No Excuses

by Nikky Kaye

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Having lunch with my big brother?”

  I waited silently.

  “Okay, I was supposed to have lunch with Aaron but he’s still stuck in some sponsorship meeting. So I thought I’d try Maddie instead.”

  I was the consolation prize. Great. I gave her a noncommittal grunt, but at least the tightness in my chest eased a bit when she stood up to approach my desk.

  “You’re looking better,” I said as she sat down in the visitor’s chair. “You’ve got some color again.”

  “Yeah, now I’m green.” My blank stare made her roll her eyes. “Morning sickness, Brainiac.” She clutched her belly, bent over and faked a retching sound.

  “Charming.”

  “Isn’t it? One of the fun things about pregnancy.” Her tone was sarcastic but her demeanor made me wonder if she was gestating a unicorn—she was so damn chipper.

  “You mean there are fun things about pregnancy?”

  “Sure.” But then my sister pressed her lips together tightly. Either she was going to hurl, or she’d decided not to talk about it anymore—at least not with me.

  I grabbed a file folder from a fan-shaped array of them on the left side of my desk. “I don’t have time for lunch, sorry.”

  The truth was that I was still uncomfortable around a pregnant Bobbie. It was hard enough for me to accept the fact that I had no control over the situation, but now Madeline was pressing me to accept the fact that it shouldn’t be a “situation” for me in the first place. Which reminded me…

  “Don’t you have a job to get back to?”

  Bobbie’s mouth turned down. I hadn’t meant for my words to come out sounding so, well, snarky. But really, was she still working at the lodge? Or, had she quit that job now too?

  “I talked to them, and they were really understanding.” ‘More understanding than you,’ was the unsaid implication. “It’s kind of shoulder season now, so things are slower. It’s getting too late for hikers but too early for skiers.” She shrugged. “I’m taking my vacation time now to figure it out.”

  “Are you going to quit?” My stomach soured at the thought of another abandoned career.

  She shook her head emphatically. “No. I really love that job, and I’m good at it. I’m just trying to, well, you know.”

  No, I didn’t.

  “Are you still staying with Aaron?” Our mother had downsized to a one-bedroom condo a few years ago, not that it had stopped Bobbie from crashing there before in between jobs and apartments and boyfriends.

  “Yup. He’s been really… amazing.” She sighed, and despite the bit of pallor lingering on her skin, she looked happy. Birds-chirping-around-her-head kind of happy, in fact. I had to grudgingly admit that it looked good on her.

  “How does he feel about the baby?”

  She frowned. “He’s okay.”

  “Okay?” My eyebrows rose. “Well, that’s a ringing endorsement.”

  “I don’t know. We’ve kind of been avoiding talking about it too much. We just started dating, and we’re not quite sure what we’re doing yet.”

  She made a vague gesture to her lap, which disconcerted me. It was a bit late to have the birds and the bees talk with her.

  “You mean with dating?”

  “I mean with the baby.” She folded her arms protectively over her stomach, looking worried. The imaginary birds around her head fell silent, one of them metaphorically plummeting to the ground.

  “How can you not know?”

  It boggled my mind. If it were me, I would have already had several conversations and set agendas and goals and made a list of pros and cons and—oh. This was probably exactly the kind of thing that Madeline was talking about.

  “We’re just not sure what to do. I still don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

  Bobbie looked at her lap, then up at me, then down to her lap again. It felt like she was silently asking me for advice, and for once I had none to offer. Madeline had told me to back off, and I was trying my best. I didn’t know if Bobbie was ready for this either, but I knew I couldn’t actually tell her that.

  “I don’t think anyone is ever really ready to be a parent,” I said lamely, opening a folder and staring blankly at the contents. “It’s kind of a learn as you go along thing, right?”

  She nodded. “You know what I keep thinking, and I feel so guilty about it?”

  “What?”

  “I keep wondering if I’d be a better mother than Mom was.”

  Wow. I shoved the folders aside. She pretended to be staring at her hands, but she was peeking up at me every few seconds—probably to gauge my reaction. My initial reaction was one of a complete loss for words, though. She probably hadn’t expected that—I usually had an opinion about everything she did.

  “Say something, Brain!”

  Shaking my head, I leaned back in my chair, trying to approach this conversation systematically. “Do you think Mom did a bad job?”

  “No! Not really.”

  If she was waiting for me to put words in her mouth, she’d better get comfortable. I bobbed back and forth in my chair as it reclined, flipping a pen between my fingers.

  “It’s just that… well, I think it was harder after Dad died, right?” she said. “It’s not like she lost it, but she didn’t really have her shit together either.”

  Pot. Kettle. Madeline would have been proud of me for keeping my mouth shut. I merely hummed instead. Of course, I agreed with her, but I didn’t trust my opinion not to run away from me without letting my brain catch up.

  I cleared my throat before coming up with, “It was hard at times for all of us.”

  Holy shit. If I came up with any more of these mind-blowingly erudite observations, I would have to record them and write a fucking motivational book.

  My sister looked at me as though an alien had replaced me. I threw the pen down on the desk.

  “Okay, fuck. I don’t know, Bob. Yeah, there were times when I worried Mom might burn down the house, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love us. Hell, she was almost beside herself with her love for us. Nobody’s perfect.” Well, except me, right? It was a good thing that Madeline wasn’t there, or she’d give me a withering look.

  “Remember the time she forgot to pick me up from camp? She thought it ended the next week?” She snorted, but I still remembered the tears mottling her face when an irritated senior counselor dropped her off.

  Of course, it hadn’t helped that it was the beginning of my entrepreneurial programming phase, and I’d managed to convince her that Mom had sold her to ‘Camp I wanna to finance my new computer.’

  “You always got along better with her than I did,” I pointed out. “You guys are a lot alike.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of!”

  When I looked at her more closely, I saw new lines of worry etched in her face. This baby thing was really freaking her out. Hell, it was freaking me out too.

  “You can’t live your life in fear,” I said.

  I knew Aaron would step up—that was just the kind of guy he was. He also knew that I would string him up by his life-giving balls if he didn’t. And to whatever extent she could, I knew that our mother would enjoy being a grandma. Bobbie just needed more confidence. It was sobering to realize that I was probably a big part of the reason she doubted herself.

  “Ha! That’s easy for you to say! You’ve never been scared by anything.”

  I swiveled in my chair to look out the enormous window behind me. Shit, she was so wrong. I was scared of lots of things, which is why I had a low tolerance for excuse making. It would be too easy to do it myself.

  “Brain?”

  “Everybody’s scared of something,” I muttered, looking out over downtown. Busy people, busy lives, failure, success, family, solitude—it was all out there. Some people worked their asses off for it, and for others it fell into their laps.

  If I were going to be honest, I would tell Bobbie that I was
afraid that I would lose Madeline, or at least fuck it up somehow. I was afraid that my ideas and applications were one-hit wonders and that I would crash and burn like so many start-ups before me.

  With a jolt I realized that I already lived in fear; it was what drove me to succeed. I kept pushing Madeline to take a chance, but all the chances that I’d taken weren’t risks so much as they were tunnel vision. The real leap of faith would be to let go of the reins a bit.

  “Honestly, Bobbie, I think that having that fear might help you as a parent. If you’re aware of what you’ll fuck up, you’ll try harder.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Seriously, it’s the clueless, arrogant assholes who screw up their kids.” Like me? Again, I imagined Madeline and myself in this situation. For the first time, the idea didn’t make me want to puke.

  A strange noise behind me made me turn back around. Bobbie’s face was pink, and she pressed her fist into her stomach.

  “Sorry. I’m hungry. But thanks for the, uh, pep talk.”

  I exhaled heavily as I stood up. She rose as well, then paused as I slipped my phone into my pocket. “Okay, let’s go feed the parasite,” I grumbled, but my sister’s surprised smile was contagious. Maybe there was hope for me yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  MADDIE

  The things that I’d collected over a few months of working at Apptitude didn’t even need a banker’s box to carry out. It all fit in my laptop bag.

  Every day that I worked after giving Gage and Susan my two-week notice was harder than the one before. Every day I went back and forth over my decision to leave so I could commit myself to trying a real relationship with Gage. Every day his expression was a little more hangdog, a little more mournful. The look on his face tied my stomach in knots, but for once, I decided not to let myself be wishy-washy.

  In the end, I didn’t even have to work the whole two weeks. Susan let me know that they would manage without me but I would still get two weeks of pay, and I got the bum’s rush out of the office.

  Before I left on my last day, I allowed myself one solid hour of necking with Gage on the black leather couch in his office.

  “Are you sure about this, Madeline?” he drawled in my ear. We were curled up like baby cats on the couch, my back against the armrest and my former employer deliciously crowding me into the corner.

  Even someone whose decision was carved in stone would wobble a little with Brian Gage’s five o’clock shadow brushing over their earlobe. I fought a shiver, not wanting to show any hesitation. I wasn’t strong enough to withstand a full-on siege, and we both knew it.

  “Yes? Oh god, right there.”

  His lips curved into a smile against the side of my neck as his fingers deftly undid the buttons of my tailored white shirt. “Really sure? You won’t be able to do this every day,” he reminded me.

  “I’m sure I’ll survive.” I might self-combust, though.

  My tongue ventured out to taste the divot at the base of his throat. His skin had that end of the day smell—the pure masculine scent left on him after the veneer of shampoo and soap had worn off. It was intoxicating to me. Maybe all this attraction was just pheromones. “I’ll live.” Probably.

  “But I won’t,” he groaned as I untucked his shirt. “Really, Maddie? A black lace bra under this shirt that just screams businesswoman?”

  My fingers were practically itching to undo his zipper and… no! I was an adult, and I had more self-control than that. “There’s always after work.”

  “The first time she makes a decision, and it takes her away from me,” he complained under his breath. Of course, I heard him since his breath was practically on my own lips.

  My mouth sought his in a passionate attempt to stop him from making me doubt myself. His tongue helped, but it was his hands on my breasts that really bolstered my self-confidence. I had to stop making out with him at work, so that I could get naked with him outside of the office.

  “What else does my shirt scream?”

  He tilted his head. “I can’t hear it very well, since it’s all the way over there on the floor now.”

  So it was. My nipples hardened in the cool air of the office, rising to meet his urgent touch.

  “You sure you don’t want me to try to train the temp?” I hadn’t heard much about my replacement, but assumed that he was getting somebody from the temp agency through which he’d found me.

  “Hmmm?” He was twisting a lock of my hair with one hand and teasing a circle around my bellybutton with the other. Heat built in my core, but all my spare underwear was packed, so I reluctantly stilled his fingers before they ventured lower.

  “Training?” I repeated.

  “Right. Unneeded for now.” With a frown, he flopped back against the couch beside me. His erection was on full display, but he showed not one iota of shame or embarrassment—just a whole lot of tenting. “Susan’s going to help me out for a while.”

  Pretty man say what? “Explain?”

  “She took a course in business communication and wants to work on her skills, so she offered to work with me until we find your replacement.” He grabbed my hand and kissed my palm. “You’re a hard act to follow.”

  “She wants to follow your ‘hard act’,” I muttered. Susan was probably already imagining late nights on this very couch. She was a relatively nice person, but a little too flirty with my man.

  I traced an outline of the bulge in his trousers with my fingernail, making him hiss in pleasure. There was a sexy tendon in his neck that was calling my name as well. Decisions, decisions.

  “So what are you going to do with your time now? Other than me, of course.”

  Gage waggled his dark eyebrows in a manner I’m sure he thought was seductive. On anyone else, it would look ridiculous, but I found pretty much everything about him irresistible. I rolled my eyes and tried to escape my little corner of the couch, but he pulled me across his lap instead—ass end up.

  “Hey!” I twisted around to glare at him.

  His hands splayed across my backside, exploring the center seam on my leggings. “I believe I owe you a spanking.”

  “That was just playing. Goofing off.”

  “I never just ‘goof off,’ Madeline. Now it’s time for you to get off.”

  Party pooper. “Okay,” I sighed. I squirmed to move off his lap, but let out a delighted yelp as his palm stung my skin. My neck tweaked as I jerked my head around, but he just smirked at me.

  “Different kind of ‘get off.’”

  Oh. In that case… I wriggled to get more comfortable, but there was a good chance that my sudden breathlessness had more to do with his intentions than my ribcage pressing into his thighs.

  “Isn’t it time we had a safe word?” I asked.

  “Do you feel unsafe?”

  “Not exactly.” Nervous, maybe? I’d never been spanked before, and I was surprised at how damp the idea made me.

  I was spread over his lap like a napkin at a nice restaurant, my knees, and arms on the couch on either side of him. My back was arched due to the angle that my hips were pressing against his thighs, pushing my ass further up. The leather of the couch cooled my heated face.

  Gage walked his fingers up the back of my thigh and over my ass to hook them in the waistband of my leggings.

  “Can’t you be spanked through clothes?” I asked him.

  “Of course.”

  Without hesitation, he peeled my leggings down to expose my cheeks. Then Gage snapped the top of the thong I wore to avoid a visible panty line.

  “Hey!” I gasped, resting my face on my hands to look back at him. His expression was intense and amused at the same time. With one hand, he massaged me and with the other he reached over to touch my face.

  “I can’t wait to make these cheeks as pink and warm as this one.”

  Oh god. I was going to die of embarrassment and arousal while sporting a raspberry-lace whale tail. “Gage, you can’t say things like that to me.”

/>   He gave me a raised eyebrow, as though to say, “Have you met me?” I was pinned by his disbelieving stare. Then he smacked my ass.

  “Ow!”

  The sudden flick of his fingertips startled me, even though I knew it was coming. He didn’t even use his whole hand—just stunned me with the whiplash of his first three fingers. It was the kind of slap you’d give a child on the hand for trying to sneak cookies before dinner—or at least the kind I got in one foster home.

  “Am I supposed to be counting these or something?” I asked him.

  The lascivious gleam in his eyes filled my heart and broke my courage at the same time. God help me, but I was up for anything with this man.

  He frowned. “Do you think I’m punishing you?”

  It was a good question. “You’re still mad that I quit,” I pointed out.

  “Disappointed, not mad.”

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Okay, I’m a little mad.”

  “But you get why, right?” It was important to me that he understood why I couldn’t work for him anymore if we were going to pursue a real relationship. I was ready to take that leap of faith and commit my heart to him, which was a hell of a lot scarier than committing my working day to him.

  He was silent, one hand on the small of my arched back and the other slowly petting me.

  “Gage? Look at me.” His head tilted. If I craned my neck anymore around, I would look like I was possessed. “I want you.”

  “You’re half naked and bent over my knee. I should hope you do.”

  “Smart ass.”

  Once again, his hand came down, lighter this time but with no less of a sting. My ass actually smarted, which I supposed I had asked for. My whole body was heating up, and I was glad that my leggings hobbled me at the knees, because it made it a lot easier to squeeze my thighs together.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” he scolded me. “I see what you’re doing, Madeline.” He dipped between my legs, making me gasp as he traced along my crack to the moist darkness below. He spread his fingers, preventing me from clenching my upper thighs together for relief.