by Mia Malone
“Will you have time for a dog?” Lee asked.
“She’s easy. I can take her with me wherever,” Joke said. “Andy is staying so I’ll spend less time in the bar. I need to put some time in on the smoker, and Dobie broke his damned arm, so he’s out for a good while which means I’ll pitch in some with the brewery part too.”
“Really?” Day said.
“Yaah,” Joke retorted and got a wide grin back.
“Seriously, man. You gonna grow a beard too?”
“Dobie? We’re gonna call you Jokie in the future?”
One of the guys muttered something about suspenders and fucking loafers, and I leaned back, watching them and wondering how I could find them so damned hot when they acted like idiots more often than not.
“I can hit you, but you can’t hit me. Not for another eight weeks,” Joke said with a smirk and indicated his chest area.
He’d healed well, but the doctor had told him to be careful and given him a paper with rehab exercises. Since the good doctor apparently was experienced with men like Joke, he’d told him to not get in any fights until the end of summer. Joke had thrown the papers away, started on his own routine and seemed mostly like he’d always been.
“You happy about being less at Oak?” Gibson asked. “Andy fucking loves being there, but –”
“I’m good. Will be fun to start up something new. And you laugh about the beardy-boys, but they’re fucking contagious. Not –“ he raised a hand to stop any unfunny jokes, “Not the fucking ridiculous look of them. But they have such… dreams, I guess. It’s good to be around. Can’t stumble around behind the bar with Tug for the rest of my life.”
I cleared my throat and waved a hand in front of myself to indicate that I was working behind that same bar too.
“Yeah, but you’ll do more day shifts when Mimi comes. Handle deliveries. Fucking paperwork. That shit.”
“This is true.”
“Is Dante still okay?” Jenny asked.
“He seems okay,” I said. “Although he wore one of the tees from here to a date with that lawyer-lady he was seeing, and she did not like it, so they called it quits.”
“They broke up over a tee?”
“Apparently,” I said. “Cady said he’s met someone at the yacht-club. Said he’s singing in the shower, so I guess she makes him happy.”
“Yacht club, huh. He’s back to golf-shirts then,” Gibson snorted.
“No, she works there.” I paused and heard Joke’s chuckle. “She’s their bartender.”
***
Joke
Less than six months earlier he’d changed kegs at Oak, thinking that he was a little lonely and wondering what the hell he should do.
Now he had two girls who weren’t his daughters but who totally fucking was. He had his bar but also a business to expand. A dog he had to drag his ass out of bed to walk in the morning. And a woman who wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met.
He’d thought she’d change when that man was killed, but she didn’t, and he realized that she’d already taken the pieces of her life and molded them into something that was uniquely her.
Sissy. Top skier. College-graduate. A kindergarten teacher with a crazy biker-family. Mother. Partner. Bartender. So sweet his chest ached but at the same time, steady as a rock.
He still stared at her like a damned puppy sometimes because how could he not.
Then the others left but Sissy calmly opened another bottle of wine, topped up her glass, and they sat with Gibson and Lee on their back porch as the sun disappeared behind the mountains.
“Right,” Gibson said suddenly. “And on that note…”
Joke blinked and stared at his friend who had grabbed the bottle and walked off toward the barn holding Lee’s hand. On what note?
“Zacharias,” Sissy murmured and got to her feet. Her face was soft, but there was a look in her glacier-blue eyes that was hotter than the fucking sun.
“Yeah,” he said and smiled when he heard the hoarseness in his voice.
She grinned and stretched her hand out toward him.
“You owe me.”
He started laughing, and then they walked toward the barn with their arms around each other because yeah.
She was that too.
The wild girl.
A reminder –
If you enjoyed Joke’s story, please, please, please remember to support the series.
Put a short review of it wherever you can (The store you got it from, Goodreads, etc), tell your friends about this book, and pre-order Book #4…
Thank you heaps and bunches for your support!
XOXO/Mia
Now I’ll let you flip the page to read the first part of Day…
Day
“Yeah, well I don’t want to do you either. Being friends sounds just perfect.”
Falser words have probably never been spoken, and Beatrice regrets them immediately and repeatedly. Yes, she had a thing with Day ten years ago. Yes, it was five minutes. Yes, it’s pathetically enough probably still the best sex in her whole goddamned life. And yes, she used it to kickstart her new career. A career that has hit a snag.
Day loves his home deeply, but hates the memories he can’t seem to let go of. Thirty years of trying to escape have not eased the pain, and now he’s forced to stop running. He’s frustrated and furious, and to top it all off - he blurted out that he only wanted to be friends with the curvaceous, and stunningly gorgeous woman living in his guesthouse. And the goddamned woman agreed.
A dead woman and secrets from the past seep into the everyday life of a headstrong couple, who slowly learn to rely on each other when life turns rough.
Prologue
Beatrice
So I was rip-roaring drunk.
Fuck it.
Fuck it all to hell and back because why wouldn’t I be?
I was forty-two years old, which wasn’t ancient even though it felt as if I was a million years old when I hauled my sorry ass out of bed at five each morning.
Ridiculously successful, if being a vice president counted, which it did if the people around me were to be trusted. Something I wasn’t sure was the case.
Mother of five fantastic kids, ages twelve to eighteen which meant I’d had them all before the age of thirty, and no. No one ever thought we were siblings because I might be forty. Something. But I didn’t look like it, and not in a good way.
Skinny, which was what every glossy magazine announced that a woman was supposed to be but in my case mostly was since somewhere between the office, the kids, our two dogs and a house to maintain, I did not have time to eat. My lunch hours were also spent in the company gym because this was what one did when one wanted to get the good positions. Eighty-hour weeks, five cocktails in the evening, a five-mile run in the morning, and the gym over lunch before spending the afternoon cutting throats. Go get them, tiger.
I was also divorced.
Newly.
So newly I’d signed the final papers that very afternoon, and this was the main reason I was drunk off my skinny vice president ass.
My dark brown hair fell over my eyes when I wiggled my glass toward the bartender to indicate I wanted another one. He looked like he was the same age as my son. The oldest one. I didn’t have any daughters because according to my husband I didn’t have any female DNA.
Shit. Ex-husband.
Toby wasn’t a bad man, or he hadn’t been one, at least. We met in college, married in college, and procreated in college which resulted in an abortion. Sometimes I wondered if that had been my girl. Then we worked and procreated for the next seven years, and suddenly without any fucking warning whatsoever, I was thirty.
Then we worked and raised kids for the next ten years and boom. Forty.
The company had decided that I was good at what I did, and perhaps I was. The stupid stuff they wanted me to do was easy, though, and so damned uninteresting I spent half my days staring intently at the screen but letting my mind wander, creating storie
s in my head just to keep myself from dying of boredom.
“You don’t see me,” Toby suddenly said one night over gin and tonics.
I hated gin. And Tonic. I enjoyed wine of any kind and in particular the kind that had bubbles in it. Most of all I liked beer and not the fancy kind someone brewed in their little hole in the wall somewhere. I liked Coors. I could do Bud in a pinch, or Miller, but I was a Coors-girl to the core. To the Coor. Ha.
I snorted out laughter and wondered why the hell I was drinking vodka on the rocks.
“Share the joke?” a male voice murmured next to me.
As I watched, an absolutely gorgeous man sat down on the stool next to me. He was tall, lean, muscular, and had the most amazingly red hair I’d seen since I dropped my sons off that afternoon.
My boys all had that same bright red hair, and so did I, but I dyed mine brown. Dyed my eyebrows brown too. Did not dye the hair between my legs because that would be disgusting and also meaningless. No one saw that hair anyway.
My husband, ex-husband, whined about not being seen but it wasn’t as if he looked at me. I’d also known that Toby might not have been seen by me, but he had most definitely been looked at, in his birthday suit and in great detail, by at least four other women that I knew of.
I informed him about this piece of knowledge, and he told me they didn’t matter to him. I calmly informed him that he didn’t matter to me.
And so I’d signed the divorce papers that very afternoon.
“Not a funny joke,” I murmured to the man next to me. “Not a funny day today.”
He narrowed his eyes a little which looked good on him, and I felt a weird pressure across my chest.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said, and then the devil got hold of me. Or the vodka did in any case. “Signed some papers today so I’m on a rebound,” I murmured and leaned in closer with a smile that I suspected was mostly a smirk. “Want to be my rebound fuck?”
A slow grin spread on his face, making it even hotter than it had been two seconds earlier.
“Sure,” he said lazily. “Right now?”
“Yeah,” I said and slid off the bar stool. “Let’s go.”
We walked in silence through the bar, got into an elevator which would take us to my room and I pushed back all thoughts of what the hell I was doing. I’d only slept with my husband, ex-husband for fuck’s sake, since I was twenty-one, and in the past three years, we’d done it four times. The man next to me looked like he’d done it four times before lunch that very day, so he’d be a good one to get back up in the saddle with.
I turned and tilted my head back to look at him, and he grinned down at me.
“Second thoughts?” he murmured.
“Kiss me,” I said quietly.
He did, and I ignited. He must have ignited too because before I knew what was happening, we were outside the elevators, and I was pressed up against the wall.
“Key,” he grunted.
I pulled the plastic card out of my pocket, he glanced at the number written on the paper covering it and pulled me along, opened the door and slammed it shut behind us.
My dress was pushed up over my hips, and my panties were down by my ankles in seconds, and I kicked them away so I could spread my legs when I felt his hand on my pussy. He pushed a long finger inside and moved his hand against me in a way that made me gasp.
“Jesus,” he muttered, pulled back, and I heard the sound of what I assumed was him opening a condom package.
Then he was inside me, pressing me up against the wall, and pounding.
I moaned, and he increased the already furious pace to something that made my legs start to shake. I tried to think, tried to understand what the hell was happening, and then it hit me. I came with a low keening wail, and when I did, he tilted his head back and pushed out a long, hoarse roar. I felt his cock jerk inside me as he came, and shoved my face in his neck with another low moan. He leaned forward and put his forehead on my shoulder while we came down from what possibly had been the best orgasm of my life.
It had taken us less than five minutes.
Then he suddenly straightened and grinned at me.
“That was great, babe,” he said.
“Uh,” I wheezed out, still stunned by what had happened, and finding it a bit hard to breathe evenly.
He pulled out, and when he pulled his pants up, I leaned down and reached for my panties.
Then he slapped my butt.
What in the hell? The man who had just taken me against the wall in a way I hadn’t known was even possible had just casually slapped my butt in a way that hadn't hurt, but it had not felt nice at all.
“We must do it again some time,” he said.
I pulled my panties up and looked at him.
“Did you just slap my butt?” I asked, and tried to get air into my lungs.
“I have a meeting downstairs, so I really have to go,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
I smoothed down my dress as I watched him move toward the door which was just a few steps away. A heavy weight settled on my chest, and there were suddenly tingles down my left arm. I tried to move it but it felt heavy, and it also felt as if I was losing my breath which made me wonder if I was having a panic attack. Or, oh God. I realized what was happening.
“You have to –”
“Don’t have to do anything, babe,” he said, suddenly sounding not so happy anymore. “You asked for this, remember?”
“Yes, but I need you to –”
The pressure had increased to an iron band across my chest, and I raised a hand to massage it, hoping I had a little while longer. If I could make him understand, I’d get help.
“Bye, darlin’,” he murmured and opened the door.
“You have to…” The door closed softly as I finished the sentence, “call an ambulance.”
***
I’d been in the hospital a week when the CEO of my company came for a visit. He shared that they were restructuring, my division would be merged with another part of the company, and here were the papers I needed to sign to get my severance package.
I blinked.
The doctors had told me the heart attack which had felt like an elephant jumping on my chest had been minor. A warning sign they called it. The therapist I’d tried to kick out of my room had calmly sat down and asked me if I was happy.
Was I happy?
I’d nodded, futilely hoping that she’d take my word for it and leave. She leaned back and asked me if I was satisfied with my life.
I wasn’t that either.
The truth was that I hated my life.
I’d had plenty of time doing nothing in the past days. There had been visits from my kids who were worried, my ex-husband who mostly seemed surprised, my bestie from college who glared at me and told me her husband was cleaning out their guest bedroom as we spoke and I would recuperate there. Apart from that, I’d had a week full of doing nothing, which I hadn’t had since before college.
While I stared at the walls and tried not to freak out, I realized that I did not like my job. Did not like my life. And worst of all, I did not like me. I was approaching middle-age, and I didn’t have time for my kids. I dyed and straightened my hair because bright red waves took attention away from the numbers I was presenting, as did the curves I fought so hard to keep off my body. I’d overheard someone compare me to Margaret Thatcher, and I’d grinned with satisfaction, taking it as a compliment but what the hell? The Iron lady?
I didn’t want to be that woman, mostly because I wasn’t that woman.
Then I signed the papers which would give me a severance package good enough to keep me floating for a while.
I knew what the company was doing but didn’t have the energy to protest or push them for more money. Having a heart attack was not an approved activity for a vice president. It made you less of a tiger and much, much more of a kitten, so they’d probably renamed my division, put someone else in c
harge of my shit, and handed me the papers I’d just signed.
I stared at the door when he’d left and wondered what I would do. The house I bought when I moved out of the home I’d shared with Toby had one room each for my boys, and a fantastic pool area out back. It was also expensive to maintain. School fees for the kids were humongous. We’d planned to go skiing, which I hated with a vengeance that was as deep as it was profound, and Aspen was not exactly cheap. I’d ordered a new car to console myself with.
And I didn’t have a job anymore.
The therapist had told me to start writing things down. Like a memoir, or a diary. It would help me clear my thoughts, she said.
I looked at the pen and paper pad on the table next to me.
Then I started writing.
Rebound – a novel
I met him at a bar that first time, and he was gorgeous. His thick, jet-black hair was a little too long, so a lock fell over his forehead, and the short, carefully groomed beard looked like something I’d enjoy if it were scraping the inside of my thighs while he moved his mouth over me. His broad chest stretched a soft, gray tee to its limits, and the way it clung to his abs made me wonder if he had it tailor made.
“Do you want to be my rebound fuck?” I asked and watched eyes the color of expensive brandy light up with humor but also anticipation.
“Sure,” he said lazily. “Right now?”
We walked in silence through the bar, got into an elevator which would take us to my room and I tilted my head back to look at him.
“Kiss me,” I said quietly.
He did, and I ignited. He must have ignited too because before I knew what was happening, we were outside the elevators, and I was pressed up against the wall.
“Key,” he grunted.
I pulled the plastic card out of my pocket, he glanced at it and pulled me along, opened the door and slammed it shut behind us.
Chapter One
Day