Not Quite Perfect (Oakland Hills Book 3)
Page 1
Contents
From the Inside Flap
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Author Note
Also by Gretchen Galway
About the Author
Not Quite Perfect
by
Gretchen Galway
Serial temp worker April Johnson is nothing like her wildly successful brothers. She doesn’t have an Olympic gold medal. She doesn’t have millions in the bank from a tech company she founded as a teenager. She doesn’t even have a place to live, not since her boyfriend sneaked off in the middle of the night—skipping out on the rent, his three-legged dog, and her. Now forced to move back home with her mother and grovel for a job from one of her brothers, April decides it’s past time she got serious about her life.
Zack Fain, on the other hand, has been too serious for years. After losing his wife to cancer at the age of twenty-six, he’s done nothing but work on his consulting business. But when he meets April at a new job, he forgets he’s a humorless suit who never gets emotionally involved. She makes him laugh, she turns him on, and he begins to wonder if it’s time he broke a few rules.
Although April refuses to get stuck in yet another dead-end relationship, Zack isn’t like any of the guys she’s dated before. This could be the real deal. This could be serious.
But is either of them ready for the kind of serious that lasts a lifetime?
NOT QUITE PERFECT
Copyright © 2014 by Gretchen Galway
Eton Field, Publisher
www.gretchengalway.com
Cover Design: Gretchen Galway
Cover Graphics: Shutterstock
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN (eBook): 978-1939872098
Chapter 1
WITH CHILLY RAIN SPATTERING HER back, April stood on the front porch and stared at the old key in her hand, the same key she’d had since she turned eleven.
It was the right key. But it wasn’t unlocking the door to her mother’s house, the house she’d grown up in, the place she still considered home. It’s probably just the humidity, she told herself, fighting down irrational panic.
At her feet, Stool—the three-legged dog she'd just adopted that morning after her boyfriend bailed on both of them—sniffed the welcome mat and wagged his tail, not a care in the world.
I used to be like that, April thought, shoving the key into the hole again.
Although the big house had a roof over the front porch, the wind was driving the rain at an angle, soaking her shoulders and backside. The dog, part Labrador retriever, seemed to enjoy the rain, and kept lifting his nose to the sky and lapping at raindrops.
The key still wouldn’t turn.
Where else could she go? She glanced behind her to her car. Because the house was up in the cramped, winding Oakland hills overlooking the bay, the flat parking area was just a squat rectangle of concrete in front of the garage. Her old VW, filled with all of her boxes and bags, stared back at her with its cheerful round headlights and rounded grill as if asking, So, what’s the plan?
The eternal question.
Feeling edgy—she’d already been evicted from one home that day, and it was barely lunchtime—she pressed the doorbell for the house she’d grown up in.
In an attempt to lighten the mood, she shouted, “I don’t have any religious pamphlets, I swear!” A strand of her hair, curled into a tight ringlet in the humidity, stuck to her lips, and she brushed it away.
The door swung open to reveal a tall, muscular guy with blond hair and hard brown eyes: her oldest brother, Liam. The last person she wanted to see.
She bent over, grabbed Stool’s collar, and dragged him into the house. “Hey,” she said, kicking off her boots next to the hall closet and closing the front door behind her before her brother could see the contents of her car. She’d have to go back out to get her things—all of them—but he didn’t need to see that. He wouldn’t approve. Twenty-seven and moving back home with mom…
No, the perfect gold-medal-winning-fashion-CEO-mastermind and recent first-time-father, Liam Johnson, definitely would not approve.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked, hoping he didn’t notice the puddle she was leaving on the wood floor, or the river Stool was tracking in, because her big brother would have something else to add to the list of ways in which she didn’t measure up, the list he kept in his head and added to daily. “And why’d she change the locks?”
“Lost her keys on a walk,” Liam said. “What are you doing here? Whose dog is that?”
April strode over to a linen closet near the downstairs bathroom and grabbed a towel to rub down Stool. “Mom?”
“She’s next door,” Liam said, at her heels. “Helping with the baby. Bev’s walking the dogs, trying to get some air.”
Liam and his new wife, Bev, had moved into the house next door a month before their first kid was born, after buying it from Bev’s mother.
“If Mom’s helping with the baby, then what are you doing over here?” She wiped Stool’s paws. Putting her brother on the defensive was her only hope of getting him off her case. His first baby was just six weeks old, and he was probably determined to be a perfect father, since he’d been perfect at everything else so far. The weariness in his face, though, told her he was having trouble.
He loomed over her. “Don’t worry about me. What are you doing here?”
Her soaked sweater and thin camisole clung to her back, cold and heavy. It was the first real storm of winter, and they needed the rain after months of drought, but she wished it could’ve waited one more day, when she didn’t have to haul all of her measly possessions and a hungry dog across a San Francisco street into her double-parked economy car and then fight traffic across the Bay Bridge.
Her teeth began to chatter. Her dry clothes were in the car, and she couldn’t get them without parading her homelessness past her domineering brother. He didn’t mean to be a pain, but he was eight years older, their father had died years ago, and she was the youngest—and a girl—so he had stepped into the role.
“You look terrible,” she said. His eyes were almost as red as the stained and wrinkled T-shirt he was wearing, and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. “Is the baby okay?”
His scowl faded. Rubbing his face with both hands, he sighed. “Merry’s great.”
“Still not sleeping?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. Bev says she sleeps while I’m out. Lots
of newborns do it.” He sank into a dining room chair and thunked his forehead on the table. “Maybe I should do the same. Catch some sleep where I can.”
April, still shivering, went over and massaged his shoulders. He’d had an injury from years of competitive swimming, and she still remembered where the pressure points were for relieving the pain.
“Mm,” he said, sinking lower. After ten seconds of massage, he said, “You can’t move in. Mom’s overwhelmed with the baby.”
He didn’t mean to be a tyrant. It came naturally. Their father had been the same but lacked Liam’s nurturing, squishy center. Under there somewhere.
“I’ll help,” she said, digging a thumb beneath his shoulder blade.
He groaned in pleasure. “Mom’s over there every morning as soon as she sees a light on—sometimes in the middle of the night. Changing diapers, rocking and walking, making meals, giving Bev breastfeeding advice—”
“Sounds like you’d want me to distract her. Isn’t that driving you crazy? Mom used to get on your nerves.”
He let out a ragged breath. “You’d think. But no. We’re desperate. She’s like an EMT. She should have a siren.”
Voice trailing off, he sagged across the table. Eventually, she realized he’d fallen asleep. Stool had curled up on the floor beneath him with his chin over one of her brother’s outdoorsy slippers. So forgiving, dogs. One man abandons him, and three hours later he’s ready to pledge his loyalty to another one.
Not me. This time had been the last straw. She’d dated losers before, but this last one had been so low, he’d deserted a dog. A helpless, loving animal. Man’s best friend. Sure, this one was missing a leg and liked to eat poop, but he still deserved love and respect.
And so do I.
She continued rubbing her brother’s shoulders for another minute before jogging back to the front door, shoving her feet into her soggy boots, and bolting out to her car for her biggest duffel bag. The rain fell in uneven sheets, battered by gusts of wind, and she returned to the house as wet as if she’d fallen off the Berkeley Pier into the bay.
Liam stood in the doorway, arms folded across his chest, glaring at her through his heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes. “Nice try,” he growled.
Still holding the duffel over one shoulder—if she put it down, he might throw it out into the rain—she held up her shaking hands. “Look at me. I’m hypothermic. I need to change.”
“You do need to change. I completely agree.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.
“What happened to your apartment?”
“Lost the lease.” She gritted her teeth together to control the chattering. Could she lose the lease if she’d never had one? Bob had seemed like a nice guy until he’d bailed in the middle of the night, leaving his dog, unpaid utilities, and an angry landlord who’d just discovered they had a dog in the place. Her creep radar had failed her on that one.
What radar? Time to admit she was flying blind when it came to judging men. It was past time she kept her feet on the ground.
“Stay with a friend,” her loving brother said.
“Nobody can take me in with a dog,” she said. “And if I don’t take him in, who will? Look at him. He’s an old mutt with three legs.”
Her brother didn’t budge.
“I’m going into shock, here.” She held out her arms to show him the trembling had now spread above the elbows.
“Maybe you should’ve worn a jacket.”
Her patience snapped. He wasn’t her father, he wasn’t her, he didn’t know. “Get out of my way before I pass out.” She pushed past him, using the bag as a soggy battering ram.
“Not moving in,” he said in a low voice.
“It’s not up to you, bro.” That was bravado. He could stop her if he really wanted to, not by physical force, but guilt. If he really thought her presence would be bad for their mom, he’d convince April of it, too, and off she’d go.
“I’ll make sure it’s up to me,” he said.
“If this is because I overstayed my welcome at your apartment that time—”
“Six months. If Bev hadn’t moved in, you’d probably still be there.”
“I couldn’t afford my own place. So sue me.”
“Get a job.”
“I have—or had—a job. Lots of jobs.” She’d been temping on and off now for over five years, a milestone that made her stomach hurt. Classmates of hers had founded tech companies and become oncologists. She made pretty spreadsheets. “You don’t know what life is like for the little people, being a vice president your whole life.”
“It was hardly my whole life. I worked my ass off to get there.”
She pressed her lips together. Of course he had. Watching him work so hard for so many years, with so little happiness to show for it, she’d decided when she was very young to avoid his bad example. Was it her fault he got lucky at the last minute and found a woman who slowed him down and showed him joy?
In some ways, she understood his fears. He thought she was a parasite. A lazy leech who lived off her hard-working relatives. A hopeless slacker.
Compared to him, maybe she was. He didn’t understand what it was like to be a normal person, a person who wasn’t an Olympian or a self-made millionaire. The men in her family were driven and successful. She wasn’t. She was just April. She’d made it through college but never made a splash. Her art, the one thing she was proud of, was good, but nobody had ever called her a genius. She wanted to find her footing, build a real career, but it was a lot harder than it looked.
She gestured to the kitchen. “Come on. I’ll make us coffee.” She’d planned on talking to him about her humble career, which was at the heart of his dissatisfaction with her, under better circumstances, but maybe his sleep-deprived stupor would be to her advantage.
“Only because I need the caffeine.” He made a sudden move, taking the bag from her. “We’ll leave this right here.” He dumped it next to the door.
Well, at least it was inside. She strode into the kitchen, blessedly warmer than the foyer, found the beans and grinder, and got to work. April’s teeth still chattered, but hot coffee would fix that.
Stool followed her into the kitchen and sprawled under the table, where he licked invisible crumbs off the tile. Her mother’s three dogs, tiny little animals from a Chihuahua rescue, must not have left much behind, because he looked up at April sadly. She’d already fed him breakfast, but she found him a dog treat in the cupboard and dropped it between his paws. She still couldn’t believe Bob had run off without him.
What did it say about her that she found that harder to understand than leaving her?
“Hungry?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Liam said. “I think I had dinner. Was that yesterday?”
She looked at the screen of the microwave. One o’clock. Could it have been only four hours ago since the landlord had knocked on the door with his ultimatum? Thank God most of her stuff was stored here at the house.
Opening the fridge, she found cheese and turkey, some spinach, pesto, and butter, and within a few minutes had two sandwiches cooking on the grill pan and fresh coffee in the pot.
When she presented the meal to him, the sandwich sliced and steaming with melted cheese oozing onto the plate, he inhaled deeply and said, “I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I’ve been learning,” she said. She’d had to. Another strike against Bob: he’d been a worse cook than she was.
He made a face. “Hidden talents. What else can you do?”
She patted him on the back.
Frowning, he ate and said nothing. He’d given her an opening—why not strike now?
“Funny you should mention my talents,” she began.
He grunted and kept eating.
“I have them, you know.”
His left eyebrow arched. “Really?”
She felt her face warm. Being in her family was brutal on the ego. “Yes, and I’ve thought of something yo
u can do to help me utilize them. For this career of mine you care so much about.”
The other eyebrow went up. “Me?”
She gritted her teeth. “Maybe this isn’t a good time.”
He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “This is the only time you’re going to get. Spit it out.”
She’d expected him to be skeptical but not hostile. Fatherhood had made him grouchier than usual. She reached for her coffee, sucked down a mouthful, and sat down next to him with a big, forced, eager smile. “I want to work at Fite Fitness.”
He stood up so fast, the chair tipped over. “No. I just got rid of Bev’s sister. Months of pain and suffering—for everyone. No. I’m not going to do that to my company and everyone else ever again.”
Shocked by the force of his reaction, she gaped up at him in dismay. “Please. Just—”
“No. No more relatives.”
“I don’t want to design clothes. I want to work in the art room. Doing graphics.”
He was still frowning. “Art room?”
“Whatever you call it. Computer-aided graphics, sketching, surface design, whatever. I—”
“They have years of training, specialized training.”
“You don’t think I’m smart enough to—”
“Smart has nothing to do with it.” He carried his plate to the sink and started washing it.
“Talent, then. When’s the last time you saw my portfolio? I was an art major, you know, and I never stopped drawing. I go to an art studio every Wednesday night to share a live model, and I’d paint more if—”
“Commitment,” he said, pointing at her. “It takes commitment.”
She ran her fingers through her damp, curly hair, avoiding his gaze. “I can do commitment.”
He snorted.
“I can.”
“That department has trouble holding onto people. The last thing I’d want to do to Rita, the manager, is dump another freelancer in her lap who’s going to disappear a month later, after she’s done all the work with the training. She’s had that happen three times this year already.”