by Noelle Adams
Seducing Her Brother’s Best Friend
Noelle Adams
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Epilogue
Excerpt from Unguarded
About Noelle Adams
One
“I’ve got a plan,” Carol Murphy announced to her two best friends.
Emma and Ginny had been Carol’s best friends since they’d all been ten, and Carol had always told them everything. She was a little nervous about this though. Her hands felt slightly cold, so she picked up her mug of tea in both hands to warm them up.
The three of them were sitting in a corner table at Tea for Two, the tea shop in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia, that Carol and Ginny had opened earlier last year.
Ginny, blond, gorgeous, and always smiling, arched her eyebrows. “It’s not a Man-Fast, is it? Because you know how well that worked out for Emma.”
Emma slanted her friend a look of mock indignation. “Hey, I managed it for a couple of weeks.”
“It’s not a Man-Fast,” Carol said firmly, trying to bring them back to the topic before they got completely distracted. “I’ve basically been on a Man-Fast for the past year. It’s been more than a year since I’ve even had a date. I’ve succeeded in a Man-Fast far beyond Emma’s dreams.”
She was making light of the subject, but it really was rather depressing to think she’d gone so long without a date. A couple of guys had asked her out in that time, but they were men she barely knew and had absolutely no interest in.
She would be twenty-six soon. She had a good life—with a lot of great friends and her own small business, which was doing as well as could be expected. She was reasonably attractive with long, reddish-brown hair and gray eyes. She could stand to lose about fifteen pounds, and she wasn’t nearly as pretty as her two best friends, but still…
She thought she was a nice person. She didn’t know why no one wanted to go out with her.
“It’s not because men aren’t interested,” Ginny said as if she’d read Carol’s mind. “It’s because you don’t put yourself out there.”
“I try!”
Emma laughed. “I know you think you’re trying, but I don’t think guys know that you are. Guys are sometimes kind of clueless—”
“Sometimes!” Ginny said with an ironic snort.
Emma narrowed her eyes. “Sometimes they are. Your attempts are all so subtle they don’t even know you’re trying to flirt. You can’t be subtle.”
Carol thought about that and wondered if it was true. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that her friends were just trying to make her feel better, but they were usually honest with each other. She was shyer than Emma and Ginny. She was naturally less likely to put herself out there for other people to judge. Maybe that was part of her problem. “I don’t want to embarrass myself,” she admitted.
Ginny chuckled. “See, that’s your problem. You’ve got to be willing to embarrass yourself if you want to really flirt.”
Carol cringed at the visual of her doing something like that—flirting so obviously that everyone would see it.
She was by nature a listener rather than a talker. She loved baking and taking care of people and supporting those she loved. She didn’t like being the center of attention, and it felt unnatural whenever she tried it.
Maybe that was why she’d always gone unnoticed by men.
Or maybe they just weren’t that attracted to her.
“So, what is your plan?” Emma asked. She’d always been the most practical and organized of the three, and she was the one who usually kept them on topic. “Are you going to put yourself out there more? Maybe you should join a dating site or something.”
Carol had thought about that. She’d been thinking about it a lot last year, but then in September something had changed.
She didn’t just want a man.
She wanted one man in particular.
She’d never admitted it to anyone though, and now that the moment was at hand, the words stuck in her throat.
Ginny frowned. “What’s the matter? Surely your plan isn’t that scary.”
“It is,” Carol said. Seeking some sort of distraction from her rising nerves, she looked around the shop and noticed a woman was waiting at the counter. Rachel, one of the college students who was working for them, was clearing up dishes from tables on the other side of the room. “Hold on. Let me take care of her real quick.”
She walked over to the counter, smiling at the woman waiting there. The woman was a frequent customer, and Carol recognized her immediately. She was small and blond and incredibly pretty with a quirky, straight-laced sense of style. Today she wore a sweater-vest over a blouse and a pleated skirt.
“Sorry about that,” Carol said with a smile. “I don’t think Rachel saw you.”
“It’s no problem,” the woman said. She didn’t look impatient or annoyed, so that was a relief. “Do you still have that chai I had last week?”
“Yes, we do! It was really popular, so we’re going to stock it regularly. To go?”
The woman nodded her assent and waited as Carol prepared the tea in a to-go cup. “It’s not very crowded today.”
“No. Wednesday afternoons are always dead for some reason.”
“But business is going pretty well?”
Carol glanced over and saw that the woman seemed to really want to know. “Yeah. We’re doing great.”
“So you’re not going to close anytime soon?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Oh good. I was so happy when you opened up.” The woman flashed her a quick, intelligent smile. “My apartment is right upstairs.”
Carol smiled back. “No wonder I see you here a lot. I hope you’ll keep coming.” She swiped the woman’s card and handed it back to her. “By the way, I’m Carol.”
“Jill.” The woman slid her wallet into her leather tote and took her tea. “And I’ll definitely keep coming.”
Carol logged out of the register and then went to sit down at the table with Ginny and Emma, who were both staring at her with a strange intensity.
“What?” she demanded, looking down at herself to make sure she hadn’t spilled something on her top or gotten flour all over her broomstick skirt. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“You were about to tell us something,” Ginny explained. “And you were nervous about saying it. So now we want to know what it is.”
“What is your plan?” Emma asked.
There was no sense in stalling or trying to distract them now. They knew she had something important to say, and they’d never let her get away with not saying it. Carol clasped her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “It’s not a Man-Fast,” she said slowly. “But it is about a man.”
“I knew it!” Ginny exclaimed, clapping her hands excitedly. “I knew it! I just now told Emma that’s what you were going to say.”
“I haven’t even said it yet.”
“But what else could it be? You’ve always secretly liked him. All of us knew it,” Ginny said.
Emma and Ginny were both smiling, both looking pleased and proud and brimming wit
h enthusiasm.
Carol shouldn’t have been surprised. They knew each other so well. They would have known where her thoughts had been drifting lately.
“You’ve been into him since middle school,” Emma added. “Remember when you asked him to the dance?”
Naturally Carol remembered it. She’d never been able to forget it. It was one of the most humiliating moments of her life.
When she was thirteen, their school had had a Sadie Hawkins dance. Emma and Ginny had both founds boys in their class to ask, but Carol had had someone else in mind. She’d wanted to go with Emma’s brother, Patrick, who was two years older than her and always so smart and serious and intriguing.
So she’d worked up her courage for a week and then finally made her move one day after school. He’d been doing homework in the dining room of his and Emma’s house, and she’d gone up to talk to him. She’d been so scared she hadn’t been able to say anything immediately, so she’d just sat down at a chair beside him.
He was working on some sort of math problem on graph paper—he was taking math more advanced than anything she could even understand—and he raised his eyes to look at her.
When she didn’t say anything, he said, “What?”
There was nothing else she could do. She was there, and she had to say what she’d come for. So she’d blurted out, “Will you go to the dance with me?”
He stared at her for a minute, his brown eyes absolutely unreadable.
Then he’d lowered his gaze and kept working on his math problem.
That had been it. He hadn’t even answered her. He hadn’t looked at her again.
Carol had wanted to melt into the floor in absolute humiliation, and she’d run away and avoided him for weeks afterward.
“Don’t remind me,” she said, realizing her friends were waiting for her to say something. “If I think about that, I’ll never have the courage to do anything now.”
“He was a kid,” Emma said softly. “He was terrified of girls back then. It wasn’t personal.”
The rejection had felt personal to Carol, but she was reasonable enough to acknowledge that it didn’t mean her hopes for Patrick now were futile. They had a good relationship. They were friends.
She thought they might be even more if he could just start seeing her in a different way.
Then she blinked as she thought about what Ginny had said earlier. “What do you mean, all of us knew it? Not… not everyone knew it, did they?”
“No.” Ginny was twirling her engagement ring absently, as she often did. “Just Emma and me. No one else knows anything. Like I said before, even when you think you’re being obvious, it’s too subtle for guys to pick up on.”
“Patrick has no idea,” Emma added. “Talk about clueless.”
Carol let out a long breath and closed her eyes for a moment.
There it was.
Patrick Stevenson. Emma’s older brother.
The guy she’d liked since she was a kid.
She hadn’t been nursing a desperate love for him or anything, but in the back of her mind, he’d always been the man she most wanted.
Not that he’d ever noticed her at all.
Feeling better that it was out on the table, she said, “Okay, yes. That’s my plan. I want a man, and I want that man to be Patrick. So I need a… I need a plan to make it happen.”
“He already likes you a lot,” Ginny said. “I don’t think it will be very hard to seal the deal.”
Carol shook her head. “Yeah, he likes me as a friend and as his best friend’s little sister. He isn’t attracted to me.”
“How do you know?” Ginny asked.
“Because he’s never given even the slightest indication that he is. I’m not stupid, you know. I know if a guy is attracted to me, and Patrick just isn’t. So I need help with a plan to get him to start seeing me sexually. I’ve got to figure out how to seduce him.”
“Ew,” Emma said, making a face. “He’s my brother, remember. I don’t really want to think about him and sex.”
Carol sniffed. “If that’s the case, then maybe you can mention to Ginny to not sneak off in the middle of a cookout to do the deed with my brother.”
Ginny giggled and looked a little sheepish. She’d been engaged to Carol’s brother, Ryan, now for two months, and Carol had never seen either of them happier. “Well, I’m sorry, but your brother happens to be insatiable.”
When Carol started to object to this piece of information, Emma interrupted. “Okay, okay. We’ve got to just agree that any specific details about sex with any of our brothers are completely off-limits. But I’m happy to help you with a plan to get Patrick to start thinking about you differently. As long as we agree to use the word attract instead of seduce.”
Carol and Ginny both laughed.
Then Carol nodded, feeling better and more hopeful now that her friends were in on the idea. “Okay. It’s a deal. So we need to come up with a plan to help me attract Patrick. You know how bad I am at this kind of thing, so you both need to really help me.”
“We can definitely come up with some ideas,” Emma said.
“This is going to be fun!” Ginny added.
Carol didn’t know how fun it was going to be. Even the thought of making moves on Patrick absolutely terrified her.
She was very likely to end up feeling like that thirteen-year-old again, mortified and completely rejected.
But this wasn’t going to happen unless she took some real steps. She might think Patrick was the cutest, smartest, funniest, nicest guy in the world, but he didn’t think about her as anything except Ryan’s little sister.
That had to change.
Other women managed to seduce guys all the time.
Surely she was capable of doing it too.
***
That evening, Carol was working in the storeroom, trying to reorganize to make room for a new shipment of gourmet tea and coffee they’d gotten in.
Since she arrived at work every morning at five-thirty, she usually left the shop in the mid-afternoon, letting Ginny manages things in the later hours, but she hadn’t been able to get away today. Now she was tired and had a tension headache wrapping around the base of her skull, and the boxes she’d wanted to put on the lower shelf just wouldn’t fit.
She growled to herself as she tried to squeeze the last box into a space that was simply too small for it.
She’d been feeling hopeful earlier today, when she’d been chatting with her friends about doing something about her feelings for Patrick, but her mood had definitely plummeted since then.
Patrick hadn’t even stopped by today.
He often did, taking a break to come over for a coffee or snack, and she’d been hopeful he would today.
But he hadn’t.
If he didn’t care enough to make a point of seeing her for a few minutes, then she wasn’t sure how much hope she had for more.
She reminded herself it was early days and his feelings for her could change at any moment. She growled again as she tried to force the box into place.
“What did that box ever do to you?” The dry voice came from the doorway to the storeroom behind her.
She gasped and jerked in surprise, hitting her head on the shelf above her. When she straightened up, rubbing her sore head, she saw Patrick had stepped into the room, his leather saddlebag slung over his shoulder and a quizzical lift to his eyebrows. He wore jeans and a wool car coat. His brown hair was slightly rumpled and his brown eyes looked very dark in the artificial light. “Ouch,” she said. “You could have let me know you were there.”
“I thought I did.” His eyes scanned her face, made a quick detour down her body, and then turned to the shelf she’d been working on. “That box is never going to fit, and trying to shame it into being a size smaller is wasted energy.”
A bubble of amusement broke in her throat, despite her aching head and the aftermath of her surprise. “I wasn’t shaming it.”
“You were growling at
it for being too big.
“No, I wasn’t.”
His eyebrows lifted a bit more, clearly questioning the credibility of her statement.
With a resigned giggle, she admitted, “I’d just done this whole reorganization of the shelves, and that was the last box on the last shelf. If it doesn’t fit, my whole plan falls apart.”
His eyes rested on her face for a moment with that wry, thoughtful look that was so much a part of him. Then he stepped over, leaned down to take the box she’d been trying to make work, and casually placed it on an empty spot on the shelf above it. “There. It works.”
She laughed even more, tingling excitement spilling over in her heart at the fact that he’d come here to see her and he was being so Patrick-like. “That’s a coffee shelf. Not a tea shelf. It’s supposed to be on the bottom shelf with its co-patriots.”
He hadn’t yet smiled, but his eyes were warm and amused. He shook his head, but then dropped his bag onto the floor and knelt down to start pulling the boxes off the lower shelves.
She knelt down beside him. “You don’t have to mess with it, Patrick. It’s really not a big deal.”
“You wanted to make it work, so we’ll make it work. We’ll summon our best geometrical skills and see what we can do.”
She watched him as he assessed the size and number of the boxes and the dimensions of the shelf. He didn’t say anything, but she could see him doing math in his head.
She’d known him since she was ten. She knew how to read his expressions. He’d always been smart like that, putting pieces together in his mind, figuring out how to solve problems with no-nonsense intelligence.
After a minute, he seemed to come to some sort of conclusion, so she asked, “Do you think they will fit?”
“Yeah. I think so.” He still wasn’t smiling, but he looked both sexy and adorable sitting on the floor of the storeroom with his mussed hair, his five o’clock shadow, and the seriousness of his expression. “We’ll start with all the boxes of this size.”
They worked for several minutes, fitting the boxes in as he suggested, with a few modifications from her so she would be able to see all the boxes without removing some first. When he slid the final box into place, she clapped her hands in victory.
