Barking Up the Wrong Tree

by Jenn McKinlay

  “Why didn’t you mention this when I met you that first day in the park?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said. “You looked familiar, but I didn’t put it together until after I was leaving your house the morning after and saw the name DeCusati on the mailbox. Then it all started coming back to me.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “Well, you’d made it pretty clear that we were dusted and done,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to convince you to see me again even as a friend.”

  Carly was having a hard time breathing; she was sweaty and shaky, sort of like a panic attack but more like a bout of hysteria. She desperately wanted to know who his cousin was but, then again, she was afraid to find out.

  She spun on her heel and strode toward the door. She needed some fresh air—right now!

  “Carly, wait!” James hurried after her.

  Once she was outside, she paused to suck in a deep breath of the cold night air. It helped. There was no avoiding the next question. She had to know.

  “Who was your cousin?” she asked. She forced herself to look calm even when the urge to throw up roared up the back of her throat. She closed her eyes for a second, silently begging Please don’t let it be him, anyone but him.

  “Preston Bradley,” he said.

  Of course, it was him. She turned and hurried to the car, while James fell in beside her.

  “Or as he likes to refer to himself, Preston Sinclair Bradley, the third,” James said. He seemed oblivious to her distress and Carly planned to keep it that way. “He tried to get us all to call him ‘Trey’ for a while but my sister kept calling him ‘Tres Imbecile’ so he gave up.”

  “Ha!” Carly forced out a puff of air that she hoped sounded like a laugh.

  “I got the impression that you and Preston were together at the time,” James said. He glanced at her. “Is it weird that I’m his cousin?”

  “Me and Preston? Together? That’s a laugh,” she said. She wondered if James noticed that she didn’t really confirm or deny.

  He held the car door open for her, and she slid into the driver’s seat as if it were an escape hatch. She could not get away from here fast enough.

  “Oh, well, good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want things to be weird between us.”

  Carly looked at him.

  “Well, any weirder than they already are,” he joked.

  “No, not weird.” She forced a smile while thinking, Too late.

  “Good. I’ll see you around, sunshine,” James said.

  Carly nodded and started the engine. With a wave, she shot back down the drive. She refused to look in her rearview mirror at him. She didn’t want to have an image in her head of him standing alone in the cold, for fear that it would make her turn the car around and tackle him to the ground like her basic instincts were badgering her to do.

  She shook her head, trying to get her common sense to wrestle her wayward thinking down to the mat where it could hold it for a three-count and save her from making an ass of herself. They were friends, just friends. And even more than that, he was Preston’s cousin, freaking Preston Bradley, the bane of her existence! There was no way she could be anything more than friends with James and right now even that was in question.

  What if James and Preston talked and Preston told him about . . . no, she couldn’t go there. Her shame needed to remain in the past. Given that her time with Preston did not put him in a good light, surely he wouldn’t say anything to James. And even if he did, what did it matter?

  She had to remember that what she had with James was now no more than an exchange of goods and services. Carly pondered that thought. Was she the goods or the services? Since he was servicing her by making the recording, Carly’s undetermined favor must be the goods. Well, that sounded dirty in a decidedly sexy sort of way.

  Ugh, everything was sexy when it came to James. She was pretty sure the man could make household chores sexy to her, especially if he did them naked or, even better, in just an apron.

  She resisted the urge to do a face palm, barely. She had to get a grip on this attraction and strangle the life out of it. She did not date, she did not sleep with men more than once; no repeats, that was the code she lived by, and she was not changing it just to shag James Sinclair one more time. Never mind that it would likely be the hottest night of her life. It would only lead to heartache and pain, and she was not going to do it.

  Since James was tempting her beyond reason to break her no-repeater rule, there was clearly only one thing to do. She needed to add a layer of protection to keep herself from doing something dumb. She was going to have to break out her baggiest, droopiest cotton underwear, her granny panties, bolstering the foundation layer to keep herself from having a lapse in judgment and encouraging his hands to wander to places that they shouldn’t.

  As a former lingerie buyer, underwear had been her business, and Carly would rather die than be caught in anything that looked like it was even marginally comfortable. A girl had to have standards after all. But with James around, making her cross-eyed with lust, she needed to add a layer to her no-sex shield. Those droopy drawers of hers were going to be more effective than a chastity belt.

  • • •

  Carly arrived at Making Whoopie bright and early. Jillian glanced up at her as she came through the front door, carrying two large paper cups of coffee from The Grind.

  “What?” Carly asked.

  “You’re an hour early,” Jillian said. “What gives?”

  Carly shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Really?” Jillian tossed her head of dark curls and leveled Carly with an assessing look. “So, you being here this early has nothing to do with James coming in to talk about his special order.”

  “Is that this morning?” Carly blinked. She had forgotten that James was supposed to meet with Jillian. Frankly, she’d been so freaked out about him being Preston Bradley’s cousin that she hadn’t slept and was barely functional.

  “I can’t be here,” she said. She thrust the coffee at Jillian just as the door swung open and James popped his head in.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said. “Am I too early?”

  It was nine o’clock on the button. The boy was punctual. Of course he was. Was there nothing wrong with him? Truly, it was maddening.

  “Perfect timing,” Jillian said. “Come in. I’ve got a tray of samples for you to plow your way through.”

  “Excellent,” James stepped into the bakery. He inhaled deeply and sighed. “This smells like heaven.”

  Jillian grinned at him and said, “I think so, too.”

  Carly glanced between them. They were both tall and lean and would make a spectacular-looking couple. Why couldn’t they have hooked up instead of her and James? Everything in her world would be so much easier if she had never decided to have a one-night stand with the hot physical therapist.

  “I’ll just go tidy up the back,” she muttered and stomped into the kitchen.

  She knew it probably looked like she was running away. She didn’t care. She put her coat and purse in the small office and set to tackling the dishes Jillian had left in the large industrial steel sink. Jillian usually came in at five in the morning and baked straight through until they opened at nine. Since she didn’t bake, Carly had taken over the role of chief dishwasher, which was mostly mixing bowls and baking sheets, to give Jillian a break from the kitchen.

  While Carly was happy to help her friend in her whoopie pie business—was grateful, in fact, for something to do—the thought of being stuck in this kitchen doing dishes for many more weeks made her want to stick her head in the oven. The only job offer she’d gotten so far was as a buyer for a uniform company. She just couldn’t get that jazzed about shopping for polyester slacks and scrubs in every color of the rainbow, plus the job paid nothing and was in a Podunk town i
n the Midwest. Not to be picky but even scrubbing dishes looked better than that.

  She did a quick gut check and realized her self-esteem was about as low as the tide in a hot, dry summer. Seriously, if she didn’t get a good job offer soon, she was going to have to go for therapy.

  She tied on an apron, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and set to work, filling the sink with hot, sudsy water. She hoped scrubbing the batter out of the bowls would calm the paranoid beast still trying to claw its way out of her chest. She had spent the night tossing and turning, wondering how much James knew about her past with Preston. She didn’t think she could bear it if he knew the full extent of her humiliation. Even now after all these years, just thinking about it made her queasy.

  Full disclosure, at least to herself, she would die, just die, in a complete and total meltdown of mortification, if James knew about the truth behind her relationship with Preston.

  “What a mess,” she muttered. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  She took her anxiety out on the bowls, scrubbing hardened bits of batter with the rough side of the sponge. Sweat was beading up on her forehead and it wasn’t until she paused to wipe it away that she got the feeling someone was watching her.

  She spun around expecting to find James. When she saw Emma and Mac, she felt the tiniest twinge of disappointment, which she was certain was only because she wanted to see James with her new sense of boundaries in place. She wanted to be sure that he knew nothing of her humiliating past, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  “Angry at the mixing bowls?” Emma asked.

  “They’re being difficult,” Carly said.

  “Well, if you can take a break from scolding them, we want to talk to you about James.”

  “No.” Carly turned her back on them.

  “What do you mean ‘no’?” Mac asked. She sounded outraged.

  Carly wasn’t surprised; very few people ever said no to Mac, as she usually had them charmed into her way of thinking before they even realized she’d put the whammy on them.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Carly said. She glanced at them over her shoulder. “You think I should date him and the answer is no.”

  “But—” Emma looked at Mac in consternation. She pulled the blue beanie off her blonde hair and shook it out as if she was gearing up for a fight.

  “No.”

  “Just hear us out,” Mac said. “He’s a great guy. He takes such good care of Hot Wheels and the aunts adore him. He’s very successful in his business, he’s totally hot, and he owns a freaking lighthouse. What more could you be looking for in a man?”

  Carly continued scrubbing the bowl in her hands even though it sparkled and was destined for a spin through the industrial dishwasher beside the sink.

  “You can’t ignore us,” Emma said. “Well, you can, but you know we’ll just bug you and bug you and bug you until you listen.”

  This was true. These girls had staying power, especially when they got their nag on. Carly was pretty sure that coupledom was a disease and once infected the people in them were determined that everyone around them should suffer from the same sad circumstance, sort of like contamination from a zombie bite. No, thank you.

  “All right, get it out of your system,” Carly said.

  She began to load the dishwasher while Emma and Mac moved to stand one on each side of her. They stood with their arms crossed over their chests in identical postures of stubbornness.

  “We like James,” Mac said.

  “A lot,” Emma agreed.

  “Good guys are really hard to find, and he seems like a really good one,” Mac said.

  “But that isn’t the point,” Emma said.

  “It isn’t?” Mac asked. She glanced at Emma with a bewildered look. “I thought the whole point was that we wanted her to reconsider keeping James at arm’s length.”

  “We do,” Emma agreed. “But even more we want her to think about why she refuses to be in any relationship ever. I mean it’s been years, years, since that ass hat ruined her life and it’s time for her to rethink it.”

  “And she’s standing right here,” Carly said. She loaded a whisk and two spatulas.

  They ignored her.

  “But we’re still for James, right?” Mac asked. “I mean the whole reason we want her to rethink the relationship thing is because we think James is a keeper.”

  “Yes, of course,” Emma said. “But she has to get the root of the problem—”

  “Still right here,” Carly said. She used her thumb to scrape a cookie crumb off of a baking sheet.

  “Sorry,” Emma and Mac said together.

  Carly put the sheet in the dishwasher and closed it. She stepped back and glanced at her friends. She knew they loved her. She knew that their own happy relationship statuses were influencing their opinion of her life. The truth was she liked being unencumbered and they just didn’t get it. She decided to be very clear with them once and for all.

  “Listen, even if I were looking for a man, which I am not,” Carly said, “I would never ever pick someone like James. He’s entirely too nice, too well-mannered—”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s the worst,” Mac said. She looked at the ceiling as if praying for patience. Carly ignored her.

  “I’m serious,” Carly said. “I like bad boys.”

  “Oh, right, because the one relationship you had with a bad boy turned out so well that you’ve never dated again,” Emma said.

  Okay, that smarted. Carly knew her friends meant well but she felt the need to end this discussion permanently.

  “Stop trying to get me to be like you,” she said. “I am not you, either of you, and I don’t want a relationship. Ever. I like my life exactly as it is. I do what I want, when I want, and with who I want, even if it’s a different who I want every Saturday night. I live my life with no compromises, and it’s fabulous.”

  Both Mac and Emma opened their mouths to speak, but Carly cut them off by holding her hand up.

  “No. You need to hear me, really hear me, for a change.” She couldn’t maintain eye contact while she fibbed, so she stripped off her rubber gloves while she spoke. “I don’t care how nice James is, I am not now nor will I ever be interested in a relationship with him. He’s not my type, frankly, he just doesn’t do it for me. Okay?”

  She glanced up. Both Mac and Emma were staring past her at the door. They looked horrified. Carly felt her heart sink into her shoes.

  “And he’s right behind me, isn’t he?” she asked.

  Chapter 20

  Both Mac and Emma nodded, looking sickly. Carly blew out a breath and turned around with the brightest smile in her arsenal. When she saw him leaning against the doorjamb, studying her, it faltered but only for a second.

  “James,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Clearly,” he said. He glanced at Emma and Mac, looking serious, and spoke in a tone that made his request more of a politely worded order. “Will you excuse us, ladies?”

  “Sure.”

  “You bet.”

  Both Emma and Mac bolted from the room, practically tripping each other on their way out. Traitors!

  Carly sighed and prepared to do triage on the fractured male ego she was certain she had just unwittingly laid to waste. Men could be so fragile—another reason she had no desire to be involved with anyone. She wondered what she could say that would stop the pout and sulk she was certain was coming her way.

  She glanced back at James, pulling together a string of adjectives about his performance the other night that would assuage his wounded male ego.

  One look at his face, however, and the words stuck to her tongue. Instead of looking irritated or wounded, he was grinning at her. And it wasn’t just a grin of amusement, it was a lascivious, naughty, wicked twist of his lips that made her knees buckle just enough s
o that she had to grip the counter at her back to stay upright.

  “I can explain,” she said.

  He ignored her. He continued to cross the room until he was standing just inches in front of her. Carly felt her pulse pound in her ears and her breathing was shallow, both adding to the dizziness that was already impairing her balance.

  “Not your type, huh?” he asked. He leaned forward, resting his hands on the counter behind her, penning her in with a proprietary swagger that she knew she shouldn’t find so hot, but it totally was.

  Carly tipped up her chin. She knew she needed to put up a barrier here, before this whole thing got out of hand. She didn’t want to crush him but then again maybe it was for the best. This would keep him from misconstruing anything between them, inadvertently making more of their one night than he should.

  “No, you’re not. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is,” she said.

  She turned away from him and glanced down at the tray of whoopie pies that needed to be taken out front. She didn’t hear him move and was startled when he reached around her to take the tray, pressing her up against the table just the slightest bit so that she could feel his front against her backside, causing a flash of heat inside of her that made her think she might spontaneously combust. He leaned closer so that his mouth was just a breath from her ear.

  “You are quite possibly the worst liar I have ever met,” he said. The feel of his breath in the shell of her ear made her shiver and she was pretty sure she went cross-eyed for a moment. He lifted the tray over her head and stepped back. “And now you’re in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” she asked. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.

  “Big trouble,” he said. “Because now I feel the need to prove you wrong. I am most definitely your type—well, if the way you cry my name out when you’re about to—”

  “Point made,” Carly said. “No need to revisit the past.”