Hooked On You (Bliss Brothers Book 3)

by Amelia Wilde

  “Something’s going on with the resort.”

  “What is it, you cryptic asshole?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Such language.”

  “Roman…did you see the woman I was with out at the pool? Even a glance?”

  “I saw her.”

  “I walked away from her to come talk to you. Let’s not play games.”

  “This isn’t a game.” He looks up, over my shoulder. “Good. You’re here.”

  I twist around in my seat. My twin brothers, Beau and Charlie. Charlie in his classic flat-front shorts and a white button-down, and Beau in a Hawaiian-print swimsuit and white button-down. Twins. Beau is empty-handed, which still looks weird to me.

  “I hope this is important,” Beau announces. “I was with Claire.” The scent of chlorine wafts off of his shorts. “She took the morning off.” He drops into the chair next to mine, leaving Charlie to stand behind us both like a lanky bouncer.

  Roman fixes Beau with a look. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”

  “Yeah, but you asked Charlie, and I saw how harried he looked—”

  “I did not look harried,” interjects Charlie. “I looked like I was concentrating on the matters at hand, instead of a woman in a hot tub—”

  “You don’t have a woman in a hot tub,” Beau says mildly. “Anyway, I came to offer moral support.”

  “Oh, good. I don’t know how I’d have made it without you.” Charlie lets out a huff of a breath through his nose. “Roman. Go on.”

  “Is this something you’ve all been talking about without me?” I lean toward Roman as he clicks around on the mouse, eyes on the computer screen. “I hate it when you keep secrets until the last second.”

  “This isn’t until the last second, and everyone talks about things when you’re not here. You’re almost never here.” Roman keeps clicking.

  “No, Asher is almost never here. I’m here on a semi-regular basis, if we’re keeping track.”

  “We’re not, really,” says Beau. He looks so pleased with himself. “Wait. Did you have something to do with how distressed Charlie was looking on the way here?”

  “I wasn’t distressed,” sings Charlie. He’s gone over by the window and doesn’t look up from his phone.

  “Charlie. Put away the spreadsheet.” Roman hits a button on his keyboard and turns to face us. “Beau—I don’t know why you’re here. And Drive, this is why I need you back on the road. Charlie, did you find anything?”

  Charlie turns away from the window and stands at the edge of Roman’s desk. “Nothing that makes any sense. Everything we’re looking at right now is very surface-level. The kinds of reports that would be available to the management staff.”

  I don’t know anything about reports, and thinking about that kind of thing—spreadsheets and printouts and god knows what else—makes my skin crawl. I want to climb on the back of a motorcycle and flee from the state of New York. That’s only one of the reasons why Roman’s detailed reporting scheme crashed and burned at the beginning of the summer. “Okay.” I rub my hands over my face. “What are you hunting for then, Charlie?”

  “We’re bleeding money,” announces Roman, and I swear I’m having deja vu.

  “Weren’t we bleeding money before? And your risky business picture fixed all that up?”

  “Uh oh,” says Beau. “Turns out Roman’s dick wasn’t quite enough to raise us up from—”

  “Shut it.” Roman glares at Beau. “Yes, Drive. Something’s going on with the finances that I can’t explain.”

  Beau gasps. “If you can’t explain it…”

  Roman tilts his head back, exasperated. “Why are you here? Go have a fake margarita.”

  “It’s too early for a margarita. A mimosa, more like. Want one?” Beau stands up from his seat.

  “No,” says Roman.

  “I do.”

  Beau snaps his fingers at me. “Coming right up.” He saunters out, greeting people in the office as he goes.

  The instant he’s gone, Roman’s face turns serious. “You’ve started looking, then?” This, to Charlie.

  “I’ve started looking. It’s slow going. All the paperwork—”

  “I get it,” says Roman. “Drive, I need you to get back out on the road and make up some of the shortfall. Okay? All the good deals you can find.”

  HOLIDAY

  My phone rings in my boobs.

  It jolts me right out of a sound sleep, and I know immediately that it was not an attractive sleep. Mouth open, head flopped over sideways…yikes.

  And I’m still in the deck chair by the pool.

  The phone rings again, vibrating in my cleavage. It seemed like a good idea at the time to keep it in there. The number looks familiar, but it’s not saved in my phone. A New York City number.

  “Hello?” I take in a calming breath, trying to clear my system of the adrenaline.

  “Hi there. Is this Holiday Taylor?”

  “This is she.” I feel like I’m back in high school, waiting for callbacks on my applications to the local businesses.

  “Hi, Holiday. This is Wendy Limkins calling from Windspire Publishing.”

  “Right, of course!” I bleat into the phone. “Of course. Wendy. Hi. How are you.” I try to cover my cringe with my free hand, though it’s utterly pointless.

  “I’m doing well,” she says in an even voice, a smile somehow communicating over the line. Wendy is the Human Resources manager at Windspire. She’s the one who hired me. She sent out all the paperwork and she was so nice, and it made me think I could hack it in a New York City apartment with too many roommates and not enough money. “Holiday, I’m calling because I’ve had a request from Ms. Bower, who’s your—”

  “My department head. She’s head of editorial.” Oh, my god.

  “That’s right. She had your official start date down as September third, but in light of a ramp-up in acquisitions, she’d like to move that forward.”

  “Forward?”

  “To the last week of August. It would be…” Paper rustles. “August twenty-seventh.”

  That would mean getting to the city a week earlier. That would mean leaving here a week earlier.

  That would mean making a decision about what to say to Driver a week earlier.

  “Oh, that’s—” My throat goes tight. Maybe it’s stupid that I didn’t blurt out the news when I saw him on the beach, but Driver…he’s not the kind of guy who’s going to want to stick around for this. And I’m going to stick around for it.

  The certainty hits me like a ton of bricks. Bricks ringing with truth. It’s shaken me so much because, from the moment I saw those words on that test, I knew. Just like I know I’m meant to stay inside, alone. Just like I know that home is where safety is, and the outside world is where things can happen.

  Things have happened.

  “I just need a minute to…I’m sure I can make it work.” I want to throw the phone into the pool when those words come out of my mouth. “I’m sure I can.”

  “Are you?” Why is Wendy Limkins so compassionate? “If you need some time to see if you can rearrange your plans, I can let Ms. Bower know—”

  “Don’t. Don’t do that.” There’s too much flying around my head right now to take back the commitment I’ve just made, even though a hollow opens up at the pit of my gut. I can’t go to New York a week early. And I can’t ask Driver to come with me. Can I? No. What was I doing out on the beach if not figuring all this out? “I’ll be there,” I promise, and for the first time in my life, I wish I was like Sophie. She dropped everything and went to Portland. I’m sick to my stomach about moving to New York City.

  Oh, please. It’s more than that.

  “I’ll let her know,” says Wendy. “If anything changes, give me a call, okay?”

  I almost, almost, tell her that I’m pregnant, but swallow back the words like an errant burp. “I sure will.”

  The moment I end the call my stomach growls. “You have to be kidding me,” I grumble at
it.

  “Sounds serious.” The words come from the edge of the umbrella, and I jump.

  “Driver.”

  “Me again.” He steps underneath, his expression caught between serious and searching. “I think it’s another sign.”

  “What’s another sign?”

  “If you’re hungry, I should take you to lunch.”

  “Oh—oh, no.” My hackles go up. “I’m not sure if I should sit in a restaurant, in case the ol’ stomach turns on me.” The ‘ol stomach. This is a train wreck. “I should probably head back to my place.”

  “Where’s your place?”

  “Down the beach, only a little—” I wave in the general direction of my uncle’s place.

  Driver nods crisply. “Right. I’ll come with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Are you kidding?” He offers me his hand and I reach for it automatically, like I’ve been doing it all my life. “With how this day has gone, I’m not letting you out of my sight again until I have to.” I stand up, the warmth from his hand zinging through my entire body. I want to go with him. I want it so badly, even though I know he’s only going to leave.

  He’s only going to leave. He said that the first night we met, and he had no reason to lie.

  “Hey,” he says softly. “Don’t look so shaken up. It’s just lunch.”

  5

  Driver

  The thing about Roman telling me to get back on the road is that now I am called to do the opposite. It’s in my soul, all the way down in my DNA. My mom would tell you the same thing. “You always had your way about everything.” She must have said that a thousand times while I was growing up.

  I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks. She’s not the kind of mom who flits around the Bliss Resort, giving it homey touches and micromanaging. Not by far. Since Dad died, she’s been traveling. And it’s me who wants to be in charge of my own destiny.

  Driver: Are you still in the Southern Hemisphere?

  I send her the text knowing it could be hours or days before she replies, but that’s okay. It’s better to be a little less attached to people.

  I’d almost convinced myself that I’m not attached to Holiday as I made my way through the lobby and out the narrow hallway that leads to the outer courtyard.

  If she was gone, then that was it. That was the universe telling me that it was time to let go of the mystery girl who appeared out of nowhere on the beach a month ago, came back to my house with me, and, to put it lightly, rocked my fucking world.

  The bigger surprise was that she wasn’t gone. And then she agreed to eat lunch with me.

  Did I hold her hand all the way back to her uncle’s cottage? Damn right I did. Right up to the moment she sat down in one of the tall stools at the kitchen island in the sundress that has been driving me crazy for the last hour.

  And now I’m here, trying not to look too hard at it.

  Truth be told, she’s been on my mind every second since I woke up in bed without her all those weeks ago. I caught myself more than once looking in the windows of passing cars on the freeway, hoping like an idiot for a glance of her strawberry blonde hair.

  She considers me with big gray eyes, her chin in her hand, like she’s sizing me up for something more than lunch. It wouldn’t get to me, normally, but with Holiday…

  “So, first things first.” I rub my hands together. “What are you hungry for?”

  Holiday purses her pretty lips. “Honestly?”

  “I’d say honesty in this case would be a good baseline. I can and will cook for you, but why waste this moment on food you don’t want?”

  She smiles, eyelashes lowering. “Honestly…pancakes.”

  “All right.” I clap my hands together and turn to survey the rest of the kitchen. It’s not a bad vibe in here. Professional-grade stuff, but without the snobby professional grade cavernous room around it. It’s open and airy, the kitchen leading right into a living room that I wouldn’t mind hanging out in. “Do you have all the stuff for pancakes?”

  “Mmm. There should be plenty of stuff in there. I don’t do the shopping, so I’m not sure exactly…”

  I turn around to face her. Her cheeks are pink. Sheepish. That’s the word that comes to mind. “That makes sense.”

  “Does it?”

  “In a house this size, it absolutely does make sense that you don’t do the shopping.”

  “I would normally do the shopping,” she says as I start rummaging through the cupboards. “This isn’t…how I normally live.”

  “You don’t normally live in a lakeside mansions?” I turn so she can see me smiling at her. “I’m not judging. I don’t normally live at the resort, either. I spend a lot of the time in roadside motels.”

  I catch her raising her eyebrows before I turn back to the work at hand. “You spend time in roadside motels?”

  “Yeah. I don’t like flying, and the gas probably adds up to more than what it would cost to hop a flight out of the city and back, so I try to save where I can.”

  “I didn’t think the Bliss Brothers were big savers.”

  “I can see why you’d get that impression.”

  “We used to visit here as a kid. My parents called it the Big-Spender Resort.”

  “They’re right about that. A lot of the people who visit spend pretty big. But we’re not all about the private club. We have lots of affordable spaces, too.” I pull some Bisquick out of the cupboard and drop the box onto the counter. “I sound like a brochure.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Enough about me.” Butter from the fridge. Milk. Sugar. Vanilla. Two eggs. “I want to hear more about you.” A bit of baking soda, which I don’t see until—there it is.”

  “There’s not much to know about me.”

  “Didn’t seem that way a month ago.”

  She shifts in her seat and I open more cupboards. Mixing bowl. Tucked next to the mixing bowl is a griddle that fits over the stove and plugs into a wall outlet that seems made for this.

  “You wanted to know more about me a month ago?”

  I have to turn around and look her in the eye for this. “Holiday, I don’t even know your last name, and I’ve thought about you every day since then. Why else would I be making you pancakes?”

  HOLIDAY

  Why else would a person walk all thew ay down the beach to cook pancakes for another person? Specifically, why would Driver come all this way to cook for me?

  He doesn’t know me at all.

  If he did, he wouldn’t be standing in the kitchen stirring things into a bowl. Too many things.

  “These look like complicated pancakes.”

  He throws me a grin over his shoulder and my whole body bends to catch it. “I bet you follow the recipe on the box, don’t you.”

  I always have, and it’s never been very good. “Yes. And it’s Taylor.”

  “What’s a tailor?” He whisks melted butter into the Bisquick.

  “My last name. It’s Taylor. Now you know.”

  “Now I know.”

  I study the lines of his shoulders as he whisks more ingredients together. Driver takes the time to separate out the egg yolks and the whites, stirring them in at different points during the recipe. Pancakes made from the box’s directions have always tasted too much like egg to me, but I have a feeling these won’t.

  I have a lot of feelings, watching him standing in the afternoon light of this gorgeous kitchen.

  “What else did you want to know?”

  Driver’s watching the clock on the stove. “You can’t whisk it too long, otherwise it starts to get weird.” After exactly one minute, he stops whisking and opens the drawers on either side of the stove. On the third try, he comes up with plastic wrap, which he uses to cover the bowl, then pops it into the fridge.

  The fridge door closes on its own with a low hiss, and Driver comes to stand at the island, both hands planted and the muscles of his shoulders outlined by his shirt. Those eyes�
�those eyes. I could melt right off the stool.

  “I never expected to see you again.” He narrows his eyes. “You said you lived a few places down from the resort that night.” That night resonates, every moment flickering through my brain like a silent film. “Still, I didn’t think you’d be here when I got back.”

  I bite my lip. “Are you…disappointed?”

  He laughs. “Hell, no. Only surprised. You seemed like…something out of a dream.” The laugh deepens to a self-deprecating chuckle. “A good dream. A great dream.”

  “I thought the same thing when I saw you standing on the beach.”

  “Today? Because you looked kind of sick when I saw you earlier.”

  “I’m fine,” I insist. “I’m fine. And I meant…a month ago. When I first saw you there. And I wanted…”

  “You wanted a night of company. That’s how I remember it, anyway. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  “Why…” I clear my throat. “Why is the pancake batter in the fridge?”

  “It’s in the fridge,” Driver says, his voice dropping into a range that’s so smooth that all I can feel is the cool of his sheets sliding against my skin, his hand on the small of my back, that rush of satisfaction… “Because it needs to rest for thirty minutes minimum before I make the pancakes.”

  The bed. His room. The streetlight outside, bathing him in a glow I can still see now. Is that my bra lighting up my nipples like that? I’ve never been so aware of the fabric in my life. I’ve never been so aware of how the bar stool cups my ass.

  “What happens if it doesn’t rest?” The words come out breathy and low and Driver must here the come hither in them because he comes around to my side of the island and turns me slowly, so slowly, until he can press his hips between my thighs and put both hands on my face.

  I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe. I want him to kiss me again, and then I want him to take me to bed, and I never want to get back out. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never.