“I didn’t know until last night that I’ve been living in fear for the last two years.”
Bette clasped a hand over her mouth, but I could tell she was ready to start sobbing. Hell, I was ready to start sobbing! Raphael looked more than ever like he wanted to go punch something or someone.
“I need to do this… for me.” I looked from one to the other and gave them both a hard, Don’t screw with me look. “And that’s the end of it.”
I turned and poured myself a cup of coffee and cut off a huge hunk of Raphael’s pumpkin bread.
Chapter 37
Jake
The damn oil pan just wouldn’t budge. I pulled and pushed and cursed and even punched the damn thing, yet still it wouldn’t come loose.
I never had a hard time when I was working on a car, but ever since what happened last night and this morning at Hope’s, I hadn't felt like myself.
I know, people say that all the time. But for the first time in my entire life I really don’t feel like me anymore.
I feel dazed and confused, and most of all… incompetent.
I’ve never felt incompetent.
Not when it comes to fixing cars, and not about women… well, not since my junior year in high school.
That thought made me stop all my ineffectual yanking on the oil pan.
What had changed?
I’d started filling out, that was one thing. I went from a bean pole to pretty much how I was built now practically overnight.
I let my head drop back to rest on the rolling board I was using to slid up under the Saturn I was working on.
That’s when I’d given up trying to get Hope’s attention.
I had, hadn’t I? I hadn’t remembered… or maybe I just didn’t want to remember, but I had given up on her. I'd carried a freaking torch for her all these years, sure, but I’d given up trying to get her attention.
I’d given up on her.
I absently reached up and placed my hand against the Saturn’s oil pan.
Shiiit…
And hadn’t I done the same thing when I’d walked out of her house? I’d given up on her, just when I’d finally, FINALLY gotten not only her attention but all of her.
For one night she had been mine, all mine...
MINE.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I gave the oil pan a thoughtless tap with my fist… and it came loose and emptied its slick, black contents all over my work shirt.
I closed my eyes and thought some curse words, and then used my legs to pull myself back out from under the Saturn. I needed to get a fresh shirt out of my locker… and to get this damn oil change finished before I did something to cause the damn car to fall on top of me.
I stood up and unbuttoned the work shirt, and then pulled my oil soaked t-shirt off over my head.
It was times like this when I really missed the old garage. There was a shower, a washing machine and dryer.
I was wiping some slick, dark brown sludge off my chest when I heard a pair of heels click their way into the work bay behind me.
“You really don’t have to strip for little old me.”
I rolled my eyes and turned around, and found Bette standing there, a vision in a light pink sundress that hugged all her curves in all the right ways. She had sunglasses on and a wide brimmed hat on top of her head, her fiery curls flowing down around her petite, bare shoulders.
It was a look that could seduce a thousand men… all at once.
But for the first time since I’d met the woman, her voluptuous beauty didn’t stir anything inside me.
From the sardonic smile she threw me, I think she recognized that I—for once—was unfazed by the sight of her.
It might be because I’d just watched her bludgeon a steel reinforced safe with a sledgehammer until it broke open and begged for mercy.
But it might be because I just couldn’t stop thinking about her crazy, sexy as hell next-door neighbor.
I plastered a wary smile on my face and crossed my arms over my chest. “Need me to fix something for you on that overpriced pink yacht on wheels?" She smiled… with dimples that suggested so many, very naughty things.
“Do you really think I would take my Caddy to Wal-Mart to get worked on?”
“No, I didn’t think that you would. So why don’t you tell me why it is that you’re here?”
Bette shoved out her pouty lower lip in contemplation.
“Just thought someone should find out what your intentions are.”
I blinked at her.
“My intentions?”
Now Bette rolled her eyes at me. “Toward Hope,” she scolded, placing her hands on her hips and giving me a haughty glare. “What are your intentions toward my romantically challenged best friend?”
I cringed. This was just too much.
“That’s none of your business.” I didn’t wait for her to continue. I walked off toward the back of the work bay and headed to my locker. I wasn’t about to stand there, bare-chested in the middle of where I worked, talking about my love life—or lack thereof—with a crazy redhead.
“Of course it’s my business,” Bette groused, her heels clacking as she followed right behind me.
“How’s that?” I opened my locker, threw my oil soaked shirts into the bottom of it, and pulled out a fresh t-shirt, pulling it on over my head.
“I’m her best friend.”
I shook my head as I pulled on my work shirt and started buttoning it up. “So?”
She lowered her sunglasses and hit me with her vibrant green peepers. A more sarcastic look there just couldn’t be.
“Hope’s hopeless when it comes to her love life.”
I shrugged but stayed where I was. I wanted to hear where she was going with this.
“She’s an idiot when it comes to dealing with men. I imagine you can attest to that?”
“Sure,” I hedged, running a hand over the back of my neck.
Why the hell did my neck always turn all hot and tingly when I thought about Hope?
Bette held up her hands as if to say, Isn’t it obvious?
“Well, someone’s got to look out for her!”
I stepped closer to Bette; close enough she had to look up to look me in the eye.
“And you’ve done such a great job up till now.”
She screwed her mouth up into a grimace. “She didn’t ask my advice about the cover.”
Touché.
She stepped closer, until I could feel the heat emanating off her body.
“But even if she did, I still don’t see what the big deal was.”
Again, she had a point. I stepped back from her, scrubbing my hand over the back of my neck again.
“What red blooded man wouldn’t want thousands of women swooning over his photograph?”
“It wasn’t about the picture!” I snapped.
Wow! That just popped right out, didn’t it?
She canted her head and frown lines formed in her smooth forehead.
“So what was it about?”
Okay, this was getting just creepy.
“When did you get all insightful?”
Bette leaned her shoulder against the locker next to mine, resting her hand on her hourglass shaped hip.
“I see a lot more than people give me credit for.”
And she wasn’t kidding. I’d heard about her surveillance equipment.
“And though I’d love to try you out for myself…” She pulled back from her sexy pose and come hither stare, and looked me right in the eye. “She really does have it bad for you, and I can tell you feel the same way.”
I scoffed. “What about that muscle-bound bastard of a neighbor? Are you going to tell me how she feels about him too?” I slammed the door of my locker closed and it made a thunderous clash of metal sound.
Bette didn’t even flinch or bat an eyelash. “They flirted with romance.”
“Yeah, I remember.” I sure as hell remember her lipstick on his lips, and his shi
rt being unbuttoned.
She took a deep breath and sighed, looking like she didn’t liked what she was about to say.
“I’m pretty sure Raphael has his eyes set on someone else.”
“That was quick.”
She blinked and shook her head mournfully. “Yeah, and it will end just as quickly if I have anything to say about it.”
Huh? “What does that mean?”
She shot me straight though with that haughty, smart-assed look again.
“It means, Mr. Sexy-Pants, that you need to strike while the iron is hot, not wait around to see what that crazy woman might end up doing next.”
I gulped.
She was right.
“You comprehend what I’m telling you?”
I smiled ruefully.
I did.
Chapter 38
Raphael
I was pacing.
I was confused and nervous and kind of crazed.
And I was pacing.
I have never paced. Not while I was waiting for my mom to come home to open my acceptance letter to MIT. Not even while I waited to take my first airplane ride, which I was secretly terrified of (thank you very much Tom Hanks for making being shipwrecked seem so horrifying): especially since it was a trans-Atlantic flight to Japan.
And never had I felt the least bit nervous about a woman. Not in high school—but I was a twelve year old freshman—and not in college, I’d been a sixteen year old freshman there.
I always felt excited, but like a hunter.
Even with as confusing and loopy as Hope seemed, I was cool and focused on getting to know her better…
Where had that cool focus gone? Hadn’t I had a great measure of detachment too?
And now I was pacing back and forth in my living room, rubbing my hands together, and rubbing the back of my neck like…
Jesus, like that loser ex boyfriend of Hope’s: Jake.
I was acting like that scrub piece of crap Jake!
And over my sex-pot neighbor.
Bette…
I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to dispel all the sudden, and very powerful thoughts of her—but that just made the image of her laying waste to that mini safe all the more vibrant.
She was not my type. I like women that are shy, a little clumsy, and most of all natural looking.
There wasn’t anything “natural” about Bette.
Well, her breasts were real. That she’d proved as she hoisted that damnable sledgehammer. But she wore make up all the time. I had not once seen her without her makeup done and her hair fixed.
I gravitated to sexy hot messes, not hot as hell redheaded bombshells who look like they just wriggled off the cover of Maxim.
But damn it all to hell, the way she looked in those shorts…
And that t-shirt…
With her hair kind of wild and that freaking sledgehammer!
I eyed my laptop. I’d checked out all my neighbors before I’d bought the house. I knew it wasn’t moral or politically correct, but my family was going to be coming and going from my place all the time. I wasn’t about to expose them to anything untoward or anyone dangerous.
Hope’s profile had been so humdrum and boring I hadn’t given her a second thought—that was until she’d threatened to blast off my balls with a shotgun (which I noticed she doesn’t even own!)
That was a good bluff.
I’d found out the neighbor across the street was having an affair with her dentist, and that the old couple at the end of the block had been in a doomsday cult in their forties: but abandoned their brethren soon after the “Rapture” failed to happen, and their leader had absconded with over a hundred thousand dollars of the society’s money.
The only neighbor that had turned out interesting had been Bette.
She was independently wealthy, married five times, owned multiple firearms, boasted a criminal amount of high tech surveillance equipment, and was hysterical on the Amazon Kindle discussion boards.
And all this before she’d even turned thirty!
But the most intriguing thing that had popped up was that the bulk of her small fortune—estimated at two point five million dollars—had been made off an adult website.
Not that what she did on the site was pornographic.
No, she was strictly soft core, and from what I had concluded had never taken off all her clothes, and had never done any deviant acts.
Mostly she had dressed up in lingerie, sexy bra and panty sets—and an apron—and had done housework for her core subscribers’ pleasure.
Vacuuming, washing dishes, laundry… hell, she’d even streamed herself sitting in her kitchen, drinking coffee and reading her Kindle.
There had been hundreds of comments asking what she had been reading.
Through some morally reprehensible privacy invasion I’d found out she’d been reading A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Interesting…
But her most popular household chore had been her twice weekly changing of her bed linens.
I hadn’t watched it… truthfully, I hadn’t watched much of any of her work.
But now I was dying to watch her change her bed linens.
I opened my laptop and called up my archive program.
Bette’s site might have been off line for three years, but that didn’t make it irretrievable. She’d even had some teasers on YouTube.
A few moments later, and a very deep, cleansing breath, and I clicked onto her first “Changing the Sheets” post.
Good god she was gorgeous. Surprisingly light makeup, her hair pulled up again on the back of her neck, those artful little curls sticking out here and there.
And…
All.
That.
Creamy, freckled skin.
I knew she’d have freckles. Somehow she’d been able to completely cover them up. But not for her paying viewers. For them she’d showed off her freckles, her dimpled smile, and her magnificent cleavage.
First she pulled all the old bedding off and tossed them on the floor. Then she slowly pushed and pulled and straightened the new clean sheets, all the while stretching and flaunting her curvaceous body to its utmost advantage.
I could easily see why these were her most popular posts.
Bette then looked around her as if checking to make sure she was alone.
With a glowing, beguiling innocence, she jumped up on the bed and started jumping up and down on it, laughing and screaming, and dancing as she bounced.
And good god almighty did she bounce.
I sat there, spell bound, as she jounced and bounced and made every molecule of her delicious body jiggle.
Breathless, I watched as she did a few nearly acrobatic mid-air moves, and then let herself fall onto her back, giggling and panting, rolling around on her freshly changed bed sheets.
I closed my laptop and realized I was rock hard. I mean straining the zipper of my jeans hard.
Shiiit…
I tried the old clichés: doing math problems in my head—nada; thinking of my mother just made me feel even dirtier about having a hard on: and trying to concentrate on what little I knew of baseball just made visions of Bette wielding a baseball bat and waiting for me to throw her my balls… I mean, toss her the ball…
Oh hell!
Either I was going to go all pervert and whack off to her streaming feed, or subject my junk to an ice cold shower.
Neither choice seemed all that appealing.
Just then a Nike commercial flickered to life on the big screen on the wall, and gave me another option: exercise.
I raced upstairs, tore off my clothes—which only made me harder (I was imagining Bette tearing them off me)—and pulled on some running shorts and a tank top.
A run was exactly what I needed to cool off… or at least to get the blood flowing away from my crotch.
I stretched a couple times, jogged outside…
And found myself standing there, staring like a slack jawed troglodyte as Bette
was loading her freshly demolished mini safe up onto a dolly.
She wasn’t in the cut-offs anymore. Instead she had donned a form hugging, low cut pink sundress.
My erection started to freaking point in her direction.
I turned and started to jog away, clumsily trying to tuck my woody away in some fashion.
“Hey, Raphael!” Bette called out in her sweet Texan twang. “Can you help me?”
I stopped and closed my eyes.
No, this couldn’t be happening. It was like the nightmare sequence that happened in all those teen movies from the early nineties.
“Raff?”
I bit my lower lip. I really wasn’t going to get away, was I?
I lowered my hands to try to obscure my regrettably large package, and turned to try and beg off from helping her.
But damn, if she didn’t have the sweetest smile I’d ever seen. She glowed. And those sexy dimples didn’t hurt either.
Her smile faded a degree or two as I stared at her like a goon.
Yep, I was a goon—a knuckle dragging, hard-on hiding goon.
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. I coughed, which just made my dick jerk against my palms, but I could finally talk. Well, my first word was in a girlish falsetto, but my voice deepened back to normal by the next word.
“So… you need help?”
Bette got this look on her face for a second, as if she were reconsidering whether she really needed my help.
Fuck it! I wasn’t going to start actually being a goon around her.
I marched on over and lifted the safe up onto the dolly as she held it still for me. I re-covered up my tumescent joystick as I stood up straight again.
Okay, task completed. Now I could skulk away and maybe run until I crossed the Canadian border, and maybe then my hard on would go away.
But I ended up looking at Bette again… and staring…
And then I realized her eyes were darting down to my hands…
Oh crap.
I turned and started walking away.
“I think we need to talk,” Bette said, her voice flat.
“Sure,” I called over my shoulder. “But later, okay?”
I didn’t wait for her answer. Before I knew it I was five blocks away, running like my life depended on it.
Love Him: A Love Him, Hate Him, Want Him Novel Page 27