by Franca Storm
The tension drained from his face then and his lips curled into a sly smile. “And your message was very well received.”
“I’m glad,” I said, flashing him a coy grin.
“That mouth of yours is extremely talented, darlin’.”
He tried to reach for me to pull me back onto the bed and I knew exactly where things were headed.
I pulled away, shaking my head. “Uh uh. Breakfast first,” I chastised him as I quickly stepped back before I caved. It wouldn’t take much. Just the mere suggestion in his eyes had heat pooling between my legs. But I knew he needed to eat first and down a hell of a lot more water, or he would end up feeling crappy for the rest of the day.
“Exactly. Breakfast,” he said, his gaze focused between my legs as he licked his lips.
“Nice try,” I said, walking to the door quickly, before I ended up pouncing on him.
I heard him grumbling after me and the bed creaked as he reluctantly climbed out of it.
***
Brad’s hand gripped mine tightly as we walked through town.
After we’d eaten and then fooled around in the shower for a good hour, I’d let him convince me to head into town…together. Our first appearance together as a couple.
Ten minutes had barely passed since we’d arrived and I was already regretting it and thinking, perhaps, it hadn’t been the greatest idea in the world.
My entire body was racked with tension and nerves and all I wanted to do was to turn around and head back to Brad’s place. But I’d already failed to convince him of that when I’d tried to tug him back to his truck about two minutes after we’d arrived.
“They’re staring at us, Brad,” I whispered in his ear. “And not in a we’re-happy-for-you way.” In fact, people were shooting daggers our way and demonstrating their disapproval in a very clear manner.
“Those death stares are directed at me, not you.”
I looked up at him in surprise. “What?”
“Look closer.”
And I did.
Sure enough, the animosity was directed entirely his way. Oh my God. “This is Ollie’s doing.”
“No doubt,” Brad muttered.
“He’s spread his version of things all over town.” I stopped walking, forcing Brad to do the same. Gripping his arms with urgency, I told him, “I’m so sorry, Brad. This is all my fault.”
“Your fault?”
“Yeah. He’s my brother. If we’d told him properly, like you’d wanted, it wouldn’t be like this now.”
He lifted my chin with his index finger and gazed down at me with those loving eyes of his that always had me melting at his feet. “It’s not your fault, Soph. It didn’t matter how we told him. You know Ollie. He loves to retaliate. He would’ve done it either way.”
“But—”
He pressed his finger to my lips, cutting me off as he said patiently, “But nothing. Try to relax. It will blow over soon enough. And the best part? We’ll be together without having to hide in the shadows. It’ll be fine. I promise.”
He sounded so confident that everything would work itself out, but he failed to hide a brief flicker of hesitancy in his eyes. Doubt.
And that was when I knew. He was as worried about it as I was. He was just putting on a brave face…for me. To reassure me.
I wrapped my arms around him tightly. “I love you.”
He chuckled and stroked my hair softly. “I love you, Soph.”
After a few moments, he pulled away and took my hand again. “Now, let’s at least make it to the other side of the square and then we can get the hell out of here if you want.”
“Okay,” I agreed, making an effort to swallow my nerves.
I hated having people’s judgmental eyes on us. I wasn’t used to it like Brad was. And, although, it was directed primarily at him, it didn’t make it any less distasteful. Animosity directed at the man I loved was just as bad as it being directed at me.
I could only hope that it would blow over like Brad had claimed.
Chapter 23
~Brad~
I eyed Soph over my newspaper and smiled to myself. So fucking cute.
She was curled up on the other side of the couch, her knees drawn up, with her notepad resting on top of them as she wrote furiously. That determined, concentrated look of hers was set firmly in place.
She’d been sitting there writing for the better part of the afternoon. She hadn’t even noticed when I’d left the couch a couple of times to make a trip to the bathroom and to make us both a coffee. Hers was sitting there cold on the coffee table.
“What?” she said, startling me, because it was the first time she’d spoken in hours.
“Nothing,” I said, returning my eyes to the Sunday newspaper. I’d barely made it two pages through, because I’d been so distracted watching her in her element.
The next thing I knew, she was snatching it out of my hands and sitting up on her knees, eyeing me curiously.
“Hey!”
“Are you making fun of me?”
I held up my hands. “Never, my little princess.”
“Yes, you are. And stop calling me that.”
“What? Little princess?”
“Exactly.”
“I can’t. You are my little princess.”
She growled at me; actually growled and shot me a disapproving look.
I ripped the newspaper from her grasp and tossed it on the floor.
And then I pounced on her, covering her body with mine. She shrieked in surprise and gripped my biceps for support. Mmm, I like that.
I gazed down at her and she met the intensity in my eyes. “I just like watching you when you’re like that.”
“Like what?”
“In your writing zone. You get completely absorbed in it and don’t notice anything else around you at all. It’s like you’re off in another world altogether. It’s cute.”
“Cute?” she said, screwing up her face.
“Yeah,” I said, kissing her right cheek. “Cute.”
She smiled and her eyes sparkled as she revealed, “I’m writing a modern love story that’s kind of based on ours.”
“Really?”
“Yep. You know…forbidden love and all that?”
There was a really awkward pause as we both took in what she’d just said about forbidden love. In the aftermath of Ollie finding out, we’d both come to realize just how fucking forbidden it truly was in his eyes.
The townspeople had now graduated from casting ice-cold, accusatory glares my way to actually boycotting my damn workplace. It’d been dead for the last few days. No customers.
Soph had barely been home, except to pick up a fresh change of clothes every now and then, just so she could avoid Ollie. She’d been crashing with me and I’d been all for that. Given my track record of never doing relationships, I’d been surprised as hell that I’d taken to having her around 24/7 so easily. But I had.
As far as I was concerned, it just proved how compatible we were and that this thing between us was meant to be and so fucking right, despite the town’s ridiculous bullshit. I actually couldn’t get enough of her and it’d been a struggle for both of us to part ways to go to work.
I was fucking whipped. One hundred percent. And I didn’t give a damn. Sophie Clinton had me by the balls and it was just the way I liked it.
“Huh,” I finally responded. I drew my finger over her lips and whispered, “And how will it end, Soph?”
Her tongue darted out and licked my finger. She chuckled and said in a teasing tone, “How do you think?”
I leaned into her and nibbled her left earlobe, whispering, “You tell me.”
“Happily. Ever. After.” She enunciated each word with emphasis as her eyes fixed on me. I watched them darken with that familiar come-fuck-me look.
And then, before I could even draw in my next breath, she flipped me, using one of the self-defense moves I’d taught her against me, until she was on top, straddling me. Holy he
ll, that’s hot!
She slid her hands underneath my t-shirt, her soft fingers massaging my chest. “Mmm…love your hands on me, darlin’,” I murmured, relaxing into the couch as her magic hands went to work.
She smiled and then asked, “What about you?”
Her question came out of left field and I had no idea what she was getting at. I was also having a little trouble trying to summon any thoughts in that moment with her hands on me. “What about me?”
“Before I left…after our night together last year…you were headed back to engineering school…your second year.”
And just like that, any relaxation I’d been feeling instantly disappeared and tension coiled through my body. “Soph,” I warned, shaking my head. We’re not talking about this.
“Brad, I’ve been tiptoeing around this since I came back here.”
Yeah, for good fucking reason. I don’t wanna talk about it. Ever.
When I didn’t respond, she pushed, “You never went back. After what happened with your dad, you stayed here. I get that. You needed to regroup and you wanted to be here to take care of your mom. But it seems like…like you have no intention of ever going back now.”
I eased her off me and climbed off the couch, turning my back to her as I tried to keep my cool. “Wow. That’s one hell of a mood killer you just doused me with. Bringing up my mom, my asshole of a dad and my career failures in one shot. If you weren’t up for it, you could’ve just said no.”
I tried to keep things lighthearted, but I could hear the edge in my voice. The fierce bite there. Fuck.
The last thing I wanted was to push her away. She was my only fucking ray of light in our dead-end, hell-hole of a judgmental town. I needed her. I’d never thought I’d live to see the day where I needed anyone the way I did her. But I did. It was more than a craving. It was a gut-wrenching necessity.
I felt her arms snake around my waist, her head rest against my back.
“I’m sorry it upsets you, Brad. I’m just bringing it up, because I love you. I don’t care what everyone else thinks, or what they say about you. You’re a good man and you’ve always taken care of me. So, please let me take care of you now. You don’t belong here—stuck here. You were always so smart, so driven. And somehow you lost that after what happened with your dad.”
Oh, fuck me. “Soph, I can’t—”
“Please,” she begged. “For me.”
I drew in a deep breath to try to get my shit together. The plea in her voice reached something within me that I’d thought I’d buried down safely a long time ago. I found myself responding, instead of shutting down, like I always did with everyone else. “You’re right. About all of it.”
She tightened her hold around me, silently encouraging me to continue.
I clasped her hands around my waist and distracted myself with stroking them as I told her, “The shit with my dad really fucked with my head. I guess it…made me question myself…question everything. I thought I’d stayed for my mom, but the truth is, after a couple of months, she would’ve been fine without me here. But I just couldn’t…I was lost.”
“That makes two of us. You know that’s why I came back here,” she whispered into my back. She gripped my shirt and jerked me around to face her. “But now we can figure it out together. Right?”
“Maybe.”
But she wasn’t having any of it.
Soph didn’t like gray. She never had. She was a straight-up, black and white kind of woman. It was always all or nothing with her. Feisty ballbuster.
She fixed me with that no-nonsense glare of hers that no one could ever escape. “Brad,” she pressed.
I blew out a breath. “Yes. Fine, my little princess. We’ll both work our shit out together.”
“Good,” she said, happily. She patted my chest and walked around me into the kitchen. “Now, get in here and help me make dinner. You’re a better cook than me.”
Well, shit. There was no arguing with her when she was like that. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, chuckling as I followed after her into the kitchen. “Besides, I don’t wanna risk food poisoning by making you cook on your own, do I?”
“Hey!”
“Don’t worry, darlin’. I’ll teach you a few things.”
She fixed me with a smoldering gaze. “Are you still talking about cooking?”
That’s it! I stalked towards her. “You’re so fucking hot.” I gripped her hips and hoisted her onto the kitchen counter. “Now, where were we, little princess?”
Chapter 24
~Brad~
A couple of weeks had gone by and things still hadn’t calmed down.
There was no sign of it blowing over at all.
It was taking every shred of self-restraint I had, not to confront Ollie and demand what the fuck he thought he was playing at.
Disapproving of my relationship with his sister was one thing, but continuing to bad mouth me and turn everyone in town against me was another fucking thing entirely. And the only reason I was holding back was because of Soph. I didn’t want to aggravate an already extremely tense situation between her and her brother.
Amazingly our relationship hadn’t suffered, despite my fears that it would.
In fact, all the heat on us had brought Soph and me closer together.
She was still living with me. It’d gone from her intending to just crash there for a couple of days, to a long-term thing.
Things at the house with Ollie had been incredibly tense, so they’d been avoiding one another as much as possible. I’d put in my two cents and told her that she needed to have it out with him, or things would never get better. But she’d been against the idea right off the bat. Soph didn’t like confrontation, as a rule. But I knew it wasn’t just about that. It was because she didn’t want to openly go up against Ollie, out of respect for him. She felt like she owed him or something, because he’d always had her back and been like a father to her after they’d lost their parents all those years ago.
I just hoped she’d realize there wasn’t an alternative.
I wasn’t worried about me, or my reputation suffering. I was used to it.
Back in my teens, I’d been the poor kid with the abusive, alcoholic of a father and as I’d got older, I’d become known as the womanizer. The town bullshit wasn’t anything new to me, so I wasn’t concerned for me.
But I was concerned about Soph. I was worried about her relationship with her brother; worried that she’d lose him for good. The two of them had always been close and losing that would surely break her. But there wasn’t much else I could do, given that she’d already shot down my advice. She’d talk to him when she was ready. Just don’t wait too long, darlin’.
I pushed through the door into Miller’s Tavern. The owner, Jeff Miller, had called me in at the goddamn crack of dawn for a meeting. Tiff and I had already had our monthly meeting with him three weeks ago, so I had no idea what the hell he needed to talk about, because we’d already been over everything during that meeting. Jeff was very hands-off. He had his fingers in a lot of pies and Miller’s Tavern was just one of his many businesses—likely, his least profitable one. He had no experience running a bar, so he left the management in the hands of Tiff and I and checked in with us once every month or two.
“Brad.”
I turned towards a booth in the far corner of the bar to see him waving me over. I was surprised that Tiff wasn’t there. I was close to ten minutes late thanks to my truck giving me shit and being a little bitch about starting in the morning’s sub-zero temperature.
“Morning. Sorry I’m late. The truck gave me some trouble.”
He ignored my apology. “Have a seat, Brad. We need to talk.”
We need to talk? That phrase never boded well in any situation. What the hell was going on?
As I approached, I was very aware that he wouldn’t look me in the eye. That had me tensing up right away. Shit. It’d just become clear that it wasn’t a normal meeting he’d called me to. Wanting to c
onfirm that, I asked, “Tiff’s not coming?”
He shook his head and fiddled nervously with a wad of papers on the table as I slid into the booth opposite him. “No. Just you and me.”
I was fast becoming agitated with his cryptic bullshit. I hated people beating around the bush and Jeff was very much that kind of guy. He took ages to get to the damn point. The fact that he was so obviously ill at ease didn’t sit well with me either and it was putting me on edge.
“What’s going on, Jeff?” I pressed, leaning back against the booth as I snuck a discreet glance at the papers that his intense stare was threatening to bore a hole right through. Profit and loss statements. The nosedive of the graph on one of the pages didn’t escape my notice. Fuck. This isn’t good at all.
He drew in a breath and finally had the goddamn decency to actually look me in the fucking eyes. Pussy.
He scrubbed his hand over the rough stubble on his jaw and then scratched his way-too-long dirty blonde hair. Wearing holey jeans and a faded t-shirt, he didn’t look like a typical businessman at all. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never once seen him wearing a suit, or even giving any kind of fuck about his appearance. He’d never left the 90’s grunge era. It seemed like he’d settled on that look and never looked back—or forward.
“We’ve taken a massive hit over these last couple of weeks,” he finally spoke.
“It has been quiet, yeah.”
“Quiet? We’ve had no business, Brad.”
Before I could get another word out, he went on, “Because of your personal life.”
Excuse me? “What?”
His gaze hardened; his uncompromising business glare. “The town is boycotting the bar.”
“It’ll blow over. You know how this town gets, overreacting over every little thing.”
“I do. But I can’t take the risk.”
My stomach lurched at his words and the look in his eyes. It was then that I realized exactly where he was going. But I had to ask anyway, mostly because he didn’t have the balls to say anything more. “What are you saying?”
He cleared his throat, struggling to step up to the plate. “I have to let you go, Brad.”
