I can’t brand you.
You’re Brad’s woman.
“I can’t,” I said. I stopped, and looked up at him. “I can’t, Brad.”
Chapter Ten
Brad looked at me like I might faint or something. “Are you okay? Do you need to sit down?”
“No,” I said, pulling away from him.
“Andie,” he said, facing me and taking my hands in his. “We have plans to make, sweetheart, remember? If you’re okay, let’s go get started on our life.” He looked around like there were hoards of people surrounding us. “I was going to do this at home, but—” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the ring box.
“Oh,” I said. “No—let’s not do this right—”
But he was already there. The ring was in his hand and sliding on my finger. Glinting in the sunlight and probably misguiding satellites somewhere.
He took my face in his hands. “Marry me, Andie.”
I stared at him, and then started walking to my car. My plain little Mercury with the scratch on the front bumper that he’d traded for the day before. Around the remains of the building that had been my refuge and my hell. Away from the man inside that was pulling my heart right out of me as I walked. Brad followed on my heels, and then stopped me as we got within a few yards of the car.
“Hey—do I get an answer?”
His face was sweet and charming and unassuming. And I wanted to throw up again.
“I don’t—I think maybe this isn’t a good idea, Brad,” I managed, my voice sounding weak. I hated it. I wanted to sound in charge.
His face fell, and that made me feel even worse.
“We have a life together, Andie,” he said, grasping my arms. “A good one.”
“Based on what?”
He blinked and shook his head. “What?”
“Based on what?” I repeated. “Because we live in the same condo? Work out at the same gym? I don’t even work out when we go there, Brad, I walk around and around the track till you’re ready to go.”
Brad ran fingers through his hair, actually messing it up. He really must have been frustrated with me. “What are you doing? I don’t understand why we’re doing this in the middle of a parking lot. I didn’t understand why we did it in the middle of the yacht, either. I thought that’s what the last twenty-four hours were for. So you could get your head right.”
“So I could get my head right,” I repeated. “So I’d think like you.”
He stared at me like I spoke in tongues. In his defense, it probably seemed like that.
“I need for you to be my best friend, Brad.”
He blew out a breath. “And you have that. My God, don’t you know that by now?” he said, guiding me to the car. “Can we go?”
But the closer I got to that car, the more nauseous I felt, so I stopped again, and he groaned.
“What’s my favorite color?” I said, interrupting him.
“Seriously?”
“Not game playing here.”
Brad closed his eyes in his typical humor-Andie look. “Blue?”
“Red,” I responded. “What’s my favorite breakfast food?”
He gave me a crazed look. “Your favorite—what? We don’t eat breakfast.”
“You don’t eat breakfast,” I countered. “I love it.”
He shrugged. “I’m sorry. It’s an unnecessary meal, usually stacked with carbs and sugar,” Brad said.
“I like carbs and sugar,” I said. “I love waffles. And blueberry topping. And bacon. And donuts.”
Brad’s face started to go serious as my ramble came to an end and the quiet rang loud around us. “What’s this about?”
“We don’t know each other, Brad,” I said. “Not really.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “What don’t we know?”
I looked him hard in the eyes. “You don’t tell me anything about your business.”
Brad held up his hands. “I don’t bring it home, Andie. That’s not—”
“Don’t say it’s not important,” I said. “You know Jesse pretty well, don’t you?” I said, daring him with my eyes to lie to me. “Way past we’ve met.”
Brad’s face took on a different expression. Something from that other side of him I didn’t know so well. “Business is business, Andie. It’s not personal.”
“It is to him,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Our party was just a party to everyone else there. But when I didn’t say yes, was it personal?”
His blue eyes flipped back to the Brad I thought I loved, actually misting over at the mention. “How can you ask me that?”
“Exactly,” I said. “What you do to people is personal, Brad.”
The longest silence ever passed between us. “This is about me and you, Andie,” he said finally. “Not work, not food—”
“What kind of ring did I say I liked?” I asked.
“Small,” he said on a deep sigh of resignation. “Simple.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So that, you heard.” I looked down at the weight on my hand and held it up. “And yet this is what you get?”
“Baby, every woman wants a big rock,” he said. “I was trying to surprise you.”
But I was already shaking my head. “No. Every woman doesn’t. I told you what I liked. I even showed you. You chose what you wanted. What you decided I should want.”
“Okay,” he said, flinging his arms out to the side. “I get it. I’ll take it back and buy you a gold band if that’s what you want. Or a different color for each day of the week. I’ll tie a string around your finger—I don’t care, I just want to marry you.”
Brad could be so cute when he let himself be disarming. If only that were more often.
“Why?” I asked, taking his face in my hands. I begged him with my eyes to tell me that.
He looked like he’d rather be flogged than answer that question, but he grabbed my hands and brought them to his lips. He looked tired, like he’d been worrying, and the guilt hit me in the gut. His blue eyes took me in, and I wondered if he would say it. I didn’t even know if it would matter, but I wanted to hear it.
“Because we’re good together, Andie. We were meant to be.”
* * *
There had been gravel and dust crunching under my feet the day before. Now the sucking action of my flip-flops in the shallow layer of mud was all there was. Just me, out there. With deep ruts where the wheels of my car had stood, before Brad Marcus drove it away.
I walked slowly to where the door to the diner used to be. It was gone, along with the porch and the bench. Jesse had laid three cinder-block bricks in front of the gaping hole in lieu of steps. Evidently he had done more than just watch me sleep.
I swiped under my eyes and stepped up into the mess that was once home to delicious aromas and the mingled conversations of a multitude of souls. I steadied myself with a couple of slow breaths, suddenly very unsure of my standing. My feelings weren’t in question, and that’s what had held me up like a concrete statue out by the car. Alone and standing amidst the wreckage of the diner, all that bravery was a little limp. I felt about as crumbly as all that was in front of me.
The photo of Jarvis and May caught my eye, their perpetual smiles not doing much to calm my nerves.
“You and my dad brought me here,” I whispered, pointing. “Now you’d better help me out.”
As if on cue, canned items began flying out from behind the partially open pantry door, landing with thud after thud on the floor. Jesse appeared from around the door shortly afterward with a scowl and stopped short when he saw me. I saw the whole gamut of surprise, hope, and wariness cross his face, before he buried all that back down again. The push-away glaze took over his eyes, and he pushed his body back into action.
“Forget something, Fremont?” he said curtly, bending to pick up all that he had tossed out, and setting them on the bar.
I forced a laugh. “Oh, we’re at Fremont again, are we? And here I was thinking we’d advanced to f
irst names.”
At the sight of him, however, every nerve ending in my body stood up, and the twenty-two-year-old still inside me somewhere melted. It was the moment of truth.
He ignored my remark and walked down to the giant fridge that still stood proud, though dented and banged up a little. He started pulling out the items inside, stacking them in one of the coolers we’d put together the night before. I stepped over the pile of sandbags and walked around to the end of the bar next to him, opened the other side of the fridge, and started pulling random items off the shelves. I felt the heat from his gaze burn into the side of my head, but I refused to give in to it. I kept pulling out things and placing them on the counter so he could figure out what to do with them.
“Still have ice?” I said finally, noting the wiggle in my voice.
The pause made me start to sweat.
“Some of your free stuff,” he said. Was his voice softer or did I imagine it? He blew out a breath and leaned against the fridge with one hand. “Okay, what are you doing, Andie? Why aren’t you in that car?”
Trying homeless on for size. I hadn’t even thought about getting my belongings from the condo, or where I’d go with them. I didn’t actually have much, I realized. My stuff had been sold because it didn’t match Brad’s.
It was the most irresponsible, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants thing I’d ever done. And nothing had ever felt more terrifying. Or more perfect.
“Helping you.”
“And what’s Marcus doing?”
I raised my eyebrows, imagining that he was most likely cursing me. “He’s driving home.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw him rub at his face. “Andie, I have nothing.”
“Neither do I,” I said, still looking blindly at the items I snatched.
“No, I have nothing to offer you,” he said, his tone making me finally meet his eyes. “I don’t even have a place to live.”
“Neither do I,” I repeated, letting a smile come. “Although evidently I still have a phone around here somewhere.”
A small silent chuckle crossed his lips and reached his eyes. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe,” I said, pulling out two almost-cold beers. “But I know where I want to be.” I held them out to him. “For emergencies.”
Jesse stared down at me with a mix of amusement and wariness, and I didn’t blame him. He was afraid to believe in it. I knew the feeling. Blinking away from me, he took in the room and its chaos before meeting my gaze again with emotional eyes.
“Why?” he asked, the word barely making a sound.
I took a deep breath. “Maybe I wanted to see what day two with you looks like.”
He gave me a long look as his mouth fought a smile. It was the eyes, though, that made my skin tingle from head to toe. He took one of the bottles and clinked it against mine.
“Looks pretty good so far.”
The sound of a fire engine rattling into the parking lot made us both turn. Behind the emergency vehicle was a pickup truck with cases of water stacked in the bed.
“Cavalry’s here,” Jesse said, turning back to me.
“So it begins,” I said, smiling.
He tugged gently at the neck of my T-shirt to pull me closer to him.
“Yes, it does.”
Excerpt from The Reason Is You
The Reason Is You
“Sometimes falling into the past is the way forward.”
Anything but normal . . .
Dani Shane just wants her daughter to have what she never did—a normal life. But “normal” leaves the equation when sixteen-year-old Riley is found talking to Dani’s only friend, Alex—who has been dead for forty years.
In the small river town of Bethany, Dani never fit in. Being different pushed her to the fringes of society, and even leaving town for two decades didn’t stop the talk. Now that she’s back, so is Alex. Mischievous and sexy and still hot enough to melt her shoes. Between his popping in at inopportune moments and her having to hide her daughter’s new talent, Dani fears that her plans for staying under the radar may be short-lived.
As Dani scrambles to get solid footing under her family, secrets buried for forty years begin to unearth themselves. She and Alex have always been connected, but he is hiding something. The computer is making her hear things. Weird memories that she doesn’t recognize keep popping up in her mind. Then there’s that little thing she hasn’t told her daughter yet—that some of the people she sees aren’t breathing.
Chapter One
Starting over sucks, but at forty it sucks the life out of you. This thought squeezed my brain on the six-hour drive to Bethany from Dallas. I second-guessed my decision for the ninety-ninth time, eyeing every exit ramp as a potential escape hatch. As we got closer to the dark clouds looming above my hometown, in a Ford Escort with no air-conditioning and my sixteen-year-old daughter hanging her naked legs out the window to dry her pretty little coral toes, I felt the options slipping. One by one.
Not that I wasn’t grateful to have a destination. My dad loves me, and he’s never judged. But this time was no visit. It was the real deal, with bath towels and Tupperware and everything that would fit in a U-Haul trailer. My head started to bang out a rhythm just thinking about it, but I knew it was the smart thing to do. I’d tried everything after losing my job, and despite the number of times I pushed reality aside, it kept waving at me.
I had Riley to think about. I had to keep a roof over her head, and I couldn’t afford to be choosy on what roof that was. We would be okay. I glanced over at her, eyes closed, jamming to whatever her iPod was pumping into her head, and I prayed she would be okay. That she wouldn’t be tainted by association with me.
“So, when do we get to Podunk?” she said after we drove through Restin, the nearest big town. Not big like high-rises. Big like it has a Walmart.
I cut my eyes her way. “Wow, that’s nice, Riley. Good attitude.”
“Well?” she whined, holding her cell up to the window. “I barely get a signal when we go to Pop’s. It’s like the world falls into hell at the city limit.”
“Sorry. Make do.”
She rolled her eyes with a smirk, then pulled her dark hair down from its ponytail and fluffed it out before tying it right back up again.
“It’s so sticky,” she muttered.
I scooped my own hair back. “Rain’s in the air,” I said. “Get used to it.”
The scenery turned from flat and drab to rolling hills of pine trees and underbrush. I knew we were close. I knew my dad had probably adjusted and readjusted the furniture on the wraparound porch. Probably checked out my old bedroom and the extra bedroom just one more time. It was one in the afternoon, and he most likely had dinner planned for that night and the next two.
The sign came closer as we topped a hill, barely visible under the neglected tree branches. The paint was worn off to nothing, and the words were just a darker shade of old.
Riley squinted as we approached.
Just One Day Page 11
