I thought about whacking him upside the head with my cane, but thought better of it. “Bill, so help me, please, shut the fuck up.”
“What kinda language is that to use around a lady?” Bill said with a cackle as he walked back to the storeroom.
Liv was laughing, though. “He is kinda funny.”
“He’s nosier than you are. Loudmouth motherfucker, too,” I added.
Olivia’s laugh was something a guy could get addicted to—it came easily, naturally, and beautifully. Her laugh made you feel like you were the funniest person on earth, and each note of it jolted through you like a thousand volts of pure electricity.
“You really are a fan of the colorful language, aren’t you?” she said, not sounding offended, though.
“Ain’t been anyone to care how I talk in…well…” A harsh sigh scraped out of me. “A long time.”
Olivia’s gaze was speculative as she led the way out of the store into the parking lot. “If I asked you what that meant by that, I’m guessing you’d dodge that question, too?”
I nodded. “Probably.” A glance at her, a long glance in which I nearly lost track of myself in her open, questioning hazel-brown eyes. “You always make a habit of asking people about the hard-to-talk-about shit within ten minutes of meeting ’em?”
She shrugged. “Yes, actually, I do. My husband died of a heart attack, leaving me a widow at forty-three. One of the things I’ve learned is that life is far too short to waste it on small talk.” Her smile was sad, but bright. “So, I ask about the things I want to know, when I want to know them. You don’t have to answer, but I’m not going to feel bad about asking.”
“Makes sense.” I tap my bad leg with my cane. “Car accident.” I tap my chest, over my heart. “Bad luck, bad choices, and bad people.” I tilt my head to one side. “Although, I guess you could argue those are all one and the same.”
She tucked her clipboard under her arm and rummaged in her purse, found her keys, unlocking a new red Canyon pickup. “So. Where do you live?”
I dig in the hip pocket of my jeans, pull out my keys, and pretended to blip an imaginary key—Olivia looked around, confused, and I laughed, pointing across the street with the key—which was just a regular old house key. “Over there.”I gestured. “I live in that apartment building across the street.”
She laughed, and my belly flipped and my skin tightened. “Let me put my stuff in my truck and I’ll walk over with you.” She hesitated. “Unless you’d rather a ride over? Save your leg?”
I waved a hand. “I need the exercise anyway. Both my leg and my…well, everything.”
Truth was, I’d much rather have gotten a ride, but I was too stubborn and prideful to say so. Pretty women do that to a man. Make you do shit and say shit you got no call doing and saying. Like pretending you might be somebody you ain’t.
But there’s a sexy lady in the picture, so I’m pretending I’m a solid guy, and that my life hasn’t been one colossal fuck-up.
Olivia sets her stuff in her truck, keeping her clipboard under one arm, and then she moves to stand next to me, smiling in anticipation. "Shall we head over?” Her voice was bright and eager and warm.
I extend my elbow to her, offering her my arm, acting as if I’ve been anything even close to resembling a chivalrous man. I barely have decent table manners, much less the gentlemanly bullshit you see on TV.
Yet, here I am pretending. How long can I keep this up? The better question might be, how long will she buy it?
She took my elbow, tucking her warm tiny palm against my thick burly arm. Well—an arm that used to be thick and burly, but was now as much flab as muscle. Still, as far as arms go, it ain’t a small one, and her hand is warm and soft, curled against my bicep like it belonged there.
I do my best to keep my limp to a minimum as we cross the street, but I had to lean pretty heavily on the damn cane. The doc said the limp was temporary, and as long as I exercised it regularly and built the muscle back up, I would make a full recovery.
“So. Triplets.” Olivia’s sideways glance at me was inquisitive.
I nodded. “Yes ma’am. They’re thirty—uhh, two? Thirty-two.” I palmed the back of my neck in embarrassment. “Hard to remember, sometimes.”
She squeezed my arm. “Don’t feel bad. I have five daughters, and if someone asks how old they are, I have to stop and think about it.”
I blinked at her. “Five daughters?”
She nods. “Five girls. Well…women, now. They are…” She laughs. “See? I have to think about it. Charlie is twenty-four, Cassie is twenty-two, Lexie is twenty-one, Torie is nineteen, and Poppy is eighteen.”
I made a scoffing noise of amazed disbelief. “Damn, girl. Five kids, none of ’em multiples?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Darren and I were…busy.”
I guffawed at that. “Yeah, clearly.”
She blushed and bumped into me. “Not like that, you pervert.”
I snickered. “I ain’t the one with five girls in less than what, six years?”
“Are you trying to shame me?” she asked, but the smirk on her face told me she wasn’t upset.
“Yep. You’ve had a lot of kids.” I paused at the door to my building. “Charlie, Cassie, Lexie, Torie, and Poppy?”
“Charlotte, Cassandra, Alexandra, Victoria, and Poppy, which isn’t short for anything—my husband’s mother’s favorite flower was a poppy. She had only months to live when I was pregnant with Poppy, and she made me promise to name the baby Poppy, if it was a girl.” I held the door to the apartment building open for her and she stepped inside, turning back to wait for me to continue leading the way to my apartment. “Your boys’ names?”
“Roman, Remington, and Ramsey.” I rolled a shoulder. “I just thought they were cool sounding names.”
“What did your wife think?”
I sighed. “No wife. Never married. Their mother…I think she was in too much shock about having triplets to care about names.”
She frowned at me. “Shock I can understand, but not shock to the point that I wouldn’t care what my newborn triplets were named.”
I groaned. “You are sneaky, you know that?” I unlocked my apartment door and stepped in, closing the door behind us. “She wasn’t a great person, and it wasn’t a great situation. She wasn’t interested in being a mom. She never really clicked into the role, you could say. She took off when the boys were seven. I haven’t seen her since, and I’m not interested in doing so.”
Olivia stood just inside my apartment, staring at me. “She left?”
I nodded. “Yep. I came home from work one day and she was gone. The boys got home from school before I got home from work, and when they walked in the place was empty. She had packed a suitcase, took the money we’d been saving in a coffee can, and vanished. No note, nothing. Just left. The boys didn’t understand and, honestly, neither did I. Had no clue what I was s’posed to say to ’em. The bitter truth was their mama was nothin’ but a bar slut I never intended to have kids with. But seven-year-old boys don’t understand that shit.”
“And you raised them alone after that?”
“Well…if you want the truth, I’d say raised might be a bit of an exaggeration. Getting them to adulthood without them starvin’ or livin’ under a bridge is about the best I can say for myself.”
Olivia sighed. “I’m sure you’re underestimating yourself.”
I scratch my shaggy beard. “Possibly, but I doubt it.” I waved at my apartment. “Anyway, here it is. I wasn’t expecting company, least of all a beautiful woman, so I ain’t cleaned up properly.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” she laughed, patting my shoulder. “There’s nothing in here to clean.”
I faked being offended. “I have an entire couch and a twenty-five-year-old fourth-hand television set, I’ll have you know.”
“And that’s it,” she said, snickering. “Literally. Not even an end table?”
I shrugged. “No poin
t. Don’t need one.”
“What if you want to set a drink down? What about photos of your boys?”
I pawed at the back of my head. “Don’t really set my drinks down, now that I think on it. I drink ’em, finish ’em, and that’s it.” I frowned. “As for photos of my boys…? I guess I don’t really have any.”
She sighed. “Not even one?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Didn’t have the money, or the time for that.” I growled to myself. “Or at least, that’s the excuse I’ve always made.”
She moved into the middle of the living room, poked her head into the kitchen, then the bedroom and the bathroom. With a wave of a hand, she indicated my apartment. “So it’s a totally blank slate right now. What do you want in here? What do you want it to feel like?”
I shrugged. “I ain’t got a damn clue, Liv,” I said, frustration tingeing my voice. “I guess all I can say is that I’d like it to feel like a home.”
“This is an apartment, though. Will you be here for a while? Like, does it make sense for you to paint walls and such if you’re just going to move in a year or so?”
I hang my cane on my forearm and sit heavily on the couch, massaging my throbbing leg. “I dunno. I’ll be here awhile. My boys all have their own lives, serious girlfriends, and careers and all that shit. So I’m here because…well, that’s another long story. But I’m here, and this is a nice spot. Close to all three of the boys. Close to a half-decent job. Grocery store. Video store. Library.”
Olivia snorted. “Video store?”
I frowned, gesturing at the DVD player, which I got at the same thrift store as the TV and couch. “Yeah, the video store. How else’m I gonna find anything to watch?”
She stared at me as if trying to decide if I was kidding. “Uhhhh…Redbox? Netflix? Amazon Prime? Hulu? Apple TV? Roku?”
I blinked back at her. “Pumpkins. Rabbit. Sixty-two.”
Her face twisted into a rictus of complete confusion. “Are you having a stroke or something?”
“Is that a joke about my age?”
“I just have no idea what you’re talking about, or why you said those words.”
I laughed. “Well, you spouted a bunch of gibberish, so I figured I would too.”
She closed her eyes slowly and palmed her face as comprehension dawned. “Those are all alternatives to renting DVDs at a store, Lucas. Redbox is, well, a big red box from which you borrow DVDs. There’s one close to here, actually. The other things I mentioned are all streaming services.”
“Streaming services?”
Olivia shook her head. “Are you teasing me? I don’t want to assume you’re really this uninformed about current technology.” She huffed a laugh. “I mean, you have three sons in their thirties. Surely they’ve tried to get you basic Internet, at least.”
I snorted. “Sure, they’ve tried. Ain’t interested.”
“Lucas. Aren’t you interested in trying things which may make your life easier and more pleasant?”
“I thought you were gonna help me spruce up my walls, not guilt me into getting a Wi-Fi gizmo or whateverthefuck.” I snapped this with a bit more vitriol than I’d intended.
She frowned at me, this time not entirely playfully. “Well excuse me for wanting to improve more than just the color on your walls.”
I leaned my head back against the couch and sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s just an old argument. The boys are always nagging at me to try new shit, and I’m just a stubborn old grizzly—set in my ways doesn’t begin to describe me.”
She sat delicately and demurely on the edge of the couch a few inches from me. “Well, I’m not your boys in case you hadn’t noticed. We could be friends—good friends, even. But you can’t snap at me just because I suggest you stop living in the Stone Age and accept something as basic as the Internet into your life.”
I scoffed. “Liv, take a look around. I been stuck in the Stone Age for forty years.”
“Then it’s high time to join the information age, isn’t it?” She set her clipboard on her knees and pulled a pen out from behind an ear. “So, you were thinking blue at the hardware store, but now that I’m here and I have had a chance to chat with you a bit, I think you may enjoy a green more than a blue. Because of the light in here, I would suggest something between pine needle and sea foam. I’ll bring over a few little tins of sample colors and we’ll see which strikes your interest. Part of the thing with those little color samples they have hanging off the racks is that it’s hard to visualize what a color will look like on your wall. We can get a few ounces mixed up in a few different shades you like and put them on your actual wall. Then we can see which one feels right. Once you decide on the color, you prime the wall again and paint over it.”
I nodded. “Never thought of that, but it makes sense.”
“Pick a paint is the first and simplest step. You need a few more items of furniture, some pictures or paintings, some knickknacks to make it feel cozy and homey.”
“Just don’t make it look girly.”
“You’ll just have to trust me on this. If I didn’t know how to reach a client’s desired aesthetic, what kind of interior designer would I be?”
“I suppose that’s a good point. So.” I grinned at her. “Paint?”
She tapped her pen against her clipboard. “Let me do some thinking on the overall look. I’ll come by tomorrow and we’ll get started.”
“I’m done working by eleven.”
She jotted down a note, and her smile shifted from bright and professional to intimate and personal. “How about we start with lunch at twelve?”
I felt my heart thumping crazily in my chest—I’d already had a heart attack and knew the symptoms of that, but this wasn’t that. This was just good old-fashioned nerves and anxiety.
“I. Um. Yeah. That sounds good.” I tried to smile at her, but it ended up lopsided.
“Good. It’s a date.”
I choked. “Um. Okay. Yeah. Good.”
Her smile was too much for me—as if I was somethin’ worth her time. As if I had something to offer. As if I wasn’t a fuck-up and a no-good lazy asshole. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was cozyin’ up to an alcoholic with no car and no license, a dirty, sordid past, and a busted-up heart. ’Course, I doubted I’d have to tell her anything. She’d see the obvious soon enough.
Sadly for her, I was too damn selfish to try too hard to push her away.
I really liked Olivia Goode.
I liked the brightness and eagerness in her eyes. I liked the sway of her slender hips. The quick delicacy of her hands. The intelligence in her features. There was a sadness to her, too, which I couldn’t help but recognize; she was a widow, and yet despite her loss there was an optimism to her that drew me in like a moth to a bug zapper.
Goddammit.
I found myself wishing I knew how to be a better man. Wishing I could be the man she thought she saw when she looked at me. I’d known her less than an hour, but there was somethin’ about the woman that just…
Well it made me feel, for the first time in forty years, that maybe there was hope for my busted-up heart after all.
’Course, I knew better than to put any faith in that kinda hope. It just left you more fucked up than you were when you started thinkin’ shit could get better.
2
Liv
“I really hate it here, Mom.” Poppy, my youngest daughter, wiped tear-tracks away from her eyes—the tracks were mascara-stained, smearing black across her cheeks. “I hate my professors, I hate my roommate, I hate my classes, I hate all the people in my classes. I hate the town, the bars, the keggers, the sorority bitches and the frat bastards. I hate the stupid restaurants and the stupid…gah. The boys are the stupidest of all.”
I sighed and adjusted the iPad on my lap so I could see her better. “You loved Columbia last year, Pop.”
“I know I did. But things have changed.” She pulled her massive sheaf of glossy black hair over her shoulder.
&
nbsp; “Like Reed?” I suggested, my voice wary and gentle; Poppy was…defensive, shall we say, about her boyfriend.
She snarled wordlessly. “Fuck Reed O’Reilly.”
“Poppy Estelle Goode, I raised you better than that, young lady.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Poppy muttered. “But he’s a dick and I hate him most of all.”
“I take it you broke up.”
“If by broke up, you mean I broke his nose, then yes.” She ducked her head so her hair fell in a shimmery raven-black curtain hiding her face from my glare.
“You did not.” My glare is such that she was prudent to hide from it.
“He cheated on me, Mom! And not just with my best friend, but my roommate too—at the same time.” She paused for effect. “IN MY BED.”
I winced. “Oh. Wow.” Don’t say it, I told myself. Don’t say it. DO NOT SAY IT.
Poppy tossed her hair away and glared back at me— I saw she was sitting in the common room in her dorm as students passed back and forth behind her, chattering and laughing, holding textbooks and Starbucks cups. “Go ahead and say it,” she muttered. “You’re about to burst.”
“I’m not going to say it,” I said, my voice crisp. “You know what I’m not saying, so I may as well not bother saying it.”
She blew a raspberry at me. “But you’ll get satisfaction from saying it. It’s already as good as said, so you may as well say it.”
“No.”
“Mom.”
“Poppy?”
“Say it.”
I sighed. “Fine. I told you Reed was going to hurt you. I wanted to think otherwise, but I always got a bad feeling from him the few times I met him.”
“You did not want to think otherwise. You disliked him from the start.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “Well, yes. Because I got a bad feeling from him. I didn’t want you to get hurt, like you are now. I wouldn’t be a good mother if I had a bad feeling about a guy and didn’t say anything.”
She takes a sip of an iced coffee—something with a bucket of sugar in it, probably. “Well, regardless. Reed being a colossal dickhole isn’t the only reason I hate it here.”
Badd Daddy (The Badd Brothers Book 12) Page 2