Calling His Bluff

by Amy Jo Cousins

  The magical transformation to foxy was a little more labor-intensive without the stylists she’d hired in Vegas, but she was sure she could pull it off pretty well nonetheless. When her little sister dropped off the flat iron she’d asked to borrow, along with a makeup case the size of a Samsonite carry-on that she hadn’t asked for, Maxie tried to worm the reason behind this sudden attitude change out of her—Sarah hadn’t swiped so much as a Chapstick across her lips in weeks—but Sarah wasn’t talking. She needed to do this on her own this time. She’d had all the family support a girl could ask for, but it was time to stop making safe bets. It was past time to take a few chances.

  She excavated deep in the back of her closet and pulled out the garment bag from the Bellagio. Neither dress had seen the light of day since her return from Vegas, and honestly, both were too over the top for tonight. She hooked the zippered bag over the back of her closet door and left it open, facing the rows of black, gray and navy trousers and jackets that made up the bulk of her wardrobe. She’d decide after her shower.

  Twenty minutes later, steamy warm and slicked up with mango sugar body butter, she dropped her short pewter robe to the floor and slipped the sewn-in hanger straps of the red halter dress off the padded hanger.

  No sense going for subtle. This was a statement-making night and this dress certainly made a statement.

  She stepped into the short skirt and slicked the bodice up her torso, lifting both hands behind her neck to tie the straps at her nape. Giving her shoulders a shimmy to settle everything in place, she turned and faced the full-length mirror in the corner.

  “Sarah Tyler rejoins the living.”

  She grabbed her ridiculously tiny purse and belted on a black silk trench coat that hid the dress entirely, giving the distinct impression that she might be naked underneath it.

  Time to hit the road.

  * * *

  Her mother was a little surprised by the stretch limo, but happy to have an unexpected adventure. The amount of bare leg her daughter had on display did provoke a slow blink and a cocked head. Sarah just smiled.

  “Coming out of hibernation, are we?”

  “We are.”

  Susannah leaned forward and patted her knee.

  “Good.”

  The story was that she needed to stop by Tyler’s pub to drop off J.D.’s keys before they headed downtown for dinner at Spiaggia, the ultimate splurge. Sarah was irked that she couldn’t find a way to avoid bringing J.D. into the conversation, even for one night, but at least it had the ring of truth to it. Those keys had been burning a hole in her purse for weeks now.

  When the limo pulled up outside the pub, she asked the driver to throw on his hazards and wait for them for half an hour or so.

  “C’mon, Mom. Our reservation isn’t until 7:30. Let’s get your son to buy us a drink.”

  The mullion windows at the front of the pub were blocked from the inside by something large and white. A smart move on her brother’s part, seeing as fifty of Susannah’s nearest and dearest were packed into the bar. Sarah fought hard to keep the grin off her face as they picked their way up the icy sidewalk to the front door.

  “I keep telling Tyler he should add a fireplace. We get chilly nights up through June. A fire would be lovely on a night like tonight,” her mother said over her shoulder as they entered through the temporary fabric and plastic vestibule and pulled the heavy wooden door open.

  “Pretty sure he’d burn the place down,” Sarah joked. She managed to keep her mother’s back to the room by the simple expedient of turning Susannah toward her as she helped remove her coat. She could see everyone, her family, their friends, waiting quietly behind them, bouncing in place with the last seconds of contained excitement.

  When she spun her mother around and gave her a gentle push into the silent room, she was still laughing.

  The place exploded around them.

  “Surprise!”

  The gleeful cheer was followed by a blast of confetti and swiftly rising balloons. After a moment’s hesitation, Susannah stepped into the waiting crowd. Her hands were pressed to her cheeks and a tear or two was spilling over. Her smile was a million miles wide.

  Sarah hung back, happily surveying the chaos before her. And then she noticed what Tyler had used to block the windows and her heart stuttered in her chest as her stomach did a slow, sensual tumble.

  J.D.’s photographs. She’d recognize his work anywhere. Dozens of images had been blown up to poster size and beyond and were hanging all over the bar. Pictures of her mother—by herself or with one of her children or a friend—were on display everywhere, with smaller framed pictures on the tabletops.

  Jesus, there was even one of her mother with her father. Who had gone digging through the boxes of old photos at her mom’s house for that one?

  Sarah realized that she was crying as she spun slowly in place, her breath catching at each new sight. There was Susannah showing a ten-year-old Christopher Robin how to stand in a proper batter’s stance. And there was one of her mother with her little sister, both of them lying on their backs in what had to be their backyard, pointing up at the sky, where Maxie could always spot more imaginary animals than anyone else. She had never even seen some of these photos.

  More recent pictures were mixed in, too. Susannah in the white apron and chef’s hat she wore on the occasional night when she still helped out in the pub’s kitchen, pointing a soup ladle threateningly at the photographer through the pass-through from the kitchen. A picture from a dinner at her mom’s home, her mother framed by flickering tall candles as she lifted a wine glass and shook her head, laughing.

  It was brilliant. It was gorgeous. And it was obvious from these photographs that J.D. felt all the love in the world for her mother. Her heart hurt with happiness, knowing that he’d been thinking of them even from California. He had remembered. Of course he had. And she was included in that love. It might not be what she’d hoped for, but it was still love. And for that she was glad.

  After another minute, Tyler’s slow wave from behind the bar caught her eye. She couldn’t hear a word over the loud chatter and the music that had come pouring out of the speakers shortly after their arrival. The soundtrack to The Big Chill, it sounded like. Their mother’s favorite.

  She gave her brother two big thumbs up.

  He nodded and smiled back, hands working the taps fast and furious as the party kicked into high gear. She hadn’t even figured out who all was there since the pub was so crowded, but she planned on working her way through the room in what would undoubtedly be a blizzard of hugs. She noticed that Tyler was jerking his head toward the back of the room and giving her significant looks.

  No way. She was absolutely not going to tend bar in this dress. She’d be flashing the room every time she bent over a beer cooler.

  Tyler kept pointing his chin at the far end of the bar, eyes narrowing threateningly.

  She stalked back there, giving quick smiles to those she passed and mouthing “Be right back!” at a bunch more. She’d read her brother the riot act at the wait station and grab a Diet Coke off the soda gun while she was at it.

  Halfway there, she stopped dead in her tracks.

  Directly opposite the middle of the bar, a cluster of photographs hung on the wall. A picture of Susannah was situated in the middle, and pictures of her children surrounded it like the petals of a flower. All were black-and-white images, and each captured its subject with such perfect clarity that even a stranger would know everything about their family from these pictures. Susannah’s grace and rock solid love for her family. Addy’s refusal to bend an inch and her heart full of secret dreams. Maxie’s chameleon changeability reined in by her control freak love of command. Tyler’s bullish determination and bedrock compassion.

  And Sarah.

  She didn’t know when he’d taken the photograph. It was so tightly focused on her face that she couldn’t get any hints from what she was wearing or where she was. Just her face, her straight hair
tucked starkly behind her ears. She wasn’t smiling, but something about her eyes suggested that she was about to.

  It was simple, even a little plain. There was nothing obvious or woman-on-display about her in the picture. But she was beautiful. And happy. And he’d seen right into her soul.

  Damn. Now she really needed a napkin, before she cried all her make up off.

  Everyone blurred a little as she spun and kept moving through the crowd. She needed a minute, just one damn minute to herself at the end of the bar. Pull it together, girl. She blinked as the curved brass rails designating the wait station came into focus through her tears and there was some jerk standing in her way. Tall and broad, with dark fucking hair in a stubby ponytail and even half-blind with tears she would know that silhouette anywhere.

  J.D. turned and she jumped on him, arms wrapped around his neck, breasts smashed against his chest as she crushed her mouth to his, and his hands—oh, thank god—slid up the bare skin of her back to lock over her shoulders as she tried to inhale him with her mouth. She couldn’t stop kissing him as the heat exploded in her belly.

  He couldn’t let go of her, either, apparently. She felt him growing hard against her and one of his hands dragged down her back, over her ass in that miniscule skirt, and down her thigh.

  The pulse of sound from the crowd dipped for a moment and she realized that they were in a public bar.

  A bar filled with her family and friends. With her mother, for god’s sake.

  She gave one last lingering suck to his bottom lip and dropped her head back to look up at him. His eyes were dark and half-lidded, his lips wet as he licked where her mouth had just been.

  Jesus. That was hot.

  She slid her leg off him and stood on two feet again, leaving her arms wrapped around his neck. J.D. settled his hands on her hips.

  “I was pretty goddamn pissed at you, Damico.”

  He nodded. “You were right to be.” A pause. Then a quiet question of intensity. “Was?”

  She waited for a moment to feel it in her bones. Imagined that her face at that moment looked almost exactly like the picture he’d taken of her that hung on the wall.

  She nodded back.

  “Was.”

  The slow smile born on his face was like the sun rising over the lake. The last of the dark night was fading away in the west. His fingers tightened on her hips.

  “The plan was to come home and talk you into forgiving me. After a lot of groveling and explaining and some serious time on my knees, begging for mercy.”

  She bit her lip to keep from grinning. Hitched her hips up against him.

  “I’m feeling pretty merciless.”

  Heat flared in his eyes. He tugged her even closer between his legs.

  “I’ll struggle through.”

  Before he could dip his head down and capture her mouth again, she stopped him with a pointed look.

  “I am assuming the Lana problem is no longer a problem.”

  He laughed shortly. “You’re assuming correctly.”

  Yeah, she was gonna need more details than that. He shook his head and kept talking.

  “I hooked her up with Ben like she asked. Man, I hope that’s not the end of that friendship. But I made her sign every frigging piece of paper in our divorce file. Twice. She is out of our lives for good.”

  She tapped a finger against her own mouth. Almost there.

  “I was sure it was going to show up in the gossip rags sooner or later.”

  J.D. exhaled a deep breath.

  “Yeah, that.” Sarah kept her eyes locked on him. “We kind of just…have to trust her.” Sarah’s snort wasn’t exactly ladylike and he loved her for it. “She really doesn’t want this coming out, either, so I think we’re okay.”

  Okay. She didn’t know if she could actually trust Lana not to resort to cheap scandalous publicity if things got tough for her again in Hollywood, but they’d deal with that if it ever happened. And she and J.D. would need to spend about a bazillion hours talking, making sure that each of them understood exactly how not to make the other person feel like crap.

  Later.

  Because right now? Right now she wanted this man naked and on the nearest flat, horizontal surface available. Her mother would never miss her.

  Everything else she could live with.

  She grabbed J.D. by the hand and prepared to tug him through the crowd and right back out that front door. They’d phone in their goodbyes from the back seat of the limo.

  “Hey, J.D.!”

  He pulled back from her at the shout from her brother. Tyler was leaning over the bar, waving his best friend over. The crowd was thick between them with people who blocked her view.

  J.D. pressed a quick kiss to the side of her neck and whispered in her ear.

  “One second.”

  He made his way through the throng and stepped up to the bar, reaching out to do one of those complicated guy handshakes with his buddy.

  Tyler’s fist flew over the bar and plowed straight into J.D.’s face.

  “What the fuck?” she shrieked and started pushing past people without caring who she shoved out of the way. At the bar, she jumped between her boyfriend and her brother, pulling at Tyler’s other hand where it was snagged in the front of J.D.’s shirt. Her brother was trying not to punch her in the head as he kept swinging at his friend.

  She’d begged her sisters to withhold certain details from their brother. But clearly someone in her family had just slipped up and let him in on the events of the past two months. And that person was going to pay dearly, as soon as she managed to interrupt this assault and battery in progress in front of her.

  They were drawing quite a bit of attention by now.

  “Tyler. Tyler!” She wasn’t getting his attention and sooner or later she was going to get clocked by accident. Time to pull out the big guns.

  “Christopher Robin!”

  He jerked to a halt in midswing to glare at her, but then started shouting at J.D. “You do not fuck with my sister, dude!”

  Shit. There was too much testosterone at this end of the bar. Although she had to admit that J.D. wasn’t participating in the chest beating at all. He hadn’t even raised his arms to defend himself. “Stop beating him to a pulp, you idiot. I love him.”

  She heard the sudden, sharp inhale from behind her and looked back over her shoulder, keeping her body between the two of them.

  “Just in case that wasn’t clear,” she said. And smiled.

  “You know I love you, too, right?”

  Her heart didn’t skip a beat. There was no roller-coaster high or sudden low. No panic, no crazy adrenaline rush. Just the clear, steady knowledge that she loved this man and he loved her right back.

  “Not a doubt in my mind.”

  “Aw, crap.” Her brother’s muttered apology from behind the bar was nice, but she really didn’t give a damn. “I’m going to have to make this up to him, aren’t I?”

  She pried his hand off J.D. and replaced it with her own. “Yup.” Tugged him back to her and went up on tiptoe, looking him straight in the eyes the entire time, this man who knew her so very well. “You can start planning our honeymoon.”

  J.D. was grinning down at her. “Our honeymoon?”

  “You bet. You don’t think I’m gonna let you be in charge of this thing the second time around, do you?” She smiled back at him and licked her lips.

  “So.” He looped his arms around her waist. “We’re really gonna do this? For real this time?”

  She didn’t flinch before laying it all on the line. And this gamble, the biggest one she’d ever make, wasn’t any different when it came right down to it.

  “We so are. I’m all in, baby.” She grinned and, just before his mouth leveled over hers, heard the only word he said in reply.

  “Jackpot.”

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  About the Author

  Amy Jo Cousins knows one thing for sure: the people who read and write romance novels are the smartest, funniest, kindest and most optimistic souls on the planet and finding a place in this community has been like coming home.

  She lives in Chicago, where she writes contemporary romance, Tweets more than she ought and sometimes runs way too far. She loves her boy and the Cubs, who taught her that being awesome doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with winning.

  You can visit her online where she hopes you’ll say hi!

  Booklist

  At Your Service

  Sleeping Arrangements

  eISBN-13: 9781460330753

  CALLING HIS BLUFF

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Jo Albinak

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