Love Him: A Love Him, Hate Him, Want Him Novel

by Blaze, Stella

  Bastard.

  I walked past him into the kitchen, jamming my knuckles into his six pack abdominals as I handed him the Spencers’ bag.

  Just touching him gave me a little thrill, as if I had a low grade fever. He groaned over dramatically, but never stopped smiling.

  “Mi casa es su casa, ladies,” he crooned. “So who are all those angry ladies on Hope’s front porch?”

  I went right for the coffee and banana nut bread, cut off a four-inch slab and slapped it on one of the plates Raphael had set out.

  Don’t look at me that way! I eat when I’m nervous.

  Bette, still acting beyond strange, bee-lined it straight for Raphael’s open laptop. “The first two were Hope’s ex’s mother and sister,” Bette said absently. “The late comer was her mother.”

  Raphael made a low whistle and a scowl, pouting his luscious lips.

  I just stared at Bette. “What, do you have my porch bugged too?”

  She tried to look apologetic as she pulled her mini listening device from her ear. “I just had my binoculars out, so I kinda caught the whole thing.”

  I shoved a huge bite of banana nut bread in my mouth and then pointed accusingly at Bette.

  “Ma shoon ass—”

  “What?” Bette said, furrowing her brow at me.

  Good god the banana nut bread was good!

  I swallowed and took a gulp of coffee. “As soon as the goon squad loses interest in having a death match on my front porch, I’m going to change all the locks on my house and install surround sound speakers in every room so you won’t be able to eavesdrop on me anymore.”

  Bette shrugged.

  “And black out blinds on every window.”

  She actually looked sad at that.

  Raphael laughed at me.

  I turned on him, “And you, you immature little…”

  He just smiled at me. “I’ll go with you to the party.”

  “You will?”

  He took a step closer. “Yeah, I’ll go to your little party.” He stepped closer. “I’ll be impeccably groomed, probably better dressed than you, and I’ll do my best to make every woman and man in the place wish they were you.”

  I bet he would…

  I looked up into his dark, sexy eyes and lost all track of my thoughts. I’d been angry, right?

  He smiled, looking like the sexiest devil ever, and raised the bag I’d given him up into my line of sight. “I assume this is from you?”

  That broke me out of my temporary mind meltdown. I shook it off and coughed.

  “Call it a belated house warming gift.”

  Raphael walked away, and the temperature in the kitchen blessedly went down about twenty degrees. He placed the bag on the floating island, gave Bette a cursory glance, and then pulled the box out of the bag. He opened the box and pulled out a gaudy, multicolored, sprinkle clad coffee mug. Only the handle was white.

  “I washed it and everything, so you can have your coffee in it.” If you can stand it… you obsessive compulsive pain in the ass!

  Raphael studied it with a scowl. I mentally patted myself on the back. This was the last thing he’d want in his kitchen, or his house.

  I smiled.

  “Um, Raff?” Bette interrupted.

  We both turned to look at her. She was still standing in front of his open laptop.

  “Sorry to be so nosey,”—Raphael and I rolled our eyes simultaneously at this—“but are you really worth what it says on this spread sheet?”

  Raphael gulped, suddenly looked flushed, and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “No… not really.”

  Liar. Just hearing his words screamed he was lying.

  I walked over to Bette and peered at the screen.

  It was a spreadsheet and… well, I hadn’t any idea what it all meant. But there were a lot of large numbers on there.

  “What’s it say?” I whispered to Bette.

  “It says our neighbor is rich enough to live in a penthouse in New York City… and to summer in the Hamptons… and to have a villa in France—”

  “Ladies!” Raphael said, his voice cracking. “I’m…”

  We both stood there, staring at him, not giving an inch.

  “I remember your sisters said you were some kind of computer genius,” I prompted. Maybe he’d started some software company like Bill Gates had?

  He shook his head.

  Bette raised her eyebrows. “So you’re… what, some sort of mobster?”

  “No!” Raphael scowled.

  I joined in. “Are you the founder of a pyramid scheme? Like Ponzi?”

  That made him smile. “No.”

  He walked over to his refrigerator and pulled out a package of Hot Pockets: the two pack. He turned it so we could see the back and pointed to the UPC—the little barcode that they scan at the cash register.

  “What about it?” I said.

  Bette raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Don’t even try to say you invented barcodes!”

  He shook his head, looking meek and embarrassed. “No. I just came up with a way to make them look better.”

  We looked to each other and Bette shrugged.

  “What do you mean, look better?”

  He took a deep breath and sighed. Then he walked closer and pointed to the UPC again.

  “See how it’s in the shape of a flame?”

  Bette and I nodded.

  “I came up with that.”

  I canted my head at him. “No way.”

  Bette took the box out of his hands and glared at the barcode. “I read that this shit came out of Japan.” She locked him with a hard gaze.

  “Yeah, they implemented it first… but I’m the one who came up with it.”

  WTF?

  “Okay…” Raphael pulled up a stool and sat at the floating island. “I was sixteen, I’d graduated early from high school and was a freshman at MIT.”

  Oh boy… he really was a genius.

  “By the way, I don’t recommend going to college early. Especially so far away from home.” He looked off out the window over his kitchen sink. “I was homesick, friendless, and bored shitless when a professor in mathematical statistics started in on a two hour lecture on the modern UPC.”

  “Eww,” Bette said sympathetically.

  “Yeah, so I started playing on my laptop, found the UPC for Preparation H on the internet, and then made it look like his face. His teeth, actually.

  I had to smile. Sixteen and alone in a strange university, and he was still a smart ass.

  “I’d hacked into the professor’s email the first week of class, and had the emails and phone numbers for everyone in class… so…”

  Bette had a wicked smile on her face, leaning forward in anticipation of where his story was going.

  He took another deep, embarrassed breath and sighed. “So, I texted it to everyone in the class.”

  “And?” Bette prompted.

  “And people started laughing and talking, and the professor swooped in and took a kid’s blackberry from him and saw the UPC.”

  Bette roared with laughter. “I bet that went over real well!”

  Raphael shrugged his broad, thickly muscled shoulders.

  “At first he looked pissed… and then he started smiling. Next thing I knew he dismissed the class and had me making other—less embarrassing to him—UPCs. About an hour later he dragged me across campus to the Dean of Computer Sciences office and presented me and my little trick.

  “They both got really excited, and for the next two weeks I was refining and making more and more of my “artistic barcodes.” They took me to six meetings with manufacturing executives, but they didn’t think much about my little trick. So they started talks with some companies over in Japan and Asia. I guess the Dean had some contacts over there from his college days.”

  He sighed. “They ate it up, and before I knew it most of the products over there started sporting UPCs made to look like cartoon art.”

  “Wow,” I sai
d.

  “A couple years ago they started popping up in the good old US of A.”

  “And you…” Bette shook her head and smiled. “You get paid for every product that uses it?”

  He shrugged. “I get paid a certain amount for every item that’s sold that has one. It renews every six months.”

  “Wow…” I couldn’t even imagine how much money that was.

  Bette shook her head again. “So why the hell are you living here?”

  Good question.

  Raphael looked around his kitchen and I could see him relax. “I liked the house.”

  I raised my eyebrows to Bette.

  “I mean… I grew up in a crappy little apartment, sharing my room with two brothers, and the rest of the apartment with my mom and two sisters.”

  “There were five of you?” Bette asked.

  “Yeah, in a two bedroom apartment.”

  Okay, I couldn’t even imagine that kind of living arrangement.

  “My Aunt Freda lived in a house just like this one, and I always thought they were the luckiest people in the world. So I looked around until I saw a house…” he stopped for a moment, and then took a deep breath. “Until I saw a house I would’ve liked to have grown up in.”

  Bette sat down on a stool and leaned her chin on her hand. “With your kind of money you could afford to buy a hundred houses just like this one.”

  He smiled roguishly. “I have.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I didn’t know what to do with all the money at first. But I’d seen some of the elaborate life styles the owners of some of the companies paying for my barcodes had, and it just made me feel like they didn’t have homes. They had show pieces and party houses, and cold, hard works of art that they pretended to live in.

  “So one day I was at my family’s summer reunion. We gathered at a campground in Hemis Fair Park, and there must have been three hundred people there.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “And like a hundred and fifty rusted out junkers.”

  I felt a pang of recognition: I abruptly knew exactly how he felt. I cringed.

  “My family has always been poor,” he continued. “Maybe two or three people in the family went to college. Only Aunt Freda owned her own home. And that’s when I knew what I wanted to do with the money, and with my life.

  “I wanted to help my family… all my family.”

  “So,” Bette said, looking starved for more of the story, “You bought them all houses?”

  “And new cars—nothing flashy—and set up a fund so anyone in the family who wants to go to college, and has the grades to actually get in, can go.”

  “You’re paying for college?”

  He nodded gravely. “Right now there are fifty one adults enrolled in community and state colleges all over the country, and seventy-five teenagers. Ten are in Ivy League colleges, but they won scholarships. I’m just helping out with the extra expenses so they won’t have to work and try to go to college.”

  Well shit… here I was feeling like such a humanitarian about helping Darla learn how to drive, and I’d had a hot, sexy, male Mother Teresa living right next door!

  He shrugged those massive shoulders of his again. “So truthfully, I can’t afford much bigger of a house than this right now.”

  I had to laugh.

  He smiled at me and at Bette. “So, are you ladies okay with this? I mean, can I count on you keeping this to yourselves… and not treating me any different?”

  I caught Bette’s eye and she winked.

  I leaned across the floating island and patted his hand. “I promise to treat you like the conceited asshole you’ve always been.”

  Bette snuck up behind him and threw her arms around his heck. “And I promise to try to seduce you and get you to be my next husband from now until the day you die.”

  Raphael’s eyes got round as saucers when she playfully nibbled on his earlobe. “Um… Bette?”

  “Yes, baby?” she purred.

  I burst out laughing at the sudden look of panic on his face. It was too freaking good!

  Raphael got this long-suffering look on his face. He’d obviously been the butt of his sisters’ jokes before.

  “Woman…” he muttered.

  Bette let go and strutted back to where she’d been sitting.

  When I finally regained control of myself, and stopped laughing at him, I took a sip of my coffee and pondered getting a cookie—how had I not noticed the sparkling glass cake pedestal boasting over a dozen white chocolate macadamia nut cookies?

  “So, Sprinkles?” I taunted.

  He glared and showed me his white teeth. It wasn’t a smile.

  I gave him my best smile. That’s right, Mother Teresa in hot male clothing or not, he was still the guy who tried to chainsaw my sycamore tree.

  I tried to extend my hearing and decide whether The Women were still having it out on my porch. Nothing but quiet and the sound of the wind through my tree.

  Hallelujah!

  “So pick me up at six thirty, okay?”

  “I’ll drive.” He smiled. “We may not make it in your hunk of junk.”

  “Hey!” I grumbled, but he was kind of right.

  “And…” He sat up straighter and adjusted the nonexistent collar of his t-shirt. “I can’t be seen showing up at a ritzy party in something as mundane as your car.”

  I closed my eyes and took a big, deep breath. Don’t kill him… you need him… don’t kill him…

  I shot him with my brightest smile. “Just don’t dress too flamboyantly.”

  He scowled.

  “We want everyone to think you’re my sexy date, not my sexy gay best friend.”

  His eyes turned to slits.

  Ha, take that!

  He stood and was suddenly right up in my personal space. He smelled like butter and freakishly attractive man. I felt hot and a little dizzy from the contact high.

  He leaned over and picked up the last piece of banana nut bread from my plate, and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly, his thick, soft looking lips making a show of it.

  As he eyed me I gulped and tried to look away—but I freaking couldn’t.

  Damn him!

  He swallowed and smiled again (asshole didn’t even have anything stuck in his perfectly white teeth).

  “I think I can pull it off.” He turned and walked over to the coffee maker, sprinkle mug in hand, and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  Bette raised a lewd eyebrow at me and I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  What was I getting myself into?

  Chapter 30

  Jake

  When I got home my answering machine was blinking that I had thirty-seven messages.

  Okay, that had to be a mistake.

  I hit the play button and the cloying voice of my cousin, Julie Hours, sang excitedly from the recorder.

  “Hey Jake, thought you should know your mother and sister are back in town,”

  Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.

  “And they showed up on Hope Jones’ porch.”

  That I didn’t know.

  “There was a commotion, some yelling and cursing—on your sister’s part—and then Hope’s mother showed up.”

  Oh dear god…

  “They almost came to blows, but the old man across the street came out and threatened to call the police, so they all decided to leave. Call me when you find out what they were there for, okay?”

  Beep.

  The second message was from Rhonda Porter, a woman that worked at Wal-Mart in the frozen foods department.

  “Hey Jake. Just wanted to let you know your mother and sister were spotted giving that Jones girl a hard time on her front porch. Right out where everyone passing by could see and hear. And from what I heard, they were arguing about you. You sneaky little devil. I didn’t even know you and Hope were dating! Call me.”

  I sat down and cringed as people I hadn’t even thought of in years told me over and over about
sightings of my mother and sister, and the verbal battle they had with Hope’s mother.

  Now that would have been the scariest thing… ever. My sister was the meanest bitch of her generation, and my mother was a freaking iceberg of mean. But Hope’s mother was the kind of evil they foretell of in the Bible.

  Pure, unadulterated nasty.

  “Hey, Jake-y,” came Tammy Faye Bullock’s sweet twang. “I heard about your mother and sister getting into it at Hope’s—no class there, no class at all. But I thought you should know they’re all over here at Crickster’s calmly chatting over milkshakes and a basket of cinnamon twists.”

  Okay, that’s not good.

  “Nothing good can come of this, so I thought I’d give you a heads up.”

  Beep.

  The messages were still going when Paula and mother came through the front door. They stopped and looked guilty.

  “So,” I said, my anger barely held in check. It felt like my fury was expanding in my chest, ready to explode. “I hear you two have been busy today.”

  My sister regained her bitchy composure and cocked her hip at me. My mother folded her arms over her chest and took a breath to speak.

  I jumped out of my chair and bashed the answering machine with my fist, crushing it with a crunch and some sparks.

  Both women winced and took a step back.

  “I don’t care what you and that bitch Hope’s mother think you’re doing, but it’s over!”

  “Jacob Michael Troy!” Norma breathed heatedly.

  I cut her right off. “Shut up!”

  Her head went back as if I’d slapped her.

  “Get your things,” I snarled. “I’m driving you to the airport.”

  She started to say something and I grabbed the broken message machine and threw it across the room, just missing the front window but knocking an old cuckoo clock from the wall.

  “I said get your shit… you’re leaving.”

  Chapter 31

  Hope

  I couldn’t sleep. Well, I couldn’t get comfortable. It was as if I had forgotten something important… like leaving the stove on or the dog out in the cold… if I had a dog.

  I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something.

  Or something was missing…

  And then I felt movement in my bed; for some reason I wasn’t a bit surprised when a muscular arm draped over my shoulder, pulling me possessively against him. He smelled of Dial liquid soap and a hint of axle grease.