And stopped.
Standing before me, their backs to me, were the two men who’d been ready to trade blows on my front porch just a few hours before. Now they stood side by side, appreciating the sight of my gorgeous neighbor taking a sledgehammer to what looked to be a small safe.
I took in the sight of them, took a moment to appreciate the two men standing side by side, how their shoulders stacked up, the difference between Raphael’s curvy bubble butt and Jake’s perfectly tight ass.
And they were both still oblivious to my presence.
Well, maybe they’d end up fixating on Bette and leaving me the hell alone!
Maybe I could just go back to my boring, solitary life, no more drama, no more men mucking everything up…
No more Jake…
No more Raphael…
I blinked and watched them as they watched Bette assault and batter her safe.
And felt suddenly jealous.
My head swirled at the thought. Who was I jealous over?
Jake?
Raphael?
Shit, was I jealous of both of them?
I closed my eyes and pushed the tempest of green, possessive thoughts from my mind. I turned and without looking back at the two men in my side yard, tiptoed up onto my porch and back toward my front door.
“Hope!” Bette called out, shining a spotlight on me when all I’d wanted to do was scramble back into my house and back up into my nice warm bed.
I stopped and turned to look at her. She was smiling, one foot up on the now wrenched open safe, triumphant, the sledgehammer resting on the ground before her.
To my horror, both men were now staring at me, and they didn’t have rapturous, heated gazes. They were both trying to conceal smirks.
I closed my eyes—I could just imagine how my hair looked.
I shook my head and marched back into my house, slamming the door and throwing home all the locks.
I heard Bette laugh outside, and could only imagine what had been said.
And it had probably been about my hair.
I looked in the hallway mirror and cringed. It was even worse than the time Raphael had caught me spying on his construction workers.
Half of my head was flat, as if I’d slept with my arm over my head. The other half was teased up like a bunch of jungle bushes.
And there was a bright yellow rainbow Twizzler stuck in that puffy mass of hair. I tried to pull it out, but it was melted into the hair.
Then I looked down at the old sweater I’d pulled on. It was old alright, and matronly, and purple like Barney’s grandmother—and it had Clive’s cat hair all over it.
The offending feline stared calmly at me from his perch on the back of my couch.
“Why didn’t you tell me I looked like something you hacked up?”
Clive flicked his tail, shot me a withering glance and proceeded to lift his leg and lick himself.
Men.
###
It takes approximately thirty-seven minutes to get a melted Twizzler out of your hair—just in case anyone wants to know. I pulled, I heated, I tried a comb and then some no-stick, spray-on PAM. Then I stood under the hottest shower I could stand until the water ran cold. That seemed to work, but after it dried, my hair in that section had a definite funky quality to it. It just slumped there on top of my head, like it had been ravaged by an oil slick.
I opted to pull the whole mess back into a ponytail… but that gummy lank of hair still stood out, so I twirled it up into a nice, neat, tight little bun.
My belly growled and I pulled on my usual t-shirt/jeans combo, slipped on some cute flip-flops and headed back downstairs. I stopped at the bottom of my stairs—I smelled pumpkin bread and fresh coffee.
“We’re out here in the kitchen!” Bette called out, and added, “Raphael brought some bread!”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Why me?
Defeated—and hungry as hell—I lowered my head and headed toward my two B&E inclined neighbors and that heavenly smelling pumpkin bread.
Bette was still in her short-shorts and white t-shirt, leaning over and resting her elbows on the center island, clicking through my computer.
My. Computer.
I was seconds away from reaching over and grabbing hold of her much more artfully put together bun—hard.
Snatch her bald… sizzled in my head.
But then I saw Raphael leaning sexily against the kitchen sink, a mug of coffee sitting untouched beside him on the counter. I took a moment to appreciate the sight of his profile. Such a gorgeous, deliciously handsome face he had. If there were angels, then he would be the archangel of sex… plain and simple.
My eyes wandered down over the swell of his chest, and the tattoo free arm that faced me.
I was about to ogle his denim clad legs, and maybe something a little higher up, when I realized that he hadn’t even looked at me since I walked in the room. Actually, Raphael had his eyes glued on Bette’s round, firm bottom. And since she was leaned over and had said butt pointed out on display, there was an awful lot to look at.
Oh, and the Daisy Dukes didn’t hurt either.
I grabbed myself a cup of coffee and took a healthy gulp before snagging a piece of the pumpkin bread from the tinfoil covered platter Raphael had obviously brought over—the damned thing was another boring piece of plain white china.
I stood next to Raphael and joined him in staring at Bette’s ass. I had to admit she had the kind of bottom both Michelangelo and Hugh Hefner would consider delectable.
They were both ignoring me, which for some odd reason kind of ticked me off. I mean, they were in my kitchen…
Wait, how is it they were in my kitchen? I’d changed the locks, right?
No, wait, I’d said I was, but I hadn’t, had I?
“So,” I said to Bette’s perky round bottom, “are you installing spy-ware on my computer or something?”
She stood up straight and turned around, fixed her pretty green eyes on me, as well as her high wattage smile.
“I have many talents, cupcake,”—Cupcake?—“but computer surveillance isn’t one of them.”
Her eyes flashed as an idea burst into flame somewhere in her head. “But I’m sure Raff would be more than adequate at doing just such a thing for me.”
She turned and gave him a wink… and then blinked, as if she didn’t believe what she was seeing.
I looked too.
That beautiful, achingly male face was slack in concentration. The kind of expression one imagines a big jungle cat might wear as he patiently stalks his prey.
I gulped.
Bette gulped.
Raphael stared at her for a few more beats and then seemed to shake himself out of it. He looked over at me as if he hadn’t noticed me enter the room, or that I'd stood beside him for the last couple of minutes.
He shook his head as his brain caught up with what Bette had said, and not with the sight of her ass.
“No, I’d never invade Hope’s privacy,” he said, his voice darker than usual. He turned his attentions back to Bette. “Not even for you.”
Not even for you…
What did that mean?
Bette shot me a confused, almost panicked look—which seemed totally incongruent. I mean, this was Bette I was talking about here. She can handle multiple males, in succession or consecutively—which I didn’t want to think about, but now…
Ewwww…
There was Bette, looking to me as if I could save her, or help her.
Hell, I couldn’t handle one man, let alone multiple men.
I took another big bite of the scrumptious pumpkin bread and gave Bette a shrug of my shoulders.
You are on your own…
My phone started ringing… but I didn’t know where it was. It sounded like it was under a rock somewhere. I started walking around the kitchen, trying to pin down where the phone was.
“It’s in the breadbox,” Bette said irritably.
I looked at her an
d walked over to my little wooden, daisy covered breadbox, opened it and then pulled up a loaf of wheat bread to find my pink iPhone beneath it. The call rang off to voice mail before I could answer it.
“Why was my phone in the breadbox?” I asked.
Bette was still giving Raphael a confused look, but then turned her back on him and started clicking through my computer again. “It just kept ringing, and it was getting on my nerves.”
I rolled my eyes at her and thumbed to my voice mail when it chimed that there was a new one waiting for me. My voice mail lady told me that I had seven new messages.
“Who’s calling me so much?” I asked no one in particular.
Bette laughed. “Probably the deranged woman who's emailed you 10 times in the last two hours.”
I walked over and hip checked Bette out of my way. All ten emails were from Janine.
Shit…
My phone started ringing again, this time sounding more emphatic and demanding simply because I knew who it was.
I banged my head on the counter of the center island my laptop was perched on.
“Are you okay, cupcake?” Bette asked.
“Stop calling me that!” I sat up straight again and answered my phone. “Hi Janine.”
“Why haven’t you returned my calls and emails? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning. What the hell happened last night? How do you know Poe?”
I closed my eyes and listened as she harangued me with demands, questions, and a few veiled threats. It’s funny how I never took the things she said to me as being threats until Raphael brought it up and shone a light on it.
“Janine,” I said, but she just didn’t shut up. “Janine, I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“Of course you’re going to talk about it! There’s a YouTube video showing your hot stud threatening Poe at the party.”
Good god…
“It’s gotten a hundred and twenty thousand hits since it went up! My email box is full and I had to route all my incoming calls to my voice mail. I sent you the goddamned link!”
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. When I opened them both Bette and Raphael were staring at me. I pushed past them to my laptop and opened an email that said, laconically, LINK in the subject field.
It opened and I clicked on said link.
In seconds the scene from the party appeared on the screen.
“What is that?” Bette asked.
Raphael cursed when the picture came into focus.
I’d been shielded behind Raphael’s back, so I hadn’t seen it. He looked like a tall, dark, dangerous-as-hell monster looming over Eric.
Eric tried to side step around him and Raphael reached out, snatched him up with both hands gripping Eric’s collar. The smaller man dangled and struggled in Raphael’s grip, until Raphael leaned in, his teeth bared, and hissed something in Eric’s face. Eric suddenly went still and pliant in the bigger man’s hands.
Raphael’s baring of teeth turned into an icy smile as he set Eric back down on the floor. Without another word Raphael spun around, wrapped an arm around me and whisked me from the dance floor.
The title of the YouTube post was “Nationally renowned photographer assaulted at Branded Publishing party.”
That was probably the worst part, at least from Janine’s perspective. Her company was involved in a viral post showing a famous artist being bullied. Or at least that would be what you would think had just happened if you didn’t know all that had come before.
And the hundred and twenty-five thousand hits had grown to two hundred and fifty thousand.
“Hope!” Janine called from the phone. “Have you seen the video yet? We need to talk!”
“I’m very sorry, Janine.”
She made a strangled sound and laughed mirthlessly. “That’s not an explanation! I need to know what happened, and why your date assaulted Poe… and how the hell you even know the man?!?!”
My stomach turned over just thinking about it all again. If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said those old fears involving Eric were history, that I’d worked through them and they didn’t mean a thing anymore.
But that had been a pretty lie I was telling myself. Just the sight of the man had sent me right over the edge, throwing me head over teakettle over the ledge of hysteria.
Obviously not thinking about it and keeping away from the man for the last two years hadn’t helped my mental state at all.
“I guess you can’t run from your problems,” I said to myself.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Janine groused.
I shook my head and then leaned my forehead against my palm. I was getting a splitting migraine.
“It means that Eric… I mean, Poe and I have a past, and I didn’t want to see him.”
There was a pregnant silence, and then Janine groaned.
“What kind of past? Were you two fucking or in love or some shit?”
I jerked at how she’d put it. “Both, actually, but I don’t want to talk about it right—”
“Oh, come on Hope! I work with my ex all the time and you don’t see me going all movie of the week over it.”
“Janine, it’s not that simple.”
“Yes, Hope,” she grated, “it really is that simple. Poe is the hottest cover artist in the romance industry, and most of our clients want him to work on their covers.”
I felt an icy knife slide right into my heart. She really was going to replace me with him. I was losing my job, my livelihood… hell, it was my identity. If I wasn’t a photographer any longer, then what… who the hell was I?
“Luckily for you, though, many of the authors feel a loyalty to you, and want you both to work on their covers.”
Huh?
“What does that even mean?”
“Well,” Janine said, “they seem to all love the covers you’ve done for them in the past, they just want that dark, edgy “Poe” feel to be in there too.”
I closed my eyes and cringed. “What does that even mean?”
Janine sighed, as if she were having to explain things to a child. “It means, cupcake, that the majority of our authors want both of you to work on their covers. Like a collaboration.”
I could taste bile in my mouth, and I literally could not breathe. I couldn’t even be in the same room with the man without having a breakdown, how the hell did she expect me to work with him.
“And he wants to meet with you... are you hyperventilating?”
I listened… yep, I was hyperventilating.
“Shit, Hope! It’s just your ex we’re talking about here, not the Spanish Inquisition.”
Bette handed me a paper bag, pity in her eyes. Raphael was glowering in the corner.
I accepted the bag and started breathing into it as Janine rattled on. I had no idea what she was saying, all I knew was she wasn’t going to listen to me even if I told her the whole, messy story. She had it in her head that I needed to work with Eric, and that was that. She was the boss and I just needed to toe the line and work with the man.
Or find somewhere else to work.
I set the phone on the counter and blew my nose with a paper towel. Bette and Raphael remained silent and I wrapped that quiet around me like a blanket.
There was no getting out of this, no going around it. I needed to deal with Eric or lose my job, my career.
I picked up the phone and said, “Give the son of a bitch my address and tell him to come by this afternoon around two. We need to talk.”
And I hung up.
“Hope?” Bette was the first to speak. “Are you sure about this?”
I nodded, slowly, staring at my coffee machine.
“Are you out of your freaking mind?” Raphael roared. It made me jump. “That guy isn’t coming anywhere near you!”
I looked to him and gave him a wan smile. “I really appreciate what you did last night, but this isn’t your decision. It’s mine.”
Raphael stood u
p, his hands in fists. “Not if I break his legs before he makes it to your front door.”
Bette’s eye’s turned round as saucers.
I walked over to Raphael and placed my hand on his chest, looking up into his beautiful, dark eyes. He was so angry those pretty eyes of his were almost black. “You’re going to do nothing of the kind.”
“But—”
I cut across him. “I appreciate it and all, but this really is my decision.”
Raphael gritted his teeth so hard I could hear his molars grinding together.
“It’s not your decision anymore when your boss forces you to talk to him.”
True. I wouldn’t be even contemplating meeting, talking or even breathing the same city’s air with Eric if it hadn’t been for Janine’s insistence.
But this was my career on the line here. And with a pang of resignation I saw that I was once again going to do something very against who I thought I was to save my job.
I swallowed that feeling and licked my lips, trying to gather the words I needed to say right then. I needed my well intentioned neighbor not to go all bodyguard on me, or start beating up my ex-boyfriends.
He already didn’t have a good track record with them.
“I’m fine with it.” He took a breath to argue, but I lifted my hand from his chest up to his lips and placed my fingers over his mouth.
I didn’t say anything at first.
Truth was I didn’t really know what I was going to say. My mind had been racing, trying to talk the rest of me into not being so scared at the thought of confronting Eric that I curled into a fetal ball on the floor and hyperventilated my way to Crazyville.
But when I looked up into his pleading, angry eyes, I suddenly knew why I really needed to meet with Eric.
“I can’t be afraid of that man for the rest of my life.” I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath—knowing the truth and doing something about it are two different things.
I opened my eyes and saw that Bette was standing beside Raphael now, her gorgeous green eyes glistening with unshed tears.
She was on the verge of tears for me.
Love Him: A Love Him, Hate Him, Want Him Novel Page 26
