by Heidi Betts
“Everybody but Gage, anyway,” Ronnie put in.
With a shoulder shrug, Grace said, “He should have thought of that before he lied to her and wasted three years of her life. Now it’s Jenna’s turn to call the shots and make the big decisions, and he’ll just have to deal with it.”
Grabbing the cordless phone from the wall, she passed it to Jenna. “You’ve got the story straight, right?”
Jenna nodded.
“Good. So dial.”
Taking a deep breath, Jenna focused her slightly blurry gaze on the key pad and very carefully punched in the series of numbers she had memorized, even though she shouldn’t have known them at all.
While she listened to the ring and waited for an answer, Grace pinched Ronnie’s elbow and lured her out of the kitchen and into the other room. At the muted giggle that followed, Jenna closed her eyes, covered her face with her hand, and seriously considered hanging up before the humiliation that was about to befall her kicked in and became absolute.
But then the ringing stopped and a deep male voice sounded in her ear, sending her stomach plummeting toward her toes and making Phase One of their plan complete.
There was no turning back now.
Purl 2
When the phone rang at ten minutes after ten, Gage Marshall had already been asleep for about forty minutes.
It didn’t say much for a thirty-three-year-old man to be passed out in front of the television so early on a Friday night, but his life hadn’t exactly been a thrill a minute lately.
If his friends had been in town, he probably would have met them for some beer and fries down at The Penalty Box, but since they were both on the road for the next couple of weeks for an off-season charity event with some of the other players from the Cleveland Rockets, he was on his own. And on his own meant cold pizza, the last remaining Rolling Rock from a six-pack in the fridge, and whatever half-interesting ten-year-old action flick he could find on the tube.
Even work didn’t seem to do it for him these days. He still enjoyed going undercover for the CPD, but he wasn’t on an active case right now, which gave him more downtime and more time to devote to paperwork than he would have liked.
Downtime meant a lot of time alone and too damn much time to think. He didn’t want to think, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be alone.
But he’d made his bed, he supposed, and now he couldn’t even bring himself to sleep in it.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he pushed himself up from the couch and searched for the remote to mute the TV. The phone continued to ring, shaking his brain like a snow globe until he grabbed up the handset and barked, “Yeah?” into the receiver.
A second passed with nothing but dead air and he was about to hang up-after muttering a few colorful invectives the prankster wouldn’t soon forget-when a soft, tentative voice played over the line.
“Gage?”
He knew that voice, dreamed of that voice, and it went straight to his gut.
“Jenna?”
For a minute, he thought he might still be asleep. Maybe he was dreaming, because there was no earthly reason he could think of that she would voluntarily call him. Not after the way they’d parted and the length of time they’d been divorced.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said hesitantly while he continued to rub his eyes and tried to make sense of the alternate universe he’d apparently fallen into sometime between arriving home from work and then waking up after passing out on the sofa.
“But I’m at Aunt Charlotte’s house all alone, and there’s something wrong with the pipes under the sink upstairs. There’s water everywhere, and I’m afraid it’s going to start soaking through the floor into the downstairs ceiling.”
Her words trailed to a stop, but only so that she could take a deep breath and dive in again.
“Normally, I’d ask Dylan or Zack to come over and help me out, but they’re both out of town right now. And I’d call a plumber, but you know how expensive they are for evening and weekend visits, and it makes me a little nervous to think about inviting a stranger to come out here with no one else around. Could you… I mean, would you mind…”
She paused again, and he could picture her licking her lips and shoring up her confidence before continuing.
“I hate to inconvenience you, but is there any chance you could come out and take a look? I’d just die if Aunt Charlotte came home from her trip to a house that looked like it barely survived a hurricane.”
Gage’s brain was still slogging along, trying to process the fact that his ex-wife was on the phone and that she’d called him willingly. Not only willingly, but to ask him for a favor. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and that do-do-do-do do-do-do-do theme started to echo in his head.
Scratching his chest through the worn cotton of his T-shirt, he cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, okay. Sure.”
He checked his watch, calculated the distance to Charlotte Langan’s isolated farm house from his apartment in the city, and added, “Give me half an hour.”
When Jenna responded, the words seemed to come out in a rush. “All right, I’ll be here. Thank you.”
There was a loud click and then he was left with nothing but a dial tone buzzing in his ear.
Ten minutes later, boots and jacket on, Gage walked to his older-model, nondescript, gray unmarked car, small metal tool box in hand. He didn’t know a lot about plumbing, but he figured he could tighten a few fittings or replace a pipe or two, if needed, just to get Jenna through the rest of the weekend.
The real problem wasn’t how he’d manage to fix a leaky faucet, but how he was going to handle being alone with Jenna for the first time in two years. Away from their small group of friends; away from the boisterous crowd at the bar where they hung out; even away from her odd, mop-headed little aunt.
And he didn’t know who he should be more concerned for. Jenna… or himself.
Jenna slammed the phone down, feeling like she might throw up. “He’ll be here in thirty minutes.”
Grace made a sound that was half squeak, half giggle, and both she and Ronnie bounced up and down on the balls of their feet.
“Okay, let’s get moving. Ronnie, you go park your car out of sight. Jenna and I will run upstairs and get the bedroom ready.”
Oh, God, the bedroom.
This was crazy. It was insane. How had they ever come up with such an off-the-wall idea?
Unfortunately, Jenna agreed that it was the only way she was ever going to get what she truly wanted. It was either this, or be miserable for the rest of her life. And at twenty-nine, she just wasn’t ready to give up and play dead yet.
So she would have to go forward with Phase Two of Operation Knock-Me-Up as planned. Even if the very thought made her feel nauseous, lightheaded, and scared witless all at once.
Thank goodness Grace and Ronnie were there to help her out and walk her through everything that needed to be done-and for the margaritas. Otherwise she would have wimped out hours ago.
Finished in the bedroom and bathroom, she and Grace hurried back downstairs just as Ronnie returned from moving her car behind the barn where Gage wouldn’t notice it when he arrived.
“Everything set?” Ronnie asked, slightly out of breath. Her leopard-print raincoat was misbuttoned, two of the fastenings crooked and one in the wrong hole, leaving a flap of extra material where it didn’t belong. A thin layer of mud caked the bottoms of her wedges, sprigs of grass sticking out of the light brown sandal straps that crisscrossed over her otherwise bare feet.
Not the least bit anxious about what they were doing, Grace gave a cheerful, “Yep,” and skirted around them back to the kitchen.
Digging through her purse, she pulled out a flat plastic tray of tiny white pills. “Get me a couple bottles of beer and two teaspoons,” she ordered, beginning to pop the pills one after another through the foil backing.
Ronnie and Jenna quickly gathered the items Grace needed and set them on the island in front
of her, watching as she ground a dozen pills into a pile of dust on the counter. With almost scientific care, she deposited half the white powder into each of the two bottles of Corona they’d never gotten around to drinking for Mexican Night and slowly swirl, swirl, swirled them until she felt they were adequately dissolved. Then she screwed the caps back on and returned them to the refrigerator.
“Remember,” she told Jenna, “you uncap the bottles and hand them to him. Don’t let him take the caps off himself or he might notice they’re not on quite right. And if he starts to get woozy after the first one, don’t bother with the second. We want him passed out and compliant, not comatose or dead.”
Jenna swallowed hard, but nodded. She’d been running the details of the arrangement and exactly what she was supposed to do over and over in her head. Everything had to be perfect. Everything had to go according to plan.
If she messed this up, if anything went wrong… Well, she would never get another chance like this one, she was sure.
The rumble of an engine coming up the road sent her heart into palpitations. “Oh, boy, I think he’s here.”
Almost as a single entity, the three women froze, then drew ragged breaths into their lungs.
“Okay, this is it,” Grace said, giving Jenna’s arm a squeeze. “You can do this. It’s going to be great. And if you need anything… I don’t know. Call us, or send up smoke signals, or scream or something.”
Jenna nodded, wringing her hands together as the worst case of nerves she’d ever experienced assaulted her.
Ronnie ran up and gave her an encouraging hug. “We’re going to sneak out the back, and if we don’t hear anything from you after a bit, we’ll call a cab. But like Grace said, if you need anything, scream bloody murder and we’ll be back in a snap.”
While Jenna stood rooted to the spot like she was stuck to fly paper, Ronnie and Grace slipped around her and out the door at the rear of the house. A minute later, the front door rattled with Gage’s heavy knock, and Jenna wondered if there was still time to run to the kitchen and throw up.
A second later he pounded again, and she decided puking up her guts would have to wait. Forcing herself to move, she headed for the door and yanked it open, hoping her face didn’t look as flame-hot as it felt. Hoping her mouth would work even though it felt stuffed with cotton. Hoping her heart wouldn’t pound its way out of her chest at the mere sight of Gage standing there, looking better than a winning lottery ticket, a hot-fudge sundae, and steamy, all-night sex all rolled into one.
No matter how long they’d been separated or how many other men she’d gone out with before or after him, he was still the handsomest man she’d ever seen. Towering over her at around six-foot-three, he was built like a great oak, all broad planes and thick muscles.
His face was a collection of hard angles and gorgeous, masculine features. Brown eyes that could go from pleasant to murky and back without warning, surrounded by lashes longer and softer than any man deserved. A hint of five o’clock shadow outlined his jaw, making him look more menacing than usual.
If that were even possible. With his black biker boots, worn leather jacket, and a physique that would put The Rock to shame, the man all but oozed danger from every pore. He might as well have had a blinking red WARNING! label stamped on his forehead.
Which, of course, she’d always found amazingly attractive. Maybe it had something to do with his being almost twice her size, or how safe and protected he made her feel, but the qualities Gage possessed that made most people quake had always turned her on. Big time.
At the moment, his dark brown hair was military short, just starting to grow in from having been shaved to the skin. He’d been known to let it grow out well past his shoulders, too, though, tying it back with a rubber band or thin strip of leather.
It depended, she knew, on what type of case he was working. When they’d first met and married, he’d been a uniformed officer for the Cleveland Police Department. Soon after, though, he’d transferred to vice and started working undercover. Short stints at first that gradually grew longer and longer.
If he was infiltrating a biker gang, his hair was long and sometimes straggly. If he was infiltrating a white-supremacist group, it was the shaved skinhead look. And if it was something in between, then his hair would be somewhere in between.
The funny thing was that Jenna had liked it all. She’d enjoyed tickling her fingers over the slightly stubbled curve of his skull just as much as running them through the long, silky strands when they’d reached halfway down his back.
What she hadn’t liked were the changes to Gage’s personality. The distance that seemed to grow between them more and more each time he returned home after being away.
Gage cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to the present.
“You going to let me in, or have you changed your mind about letting the house flood?”
It took a second for Jenna’s snookered brain to send the message to her limbs that she needed to move, especially with the way the deep timbre of his words turned her spine to jelly. But finally she stepped back, pulling the door with her, and waved him inside.
“Sorry,” she said, having to lick her lips and swallow to clear the squeak from her voice. “I’m just tired, I guess. I didn’t expect to still be up this late or to have to deal with household emergencies.”
As stories went, it wasn’t exactly a New York Times bestseller, but it was the best Jenna could do on the fly, with a roiling mass of nerves wiggling around in her belly. She just wasn’t as good at this sort of thing as Grace and Ronnie… or as good as Grace and Ronnie assumed she would be, at any rate.
“Can I take your jacket?” she asked.
He set the dented red metal toolbox in his hand on a bench just inside the front door, and while he shrugged out of the mammoth black leather coat, Jenna ran to the kitchen and grabbed one of the bottles of Corona from the fridge that Grace had so carefully spiked. She gave it a little swirl and twisted off the cap on her way back into the other room.
Having been in Jenna’s aunt’s house many times before, Gage didn’t need her to show him around and had already hung his jacket on one of the wooden dowels running along the wall above the matching bench by the time she returned.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the cold bottle toward him in what was not the smoothest motion in recorded history.
Gads, she hoped he didn’t figure out what was going on… or that she’d had one or two-maybe six-drinks too many with her so-called dinner. Let him chalk up her odd behavior to the discomfort of having to call her ex-husband in the middle of the night to help with some supposed plumbing problems. Or even to simply being alone with him again after their less-than-amicable breakup and two years of avoiding each other as much as possible given their mutual social circles.
Gage’s warm, slightly wary brown eyes took in the beer in her hand before moving back up to her face.
“I thought you might appreciate a little compensation for coming all the way out here in the middle of the night. I know it’s not your favorite brand, but…”
She shrugged one slim shoulder, hoping he’d buy what she was selling, because Lord knew she didn’t have a clue what else to say to convince him to accept the offering.
Thankfully, he lifted the pressure by reaching out for the bottle and taking a quick first swig. A small wave of relief washed over her as she mentally checked that step off her list. If she could just keep him drinking, then this plan might actually have a shot at working.
“So where’s this leak?” he asked, picking up his toolbox. The hand holding the beer lowered to thigh level at his side and he clutched the neck between two fingers.
Realizing there wasn’t much chance of getting him to imbibe more of the doped Corona right this minute, she dragged her gaze up from his strong, tanned hand to his equally strong, tanned face… and slurped up her tongue long enough to tilt her head and turn for the stairs.
“This way.” She spun ar
ound to lead him in the opposite direction… and nearly did a three-sixty as the room whirled around her and her feet failed to stop when they should have. Catching herself, she took a second to regain her balance, then started forward, hoping he hadn’t noticed her imitation of Drunken Ballerina Barbie.
She’d never considered herself inherently sexy, and she’d lucked out when she’d met Gage, because he’d always seemed to find her attractive enough just the way she was. She hadn’t needed to doll herself up or bat her lashes or slap on layers of makeup and lip gloss to catch his attention. There’d been an instant and unmistakable zap of electricity between them that had never required play-acting or embellishment.
Even so, as they made their way up the narrow stairwell to the second floor, Jenna found herself purposely swishing her hips, taking exaggerated Mae West steps that put her a couple of feet ahead of Gage and hopefully kept her rear end at his eye level.
Until the sleeping pills mixed with his beer kicked in, she had only her feminine wiles to lure him. And since they’d been divorced for almost two years now, she wasn’t certain her appearance or flirting skills would have the same effect on him as when they were married.
At the top of the stairs, she took her time rounding the newel post, keeping her hand on the carved wood and drawing her fingers slowly-seductively, she hoped-along the railing. It also helped to keep her steady, but he didn’t need to know that.
Gage didn’t say anything, simply followed along behind, his big boots thumping first on the creaky old stairs, then along the creaky hallway floor.
That was the thing about two-hundred-year-old houses, she thought absently as they approached the upstairs bathroom. Everything tended to be squeaky, rickety, and in constant need of repair.
Jenna liked her aunt’s old farmhouse, though. It had a comfortable, homey feel to it, and was filled with a million childhood memories. Not just her own, but those of all the generations that had come before.
Keeping with Charlotte ’s unique-okay, quirky-sense of style, the upstairs powder room was crazy and colorful. The walls were a watermelon pink so bright, it almost hurt to look at them. There was no window in the room, but both an overhead lamp and rows of tiny bulbs on either side of the mirror above the sink provided plenty of light.
