Haley’s eyes narrowed.
“But with the trusty help of your owner’s manual, it sure is easier to troubleshoot.”
“They’re romantic,” Haley added.
Immediately after, Danny informed him of the male perspective. “Plus, the sex is hot as fuck.”
Haley giggled, Hunter guffawed, and Wade sputtered. I was still too nervous about telling them about the trip to do anything. At any other time, I would have had a bigger reaction.
“Maybe I could borrow—” Hunter started, only to have me interrupt him.
Seconds felt like minutes, and minutes felt like hours. I couldn’t wait any longer to say something for fear that, if I did, I’d explode.
“All of you need to get time off from work, or if you can’t, work on sounding convincingly sick.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of a declaration that lacks finesse.
Jesus, Allison.
Confusion spread quickly, once they processed what I’d said, and faces demanded answers.
And, I’m ashamed to say it, but all of that pressure must have gotten to me. If I were a pot roast, I would have been tender to the point of falling apart.
In fact, the feeling of all those nerves zinging and firing felt eerily similar.
That was why I lost all preamble and tact—though, I didn’t really have much there to begin with—announcing loudly, “We’re going on vacation! A cruise!”
Chins jerked back into chests, but I had too much momentum to not charge right through the wall of surprise. “It was Wade’s idea!”
The sound of chairs screeching and scraping the tile as the crowd jumped to their feet was only overshadowed by the reason they did it.
Wade was choking.
Spitting and sputtering, rice casserole made its move to commit murder, cutting off his source of air at the first gasp of surprise.
Self-deprecating panic consumed me at the possibility that I was going to kill my attractive house guest before I’d even had the chance to see anything naked.
Not that that was something I was counting on or expecting, but I liked knowing there was a possibility! And since I wasn’t into Necrophilia, a dead Wade breathed the same lack of life into my chances.
RICE, WATER CHESTNUT, AND CELERY wrestled and caked in my esophagus, blocking the air and forcing a low wheeze to set up right behind the thing that hangs uselessly at the transition from mouth to throat.
What’s that thing called?
Oh yeah. A uvula. And ironically, if I remembered correctly, it was supposed to keep me from choking.
Hah!
Pounding on my chest with a closed fist, I fought to regain my composure. When I looked up, four sets of eyes bored into mine, three inquisitive and one imploring.
Focus, Wade.
A cruise?
My idea?
That was funny since I’d never heard anything about it before.
Another glance at Alli had her unspoken words screaming in my head. “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GO ALONG WITH MY BULLSHIT ALREADY!”
“Right, right,” I flubbed, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about when I really had not one fucking clue. “Big ship . . . all of us . . . vacation.”
I tried. Obviously, I failed.
Danny’s eyes narrowed significantly, but thankfully his lips sealed tighter when I’d feared they would open.
Years of working together had trained him to know that he would get way more, far more accurate information out of me if he addressed the issue in private. Plus, when he saw me flail and suffer through a lie, it was usually his job to bail me out.
“Oh yeah,” he covered, bullshitting far better than I ever would have. “That’s something you’ve always wanted to do, right?”
All I could do was nod. I used my recent near brush with death as an excuse not to speak by continually thumping myself in the chest.
“Well, it’s definitely the perfect time,” he kept on, “since you’re sidelined with your shoulder.”
Haley’s eyes turned questioning, but I had a feeling the idea of getting out of the quickly turning fall weather of Knoxville to get on a boat where she could wear a bathing suit had a significant hand in keeping her from voicing her doubts verbally.
“Yeah!” Allison chimed in excitedly, nodding. Her nerves were just under the surface, but somehow she managed to cloak them in zeal. “Wade was telling me how he’d always wanted to do it, and that now was the perfect time.” She looked around her audience briefly, casting her glance downward when the scrutiny became too much. “And then, well, he wanted us all to go too, but he didn’t want to bother with all of the paperwork.”
Danny’s eyebrows shot up, but he covered it by sniffing Haley’s hair.
Paperwork had been my absolute life for the past twenty years. Many an hour had been spent combing through droves of it, looking for one piece of information that had failed to stand out in the past. Danny always joked that a picture of me at my memorial service would be with my focus cast down into the center of a folder.
Saying I didn’t want to deal with paperwork was like saying I’d abandoned everything I’d ever known to join the circus.
Luckily, Danny seemed to be the only person aware of it.
“So I did!”
Out came the folders from somewhere under the table, itineraries for everyone, individually specified to their individual needs.
Just barely resisting the urge to look under the table in search of her secret hiding spot, I reached for my folder as she extended it in my direction, the tips of my fingers just grazing hers in the exchange.
“Where’d you get those, Mamalicious?” Haley asked, bobbing her head below the table and back again, apparently wondering the same thing I had been. “Were you keeping them in your vagina?” Waving her hands together and apart again, she shouted, “Christ, it’s like a magic show in here!”
Danny and Hunter chuckled freely as the bulk of my lips pulled back off of my teeth in a smile.
Wisely ignoring all of us, Allison started her presentation like she was a lifelong travel agent.
“We leave out of Fort Lauderdale tomorrow evening for a seven night Eastern Caribbean cruise.”
“Tomorrow night?” Hunter guffawed.
Allison didn’t let it sway her or slow her down. “Yep. Pack up, make your phone calls, and be ready to go the airport at eight tomorrow morning.”
“We can’t just take off of work on no notice,” Hunter argued again, his face one of minor panic.
“I can!” Haley whooped cheerfully, jumping up from her place snuggled in to Danny and slapping her mom with a high five.
“High five! Very nice!” she added in her best Borat voice.
Danny laughed and shrugged, happily putting Haley and family ahead of work for the first time in his life. “Hey, I’m in. I’ll hack up a lung when I phone it in to work if I have to.”
Allison looked to me for confirmation, but with the way this had started it went without saying that I was in. Still, I gave her a subtle nod to ease her worries.
Her answering smile beamed.
“Look, I don’t know if I can just drop everything—” Hunter started again, but Allison’s head whipped around to interrupt him, preemptively robbing me of her eyes.
I didn’t like to see them go.
“You have your own room, and I’m sure there will be several bikini-clad women willing to make nightly visits.”
Haley nearly choked on her own saliva at Allison’s frankness, but her reasoning was clear to me. For some reason, she desperately needed us all to do this, and she wasn’t afraid to pull out all the stops.
“I’ll talk to your superiors if necessary,” I backed her up, knowing that I had plenty of ties in the Knoxville police department. “You haven’t taken any extended vacation time in years.”
I said it as a guess, but the look on his face told me I couldn’t have been more right. He’d been busy finding vindication for his f
riend.
“Okay. I’m in,” he grumbled, throwing his hands up in fake exasperation and smiling broadly.
We all needed a break from life.
Allison was providing it.
“Well,” I said, once again garnering the attention of everyone at the table. “Looks like I need to get a bathing suit. I didn’t manage to pack one.”
“That’s because you don’t own one,” Danny pointed out helpfully, popping a final bite of cornflake covered crispy chicken into his mouth.
“Right.”
Dinner broke up pretty quickly, the need to pack and make arrangements in a hurry taking precedence over hanging out and shooting the shit.
As it turned out, we’d have a week on a big ass boat to do that.
Allison’s soft hands glistened in the running water of the faucet, dishes and soap bubbling and frothing below. Her hair cascaded neatly down the center of her back, and one jean clad hip cocked to the side.
“Don’t you have a dishwasher?” I questioned, eyeing that very appliance as I asked.
“I do. But I like doing it myself sometimes.” She shrugged, not bothering to turn around. “Gives my hands something to do.”
My mind, of course, went to other activities she could use to occupy her hands.
Not good.
Clearing my throat around the lump of unwelcome arousal, I shifted my stance against the opposite counter and asked, “You want some help?”
“No thanks,” she murmured in response, politely shutting me out.
Fine.
“You want to give me an explanation then?”
“Maybe,” she answered, smirking softly over the bare curve of her shoulder. “After wine.”
“Fair enough,” I conceded without delay, wanting to make talking to me easy. I had a feeling she was going to need the open armed approach.
“I’ll get the wine while you let your hands work.” Ghosting my hand over her hip as I stepped around her to the cabinet to the left of the sink, the heat of her skin transferred into mine, leaving my hand aglow long after I’d moved it.
The feeling was so foreign I found myself rubbing the tips of my fingers together to explore every nuance of the sensation.
Tingles and small surges of energy made them throb. I’d never felt anything like it before.
Shaking them out before grabbing glasses, I pulled them down, snatched the half gone bottle of wine from the fridge and poured us each a glass.
I didn’t know if I really wanted wine, but I figured drinking a glass along with her would make me less threatening.
Minutes turned into an hour, and before I knew it she’d finished the dishes and we were each two glasses deep into a new bottle. And I was still waiting.
Not one word had been spoken.
But while her lips had yet to loosen, her body was already doing a decent impression of jello.
Her lazy legs had given up standing fifteen minutes ago and were folded criss-cross applesauce in front of her butt on the counter. Despite the fact that she probably hadn’t done it in a couple of decades, her body complied at an expert level.
Mine rebelled with equal exuberance. Goddamn gorgeous, womanly body.
Really, it was just the alcohol delaying her body’s reaction until tomorrow morning. If her aging body was anything like mine, she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
“Okay,” she said out of the blue, startling me enough that I jumped a little. I’d kind of gotten used to the easy silence.
“As strange as it sounds, you probably deserve an explanation more than anyone. You’ve been roped into more of my strange plans and detours than the others, and I don’t know, maybe because you’re slightly removed, it seems easier to tell you.”
With that kind of preamble, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what she had to say.
I encouraged her anyway, setting my glass on the counter behind me. “Okaaay. You can tell me anything, Alli. If you want it to be in confidence, it will be. I know I don’t know you well, but I know you well enough to know that if it’s something important—something you should be sharing with more than just me—you’ll do it when you need to.”
She nodded in agreement, fervently and more than once. According to my untrained eye, she was trying to convince herself just as much as she was trying to convince me.
She swished the remaining wine in her glass, tilted it back and forth. Anything to distract against what she was actually talking about. This was one of her tells. She’d done it the night before as well.
“Well, before Haley dragged me on the road trip I had a regular doctor’s appointment. Nothing was amiss, I was just scheduled for my yearly torture session with the gynecologist.”
It was safe to say, I really didn’t like where this was going. Memories long passed swelled and ached in my chest, and the more she talked, the harder it was to get away.
“In the middle of the trip I got a phone call. My pap smear came back abnormal.”
Her eyes met and held mine, so I tried my hardest to return the favor.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my whole life.
With the increased pressure in my chest, my chin wanted to collapse, and the desire to run away thickened the saliva in my mouth.
So that’s what cotton tasted like.
“I figured it was no big deal, right? I mean, an abnormal pap wasn’t good, but it could have been anything. I’d been feeling a little tired, but you’ve met Haley.”
I nodded in pitiful agreement. Tried to smile.
God, I was a failure.
“Anyway, the doctor wanted to see me first thing when we got back . . . look into things. That’s why it was probably good that I came back a little ahead of time anyway. There was no need to delay. Except Haley came back in a hurry, and her heart was broken.” She shrugged. “My baby came first. Of course, then she wasn’t. Danny was back and better than ever, and before I knew it, she was jumping her lease and moving in with him.” She shrugged again. “She asked me to help, and honestly, I didn’t want to miss it. I wasn’t too worried anyway.”
Reaching out, I put my hand on her knee, so desperate to say something that I’d settle for it being nonverbal.
“So there we were, three weeks down the road, and I still hadn’t done the test the doctor wanted me to. I finally went for the colposcopy on Monday. Got the phone call with the results yesterday.”
My thumb stroked back and forth on her leg so intently, the muscles contracted and pulled all the way into my shoulder.
One word came out, mined from somewhere deep; somewhere I never wanted to see again. “And?”
“And it’s Cervical Cancer.”
My eyes closed and my hand jerked involuntarily.
“Alli.” Her name almost choked me.
“It’s okay,” she consoled, pulling me into her arms and giving me a loose hug.
Her face tucked into my throat, and the tiny hairs of my neck blew in the breeze of her breath.
“It’s early stage and hasn’t spread.” My arms tightened just as I realized what a slime ball I was for letting her comfort me in this situation.
“I just . . .”
A single tear splashed on my throat; I squeezed harder.
“They’re going to do a total hysterectomy in two weeks. Take the ovaries too if they can reach them.” I felt her shrug.
I pulled away just so that I could look at her.
“It’s fine, you know,” she lied, fighting tears enough that her nose wrinkled up. “I don’t need a uterus or ovaries anymore. I was done with them years ago.”
It wasn’t long before she lost the battle. A tiny, clear river formed, carving a path up and over the apple of her rosy cheek.
“Alli.”
Her shaky voice was no louder than a whisper. “I’m just afraid of how I’ll feel.” Her perfect lips quivered as she shrugged again, trying to downplay her fear. “I’m scared I’ll feel less like a woman.”
I wanted so badly to
tell her she wouldn’t. But, God, what did I know? I wasn’t a doctor, and I sure as shit wasn’t a woman.
“I’m scared sex will never be the same. I’m scared no one will want me any more.” Her lips rolled into her mouth and out again. “I’m scared I won’t want to be wanted.”
“None of that is going to happen,” I declared, translating my desire into fact. I’d do everything I could to make sure she never felt those things.
“You can’t know that.”
“Alli—”
“Neither of us can, and this is it. I’m alone. No last rounds of crazy sex beforehand, no one to make it good enough so that I remember. Good enough so that when I look back on it, I know there will never be a time when I don’t want to be shown love.”
My hands skimmed slowly down her body until they reached her ass and dug in. Her hips slammed into mine, her ass settled into my palms, and I lifted, smashing her body as close to mine as it would go.
She shrieked her surprise right next to my ear because that’s where I’d put her.
“What are you doing?!”
Words vibrated from deep in my chest. “Making sure you remember.”
Carrying her down the hall, up the stairs, and into her bedroom was the easiest thing I’d ever done.
I’d have thought that an injured shoulder would have slowed me down, but the truth was, I didn’t even feel it.
Adrenaline, arousal, and anticipation mixed with blood in my veins, the potency of the resulting solution stronger than anything I’d ever come in contact with.
Soft lips worked the skin of my neck so hard that keeping my eyes open flirted with the line of being physically impossible. Luckily, the bed loomed ahead, and I knew that even if my last few steps were staggered, I wouldn’t be able to miss it.
Clothes disappeared with the help of fast fingers, and the scrape of my shirt as she yanked it over my head was the only warning I had before my shoulder reminded me of its existence.
A sharp sting gave way to pleasure as her wandering hands fought desperately to explore my entire chest and abdomen, the sparse smattering of brown hair snagging slightly in between the grasp of her delicate fingers.
Accidental Alpha Page 7
