Calling His Bluff

by Amy Jo Cousins

“No, I mean, why can’t you?” Tyler’s hand fell heavily on his shoulder, and when J.D. turned his head to look at him, his friend was giving him a serious look. “You mean it? You want to do something for my mom’s birthday?”

  “Yeah, I do.” He meant it. He didn’t want to head out of town or lock himself up with his Mac and two thousand photo files in glorious isolation for the next month. He wanted to be a part of Susannah Tyler’s birthday planning, damn it. He wanted to be a real part of this family.

  “Then do it. Whatever it is that you want to do, just do it. You’re a part of this family. You don’t need my sister’s approval for that. And screw her if she can’t take it.” Tyler winced at his own choice of words. “God. Don’t. Please. Or at least don’t tell me about it.”

  His words took about a thousand pounds off J.D.’s shoulders, but that didn’t mean J.D. was going to avoid that sore spot for one second. He let the memories wash over him until the grin that spread over his face couldn’t be mistaken for anything but pure carnal pleasure.

  He wiggled his eyebrows at Tyler.

  “Your sister can kiss like a house on fire.” He corrected himself. “Like you’re standing in a house that catches on fire, and you don’t even notice that it’s burning down around you.”

  Tyler groaned and dropped his head into his hands, elbows on the bar rail.

  “Man, I’m gonna puke.”

  * * *

  After a week of family meetings and party planning, it had become clear to Sarah that certain things just did not go together.

  The combination, for example, of sisters gathered around a table, an abundant assortment of junk food and massive bouts of self-pity led directly to a roiling, unhappy belly that had haunted her throughout the following days of veterinary house calls. The Lincoln Park yuppie couple who had shut their cat in the bathroom to confine his vomiting to one small area had not helped matters. The bathroom had been covered in puke.

  She sat at her laptop, digging her way through the backlog of work emails that never seemed to shrink, no matter how many hours she spent on them. With a click, she switched files to her grocery list, deleting certain items and adding others.

  Note to self: Drop the Ben & Jerry’s, beef jerky, chips and dip. Pick up veggies, hummus and pita for your next sit-down with your sisters. Maybe then you can get through the following day without feeling like you’re going to puke, just like that poor kitty.

  The nonstop razzing from her sisters, down and dirty in the way only your best girlfriends could get, had trailed off into sympathetic back rubs and stealth hugs when she told them about the last time she saw J.D.

  She slapped her laptop closed and propped her elbows on its gray plastic case. Pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes and wished the sunbursts of color that bloomed against her eyelids could blur out everything else. She hadn’t even admitted the worst of it to her sisters. Hadn’t told them about her sitcom-worthy drunken marriage and the farce of being uncertain whether or not her “husband” was actually divorced from his first wife.

  “Clearly, I have lost my ever-loving mind,” she said and considered asking her mother if insanity ran in the family. Looked at objectively, the idea had promise. Her entire family, except for Maxie, had taken crazy risks for love.

  And won, her gambler’s heart whispered to her.

  Was it so surprising that when it came to matters of love and marriage, the greedy core of her might have hoped she could find a way to win this biggest pot of all?

  She shook her head at her own foolishness and straightened the laptop on the desk until it was centered in the bare expanse of wood. Standing up, she pushed her chair in, leaving her clean, uncluttered living room for the kitchen. She wanted tea before bed.

  Wish as much as you want, she told herself, but you just aren’t like them. Never have been. Oh, you play at taking risks, and there’s no one who can say you won’t lay it all on the line at the card table, but that’s just play. Deep down, you’re a planner, not a cliff jumper.

  She gave a mental shrug, filled the shiny silver kettle just enough for one cup and turned the flame on high beneath it. And what was so wrong with that? She’d worked her ass off in school, four years of undergrad and four more of veterinary college plus a year-long internship, because she knew what she wanted. She still worked hard and was good at what she did because she wanted to be. She loved her family and took pride in being someone they could count on—for help, for humor, for anything. Why did everything she took pride in seem so dull and tarnished to her now?

  Why did she feel so lonely? And why hadn’t he called?

  A week.

  It had been a week since J.D. had left her right here in her own kitchen, her emotions and insecurities churning inside her like sludgy concrete in the barrel of a cement truck. Seven days and not a word, damn him.

  She’d hurt his feelings, she realized now, by not including him in her plans for her mother’s birthday. Couldn’t help but realize it, since Tyler had torn a strip off her the next day over the phone when she’d called to line up his cooperation. She hadn’t even been able to squeeze in a question about whether or not Lana had made any further appearances. Because a part of her still didn’t believe she could compete with a sexually adventurous actress. And no, she hadn’t thought about how much J.D. cared for their mother. Hadn’t remembered how as a boy he’d found a place to call home with her family. Which was strange, given how often she wondered if it was his love for her family that had triggered his enthusiasm for being with her. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that J.D. adored her mother, counted her brother as his own and slid into place with the rest of her family like he belonged there.

  It was hard to admit that the man you wanted to love you loved your family more.

  Harder still not to see how that love might drift so easily into a kind of affection for her, especially when given a good hard push from blow-the-drapes-off sex. And she knew they didn’t suit, that her life and his could never mesh together, that she wasn’t the kind of woman a man like J.D. wanted. Maybe he would settle for her if it meant he would find a permanent place in the family he so clearly loved, but she wanted more, damn it. She deserved it.

  The shrill whistle of the kettle on the boil barely competed with the mental whirl of her thoughts. When she snapped off the flame and the jet of steam from the spout eased off, she could hear her doorbell blaring on top of the clatter in her head.

  She grabbed the kettle off the burner without stopping for a potholder and winced at the sharp pain. At moments like these, she wished that her family wasn’t quite so close, emotionally or geographically. A pity party like this would just be embarrassing in front of company.

  Sucking at her sore palm, she hustled down the steps, prepared to shuffle whichever sibling had come to check on her right back out the door.

  And felt her heart stop when she yanked open the door and it was him.

  She knew she looked like an idiot, frozen in place with her hand pressed against her mouth, eyes locked on J.D. like the sight of him was air and she’d been holding her breath for seven days.

  He seemed bigger than she remembered, looming over her in the doorway before stepping inside, then crowding her until she stumbled backwards and her heels bumped up against the bottom step of the staircase. He brought the cold air in with him and the darkness of the night sky was in his eyes as he stared down at her.

  “I don’t want to be mad at you anymore,” he said, sounding like he resented it a little bit. She could see his breath in the chill and took a step up onto the lowest riser, bringing her eyes level with his.

  She was chicken enough to drop her gaze to the front of his ancient wool peacoat as she apologized.

  “I’m sorry. I was an idiot. I wasn’t trying to make you mad.”

  “Don’t get me started on the number of ways in which you piss me off without even trying, Sarah,” he said, sliding gloved hands under her elbows, lifting her to her toes.


  “Hey.”

  She jerked her head up to meet his fierce look.

  “Just—” he pulled her against him “—stop.”

  Then his mouth was on hers and she wanted to protest, to tell him she deserved better than this abrupt assault, but the heat of him was sharp and brutal and she shoved herself up against the cold, wet wool of his coat, her mouth opening, her arms wrenching out of his hands to snake up behind his neck and just hang on to him. The world rocked and then spun around her, but at her core she knew she was home. Finding her center with him here, now.

  She heard him kick the door shut behind him, his teeth nipping at her bottom lip before he plunged back into the kiss. She barely needed the suggestive run of his hands under the length of her thighs for her to jump forward and wrap her legs around his waist. She was dizzy and burning with need.

  She curved her body around J.D. as he climbed the stairs, one of his arms braced under her butt and the other wrapped around her waist, her mouth open beneath his, her fists in his hair, and knew that no matter how briefly this lasted, she would take it. She would. She would take anything she could get.

  Chapter Ten

  When she’d decided to take anything she could get, she hadn’t factored in the possibility of being struck by lightning.

  A sudden shriek of wind blew the rain sideways and ripped a satellite dish out of the building’s mortar, sending it crashing to the street twenty feet below. Sarah scraped the edge of her palm over her face to wipe off the rain as she tried to see into the narrow gap between the two warehouses by the beam of J.D.’s powerful flashlight.

  “Can you see her?” she shouted.

  “No!”

  J.D. was standing only a few feet away from her on the tar paper–covered roof of his warehouse building, but he still needed to shout to be heard over the wind and the whipping rain. He braced his hands on the edge of the opposing roof, across the eighteen-inch gap, and peered down into the darkness. Rain streamed down his arm, plastering his T-shirt to his skin. He stood up abruptly and cursed.

  “Stupid animal. She picked a helluva time to come out of the fireplace.” He clawed his hair out of his eyes and turned back toward her. “And you’re sure you heard her?”

  Sarah wasn’t surprised that the cat had managed to escape J.D.’s loft when her labor began. Wild things often returned to the wild to give birth, even if it would be more comfortable and safer to stay indoors. Since she spent most of her nights at J.D.’s these days, she’d made a point of keeping an eye on his cat, not sure when she’d deliver. What did surprise her was how upset J.D. got when he finally realized the cat was missing. After weeks of complaining about “that damn animal” and steadfastly refusing to name her, she’d expected a shrug and “good riddance.”

  Instead, he’d searched his place for an hour before heading outside into what had been a light drizzle.

  Two hours later, that drizzle had morphed into a downpour that was rapidly melting the remaining piles of plowed snow at the street corners, melting it and funneling it into rivers of ice-cold runoff that streamed along the curbs and through the alleys.

  “I heard something. I don’t know what.”

  Right before the heavens opened on their heads, Sarah had been shining a flashlight down this same narrow gap, not even wide enough to be a walkway, between J.D.’s building and an identical warehouse structure next door. She hadn’t been able to see anything other than scattered piles of rubble. The space stretched for nearly a hundred and fifty feet back to the parking lot behind the buildings.

  But when she leaned into the gap, she could have sworn she heard the soft mews of newborn kittens.

  Standing on the roof with J.D. now, she braced a hand on his shoulder, his shirt soaking wet beneath her palm and so cold that she couldn’t feel the heat that always radiated from his skin. She leaned over the edge.

  “Careful,” he warned, reaching under her jacket to grab hold of the waistband of her jeans. “It’s still slippery up here.”

  His fingers were like ice against her skin. She looked down. Shivered. And was suddenly intensely aware of his body next to hers, her anchor. She leaned a little more heavily on his shoulder and scraped the rain out of her eyes.

  “I don’t see anything.” The light he was shining in the gap just wasn’t powerful enough.

  “Me either.”

  “Shit.” She didn’t know what to do next. Give up and cross her fingers that the newborn kittens weren’t drowning in the alley? If they survived this storm, she was pretty sure Mama Cat would eventually show up at J.D.’s door again, looking for food and warmth. “Shit!”

  She felt him sigh heavily next to her. He’d already spent hours in this nasty rain and cold, searching for an animal he hadn’t wanted in the first place.

  “Sarah—”

  “Maybe I can squeeze into that gap a little ways and get a better look,” she said, and twisted away to head back down there. She couldn’t give up yet.

  J.D. yanked her back by his grip on her pants. He spun her around and grabbed her by the upper arms, giving her a shake.

  “No way, Sarah.” He loomed over her in the rain, blocking the wind that was sweeping nearly sideways as lightning flashed overhead. Ozone hung sharp in the cold night air. “Absolutely no fucking way. That’s just what we need, you getting stuck down there.”

  She shook her hair back and stood there, fully aware that she couldn’t step away from him unless he chose to let her go. What she really wanted to do was step closer. Press herself up against him, wrap her arms around his waist and see if they could work up some body heat between them in this freezing rain.

  He was only touching her arms, for god’s sake. She was shivering, soggy and frustrated, and she still wanted nothing more than to run her hands up under his shirt and across the soft skin and hard muscle of his back.

  Focus.

  “I wasn’t actually asking for your permission, babe,” she said, making a face. His expression went flat and she felt his fingers squeeze her arms briefly before he dropped his hands to his side. She knew she was being bitchy, but she had to do something, damn it. She shook her head and tried again, this time without the bitchiness.

  “You’ve done all I could expect you to do. You’ve been great and you’re totally off the hook, promise.”

  J.D. turned his head away from her for a moment. His chest rose, held, fell.

  “That’s the thing, Sarah.” He faced her again, lips pressed together, rain splashing off his face. “You keep trying to let me off the hook when I don’t want to be. Don’t you get it?”

  He didn’t understand.

  “J.D. It’s okay. You—”

  “No, it’s not okay.” He dropped his face into his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes for a moment. “I don’t want to be off the hook, Sarah. But I guess that’s what you want, huh?”

  He stepped past her without looking at her again, heading for the door to the interior stairwell. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why he was pissed. She got it. She just…couldn’t trust in it.

  “Just go downstairs and wait for me by the doorway to the street,” he said. “We’re going to find that damn cat.”

  At street level, she huddled miserably under the scant protection of the doorway and waited for J.D. to come out. Which he did after five minutes, thrusting the pole of a large klieg light at her before heading back to the roof. An industrial orange extension cord ran from the base of the light she held back through his open front door.

  “Get that elevated as high as you can. Lift it up if you have to. And shine it down in the gap.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. She knew he thought she was crazy to keep at it when there was little to no chance any of this would help. And now he was risking his professional equipment on her crazy need to continue this hopeless search? Even if the light didn’t suffer death by drowning, what good could it possibly do? The gap was just too long and narrow.

  “Yo
u’re not going to be able to see a goddamn thing even with this light!”

  Lighting exploded. J.D. shook his head and laughed hollowly.

  “Actually, I think I’ll be fine.” He headed for the stairs to the roof.

  He was carrying an armful of metal tubes and she wondered what he planned on doing with them. Cold water squished in her shoes as she headed back to the small gap between the buildings.

  The light was heavy and awkward to carry since most of its weight was apportioned to the boxy light atop the long pole. She propped it upright at the gap and figured out how to manipulate the three legs of the base into a stable tripod. She found a power switch and flipped it on.

  Dazzling. Sarah squinted involuntarily against the blue-white radiance, turning her head away until her eyes adjusted. Rain rattled down onto the square metal housing that encased the light. She twisted the box until it faced the gap and peered under it to see if it was working.

  The intensity of the light made bright highlights, but even darker shadows. Still, it shone much farther into the gap than the handheld flashlights. What she’d taken to be a pile of trash was actually—no, it was a pile of trash that cast an inky black shadow stretching out behind it. She blinked again and wiped the water out of her eyes.

  “Sarah.” The shout came from directly above her. She looked up and saw J.D. leaning over the parapet. “Can you get the light any higher? The shadows are too long.”

  She understood immediately. If the light could be made to shine from a higher angle, the shadows and areas hidden by them would be smaller.

  “Give me a minute,” she called back.

  She found a textured metal band on the pole that twisted when she screwed it counterclockwise. When the fitting was loosened, she was able to extend the pole another foot, moving the light over her head. The shadowed spots in the gap looked smaller.

  “Any better?” she shouted. But if J.D. replied, she couldn’t hear anything. Thunder boomed and in mere moments lightning burst overhead. The wisdom of standing next to a tall metal pole in a storm was frigging questionable. Yikes.