Sounded reasonable to Sean. “What did your folks think about you being on the show? Chasing pigs and competing for that Pete guy?”
“I didn’t talk to them while we were taping, but of course I could guess.” She put her fork down and reached for her coffee.
“You couldn’t contact them?”
“Yes, but we could only make one call a week on the phone in the Hitchin’ House, and those were recorded. I didn’t want a recording of my mom crying and my dad swearing over the pig phone.”
“Pig phone?”
“It was a landline phone shaped like a pig.” She took a sip from her cup. “It was pink and grunted instead of ringing.”
Of course it did. “What did your parents think about your groom?”
“Dad thinks Pete’s a pansy ass.”
“Is he?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged one shoulder. “My mother couldn’t quit crying and thought I shouldn’t marry a man I didn’t know. She was right. I’d had two solo dates with him, but we weren’t really alone. The whole film crew was there.”
“Are you shitting?”
“No. Some of the other girls met him alone in his private Pig Pen.” A separate bungalow on the property which housed his euphemistically titled bedroom, Hog Heaven. “I never went to his Pig Pen.”
“Again.” He leaned forward. “Are you shitting?”
“No. I didn’t want to humiliate my parents or embarrass myself.”
That wasn’t what shocked him. “You were going to marry a man you didn’t know and hadn’t spent any time alone with?”
“I know it sounds crazy.” From beneath the fish head on her hat, she lifted her gaze to the picture of the Pesuta shipwreck on the wall behind him as if to gather her thoughts. “But the show was crazy.” Her brows lowered. “We got caught up in it. At least I did.”
He held up one finger. “Your parents didn’t want you to marry him.” A second finger. “You didn’t want to marry him.” Then a third. “So why in the hell were you getting ready to marry him?”
She returned her gaze to his and said as if it made perfect sense, “Our pictures were on the tea towels, as the saying goes.”
What saying? And what the hell was a tea towel?
“We did manage to have a few moments alone when the camera crew packed up for the day. Like after the surf challenge.” She took another drink and shook her head. “He did seem really moody that day. Like someone forgot to put sprinkles on his birthday cake.” Her nose wrinkled. “We were still on the beach and I was busy trying not to stare at his disturbingly long toenail.”
“What?”
“That should have been my first clue that I couldn’t marry him.” She set her cup on the table. “Then he said he doesn’t like little dogs—which normally qualifies as a deal breaker.”
His toenails and dislike of dogs were probably the least of the problems between them. “A lot of people don’t like little dogs.”
One brow winged up her forehead. “In my experience, men who don’t like little dogs are compensating for something.”
He leaned back and reached for his glass. “Like what?” He knew what she meant; he just wanted to hear her say it.
Beneath the brim of her cap, her eyes moved back and forth as if she was a perp in a room filled with cops. Her cheeks turned pink and she lowered her voice like she was going to say something shockingly vulgar. “Small penis.”
That was it? Penis? Sean hated the word “penis.” It sounded small. “Not all men who don’t like little dogs are hung like babies.”
“How many men do you know who don’t like little dogs?”
Just him, and he didn’t have a problem in the hung department. He took a long pull of beer, then asked, “Explain it to me again. Why in the hell were you about to marry a moody guy with bad toenails and small junk?”
“Well, if you love someone—”
“Don’t tell me you loved the guy,” he interrupted. “It doesn’t happen that way.”
Her big eyes rounded. “How many times have you been in love?”
“Enough to consider marriage?”
“Yes.”
“Never.”
“Then you don’t qualify as an expert.”
“Not saying I’m an expert. Just curious how a girl like you ends up engaged to a man she doesn’t even know.”
“A girl like me?”
Mindful of the trap women set to snap off a man’s leg, he answered carefully, “Not ugly.”
“Pressure.” She sat back in her chair. “And convincing myself that it was love at first sight.”
He scoffed.
“You don’t believe in love at first sight?”
“No.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I believe in lust at first sight.” He was looking at it square in the face. Staring into lust. Lust and chaos. A dangerous combination for him.
She sighed and gave up the pretense of maybe, sort of, could have been in love. “I told myself that I was probably wrong about his moodiness, and I figured he could get pedicures.” She set her knife and fork on her plate and pushed the remains of her waffle away. “Everyone can’t help but fall in love with Yum Yum and . . . and we could compensate.”
He shook his head. “Princess, there’s no compensating for a small dick.”
“I once dated a guy and . . .” Her voice trailed off and she didn’t finish.
“Exactly.” He looked at her, sitting there in her ridiculous fish hat, looking absolutely beautiful. Sean Knox had sat across from a lot of beautiful women. Some were a punch in the gut and a feast for the eyes. Others piqued his curiosity and left him wanting more. Lexie was both: a double dose of seduction and cut with some grade A drama. That made her a trifecta of trouble. The kind he didn’t need.
He raised one hip and pulled a wallet from his worn Levi’s. Last night, he got a real good glimpse of her corset. He imagined it had been designed for her wedding night, and the thought of some man peeling her out of it had made him peel out of the Harbor Inn parking lot, once he’d dropped her and Jimmy off.
He’d needed to put some distance between him and Lexie Kowalsky, but here he was. Back again, thinking about her underwear and soft skin. “I got your waffles covered.” Sean pulled out a green queen and tossed it on the table. He’d checked up on his coach’s daughter. It was the right thing to do and bound to make him look like a hero in the eyes of his teammates.
“Are you leaving?”
He glanced up from the twenty and into her blue eyes. “Yeah.”
“Where are you going?”
He’d done his duty.
“To your mom’s?”
“Maybe.” He shoved the wallet back into his pocket and stood.
“I’d love to meet her.”
“Why?” She rose also. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly subject themselves to Geraldine Brown.
“Well . . . she’s sick with a leaky pancreas. That sounds . . . debilitating. I could help out and . . . make some soup.”
Soup wasn’t going to cure his mother’s hypochondria.
“I am an excellent nurse and I have people skills.”
“No. Thank you.”
She grabbed his forearm and dropped the pretense of a soup-making nurse with people skills. “I’m bored to death, but I can’t exactly walk around town. I might get recognized.” He ran his gaze from the top of her head, down the fish hat and shirt, to the baggy sweats tucked into a pair of ugly boots. Sean wasn’t an expert in women’s fashion, but he hated baggy sweats and fucking Uggs. “If I have to spend all my time cooped up in my room, I’ll go crazy.”
He didn’t owe her anything. Hell, he’d already given her his shirt and paid for her breakfast. The thought of her chatting it up with his mother made his brows pinch together.
Her eyes widened and her grasp on him tightened. “I’ll go all Bates Motel.”
For a few seconds, he gave it some thought as he lowered his gaze to her hand wrapped around his
forearm. She was fresh meat for his mother’s deathbed stories, the ones she told repeatedly to anyone within hearing or shouting distance of her. If he threw Lexie to his mother, she’d refocus her attention away from him.
When he didn’t answer right away, Lexie took that for a yes, and a big smile curved her lips and lit up her eyes. She released him and grabbed a worn bomber jacket that had to belong to Jimmy. She shoved her arms through the sleeves, then followed him out of the waffle house. Fresh snow crunched beneath their boots, and puffs of their breath hung in the air as they walked to his mother’s Subaru. Sean opened the passenger door as Lexie shoved a hand down the front of her shirt. His breath caught in his lungs, leaving only her little puffs to hang between them.
“Chap Stick,” she said, as if that explained anything. Her hand fished around between her breasts before she pulled out a tube of Burt’s Bees. “I don’t have a purse or pockets in my sweats. This jacket has huge holes instead of pockets.” She coated her lips with honey-scented balm.
“What else do you have in there?” He was tempted to look for himself.
“The phone Jimmy bought for me.” She shoved the yellow tube back down her shirt. “Don’t freak out if you hear ‘Crazy Train’ coming from my bra. That’s my ringtone. It seemed appropriate.” She got into the car and said, “Thanks for letting me tag along. I won’t cause problems. I promise.”
She broke that promise before he drove from the parking lot. “Can we stop somewhere so I can get some bottles of water?”
“I thought you weren’t going to cause problems.” They stopped at a drugstore, where she hung a blue plastic basket from her elbow. She filled it with two bottles of water, a bag of pretzels, breath mints, mascara, and a “zit stick.”
“Thanks, Sean.” She grinned as they pulled away from the store. “I won’t cause you any trouble now.”
He doubted it. From the top of her fish hat to the bottoms of her ugly boots, Lexie Kowalsky was all kinds of trouble. The kind that—All aboard! Ozzy Osbourne yelled from Lexie’s boobs. Sean accidentally jerked the wheel and nearly drove off the road. Ozzy laughed like a lunatic as she dug into her shirt. I, I, I, I . . .
Lexie pulled out a TracFone and glanced at it before answering. “Hi, Marie. Oh yeah? Did Jimmy give you this number?” She listened for several moments, then said, “Sandspit, British Columbia.” There was a brief pause, then she said slowly, “Sandspit . . . British Columbia . . . No. Sand—spit.” She spelled it out, then laughed. “I know, right?”
Sean drove up the two-lane road and gathered from the one-sided conversation that the driver of the silver clown car was on the other end of the line. Lexie scratched her head beneath the fish hat.
“I’ll be home day after tomorrow,” she said as he turned up a gravel drive. “Come over and we’ll open a bottle of wine and order takeout . . . Okay. Love you, too.” She ended the call, and the phone went back down her shirt. Then she placed her hands on the outside of her T-shirt, cupping the undersides of her breasts, and adjusted herself.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She pushed one side and then the other.
Sean forced his gaze from her shirt as he drove around a weathered A-frame house that had once been the main lodge at a KOA. He pulled to a stop and glanced at Lexie adjusting herself one last time. “Do you need help?”
She looked across at him, blinked as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone, then said, “I got it.”
“What you got down there beside a phone and Chap Stick?” And big breasts.
“A couple of toonies, some sawbucks, and a Borden.” She dropped her hands. “My driver’s license and hotel key.”
Money and a hotel key. “You have a lamp in there like Mary Poppins?”
“I wish I had a magic carpetbag, right about now.” She didn’t wait for him to walk to her side to open her door. “I’d pull out my makeup bag, good shampoo, and black cloche.”
Sean had no idea what a cloche was, and didn’t think he wanted to find out.
“And underwear.”
Underwear was something he did know about, especially the lacy stuff worn by Victoria’s Secret models. The sound of her boots on snow and gravel seemed unusually loud as she followed behind him toward the back door. He wondered if he should warn her about his mother. Give her a quick heads-up, but how could he explain Geraldine Brown? He’d tried in the past, but people tended not to believe him when he told them that his mother’s illnesses were all an act. That she was at death’s door at least twice a year. It sounded crazy because it was crazy. If he talked about it, people tended to think he was crazy, too. Either that or a coldhearted asshole of a son who didn’t care about his dying mother.
The back door squeaked as Sean opened it, and Lexie followed him inside. Instantly he was reminded of exactly why he’d stopped bringing his friends home at the age of twelve. Pill bottles and every kind of over-the-counter medicine took up most of the counter space. And just like when he’d been a kid, a rush of heat rose up his neck and face.
“Sean?”
He paused in the middle of the small kitchen as the old familiar heat scalded his esophagus. As a kid, he’d always had the most embarrassing mother on the block, or at his school, or sitting in the bleachers.
“Is that you? Are you back?”
This latest illness had been inspired at the medical clinic when a nurse suggested she get a glucose tolerance test for pancreatitis. “Were you expecting someone else?” Six months ago, she’d gone to the doctor for a scratchy eye, but she’d left his office at death’s door. Again. That time angina had come knocking and, of course, she’d answered.
He stepped into the living room and was somewhat relieved to see his mother lying in her recliner, covered by one of the multicolored afghans she was always crocheting. An Elasto-Gel Cranial Cap covered her head, secured with Velcro around her throat. He’d bought her the cooling cap when she’d had “meningitis.” What it had to do with her pancreas was a mystery. One he didn’t care to solve.
“I brought a guest,” he said, and glanced back at the woman close behind him. “Mom, this is Lexie Kowalsky.” He didn’t know which hat was stupider, the fish hat or the cranial cap. “Lexie, this is my mother, Geraldine Brown.”
Lexie stepped around him and moved to the recliner. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Brown.” She actually took his mother’s hand and patted it.
Geraldine turned her head and studied Lexie. “You’re not a local girl.”
“No. I live in Seattle.”
“Well, Sean.” She looked from Lexie’s face to his. “You didn’t tell me that you’d brought . . . a special friend?”
Lexie wasn’t a special anything. “Surprise.”
“I’ll say.”
Lexie dropped his mother’s hand and Sean was almost certain she recognized the Gettin’ Hitched bride. Geraldine Brown watched nonstop television, and Lexie was big news. His mother didn’t mention anything about the show, and Sean grew suspicious.
“How long have the two of you known each other?”
Lexie looked over her shoulder at him and they answered at the same time.
“For a while” collided in midair with “Not long.”
Lexie’s eyes widened. “For a while, but sometimes it seems as if we just met,” she said, then turned her attention back toward his mother. “Has that ever happened to you?”
“Just once. Sean’s father was the love of my life. I felt like I’d known him forever, yet never long enough.” She sighed for dramatic effect. “We were soul mates, but he died when Sean was two.”
Theodore Knox had been his mother’s second husband. She’d gone on to marry once more.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Geraldine managed a chin quiver. “Thank you.”
For God’s sake. It had been twenty-five years. “It’s past noon. Are you hungry, Mother?” he asked before she went into her long-winded story of how she’d tried desperately to nurse the love of
her life back to good health after a fall from a roof in Prince Rupert. His uncle Abe had always said that his mother had become addicted to the attention she received while caring for her dying husband and had turned into an attention-seeking hypochondriac afterward.
“I’m too nauseous to eat.” She reached up and adjusted the Velcro strap beneath her chin. “What do you have in mind?”
“I bought chicken, pasta, apples, bananas, and green vegetables.” His mother didn’t believe in fresh fruit and vegetables, but Sean was more mindful of what he put in his body. During the season, he consumed five thousand calories a day. He ate a prescribed diet of healthy carbs, lean protein, and fresh fruit and vegetables. He drank two to four liters of water, and the occasional vodka tonic or beer.
“Bread?”
“Multigrain.”
His mother’s scowl told him exactly how she felt about multigrain anything. “You know multigrains give me terrible gas and diarrhea.”
The last thing he wanted was to discuss her bodily functions. It might be her favorite subject, but he’d rather take a hammer to his skull. “Or I can stick a frozen pizza in the oven for you.”
“It has cheese. Cheese is good for me,” she argued like a kid, but at least she wasn’t studying Lexie’s face like she was about to jump up, all excited about the Gettin’ Hitched bride.
“Fake cheese.”
“Hot dog.”
“Lips and assholes.”
“You know . . .” Lexie said, and put a finger to her chin. “I can probably come up with something better for you, Mrs. Brown. A woman suffering with delicate health, as you do, needs proper nutrition. Not pizza.”
He’d been raised on hot dogs, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and frozen pizza. His mother didn’t like him or anyone telling her she wasn’t eating right. Although it was true, he half expected her to cross her arms over her chest and have a fit.
“I know you’re right,” she said.
What? It must have been the words “suffering with delicate health” that turned her so compliant. That or the Elasto-Gel had frozen her brain.
“I just ate, but I’d love to make you a good meal. I’m a really good cook,” Lexie assured them. “I get it from my mother’s side. Along with my talent for fashionable pet apparel.” With a slight smile, she turned on the heels of her boots and walked from the room and into the kitchen. He watched her go, his gaze sliding down her back and her long hair, pausing for a moment to appreciate the curve of her waist before stopping at her nice round butt. He didn’t know who was crazier, the woman in the cranial cap or the one in the fish hat.
The Art of Running in Heels Page 6
