by Jen Andrews
I went back inside, found us some drinks and snacks, and plugged my iPod into the stereo system I’d installed on the patio. I found a fully inflated air mattress and tossed it into the pool, laughing at the memory of waking face down with a deflated one between the concrete and me.
“What’s so funny over there, chuckles?” Teagan asked as she put the net away.
I picked up the deflated air mattress. “Just thinking back to when my friends helped set up the garage and they brought tequila . . . I woke up on this the next day.”
She laughed as she pulled her sundress over her head. Her dress caught on her hair clip and she pulled it free. Her hair spilled over her back and shoulders in beautiful, red waves. She was wearing a skimpy, emerald green bikini that left nothing to the imagination. Her peaches and cream skin was flawless, her body was perfectly curvy, yet fit, and she was definitely the most captivating woman I had ever seen.
I watched as she twisted her hair back into the knotted style she always wore. The way the muscles in her arms flexed as she twisted her long hair had my mind wandering to having her arms wrapped around me, and her hair spilling around us. I groaned inwardly as my mind and dick betrayed me, yet again.
“Jeremy, are you coming?”
My mind went straight to the gutter and I grinned. “Yeah, I forgot towels though. I’ll be back.” That wasn’t a lie. I had forgotten them. Thank God I had because I needed to get my hard-on under control.
By the time I returned, Teagan was in the shallow end of the pool. She was so petite the water was almost to her chest. She turned when she heard me. I took off my shirt and tossed it onto the back of a patio chair. She glanced down at my chest, and a surprised expression came over her face.
“Jeremy, when did you get your tattoo?”
I thought back to when I went to the tattoo shop with Andy, Zoey, and Sweet Pea to commemorate my induction as a godfather. It was a monumental week in my life, the best week of my life, actually.
“It was a week or so after the night I saw you at Dub’s, why?”
Her cheeks flushed and she looked mad. “Can you grab my phone off the table, please?”
I handed the phone to her as I set our towels down on the patio next to the pool. I sat on the side then dropped down in the water next to her. She scrolled through a bunch of pictures and when she found the one she wanted, she handed her phone to me.
On the screen, was a picture of me asleep in my bed. I knew it was mine because I recognized my bedding and headboard. Cammie was draped over me doing that gross duck-face she thought made her look sexy. She was topless and her fake tits were pressed against my chest. The text below the photo read: Guess where your BF is while you’re working. Lol.
I was pissed she’d taken the picture without my knowledge, and furious she’d taunted Teagan with it. It made me want to watch Teagan jump on her and punch her all over again. She deserved it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Is this why you didn’t want to sleep in the guest bedroom? Because of the bed?”
“Yes. I’m sorry—it’s stupid. I didn’t want to sleep where she had. Sorry for acting ridiculous.”
“Nothing you do is ridiculous, Teagan. Don’t talk like that. Just so you know, the mattress is brand new. I’m the only person who has ever slept on it, and you, Hannah, and I are the only people who have slept on the bed in my bedroom. When did she send this to you?”
She took the phone out of my hand and set it on the towels lying next to the pool. “A few days ago. But since you got the tattoo after you broke up with her, I know it’s an old picture. By the way, your tattoo is adorable,” she said as she checked it out again.
“Adorable, huh?” I asked. “Well, I happen to think you’re pretty adorable too.” Did I really say that? I think my cheese-factor just hit an all-time high.
She smiled sweetly, and her cheeks flushed again.
“I also think I need to know why your nickname is Peaches.”
Her cheeks turned even redder and I suspected that her pretty skin was the reason for the nickname. She playfully splashed me then blatantly ignored my statement about her nickname.
Reaching out, she placed her hand over my tattoo. “Is this really Hannah’s handprint?”
“Yep, it is.” I told her all about the day they asked me to be her godfather and the day I got the tattoo.
“Everything you’ve been doing these last several months has been because of her?”
“Pretty much. That and I realized I’m too old to be doing the same crap I’ve done for years. It’s time for me to grow up, I guess.”
She laughed. “Yes, I’d say thirty is a good age to finally become a responsible adult.”
“Now you’re just being mean to me,” I joked and backed away from her toward deeper water. “You’re breaking my poor, irresponsible heart over here.”
She splashed water at me again as I floated farther away. The water was now to my chin and I was standing on my toes. I exhaled all the air from my lungs, submerged, and walked backward across the bottom of the pool until I reached the side.
With three feet of water over my head, I watched as she lifted herself out of the pool. The next thing I knew, I felt an impact of someone jumping in, and she was under the water in front of me. She sank down until she was eye level with me. I pulled her close and pressed my lips to hers.
She wrapped her arms around my torso and pushed off the wall behind me, pulling me with her. We broke the surface of the water with our lips still pressed together, and her arms wrapped around me.
I wanted to deepen the kiss so badly, to taste her—but I needed to let her make the first move. Thank Christ she did. Her lips parted, inviting me in. I didn’t resist. I didn’t have the strength to. Her legs wrapped around my waist and I propelled us to the shallower edge of the pool where my feet touched bottom.
I couldn’t get enough of her. Our hands were all over each other—bodies pressed tightly together, tongues and mouths in a frenzy of motion. Her phone rang from the side of the pool, interrupting our heated moment.
“Don’t answer it,” I begged as she released her hold on me and made her way across the shallow end to the pool steps.
“I need to. It might be about Nanna,” she said breathlessly. By the time she got to her phone, it had stopped ringing. Within seconds, it was ringing again, and she answered it. “Reese!” she squealed. “I’m alright, how are you?” she asked the Reese person.
Was Reese a man or woman? From the one-sided conversation, I eventually determined Reese was definitely a man. A pang of what I assumed was jealousy, shot through my gut. Great, yet another new feeling for Jeremy James.
I waded to the steps and got out of the pool. It was past lunchtime and I was getting irritable from not eating.
After I dried off, I wrapped a beach towel loosely around my waist. Teagan wasn’t paying attention to me so I pulled my wet shorts off from under the towel and laid them over the drying rack. I opened the French doors that led to my bedroom, and went inside and put on dry shorts.
I was in the kitchen cutting leftover lemon chicken in to chunks to toss onto a salad when Teagan came in.
“Why’d you leave?” she asked.
I turned around and found she was wearing her sundress again. “I was hungry and wanted to give you some privacy for your call.”
She closed the distance between us, so she was standing directly in front of me. “Reese is a good friend from Denver. He’s moving out here next week and we needed to confirm our plans. The apartment won’t be ready when he gets here so he’s staying with me and my family until then.”
I cringed inside. There’s that pang of jealousy again. I didn’t like it. “He’s staying with you?” I asked just to confirm that I’d heard her correctly.
She smiled, and a hint of curiosity outlined the corners of her perfect lips. “Are you jealous, Jeremy?”
Hell yes I am. I didn’t want him to come and take her away from me. I leaned against the cou
nter. “Yes,” I muttered as I stared at the floor. “I know I don’t have the right to be, but . . .”
She moved closer and pressed her body against mine, resting her cheek on my bare chest. “Don’t be. Reese is very . . . gay.” She looked at me, grinning. “Besides, after our visit with Nanna this morning, we’re both officially off the market.”
Huh? “I’m sorry, what?” I mumbled, shaking my head in confusion.
She stood smiling at me, and then laughed heartily. “You should see the look on your face, Jeremy. It’s priceless.”
“What are you talking about, Teagan?”
She was now doubled over holding her stomach because she was laughing so hard. “I thought you wanted to be my boyfriend,” she said between laughs.
Duh, Jeremy, wasn’t that the whole point of this weekend alone?
She pushed me out of the way and finished making our lunch as I stood there like an idiot. She took our plates to the dining room, sat down, and began to eat without me. After a few minutes, she came in and dragged me to the seat next to her. As she ate and I stared down at my plate, perplexed, she took my right hand and rubbed her thumb over the ring her grandma had given me.
I got the hint. “I guess you should tell me about the rings.”
Jeremy wanted to know about the rings Nanna gave us. I didn’t know the exact history of them, but I knew what we were supposed to do with them and why she gave them to us. “They’re my grandparents’ wedding rings, Jeremy. They are over sixty years old.”
He shifted anxiously in his seat and propped his elbows on the table. “Why did she give one to me?” he asked.
His questioning made me uneasy, and I found it difficult to tell him what she said to me. When she’d started speaking, I hadn’t believed my ears because she hadn’t spoken that many words in a row since her stroke.
My eyes stung from the tears forming in them. “She’s eighty-one, Jeremy, and very old school. She gave them to us because she said she can tell we love each other as much as her and my papa loved each other.”
“How can she know that if we don’t even know it?” He ran his fingers through his hair.
“Call it Nanna’s intuition, I guess. She’s never been wrong about it before,” I said. She’d seen it with my mom and Lucas, and she’d seen it with other family members and friends throughout the years. Why would I ignore it?
“I know it sounds crazy, but she’s never been wrong about people before. In my family, the Claddagh ring is supposed to be passed from mother to daughter, but my parents already have their own rings. Nanna gave us the rings now because she said I didn’t trust in us, but we were meant to be.” I gestured between us as I spoke the last few words.
“What was the purpose of us putting on the rings the way we did, Teagan?” He swallowed hard.
“My mom once told me that wearing them on our right hands with the bottom of the heart facing toward our wrists means we’re not available to be with other people. That we’ve found the person we’re destined to be with.”
He looked down at his plate, then back over at me.
“Holy shit, I’m at a loss here, Teagan. I don’t know if I should take it off and give it back to you . . . or keep it and hope she was right by giving it to me.”
My heart and stomach simultaneously flip-flopped inside my body. “I don’t know what to do either.” On one hand, I wanted him to take the ring off and give it to me, but was it because I was on the fence about trusting him? Or because of all the trouble with Cammie?
On the other hand, I desperately wanted him to keep it, and for Nanna’s premonition to be correct. I wanted to be in love, but a trusting love. I wanted to be married and live in a house with a white picket fence. I wanted a bunch of babies to hold and to watch them grow. I wanted it all, but was Jeremy “the one” I was supposed to have it all with?
“Do you want her to be right, Jeremy?” I swore he was turning green right before my eyes.
He pushed his chair back and stood. “I don’t feel so good,” he said and left the dining room in a bit of a daze.
Obviously, he could use some time on his own, so I continued to eat. When he didn’t come back in a few minutes, I went to find him. I found him lying face-up on his bed. A small fan on his nightstand blasted cold air on him while he stared at the ceiling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I stood next to his bed.
As I waited for an answer, I stared at his gorgeous body. Physically, he was perfection. His dark brown hair was short on the sides and longer on the top. I loved watching him run his fingers through it. I would love to run my fingers through it. His dark, olive colored skin covered a slim but muscular body. My eyes drifted from his tattoo, down his body to a faint scar low on his abdomen. I guessed he must have had his appendix removed years ago.
The man definitely took care of himself. I scanned his torso where he had that sexy-as-hell V of muscle along his hipbones. The sexiest part of his body was the two thick veins that bulged above the waistband of his shorts, and wandered up his lower stomach. I hated to think of all the sit-ups and the ab workouts the man tortured himself with to get that V.
He still hadn’t responded to me by the time I’d finished studying every inch of him. “Jeremy, what’s wrong?”
“I think you should take the ring,” he said without looking at me.
“Why?”
“Because, Teagan. I’ve told you how I feel about you, but you haven’t told me anything. I’ve already caused you too many problems, and I can’t promise you it’s going to get any better. You don’t deserve that.”
He was right. He wasn’t holding anything back from me, but I was. Since so many thoughts and feelings were on my mind, and I’d had many, many days to think about them, they all came out in a flood. “Jeremy, I love being here with you. I love being around you. I do think we have something between us. It’s when we get out in the real world, and I go to work . . . that I get worried. Am I going to have to watch out for random girls you’ve been with, trying to do the same thing Cammie is doing? Every time we go somewhere, and you talk to a girl, do I need to wonder if you’ve had sex with her?” I placed my hand on his arm and gave a little squeeze to make sure he was paying close attention to me. “Do I need to worry about you cheating on me?”
He finally looked at me then rolled onto his side facing me. I laid down beside him, mimicking his position.
“I would never cheat on you, Teagan. That’s not how I am,” he said. “As for going out and running in to girls I’ve been with before, it’s a possibility. I’m friends with some of them still, but only friends.” He took my hand in his. “Besides, they don’t compare to you—not even close. I’ve barely touched you, but I know you’re so much more than what I deserve.”
Not once had he taken his eyes off mine.
“What do you want to do, Jeremy?” I whispered. “Now that we’ve cleared up a lot of what’s happened with Cammie, I want to give us a chance, but . . .”
“Teagan, what’s happened with Cammie is not your fault. It’s mine and I need to fix everything that she’s done. I can’t let it go on.”
I shook my head. “I’m scared it’s going to make everything worse at work. I already have two strikes against me, and I’m still on probation.”
“Why are you on probation, and what could you possibly have done to get two strikes against you?” He was making it sound like I could do no wrong.
I explained how the probationary period worked, and then I went on to tell him about the disciplinary actions in my personnel file. “The pictures HR had were completely innocent, but I did break the rules by dating a coworker.”
Jeremy reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his phone. Once he found what he was looking for, he handed the phone to me. “Are these the pictures they showed you?”
When I looked at them, I saw Cammie had sent them. I felt like beating the crap out of her. Again. “Yes, they’re the same. That morning, I’d visited Nanna befor
e work and was upset about her condition. The guy consoling me is Jared and we dated for a month or so.”
I swiped my finger across the screen to look at the photos again, but a different picture popped up. This one was of a shirtless Jeremy, and Hannah was sitting on his lap. The tattoo on his chest was very fresh looking.
“I love this.” I smiled as I showed Jeremy the picture.
“Me too,” he said. “Keep scrolling and you can see the rest of them if you want.”
I scrolled through several more—pictures of cars or his family.
“Who is this princess?” I asked when I came to a photo of him with an adorable dark haired little girl with big brown eyes.
“That’s Mya, Jason’s little girl. She had her first birthday in June. She is a princess for sure. She was the only girl until Hannah came along. Spoiled rotten . . . both of them.”
He smiled like the proud uncle that he was. From the high chair I’d noticed in his dining room, I knew he took his godfather and uncle duties very seriously.
I laughed at the next photo. “Uh, Jeremy . . . please explain this to me.”
He took the phone and laughed with me. “That would be my baby brother, Adam.”
“Is he duct taped to a pole?” I leaned in and looked closely at the picture.
“Yep, check this picture out.” He flipped to the next picture, and Adam was wearing makeup and his hair was in pigtails. Jeremy had the biggest grin on his face as we looked at the next several pictures of his brother.
“You guys are so mean. What did he do to deserve that?”
Jeremy shrugged. “Hell, I don’t remember, but I’m sure it was justified. We were in so much trouble with my mom after we cut him down, though. The duct tape ripped all the paint off the pillar and ruined his work uniform.”
He laughed explaining how they left Adam taped to the pillar for over an hour and how they’d had to repaint it.
Jeremy suddenly stopped laughing and turned serious. “Teagan, you asked me a question earlier, and I didn’t answer you. My answer is yes. I want your grandma to be right about us.”
