by Maria Luis
“I don’t know, Ben is pretty observant.” Josie curled her hand around the strap of the leather purse and studied Shaelyn. “He realized I was pregnant the first time before I even knew I was pregnant.”
“Does he sideline as a gynecologist?”
With a tinkling laugh, Josie shook her head. “Sometimes he likes to pretend that he’s an OB-GYN. In bed.”
“That’s, ah, invasive. I mean, fun.” Please stop talking, she told herself. “Definitely fun.” Shaelyn snatched the neon-green dildo and gestured toward where the bride-to-be was speaking with Anna. “I’m gonna go ask my cousin if we’ve got any more of these bad boys.”
“Sure.” Josie cut Shaelyn a speculative glance. “Let me know if y’all do. I was thinking about purchasing one. Sometimes Ben likes to watch, if you know what I mean.”
Shaelyn knew exactly what Josie meant and, oh boy, way too much information.
“I’m sure it’s entertaining—I mean, I’m sure he’s interested.” With the dildo clutched in one hand like a lifeline, Shaelyn pointed the toy at Josie. “I’ll keep you updated.”
“Yes . . . . Please do.”
It was times like these when Shaelyn questioned her complete ineptitude to string two words together. For as many personas as she’d adopted over the years for her old job, she’d never learned to feel comfortable in her own skin.
Turning on her heel, she surveyed the room until she spotted her cousin by the cash register. She sidestepped a group of young women discussing the upcoming nuptials and beelined toward Anna. Only once she had closed the last two-foot gap did she say, “You didn’t tell me my fiancé’s wife would be here.”
Anna glanced over, her attention dipping to the dildo. One perfectly waxed blond brow lifted wryly. “Are you done playing with the merchandise?”
Feeling her cheeks burn with embarrassment, Shaelyn dropped the toy on the counter like it had scalded her skin. “Josie Beveau was interested in buying one.”
“Did you make the sale?”
“I was a bit preoccupied with their sex games, to be honest.”
“Whose sex games?”
“Josie and Ben’s.”
“So, you didn’t sell her one?”
“What?” Shaelyn shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Just like you didn’t tell me she was going to be here tonight.”
Anna shrugged, which made the pink chiffon strap of her blouse slip down the curve of her right shoulder. Anna had always reminded Shaelyn of a delicate fairy: fair hair, fair skin, fair eyes, fair voice. When she’d been young, Anna had been fair of personality, too—as in she had been content to play the fiddle to her parents’ tune.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Anna said as her fingers punched the keys on the black calculator. “It’s not like it was Brady Taylor. I might have warned you then.”
“Might have?” Shaelyn echoed.
“After I watched you wave that dildo in the air like you just don’t care.”
Shaelyn stared dumbfounded at her cousin. “Are you quoting ’90s hip-hop at me?”
Another shrug—the chiffon strap slid even lower. This, Shaelyn decided, was how her cousin attracted hoards of men like bees after nectar. Without even realizing it, Anna reeled them in like bait. Clearly she and her cousin did not share the same genes.
“Julian’s decided he wants to be a musician,” Anna said. “He’s listening to everything. Including what his grandma calls ‘baby-making music.’”
“Tell me he’s got Genuine on that playlist.” Ever since she’d watched the first Magic Mike a few years ago, Shaelyn had become a sucker for the song “Pony.” Channing Tatum had made the song downright magical.
“I told him there were limits,” Anna said with a shake of her head. Her blond ponytail swayed with the movement, her chandelier earrings tapping the column of her neck. “But if I have to hear about liking big butts one more time, I’m cutting off the boy’s creative license. Him and his friends discovered Sir Mix-A-Lot last week, and Julian memorized all the lyrics to spite me.”
“How is this spiting you?”
Pushing the calculator across the counter, Anna turned toward Shaelyn and propped her elbow on the glass top. “Because he thinks it should be La Parisienne’s theme song.”
Shaelyn didn’t know Julian very well but it did sound like a good case of teenage mischief. “I think he may be shitting you.”
“Oh, definitely. I told him he wasn’t allowed to date until he turned fifteen, and I’m sure this is his revenge.”
Shaelyn thought Julian could do better with his scheme for revenge but kept that opinion to herself. Anna worked really hard to provide for her son, and it was obvious from the puffy dark circles under her eyes that running a business and being a single parent were rapidly catching up to her.
“If you want, I can watch him sometime next week when you’re working,” she offered.
A glimmer of amusement danced in Anna’s blue eyes. “He’s not three, Shae. He’s thirteen. He doesn’t need a babysitter.”
“Right. I didn’t mean that he needed one. Think of it as a thank-you for giving me this job. I’ll introduce him to the brilliance of the Spice Girls and Girl Power.”
Instead of laughing as Shaelyn hoped she might have, Anna’s gaze flicked to Shaelyn’s left and stayed there. A weird choking noise emerged from the back of her throat.
Oblivious, Shaelyn picked up the green dildo and held it up in the air. “I’ll take your silence as a yes. Now, promise me you’ll warn me in the future if Brady—”
“Are those real rhinestones?”
6
Her entire body froze as her eyes sought out her cousin. No, she mouthed. Life would not be so unkind as to have Brady—
Yes, Anna mouthed back.
Crap.
She oh-so-carefully placed the sex toy on the counter, gathered her bearings, and turned around. What was the first rule of safety again? Oh, right. Never put your back to the door. She’d learned that in the self-defense class she’d taken after Carla Ritter had hired her.
Instead of scoping out the instructor’s tight buns, Shaelyn should have been memorizing his words of wisdom.
But no, the instructor’s butt had been distractingly spectacular, and here she was staring at the wide expanse of Brady’s chest because she couldn’t bring herself to look at him directly. Not that avoidance did her any good. She could feel the weight of his stare, could sense the laugh he was, for once, trying to keep buried in his chest.
By the time she found the courage to meet his gaze, his wide grin was tipping the scale at shit-eating. Unwanted lust hit Shaelyn hard. The fact that her body reacted so powerfully to him felt like a complete betrayal.
“Well?” he prodded. “Real or not?”
“Not.”
“Interesting,” he murmured. He looked past her to offer her cousin a smile. “Nice to see you, Anna. You doing well?”
“Oh, just great! Wonderful!” Anna half stepped back. “I should go check on the bride-to-be.” A “nice seeing you, Brady!” was tossed over her shoulder as she scurried off.
“Coward,” Shaelyn muttered under her breath.
“Is she okay?”
Shaelyn looked over at the man beside her, hating him for not becoming one of those stereotypical popular guys in high school who grew a paunch and lost their hair by the age of thirty. Instead, Brady was the stuff of fantasies, dressed in black combat boots, jeans, and a black T-shirt. Dirty fantasies, specifically. The boots added an extra inch to his already towering height, and she had to lift her chin to make eye contact. “Yes,” she said, “Why do you ask?”
“She couldn’t get away fast enough.”
She snorted. “Grab onto something steady here a second—this might shock you—but not everyone feels blessed by your presence.”
One hand slid down into the front pocket of his jeans in a move that shouldn’t have been sexy but undeniably was.
“How about you?” he asked, his blue
gaze steady on her face.
“How about me, what?”
“Feelin’ blessed, sweetheart?”
“Don’t be delusional. And I’m not your sweetheart.” Not anymore, at any rate. She cast a swift glance at the women milling about the boutique. Nearly every woman had her attention trained on Brady, including the bride. Those looks were hungry.
“Let’s take this outside.” Settling one hand on his arm and the other on his back, Shaelyn guided him toward the front door. “Before the bachelorette party gets the idea that you’re the male entertainer for the night.”
A laugh escaped him. It was the deep, throaty rumble of a man who was all too comfortable in his own skin. “If I were the entertainment, they’d be counting their blessings.” He looked down at her, and those blue-on-blue eyes glimmered with good humor and something else, some unnamed emotion that hinted at his desire for her to rise to the occasion and stand toe-to-toe with him. Something that made Shaelyn’s breath hitch and her skin tingle with anticipation. “You’d be counting, too, sweetheart.”
That something elicited tingling in a different territory altogether, and Shaelyn forced her legs to keep moving. “I’m not your sweetheart,” she repeated with less heat this time.
Brady opened the door. With his palm flat against the frosted glass, he stood to the side so she could pass under his arm. It was the closest they’d been to each other in years, and Shaelyn hunched her shoulders to avoid brushing up against his body.
The scent of pine and mint flirted with her senses as she ducked past. The mint made sense, since he’d always had a weird obsession with mint-flavored Mentos, but the pine didn’t, unless it was his cologne. When they were kids, his signature scent had been the original Axe body spray before she’d admitted to hating the smell. That same day he’d brought her to the local Rite Aid and instructed her to pick out a new deodorant for him.
“Want to take one last sniff?” he’d asked, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Palm playfully cupping the side of her head, he had tugged her so close that her nose got personally acquainted with his armpit. “Get a good whiff, baby,” he’d said with a hearty laugh, his shoulders bouncing with mirth.
“Oh, c’mon! Gross!” Sliding out from his grip, Shaelyn had danced back and grabbed a pink loofah from a display rack. She pelted one at his shoulder while the next glanced off his head. He’d snatched her wrists and brought them up to his lips to place a kiss on her knuckles.
Boyish and tender had once been Brady’s M.O. But that was the old Brady, the old them.
Now, Shaelyn didn’t hesitate in putting distance between them.
Tourists and locals alike were wandering the sidewalk, and across the narrow street a tour guide, dressed in all black, boisterously regaled his group about a house that was really haunted. The boutique, if she had to guess from the way he kept pointing at La Parisienne.
Maybe she’d take Julian on a ghost tour. Didn’t teenage boys like spooky things?
As if he had the power to read her mind, Brady asked, “How’s Anna’s kid doing?” As if by habit, he slid his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. His thumbs remained outside the denim, pointing down like a pair of arrows to the bulge in his jeans.
“Shae?”
Her gaze jerked up to his face. “Sorry, what did you say?”
The right corner of his full mouth tipped up as if he knew exactly what had distracted her. “I asked how Anna’s boy is—how old is he now? Ten? Eleven?”
“Thirteen,” Shaelyn said. “Apparently he’s decided to memorize the lyrics to ’90s baby-making music just to mess with his mama.”
A full-fledged smile broke out on his face. “That’s my kind of man.”
She rolled her eyes. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”
“You shouldn’t be. Remember when I used to sing all kind of shit after we—”
Nope, not happening. She did not need images of them lounging in bed—or in the back of his old truck—infiltrating her mind. Shaelyn lifted up a hand to cut him off. “That was a rhetorical question, Brady.”
His gaze dipped to her mouth, lingered for a moment too long, and then swung back up to her face. She had the strangest feeling that he wanted to nip at her fingers. When he spoke, his voice was husky as if he, too, was tormented by the past. “You know how I feel about rhetorical questions, Shae.”
“You know how I feel about you.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Why are you—” A mother pushing a stroller cut Shaelyn off as she maneuvered between them along the narrow, cracked sidewalk. As she passed, a blanket fell from the stroller to the ground. Brady was quick to retrieve it for the woman.
“Here you are, ma’am,” he murmured, handing out the blanket.
“Oh, thank you!” The woman took it with an apologetic smile and draped it over the stroller’s handle. “So sorry to interrupt.”
“No need to apologize, ma’am.” Shaelyn shot a look at Brady over the woman’s head. Although his expression was casually polite, she noted the tick pulsing in his jaw. “There’s nothing to interrupt.”
“Well, have a great night, y’all.” With another gesture of thanks, the woman continued down the street.
“What were you saying?” Brady prompted, studying her intently. And although there was barely a breeze, goosebumps flared to life on the exposed skin of her arms and legs. “You were going to ask me something.”
How did she even go about explaining that he was her problem? The thought of seeing him all over town unsettled her for more reasons than she wanted to name. Or could name for that matter.
“I just don’t get why you’re even here.” She jerked her thumb toward the boutique. “This isn’t exactly your scene.”
“Really?” Those tempting laugh lines of his reappeared when he flashed a smile. “Lingerie, sex toys, and potentially single women isn’t my scene?”
It would be all too easy to get swept up in his sly jokes, his mischievous Destin-blue eyes—
Shaelyn shook herself. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin and steeled herself against his charm. She would not consider his suggestion for them to put a pair of handcuffs to good use. No. No, she wouldn’t.
Even if she was half tempted.
“Unless you’ve hit a dry spell, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than hover around here.”
She didn’t miss the narrowing of his gaze. In a voice as deep as gravel, he growled, “Sweetheart, if I were having a dry spell, my target wouldn’t be a group of women who think a neon-green dildo can do the job better than a man can.”
Heat rushed to her cheeks. “I didn’t—”
He took a step closer. “If I were having a dry spell, I also wouldn’t waste my breath on talking to a woman who is engaged.”
“Brady—”
His black combat boots took two more steps in her direction, and her back pressed flush against the storefront. His broad chest filled her vision. One look up at his expression told her that if they had been anywhere else, his hands would have been planted on the glass on either side of her head. Enclosing her in.
Even now he barely maintained the slim distance between them. Maybe five inches separated her breasts from the hard planes of his chest. His breath was a hot whisper that rustled her hair; hers was a shaky exhale that did little to hide how his close proximity affected her.
Shaelyn placed a hand in the center of his chest. She didn’t even know if she was pushing him away or pulling him closer. They couldn’t be doing this. They shouldn’t be doing this.
“Brady.”
She uttered only his name, but apparently it was enough because he moved. With much-needed space between them, the tension in her shoulders eased and she drew in a heavy breath. She so did not want to think about what her and Brady’s little tête-à-tête looked like from the interior of the boutique.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here?” she asked. “I’ll be honest, I can’t think of one good reason.”
&
nbsp; One of his big hands lifted to rub the back of his neck. His short sleeve inched up with the movement, exposing hard biceps . . . . As well as heavy obsidian ink.
She blinked. He hadn’t had a single tattoo in high school. For God’s sake, the Taylors would have eaten two-day old Taco Bell before allowing their golden grandchild to permanently mar his precious body.
And, okay, so a small part of Shaelyn was curious to know what he had inked on his body; the other part of her didn’t care. Not one bit, she told herself as she focused her gaze on his face. All the better to ignore how his bicep bulged under the thin fabric of his cotton shirt.
His fingers raked through his thick hair before settling on the back of his neck. His words came on the tail end of a breath like he was nervous. “I actually came to apologize.”
A bubble of laughter escaped her. Brady Taylor, apologize? Had New Orleans frozen over? A few moments of awkward silence followed, in which she realized he wasn’t pulling her leg, and in which she gathered from his expectant expression that he was waiting for her to say something. “No, really,” she said, “Why are you here?”
His brows knitted. “I told you. I came to apologize.”
Briefly, the heady thought occurred to Shaelyn that he might be apologizing for breaking her heart. She traced the familiar lines of his face with her gaze: the crooked bridge of his nose (broken from the time she’d punched him in the fifth grade), the thin scar beneath his right eye (earned during a high school football game), and the small banana-shaped birthmark on his jawline (assigned at birth).
She’d been waiting for this moment for years. From tearfully kissing while Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” played in the background to kneeing him in the balls and throwing a drink in his face, she’d imagined the whole spectrum of their possible reunion. Rainbows and unicorns, to rage and Taylor Swift’s Red album, there wasn’t one scenario she hadn’t thought of.
But with Brady’s words playing on repeat in her head—“I told you, I wanted to apologize”—she realized that her mind was utterly, resolutely, pathetically blank. Blank!
