Lucky Charmed

by Sharla Lovelace

  And I’m invisible. “I’m Carmen,” I said. “It’s been a long time, I don’t know if you remember meeting me.”

  Her dark eyes fell on me. “I remember.”

  Okay.

  Swallow your pride. Work with his new bang.

  I licked my lips and smiled. “What do you need?”

  * * *

  My mother left in a huff about a half hour in, but the rest of us got to work. With Sully in charge, volunteers took down measurements. He distributed action items and a budget for people to go buy wood, nails, screws, and extra hammers. A few others said they had cordless drills at home, and Sully said he’d take care of the odd things like the levers and other tools I’d never heard of.

  It was surreal.

  Seeing him talking and walking among us like he’d always been there. Except that now he was mature and responsible and knew things about things, and had a sexy female sidekick. With the exception of two seemingly angry phone calls he had to take, he was on top of what everyone was doing. I felt a little sorry for Frank and his one chance to be team captain, but Sully was making it happen and quickly. With Frank in charge, we’d have still been there talking it to death after the whole theme park was done.

  I was hot, and not in a good way. Definitely not in a Kia way. I was sweaty and smeared with dirt, and my knees were bruised from crawling around on the ground. Kia was sweaty and dirty, but she looked like she’d been doing the nasty in the dirt and loving it. Great. Good for her. Good for Sully. They’d make beautiful babies.

  I ignored whatever crawled on my neck as I stretched string and tied it to sticks shoved into the ground marking areas that needed to be leveled. I was halfway done making indentions in the dirt with a shovel, when I felt Sully behind me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Playing in the dirt,” I said. “You?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m marking where the string is so we can pick it up,” I said.

  “We don’t need to pick it up,” he said as I turned around. “We leave it here till we have the wood to take its place.”

  “Great,” I said. “Someone told me to do this.”

  “Someone probably wanted to watch you do that,” he said, chuckling as his eyes scanning me. Before I could make a scathing remark about his once-over, he continued. “Speaking of, it’ll be easier on your knees to wear jeans. You’ll be kneeling a lot. And work gloves would be good, too.”

  I nodded toward the dream girl, stretching in the sun like a cat and laughing at something Bash was saying. “Kia has shorts on.”

  “She’s used to things like this.”

  “And I’m a sissy weakling?” I said.

  He held up his hands. “Fine. Wear whatever you want. I was just trying to help.”

  I blew out a breath. Dial back the hormonal jealousy, Carmen. You are above this.

  “I may not be out here every day, anyway,” I said. “I may be working late.”

  He nodded. “Because of me?”

  I scoffed and scratched my cheek, realizing too late that I’d added more dirt to my face.

  “No,” I said indignantly. “Because I may have to work late.” I forced a laugh. “Not everything I have to do pertains to you. And I’m leaving in a couple of weeks anyway.”

  “Leaving?”

  “On vacation,” I said.

  “The work’ll still be here when you get back,” he said with a small smile. “You won’t be gone forever.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, surprising myself. The thought had been playing with me, but it was the first time I’d said it out loud. Damn it, the things he made me do. I shrugged. “I work for myself. I’m licensed to practice anywhere in Texas and there’s no end date. And nothing keeping me here.”

  I watched the words land on him, expecting him to step back and go distant. To get pissed off and be a jerk. That’s what I wanted. It’s what I needed. I needed for him to stop being everywhere I breathed air, and just go play house with his sex goddess. Preferably in another town, in case I did end up back here.

  There was no jerk, however. No distant jaw twitching. Instead, he reached out and then let his hand drop, lifting it again as if it had a mind of its own. He swiped the dirt from my cheek with one finger, and I almost lost my knees. My bruised dirt-covered knees. Shit-damn-hell.

  “Sorry,” he said, frowning at his hand as if it betrayed him and backing up a step.

  I had to channel that surge of what-the-fuck into something, so I shoved the shovel into the dirt, letting it stick up like I knew what I was doing.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I—I’m housesitting for Lanie and I need to feed her dog, so…”

  Jesus Christ. I’m a big unlovable loser wasn’t taken, so that was the sentence I went with.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Thankfully, I didn’t trip and break the string as I turned around. Unthankfully, I caught Dean’s eye. He stood across the field watching me with his arms crossed like a jilted woman.

  It was the final knot in my rope for the day. My heart pounded like I’d swum the perimeter of the pond; I was filthy, and I’d spent entirely too much time today way too close to Sully Hart. I was done with this day and these people. I wanted a shower, a book, and maybe Ralph snoring in my lap. And one more thing.

  “Ice cream,” I muttered. “Chocolate fucking ice cream.”

  * * *

  Lanie and Nick were on their way home from their honeymoon, and I was thankful for about a billion reasons. Namely, that a relatively sane person I trusted could look me in the eye and remind me that I was a grown independent woman with no logical reason to need anything from Sully Hart. Answers, mouth-to-mouth, monkey sex in a cave….

  None of it.

  Not that any of those things were on my mind the last two days since crawling in the dirt or the one-on-one outside City Hall. At all. Or that I’d been obsessing over every word, every look, every inch he’d closed between us, or the way his hand had automatically closed over mine one day and had to touch me the next. Or that I was thinking of him or Kia—or him and Kia—or any of it while I drove home from the last-minute trip to the vet’s office for Ralph’s food (I promise; he didn’t starve), fully aware that Maple Street was just four measly little blocks off of Main.

  Because I was an adult. A responsible, non-flaky adult. Hitting my blinker. Turning down Eighth Avenue. To Maple.

  I shook my head all the way down the road, unable to believe what I was doing. This was the kind of thing I lectured my divorcing clients about. Obsessing over their exes.

  I’m not obsessing. I’m just curious. Curious over what could make someone so untethered and beautifully free want to fence themselves in. Yep, that was all.

  I didn’t have long to find out. I turned left on Maple toward the five-hundred block and my palms started to sweat. My pulse raced. Even before I saw the house number, I knew it had to be the one with the big black Chevy out front. The Chevy I’d parked next to at city hall the other day. Of course I had.

  The house itself was ordinary. Brick and wood, one story, non-descript with no real landscaping. Some of the flower beds had been marked off with stakes, but that was about it. I rolled slowly past, my mouth completely dry.

  “This is crazy,” I muttered.

  And then he walked around the side of the house. I hunched over and gunned it at the same time, parking around the corner where I could still see him but he wouldn’t notice me.

  “How pathetic am I?” I whispered.

  My phone screamed through the speakers. I yelped and then clapped a hand over my mouth as I hit the button.

  “Hello?” I whispered, not caring who was on the other end of the line.

  Because he was there. In a tight, ratty tank top, old jeans, and a backward baseball cap, he drove a shovel into the ground, arm muscles rippling. Now that was how to sink a shovel. Sweet Jesus.

  “We’re at the airport,” Lanie said. Nick muttered something
in the background. “So we should be home in a couple of hours. After they find our other suitcase, anyway.”

  “Awesome,” I hissed, watching Sully turn over dirt, one shovelful after another. “Drive safe.”

  “Awesome?” she said. “They lost our suitcase.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Hope they find it quickly.”

  “Why are you whispering?” Lanie whispered.

  Because I’m hiding around the corner from Sully Hart’s house, of all things, watching him play in the dirt and get sweaty.

  Completely logical.

  “Um, I’m in a building,” I said, just as a truck pulling a squeaky trailer drove around me.

  “You sound like you’re outside.”

  “We have things to talk about when you get home,” I said. “So plan on some ice-cream-on-the-couch girl time tonight after you get unpacked. Nick and Ralph can go somewhere and bond.”

  Lanie laughed. “I’ll let him know. See you soon. And Carmen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “No Sully.”

  See? That’s what I needed. But in person, with a leash or a stun gun. Or a box of imported chocolate. I dropped the phone in my lap and watched as my tattoo—his tattoo—moved with him. He had more of them now, but the one on his left bicep that matched the tiny one inside my left breast tugged at me. An infinity sign.

  I love you, Carmen. Forever.

  It was supposed to signify that. Something we’d done together the day before he left me. Forever. I guess it was significant after all.

  The old pain stabbed through me like it was coming straight from that fifteen-year-old ink, and I welcomed it. Yes, remember that. Remember how that felt to stand there alone, waiting at the stadium, where he said he’d pick me up. Remember the confusion and pain as I left Charmed to drive hours to the last carnival stop, thinking maybe I just misunderstood.

  Remember that.

  He left you.

  And now he was back.

  Another person appeared from the side, her cute figure sporting a bandeau top and gym shorts, her long dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail. She carried a little spade, perfect for tending flowerbeds.

  My stomach lurched at the domestic sight they made. Yeah, he left me, all right.

  For her.

  But something was off. Something like… awareness. That energy between couples that links them together and says they’re a unit without doing a single couple-ish thing.

  They didn’t have it.

  No. I wasn’t going to sit here and analyze them. I refused. Fuck him.

  I put the car in drive and coasted till I was out of sight, then hit the gas back to Lanie’s house. Back to people who didn’t ditch their loved ones.

  * * *

  “Aunt Ruby would have been so proud of us,” Lanie said, flopping onto the couch and sitting cross-legged. “We actually went to a toga party at Caesar’s Palace.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yep,” she said. “I have pictures.” She pointed at me. “Real pictures, too, not manufactured ones.”

  Lanie’s Aunt Ruby had been an eccentric breed of woman who definitely marched to her own drummer. In all the times I spent in that house growing up, we did some crazy things. Waking up at midnight for a picnic under the stars. Blanket forts with twinkle lights. Wrapping ourselves in sheets for Julius Caesar’s birthday. Baked cinnamon apple treats to mark special occasions, like a ‘C’ on a test or a particularly good hair day.

  Aunt Ruby raised Lanie after her dad left and her mom died, and although there was always talk and speculation about the inexplicable and “special” things that happened in that house, there was never any question about the love there. Both ways. When Aunt Ruby hired me to do her will, she made sure to set Lanie up to succeed, even though Lanie had shown her fake pictures of a happy life. Now, possibly due to her aunt’s interference, she had the real deal.

  I wouldn’t lie. The nights I spent there dog-sitting Ralph, I threw a few thoughts out to the cosmos. It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings to have Aunt Ruby interfere a bit like that in my life.

  “So tell me what’s going on,” Lanie said, as Nick dropped a drive-by kiss on her head. “Spill it all.”

  I gave her the low-down on everything since she’d left. Good lord, had that only been two weeks? It felt like two months. The big secrets that weren’t secrets. Bailey. Larry. My mother. Sully.

  “Holy shit,” she said finally.

  “Right?” I said, holding up a spoonful of double Dutch chocolate. This conversation needed the heavy armory. “It’s like everything fell apart when you left.”

  “We knew about the permanent carnival thing coming,” Lanie said. “But Lucky Hart doing that really didn’t cross my mind.”

  “If it were just a rides thing it might have,” I said. “But the boardwalk and shops and everything he’s doing…I have to be impressed.” I held up my spoon again, along with my other hand. “I don’t want to be, but damn the guy has to have some heavy backing to pull this off.”

  “Not the rebellious hot carnie boy I remember,” Lanie said.

  My skin got hot. “He’s so much that and more,” I said. I thought it was to myself. But the look in Lanie’s widened eyes told me it was out loud.

  “Really, now?”

  I ran a hand over my face. “I tell myself every day that he’s still the asshole that crushed me and never looked back.”

  Lanie nodded. “And? But?”

  I blinked and looked away. “And I don’t know. That’s easy to do from a distance.” I stared down into my ice cream and shook my head. “I saw him and Kia at the Blue Banana. And then today, at—” I stopped. Foot in mouth.

  “At where?” she asked. “At the site?”

  “Yeah.” I was lying to my best friend now? Guilty, counselor. “But, I don’t know. Something doesn’t fit.”

  Lanie furrowed her brow.. “What do you mean?”

  I rolled my head. “Looks. A feeling. No, it’s the looks,” I reiterated. “The way he looks at me just—”

  “Cher says that’s just his eyes,” Lanie said, spooning butter pecan into her mouth.

  “Then his eyes are fucking killing me,” I said, the witty charade fading as my own lame-ass words settled over me. “I don’t know what to think,” I said softly, blowing out a breath that wasn’t all that steady. “Or why I’m thinking anything. And I can’t stand that; you know I can’t stand that. I’m always on top of everything. But…” But what? The way his eyes would burn into me every time? The way he’d fought the need to touch me? To be close? The way I fucking liked it? Damn it, that was the worst part of it all. “When he looks at me,” I whispered to myself, staring at the pillow.

  “Carmen.”

  I jumped at her tone and jerked my head up to see the old Lanie glaring at me.

  “Don’t you get lost in him again,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t let him break you.”

  The words hit me like ice pellets in the face. My eyes grew hot with unbidden tears.

  “I’m trying,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice and hating it. “But every time he gets close it’s like—”

  “He gets close?” Lanie asked, leaning forward. “How, dear, is he doing that?”

  “Because I’m a moron and can’t seem to escape the magnetic pull,” I said, swiping the tears off my cheeks as they fell. “I don’t know. He’s just friggin’ everywhere. I don’t go looking for him.” Except for today. But we’ll keep that to ourselves.

  She leaned further forward and gave me a stern look. “You need to remember that he doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Can you record that so I can play it on a loop?” I asked. “Now that Bailey sold him everything, it’s like there’s nothing he doesn’t touch. Including that thing my mother signed us up for. You are coming with me the next time.”

  “Which would have been today?”

  “Okay, tomorrow.”

  Nick walked in, plopping into their oversized chair like the
world had worn him clean out. “Vegas is exhausting,”

  I blew out a breath and swiped under my eyes, grateful for the change in subject.

  “Good exhausting, but I think I’ve walked around the planet twice in the last two weeks.” He frowned at me and gave his wife a double-take. “Are you okay? Did I interrupt something?”

  “Not at all,” I said with a smile.

  “Do I need to kick somebody’s ass?” he asked, making me laugh out loud. “Because I’m on it.”

  “No,” I said, kicking at his foot. “But thank you for offering. And you run every morning like a freak. How can walking tire you out?”

  Nick shook his head. “Slow walking. Shopping walking. Strolling walking. Give me a hard fast run any damn day over that.”

  “Love you,” Lanie sang.

  Ralph jumped up on the couch next to her. He rolled onto his back with his head in her lap, tongue lolling out as she rubbed his belly. Oh, to be a dog.

  “Love you too, babe,” Nick said, saluting her. “Just let’s look at a beach vacation next year, okay?”

  “How about a cruise?”

  Nick gave a thumbs-up. “Even better.” He nodded my way. “So, back to the story. Sorry, this house is like an echo chamber. Who’s Bailey?”

  “He’s kind of a mystery, as not too many people ever see him,” Lanie said. “I think my aunt was friends with him when they were kids. But he owns like a third of the town, and he sold all the land around the pond for that entertainment area Alan was talking about last month.”

  “Alan,” Nick said under his breath, like one might say bed sores or pond scum.

  “I know,” Lanie said with a grimace. “Sorry. Oh, Carmen, I had an e-mail that there’s a town meeting tomorrow, so maybe they aren’t working on the pavilion. You going?”

  I looked at her. “The one driven by my ex-husband?” I asked. “Are you really asking me that question?”

  “It’s about the project.”

  I groaned. “Do you know how tired I am of that? And of people giving me the side-eye because they can’t move into this century?”

  “Which would give you a chance to look like a grown-up at a meeting with both men,” Lanie said.

  I sucked ice cream off my spoon. “Didn’t make much difference the other day But maybe repetition might dispel some of my pariah status with those who still think I wronged Saint Dean in some way.”