beginning to understand why my brother said he needed his wife. I hated it when days passed and I didn’t get to see Jaci’s beautiful face or hear her laugh. And I hadn’t even slept with the woman yet. How crazy was that?

  “Okay, out with it,” Ryker said, leaning forward. “What’s on your mind?”

  If anyone could give me relationship advice, it would be Ryker. He knew what it took to land a quality woman and make her so happy she wasn’t interested in looking elsewhere. That’s what I wanted,
to make Jaci realize I was the only man she needed. For now. I wasn’t looking to put a ring on her finger; I just wanted her in my bed most nights. Until we both agreed we’d gotten our fill of each other and it was time to move on.

  “Jaci told me about this boyfriend,” I said, struggling to remember his name. The only thing that mattered to me was figuring out whether he was the reason she was hesitant to get involved with me. “They broke up before she moved here. But I guess things were pretty serious. They were talking marriage.”

  “Is he still in the picture?”

  “I don’t think so.” Though I couldn’t say for sure that she didn’t keep in touch with him. If I were him, I’d probably stick around if only to convince her to give it another chance. “But it sounds like he had her mother’s approval.”

  “And that’s important to Jaci?”

  “You know how it is, Ryk. When you’re raised by a single mom who busts her ass to provide for you, you’d do anything for her, even if you sometimes butt heads.”

  We were silent for a minute, and I knew we were both thinking about how much we missed our ma, how much we wished she were there with us.

  “Sounds like Jaci’s mom’s pretty religious. She raised her right but may have kept her on a short leash, if you know what I mean.”

  Ryker grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Her mama would’ve locked her up and thrown away the key if she slept around.”

  “Something like that. So now that she’s on her own, she wants to experience all the things she couldn’t when she was living under her mother’s thumb.”

  “Makes sense.”

  It made perfect sense, but it was providing one hell of an obstacle for me, and I didn’t know how to overcome it. “So because of her unquenchable thirst for freedom…” God, I was starting to hate the sound of that word. “And the memory of her ex still fresh in her mind, she’s not interested in dating just one guy right now.”

  “Ah,” Ryker said, smiling as understanding dawned in his eyes. “And you don’t wanna share?”

  “What do you think?”

  Nex and serious relationship would have been antonyms in any thesaurus, but I had a problem with sharing my women. If they were sleeping with me, they weren’t sleeping with anyone else. No exceptions.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a problem.”

  “I know that,” I said, pushing my empty plate aside. “What I need to know is what to do about it. She finally agreed to go out with me on Saturday night, and I don’t wanna screw this up by making all kinds of demands on her, but I can’t be with her without wanting to sleep with her. And I can’t sleep with her without having her assurance she’s not sleeping with anyone else.”

  “Sounds like you might be best to leave this one alone, Nex.”

  “No!” Ryker looked as surprised by my vehement reaction as I was. “I’ve been after this girl for months. I’m not giving up now when I’m so close to getting what I want.”

  Ryker stroked the stubble on his chin. “And what you want is to get her into bed?”

  What I wanted from Jaci went so far beyond sex it was actually starting to scare me a little, but that didn’t mean I had any intention of backing off. “I want to date her and see where it could go, but yeah, of course I want to sleep with her.”

  Ryker seemed to consider my dilemma for a minute before he said, “You know, I had the same problem with Mac in the beginning.”

  “You did?”

  I was just a kid when Ryker met Mac, so I didn’t remember much about it. All I knew was that she’d always been there, a part of our lives and our family. She’d been the glue that held us all together when we lost our mom, and her parents had become like our surrogate parents, reminding us all that life had to go on and we had to be there for each other like never before.

  “Yeah, she’d had a serious boyfriend through most of high school too. Apparently, he was a decent guy—her folks liked him, which was good enough for her at that time.” He grinned. “I was the antithesis of what her parents would have wanted for her. Motorcycle gangs, drugs, booze, wild women… you can imagine how her father, the cop, felt when he found out about me.”

  I laughed, thinking about Mac’s dad, Bill, and how much he’d come to love Ryker. The son he’d never had, he said. “Bill was tough, but you won him over. How’d you do it?”

  “I eventually proved to him that I loved his baby girl, that I’d never let anyone or anything hurt her, that I’d always take care of her and be there for her.” His smile was sad, almost wistful. “I can say this now, Nex—as a parent, that’s all you can ever want for your kids. That they’ll find someone who’ll love them, treat them right, not hurt them, protect them, support them…” His voice drifted off, and he chuckled softly as though he realized he’d been babbling. “I’m sure that’s all Jaci’s mama wants for her.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.” It’s not that I ever expected to meet Jaci’s mother or have reason to ask for her blessing, but if she was working behind the scenes, trying to get Jaci back together with her ex-boyfriend, that could definitely be a problem for me. “But Jac’s a grown woman. She can decide for herself what and who she wants, right?”

  “True,” Ryker said, shaking his head. “But sometimes it’s hard to make good judgment calls when you’re too close to a situation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sure Jaci’s mama’s warned her about dating the ‘wrong men’ all her life,” he said, making air quotes around the words. “She did it so Jaci’d know what to look out for when a guy like that crossed her path, right?”

  “I guess so.” I didn’t like where he was going with this.

  “And let’s face it, Nex. You’re the guy Jaci’s mama warned her to stay away from. So can you blame the poor girl for having her doubts about you?”

  I couldn’t blame her, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  “Think about it,” Ryker said. “We grew up being warned against gators, sharks, and rattlers, right?”

  I couldn’t believe my brother was comparing me to a venomous snake. I may have broken my fair share of hearts over the years, but I wasn’t lethal. “What’s your point, Ryker?”

  “If you see one, you’re smart enough to steer clear. Am I right?”

  “So?”

  “Jaci’s been warned about guys like you all her life. Is it any wonder she’s trying to keep her distance?”

  I hated to admit it, but it made perfect sense when Ryker put it in those terms. “So what am I supposed to do?” I raised my hand before he could interject. “And don’t tell me to give up on her ’cause that’s not an option.” Ryker studied me so long I started to get uneasy. “What? Why the hell are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’ve never seen you like this over a girl. She’s really special, huh?”

  Ryker already knew she was. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard me talk about Jaci and how frustrated I was that I wasn’t making any headway with her. “Yeah, she is. So let’s hear it, Dr. Phil. How do I win her over?”

  He smirked. “Short answer? Surprise her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s expecting you to be a certain type of guy based on your reputation. Prove that you can change for her.”

  Did I really want to change? I liked myself just fine the way I was. “I don’t know if I like where you’re going with this.”

  “Do the kinds of things for her you’ve never done for a girl before.”

  “Like?”

  “Romantic dinners, flowers, cook for her…” Ryker laughed at my raised eyebrow. “You’re right, scratch the cooking. You’re trying to impress her, not make her sick.”

  “Shut up, smartass. This is serious.”

  “Okay, just do the opposite of what you’d normally do.”

  He wasn’t helping. “Such as?”

  “Call when you say you’re going to. Make her breakfast in bed instead of trying to sneak out the next
morning.” His lips twisted. “No, better yet, go the café and buy her a coffee and muffin.”

  I could do those things. In fact, for Jaci, I’d enjoy doing those things. The problem with her wasn’t calling when I said I would, it was resisting the temptation not to call every time I thought about her. Which was pretty much all the time. As for breakfast in bed… the only problem with that would be tearing myself away from her long enough to feed her.

  “Think you can handle that?” Ryker asked. When I nodded, he said, “Just remember, it’s the little things that’ll impress a girl like Jaci. She won’t care if you can afford the fancy cars and designer clothes. She’s probably used to a simpler life.”

  I suspected he was right. Jaci told me her mom was a substitute teacher who did odd jobs, including pet sitting and grooming, to earn extra money. “Maybe she’d like a taste of the finer things though,” I said, thinking about how much fun it would be to treat her to the kinds of things she’d never been able to afford.

  After growing up poor, years of earning a six- and seven-figure income working with Ryker had taught me that being rich was a hell of a lot more fun.

  “Just take it easy on that stuff,” Ryker warned. “You don’t want to make it look like you’re showing off or trying to buy her affection.”

  I could see how that might be a deterrent for someone like Jaci, who was used to working hard for everything she had. “Okay, I’ll give it some thought.” I glanced at my watch. She’d texted to tell me she was getting off early tonight, but Jade was picking her up, so I could call her later to discuss our plans for Saturday if I wasn’t busy.

  Even if I was busy, I’d always make time for her.

  “You have to head out?”

  “Yeah.” I stood, collecting my plates and taking them to the dishwasher. “Tell Mac I took my cake to go.” I cut a big slab and put it in one of the plastic containers Mac had stacked on the counter for leftovers. Licking the icing off my fingers instead of using a napkin, I said, “Damn, this is good. How’re things going for Mac and her mom at the bakery anyhow?”

  “It’s going great,” Ryker said, beaming with pride. “Their biggest problem is keeping up with the demand, especially now that they want to start taking orders for wedding cakes.”