by Harlow Cole
He suffered from that strange anomaly that saddled people with fame and fortune. As a little girl, I’d seen it in his father and his father’s friends. They seemed crisper around the edges or something. Like brand-new bills freshly spit from the ATM instead of crumpled dollars that spent life stuffed in back pockets and sweaty bras.
He didn’t walk toward me; he prowled. Slow and steady with this sexy gait that deserved its own theme music.
The rain didn’t even try to touch him.
This second sighting didn’t level the same sucker punch. More like a queasy dysphoria. A bad case of déjà vu that punctured skin and vein. Half of me wanted to run, throw my arms around his waist, and hold on for dear life. The other half wanted to put my hands around his neck and squeeze hard.
I remained stuck in place, combing a hand through my own dripping hair. My light-pink T-shirt was soaked down to the skin, letting the outline of my white lace bra peep through. As he closed the distance between us, I futilely pulled the material away from my chest, trying to appear half as trashy and plain as I suddenly felt.
“Ash?” he called out. “You need a hand?”
He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. He walked around me and stuck his head under the hood, pretending the same way I had. He tinkered long enough for me to get an eyeful of his ass. I stood and ogled it like a stupid mute, squelching down memories of digging my nails into him while I screamed out his name.
“You’ve got a broken belt. It looks like it’s snapped clear through. But you’ve got some kind of liquid spilling out, too. This is pretty fucked.”
Okay, so maybe he did know what he was looking at.
“You heading into town? Let me give you a lift.”
“No. No, I’m fine. Thanks for stopping, but I’m all good.”
Thunder crashed overhead. Punctuating my ridiculous statement.
Fine. That damn word again. Nothing about this was fine. Not the constant rain. Not this old, pissed off truck. And certainly not the way standing beside him still made me feel.
“Ashley.” He didn’t say anything else. Just my name. In that way that always made me feel childish.
I sighed, weighing the options between bad and worse.
“I have to grab a box out of the back. I was taking it to the marina. I don’t think it’s even gonna fit in that thing.” I motioned to his four-wheeled mortgage payment.
He was already back around me, pulling down the lift gate and extracting the heavy box I’d labored to get in there alone. I considered his injury too late. He’d already hefted the package onto his hip with his good arm and was carrying it to his trunk.
The car smelled like his aftershave and buttery leather. They both assaulted me as I slid into the soft luxury of the passenger seat.
“Nice car,” I said purely to have something to say as he settled in on the driver’s side.
He pulled his door shut, sealing us into unnatural quiet.
Being this close to him, tightly confined by metal and glass, was a very bad idea.
“It’s just a car,” he said nonchalantly as he pressed the button to fire the engine.
It purred in Italian, refuting his irreverence.
“So, you’re still here? I thought . . .”
I’d become the master of all things obvious. I pinched the bridge of my nose as he turned to look at me. Blue eyes burned. They soaked me in and held me captive. My nipples turned into rocks, painfully stretching against wet lace. I crossed my arms to hide them.
He misunderstood my discomfort.
“Fuck. You’re soaking wet.” The huskiness and deep rumble of his voice jolted me.
“Christ,” I murmured. Hearing him say those words felt like the worst kind of foreplay. They stirred more memories and sent involuntary sparks to the part of me that hadn’t felt tingles in a very long time.
“You must be freezing. Here.” His large frame struggled against the confines of the claustrophobic interior as he shrugged out of his hoodie. He pulled it free, leaving his hair standing up on end so he looked even more like my Brayden than he had before.
“No, really, I’m fine.”
“Wrap this around you at least.”
He didn’t wait for me to accept or take no for an answer. The material, coated in his body heat and musky scent, pressed around my shoulders and neck. We stared at one another. Long enough for that familiar burn to reignite between my legs.
How the hell did he still do that?
He hadn’t touched me, but I felt him all over my skin.
“Yeah, I’m still here.” He finally broke the silence with an answer to my earlier question. He motioned to the back seat where a bag from the hardware store lay haphazardly. “Have some repairs to make around the house.”
I nodded my head and bit my bottom lip, staving off the need to ask exactly how long that would take.
I needed him gone. Like yesterday.
He pulled away from the curb. The volume of the music magically increased along with his speed. Satellite radio spun from a nebulous-one-hit-wonder to a new song by Rihanna. My hand instinctively reached out to the dash, searching for a way to shut it off. My fingertips hovered, hopelessly desperate. The music died as he touched a button on the steering wheel.
“Fucking Rihanna,” he muttered.
My gaze shot to his profile. He was smirking. That stupid half-mouth thing.
We’d fucked to Rihanna. A lot.
When he first downloaded the album, I made fun of him. Then, he drove into me to the pace of the downbeat, and I understood the appeal. He used to murmur that same phrase in my ear as I came.
Her voice had been our sexual anthem.
Now, it brought too much pain. I refused to listen to a single chord of her latest record.
“Brayden.”
He turned to look at me. The desolation on my face chased away his sexy grin.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “Just. Don’t.”
* * *
Brayden
I fought back my innate need to touch her.
It hurt. Being so close. Chaining up all the things I wanted to say. The things I’d waited too long to tell her. For years, I’d lived in a glass prison, hundreds of miles away. I finally had Ashley back beside me, but I still stood behind bars.
“I can get that.” She said it like she really believed it.
As I popped the trunk lid, her little arms reached out toward the heavy box.
“Seriously?” I chuckled a little. “Get out of the way, baby girl.”
She inhaled sharply. I hadn’t meant to use the endearment. It just slid out of me. She was being ridiculous. Stuffing too many books in her bike basket all over again. The box weighed half of her.
Even soaking wet.
She’d left my sweatshirt in the car, treating me to the final round of a free wet T-shirt contest. White lace. Fucking white lace. I wanted to rip through it with my teeth to get down to the prize I knew waited beneath.
I pulled the box out with my good arm and cocked it against my hip. I swiveled around to ask her where she wanted it just in time to see some jackass with a man bun and too many teeth bounding up to us from one of the docks.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ashley called out to him. “Damn truck broke down again. And, of course, you know me, dead cell.”
“No worries.” He greeted her with a private smile.
I hated him immediately.
“Here, let me take that for you.” He held his arms out toward me.
I started to stammer that I certainly didn’t need any help, but the dude was already taking the box from my grasp. Never would’ve happened if I still had two working arms.
“Are these the parts for the pontoon engine?” He smiled at her again.
This must be the guy working for her. I had a copy of his background check on Grams’s old rolltop desk. It failed to mention he looked like a hipster straight out of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. He put the box down at his feet and slung one arm aro
und Ashley’s shoulders.
I twitched involuntarily.
“Oh, hell, where are my manners? How you doin’? I’m Logan.”
I took his hand in a shake two or three notches past firm. “Brayden Ross.”
I never introduced myself that way. Ever. I never gave my last name. It sounded presumptuous. Like, You should know who I am.
I didn’t usually have to introduce myself at all.
People act weird when they recognize a face. They blush and hunch their shoulders forward. Sometimes it’s only slight, but, after you’ve witnessed it a couple thousand times, you can spot it on instinct.
On a rare occasion, like this, when my face didn’t give me away, I’d only use my first name. Then, I would bask in the glow of being plain old me for a fraction of time. But, the caveman inside me, wanted this guy to know both my names.
Much to my chagrin, he didn’t seem impressed.
“Thanks for helping Ash with the lift, man. She’s always forgetting to charge that cell phone. I reminded her last night, but she has too much on her plate. She forgets the little things.” He smiled down at her, pulling against her shoulder more.
It made my stomach burn. The way he was so familiar. He’d said last night like it must’ve been pillow talk he happened to ramble about after they shut off the light and were drifting off to sleep. Together.
Bad shit started going down in my head. I’d been back in town less than a week, and already, I could feel sixteen-year-old Brayden ready to creep back in and bust heads.
I cracked the knuckles on both my thumbs.
I hadn’t done that in years.
“Worst of the storm is already blowing north,” he said, holding his palm out to grab hold of the misty drops that lingered in the air. “I’m gonna get started on these.” He extracted himself from my girl and hefted the box back up off the ground.
“Nice meeting you, Brandon,” he called back over his shoulder.
Brandon? Seriously?
I rubbed the pad of my thumb against my bottom lip to keep my inner thoughts from spilling out.
“Listen, I’ll run over and get the guys at Mr. Uxley’s shop to go tow your truck. I’m sure they can get it fixed fast.”
“No.” She held up a hand like a Stop sign. “No. I don’t need you to—”
“It’s no problem. I can just swing by and . . .”
The pinched look on her face made the words die in my throat. It looked like a strange combination of fear and embarrassment. I wanted to suck back in whatever part of my offer put those feelings there.
“I’ll get Joey to call Conner. He’ll come and fix the truck. He’s good with cars. He does it all the time. I can’t . . .” she stammered, and her voice grew quieter. “I can’t afford the tow. Or the shop. So, just don’t, Brayden.”
“Ash, don’t worry about the money. I’ll get them to fix it. It’s on me.”
“No. I don’t want anything from you.” Her bottom teeth tugged against the little pucker of her top lip. “Thanks for the lift, okay? Good luck with your house repairs.”
She was dismissing me.
I took a deep breath and tried to channel inner patience I didn’t have.
Sometimes, you had to walk a batter. Purely because the timing called for it, you would force yourself to throw balls instead of strikes. You’d coast weak shit to the outside when you knew damn well you could send heat down the pipe.
This wasn’t the time for my fastball.
Stick to the motherfucking plan, asshole.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the silent reminder.
“If you change your mind . . .” I said, letting my words trail off with less than a subtle suggestion.
Change your mind, damn it.
Look at me, and tell me you don’t feel it.
“About letting me help with the car, I mean.”
“I won’t.” Her voice didn’t waver. “Look, let’s not make this weird. Well, weirder than it already is. If I don’t see you before you leave . . . good luck, Brayden. With the house and with your rehab.”
She turned and walked toward the office without looking back. The masochist in me couldn’t stop the reflex. I stood there and gawked at the sway of her hips, daydreaming about watching them swivel on top of me.
I gazed back down at the dock where hipster boy appeared hard at work.
I knew their deal. He was a partner of sorts. A professional sunbird. His kind floated up and down the eastern seaboard, looking for temporary shelter and a way to score charter jobs. He owned his own boat. A fifty-two-foot Viking Convertible. He got to run it out of the marina in exchange for free room and board in the apartment above the maintenance shed. She got a cut of his daily excursion fees.
When I read the dossier on him, it sounded like a win-win. On paper, it still was. But now, face-to-face, I had to question what else that guy had scored with this deal.
It’d damn well better not include any part of her.
This plan needed to work.
Fast.
2
Rotted Pieces
Ashley
“I think you’ve finally sniffed too much hair dye.”
My left leg swung back and forth, tapping on the metal bar used to raise and lower the chair. Joey’s broom swept across pink linoleum, clearing away remnants of the day’s last client. Riley, the new shampoo girl, smiled from her perch behind the reception desk.
Joey rested both hands atop the wooden handle as she stopped her work to stare at me and sigh. “He came to see me,” she said, her voice as soft as her sudden change of heart.
“What? When?” I asked, my brow creased.
So not what I’d expected her to say.
“He came into the shop. I cut his hair yesterday.” She paused for a moment, considering her words. “His hair really is pretty damn fantastic. He bought a deep conditioner. I mean, people think that shit just happens, but the boy truly does respect the hell out of what God gave him.”
“Seriously? The guy boosts weekly product sales, and you go all googly-eyed? Who are you, and where did you chain up my best friend?”
“Oh, he brought her coffee, too. He brought us all coffee actually,” Riley said enthusiastically, standing up and rounding the counter to join in on the shitshow going down before me. “He went to The Grind and asked Kacey if she knew our favorite drinks. Came in with a whole load of coffees and muffins. Those lemon poppy seed ones. I’m never gonna lose this baby weight, but they are so worth every single calorie.” She placed a palm against an imaginary bulge.
Riley was a sweet girl. She’d been a star dancer, working toward a scholarship at Juilliard, until she got knocked up her senior year of high school. Her mother watched little Chloe while Riley worked her tail off, scrubbing heads and answering phones at the salon.
She’d become Joey’s latest pet project.
I almost felt bad for the girl.
“Riles, don’t help, sweetie,” Joey said, bending down with the dustpan to finish her job and escape the scalding look on my face.
“The dude brings you a cinnamon chai latte and some empty carbs, and suddenly, you’re BFFs?”
She huffed out a breath and stood back up to thoughtfully look at me.
Pensive Joey scared the crap out of me.
“I’m just saying, you should consider the idea.”
“What good could possibly come from it? Please don’t use the word closure.”
The therapist my mother forced me to see right after the accident had used that word a lot. It was a sweet notion really. Learning to tie things up and put a shiny bow on them sounded like great, big, beautiful make-believe.
“There are some things you just can’t talk out. Nothing we say to each other would change the fact that my brother lives out each day in a wheelchair and we’re the ones who put him there.”
She tucked a strand of fiery-red hair behind her ear. “He said some things, Ash. I just think . . . he’s different. I think maybe you should
hear him out. Give him a chance.”
“You know I can’t do that. I can’t, Joey. I don’t have a choice.”
She knew.
Better than anyone else.
Joey was the one who held me while I cried. She was the one who force-fed me until I gained back some of the weight stripped away by grief and a broken heart. She drove me to those therapist appointments, sat in the waiting room, and held my hand as we walked back silently to the car. Every time life shredded me, Joey had been by my side, ready to sweep up the fallout.
“You know what I was like before, Joe. I can’t go through all that again.”
“I know, babe. But he’s carrying some pretty heavy baggage, too. I think he felt like you sent him away. He didn’t think you wanted him to come home and—”
“Oh, please. I sent him to get help. I didn’t change my number or move to an undisclosed location. He’s the one who forgot all about us. He moved on, Joey. Very quickly, if you recall.”
“I’m not sure he’s moved on at all actually.”
“Please.” I rolled my eyes at her. “He moved right into a big, fancy life, just like his father planned out. The rest of us can’t move on. We’re stuck, living the nightmare he just woke up from and conveniently forgot. That’s all we are to him. An uncomfortable memory. A past he chose to never revisit. Nothing, Joey. I’ve got nothing. He never sent a card or a note. Never picked up the phone. He doesn’t even know about . . .” My voice trailed off.
It still hurt to say the words out loud.
It made the loneliness real.
“He’s just back here now ’cause he got hurt. The Jack Ross master plan finally hit a speed bump. That’s all we are to him.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think you might be part of the reason Brayden is here.”
“Oh, sure. Bet banging all those movie stars and supermodels got too tiring, and he decided to go back and look up an old flame. I mean, look at me.” I gestured down to my baggy sweats and the white T-shirt bunched up at my waist, secured with a stretched-out hair tie. “I’m totally Brayden Ross material.”
“You sell yourself short. You always have. You’ve never stopped seeing yourself as that skinny girl with pigtails, but you haven’t been her for a long time.”
