Meant to Be Mine

by Lisa Marie Perry

  Curious, she traced the voice to a shined-up Lincoln. Perfectly fine vehicles were parked on either side of it, but somehow it eclipsed them, made them appear inferior. The ride looked like a fantasy and must drive like a dream. Jealousy threatened, but hey, its owner might be overcompensating for some unfortunate shortcoming.

  “We are closed. I’m tucking everything in for the night,” she said, aiming her response at the crossover. Lamps and the lights strung around them cast golden beams over the streets, but she wasn’t trying to get a close look at the driver. She didn’t want the intimacy of eye contact, not with someone whose voice had her feeling as if she’d slipped into a hot, fragrant bath.

  Joss was trying to be different now. Not new, but improved in her own little way. Relationships left her bruised and torn. Just-because sex was always hot and fun in the moment, but it was a temporary remedy, kind of like a square of gauze on a gaping wound.

  No more men until next year. It was a promise, a personal challenge to mend herself. What she’d done a few months ago…The man she’d done it all with…The lies she still carried long after they’d showered away their mistakes and he’d let her go…

  Something must be wrong with her, and she had the rest of this year to make the proper adjustments before allowing anyone else to get close.

  It didn’t mean that come 12:01 a.m. New Year’s Day she’d pounce on the nearest guy, but it also didn’t mean she wouldn’t.

  A smooth click, then the Lincoln’s driver-side door opened as the window rose and the interior lit. Not that Joss had been paying all that much attention to a man who’d hollered at her from an open window.

  Hyperawareness was to blame for the pleasant sensation across her skin and how her ears twitched the way her friend’s dog’s did whenever she heard a noise but was too lazy to get her rump up to investigate.

  Sex was primal instinct to Joss, and denying herself the act didn’t suppress her appetite for it. Temptation was everywhere: the erotic treatery that made her hungry for more than sweets, the sex boutique that enticed her to collect every toy in stock, the boudoir photography studio that teased her to get naked in front of a lens because she was a sexual being and she wanted everyone to know it. And, of course, Guilty Pleasures, a club beneath her feet that piped in sultry music, kept quality booze on tap, and encouraged nightly dry-grinding.

  Celibacy was a shock to her system, healing her in some ways but breaking her in others. That was the point of this study of self, wasn’t it? To take away the fundamental element that made her Joss Vail and find out what remained?

  She continued to lug the easel, but the man’s voice interrupted, holding her still like strong hands clasping her wrists high over her head.

  “Can I give you some help with that?”

  “I can handle it—” Joss began to say, before her gaze tripped over him. Dark skin, darker eyes, a face whose angles and hollows held light and shadow with devastating perfection.

  She ignored his body, refused to be impressed or intimidated. Plenty of men did unfathomably amazing things to a simple sweater and jeans.

  He reached for the easel and she almost cried, Hey, who do you think you are, some damn modern-day gladiator?

  Then he lifted it with beautiful effortlessness and instead she shut up and admired the view.

  When she held open the door and then followed him inside the half-lit Lust Desserts, not for the first time tonight she whispered two soft syllables. “Fuck me.”

  The sigh of the door drifting shut swallowed her plea, rescuing her from that horribly awkward embarrassment, but now he was in her bakery and things were awfully quiet and the air was becoming tight.

  “Thanks for bringing it in. You didn’t have to go out of your way,” she said, adopting stoic professionalism that was promptly unwound the moment he glanced down at the Fraggles on her feet.

  “Are those—Is that—” He shifted this way, pivoted that way, as though figuring out how to approach the question. “Are you wearing Fraggle Rock socks?”

  Yes.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  Yes, she did.

  His face eased into a grin—great, it had to be a gorgeous dimpled one—but his eyes blatantly conveyed that he detected the liar in her.

  So he knew she could lie in a heartbeat and she knew he possessed staggering strength.

  “Can I have the name of my knight in faded jeans, please?” What was with the everyman clothes, anyway? Men who drove luxury Lincolns stepped out in tailored suits, not plain sweaters that were the color of the sky just before dawn. She knew that color well. It greeted her when she slid out of bed to start her workday.

  “Aaron North.”

  Aaron, a solid name. A Biblical name. She wouldn’t have harped on that detail had the chain around his neck not held a simple gold cross.

  No. Nope. No way. Not a man who attended church on Sundays while she painted carnal oils. Not a man who’d try to save her soul until he ultimately surrendered and dismissed her the same way her parents had.

  “Thanks again for bringing in the easel, Aaron,” she said politely, she and her Fraggles going to the door. “I won’t hold you up.”

  “You’re not holding me up. I was hoping to catch you, Joss.”

  She hadn’t given him her name. “We’ve met?”

  “No, but I’m here about the ads.” He pointed, but she already knew he referred to the HELP WANTED and APARTMENT FOR RENT signs taped to the front window. Running a dine-in plus offering specialty catering across the Cape, Joss needed more help than only one assistant could provide. She hoped to rent out the upstairs apartment to offset the expense of bringing another set of hands on board.

  “Which are you inquiring about?” she asked. “The job or the apartment?”

  “Both.”

  “You have baking experience?” Imagining his hands working fondant wasn’t a great idea, so she stopped—eventually.

  “I used to bake for church and charity functions.”

  “Are you any good? Be honest.”

  “I’m a lot good.” He paused long enough for her to apply all sorts of meanings to that. “I came in earlier asking about the ads, but someone persuaded me to buy one of those pudding cups and told me to talk to the owner, Joss Vail.”

  “Little Deaths,” she said, naming the caramelized fruit and frosted coffee cake crumble samplers. “That’s what they’re called.”

  “It was delicious as hell—Hold on. Isn’t a ‘little death’ an orgasm?”

  Yes, yes, oh God yes. “Uh-huh. I call this bakery Lust Desserts for a reason.”

  The tension that tightened his shoulders and settled in his dark-lashed eyes probably had plenty to do with all this little death talk and nothing to do with dessert.

  “Um, so why’d you assume I’m Joss?”

  “Y’all closed a few hours ago but you’re still here. The mark of somebody looking after what’s theirs.”

  Reasonable enough, but…“If you came here earlier and knew when we closed, why were you waiting outside just now? So you’re aware, if you say it’s because you were hoping for the chance to bring in my easel for me and show off your muscles, you’re better off leaving.”

  The grin returned, accompanied by a laugh, and she struggled to find some immediate flaw, some turnoff besides the cross he wore, which only reflected her own faults and wrongness. Maybe his virility wasn’t all it ought to be. Could be his spelling was atrocious and he ran screaming from a game of Scrabble.

  Then she found it, a flaw in his smile, a chip at the corner of a bottom tooth.

  Crap. The discovery only made him humanly imperfect, and it heightened his appeal because Joss liked this imperfection.

  “I was checking out the area. Heard there’s a club around here. What kind of trouble comes with that?”

  “The club’s downstairs.”

  His brows drew together, as if leaning close to share a secret. “Quiet as a library.”

  Lib
rary…ooh, one of my trigger words. She was no great scholar, but the written word was a magical thing. When everything else in her world was fiery shit, she could break out the reading glasses, stick her nose in anything from a pastry cookbook to a dictionary, and calm the hell down.

  “Guilty Pleasures opens at nine.” She raised her wrist, looked at her watch. “We’ve got a few more minutes before the revelry begins. Actually, the noise doesn’t carry to the apartments. Cross my heart. I live with my friend in the one above the boutique next door.”

  “What happened to your thumb?” Aaron laid her hand in his. She was pale on top of him—cream poured over cocoa—and his heat seemed to penetrate every cold crevice of her. If he swirled his fingers over her palm just right, chances were she’d shatter in a little death of her own right in front of him. “Somebody took a mallet to it?”

  “Not a mallet. A hammer. I was hanging art.” She took her swollen-thumbed hand away to turn on the rest of the lights and indicated the accent wall she’d ravaged. “It didn’t go well.”

  “Put something cold on it.”

  “I intend to.” A frigid shower ought to suffice. “Well, since we’re both here, and if my ineptness with a hammer hasn’t turned you off, would you like a look at the apartment?”

  “Yeah, if you feel up to giving me a tour.”

  She led him out the rear door and up a set of stairs that ushered them to a welcome mat and a pair of ceramic pots—chrysanthemums in one and pathetically wilted basil in the other. She’d been so preoccupied with sprucing up the interior that she’d forgotten to freshen up the small sort-of porch for potential tenants.

  Aaron made no comment and strode easily into the apartment.

  “Aside from the appliances, it’s not furnished,” she said, just to fill the air with something more than the smell of paint and the rush of her horny heartbeat. She trailed him from one neutral-colored room to the other. The open living room/kitchen tapered into a hall that introduced two bedrooms and a pair of closets and a four-piece bathroom.

  “This room’s kind of furnished.” Aaron leaned against the doorjamb of a room with stormy-gray walls and gestured to the king-size bed, rumpled sheets, and stack of books on the floor. Library finds, probably overdue now.

  Shit, she’d forgotten to clear it all out. “That’s my stuff,” she admitted. “I sometimes crash here when I want to give my roommate and her guy some privacy.” Though Sofia was lately spending more nights at the Eaves Marina on her man’s boat. “I won’t do that once you move in. You know, if things check out and you sign the lease.”

  “Why don’t you live here, if your roommate needs that kind of privacy?”

  “These walls aren’t so thin.” Thin enough that she sometimes heard the bump of bucking bodies and grunts of sex, but Aaron North didn’t need to know that. “It’s not an every-night thing. Besides, maybe I want a house and a fence and flamingos in the yard next.”

  He made a concerned face at flamingos and she snorted, but she was only half kidding.

  So greedy, she couldn’t help but crave more. A bakery, part ownership of a club, and now she wanted a home. Put down stakes, plant roots—she would do that here because New York had disappointed her and New Jersey didn’t want her.

  She wasn’t in a hurry to flee the place she shared with her best friend, though. She and Sofia Mercer, a marketing exec who’d recently inherited the erotic boutique next door and inspired Joss to move to the Cape and confront her dreams, had been roomies for eons in Manhattan. They’d survived their twenties together, years of screwups and fails and angst, and were as close as Joss imagined sisters were.

  “My sights are set on a fixer-upper,” she found herself telling him. “Something with a past. Something I can make new again.” That’s what the bakery was. Formerly a grocery market owned by a real son of a bitch who died some years ago, the structure had been reconfigured and given a second chance. It was what Joss wanted for herself.

  “I saw the holes in the wall in your bakery, and that thumb’s got to be hurting like hell. Sure you’re ready for a project that’ll demand something more dangerous than a hammer?”

  “Funny, not funny,” she said, but she didn’t take real offense. This was banter, light teasing, how people figured each other out. “I’m fine with a hammer. I’m just having an off night.”

  What Joss didn’t—and wouldn’t—tell Aaron was that she was terrified to live alone. She had trouble sleeping without a weapon handy or the protection of the silver-eyed beast Sofia insisted was a Siberian husky but might actually be a wolf.

  Aaron sat down on the bed. Was this how he carried on, going around doing what he wanted without waiting for invitation?

  But, more important…Could he smell her on the sheets? Was he picturing her stretched out on the mattress, wondering if she slept naked?

  She wanted him to, because at the ripe age of thirty she’d lost her mind.

  “I don’t think I know anybody who owns one of these,” he said, pressing his hands into the memory-foam mattress.

  She’d financed it when she had a stable list of wealthy Manhattan clients and a Wall Street whiz of a boyfriend who’d lavished her with luxuries before abusing and dumping her.

  Another life, she reminded herself.

  “It’s comfortable,” she blurted, plunking down beside him. The movement didn’t jostle him. “Want to know something neat about this set? The sales guy had me lie flat on one side, then he went to the other and started jumping up and down. I live to tell you I wasn’t catapulted into the air.”

  “If I said I didn’t believe you, would you demonstrate to prove me wrong?”

  Ask him to lie flat while she bounced around him on the mattress? He was using her words as weapons of flirtation.

  Crafty bastard, wasn’t he?

  “Think I weigh enough to catapult you into the air?”

  “Not even close. The question’s still there. Would you demonstrate?”

  “Only if I were selling you my bed. Which I’m not. Although…” She tapped a fingertip to the dimple in her chin, pretending to contemplate. “I might consider including it in the lease.”

  Good business was sparing herself the migraine of relocating the massive bed and instead presenting it as a fabulous feature to a potential tenant.

  “About the lease,” he said. “Would you reconsider the one-year lease—agree to month-to-month?”

  “As far as the bakery goes, I’m looking for someone to stay on for a while. Preferably full-time, but we could work something out. I was thinking if we work well together, maybe I won’t want to let you go so quickly.”

  “I can’t give you permanent. If you need help in the bakery for the next few months, I can do that, but I’m passing through.”

  “Passing through? That’s what I thought when I first came here. Eaves has a certain charm, though. Don’t underestimate it.”

  “Charm’s not always enough to convince somebody to stay.”

  Stranger to stranger, blue eyes to brown, she saw something extraordinarily familiar in him. She saw herself, rootless, searching for something to embrace her. “What are you running from in that fancy car of yours, Aaron?”

  “The Lincoln,” he said, rolling a set of shoulders that would feel like carved stone under her hands, “gets me from place to place. Nothing more to it than that.”

  “Vehicles aren’t vehicles where I come from. They’re status symbols. Calling cards.”

  “Is that why you’re here instead of where you come from?” he challenged, making so much sense that she might’ve kissed him if she were still the reckless type.

  “You sidestepped my question.”

  “I don’t have a criminal record, and I’m not looking to earn one here. Call it sidestepping if you want, but that’s all the answer I owe you at the moment.”

  Fair enough. Though she could practically see his solemnity as a dam barricading a flood of some abstract pain.

  “Eaves is home for me
now, but I don’t expect it to be yours. If you want month-to-month, I’ll consider it,” she decided. “If we don’t mesh downstairs, don’t worry too much. I came in when tourist numbers were at their peak, and all that’s mellowed out, but plenty of shops are hiring for the holidays.”

  “We’re getting along all right, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, but we haven’t worked together. Maybe a place called Lust Desserts will turn out to be too sexual for a guy who wears a cross around his neck.”

  “I’m good with it. Thanks for the warning, just the same.”

  “Optimism’s great, but you should still be prepared, Aaron. You’ll need income to pay the rent. Guilty Pleasures used to be a tiny hellhole of a bar, so the old clientele remember it and it gets okay traffic. By summer, though, it’ll be the naughtiest hot spot on the Cape. Point is, I don’t handle the hiring, but I can put in a word.”

  “You’re going out of your way for a man you don’t know.”

  “I know you need a reason to stop for a second and get your crap together.” Leaving out the confession that she was a lousy judge of men and most used the fact to take vicious advantage of her, she patted the mattress. “About this. I bought it brand-new. I’ve had it almost a year and always use sheets and a mattress protector.” She leaned across him to peel the fitted sheet from a corner of the mattress and almost fell in his lap. “Actually, you’ve got a better angle.”

  Aaron laughed and she did, too. Nervously. Giddily. Quite possibly stupidly.

  “Told you I was having an off night,” she attempted to explain, but he didn’t appear all that inconvenienced. “Before this gets any weirder, we should step out of this bedroom.”

  “It’s not weird. Not to me.”

  “Oh.” Take me, take me, take me. “Okay.”

  “How’s the heat up here?” he asked, pointing to the radiator. “I’m from Florida. Didn’t expect the kind of cold that’d freeze a man’s balls off. Not in November.”

  She very much hoped his balls were in excellent working order. “Poor you. We’re right up against the ocean, so you’d expect it to be a touch warmer, but the wind’s having its say. Where in Florida?”