The First Time Again: The Braddock Brotherhood, Book 3

by Barbara Meyers

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m hungry. You’re here. I’m paying you.”

  “You’re paying me to clean,” she corrected.

  “Yes, but since I’m paying you by the hour, it shouldn’t matter to you whether you’re cleaning or cooking. If you can cook, that is.”

  Baylee rolled her eyes. What self-respecting North Carolina country girl didn’t know how to cook? Or garden? Or can vegetables? Or pluck feathers off a freshly slaughtered chicken? “You’d be surprised what I know how to do.”

  Trey’s eyebrows rose. He gave her a speculative look. Uh-oh. Did he think she was flirting with him? Did he think she was throwing out a double entendre or something? Insinuating some kind of sexual intent? As if.

  “I’m sure you’re a woman of many talents, but how are you with eggs and bacon?”

  “In addition to cleaning up after you, you want a short-order cook as well?”

  “Forget it. This is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  He turned and did his limp-walk across the kitchen. Baylee watched him for a minute, debating. He had a great ass. What difference did it make if she spent her time cooking or cleaning? Twenty-five an hour was twenty-five an hour. The longer she stayed, the more money he’d have to fork over when she left. One of the things she did enjoy about her current work situation was quick cash.

  He took a carton of eggs and a package of bacon out of the refrigerator and set them on the counter.

  He reached into a bottom cabinet near the stove and pulled out a cast-iron skillet. He turned to set it on a burner and yelped in pain. The pan fell from his grasp, bounced off his foot and landed on the freshly mopped linoleum. Baylee expected him to grab his foot, but instead he grabbed his right shoulder with his opposite hand and swore a blue streak while staring at the welt on his foot.

  Baylee bit her lip, caught between laughter and sympathy. Clearly he was in pain, but the scene was right out of The Three Stooges. She picked up the skillet. Gently, she nudged him away from the stove. “Move over, Curly, before you permanently disable yourself. Are you all right?”

  Trey mumbled something she didn’t catch. He hobbled to the refrigerator and yanked an ice pack out of the freezer. He pulled out a chair and settled the ice pack on his foot. “Sorry about the language,” he said.

  Baylee laid strips of bacon in the skillet and turned the heat up underneath it. “What do you want besides bacon and eggs?” she inquired over her shoulder.

  When he didn’t immediately answer she glanced at him, and he yanked his gaze up from wherever it had been and met hers after a second or two.

  Had he been checking her out? No way. If Trey thought she was going to be his temporary convenience and come running every time he crooked his little finger at her, he could forget it.

  He continued to use the fingers of his left hand to massage his right shoulder. “Toast? Grits. Coffee. Juice.”

  “Got it.” She turned back to the stove, where the bacon had begun to sizzle. She lowered the heat.

  “I’ll make the coffee,” he volunteered.

  She glanced at him again over her shoulder. “You know how to make coffee?”

  “It’s one of many things I do rather well.”

  “I’m sure you’re a man of many talents.”

  “I’d let you do it, but you’d probably mess it up.”

  “Probably,” she agreed. “How do you want your eggs? And how many do you want?”

  “Three. Over easy if you can manage it.”

  She gave him another look through veiled lashes. “I’ll give it a shot.” She’d been cooking over-easy eggs practically her whole life. “Where do you keep the grits?”

  He directed her to an upper cabinet as he got to his feet. He replaced the ice pack in the freezer and stepped to the counter near the sink. He emptied the grounds from his earlier coffee into the garbage and rinsed the carafe and the filter. He went through the ritual of adding water to the machine and grinding the beans.

  Baylee turned to watch. He dumped the ground coffee into the filter. “You grind your own beans?”

  “A decent cup of coffee is one of my few remaining vices.”

  “Ah,” she said. She went back to her own efforts, laying the bacon on a plate covered with a paper towel, popping bread into the toaster, stirring the grits and cracking the eggs.

  The coffee was done brewing about the time everything else was ready. Trey had retrieved orange juice, butter and jam from the refrigerator. He’d poured the delicious-smelling coffee into a mug and taken the seat he’d occupied earlier, again propping his right leg on the adjacent chair.

  Baylee set the eggs, bacon, grits and toast in front of him.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. You should have made some for yourself.”

  “I ate already.” A container of yogurt nearly three hours ago. Her stomach growled, giving away the lie. Trey pretended not to hear it.

  “How about some coffee?”

  “Um, I should probably get back to work,” Baylee hedged.

  Trey pointed to the chair across from him. “Sit.”

  “Excuse me. I’m not a trained hound you can order around.”

  He got up and poured another mug full of coffee and set it at the place he’d indicated. “Sorry. Please sit.”

  The aroma of the coffee, something exotic and spicy and rich, wafted in her direction. She opened the refrigerator for the small carton of cream she’d noticed earlier.

  She took the seat Trey had indicated and added cream to the mug until it was a warm golden-brown color. She lifted it, sniffed and took a sip. “Mmm.”

  Her gaze met his over the rim of the mug. He looked both pleased and amused by her reaction. “Told you.”

  He started eating, chopping the bacon into crispy bits and mixing it with the eggs until it was a runny, brownish, yellow-and-white mess. Baylee sipped her coffee and tried not to stare, which was hard to do since he was right across the table from her, directly in her line of vision.

  She let herself drift back in time, remembering the party Jenny had dragged her to the summer before their sophomore year of high school. A gathering of mostly graduating seniors, of which Trey had been one. The Annual Senior Drunk was the unofficial term for this particular get-together. Jenny’s cousin Bart was in Trey’s class, and he didn’t seem to care if Jenny and Baylee tagged along with him.

  Even now, Baylee couldn’t quite figure out how Trey had singled her out from the group of half-drunk teenagers gathered around the bonfire, or how he’d hooked his arm around her neck in a possessive gesture. He’d been drinking, of course, and so had she. As usual, Trey was the life of the party, joking and laughing and cutting up. Mister Popularity. He called her “darlin’” and nuzzled her neck. She could remember the feel of all those guy muscles when he pulled her closer still and whispered in her ear.

  Usually, a girl like her would have been beneath Trey Christopher’s notice. But by some miracle she’d snagged his interest. She’d wondered ever since if it was only a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Maybe she’d simply been convenient and willing and slightly drunk for the first time in her life. Drunk enough not to object to Trey getting what her grandmother would call “too familiar” with her.

  She’d worshipped him from afar her entire freshman year, catching glimpses of him in the hallway or the cafeteria. Following his every move at every football game of the season. He always seemed to have a girlfriend of the month, one of the cheerleaders or the drum majorette or some hottie from the marching band dance line. He loved them and left them with a remarkable regularity, never noticing their broken hearts and longing looks.

  But that warm spring night, when he had his arm around her, she had enough beer buzzing through her system to feel like she’d landed in a fairy tale with the prince of her dreams.

  He maneuvered her away from the thinning crowd of kids and climbed to the hayloft. Once there, Trey had pulled her down with him. He’d been all knowing hands, se
xy whispers and practiced kisses. She thought she’d caught fire, the way everything he did made her hot. Her skin burned and her blood simmered. Surely she’d burst into flame. Though she’d only been fifteen, he made her body ache in ways it never had before or since.

  Somehow, he got her out of most of her clothes. His hands never seemed to still, and she was so caught up in the newness and excitement of being with a boy, along with having her normal inhibitions lowered courtesy of the beer buzz, that she didn’t protest.

  Trey’s skin was hot and slick beneath her fingertips. His shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, which gave her access to his entire upper body. All those boy muscles thrilled her. The scent of him intoxicated her. The hair on his chest tickled her fingers. She didn’t recall panicking when she heard the slide of his zipper. Not even when she felt the brush of him, foreign and completely male, against her thigh, or when he positioned himself between her legs, like a heat-seeking missile searching for access to its target.

  She was lost, swept away in the never-before-experienced sensation. But suddenly, like a broken reel of an old movie, everything stopped. With a sigh, Trey wilted above her, his weight crushing her. It took Baylee’s inebriated brain a moment to realize Trey was not moving. She was lying on a pile of straw in a dusty hayloft with her clothes undone or twisted around her and the dead weight of Trey Christopher on top of her.

  “Trey?” she whispered.

  He didn’t answer. Had he fallen asleep? Was she that boring? She shoved at him enough so she could get out from under him. Embarrassment burned her cheeks. She tugged her clothes back on or back into place, trying not to look at Trey, who was sprawled on his side, half-buried in the hay. His shirt was off his shoulders; his fly was still unzipped and he was sort of spilling out of it, but not in an attractive way. She looked away, embarrassed for him and disgusted with herself.

  She’d left him there as she half-stumbled, half-fell down the ladder from the loft. She found Jenny and Bart, both of whom were ready to leave. To this day, Jenny was the only other person who knew what had happened in the loft.

  Trey had graduated with his class two days later. Afterward he’d gone on a week-long class trip to the Bahamas. She had never seen him or heard from him again until last year at his grandmother’s funeral.

  Baylee jumped when she realized Trey had snapped his fingers not once but twice in front of her face. “What?” she said irritably, trying to hide the blush rising in her cheeks.

  “I said would you like more coffee? In fact, I said it twice. Are you prone to seizures or something?”

  “Of course not.”

  He gave her an assessing stare. “Well, you were definitely out of it.”

  He got up and retrieved the carafe from the counter and brought it back to the table to refill his mug. He lifted the carafe in her direction. She nodded and he topped hers off before taking his seat again.

  He’d finished eating and pushed the dirty dishes to the side. “Let’s talk.”

  Baylee added some more cream to her coffee. She composed herself, banishing the nightmarish memory to the furthest recesses of her mind, refusing to think about the impact it had had on her subsequent choices in life, and held Trey’s gaze.

  “Do you think you could work two days a week?”

  Baylee couldn’t help it. Her eyes bugged out and she set her mug down harder than she meant to on the scarred oak. “Two days? Are you that much of a slob?”

  Trey grinned and emitted a slight chuckle. “I was wondering if your duties extend beyond housecleaning.” He inclined his head in acknowledgment of the empty dishes next to him. “And cooking.”

  “That depends. What did you have in mind?”

  “Laundry, for one thing. Grocery shopping. Maybe the occasional errand.” He glanced toward the screen door. “I’d like to get my grandmother’s flower garden back in shape. At least pull the weeds. Until I get some PT, I’m sort of useless because of my knee.”

  “And your shoulder,” Baylee pointed out. She took another sip of coffee. “What’d you do to it anyway?”

  “Threw one too many passes. Got sacked one too many times. Played one too many games.” Trey shrugged. He reached up and dug his fingers into the shoulder muscle one more time, then gave an exaggerated shrug and tilted his head from side to side to loosen his neck muscles. “Sometimes it hits me if I move the wrong way, or pick up something from the wrong angle.”

  “Maybe you need a massage,” Baylee suggested.

  His eyes lit up. “Are you offering?”

  She hesitated. “Not for the happy ending you’re probably expecting. Plus, my rates go up.”

  “A happy ending for me these days is pain relief. Period. Even if it’s temporary.”

  Baylee shrugged. She got up from her chair and came to stand behind him. “Want to show me where it hurts?”

  Trey dug his fingers into the shoulder again. “Right. There.”

  She put her fingers where his were, and he dropped his hand.

  “Okay.” She dug in with her thumbs. Trey groaned.

  “Did I get it?” she asked, pleased with his reaction in spite of herself.

  “Oh, yeah. Right there. Harder.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” Still she dug into the knot of muscle as hard as she could, first with both thumbs and then with her knuckles.

  “You can’t hurt me.”

  Wanna bet?

  Chapter Seven

  Baylee wriggled around on the lumpy daybed mattress until she could reach the shelf above her head. She found what she wanted immediately and pulled it down with one hand. She pushed the curtains aside and lay back on the pillow. A shake of the snow globe sent the lavender-tinted glitter swirling. Gently, she wound the silver key on the side and listened to the childish voices singing “It’s a Small World.”

  When the glitter settled she shook the globe again, entranced by Cinderella’s gabled castle and the tiny figures gathered in the settling snow around it. She liked to pretend she was there, in the fortress of such a magical castle, where nothing could hurt her. She’d live a fairy-tale life, complete with a charming prince and a happily ever after at the end.

  The thought always made her smile, although lately the only part of any fairy tale she lived most days was Cinderella’s drudgery.

  She’d acquired the snow globe during a family vacation to Disney World. Baylee had a blurry memory of a long car ride during a particularly hot summer and a couple of nights in a no-frills motel room. Her parents shared one queen bed and she and Lisa were in the other. Meals were unexpected treats from fast food joints.

  It was the only time they ever vacationed as a family. When they arrived at the Magic Kingdom and Baylee got her first glimpse of the castle, she’d been absolutely mesmerized. She’d stared at the panes of glass in the window, the turrets and the towers as they approached en masse. She’d been disappointed to discover there was little to the interior, at least little that was accessible to her. Her imagination filled in what it looked like inside. Plush cushions, a fireplace, a purple bedroom with a canopy bed. A home fit for the princess she would be some day.

  Even now, the thought made Baylee smile. Not being a princess didn’t mean she couldn’t dream. She couldn’t wait to escape not only this house but this town with its gossiping tongues and pointing fingers.

  Soon she’d leave the past and her disappointments behind, and Trey Christopher was going to help her do it. Her smile widened. The job with him was going to bump her finances considerably.

  She’d already planned her escape. Orlando, Florida, or bust.

  Two mornings later Trey leaned against the door of the dining room and sipped his coffee. The last thing he wanted to do was sit behind his makeshift desk and go through everything he’d allowed to accumulate on top of it. He didn’t see as how he had much choice. Maybe he’d start by going through his voice mails and text messages. Then the FedEx envelopes. He should probably institute some sort of filing system for his inves
tment reports, contracts, bills and miscellaneous mail. His lip curled in distaste.

  Tires crunched on gravel. Coffee cup in hand, he went out to the porch to watch Baylee exit her car and load up her cleaning supplies. She hesitated only a moment when she spied him watching her.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” He opened the screen door for her and followed her in, a smile on his face. He’d found his assistant.

  Forty-five minutes later, replete with two helpings of French toast and sausage along with orange juice, Trey settled back in the kitchen chair and studied Baylee from across the table. He’d insisted she take a break after she made breakfast and cleaned up. She sipped her coffee and held his gaze.

  “Would you be available to work for me full time?”

  She set down her cup. “Full time? You don’t need a full-time cleaning person.”

  “No. I had something else in mind.”

  She raised her eyebrows, waiting.

  “I need an assistant.”

  Baylee frowned. “To do what?”

  Trey waved in the direction of the dining room. “The mess on the dining room table you dusted around the other day? I need help getting it organized and keeping it that way.”

  Baylee sipped some more coffee. “What makes you think I’m qualified to do that?”

  “You used to work in a bank.”

  Baylee glanced away for a second and then back at him. “I never told you that.”

  “Was it a secret?”

  “No. I didn’t think you’d snoop into my background.”

  “I didn’t snoop. Ryan mentioned it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you interested or not?”

  Baylee propped her chin in her hand and regarded him. Something was going on behind her eyes. Some sort of calculation, Trey thought.

  “I’m interested in hearing your proposal.”

  “I’ll pay your hourly rate for forty hours a week, but I’m the boss. You clean, you cook, you shop, you organize and anything else within reason I ask you to do.”

  “Who gets to decide what’s within reason?”