Here Comes Trouble

by Leslie Kelly

  “So how long were you married?”

  Ah, she wanted details. That explained the reticence.

  He really felt like telling her to be careful what she asked for. Too much 411—at least in the case of his marriage—could be a pretty uncomfortable thing. “About a year. Just as long as it took to get divorced.”

  Yeah. It had been two days shy of a year from the day he caught his wife in bed with someone else to the day he’d held the signed divorce decree in his hand. Max knew the date of the decree by heart. Because that night had been the last night of his old life.

  His new one had begun the next morning, when his brother, Morgan, had showed up at Max’s beach house, which he’d purchased with his trust fund when he turned twenty-five. It was the only remaining asset from the family money Max had inherited. The rest had gone through his fingers like sand through a sieve—or liquor through a bottle.

  Morgan had taken a good look around at the crowd—the empty bottles, the girls, the professional revelers who’d been using Max’s beautiful house as a party palace—and kicked Max’s ass.

  “You must have been young when you got married.”

  “Barely twenty-four. I was in the Air Force, stationed in Germany when we met.”

  “She was a European?”

  He sighed. “No. Actually, she was a lesbian.”

  It was amazing how that statement caught people off guard. Saying it out loud still shocked Max sometimes, and he’d been living with the knowledge for several years now.

  Sabrina went through the quick succession of reactions that everyone did when a man admitted something as…unmanly as the fact that his wife had preferred other women. Her eyes got so big they could have been used as headlights. Her mouth fell open, though she quickly snapped it shut. And she shook her head back and forth rapidly, as if trying to force the mental images out of her mind, as well as making sure she’d heard him correctly.

  Kind of like his reaction when he’d found out. All except for the “storming out and going on a twelve-month drunk” part. So far, Sabrina wasn’t taking off for the nearest bar.

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “You get used to it,” he said with a shrug.

  “But, to come out and say it like that, with no buildup…”

  “What, was I supposed to start out slow by saying I noticed she liked to wear ugly shoes and watch reruns of Ellen?”

  Sabrina came closer—close enough for him to smell the light fragrance of fruit and flowers that he would forever associate with her hair. Especially when he pictured her dressed as she was now, in a pair of tight white cropped jeans and a reddish pink top scooped low to reveal the top curves of her pretty, delicate breasts, which he so wanted to taste again.

  Soon. Very soon.

  “You’re joking, right? I mean, you’re pulling my leg. You didn’t really mean…”

  “Oh, yeah, I meant it.”

  He’d figured he might as well get this conversation over with. If Sabrina had cooled off because he’d been divorced, this could cinch the deal. Better to find out now. “You okay?”

  She leaned back against the carousel, then slowly slid down against a pole until her butt landed on the dusty floor. He almost warned her about the effects of twenty-five years’ worth of dirt and rust on her white jeans, but figured it was too late. Besides, there was something wickedly arousing about standing beside her when she was sitting, her face about even with his hip.

  That thought brought such a sharp, sexual image into his head that he had to shift to the side, so she wouldn’t see the way his body had reacted.

  Christ, he’d only kissed the woman twice, hadn’t touched her in two days, and he was as hard for her as if they’d been rolling around naked in a tub of Jell-O.

  She finally spoke again. “Was she insane?”

  He appreciated the note of incredulity in her voice. “Nope. Just greedy. And a liar.”

  Her brow lifted.

  “She fooled everyone about who she was and what she wanted,” he explained. “Lied to me and her family and her friends. Even to herself, I think.”

  “You’re actually fine about this?” Sabrina asked, still sounding disbelieving.

  He shrugged. “Fine is a strong word. I dealt with it in one way or another.” Some self-destructive, some less so. “But I moved on. Trusted karma, ‘what goes around’—all that Dr. Phil shit.”

  “Did it come around?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He fell silent, not seeing the need to get any further into the details. What was the point in telling Sabrina that he’d been married for his trust fund, which some of his buddies had told his ex about? Or that Teresa had claimed she was pregnant to get what she wanted—his ring on her finger. His money in her bank account.

  Mostly he didn’t need to tell her about the stupid things he’d been thinking about family and children, which had led him to make one of the biggest mistakes of his life—he’d dropped out of the Air Force pilot training program. All so he could be an around-the-house dad, not an around-the-world one.

  And so no child of his would ever be eating his Cheerios and catch sight of the morning news repeating and repeating the image of his father’s plane exploding out of the sky.

  Only there wasn’t any baby. He’d eventually found out there never had been one.

  While Teresa might have fooled herself into thinking she could change who she was for the sake of the money Max stood to inherit, she hadn’t been able to make it through the first year of their marriage—to Max’s twenty-fifth birthday, trust fund day—without getting what she truly wanted: a girlfriend.

  When it all blew up, she lost Max and his money, thanks to his excellent lawyer. The girlfriend, who’d also been counting Max’s pennies before he’d inherited them, dumped her, as well.

  Teresa had ended up alone and broke. So, yeah, what she’d sown, she’d definitely reaped. Not that he was vindictive anymore—he might never entirely forgive his ex-wife, but at least he didn’t hate her the way he once had.

  And she’d certainly left an impression on his life, one he’d never forget. Some things couldn’t be forgotten and some lessons, once learned, would remain imbedded forever. Like his intolerance for liars and people who claimed to be one thing when they were really another.

  Which made him feel even crappier about having pretended to be something he wasn’t when he first met Sabrina.

  Not that he’d been very good at playing Mr. Squeaky Clean, but he had tried. Whether he’d had a good reason or not, he’d disliked the deception and was glad it was over. He’d be himself from here on out. Hell, he’d pretty much been himself for the past several days, anyway, and she hadn’t gone running.

  Someday maybe he’d even work up the nerve to admit the whole thing to her, once all this book crap was over with.

  “How did you find out?” she finally asked.

  Realizing she wasn’t going to let this go without a few more details, Max sighed and sat beside her on the floor of the carousel. His thigh brushed against hers and his mind instantly went down that road. But he still managed to answer her question. “I walked in on them.”

  “Them?” Then she gasped. “Oh, God, them?”

  “Yeah.” With a wicked grin he added, “And since it wasn’t my birthday I figured out what was going on pretty damn quick.”

  Sabrina rolled her eyes. “You’re such a guy.”

  “Exactly.”

  Just an average guy with sex on the brain, and it was nice to be able to act like one—like himself—instead of pretending he was some kind of lame-ass choirboy who didn’t have a dick much less know what to do with it.

  “You’re so calm about this.”

  “I wasn’t at first. Especially when my buddies started with the ‘eating at the Y’ comments.”

  She shuddered. “I can’t believe you’re joking about it.”

  He hadn’t at first, not for months. But that was another conversation, one he w
asn’t ready to have with her. One he’d only had with a few other people—those closest to him. The ones who’d done the intervention and made him realize his drinking and wild lifestyle had gone from a brief crutch to a potential lifelong problem. Grandfather and his brothers.

  Nobody else knew why he hadn’t shared in a celebratory glass of champagne when they’d christened the new jets Taylor Made had added to the fleet last year. Nor asked him about the club soda with lime that was in his hand at every cocktail party. Or demanded to know why he always killed off an enormous bottle of Coke during a ball game, rather than a beer.

  It was his problem. He’d dealt with it. End of story.

  “Did you…did you try to do anything about it?” she asked, sounding tentative, as if she realized his mind had suddenly gone far, far away.

  “What was I supposed to do? Force her to become something she wasn’t?” Then, because Sabrina still seemed so stunned, he added, “You want to hear something really twisted?”

  “More twisted than a woman married to one of the sexiest men on earth deciding she’d rather sleep with women?”

  Laughing, he nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  Sliding off the merry-go-round, he squatted in front of her so they were eye level. Then he told her something he’d realized several years ago but had never shared with anyone else. And had never expected to. “It was better that it was a woman.”

  Now her jaw really dropped. For a second he wanted to ask Sabrina if she was a big milk drinker, because she had great teeth, not a filling in sight.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. After I calmed down and could think straight again, I realized it would have been worse if she’d been cheating with another man. That would have been head-to-head competition. And losing to a man would have made me, well, a loser.”

  She slowly nodded. “But you couldn’t compete with a woman?”

  “You got it. Can’t go head to head, so to speak, when you don’t have the same equipment.”

  She smiled a little. The first time since he’d dropped the gay-bomb on her. “Which made it all okay?”

  “As okay as it can get,” he said.

  “Did it—Never mind.”

  “What?”

  Seeing the way her chest rose and fell as she drew in deep breaths, he was prepared for another uncomfortable question. He simply hadn’t realized quite how uncomfortable it would be until she put it into words.

  “Did it make you hate women?” Her words stumbled over each other. “Did you want to punish them or something?”

  “Hell, no,” he said with a bark of laughter. “I love women.”

  Couldn’t get enough of them in fact.

  “But what about the long term? Marriage?”

  He caught her drift. What kind of self-respecting female wouldn’t want to know right up front if a man was a lost cause in terms of commitment, happily-ever-after and all that stuff they put so much emphasis on?

  Max could have lied. Maybe a few years ago, he would have, just to ensure he was going to get into her pants. But he didn’t. Whoever he might have been in the past, deceiving her wasn’t who he was now. “I don’t see that happening again, Sabrina. I’m not exactly marriage material.” Shaking his head, he added, “I come with too much baggage.”

  She continued to stare at him, her blue eyes clear, her gaze steady. He’d thrown the ball back into her court. Now she had to decide whether she wanted to pick it up and keep playing, or figure there was no way she was going to win and walk off without letting either one of them score.

  Damn, his mind did turn in sexual ways.

  “Okay,” she said with a nod, not appearing disappointed or confused in any way. “I can understand that.”

  Rising to his feet, he reached for her hand to pull her up, as well. She took it and started to stand. With the backs of Sabrina’s calves pressed against the carousel and Max standing right in front of her, she had nowhere to go but straight up.

  It was a long, slow slide. And she ended up a few inches from him. Close enough for him to see the shine on her pretty pink lips when she licked them. Plus the warmth—and compassion—in her eyes.

  Not rejection. Not pity. Not amusement. Not greed. Thank heaven. He’d had enough of those to last his lifetime.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing and her head tilting as she stared at him, “that explains it.”

  “Explains what?” he asked, a little wary.

  She opened her mouth as if to answer, then closed it again like she didn’t know what to say. But she had something on her mind—the woman looked stunned, as if someone had just proved to her the world was flat instead of round. Though it made no sense to Max, it somehow seemed the pathetic story of his love life had knocked down whatever barriers Sabrina had erected against him and made her see him in a new light.

  He wanted to find out if his theory was right. Intended to find out, in fact. It would be easy to do, just by pulling her closer, wrapping his arms around her and kissing any remaining words right off her tongue.

  Then he’d ask her to fly with him.

  But he didn’t have to. Because suddenly Sabrina grabbed the front of his shirt in both her hands and pushed him around until he was the one leaning against the carousel pole. Before he could ask what was going on, she was diving onto his mouth like it was an oxygen mask and the aircraft was losing pressure.

  He kissed her back, thrust his tongue deep and hard against hers, feeling in her slim body all the hunger they’d been dancing around since the day they’d met. Something had snapped, crackled and popped and she was all demanding, devouring woman.

  Their tongues tangling and mating, he reached for her hips and tugged her closer against him, until she could feel the rock-hard response of his body. He groaned when she responded by lifting her legs and wrapping them around his waist, arching against him until he could feel the dampness of her through her jeans. She jerked, took the pressure she needed, and a low, keening cry emerged from her throat. Like she could get off just by rubbing him the right way.

  “Sabrina, yes…” he muttered against her mouth as he tugged her legs tighter, dying to release his cock and plunge into her right here and now.

  He was about to do it—was reaching toward his zipper, in fact—when he heard a woman’s voice calling. A familiar voice.

  And the barking of a spastic dog. A familiar dog.

  Damn.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Sabrina muttered with a frustrated groan.

  Somehow managing to disguise his own groan as a sigh, he slowly let Sabrina down, feeling her frustration in the stiffness of her shoulders and arms.

  “I’m going to kill her,” she muttered.

  “Stand in line.”

  Shifting to straighten out his jeans, he cleared his throat and watched Sabrina’s sister emerge from the woods. Allie bounced along as jauntily as a heavily pregnant young woman tugging a reluctant dog behind her could.

  Allie Cavanaugh might not be a five-year-old, but she had the timing of a classic bratty little sister. Once again, her arrival had come just in time to stop Max from doing what he most wanted to do with Sabrina: make love to her until neither one of them could think.

  Before she got within earshot, he whispered, “Do you suppose we could ditch her the way I used to ditch my kid brother when he was being a pest?”

  “How are you at climbing trees?”

  “Excellent. Had a lot of practice at running away and hiding as a kid.”

  “Me, too.”

  He chuckled. “So you were a bad kid, too? I knew there was something I liked about you.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, crossing her arms in front of her chest and lifting a brow. “That I remind you of you?”

  “Yeah.” His smile slowly fading, he lowered his voice to say, “Though I think I like you better.”

  She didn’t look away—not immediately. And for that one long second, when they stared
at each other, they both acknowledged what would have happened if her sister hadn’t shown up.

  Finally breaking the stare, Sabrina nodded toward her sister. “Tempting as it sounds to run away, she’s my responsibility.”

  Yeah, he got that. He just wanted to know why.

  “And maybe it’s for the best.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Sabrina’s eyes were wide and shiny and her well-kissed mouth tight with tension. “I need to think,” she whispered, keeping her focus on Allie, who was coming closer with every step.

  “Think about what?”

  “About whether that was a good thing or not.”

  Her sister showing up? Or what had almost happened between them on the floor of that carousel?

  He had no idea. Before he could find out, Allie had walked within earshot. And Sabrina had put that invisible wall firmly back in place.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT HAD BEEN HARD ENOUGH for Tom King to sneak into the old Stuttgardt place at night when just the old man and his grandson were living there. Now, with the two women and that stupid dog staying in a tent right outside the back door, it had become nearly impossible.

  Parked on the side of the road running behind the property late Tuesday morning, he saw a car approach, and slid down in his seat. Fortunately, Tom did not recognize the driver.

  But his luck wouldn’t hold out forever. Sooner or later Chief Bennigan was going to start wondering why Tom’s car was often parked, half hidden, in the woods behind the infamous house. Especially late at night.

  “It might be time to give this up,” he muttered aloud, wanting some sound, even if it was just his own voice. The radio had given out in this old piece of junk long ago. Another reminder of the penniless hell his life had become—all thanks to his former employer, Wilhelm Stuttgardt.

  That man hadn’t only stolen a lot of folks’ money, he’d stolen their futures, Tom included. By embezzling every hard-earned dollar his employees had contributed to their pension funds, what the fiend had really stolen was their golden years.