No Strings Attached

by Susan Andersen - No Strings Attached

  “So, I’m guessing you must...love it, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, but discovered his answer was like that old screeching-needle-across-a-record sound effect from an old television series a bunch of the girls in his dorm loved when he was in college. Because did he? Did he, really?

  “I love the rush, anyhow,” he amended. “But it’s sure as hell isolating.” He stared at his hand when it made an involuntary, jerky I-take-that-back gesture. “Don’t get me wrong. I manage to make connections. I spend my time with lowlifes and killers, yet it’s been my experience that people are rarely all good or all bad. So, during those periods when I’m undercover, I can generally find one or two I enjoy being around.

  “But the truth is, it never pays to get close to anyone on more than a superficial level. Because, face it, they are lowlifes and killers, and I’m lying my ass off all the time, so it’s not like they’re real friends.” He met her gaze squarely. “I’m constantly aware of that, even if they aren’t.”

  Saying so out loud made him understand how much he’d been enjoying the company of regular, decent people like Tasha and his brothers since he’d come to town. He opened his mouth to tell her so.

  Except...

  He got a kick out of her viewing him as some kind of kick-ass super–secret agent. So, what was the point in reiterating that, before coming to Razor Bay, he hadn’t had a real friend to his name for more years than he liked to admit?

  No, he was better off keeping his trap shut unless he had something to say that might charm or entertain her. At least that gave him a shot at making her feel something for him.

  Even if it was only a fraction of what he felt for her.

  * * *

  THEIR DATE HAD jumped the rails, and Tasha wasn’t sure what had happened.

  Okay, that wasn’t true. It had been after he’d talked about his undercover work and how it had isolated him. Even then it wasn’t as if the date had suddenly crashed and burned. But it had lost the earlier intimacy that made it feel special.

  Silver City Brewery, when they moved their date down the road, hadn’t helped. The place was jam-packed with the after-work crowd, making the space crazy loud and more hectic than she’d ever seen it during the few previous times she’d been there. The high noise levels took away from the ambience and definitely contributed to the growing no-man’s-land between them. But the real problem, she couldn’t help but believe, stemmed back to him admitting that because he lied, he didn’t have any real friends.

  Hello, lowlifes and killers. Okay, so she couldn’t even imagine how exhausting that must be, never being able to just be yourself. Always having to monitor every word that came out of your mouth. Yet now that he’d put it out there, at the same time she couldn’t help but wonder...had he lied to her? To his brothers?

  Oh, God. To all of them?

  Get a grip, girl! Her suspicion was no doubt unwarranted and not only unworthy of her, but unfair to him. She tried her damnedest to shake it off.

  But his sudden facile charm following that brief moment of opening up to her had sunk deep claws of a doubt she’d love to deny.

  Until she couldn’t stand it any longer and leaned into the table. “Let’s go,” she yelled. “I’m tired of shouting.”

  He nodded, and she gathered her purse and stood. With his hand warm on the small of her back, he steered her toward the door.

  “God, my ears are ringing,” she said when they stepped out of the brewery. “Sorry about that. I’ve been here before but not at this time of day, I guess.”

  “Do you want to try another place? Or go to a movie or something?”

  “No. I’ve got a headache. I think I’d just as soon call it a night.”

  They were quiet on the drive back to Razor Bay. She felt him look over at her several times, but he clearly didn’t feel compelled to fill the silence, for it continued to stretch out between them.

  When they reached her apartment a short while later, however, he took the key she’d pulled out of her purse and unlocked her door. He ushered her in and kicked the door shut behind them. “So,” he said in a flat, inflectionless voice. “I thought you were a big proponent of honesty.”

  “I am!”

  “Yet the minute I gave it to you, you clammed up.” He narrowed his eyes at her until they were the barely-there glints of black between dense, dark lashes. But she didn’t doubt for a moment that those all-seeing eyes observed her every reaction.

  “So, what’s the deal?” he demanded. “I tell you the truth and you start wondering if I’ve been lying to you—and, oh, wait, let me guess—everyone else since I landed in town?”

  “No!” she said indignantly. Then, “Well, yes. Maybe.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, okay?”

  “Okay, fair enough. C’mere.” He cupped a hand around her elbow and escorted her to her couch. “Sit.”

  “Stay!” she snapped. “What am I, a disobedient dog?”

  His teeth flashed white in his golden-skinned face. “You are kinda bitchy right now.”

  She shrugged petulantly, then straightened her posture. “All right, I’ll give you that. If you’ll admit that you went from telling me probably the first from-the-heart honest thing you’ve ever said about your work to Mr. I’m-too-smooth-for-my-shoes.”

  He blew out a sigh and rubbed a long, lean hand across his face. Dropping it to his side, he looked at her. “Can we sit down and talk about this?”

  She shrugged, but took a seat on the couch. And gave him a pointed look. “Talk.”

  He dropped onto a cushion a couple of feet away from where she sat hugging the sofa’s corner. “I admit I was maybe a little superficial,” he said. “But I couldn’t help it. I kind of panicked.”

  She blinked. Mr. Tough and Ready, panicking? “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “Jesus, Tash.” He thrust his fingers through his hair. “I’ve seen things, done things, that would straighten your hair. Hell, who am I kidding? That would turn your stomach. I’d just admitted that I hadn’t had any real friends since I graduated college. And you went quiet on me, developed a headache and wanted to go home.”

  “Because you started talking like a snake-oil salesman, it was too damn loud in there and... Well, I wasn’t having fun anymore.”

  He scooted a little closer. “But you were having fun before that?”

  “Yes. I was having a great time. It felt both effortless and exciting, the way I remember it being when I first met you in the Bahamas. Aha!” She pointed at him. “You lied to me then.” She couldn’t believe it hadn’t been the first thing she’d thought of when she’d started in what-ifing—

  “I lied to you back then because I was on a job and had had it drummed into my head that you never, but never, broke cover. It didn’t matter that I was a thousand miles from the job at the time—those were, and still remain, the rules for covert operatives.”

  He moved closer yet and held her eyes with a steady, level gaze. “But I swear on my mother’s grave that I have not lied to you since I found you again. Nor have I lied to my brothers or their wives or Austin or—hell, anyone in this town when it comes right down to it.”

  “Okay. I guess I just needed to hear it said aloud.”

  “So, you believe me?”

  She paused to take an internal reading, then said honestly, “Yes.”

  “Good.” Twisting around, he picked her up and hauled her onto his lap facing him. “Now, about that having my wicked way with you...”

  Her mouth dropped open, a strangled laugh escaped her, and she gave him a straight shot to the shoulder. “You’re such a pig!”

  “Hey, I’m a guy, and we just had our first— Hell, I’m not even sure what you’d call this—a fight? A misunderstanding?” He tugged at the leg that was partly caught on his pelvic bone until she straddled him head-on. Then, looking up at her, he shrugged. “I haven’t been in a real relationship for so long I’m pretty sketchy on the terminology. I do know, though, that either one o
f those situations calls for makeup sex.”

  Her heartbeat picked up its pace. “Is that what we’re in, you and I? A relationship?” OGod, OGod, OGod, I thought it was no strings attached.

  “Hell, yeah. At least...that’s what I’m thinking it is.” A slight wrinkle developed across his forehead. “Why? Do you disagree?”

  She wanted to ask how long he intended this so-called relationship to last, but somewhere along the way, when she hadn’t been paying attention, she’d turned into a raging wuss. It was the only explanation she could come up with for the fact that where she ordinarily wouldn’t have hesitated to outright ask, she instead kept her mouth shut except to say, “No. I don’t disagree.” Then she bent her head to kiss him. Strictly because she wanted to, dammit.

  Not because it provided her a legitimate reason not to have to examine her own feelings. Or discuss where—if anywhere—this thing between them was going.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WHEN LUC ARRIVED at Max’s house the following Wednesday evening, he found the front door cracked open to the chilly night air, music pouring out of the living room and his brother dancing with Harper. For a minute or two he simply stood on their porch, watching them. Max had some moves. He was a better dancer than Luc, that was for sure.

  He rapped on the door frame just as Max was in the midst of dipping his woman—and looking as though he were seconds away from laying a hot one on her, as well. “Did I get the wrong night?”

  Max pulled Harper upright and turned to grin at him. “No, come on in. Harper and I were just passing the time until everyone arrives.”

  “Can I grab you a beer, Luc?” the pretty biracial woman asked, shooting him an easy smile as she extricated herself from Max’s hold. “Or maybe a cup of coffee or a glass of wine?”

  “A cup of coffee sounds good.”

  “One coffee, coming up. How do you take it?”

  “If you have milk, that would be great. If not, black is fine.”

  “Oh, sugar, you name it, we’ve got it.”

  “We do,” Max agreed. “Tonight, anyhow. You all have been good enough to offer your help on my campaign, so we laid in some serious provisions. The least we can do is see that you’re fed and watered. Speaking of which, will skim milk do ya, or you want to go crazy with half-and-half?”

  “Crazy is my middle name,” he said dryly.

  “Half-and-half it is,” Harper said and left for their not-quite-finished kitchen.

  Max turned down the music. “Let’s go grab a seat.”

  “Jesus, Max,” Jake’s voice said before they’d moved two feet, and they turned to watch the youngest Bradshaw brother usher his soon-to-be-wife into the house. “Is there a reason you’re heating the great outdoors?”

  Austin dashed past his dad and Jenny and headed straight for the two of them.

  “Hey, Uncle Max, Uncle Luc! I’m gonna help tonight, too. Dad said you might let me use the staple gun.”

  “You know what? A staplin’ guy is exactly what I need,” Max said. “Come with me—I’ll show you the station I set up for the campaign signs we’re going to put in people’s yards and along the highway.”

  Harper came over with Luc’s coffee and he accepted it with thanks. Taking a sip, he followed Max as he led Austin over to a table made from an old barn-type door and two heavy-duty sawhorses. On its working surface was an industrial-sized stapler and a stack of big glossy signs reading Max Bradshaw for Sheriff that featured both a head shot of a sober-faced Max in his black uniform sweater with its cotton epaulets and another of a laughing Max casually dressed in a white T-shirt, a bandanna tied around his head. Smaller letters along the bottom read There’s a New Sheriff in Town. A pile of flat wooden stakes resided next to the signs.

  He looked from the sign to Max. “I’ve never seen two portraits on one of these.”

  His brother grimaced. “Tell me about it. And I look like a crack-happy Hell’s Angel in the informal picture. My vote was for the one of me in my uniform, but the women shot me down. Harper said the casual photo shows my approachable side.”

  “She’s not wrong,” he said, staring at the open joy on Max’s face in the laid-back photograph. “Where was this taken?”

  “Rebecca Damoth took that on her smartphone at the Cedar Village Pancake Breakfast fundraiser a few months ago. I was the chief flapjack flipper that morning.”

  Jenny joined them. “It’s brilliant marketing, Max. You look all official in the professional one. But the other shot is more approachable and reminds people that on top of keeping Razor Bay safe and orderly, you’ve given a lot of your free time to the community.”

  “That’s true,” Tasha said from the doorway, and Luc’s head snapped around as she let herself in and closed the door behind her. It had been only two days since their date, but she’d been busy since then, and it felt a lot longer.

  She unwound a long, fringy scarf from around her neck and shed her coat, draping both items over the arm of a chair before coming deeper into the room where the rest of them had assembled. “That snapshot reinforces your ties to your neighbors, and that’s something your opponent seriously lacks. He’s never lived or worked here, and even if I didn’t love you dearly, I can’t see myself ever voting for him. He just strikes me as too rigid and inflexible—which I guess are the same thing, aren’t they?” She made a dismissive face. “But would he know how to handle Wade Nelson when he starts in on Curt and Mindy?” she demanded, referring to a local who couldn’t accept that his ex-wife had moved on—even though she’d been with her second husband for nearly a decade. “I don’t think so.”

  “Hell, I’m not sure what to do about Wade,” Max said. “It’s not like anything I try ever sticks.”

  “Well, yeah, Wade’s an idiot. But he’s Razor Bay’s idiot.”

  “He is,” Jenny agreed. “He’s one of ours, and Swanson would probably have him doing hard time alongside my father if he had to deal with the guy.”

  “Even Curt and Mindy don’t want that,” Tasha said. She came over and patted Max’s arm. “You’re going to blow him away in the election.”

  “From your lips to the voters’ ballots.”

  “Wait,” Luc said, looking at Jenny. “Your father’s in prison?”

  “He is. When I was a teen, he was convicted of defrauding a lot of people in a Ponzi scheme and has been in Monroe Penitentiary ever since. Or maybe he’s out now.” She shrugged. “We haven’t talked much since last spring, when I refused to tell the parole board he had a job waiting when he got out in the inn’s—wait for it—accounting department.” She shook her head. “He was insulted when I offered him a position with the grounds crew, but it will be a cold day in hell before I trust him anywhere near Austin’s inheritance.”

  Holy shit. The things he learned every time he was sure his brothers and their women lived a Mayberry, U.S.A.–type life.

  “Could you guys stay on track?” Austin demanded impatiently. “Getting back to the election stuff, we all know Uncle Max is gonna be sheriff. Let’s staple!”

  Max hooked an elbow around the teen’s neck and gave him a noogie. “We know that, do we?”

  Twisting in his hold, Austin grinned up at him. “Sure.”

  “Sounds like a campaign motto to me,” Luc said. “Maybe we should replace There’s a new sheriff in town with We all know he’s the man for the job.”

  “See?” Austin demanded, as if Luc’s agreement sealed the deal. “Now can we make those signs? After all,” he added piously, “that is why we’re all here, isn’t it? To work on your campaign?”

  “That we are.” Max turned him loose.

  “And since you’re such a conscientious, altruistic little go-getter,” Jake said, “maybe we should give you a stack of the smaller signs and send you into town on your bike so you can ask all the merchants and restaurant owners if they’d display one in their window. I bet you’d make a great ambassador for your uncle.”

  “Uh—” Austin was clearly thrown off bala
nce for a moment, but quickly rallied. “I would, Dad, but this is Razor Bay. Except for Tasha’s pizzeria, the streets have already rolled up. And by the time I could make it there, Bella T’s will prob’ly be closed, too. Tash is right here anyhow, so she can take ’em herself.”

  Max grinned at Jake. “He thinks as fast on his feet as you do,” he said dryly. Then he turned back to Austin. “Let me show you how I want these done.” Selecting a stake, he laid it out on the cleared middle of the table and placed a sign atop it. “See how the center of the stake lines up behind this star? Plus, how much I left free at the bottom so we can push it in the ground and still have it be tall enough to see?”

  Austin nodded, and Max picked up the stapler. “The only trick here is to not staple over any of the pertinent information. So, put one here.” He positioned the stapler just above the star.

  “Let me do it!”

  Max handed the tool over, and Austin pressed its business end against the poster in the spot his uncle had shown him and pulled the trigger. “Booyah!” He looked down at the poster. “And here?” he asked, lining up the staple gun in a clear spot near the top of the stake.

  “Perfect. I see my signs are in good hands.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t rocket science.” He stapled it and picked the sign up to admire his work. Then he gave the contents a closer look. “These are pretty cool.”

  “They oughtta be,” Max said. “Your dad designed them.”

  Austin grinned at his father farther down the room. “Good work, Dad.”

  “Thanks, son,” Jake replied from where he was doing something on his laptop, Harper watching over his shoulder. “Glad you approve.”

  Luc had already discovered he liked Austin. The kid had the same offbeat sense of humor as the rest of this group, and for a teenager, he was surprisingly free of angst. His unquestioning, openhearted acceptance of Luc had caught him by surprise and filled him with gratitude. Austin treated him as if Luc being his uncle was just an ordinary, everyday given.

  And now, after watching the byplay between him, Jake and Max, he realized he’d kind of like to stick around to watch Austin grow up.