by Maggie Wells
“Hmm. Maybe this would be a good time for me to play the client card,” she mused.
He groaned again. “We can both agree I’ve provided services above and beyond the terms of the contract.”
She laughed. “And loved every minute.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Let’s talk, though, while we…let things simmer,” she suggested.
“Yeah. Okay. Simmering is good.”
The relief in his voice was palpable enough to make her smile. Rolling onto her side, she smirked at the tool wearing the tool belt on the screen. “Goodnight, Mike. Sweet dreams.”
“Goodnight, Georgie,” he replied.
Heaving a long, girly sigh, she placed the phone on the coffee table, grabbed the remote control, and increased the volume. She endured approximately two minutes before the urge to fire nails into the toothy guy’s head overtook her. Pointing the remote at the screen, she sneered at the cardboard contractor and made pew-pew-pew noises as she started flipping through the on-screen viewing guide.
Settling on one of the cooking channels, she sank into the cushions muttering, “Mary Berry can build a better wall out of gingerbread and Royal icing.”
* * * *
“I see your pudding pack and raise you two feet of fake fruit,” James said as he tossed a handful of prepackaged snacks into the pile in the center of the card table.
Mike slumped in his chair. They were at James’s place this time, which meant they were using an actual poker table rather than a dining table like they did at his place or Colm’s. James and the boys used the poker table as a dining table, so the piece served a dual purpose.
The pot in the center of the table consisted mainly of prepackaged kid food. Once a month, they shoved the kids into a bedroom with a stack of DVDs, popped open a few beers, and played five-card stud for snack foods. While the stakes might not seem high to some, a good supply of processed fruit and string cheese was invaluable to a parent.
Mike studied the cards in his hand, weighed his odds and the dwindling pile of supplies in front of him, and decided to stick a fork in the evening. He couldn’t keep his head in the game. Setting his cards aside, he formed a plow with both hands and shoved the collection of single-serving crackers and assorted Halloween leftovers toward the center.
James glanced at the overpriced hunk of Dick Tracy equipment strapped to his wrist and sneered. “Come on, it’s barely eight o’clock. The kids haven’t even crashed yet.”
Colm, on the other hand, happily pushed his pile into the pot, smiling his shit-eating grin. He had better things to do than play poker for Pokémon snacks. Mike sighed as he watched James’s face fall. He’d been the one to insist their usual game go off as planned, and now they were abandoning him. A pang of guilt twisted Mike’s gut. He looked at his quasi-brother-in-law and grimaced an apology.
“Sorry, man, I can’t keep my head in the game.”
“Chicks. They will fuck you up,” Colm intoned with mock solemnity.
“You should know,” Mike shot back.
Still clinging to his poker hand, James shook his head. “Come on, guys. Grow some balls and scratch them, will you?”
“Did your sweet cookie dump you?” Colm asked, ignoring Mike’s glower. “Are you in a funk?”
“No, she didn’t dump me,” Mike answered a shade too quickly.
“Are we gonna talk about our feelings now?” James interjected. “I mean, because I am having so many of them right this minute.”
Colm looked at him, a hopeful expression lighting his face. “Are you going to cry? Will your eyes get all puffy? Or do you get all red and do the hiccuppy thing like Jamie?”
Without dignifying the taunt about his kid with an answer, James tossed his cards onto the table and started raking the pot toward him. “Jamie gets the hiccuppy thing from Megan’s side of the family.”
“Hey,” Colm complained.
“We didn’t see your cards,” Mike pointed out.
“Yeah, well, you two quit, so I win.”
“We weren’t quitting, we were going all in,” Colm pointed out. “Either way, one of us might still be standing.”
“Only until the next hand,” James groused, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fine. Go. But you’re leaving the goods.”
Mike watched his friend closely. “You okay, man?”
James shot him a contemptuous look. “Okay? I get one friggin’ night a month where I can hang out and drink a couple beers, and you two want to run off so you can call your friggin’ girlfriends.”
“You could get one too if you weren’t such a pouty baby,” Colm said with maddening equanimity. “What ever happened to the Carson girl?”
“Nothing happened to her,” James answered, his expression sullen.
“I mean, what happened with you and the Carson girl?” Colm clarified.
James raised one russet eyebrow. “You want the details?”
“We’re supposed to assume he fucked her and moved on,” Mike said blandly.
Colm scoffed at their friend. “You’re such an ass.”
James shot him a supercilious look. “Maybe she fucked me and moved on. Why do you always assume I’m the ass?”
The question earned a huff of disbelief from Colm. “Well, if the donkey suit fits.”
“Did she fuck and dump you?” Mike asked, his curiosity piqued.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” James retorted. “Your sister beat a path out the door pretty fast once the deed was done.”
Mike cringed. He did each time his friend mentioned his younger sister and the way she’d screwed him over. James’s relationship with Megan was always the elephant in the room. “Well, you don’t exactly have a reputation for asking women to stay around. Maybe she wanted to beat you to the punch.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, they boomeranged and hit him in the gut. Was his reluctance to see Georgie socially a preemptive strike, or something more?
“Speaking of women who beat men to the punch, how are things going with your babe of a baker?” James asked.
Deflection, pure and simple, but Mike couldn’t help but bite. He slid his friend a suspicious glance. “How do you know she’s a babe? You’ve never met her.”
“I could tell you I researched her on the Internet,” James said as he sorted the cheese sticks from the processed fruit foods.
“But you didn’t,” Mike said flatly, unamused by the cat-and-mouse games.
“Hell, no. I went in there last week. Those boobie bonbons are the bomb, man.”
Colm rolled his eyes as he started gathering the deck of cards. “I swear, you never progressed past fifteen.”
James paused in his sorting. “Fifteen was a good year for me. I became a man at fifteen,” he intoned gravely.
“Whoever she was must have given you a watered-down dose, because we’re still waiting on the full result.”
“You went into Getta Piece? Why?”
James quirked a smirk but continued sorting. “I was curious.”
Mike scowled at the oh-so-casual response. “About what?”
“About her,” James said without hesitation. “About the place. And I wanted to see the naked lady goodies.”
“There are dicks galore in there,” Colm pointed out.
James waved the reminder away. “Yeah, but mine’s bigger.”
“Pfft,” Colm scoffed. “Not bigger than the Big Kahuna.”
Rolling his eyes, James snared a cellophane package of candy corn the kids roundly rejected and tossed the bag at Colm. “Hey, I could be hauling an anaconda around every day.”
“I’m willing to bet you’re not.”
Not hard to see where this particular pissing match was heading, and Mike wasn’t interested in eyeballing anyone’s weaponry. “Yeah, no, not going there.�
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James chuckled and returned to his task. “So tell me, Mikey, what’s it like to get naked with a lady who spends her days making twenty-four-inch dicks? Feeling vulnerable? Inadequate?”
“Not at all,” Mike said evenly. Honestly.
The fact of the matter was, once he and Georgie were upstairs, he barely thought about what went on in her kitchen. He certainly didn’t feel threatened. Not when he was the one who got to slide his dick inside her.
“She didn’t strike me as your type.”
Something in James’s superior attitude flew all over him, but he really got his back up when Colm chimed in, too.
“I have to agree with the matchstick,” he commented as he wrestled the playing cards into their box. “I never would have pegged her for you.”
As much as their commentary stung, Mike couldn’t help but snicker at the use of their old nickname for their tall redheaded friend. “Screw you both. What the hell do you mean, anyway? She’s a smart, sexy woman. How is smart and sexy not my type?”
“No one is denying the appeal,” Colm said, raising his hands to fend off any further argument. “I’m only saying she seems somewhat…colorful for you.”
James had the balls to nod in agreement. “You usually go for women who are more…” He looked to Colm for help.
“Bloodless?” Colm supplied with exaggerated innocence.
Much to Mike’s chagrin, James guffawed. “I was going to say bland, but bloodless works.”
Colm straightened, heading off any counterattack Mike might launch. “Now, don’t get your dick in a knot. We’re only saying you tend to like ladies who are more buttoned up.”
“Yeah, well, I like this one, and she doesn’t wear buttons at all.”
James burst out laughing, but Colm simply lounged in his chair, eyebrows raised and an appreciative smile curving his lips. “Wow. I have to admit, I am intrigued.”
“Fuck intrigued, I demand details,” James said, thumping the table with the side of his fist.
Dragging his hand over his face, Mike plunked an elbow on the table. “I might be screwing everything up.”
James chuckled. “Already?”
“How?” Colm asked at the same time.
His manner was less offensive, so Mike chose to ignore James and his caustic commentary. Focusing his full attention to Colm, he asked, “How do you do it? The dating thing and Aiden?”
James immediately sobered. “Hey, I date a lot more than he does,” he said, clearly offended he wasn’t the one being asked for advice.
“Yeah, but you rarely see the same girl twice,” Colm pointed out.
What went unspoken was the difference in their situations. Colm became estranged from his family when he started seeing Carmen, Aiden’s mother. Communication had been reestablished after Carmen’s death, but Colm’s son remained a tiny island in a river of resentment.
Mike’s own family was much more present, with the exception of his flaky sister Megan, but also a hell of a lot more toxic. His mother begged to babysit the kids. Unfortunately, she usually did so after she’d downed her nightly martinis. And even if she could stay sober for one whole night, Mike refused to leave his kids in close proximity to his father. Not only because Big Mike Simmons enjoyed the booze as much as his wife. He’d swung his fists on rare, but indelibly memorable, occasions.
James had better access to childcare, thanks to his mother and her inexhaustible list of country club friends with babysitting daughters and granddaughters.
“Some of us don’t have the energy or the opportunity to enjoy your robust social life,” Mike said gruffly.
Fair or not, James’s ability to continue having a social life after becoming a single dad gnawed at both Mike and Colm, whose circumstances weren’t quite as flexible. A reality James never truly seemed to grasp. He seemed to believe their mostly celibate existences were a matter of choice. Like they’d been tossed from a horse and needed to get on again.
“Well, if she’s your type and the two of you are fucking like rabbits, what’s your deal?”
Ah, his deal was an easy one to pinpoint. He didn’t particularly like women who were bland or bloodless, he just wanted them to be normal. What he meant by normal, he wasn’t exactly sure. But a girl who dyed her hair a rainbow of colors and wore skintight shorts cut to the curve of her ass was pretty sure to stick out at his neighborhood’s annual block party.
A shitty thing to admit, even to himself.
He peeked at Colm and spotted the sympathy shadowing his friend’s usually inquisitive eyes. He and Colm grew up together. Colm had been at the ninth-grade basketball game where his mom stumbled in loaded and proceeded to yell at the coach for benching her kid. In actuality, there were seconds left on the game clock and Mike had already drawn his fifth foul in the process of blocking what could have been the winning shot for the other team. He’d been at the house the night Big Mike was railing on about some asswipes at his local watering hole and accidentally gave Megan a bloody nose with his broad gesticulations.
He hadn’t met James until college, so Mike had never felt the need to trot every not-so-happy family story out. Sure, Megan may have spilled the sad story of their family dysfunction in the brief time she and James had been together, but his friend had never asked and Mike didn’t tell.
He pushed away from the table. “You’re probably right. She isn’t my type, so why complicate things?”
The two men at the table craned their necks as he walked toward the steps to the rec room. He paused at the top, bracing himself for the wreck he was sure to find below.
“He’s a goner,” Colm said in a low voice.
“Totally,” James agreed. “How long until he cracks?”
Mike took the first step, but stopped, curious what kind of odds his friends gave him.
“I give him a week,” Colm replied at last.
Mike felt a sudden rush of gratitude toward his old friend for the vote of confidence. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he’d get through the weekend without going full-on grovel. Rumbling down the stairs, he clapped his hands together and called out, “Okay, time to hop in the saddle, Simmons gang. Tonight, we ride.”
Chapter 7
Every one of Georgie’s predictions had come true. The ballroom of Carson House, her great-grandfather’s mansion-turned-museum was festooned with floral arrangements in the requisite red, white, and blue motif, but these particular arrangements somehow managed to look lavish and not garish. A select group of musicians from what appeared to be a much-larger orchestra were playing a selection of standards at exactly the right volume. Not too loud for conversation, but not so soft they were lost in the hubbub. The passed hors d’oeuvres were incredible. The wine crisp, cool, and oh-so necessary.
Because her mother had ordered a cake for the occasion.
A multi-tiered cake devoid of anything as gauche as actual frosting or last year’s marzipan designs. No, this was one of those fashionably deconstructed cakes. Ironically enough, people liked to call them naked cakes. But this was a different kind of naked from the frosting-laden embarrassments her Cordon Bleu-trained daughter churned out. This soulless buttercream-challenged monstrosity bore her mother’s stamp of approval.
Georgie circled the table from a safe distance, judging every last detail with a critic’s eye. She couldn’t fault the baker for technique. Each layer was perfectly uniform. The sides were dusted with confectioners’ sugar to make it appear as if the sponge had been popped from the pan and glued together with the snow-white whipped crème smeared along the edges. Vivid clusters of ripe strawberries and blueberries tumbled from the top and spilled from tier to tier in artistic intervals. Like some forgetful pastry fairy had come along intending to decorate the poor, shivering, naked cake, but simply got distracted.
The overall effect was starkly chic. And, in Georgie’s opinion, ugly. Then again,
she sprinkled puff pastry vulva with edible glitter and added candy pearls where one would find a clitoris, so maybe beauty truly was subjective.
Georgie was willing to bet there weren’t a dozen men in the entire ballroom who could even find a real clitoris. Maybe she should have found a way to smuggle some Puff Pussies into the party. After all, being a member of the Carson family was all about public service.
Aside from the cake, her mother had arranged for an assortment of what Meredith called ‘fun’ food stations placed around the perimeter of the room. Staff clad in inconspicuous black scurried about with trays laden with food. There was a raw bar in the far corner. A cheese display lavish enough to make a Frenchman weep stood at the center of a collection of tall tavern tables. After hitting the bar, one could stop by the popcorn station, which offered a veritable rogues gallery of potential seasonings. Other tables featured more conventional fare—tacos, pizza, pasta, stir-fry, and even sushi. One could enjoy a scoop of booze-laced artisan ice cream served in a chocolate-lined waffle cone or a soft pretzel peddled from an actual pushcart.
She tried to ignore the dessert buffet altogether. The cake was a slap in the face, but checking out the petit fours would be like subjecting herself to a bloodletting via a thousand tiny needles.
Drink in hand, she accepted a paper cone filled with ranch-flavored popcorn and moved toward one of the unoccupied tables, already wishing she could kick off her too-tall heels.
She’d passed inspection. Thank God. Dutiful daughter she was, she removed the brow and nose rings for the evening. Her hair was now a boring but glossy espresso-brown. She’d slicked the short bits with gel and pulled the rest into an elegant French twist.
Her mother had narrowed her eyes at her choice of dress, but in the end, couldn’t truly complain. She’d opted for sedate navy blue in keeping with the political/patriotic theme. The high Mandarin collar kept the cupcake tattoo mostly concealed. A single silk frog closure topped a plunging teardrop cutout that exposed the upper curves of her breasts. Subtle navy beading added movement to the flow of dark silk. Like a deep blue river, the dress dipped at her waist, poured over her hips, and cascaded nearly to her ankles. Cleverly disguised slits along the side seams made walking possible, if one took tiny steps. The strappy silk sandals had been too perfect a match to resist. Her toes were pinched so bad she felt like she was feeding them through an extruder, but, hey, one had to suffer for fashion.
