by LJ Evans
“Tenerefe Sea” reverberated through my head. Ed’s voice singing about all the voices fading away as he breathed out how lovely she looked, because the look in Derek’s eyes made me feel just like Ed’s words, like no one knew anything but us.
“I hear, Mr. Waters, that you are quite practiced at saying those kinds of things.” I was hoping my voice was steady and light, but I knew it sounded breathless because, let’s face it, I loved books and songs and all the well-rehearsed one liners. Didn’t I have a dog-eared note in my wallet to prove it?
He smiled. “I have had practice.”
I dragged myself away and he let me, but he didn’t let my hand go. I looked down at it expectantly. “Where are you going?” he said with a grin as the next song started. Faster. More country rock than seduction.
“You want to dance again?” I was surprised.
He twirled me in response, and to my utter astonishment, started a country line dance that just about blew me away. Sure, I lived in Tennessee, and there were plenty of guys who could keep up with the girls in a line dance, but I wasn’t expecting it from a Hollywood playboy.
God help me, I let myself be pulled in by it. The look. The happiness. The unexpectedness of it all. How could I help it? Somehow, in the process, my heart had lightened just a little, and so I let him keep me with him for another three songs because it had been so long since my heart had been lightened.
When the band started to wrap up, we had danced so much that I was sweaty and hot again. And he was sweaty and hot again. As Cam had pointed out, a shower in our July Tennessee heat didn’t last long.
We made our way back to the drinks. This time, he reached for a beer and handed me one. I shook my head and just grabbed a water bottle. Still no room in the tent for drunk Mia.
I fiddled with my cap, trying to find something to say to this BB who had just danced more songs with me than anyone since high school.
“So, you leave tomorrow?” was all I could come up with.
“Not tomorrow. Tomorrow the guys and I are going caving over in McMinnville.”
“Like spelunking?”
He chuckled, and I looked up to see his gray eyes full of mischief again, seduction gone. Or on pause. God, I hated myself for wanting it only to be on pause. “Yes, but no one really calls it that anymore.”
I couldn’t help but think that that was too bad. Spelunking was a super cool word.
“Are there even caves in Tennessee?”
His smile broadened. “Quite famous ones. Cumberland Caverns.”
I just stared. How did I not know that?
“Would you like to go with us?” he asked.
I stopped, water bottle halfway to my mouth. “Crawling in a cave?”
“The advantage is that it’s a permanently air-conditioned room down there, plus you get to see some amazing formations,” he said.
“Is this a thing you do often?”
“Almost every stop on our tour this summer was designed with a cave in mind.”
I expected him to laugh, but then I realized he was serious.
“Really?” I said.
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
He just grinned his crazy grin. “So, you wanna come?”
Tomorrow was Saturday. It was our busiest day at the dealership. There was no way that I could run off and go cave diving with some gorgeous musician. Besides, that would be incredibly stupid of me. There was no way Good Girl Mia would continue to allow me to be anywhere near Dangerous Derek after the pull he’d had on me tonight.
“Can’t. Tomorrow is our busiest day.”
“At the dealership?”
I nodded.
“You need the day off tomorrow, baby girl?” Daddy’s voice startled me. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing behind us. I turned pink. What had he heard?
I shook my head no, but it was as if Daddy hadn’t seen it. “I wanted to go in tomorrow anyway. I need to talk with Denise about some of the recent sales.”
“It’s okay, Daddy. I told Joe I’d be there to help him straighten out that mess in the parts department.”
“You haven’t had a day off since you graduated. Go. Have fun. Enjoy something new,” Daddy said. He patted me and then wandered away as if he’d settled it all.
I shifted uncomfortably. What on earth to do now? If I tried to get out of it, Derek would know it was because of him. I was no good at making people feel bad. At least, not in my personal life. At work, that was a totally different story. I could lay down the law there and not give a hoot.
However, this was also an outdoorsy thing, and me and the outdoors didn’t typically end well. Jake and Cam had been all about the outdoors, but not me. The first and only time my daddy took me fishing, I’d burst into tears when he tried to get me to string the worm on the hook, because I’d felt so bad for the little creature. I sobbed, and Cam looked at me like I was some foreign body. Jake smirked.
I sobbed so hard that Daddy finally gave in and took the worm off the hook, and I buried it in the ground, hoping it would regenerate like Doctor Who. Then we took Jake and Cam’s bikes out of the truck and left them to their fishing. Daddy took me home to Mama where she helped me bake cookies, which was way more my thing.
If Derek noticed my indecision, he didn’t let it stop him. Instead, he dove in headfirst where Daddy had left off. “I’ll pick you up at eight, then?”
“A.M.?” I wasn’t really any more of a morning person than I was an outdoors person.
“Yes, baby, eight a.m. It’s a bit of a drive, and we want to be there early.”
My heart stopped. He was teasing me, calling me a cry baby. But I couldn’t help my mind from wondering what it would be like if he was calling me baby for a whole other reason. So, instead of fighting it all, I found myself giving in.
“Seems like I don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice. But I can guarantee you’ll regret it if you tell me no.”
“I think I’ll regret it if I tell you yes.”
The crowd had pretty much dissipated. Derek followed me as I went to find Cam and Blake. Blake was pulling things from her hands as she started to clean up. Cam on overdrive. “Stop. That’s what we paid the clean up crew to do.”
“It’s just—”
He kissed her mid-sentence. And she stilled. It was amazing to watch the effect he had on her. “No. Let them do it,” he insisted, and she acquiesced. I was stunned. Cam had let Blake win. Cam never let anyone win. Not even Jake.
She saw me with Derek hovering nearby and frowned. A frown that was then echoed by Blake. I just ignored their frowns and squeezed her goodnight. “Love you, Cam.”
“Love you too, kiddo,” she said back with a smile that was as close to teary as you would see Cam get.
Blake kissed me on the cheek and said goodnight before dragging Cam off toward the house before she could find something else to dive into. His hand was wrapped through hers, pinkies entwined. My heart swelled with happiness for her, and yet filled with a sudden longing for me that my broken heart echoed.
Mama and Daddy joined me, and we headed toward the cars with beautiful Derek matching our strides. “You won the Camaro?” Mama asked Derek with a little waver to her voice.
“Yes, ma’am,” Derek said. He was serious with her, not the flirty charmer he’d been with me. “I promise to take good care of her,” he added, but he wasn’t looking at the Camaro. He was looking at me, and it made my longing body respond like yeast to sugar.
“You taking it to McMinnville tomorrow?” Daddy asked.
“No, we’ve got the SUV we rented.”
“What’s this?” Mama asked.
“Mia’s going caving with Derek tomorrow,” Daddy said nonchalantly.
Mama looked like a squirrel caught stealing from the bird feeder, frozen in place. “Caving? Is that dangerous?”
“It’s ver
y safe. And we won’t do the expert treks with Mia. We’ll keep her to the less advanced stuff.”
“Who’s we?” Mama asked.
“Mama!” I said, humiliated at her giving him the third degree as if I was fifteen instead of twenty-two. Even though I understood that she worried about me differently now than she had at fifteen.
Daddy pulled Mama to him and kissed her temple. “People do it all the time. They have guides and safety equipment. It’ll be good for Mia to experience something of the real outdoors.”
He smiled cheekily at me, like I was five and crying over the worm on the fishing hook. I stuck my tongue out at him.
“She’s feistier than she looks. Make sure she doesn’t leave you at the bottom of a pit,” my daddy teased.
“Is that how it is?” Derek asked with that impish smile again.
“You’re all awful,” I said and moved as fast as I could in my ridiculous heels toward Daddy’s truck. At the last minute, my stupid manners kicked in and made me turn back to look at Derek, “Thanks for inviting me. See you at eight.”
Then I dove into the truck before I had to see his face or hear a response.
Caving
WHERE WE LAND
“Do I love you?
Do I hate you?
I can’t make up my mind.”
-Ed Sheeran
Like I said, me and mornings aren’t really friends. And the morning after the fundraiser, I was especially groggy. It was close to midnight when we’d gotten home, and on top of that, I’d spent several more hours researching spelunking. Caving, shmaving, I liked the word spelunking, thank you very much.
What I’d found online had been both interesting and terrifying. I’d never been in small spaces like they showed. Some people didn’t do well in them, so I was hoping that I wouldn’t freak out and embarrass myself. Leave it to Mia to do something like that. Like crying over the worm and trying to bury it.
Plus, I had nothing to wear because all the gear they’d shown seemed specially designed. It had said it would be cool and you should be comfortable, so I figured I’d do best with layers. That morning, I put on workout gear with a t-shirt and windbreaker over it along with a pair of Doc Martens that I’d dug out of my closet from when they were the thing to wear with dresses. When I looked in the mirror, I knew I looked absurd. But it was all I had.
I pulled my long hair into a low ponytail assuming we’d have some ugly helmet to wear, and hoped that I didn’t look completely like the loser I felt like.
I slipped quietly onto the porch with a mug of coffee and a power bar. Mama and Daddy hadn’t emerged from their room. Thankfully, that meant no more embarrassing moments with them acting like I hadn’t had a good time in years.
Maybe they weren’t that far off.
Even my relationship with Hayden had been more serious, painful drama than good times. I’d found Hayden in my first business class my freshman year at UTK. He was dynamic, like all the dynamic people that I’d been around my whole life, and I couldn’t help but be pulled into his orbit.
He’d smiled at me, and I thought it meant something. I thought that maybe he was smiling at me the way Jake used to smile at Cam long before he realized that she was the only one for him. So, I tagged along after Hayden, doing everything he wanted, in hopes that he’d see how much he needed me like Jake and Cam had needed each other.
For a while, I thought we’d be together forever. We’d even shared a few tangled, drunken college kisses. Then Marcie invaded our friendship. Beauty Queen Marcie who was her own dystopian universe come to wreck mine.
Even after he’d chosen Marcie, I stood by him. My only role model had been Cam standing by Jake through his swarm of high school girlfriends. I listened to Hayden gripe about Marcie, feeling like I understood him better than she did. I would say all the right words, hoping someday he’d finally believe that we were destined to be together.
And for one night, when he’d broken up with Marcie for the millionth time, we’d been as close as two people can get. Then, the next week, he’d gone back to Marcie again, and I broke for half a second and told him I loved him. He responded by telling me that he loved me too. But that he also loved Marcie and that he needed Marcie. That her world fit into his world better. Which really just meant her powerful, wealthy family fit with his powerful, wealthy family. It didn’t really mean she knew him.
I told him that too. He responded by telling me I was good at imagining things. That it was one of the things he loved most about me: my innocent, colorful way of looking at the world. But he still went back to Marcie. And I still had a broken heart. Embarrassingly, I hadn’t walked away. Instead, I’d written love letters that he’d responded to with an apology note that only made me feel like he’d wake up some day and realize that I was the one that fit his life and not Marcie.
My brain was there, on Hayden and Marcie as it hadn’t been much of yesterday, when a dark SUV pulled into the driveway. Instead of being late, like I really expected an overly confident musician to be, he was ten minutes early.
It gave me another piece of the Derek puzzle that I was collecting. As if he was a mass of cardboard waiting to be put together into a complete picture of an eagle with a guitar slung from its wings.
I kicked myself. Hayden was right: I had an overactive imagination. It was a side effect of reading so much. Truth was, the world wasn’t always the way I pictured it. I definitely needed to keep that in mind today with this tempting male body in my view.
Derek emerged from the SUV with a jauntiness that all confident men seemed to have. Jake had had it. Hayden had it. Why couldn’t I find some mousy guy who wouldn’t break my heart? Because looking at this BB in his ongoing series of tight jeans, tight t-shirts, and hiking boots was enough to break my heart right there before I even let him near the shreds of mine that remained.
“Hey,” he said with that carefree smile that made me long to feel as happy as he appeared.
“Morning.” I looked down at my clothes, self-conscious. “Is this going to be okay?”
Stupid. I realized my mistake as soon as he began slowly taking in every inch of me in my workout gear. Workout gear that showed my curves in a way I wasn’t comfortable showing outside the gym.
“You look really good,” he said in that sexy-as-hell voice that caught my breath. “Do you have some waterproof gear in that bag?”
He referred to the backpack at my feet that I’d scrounged from our supply closet. It looked like it had once been pink, but was now a motley gray, and someone, probably Cam, had duct taped every inch of it. I just didn’t have anything else that would bear the brunt of hiking in a cave without being ruined.
“I have a change of clothes, a flashlight, and a couple protein bars,” I offered with a shrug.
“Don’t worry. I think we can manage to scrape some things together for you between me and the boys.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He frowned. “Why would you be sorry? I kind of figured you wouldn’t have much. The boys and I don’t mind.”
He came up to the steps and grabbed the dirty backpack.
“This thing looks like it’s been through the ringer.”
“That would be Cam, not me. I’m more of a read-it-in-a-book versus do-it kind of girl,” I said and then flushed as he raised his eyebrows at my words. What I wanted to do was thunk my head against the porch pillar. God, I was such a bumbling idiot around him.
“But doing it is much more fun,” he whispered to me with a glimmer in his eyes.
Warning bells went off all over my body. If Mama had come out on the porch at that moment and forbade me from going, I would have scurried inside like the fifteen-year-old I suddenly felt like.
He grabbed my hand loosely, almost like Blake had Cam’s last night, and my heart zinged while my body reacted like it had every time he touched me.
Focus Mia, I told myself. Get your head out of the clouds.
He opened the front passenger door for me, and I looked inside. Three large men were scrunched into the backseat of the SUV like raccoons in a garbage can.
I backed up. “I can take the back seat. I’m used to being in the middle. I’m pretty small.”
Once again, my words came out all wrong, and I turned pink again. I was like a high schooler who’d just learned how to use a double entendre. He chuckled behind me, but let go of my hand only enough to help me into the raised SUV.
“No way. I wouldn’t trust them anywhere near you,” he said.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that statement. Was he being Blake-like protective, or was he saying he didn’t want them near me because he wanted me? Like last night, I wasn’t used to being treated this way, and I wasn’t quite sure I could trust my own instincts.
Derek hopped into the driver’s seat and turned to me with happy eyes. “Guys, this is Mia. Mia, that’s Lonnie, Owen, and Mitch. Rob, our drummer, couldn’t make it today.”
Of course, there wouldn’t have been room for him in the SUV even if he wanted to come, which made me feel bad all over again. “Is that because of me?”
“Oh no, he got in trouble with the missus and is spending the day groveling on the phone and sending flowers,” the red-haired lumberjack in the back guffawed. He leaned toward me with a grin almost as infectious as Derek’s. “I’m Lonnie, by the way.”
“He’s married?” I couldn’t help the surprise that jumped out before I could use my manners to hold it back.
“Stupid ass,” said the tattooed man in the middle with a shaved head and skin so dark and rich that it made me think of Mama’s chocolate crinkles. He was a little smaller than the other two, but not by much, which probably accounted for him being unhappily in the middle.
“Owen’s just jealous that Rob bagged Trista before he could, so don’t listen to anything he says,” chimed in the third man, Mitch. He was built like a professional wrestler and looked the most ridiculous of all of them shoved by the window. His hair was spiked and blue which somehow made the wrestler image even more probable.