by Grant, Pippa
His bright blue eyes connect with mine, and a slow grin follows. “Yeah?”
“Very. Because I think my dad really could kick your ass, and he’s excellent with surprise attacks, so you were literally taking your life into your own hands to defend my honor.”
“Is that a warning?”
“Let’s just say I suspect life for both of us is about to be far more entertaining than I ever thought I’d enjoy.”
He seems to realize we’re once again the subject of camera lenses, and instead of helping me into the car, he pins me against the side of it. “Want to start it with a bang?”
I loop my arms over his shoulders. “You want me to taser you again?”
He’s laughing as he lowers his mouth to mine. “No. I want you to love me.”
“Done.”
And I pull him tighter as our lips touch, and I don’t care who’s watching.
Because this man?
He’s worth it.
Epilogue
Beck
A month after Sarah tasered me, I finally get to take her to one of my favorite spots in the entire world.
Shipwreck, Virginia.
The quirky little pirate town nestled in the mountains outside Copper Valley always makes me happy. Probably because they have amazing banana pudding, and friendly people who treat me like one of their own and tons of hiking trails through the mountains, and also, my house out here is where I keep my Frogger arcade game.
The one that Ellie and Wyatt beat my high score on a year ago.
I’m still pissed, but I’m dealing. And plotting to get it back, because Sarah’s kick-ass at video games and between the two of us, I know we can do it. Eventually. When we get tired of kissing. And touching. And making love.
Huh.
Maybe we won’t ever get my high score back, and I think I’m okay with that.
I slide a glance at her in the darkness, watch her features in the dancing firelight, and wonder how much it would take to talk her into handing off the sleeping baby. She’s so natural with Emma cuddled up to her, and it’s making me want everything.
“You making that one for me, Ryder?” Cash calls, and I jerk my attention back to the second most important thing in my life. Okay, third.
The marshmallow I’m roasting comes after the people who come after Sarah, who are all out here with us this weekend.
My parents, Ellie and Wyatt and Tucker, the guys from the neighborhood, Charlie—yeah, she’s family.
Sarah brought Mackenzie, who’s adjusting pretty well to the level of celebrity surrounding her. It helps that Tripp’s feeling her out on her baseball opinions, because she can talk baseball for hours.
So long as she doesn’t realize Cooper showed up a few minutes ago and brought Darren Greene and Jose Ramirez with him, since they’re on their All-Star break. Though she’s flipping out a little at Vaughn Crawford also sitting across the fire, shooting the shit with Levi and Davis and my mom about something.
It’s late, and we’re all gathered around the firepit in my backyard, celebrating everything.
Ellie and Wyatt being happy. Sarah and I burning that contract we signed. The foundation launching solidly.
Sarah being Emma’s favorite human being in the entire world right now, since apparently baby poop bonds people.
Levi’s latest album going double platinum.
Cash’s latest movie topping the box office.
Charlie’s promotion to Chief Operations Officer for all of RYDE and my subsidiary lines.
Sunny—who’s not here, though Sarah video called her earlier—taking like a duck to water at RYDE and running like mad with new ideas, new models, and new opportunities.
Like going into cougar fashion.
She calls it mature fashion, but those marketing ideas she’s blowing Vicki and Hestia away with are way more cougar than mature.
Sarah’s mortified, of course, but I’ve assured her I’ll only let the most respectful younger men be in commercials with her mom. Charlie’s encouraging it all. Judson, naturally, wants to slice my balls off, but he’s wrapping his apocalyptic cowboy baseball player movie, and apparently he’s lined up for a romantic comedy role next, so my manhood might be in less danger soon.
“S’more?” I ask Sarah, pulling a perfectly toasted marshmallow off the fire and sliding it onto a waiting graham cracker before it falls off the stick.
“You should—” she starts, but before she can finish, Cash dives across her and Emma and snatches it from me.
“Aaaah, yeah. Dude. I haven’t had a Beck Ryder s’more in years.”
“That’s for my girlfriend, asshole. Give it back.”
He shoves the whole thing in his mouth and moans. “Ee oos ee oos,” he says, which I easily translate to she snoozes, she loses.
“She’s holding a baby.”
“That’s not right, man,” Cooper says.
“We need to take care of him for you, Miss Sarah?” Darren asks.
“Beck can make another s’more,” she replies with that amused smile that I love so much. “The first three would’ve been for him anyway.”
“The first one is always for you.”
She leans over and kisses me on the cheek, and I get a whiff of sleepy baby, and yeah.
We’re totally doing that.
We’re gonna make babies someday. And I’ll quit everything to stay home and rock the fuck out of being a dad while Sarah saves the world. Whenever she’s ready.
“I love you,” I whisper.
She smiles again, this time like she knows what I’m thinking, and I get another kiss that’s interrupted by a squeal of terror. “Oh my god, it’s…it’s…AAAAAHHHH!”
“You should’ve warned her,” Sarah whispers against my lips.
“You don’t taste like s’mores yet. I need to fix this,” I reply.
“Is that the catatonic one?” Darren mutters to Cooper behind us.
“Yep. And this dude still needs to be taken care of for stealing Sarah’s s’more.”
Cash leaps up and races around behind everyone sitting at the fire, crashing between Charlie and Hank, who are giving each other the silent treatment, which is pretty hilarious if you ask me.
“Y’all are the best kind of nuts,” Vaughn tells us all.
And somewhere off in the distance behind the house, someone sneezes a very loud, very feminine sneeze.
“Motherfucker,” I mutter while most everyone around us groans.
“Get a room,” Davis yells.
“We didn’t need to hear that,” Tripp agrees.
“Bless you,” my mom calls. Awkwardly. While sharing a look with my dad.
Oh, fuck.
I gape at them. “Seriously?”
Sarah snort-laughs so hard she’s in danger of waking Emma.
She did a week-long series on weird side effects of sex last week, and yeah, she included the not-so-mythical sneezegasm. And Ellie and Wyatt have disappeared. And everyone reads Sarah’s blog.
Also, yes, I did go back to my hypnotherapist, and I’m just fine now.
Most of the time.
But more to the point, most of the guys know about the sneezegasm problem. So we all know what’s going on back there in the woods.
Which I’m choosing to ignore, since I have my own plans for lots of orgasm time this weekend.
“I love your laugh,” I tell Sarah, because I do, and I don’t even care that she’s laughing at me, so long as she’s laughing.
“I love you,” she replies.
“You really hanging up your underwear, Ryder?” Vaughn calls across the fire.
“If it keeps me home with this brilliant, beautiful lady more,” I reply. And I am. I’m slowly handing over control to everyone else, because I do want to be home more.
And I don’t know everything the future holds, but I know that between Tripp’s plans for all of us to pool our resources to save the Fireballs, and my own itch that I’ve been getting since talking to Sarah more about sci
ence and the world, that itch to maybe try college, and who knows, maybe med school after that—well, one way or another, I’ll be more than that retired underwear model who plays video games all day.
His teeth flash in a grin. “Good on you, man. Just don’t propose by tweet. Who knows who you’d actually pop the question to.”
Everybody gets a good laugh—yeah, it’s funny—and I spear another marshmallow to make Sarah the best s’more in the history of s’mores.
“I could live like this every day,” I murmur softly to her.
She leans into me with another one of those smiles I love so much. “Me too.”
“They’re not too much?”
“They’re family. And they’re yours. And they’re perfect. And we’re still locking the bedroom door tonight.”
“You’re utterly perfect, you know that?”
She laughs softly. “Far, far from it.”
“But you’re perfect for me.”
“Who knew one little tweet could change our entire lives?” she murmurs.
“Clearly, I did.”
She laughs again, and Emma startles awake with a cry. I wave Tripp off when he starts to get up, because he’s helping Mackenzie breathe. Also, Sarah and I have conquered worse than a fussy baby.
“Trade me?” I hand her the marshmallow stick, and she shifts to let me take Emma.
And then we sit there together, me calming a baby back to sleep, Sarah proving her marshmallow roasting skills surpass mine, our friends and family chattering happily all around us, and yep.
Life is pretty fucking perfect.
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Pippa
Sneak Peek at Hammered
If you love bad boy bartenders and opposites attract romance, read on for an excerpt of Hammered, co-written with the fabulous Lili Valente…
Jace O’Dell
(aka a man who only thinks he’s on the verge of leaving his past behind)
Nothing goes better with tequila than a moonbeam. An Olivia Moonbeam, to be specific.
Or so I assume.
I’ve never actually had Olivia, though I’ve dreamed about it for what feels like forever.
And I’ll go right on dreaming, because moonbeams and rough-around-the-edges bartenders go together like champagne and a crap sandwich. Olivia is so high above me, we’re barely the same species, but even if we were, tonight’s not the night to make a play for a girl who’s out of my league.
Not with everything Olivia’s been through in the past twenty-four hours.
So I’m standing here, wiping the same burn mark on the bar that I know will never come clean, ignoring a half-empty tequila bottle that promises to make me forget why I don’t deserve moonbeams if I’ll only give in and have another shot.
But I won’t.
Because I want to remember every minute with her, and one more shot of tequila will take me past pleasantly buzzed and all the way to hammered.
“One more please. Something stronger this time,” Olivia says, pushing her glass back across the bar. “My sorrows don’t feel drowned yet. Shouldn’t they be drowned by now, Jace?”
God, just hearing my name on her lips makes my blood pump faster. I’ve been one degree of hung up on her or another since she landed here in Happy Cat exactly six break-ups ago.
Not her break-ups.
My break-ups. With the same woman. Because Ginger and I are stuck on an on-again-off-again merry-go-round-from-hell relationship that’s driving me out of my damned mind.
Hence, the tequila, even though Ginger and I are off right now and I rarely drink while I’m behind the bar.
I’m a professional, dammit, and I take my job seriously.
Which is why this usually happy little lightweight across from me is getting the weakest Smoky-Pepper in history.
I top off Olivia’s ice and fill in the cracks with Dr Pepper and the tiniest drop of whiskey. But she doesn’t notice I’ve skimped on the good stuff. Poor thing’s a wreck. She’s unraveled the braids she was wearing when she got here, and now her blond hair’s a hot, crinkled mess.
A fucking adorable mess.
“Wasn’t your fault, Liv,” I say, passing the glass back to her.
“But I almost committed murder.”
I shrug. “I almost committed murder once.”
Her eyes go even wider. “No.”
Grinning’s not my thing, but hell, what do I have to lose by flirting with her? And there’s no one else around this late to tell her that it wasn’t her fault a woman had an allergic reaction to the sno-cones she was serving at the farmer’s market tonight. And somebody definitely needs to comfort her.
It should be someone better than me. But she’s here. And I’m here.
So I lean onto the bar at her level and I grin. “You know that giant bunny they put out in Sunshine Square for Easter every year?”
“I love that bunny!” She claps her hands and bounces, which makes everything bounce, but I’m not ogling, I swear. If this is ogling, I also ogle her personality and her shoes, because she has the weirdest shoes. But I like them. All of them.
“I almost murdered it,” I whisper conspiratorially.
She snort-laughs into her glass like she’s drunk on Dr Pepper, which is also adorable. Who gets drunk on Dr Pepper?
Olivia Moonbeam, that’s who.
“Gluing the pink fur on it was my punishment for welding the principal’s car doors shut,” I explain. “Got so much of it stuck to myself, I was pink up to my elbows for a week.”
She snort-laughs into her glass again, a sound like a baby pig squeaking in joy.
I think. I don’t know any baby pigs, personally, but they’re cute. And she’s cute, so cute I can’t look away from her blue eyes as she whispers, “I switched the liquid foundation in my mom’s makeup case for green paint, and she did an entire zombie movie before she realized it. But the paint started flaking off in the middle of filming and a guy broke out in a rash that made the boom operator think we had a for real zombie outbreak on our hands, so he quit.” Her eyes scrunch up and her chin wobbles, and shit, I think she’s going to cry. “But I was just trying to help. Mom was afraid there wouldn’t be enough foundation, but I knew there’d be enough paint.”
“You helped,” I assure her. “You helped that boom guy realize he had a seriously overactive imagination. I’ll bet he went out and got a normal job, with no zombies in it, and lived happily ever after.”
Her lips part, and she lifts those Blue Lace Agate-colored eyes to mine like I’m some kind of hero. I know they’re Blue Lace Agate blue, because it’s the first thing she said to me all those break-ups ago. Hi, I’m Olivia Moonbeam, and I have Blue Lace Agate-colored eyes. It’s the best gemstone for chasing away fear. So if you’re ever afraid, you can just look in my eyes. I sense you’re afraid right now, and that’s okay. Losing someone we love is one of the scariest things there is.
I had no clue how she knew what I was afraid of that day—I don’t make a habit of talking to strangers, or anyone else, about my feelings.
But she was right, losing love is scary, even if it’s love that isn’t in such good shape anymore, love that probably should have been laid to rest many moons ago.
But maybe it’s time to stop being afraid. Maybe I should look into Olivia’s eyes and stop worrying that I’ll never be quite good enough, or worthy of being someone’s hero.
“You’re a very good bartender,” she says in reverent whisper. “You always know what to say
to make people feel better.”
I don’t know shit about helping people—I just get them too buzzed to care about their problems for a while—but the tequila’s humming in my blood and whispering those words that usually get me in trouble.
She likes you. Go for it.
Click HERE to get HAMMERED!
Sneak Peek at Stud in the Stacks
If you love sexy studs who aren’t afraid to read romance novels, socially awkward heroines, and jungle beefcake bachelor auctions, read on for an excerpt of Stud in the Stacks!
Knox (aka Mr. Romance, aka Tarzan, but only for tonight)
Even though it’s been six years since I stripped for a roomful of women, I’m pleased to report my loincloth still fits in all the right places. Tad more snug in front than I remember, but if I had to grow, might as well be in the junk.
I give the elastic one last test as the producer signals that I’m up. Spider-Man gives me a fist bump. Thor smacks my ass. They’re the last two bachelors going up on the block after me in tonight’s superhero-themed auction.
There are some who might say Tarzan isn’t a superhero, but Jane would beg to differ.
And I fucking own this costume.
Plus, if no one else bids on me, my Nana’s right up front, ready to throw down the hundred bucks I slipped her before the show.
I’m hoping for a little higher than that though. Batman just went for a cool five grand.
Batman was a dick, which I assume my Nana didn’t know when she started the bidding on him. A grade-A, condescending asshat who thought just because he had a few million bucks in the bank, he could call people gay like that’s an insult and take a metaphorical shit on my favorite books.
I fucking want to beat Batman.
“Ladies,” local anchorwoman Nancy Houlihan says into the microphone onstage just beyond the door where I’m waiting, “next up is…”
She pauses, the spotlight criss-crosses the stage, and a drum rolls. All goes silent, the light stops on the doorway, and Nancy crows, “Tarzan!”
