She commanded his silence by brandishing a forkful of burrito, and only winced a bit when she spattered the table with rice and beans.
Her mother. Who liked surprises. Whose children were at a loss as to what to give the woman who needed nothing and only wanted her family with her on her birthday. She hadn’t participated in any of the family discussions so far, but she’d figured out the perfect plan over burritos and awkward conversation.
She was a genius.
She saw J.D. take a slow, controlled breath across from her and knew that his patience with her was wearing thin. Tough. She was a genius, and if her idea came with the side benefit of changing the subject, well that was just happy coincidence, wasn’t it?
“We’re throwing my mother a surprise birthday party,” she announced, spreading her hands gracefully and taking a bow in her chair.
J.D.’s expression remained carefully neutral. “We are?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she hurried to reassure him. The poor guy was shocked. “Not you and me. I mean my family.” That her brother- and sister-in-law were included in this family group went without saying. “You’re off the hook, no worries.”
When he pressed his lips together and shook his head, she felt vaguely guilty again without knowing why. J.D. started to eat his cooling meal and Sarah found herself babbling to fill the silence.
“I know it doesn’t really seem like a big deal. You’ve probably been to all kinds of amazing parties. But we’ve never really gone all-out with a surprise party before. Usually everyone including Mom is in on the party planning, but we could do a full-on surprise party this year.” She couldn’t seem to stop herself from shooting out words in a rapid-fire patter. “Maybe we’ll even have it at the pub… Tyler can tell Mom he needs her to help out one night, maybe the night before her birthday. So that we’re all together at midnight! And then we can toast the first minute of her birthday together. Maybe we can have a whole day of birthday events planned for her? Or would she be too tired after a big party? I’ve gotta call Maxie—she’s the best planner. Got a mind like a general on the night before an invasion, that girl. Where’s my day book?”
She needed to leave the room. Grabbing her cell phone off the kitchen counter as her mouth kept moving and words continued to come out somehow, she stumbled into the hall and sank to her heels next to the little table that was her depository for mail and keys. Her bag sat on the worn wood floor at the feet of the table, where she left it every night so that she’d always know where to find it. She pulled her little spiral-bound planner out of an interior pocket.
What was wrong with her? She was running her mouth like she was afraid to let quiet descend for even a moment. Was she worried about what J.D. might say next? Or worried that they wouldn’t have anything to say to each other at all?
It was stress, pure and simple, over J.D. and their ridiculous marriage, the shame of needing a divorce when she was the kind of woman who’d only ever meant to marry once and this most recent and unreasonable guilty feeling that she’d done something wrong again, that she’d hurt his feelings. She dropped her head on her knees and drew in a deep breath. Time to get a grip. After another moment, she dragged herself to her feet. Twisting the planner between tense fingers, she stepped back into the kitchen and braced herself to face J.D. as soon as she entered the room.
Relief and worry took turns battling for first place when she saw that he wasn’t at the table any more. He was standing at the kitchen counter, his back turned, neatly boxing up her barely-touched food. She watched him shake his head at the emptiness of her shelves as he slid the container into the fridge.
Even though his jacket and keys were still in the hall, she felt like he was moments from walking out the door. And though she hadn’t wanted him to come tonight, had been irritated by his arrival, she was suddenly panicked at the thought that he was about to leave.
J.D. turned and spotted her. Dropped one of those casually charming grins that disappeared so fast it was a memory almost before she took it in.
“No sense in wasting it. You can have it for breakfast.”
“A burrito? For breakfast?”
More importantly, would he be staying the night to sit down to breakfast with her?
She couldn’t ask. She didn’t know what the answer would be. Was too afraid that it might be another swift grin and polite brush-off and that would really be the end of her.
“Sure. The only thing better is cold pizza.”
She’d lost track of what they were talking about.
“J.D., I—”
“You have to call your family, I know.” He chucked her under the chin and turned sideways to squeeze past her into the hall without brushing up against her. “I’ll get out of your way so you guys can get the party planning going. Call you later.”
He shrugged into his jacket, jogged down the stairs and ghosted out the door before she could think of anything to say.
“What just happened?” she asked out loud of her stairwell.
The man had all but admitted that he’d come over for sex and a meal, if not in precisely that order, since he’d seemed hungry enough for food to settle for the burrito first. Which rankled a little, upon reflection. Then, after ten minutes of conversation, he was out the door. Gone. Without so much as a “Sorry, but I’ve changed my mind about that tumble in the hay. No need to get your pants off.” She knew she’d put her foot in it with all of her questions and arguing, but still.
She was working up a righteous head of steam about being spun around like a top by the cavalier whims of one J.D. Damico, and then her brain started to play back their conversation.
You didn’t seem to be very interested in me.
And then you tried to ditch me.
We’re throwing my mother a surprise party!
The words played over and over again in her mind, her own voice growing in whininess as she listened to herself. How pathetic. Between basically telling him that she was surprised he would ever be interested in her to making him think that she was going to corral him into throwing a party for her mother, she couldn’t have made herself sound more tedious and ordinary if she’d tried.
The lightbulb in her brain blinked on with a sickening yellow glow.
She was boring him.
Sarah glanced around her kitchen and almost let loose a gust of hysterical laughter. The buttery-yellow paint on the walls was warm but faded. Hanging over the rolling butcher-block wine cart was a print of a cartoon cow with a stalk of straw in its mouth and a dialogue balloon above its head reading, “I said hay, bartender.” She had a mug with a drawing of the Paris skyline drying on the rack next to the sink.
J.D. didn’t need a mug with a picture of Paris on it. He’d actually been there, no doubt with some fabulously leggy sexpot on his arm. A woman who knew that every man who saw her wanted her. A woman who certainly didn’t talk to her lover about throwing birthday parties for her mother.
She briefly contemplated killing herself, if only so that she wouldn’t have to linger through the slow death from embarrassment she was certainly going to endure the next time she saw J.D.
However far from now that might be.
But deciding that suicide would make her even more pathetic, she dragged herself over to the counter, dug out the family-size bag of potato chips from the cabinet and the pint of sour cream and onion dip that was the only other thing in the fridge aside from the now painful to look at Mexican takeout. Pointing herself toward her bedroom, she prepared to huddle under the covers and gorge herself on fat and sodium.
She grabbed her cell phone tight with one hand. She was pretty sure that as her mortification built, she was going to start to cry. And when the crying got to the puffy-eyed, runny-nose stage, she was going to need a sister.
* * *
What a man really wanted at a time like this was a brother.
Since J.D.’s parents hadn’t seen fit to give him a sibling of either gender, he called instead on the bonds of
blood brotherhood that had been established by two twelve-year-olds and a penknife more than twenty years ago.
Though his eyes still wanted to roll up in their sockets whenever he thought of how many times he’d had to stab himself in the finger to get enough blood to satisfy Tyler, he was happy that he could use that pain and suffering as an excuse to drag Tyler out at ten o’clock on a Monday night. A man needed a bro when he wanted to bitch about some girl.
It was harder to bitch about the girl when she was your bro’s sister, of course.
Harder. Not impossible.
J.D. took a long pull of his beer and debated whether or not whiskey might be a better choice. He set his sweating pint glass back down on its coaster, studying the golden light glinting off the rows of spotlessly clean bottles behind the bar as he tried to figure out how much pain he wanted to be in tomorrow.
“I cannot believe that I am sitting in this bar on my only night off this week,” Tyler said from next to him. The pint in front of him had barely been touched and he looked none too eager to bend his elbow. But the bond of blood brotherhood was strong. “You know this is going to cost me later with Grace, right? I bet she’s gonna make me put on a tux and go to the symphony with Spence and Addy.”
“Don’t be such a baby. The symphony is cool.”
“Says the guy with the ponytail.”
“Bite me.”
J.D. grinned. This was why he’d called Tyler. Because no one could get him out of a bad mood faster than the guy who’d spent his life battling to hold his own as the one man amongst the Tyler women.
The Tyler women.
The momentary balloon of good humor he’d found hissed out of him. As much as he’d always envied Tyler his family, it didn’t take twenty-twenty vision to see that the Tyler women were a force to be reckoned with. One that could overwhelm a guy before he blinked. Although individually they were fantastic, as a group they could be, let’s face it, more than a little scary. But Sarah had always been different.
Sarah had always been the exception. To everything.
He drew lines in the condensation on his pint glass and scowled at the polished wood of the bar. Tyler sat next to him, comfortable in the silence. J.D. knew his friend would sit there until dawn, if that was how long it took to find out what was wrong.
There wasn’t anything in the universe that he couldn’t tell Tyler. Never had been. But sometimes when a guy just felt—he searched for a word that didn’t make him feel like a wimp, couldn’t find one—bummed, being around another guy, even one who’d never rag you about it, wasn’t what you wanted. You wanted something softer. Something peaceful and quiet and undemanding.
You wanted Sarah.
For a moment, the nostalgia almost made him forget why he was so disappointed in her. Why he’d called up his best friend and dragged him out to a bar, albeit Tyler’s own, at ten o’clock on a Monday just so that he could bitch. His memories of the Sarah he’d known for the first years of his friendship with Tyler were simple. They involved quiet staircases and cherry licorice and watching a quiet, pretty girl tuck long dark hair behind her ear as she leaned over a book.
But somewhere between then and now, that Sarah had changed. Not disappeared exactly, but she’d become this complicated woman. A woman who worked hard and knew how to play harder when she had the chance. A woman who could spark a bonfire when she danced and crackle with icy control when she laid it all on the line in a game of poker. He owned enough honesty to admit that maybe the heat and the ice had been there all along. He just hadn’t seen it until now.
But thinking of Vegas and all its revelations, he remembered also that there was still a sheen of innocence to everything Sarah did. Unlike some of the hard, brittle women he’d come across so frequently in the movie business, she didn’t take her thrills too seriously. She saw the glamour and the risk-taking as a fun way to let off a little steam. A nice place to visit, but not somewhere you parked your trailer and settled in to live.
He remembered the way she blushed when she confessed that she’d given away the bulk of her winnings rather than taking the seat she’d earned at the tournament table.
Remembered her eyes going smoky and dark when he pushed her up against the wall in the salsa club, giving in to the heat that had built inside him since the moment he saw her in that scarlet dress. The lightning explosion between the two of them that had quickly robbed him of all sense, that time and every time he’d touched her since.
He shifted uncomfortably on the edge of his tall bar chair, well aware that the woman he was picturing naked was the sister of the man sitting next to him. The man who’d already agreed with great reluctance not to punch him in the mouth because J.D. had told Tyler that things were getting serious with Sarah.
Not that he’d mentioned the whole thing about how she thought they were married, of course.
Still, he had told Tyler the truth. He was serious.
Try explaining that to Sarah.
You’d think he was telling her he liked to kick puppies down a flight of stairs based on the look of horror she gave him every time he brought up the subject.
And he was back to being pissed. Without even trying, he could hear the words she’d tossed at him so casually that weekend.
You’re not exactly a stick-around kind of guy, J.D.
And how did she know that, anyway? Just because he never had, just because he’d hit the road as soon as it was legal to do so, never returning for more than a quick visit, didn’t mean he couldn’t stick if that’s what he wanted.
Hadn’t he come back this time and bought that drafty old warehouse of a place? That hadn’t been part of any plan. It was a decision he’d made before stopping to question it. Still. He might be only halfway through the remodel, but he was sticking it out. He could already see what it would be like when he was done.
And that whole sudden obsession with party planning for her mother’s birthday party. Even an idiot could see that from word one Sarah didn’t consider him part of the family committee that would make Susannah’s birthday special. As if he wouldn’t want to participate in planning something nice for the woman who’d practically raised him during his formative years.
“I love your goddamn mother, too, you know.” He shoved his glass away and flung himself against the curved back of his chair.
Tyler lifted an eyebrow. “Better not tell her like that.”
“I’m serious. I fucking love that woman.”
“Seeing as how she considers you her adopted son, that’s probably a good thing.”
“So how come I’m not family?”
“Didn’t I just say you were? God knows my mother thinks you are.” Tyler shook his head once. “Why are we talking about my mother, anyway?”
“Sarah.”
“We’re talking about Sarah now? Nope. Forget it. I definitely don’t want to talk about my sister with you. Once was enough.” Tyler shuddered with a brother’s refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of his sister having s. e. x. He grabbed his beer and downed half of it in three swallows.
“I’m talking about your mother because your sister wants to throw her a surprise party for her birthday. And she definitely did not invite me to participate.” It still burned under his skin how easily she’d dismissed him. He wondered if the rest of the Tyler family would be able to cut him off so easily. If they found out what he’d done, how insanely out of control he’d let this marriage lie get, he might lose them all.
His stomach roiled and a cold sweat broke out on the nape of his neck.
Losing the Tylers, even if he’d only touched base with them from time to time for years now, would break him. The only anchor he had in the world was in this city, and the idea of losing it…well, it pretty much made him want to puke.
Tyler frowned.
“That doesn’t sound like Sarah. She’d never not invite you.”
J.D. blocked the bleak thoughts from his mind. He would make this work out. Somehow. He would tell Sarah
, eventually, at the right moment, and they’d get through this. He would hang on to the only things in his fucking lonely life that had ever meant anything to him at all.
“Sure, I’ll get an invitation like anybody else. But I’m sitting across the table from her, telling her she’s gorgeous, how I’ve wanted her pretty much since she came to see me—” Tyler screwed his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears. J.D. punched him in the shoulder and raised his voice. “Suck it up. Pretend it’s someone else. So, I’m pouring my goddamn heart out in her shoebox of a kitchen, and all of a sudden it’s ‘Hey, the family should do something special for Mom’s birthday, and don’t worry, J.D., you’re not a part of that.’”
“Hmm.” Silence seemed to be the better part of valor in Tyler’s opinion.
“So what’s wrong with me? She just about had a panic attack at the idea of you finding out we’re together. It’s like I’ve got leprosy and an ankle monitor.” He shook his head and finished the Harp. “I’m a goddamn good catch.” He smacked the empty pint glass down and demanded an answer from his best friend. “Don’t you think I’m a good catch?”
Tyler raised one hand in the air to stop traffic. “Hey, I think you look like the ass end of a donkey, but there’s no accounting for taste. Girls always seemed to go for that in a guy.” He got punched again in the shoulder for his trouble. “Ouch. Yeah, yeah, you’re a great catch. You’re successful, smarter than you look, you can hold your liquor and my mother loves you. Plus, for reasons unknown, chicks seem to dig that tough-guy thing you’ve got going on.”
J.D. was stuck on the one important thing in that list. “Your mother loves me. Exactly. So why can’t I do something nice for her birthday?”
“Why can’t you?”
“That’s what I’m saying—”
Calling His Bluff Page 17
