How to Misbehave (Short Story)

by Ruthie Knox

  She recognized the declaration for what it was—Tony’s vow. Or, if not a vow, the closest thing to it he could manage. A commitment to see what happened, and an acknowledgment that they both already knew what was going to happen. Because it was already happening.

  “Me, too.”

  For a long moment, he just looked at her, and she looked back at him, and everything felt exactly the way it was supposed to feel.

  His lips curved into a smile. “I’m glad I got stuck in the basement with you, bunny.”

  She smiled back. “So am I. But you’ve got to stop calling me—”

  He cut her off with a kiss, and his mouth was so warm and soft and amazing, she let the bunny thing slide. Just this once.

  Author’s Note

  How to Misbehave is the first in a series of novels and novellas about the Clark siblings—Amber, Caleb, and Katie—and their adventures finding love in sleepy little Camelot, Ohio.

  I didn’t set out to write this series. It just sort of happened. One day, I was musing about how cute Justin Timberlake is and how much I would like it if he mowed my lawn shirtless, as one does. The next thing I knew, I found myself plotting a novel about a pop star who visits his twin sister in the small college town where she lives and ends up having an affair with the woman who lives next door.

  Now, don’t get too excited. I didn’t actually write that book. I thought I would, and I started working out the subplot for it. The Timberlake-ish hero has a sister, see, and the sister falls in love with the security guard who gets assigned to her when her idiot brother’s affair lands the town of Camelot on the front pages. I loved this idea! I got so excited about it, I sat down and wrote a few scenes for the subplot, and the next thing I knew, Ellen and Caleb had hijacked the entire book. The result is Along Came Trouble—Caleb Clark’s story, due out in March 2013.

  While I was writing Caleb’s book, I gave him two sisters, one of whom shared his house and turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had anticipated. One thing led to another, and suddenly Katie had a love interest, a big secret, and a book of her own on the horizon. Katie’s story, Flirting with Disaster, comes out in June.

  Amber and Tony actually came last. Because—world’s-most-obvious spoiler alert!—they are already married when the action of Along Came Trouble takes place, I decided I wanted to go back in time and tell their “how Amber met Tony” story. Thus, How to Misbehave.

  I hope you get as big a kick out of reading these Camelot stories as I did writing them!

  Acknowledgments

  This would be an entirely different story if it weren’t for Serena Bell—and not a better one. Despite being in the middle of a cross-country move, she acted as a sounding board, cheerleader, and teller of hard truths during the weeks I was writing How to Misbehave. I think she might actually love Tony and Amber more than I do, which is saying something. Thanks, Serena. My life is richer and my stories better because of you.

  I’m also grateful for the enthusiasm and critical eyes of Anna Cowan, Del Dryden, Jill Sorenson, and Meg Maguire, all of whom read the manuscript and offered suggestions. You guys rock. My agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, told me how much she adored this novella just when I needed to hear it. She has a talent for that. My editors at Random House, Sue Grimshaw and Angela Polidoro, did their usual marvelous job of polishing up the prose and suggesting improvements. They also made me very happy by not cutting any of the cock jokes. Love those two.

  Giant smooches, finally, to my fans. I’m lucky to be able to do what I love every day, and it couldn’t happen without you. Thank you from the bottom of my sappy little heart.

  Photo: Mark Anderson/STUN Photography

  Ruthie Knox graduated from Grinnell College as an English and history double major and went on to earn a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use. She debuted as a romance novelist with Ride with Me—probably the only existing cross-country bicycling love story yet to be penned—and followed it up with About Last Night, which features a sizzling British banker hero with the unlikely name of Neville. Her idea of a Christmas story, Room at the Inn, is included in the Naughty and Nice anthology. She moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes a mean focaccia.

  Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s

  Along Came Trouble

  Chapter One

  “Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.

  The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.

  No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.

  They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.

  Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged southern belle.

  It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, and then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.

  Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.

  Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.

  Enough, she thought. Enough.

  But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her mascot hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.

  Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.

  It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.

  Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.

  So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.

  It felt good. It felt great, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.

  One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.

  But then it was over, and she wondered why she’d wasted the tea, because Weasel Face didn’t so much as flinch. Seemingly unbothered by the dunking, the ice cubes, or the sludgy sugar on the back of his neck, he aimed his camera at Carly’s house and held down the shutter release, capturing photo after photo as an SUV rolled to a stop in the neighboring driveway.

  “Get out of my yard,” Ellen insisted, shoving the man’s shoulder for emphasis. His only response was to reach up, adjust his lens, and carry on.

  Now what? Assault-by-beverage was unfamiliar territory for her. Usually, she stuck with verbal attack. Always, the people she engaged in battle acknowledged her presence on the
field. How infuriating to be ignored by the enemy.

  “The police are on their way.”

  This was a lie, but so what? The man had already been kicked off her property once this week. He didn’t deserve scrupulous honesty. He didn’t even deserve the tea.

  “I’ll leave when they make me,” he said.

  “I’m going to press charges this time.”

  The photographer squinted into his viewfinder. “Go ahead. I’ll have these pictures sold before the cops get here.”

  “I’m not kidding,” she threatened. “I’ll use every single sneaky lawyer trick I can think of to drag out the process. You’ll rot in that jail cell for days before I’m done with you.”

  And now she sounded like a street-corner nut job. Not the kind of behavior she approved of, but what was she supposed to do? It was already too late to give up. If she stopped pushing, he would win. Unacceptable.

  A tall man stepped out of the SUV. One of her cedar trees partially blocked the view, but she caught a glimpse of mirrored sunglasses and broad shoulders.

  “You’re going to be so sorry you didn’t listen to me.”

  Weasel Face didn’t even look at her. “Go away, lady.”

  “I live here!” She hooked her fingers in his elbow and yanked, screwing up his aim.

  The stranger at Carly’s must have heard the escalating argument, because he turned to face them. Ellen’s uninvited guest made an ugly, excited noise low in his throat, edged forward, and smashed a lungwort plant that had been doing really well this year.

  Ellen considered kicking him in the shin, but she hadn’t remembered to put shoes on before she rushed out of the house. She settled for a juvenile trick, walking around behind him and sinking her kneecaps into the back of his legs. His knees buckled, and he lost his balance and staggered forward a few paces, destroying a bleeding-heart bush. Then he shot her an evil glare and went right back to taking pictures.

  “Leave,” she insisted.

  “No.” He snapped frame after frame of the stranger as he sauntered toward them and Ellen fumed with anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, fear—all of it swirling around in her chest, making her heart hammer and her stomach clench.

  By the time the SUV driver reached her property line, she recognized him. In a village as small as Camelot, you got to know who everybody was eventually. This guy hadn’t been around long, maybe a few months. She’d seen him at the deli at lunchtime, always dressed for the office. Today, he wore a white dress shirt with charcoal slacks, and he looked crisp despite the damp July heat.

  One time, she’d been chasing after Henry at the Village Market, and she’d turned a corner and almost walked right into this man. They’d done a shuffling sort of dance, trying to evade one another, and for a few seconds, she hadn’t had a single thought in her head except Whoa.

  Big guy. Very whoa, if you went for that kind of thing.

  The two invaders assessed each other for a few beats before whoa took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket. He stepped around the obstructive cedar tree and extended his hand to Ellen. “Hi. Caleb Clark.”

  Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s

  Flirting with Disaster

  Chapter One

  “Yes,” Katie said, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Uh-huh, yes, I get it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled left, and changed lanes. The traffic was getting thicker as they approached Louisville.

  Her brother kept talking, his voice robbed of its customary power by the cheap speakers of her cell phone, which sat in a cup-holder mount and broadcast Caleb’s warnings upward at her head. “If you have the slightest indication that there’s danger attached to this threat, you’re going to call me, and—”

  “Yesssssss,” she droned.

  The drama was wasted on Caleb, who was going to give her this lecture for the seventeenth time whether she wanted to hear it or not.

  It was wasted on Katie’s traveling companion, too. Sean didn’t react to anything she did. Ever.

  Katie glanced at the man in the passenger seat of her Jetta, just to be sure. His expression as he stared out the windshield matched the bleak, featureless expanse of southbound I-71. He was like a human wall of granite, completely impervious to everything about her.

  A stern, gorgeous cliff face.

  Suppressing a sigh, she tuned back in to Caleb’s speech. “—you to be in charge of anything along those lines, Sean. This is a trial run for Katie. I’m only letting her go because Judah insists she’s the one he wants to work with. You got that, Katie? It’s Sean’s show. I need you to play nice and stay out of his way.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I know the deal. I agreed to the deal. I am on board with the deal. Now can we stop talking about it, please?”

  She flinched at the way her voice came out, sharper than she’d meant to sound. It was only because she was nervous about this trip. Her palms had gone clammy and slimed the leather wheel cover, so uncomfortable did it make her to venture into an unknown city to do an unfamiliar job with a man who didn’t like her.

  She had a tendency to bristle when nervous.

  One more bad habit she needed to make an effort to tame. Better to be professional. What Katie really needed to figure out was how to act cool and icy like some kind of Bond Girl assassin, slinking around and poisoning people by slipping strychnine into their drinks.

  Except without the poisoning. Her goal was to win herself a promotion from office manager to agent for Caleb’s security company, not to become an assassin. Not unless her ex-husband strolled into town needing assassinating.

  “We’ll stop talking about it when I’m positive you’re going to cooperate,” Caleb said. “Right now, you sound like you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

  “I’m not,” she replied levelly. “I promise. I understand that this is your company and Sean’s assignment, and I’m just a companion on this trip. I promise I’ll be quiet and helpful and learn things, okay?”

  “I need you to be safe.”

  She made a face, then immediately regretted it. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips in response to Caleb’s babying only proved she deserved to be babied. Not the way she wanted Sean to see her.

  She flicked another glance in his direction. If he saw her at all, he gave no sign.

  “I’m safe,” she said.

  “I care about you, Katelet.”

  “I know you do,” she replied. “I care about you, too.”

  “And it’s only because I care about you that I’m going to say this again …”

  Katie tapped her fingertips against the steering wheel and stopped listening.

  She understood his worry. Ever since she’d confessed that she was married and needed to locate her spouse so she could get divorced, Caleb had become all concerned and brotherly. She kept waiting for him to go back to the way he’d been before, but so far, no luck.

  Five years older than her, her brother was a born nice guy who had spent most of his adulthood in the Military Police before moving home a year ago to help take care of their parents after their dad had a stroke. Katie had been living in his house rent-free at the time, working as a bartender nights and spending her days in elastic-waist pants, moping and watching daytime TV. Her husband, Levi, had cleaned her out and dropped her like a bad habit, and she’d returned from the life they’d built in Alaska in defeat. She’d practically regressed to adolescence by the time Caleb pulled her out of her self-pity slump.

  He gave her a job running the office of his new company, Camelot Security, and after the first month or so, Katie had started to feel useful again. Competent. She’d discovered she had some get-up-and-go left in her after all. That she actually wanted to do something with herself.

  Caleb was also the one who’d encouraged her to enroll in a couple of online classes. He’d even appointed himself her personal trainer, helping her whip her body into its best shape in years.

  He was a great brother, but Ka
tie was done with the coddling. She’d turned over a new leaf. He needed to get with the program.

  “Sean, are you hearing all this?” he asked.

  Sean nodded. He was invisible to Caleb, but the two of them apparently had a man-telepathy thing going, because Caleb said, “Great. Give me a call after you’ve talked to Pratt. I want to hear the details of these threats he’s supposedly getting. And if you can, find out why he’s brought this case to us instead of giving it to his security team from Palmerston, because—”

  “Caleb,” Katie interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Give it a rest.”

  “I just—”

  “We’ve been over this and over this. Sean gets it. I get it. We’ll call you. Now let us do the job.”

  Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s

  Room at the Inn

  Chapter One

  Carson Vance lifted a bale of twine-tied newspaper to his shoulder and heaved it onto the burn pile. It displaced a plume of fresh snow that winked and sparkled in the morning sun before settling again just as he tossed a second bale on top of it.

  He dusted off his gloves and shoved both hands deep in his pockets, heading back toward his father’s house. The thermometer outside the kitchen window read five degrees, and he’d been carrying bundles of newspapers and magazines from the carport since before the sun came up. Long enough that his thighs and ass had gone numb.

  Best get inside before he froze something off he might need one day.

  He left his boots on the cold porch and shouldered the door into the kitchen open as gently as he could. Dad had been up late. He didn’t want to wake him. But when he padded into the room, there was Martin, bent over a Sudoku book, the last cup of coffee steaming away on the table.