by Lauren Layne
Taylor mourned the tragically young loss of life, but mourn the woman herself? It was easier to mourn a perfect stranger.
To give him a bit more credit, Taylor’s father had tried slightly harder. He’d stuck around, at least. Held down two jobs so that he could pay for regular daycare for his toddler.
Taylor was too young to remember any of this, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if she could.
From what her aunt had told her, all of Vance Carr’s spare time had gone toward his drag racing hobby.
The same hobby that would kill him when Taylor was four.
An orphan before she’d even started kindergarten.
Vance Carr’s older sister, Karen, was the only thing between tiny Taylor and the foster system.
Karen had once told Taylor that though she and her brother weren’t close, it had been she who’d insisted on the paternity test when Taylor’s mom had shown up pregnant.
Taylor was grateful for it. It meant that when Karen had learned that she was the guardian of her four-year-old niece, she hadn’t fought it. Taylor was a Carr, and that’s all Karen had needed to know. If Karen had ever complained about inheriting a child she didn’t want, it hadn’t been to Taylor.
Taylor didn’t remember much about those early days, but she distinctly remembered the sticky summer day when her aunt had arrived at the police precinct in Athens, Georgia. She’d been dressed in what Taylor would eventually recognize as her aunt’s “uniform”: a black pencil skirt, silk blouse, and expensive but no-nonsense black pumps.
Karen had scanned the cramped, smelly room, walked with purpose toward a terrified Taylor, and told her not to worry. That she would be safe, and she would be cared for.
There were no hugs, no smiles, but even at a young age, Taylor had felt her aunt’s confidence. Her competence.
An hour later, the paperwork was complete and they’d walked out of the station side by side, although not hand in hand, to the black sedan her aunt had hired to drive her to and from the airport.
A few hours after that, they’d arrived at Karen’s apartment overlooking Central Park, and just like that, Taylor’s new life had begun.
Her aunt had never married, and to Taylor’s knowledge, she’d never even considered it. Reading between the lines, Taylor had to imagine that her aunt hadn’t planned on children either, but Karen Carr was hardly the type of woman to resist responsibility.
Taylor had no father figure and, thanks to her aunt’s influence, had never really figured out a use for men. Sure, she’d had her share of awkward first kisses in high school, plenty of hookups in college, but she’d never fancied herself in love.
Hadn’t believed in it. Not in the bitter, been-burned kind of way, just in the didn’t-need-it sense.
She liked men. Liked their size, the way they kissed, the way the male body felt above her, below her, whatever. But not for keeps. Never for keeps.
Still…
She’d thought that things with Bradley could be different.
Or at least she’d hoped.
Hoped that being compatible, never fighting, and enjoying the same types of wine were enough to make it work in the long term.
Damn it, she at least wanted the chance.
But now, instead of nesting with Bradley, she was rooming with Nick Ballantine, of all people, which left her feeling off balance as all heck.
Taylor did not like feeling off balance, and she knew exactly where to direct her irritation.
Bradley’s door was closed, but she knew that she was on his calendar because he’d accepted her meeting invite, which she was taking as a good sign.
She didn’t stop to think that she was a couple of minutes early before rapping an impatient knuckle against the door and opening it, as she had a million times before.
Except in all those times, she’d never been greeted by this sight.
The other woman sprang backward, but not fast enough. Taylor still registered all the crucial details. The way Bradley’s hands fell away from the other woman’s hips, the way his eyes were filled first with pain and then with regret as they met Taylor’s with resigned apology.
Taylor jerked her gaze away. She couldn’t look at him…couldn’t breathe.
Instead she looked at the other woman, and was a little surprised to realize she knew her.
“Jessica?”
The other woman smiled, and while Taylor would have expected the smile to be bitchy and self-satisfied, instead it was shy and…kind.
Of course it was. This was Jessica…what was her last name?
Hayes?
Yes. Jessica Hayes. The quiet copywriter who occasionally came to their team meeting, but whom mostly everyone communicated with via email.
“Taylor,” Bradley said in his wonderfully smooth voice. “This is Jess.”
“Yes,” she managed, relieved her voice was steady. “I know Jess—”
Her voice broke off. Jess.
Jess. Not Jessica. Jess.
Her eyes flew back to Bradley. “Jess. As in your ex-girlfriend?”
The mysterious Jess had been Bradley’s one secret. Taylor had known of her existence, known that they’d ended things not long before he met Taylor, but not much more than that.
And certainly not that the woman worked at Oxford. Had been right there under Taylor’s nose the entire time.
Taylor racked her brain for everything she knew about Jessica the copywriter, and came up with…not much.
The other woman was pretty, in a quiet sort of way. Huge blue eyes, thick lashes that bore no trace of mascara. Straight dark hair that was shiny but cut in a straight, boring line. Taylor seemed to remember she often wore glasses, although she didn’t have them on at the moment. Jessica did have great full lips, even without a trace of gloss, Taylor would give her that, but…
“Jess isn’t my ex,” Bradley was saying quietly. “Not anymore.”
The words crashed around Taylor, and she took a step backward.
Jessica made a soft noise of dismay and shot Bradley an incredulous look before she took a step toward Taylor. “Taylor. Please. We never meant—”
“Don’t,” Taylor pleaded, horrified to feel a hard knot in her throat that felt suspiciously like impending tears.
Taylor Carr did not cry. Other than that one time.
Taylor, darling, you must stop. In the history of everything, crying has never solved a single problem.
With her aunt’s voice in her head, Taylor lifted her chin and forced her gaze back to Bradley.
“This is why? You left me a letter on the day we were supposed to move in together because you were getting back together with your ex?”
“This isn’t a conversation for now, Taylor,” Bradley said, his tone sharp.
“No, it’s not,” Taylor shot back. “It was a conversation for last week, when you should have dumped me like a man. Face-to-face.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could have sworn she saw Jessica try to hide a shocked look, but Taylor kept her attention on Bradley.
His face creased in remorse. “Taylor—”
She didn’t stick around to let him finish the sentence with some pathetic platitude in front of his ex—no, current girlfriend.
Taylor walked out of his office, chin held high, hips swaying.
Karen would be proud of her, and though Taylor tried desperately to cling to that as a source of comfort, it wasn’t enough.
Her aunt had taught her a hell of a lot, but there was one crucial life skill her guardian had never passed on.
How to survive a broken heart.
Chapter 8
“For the last time, I’m not talking to you about this,” Nick said into the phone as he dug his keys out of his pocket and shifted the phone to his other ear.
The frustrated huff on the other end was a familiar sound—his younger sister, Celine, had started making it sometime around the age of nine. Now she was well into her twenties, and the indignant sound had not changed…not at all.<
br />
“You can’t expect me to believe you’re living platonically with a woman,” Celine said. “That doesn’t even make sense. Unless she’s a lesbian. Is she? Let me talk to her. I want to tell her about how you put empty milk cartons back in the fridge.”
“I haven’t done that since I was fifteen,” he muttered, pushing the door open and wondering just why he’d thought it’d be a good idea to call his baby sister on the way home from work.
A blast of sound greeted Nick, and he halted. Having survived living with two sisters during their teenage years, Nick was all too familiar with what he thought of as “angry woman” music: the angsty, pissed-off songs a woman scorned would listen to.
It was exactly the sound that greeted him at home on Monday evening after wrapping up his day shift at the bar.
“Let me call you back later,” he said to Celine, hanging up before she could protest.
He dropped his bag and keys on the counter and eyed Taylor’s bedroom door warily, wondering what the hell Calloway had done to send her from sad and determined to angry and pissed.
Her door was open a crack, allowing the voice of nineties Alanis Morissette to blast through the entire apartment.
Nick wasn’t an idiot—any woman listening to “You Oughta Know” at this volume should be avoided.
He meant only to quietly shut the bedroom door so he could watch the tail end of the Rangers game.
But at the same time his hand found her doorknob, his eyes found her, and he faltered in his resolve to give her a wide berth.
Taylor sat cross-legged on a sheepskin rug on the floor, surrounded by pieces of wood. She was scowling fiercely at a piece of paper in her left hand, her hair in a messy knot atop her head. Instead of the usual tight dresses she wore to the office or the sexy tight pants she wore to the gym, she wore a Knicks jersey and tiny gray boxer shorts.
It was the hammer in her left hand that had him reaching out and flicking a finger over the volume knob on the stereo system by the door to turn it down—way down.
Her head whipped toward him, hammer rising slightly.
Nick raised his eyebrows, silently asking what her plan was.
She huffed out a sigh of irritation, lowering the hammer. “Ballantine.”
“Carr,” he said, leaning one shoulder against the doorjamb and crossing his arms.
She opened her mouth as though to snap at him, then closed it and looked away. It told him all he needed to know. The music told him she was angry, but everything else said hurting.
Damn.
Nick debated his move for about ten seconds before pushing away from the door and walking back into the kitchen.
Any man with half a brain would have left a woman in this state to nurse her breakup in private. Well, maybe first removed the hammer from her hand.
Nick was a smart man.
But it would seem he also had a moronic soft spot—one that didn’t like to see the usually impenetrable Taylor anything less than fierce and fighting.
She wasn’t broken, though. He’d seen her broken, just that one time. And this wasn’t the same. This was angry Taylor. Not devastated Taylor. He wanted to make sure she understood the difference.
A minute later he walked back toward her bedroom. She glanced up in surprise at his reappearance, her eyes locking on his for a split second before dropping to the two glasses of cabernet in his hands.
He entered her bedroom uninvited, stepping around the pieces of shelving and scattered screws, and held the wineglass in front of her face.
She hesitated only a split second before accepting it with a murmured “Thank you.”
Nick nodded in acknowledgment, his eyes scanning her bedroom. She usually kept the door closed, so it was the first time he’d seen her personal space.
He was surprised to see it was entirely different from the vibe of the living room. The main area of the apartment was all white sofa and marble coffee table and pale gray barstools. Though Nick would have expected her bedroom to be more of the same predictable neutrals, it was anything but.
Other than the white sheepskin rug, where she currently sat, everything else was bold colors.
Her bedding was a dark, deep blue, the window treatments a deep burgundy. The room would have had an almost masculine feel to it, but it also had little marks of Taylor all over. On the dresser was a bottle of expensive-looking perfume—a scent he knew was as spicy and alluring as the woman herself. A gold candle sat next to what looked like a tube of lipstick on the nightstand, and there was an animal-print throw casually draped across the base of the bed, perfectly summing up her feline tendencies.
“Everything to your liking?” she asked from her place near his feet.
Her words were sarcastic as ever, but her voice lacked heat. Her tone was more husky than usual, as though she was simply…tired.
Nick nudged the toe of his shoe against a piece of black lacquered wood as he took a sip of the wine. “Building Calloway’s coffin?”
She pleased him by laughing. “Not a bad idea. But no. I’ve been at this piece of crap for an hour, but I’m pretty sure the little pictures in the instruction manual aren’t even for the right piece of furniture. I mean, what is this one?” She pointed at the paper. “It looks like a penis.”
Taylor thrust up the directions at him. He accepted the rumpled booklet, but kept his gaze on her rather than looking at the illustration she referenced.
She was a bit paler than usual, but there was no puffy redness around her eyes to indicate tears. Good. Good. Calloway wasn’t worth them.
Nick gently nudged a board out of the way with his foot and lowered to the ground across from her, turning his attention to the instructions.
“For as much as you paid for your fussy couch out there, you couldn’t have bought an assembled piece of furniture? What’s with the Ikea flashback to college?” he asked.
She sighed tiredly. “That was the deal I made with myself. I could get the couch if I went thrifty on everything else.”
“What’s its furniture destiny?” he asked. “Bookshelf? Desk?”
“Bookshelf.”
“A large one, apparently,” he said, surveying the numerous pieces.
Taylor’s slim shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I have lots of books.”
“Yeah?” he asked, flipping through the manual, getting the gist of which piece went where. “Never pegged you as a reader.”
“What did you think I did in my spare time, killed cats?”
“Nah. Men.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she muttered, taking a sip of wine.
“What sort of books do you read?”
“Classics, mostly,” she said drawing her knees up and looping her arms around them, wineglass dangling in her fingers as she rocked the red liquid from one side of the glass to the other. “Karen turned me on to them when I was a kid. Dickens, Twain, the Brontë sisters. I inherited her collection when she died.”
She didn’t explain who Karen was, because she didn’t have to. Not to him.
He’d been there that night.
Nick watched her out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t look at him as she spoke, and he wondered if she was remembering that night at the Oxford office. The night she’d let him hold her, only to pass him over for Calloway.
He wanted to ask if that night was why she hated him so fiercely.
“Which is your favorite?” he asked instead.
“Book?”
Nick nodded, continuing to pore over the overly complicated directions for the bookshelf.
“The Great Gatsby’s marvelously written. Sometimes I read it just for the way Fitzgerald strung a sentence together. Dickens’s characters are my favorite, though.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Estella?”
Taylor’s head snapped up in surprise. “You’ve read Great Expectations?”
“I have.”
“So you’re a reader too?”
“Most writers are,” he said, setting th
e directions aside and taking a sip of wine as he evaluated the mess she’d made.
“But you’re a journalist. That’s different from a fiction writer.”
“I’m both,” Nick said, reaching for the tool near her knee, trying to ignore that her current position left a long expanse of smooth, silky thigh exposed.
“What do you mean, you’re both?”
“I mean that I write books,” he said, gathering up the screws. “Futuristic thrillers, mostly.”
She was staring at him, lips parted. “When? How can you be a bartender, a journalist, and an author, and still find all that time to drive me crazy?”
He laughed. “Let’s just say I’ve made a part-time career out of a lot of different things.”
“Are you published?”
Nick shrugged. He hated talking about this because people made way too big a deal out of it. Hell, hardly anyone outside his family knew, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he was telling her, of all people.
Taylor threw a screw at him, hitting him squarely in the chest. “How many books have you published? Do you write under a pen name? I want to read them.”
“Why, so you can critique them?”
“Um, obviously.” But there was a smile in her voice, and he realized that despite the oddness of their current situation, it was perhaps the easiest they’d ever been in each other’s company.
“I write under a different name. They’re not bestsellers by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “Also, do I even want to know why you had a hammer in your hand earlier? It’s not required for assembly.”
“No, but it will be required for something else if you don’t tell me how to find your books.”
He grimaced but didn’t respond.
What he’d said was true—his books did well, but he was hardly a household name. But what he didn’t tell her—didn’t tell anyone—was that there was good money to be made. Nick released two to three e-books a year, on his own schedule, in his own way, and had developed a loyal following.
He wasn’t a megamillionaire, but he made enough to pay for his half of the rent. Made enough to quit both Oxford and the bar if he wanted to, which he didn’t.
