Love, Laughter, and Happily Ever Afters Collection (Eight Fun, Romantic Novels by Eight Bestselling Authors)

by Violet Duke

  “And most of all, she’d really, really hated being a mother…specifically our mother.”

  Brian took her hand. “Honey, I’m sure that wasn’t true.”

  She shrugged sadly. “No, probably not. But she sure said it a lot to me. When she would remember me, that is. But I couldn’t blame her. Look at all she had to do. She didn’t have time to play with me, let alone remember my birthday or buy me Christmas presents. And with my dad working two jobs just to keep food on the table and medical bill collectors off of us month to month, I couldn’t go whine to him about it either. Not when Willow was there being just the best big sister a girl could ask for, even while she was suffering through the most horrible disease.”

  Tessa remembered often how guilty she’d felt the few times she’d resented her sister. Moments of weakness, followed by several lifetimes of shame. For Tessa, there had been no one to take it all out on…so she’d taken it out on herself.

  “From there, the start of my teen years was like a bad made-for-TV movie—hanging out with the wrong crowd, trying pot, skipping school, doing every stupid, self-destructive thing a kid could do…including having sex before I was ready.”

  When she felt Brian tense in remembered rage beside her, she just focused on keeping down the bile that rose up to her throat whenever she thought about that night.

  “What Gavin said about pulling a train—that simply wasn’t true. There was no way I would’ve done anything like what he described. That night at the lakes was my first time. I’d been drunk, and I’d been hurt…drunk mainly because I’d been hurting. But instead of getting the guy who waited for me outside of the church so he could give me a birthday cake with sixteen candles, I got the guy who took my virginity on top of an old blanket on the ground. The part that he did get right was when he said those two other girls at the party threw up all over the place…namely, on me.”

  Head hanging down in shame, she finished, “And for the memorable finale, I went home later to find that my sister had been taken to the ER that night and had almost died.”

  “My mom couldn’t even look at me, couldn’t understand why I was doing this to her, when she was going through so much to keep my sister alive. And to this day, I’ll never forget hearing her say to my dad, ‘Why couldn’t it have been Tessa? Why did God have to punish Willow with JHD?’”

  Vicious anger slashed across Brian’s expression.

  Tessa, meanwhile, just wrapped her arms around her middle, feeling the kick to the stomach those two shouted sentences had been, as if it had just happened yesterday.

  “It’s not like I haven’t asked myself the same question. Willow had all the promise, all the perfection. And yet she was the one to get JHD. It wasn’t fair.”

  Reaching up to wipe away the single, tear that had managed to break free and slide down her cheek, Brian whispered almost harshly, “It would’ve been equally unfair if you’d been the one with JHD, sweetheart.”

  Tessa laughed bitterly at that. “No. It wouldn’t have been. And what’s more, my mother would never have ended up the way she did if it had been me instead.” An almost sympathetic sadness hit her as it always did when she remembered how broken her mom had become by then. “In that moment, then and there at the hospital after hearing her say that, I decided that my mother deserved the chance to be free. Free from the motherhood she’d come to hate so much, free from the husband she’d eventually have to watch suffer through adult-onset HD.”

  “…And free from me.”

  She met his eyes for the first time since starting the morbid replay of her childhood. “So that was why I dropped out. I got my GED the summer after my sophomore year, went to the bakery near our house and begged the woman who’d always been so kind to me and Willow to train and hire me. Between my dad and me, we made a plan to have Willow’s care completely under control by the end of the summer. And by Labor Day, my mom was a free woman, living halfway across the country from us, blissfully carefree.”

  At his infuriated expression—yes, something like that would upset a wonderful parent like Brian—she added, “But it’s okay. I made sure Willow and my dad were better off without her. I took care of them, did everything she only deigned to do, but better. I loved them and filled their lives with as much life as I could.” She took in a deep, steadying breath. “And later, when my mom needed money to get back on her feet, I took care of her too. Just because she didn’t want to be my mom, didn’t mean I was going to stop being her daughter.”

  She had to look away. The sympathy in Brian’s eyes was too much. Pity, she was used to, even disdain and recrimination like during high school. But genuine, more-feeling-than-thought sympathy…never.

  He tipped her chin up gently but firmly and brought her gaze level with his.

  “You, Tessa Daniels, are even more amazing than even I can believe.”

  WITHOUT ANOTHER THOUGHT, and no further notice, he hauled her into his arms and took possession of her lips in a deep, sinking kiss that had an uncontainable growl thrashing out of his chest. The woman wasn’t just amazing, she was intoxicating.

  She was his.

  The feeling of finally having her in his arms filled him with a bone-deep comfort and reckless need all in one. Her lips parted for him and he tried, really he did, to gentle his kiss, to slow things down. But she was consuming him whole.

  Control nearly shot, he pulled back a bit to simply stare at her as she unraveled in his arms. He watched her teeth bite into her lower lip, watched her eyes become drowsy with desire and darken to almost black as he skimmed up the hem of her shirt. Just a sliver of an inch. Just enough for his calloused fingers to feel the smooth silk of her back.

  The tiny little gasp that escaped her was his undoing.

  His lips couldn’t help but fall back to claim hers again. Fully this time. With no restraint, no end in sight. Her every reaction was a revelation, her every open, honest response simply high-octane fuel that fed his arousal. He rubbed his fingers over the base of her spine slowly and drank in all the tiny sounds he was sure she didn’t realize she was making. Her body softened against his then, sinking into him as if her every pleasure was his alone.

  And he was lost.

  She was burning alive under his touch and more than anything, more than his next breath, he wanted to drown in that fire, bring it to a full-blown inferno that consumed them both whole.

  …But not tonight.

  “Babe we can’t,” he somehow managed to punch out. Voice gravelly, he drew his hands back to safer territory and said roughly, “You’re hurting and your emotions have gone through the wringer tonight. I can’t take advantage of you like that.”

  And yet still, he couldn’t bear to let her go completely.

  “Then don’t,” she replied simply, arms twining around his shoulders. “Let me take advantage of you.”

  Jerking back to put some head-clearing distance between them was about as painful as ripping off his own skin.

  “Sweetheart, why don’t we just hang out tonight? We can sit and talk more about those dickheads we ran into tonight if it’ll help. Or we could just watch a movie…anything you want to do.”

  He quickly snatched her wandering hands as they traveled down his lats and started tugging at the hem of his t-shirt.

  “Anything except that,” he groaned. “Work with me here, woman.” Raggedly, he put his forehead against hers and counted to ten to try and find the tattered remains of his restraint.

  The thought almost made him laugh. Who was he kidding? He had no restraint when it came to Tessa. By the fifth second, his lips had already found their way back to hers.

  And goddammit if her whole body didn’t just tremble right there in his arms.

 
She was just so mind-wreckingly responsive. As usual, without even trying, she was driving him batshit crazy.

  Tapping into a reserve even he didn’t know he had, he broke off the kiss and took another step away from her.

  Then he watched in sad disbelief as her expression became completely shuttered a half an instant later—closing him out behind the walls of a now ten-story castle and a moat filled with fire-breathing piranhas.

  The lightning quick response time of her defenses was a punch to his gut, a tragic reminder of how much she’d been through, how hard she’d had to fight to not let it all destroy her.

  “Look Brian, if you don’t want to, you can just tell me you know. I just thought we had something and we could have a great night exploring it. But hey, I’m a big girl. You don’t have to make excuses to let me down easy.”

  He gave her a look that said he wondered about her IQ before grabbing her hand and dragging it over the zipper of his jeans. “Does that feel like I don’t want to?”

  Her eyes widened, and her grip closed tight around him.

  Bourbon-soaked shards of glass went hissing down his throat. “For chrissakes, stop.” The blood supply in his brain was dipping down to a dangerous low.

  And the damn temptress was clearly all torn up about it.

  He glared at the smile she was biting back. “I’m glad you find this so amusing.”

  “It’s not amusement; it’s relief. Here I was thinking it was just me getting affected with my perpetually wet panties around you and all.”

  A seriously pained groan escaped him then. “To preserve my sanity—and your panties—don’t use the word wet in any more sentences tonight.”

  She sighed. “I really don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this. It’s just sex. I’m not looking for anything serious. You heard Gavin earlier this evening. Being the ‘good girl’ was never exactly my thing.” She brushed up against the hardening ridge tenting his jeans to drive home her point.

  With a muttered curse, he clamped one arm around her waist and tangled his free hand in her hair. “Sweetheart, this thing between us is a big deal,” he said roughly, tugging gently on her hair and nearly losing it when she arched her back in response. Her fitted tee was so paper-frickin’-thin. One sharp yank was all it’d take to rip it right down the middle.

  Good lord, he needed to find some control.

  “Whether this thing between us lasts one night or ten, when—and yes I said when we have sex—I’ll make damn sure that every single second of it seeps into your bones, burns into your memory, and turns into a relentless craving that makes you forget all the assholes from your past.” He ran his lips along the thrumming pulse at her throat.

  “And if I’m really lucky, it’ll also help ruin you for all other men completely.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  TOO LATE. She was already irreparably ruined, addicted.

  Hopeful.

  The latter being the scariest part of it all.

  Because for the first time in her adult life, she was actually hoping that there really was such a thing as a happily ever after for a girl like her…

  And a nice guy who calls the very next day.

  Because he did. Just to see how her day had been. A few days after that? Same thing. By the week’s end, the only thing that had kept Tessa from thinking about Brian nonstop was the sheer volume of work she’d had.

  Tessa rarely left her weekly editor duties until Friday but it had been unavoidable this week. They were having an unusually busy spring season on the catering end of things with one corporate function every few days, not to mention all the grant deadlines and other projects that she was working on with Connor’s pro bono team. She was just thankful she didn’t have to worry about the summer edition of AZ Hotspots for another few weeks—there were just not enough hours in the day.

  Halfway through checking next week’s online layout and the selection of articles for AZ Potluck’s spotlight focus on cooking with spring veggies and fruits, Tessa almost hit the ceiling when her phone rang. It was her landline, and the jarring clang echoing in her apartment wasn’t a sound she heard very often.

  “Hello?”

  “Do you have plans tonight?”

  A warm buzz filled her veins. She wasn’t sure why she liked the fact that he didn’t bother to say who it was but she did. It was…intimate, somehow. And very Brian. “Depends. Are you planning on ruining me for all other men tonight?”

  Silence.

  She sat there and smiled, waiting him out.

  “Would you come over if I said yes?” he rasped out, calling her bluff.

  Two could play at that game. “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ, woman.”

  She chuckled. For a first attempt at flirting, she’d say that was pretty successful. “I’m actually working tonight. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Just wanted to hang out with you if you were free,” he replied, sounding disappointed. “The girls are having their sleepover here tonight, and normally I’d make them sloppy joes or have a Mexican night, but since the weather’s warming up, they decided they wanted to camp out back instead. You sure you can’t make it? We’re doing our famous takeout smorgasbord. We each get to pick one or two of our favorite takeout items and we have ourselves a little buffet.”

  Tessa was tempted. “Lucky kids. I’ve always wanted to go camping.”

  His voice warmed. “Damn. I’d say we could pitch a tent as well but my yard’s not that big. And I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to behave myself.”

  Wow. Clearly, he was much better at the flirting thing than she was; her mind was doing somersaults.

  “We could go camping for real one of these weekends,” he offered then, his voice smiling as he added, “I’d see to it that neither one of us would have to worry about behaving.”

  Now the silence was on her part.

  “That was mean,” she said when her vocal cords finally started working again.

  Chuckling, he assured her, “Wasn’t trying to be. I find you make it hard for me to think before talking.”

  Oh. Well then they were even. “I’ll take a very eager rain check on the camping. Sadly, I’ve actually never even been on a vacation, let alone one in the woods. I usually just work all the time. Enter tonight as exhibit A.”

  “Yeah, Connor mentioned you’re a workaholic. Say, why don’t you bring your work here? I should probably do some grading anyhow. And the girls usually don’t resurface until at least nine the next morning. You wouldn’t even have to bring a takeout dish. We’ll have plenty of food.”

  Geez, he was making it so hard to say no. The food part yes, but also the part about their working alongside each other. It sounded so���nice.

  “I don’t know,” she waffled. “This week has been so crazy with a midweek catering event and two grant revisions for a new HD clinical trial we weren’t prepared for. My to-do list for AZ Potluck alone will probably keep me chained to my desktop until at least eight maybe.”

  “So come over after. That’s around when the girls eat on the weekends anyway. Say yes, Tessa. I like spending time with you. I’ve been thinking about you all week.”

  Definitely ruined for all other men.

  “Okay, yes. And you can put me down for takeout veggie paella.”

  *

  “I’LL CALL ABBY and ask her to stay here with you two,” said Brian firmly, as he filled up his plate with food and took a seat at the table across from Tessa. “I have third quarter open house conferences until late that night. And since Becky’s folks are going to be there too for Becky’s classes, you girls would be unchaperoned until a
fter nine o’clock.” He shook his head. “No can do, Sky-bug.”

  Seeing his daughter wind up with what looked to be a hell of a pitch, he settled in for a fast one.

  “Dad, I’m almost fourteen. I can totally stay home alone. Becky’s older sister used to babysit Becky and her little brother when she was fourteen.”

  Becky echoed that last rebuttal point, her expression serious, her fast-bobbing head silently cheering her friend on for all thirteen-year-old girls everywhere.

  “During the day, sure,” Brian volleyed back, glad that he’d done his research for this particular battle—the girls seemed to forget that parents actually talk to each other when their children are busy plotting. “But that was never at night. Again, sorry, kiddo. Discussion closed. We can pick this argument up again when you actually are fourteen.”

  Game, set, match.

  Skylar sighed in a you’re-lucky-I-love-you way and the two girls grabbed their plates and headed out back to their fully stockpiled tent, Becky praising Skylar for being so close this time.

  Tessa just chuckled, waiting until the girls slid the patio door shut before teasing, “Do you honestly believe you’re going to suddenly be able to loosen those apron strings next year?”

  He gave her a look that cried out Judas, and she chuckled even louder, miming the zipping of her mouth shut and throwing away the key.

  “Ha!” he let out in disbelief. “If I thought that had any chance of working, I’d steal that invisible key and bury it in my pocket.”

  Brian watched as Tessa paused in surprise and then tipped her head back to laugh so hard she almost fell off her chair. He’d never seen her without those colorful weekly-changing streaks in her hair—without it, her ink-black hair framed her face with a softness that made her look more delicate, vulnerable. Infinitely more memorable.

  And when she laughed. Jesus. The effect could stop traffic.