The Grumpy Player Next Door: Copper Valley Fireballs #3

by Grant, Pippa

  Or does Max Cole merely like being naked?

  Oof.

  That was a whole-body shiver. Yum.

  More coffee. Definitely time for more coffee.

  Sloane smiles at him. “Hey, Max. Cooper coming?”

  “You slept with him!” I abandon my plans for coffee, sit straight up and drop my leg off the chair, wincing when my heel bounces on the floor.

  She tilts an amused look my way. “Not sure which him you’re talking about, but no. That said, I am highly entertained by your brother’s attempts to charm me, and you’re talking more to the dart board than you are to me, so…”

  “So you haven’t slept with him?” It’s been a running question every winter since Sloane moved to town, and every winter, she tells me the same. I’m pretty sure she means it. She saw him naked after one of my own pranks gone wrong—long story—and she slapped his ass with a wooden spoon last Thanksgiving. Those two instances didn’t turn either of them into hornballs who had to climb all over each other, so I figure they really don’t like each other like that. Plus, Cooper morphed into a whiny baby when Mom let Sloane have her last piece of Grady and Annika’s leftover wedding cake a couple days after the wedding.

  Is there anything more unattractive?

  But Cooper is Cooper, and Sloane is basically the hottest single woman who’s not related to half the town—Georgia being the hottest single woman who is related to the half of the town that I’m not related to—so it’s a legit question.

  She laughs though. “Sisters before misters. Oh, look, Vinnie sent you another drink. Like you’re going to finish the second, much less a third.”

  “Are you calling me a lightweight?”

  “Yes.”

  I grin. “I would’ve made an awful pirate.” Only partially because I’ll take an espresso over rum any day of the week.

  Aunt Glory hands me my glitter tumbler that Luca Rossi’s girlfriend, Henri, gave me—so this is where it’s been—then smiles at Max. “Wings and a beer, hon?”

  “Burger and fries and an iced tea, please, ma’am.”

  “What?” I gasp in mock horror. “A burger will touch those lips? Say it isn’t so.”

  He takes the seat my foot just vacated, frowning at me. “Are you drunk?”

  “Nope. Just happy. But I’m always happy. The jitters make me extra happy. What makes you happy, Growly Bear?”

  “Not being called Growly Bear.”

  “But you don’t like it when I call you sexy beast either.”

  He props an ankle over his knee. “Why do you flirt with me?”

  “That’s a bull’s-eye question.”

  He bends, snags a dart off the cement floor, and flings it at the wall without looking.

  The dart makes a dull thump that says it hit the board.

  There’s no way it was a bull’s-eye, but you know what?

  I’m feeling generous. And I really don’t want to fight with Max.

  Joke with him? Yes. I joke with all the guys on the team. Why should he be any different?

  Because he’s hot, he’s seen you more than just naked, he’s kissed you, you like how his skin and muscles feel, you’re both single, and he acts repulsed by you, which is the best challenge you’ve ever had, my nipples whisper.

  Whoops. I’m at nipple-talking caffeine-high stage. That usually only happens when I’m exceptionally tired and only propped up by the caffeine.

  I should go home and go to bed, which is code for I need to go home and paint until I can fall asleep since there’s no way I’m sleeping until my first coffee of the night has worn off.

  Instead, I crook a finger at him. “You want to know?”

  He doesn’t lean in for the secret, but he does drum his fingers over his calf like he’s waiting.

  I wish he was in shorts. I love muscular calves. Especially hairy muscular calves. Why is it that he wears short sleeves everywhere in pre-winter, but he doesn’t wear shorts too? “At first, it was so Cooper would get you traded too,” I whisper loudly.

  Sloane darts to her feet. “Bathroom.”

  “Want me to come?” I ask her. “That’s not exactly a secret. And if it was a secret, it didn’t need to be.”

  She gives me a look that’s a little fuzzy.

  Uh-oh. She’s not fuzzy.

  My eyes are fuzzy.

  That’s a bad sign, and I should definitely stop drinking coffee right now.

  But I don’t want to.

  “I’m leaving because I want plausible deniability in whatever you say next,” she informs me. “I won’t sleep with your brother, but that doesn’t mean he can’t trick knowledge out of me. I want no knowledge of what you’re about to say. Text me if you need me to help you keep your clothes on though.”

  “No, no, come back,” I say to her retreating backside. “Make me stop talking.”

  “You gonna throw a dart, TJ?” Vinnie calls.

  Max bends and grabs another dart from the floor and hands it to me. “Go on. Throw it. Then tell me why you flirt with me now.”

  I take the dart with jittery fingers and toss it at the wall, where it bounces off and clatters to the floor again. “Whoops.”

  His long arms once again extend to the floor, and the next thing I know, I have seven darts in my hand.

  Or eight.

  Or two.

  The fuzzy-buzzy is getting real. I should go home and eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Instead, I aim a very sharp dart at a very solid wall and throw.

  It thuds.

  “Yeah, TJ!” Dakota yells.

  “Did I bull’s-eye?”

  “No. You stuck it in the picture of the 2005 pirate crew above the board.”

  I shoot out of my seat to look, swaying and grabbing Max’s shoulder for support, because it’s the nearest solid object.

  Hello, Max’s muscles. Why am I not immune to you?

  I’ve been around baseball players my entire life, because Cooper’s been a baseball god his entire life, and the thing you do when your older brother is good at something is trail along after him while he does that thing he’s good at for your entire childhood until he leaves for college and then the minors. You know that falling for a baseball player means coming second to the game every time, and you know that he’s gone half the year, and you know that one day, he’ll hang it up and come home and not know who you are since you’ve grown apart in the years that he was putting baseball first.

  And I wouldn’t date a hockey player, football player, soccer player, you name it player for the same reason.

  And I’ve never wanted to.

  But Max?

  I want to get to know this man who’s been getting under my skin for four years now. I want to know if we can be friends. I want to know if I do other things to offend him, or if he’s just an asshole and I have a complex where I’m attracted to assholes and I need to go back to therapy to work through this.

  Supporting people is good.

  Trying to fix people is bad.

  Can’t fix an asshole that doesn’t want to be fixed, and even if he wants to be fixed, he’s the one who has to do the hard work.

  I open my mouth to ask him if he really hates me so much because I flirt with him all the time, consider that he’ll be entirely too honest for me to handle, and also that if I was supposed to know the answer to that question, the universe would’ve let me in on the secret a long time ago.

  So instead, I get a grip on my over-caffeinated self, jerking my hand away and looking up at my dart, which is impaled in a poster-size print of an old Pirate Fest crew picture.

  “Oooh, I got Long Beak Silver!” I shake my booty and roll my shoulders. “Take that, you bad, bad parrot.”

  I try to flip the bird off, but I’m not very good with my middle fingers since I use them relatively seldomly, and I think I give it the pinky instead.

  Max glowers at me. “Do you need to go home?”

  This is what I do. I piss him off, and he glowers, and why can’t I
be attracted to guys who like me instead of guys who are impossible to please?

  Fuck you, Max Cole. “Aunt Glory, can I have a grilled cheese sandwich?”

  “You got it, sweet cheeks,” she calls back.

  “Yay, chair.” I smile at Max as I sink into it, almost miss with half my butt cheek, and wiggle back onto it, my temper igniting in time with the java juice flowing through my veins. “Now you have to tell me why you flirt with me.”

  His eyes close, and his chest rises and falls in one of those massive sighs that my parents never really made with me, but that Aunt Glory makes over her kids all the time.

  My parents are awesome.

  “Never mind,” Max says.

  He starts to rise, but I fling my arm out to stop him.

  I’m mad at him.

  I want to make him mad too. “I flirt with you because it obviously annoys you, and it annoys me that it annoys you, because I am not your sister. You are not supposed to be in the circle of annoyed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m a very nice person, and I’m a good person to be friends with, and I get along with every other person on your team, but not you. Never you. I don’t think it would’ve mattered how we met. I think you’d be bound and determined to not like me no matter what.”

  His Adam’s apple bobs and something flickers in his eyes, highlighting the flecks of caramel amidst the dark chocolate in them, and I realize I’ve struck a nerve.

  He doesn’t want to like me.

  He actively works at not liking me.

  I fling another dart at the wall. I’m frustrated and mad and suddenly very, very sad.

  “Cooper said you were valedictorian of your graduating class.”

  My shoulders hitch. Apparently he knows how to hit nerves too. “School came easy to me and I like working hard. Cooper’s not the only winner in the family.”

  He glances around The Grog like he’s asking what the hell I’ve done with my life since, and it’s like being back with Ben Woods, my former on-again, off-again boyfriend that I thought I’d marry when I turned thirty, despite the fact that he really should’ve been permanently off from the first time we broke up two weeks after our first date, since he kept pushing me to be something I’m not.

  Go sell your paintings in Copper Valley, Tillie Jean. Make something of yourself. You’re smart, you’re talented, and you want to waste away in this little pirate town for the rest of your life? Go back to college. Be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be an engineer.

  I curl my fingers around the rest of the darts in my hand.

  Max’s gaze lands back on me, and he holds me captive with that growly glare. “Everything comes easy to you, doesn’t it?”

  It feels like a slap in the face, and I don’t know why. “So you don’t like me because you think I’m a spoiled princess.”

  My voice cracks on the last word.

  Crap.

  Crap crap crap.

  Should not have come out tonight. So what if he thinks I’m spoiled? Who the hell is he?

  Nobody.

  That’s who he is.

  He’s nobody to me.

  Someday, my somebody will come. And when my somebody comes, I’ll be ready for him.

  But Max Cole is not my somebody.

  He’s my nobody.

  And I need to remember that.

  I bolt straight upright again. “Aunt Glory, forget the grilled cheese. I gotta get home. Put everything on my tab, yeah?”

  Max rises too. “Tillie Jean—”

  “Don’t worry, Maxy-poo. I won’t flirt with you anymore. You don’t like me. I get it, okay? I get it. Enjoy your burger.” I reach for my glittery tumbler that usually makes me so happy but feels like a false front right now, and I knock it over.

  Max snags it like it’s a line drive hammered straight at him on the mound. “I don’t—”

  “Like me. I know.” I snatch the mug. “Thank you. Enjoy eating alone. I’m done here tonight.”

  Tonight, and as far as I’m concerned with Max Cole, forever.

  9

  Max

  I don’t like being a fuck-up, but I can’t seem to help myself around Tillie Jean. And now I feel like I need to fix it.

  Because I have so much practice fixing shit with women.

  Reason number eighteen million…

  Except I don’t hate her for me screwing this up.

  And I do need to fix it.

  She’s Cooper’s little sister, she’s well-loved in this town, and clearly, I stepped over some invisible line that’s left me feeling like a thirteen-year-old kid who wasn’t supposed to tell my coach that I was late to practice because my old man couldn’t drive, because my old man didn’t want anyone knowing that his preferred therapy for the depression he didn’t talk about was vodka.

  Difference is, I know now it wasn’t my fault when I was thirteen.

  This? Tonight?

  Yeah. This is probably my fault.

  I shouldn’t have stopped to talk to her.

  Doesn’t matter that all I wanted was to see if we could clear the air and get past all the shit that’s made it so fucking hard to be around her the past couple weeks. I knew better.

  I don’t wait for my burger, but I still stuff a hundred in the tip jar on my way out the door, chasing Tillie Jean, her coat in hand.

  Crazy woman left without it.

  She’s not on the street, which means she’s either hiding in a side alley, she took off at a run, or she flagged down a friend driving past and got a ride the three blocks home.

  All three are equally likely around here.

  Two goats trot along behind me as I march through the cold night to the little house I’m calling home these days. Stars are shining overhead. Moon’s not up yet. I don’t have any extra food in my pockets to give to the goats like I usually do, since I don’t usually see the goats this late at night.

  When I hit my block, the lights are on in Tillie Jean’s house.

  She’s home. She’s safe. I could go straight to my own house.

  Pretend this didn’t happen.

  But there’s an anxious feeling roiling my gut and telling me I need to apologize, if only so Cooper doesn’t get pissed at me for picking on his sister.

  So I man up and knock on her door.

  She flings it open with an expression igniting in her eyes like maybe I should call her Growly Bear tonight. “So you were the lookout man so Cooper could get his revenge, hm? Nice. Well-played. Congrats. You win.”

  She slams the door in my face.

  And now I’m pissed. I don’t get involved in her stupid pranks.

  I bang on the door again.

  She yanks it open, snags her coat, snaps out, “Thank you,” and shuts the door again.

  But this time, I get a shoulder in the way. “I’m sorry.”

  I don’t sound sorry. I sound pissed and I know it.

  “Congratulations. Never too late to learn new words, and you just did it. You can leave now.”

  Reason number two hundred billion… “Can we please call a truce?”

  “That would sound so much more sincere if you weren’t yelling it at me.”

  “I’m not yelling.”

  “You’re not sounding very contrite either.”

  My hands ball into fists. “I’m not good at this, okay?”

  She eyeballs me with one bloodshot blue eye while the other scrunches closed, but this is no saucy wink.

  If anything, this is probably an attempt to make it look like there’s just one of me.

  Hell.

  I’m negotiating with a drunk.

  You’d think I’d know better.

  She flings the door open. “Fine. You can come in and undo what Cooper did, and then we can discuss if we can call a truce. If I’m still awake.”

  Despite the sinking feeling in my gut that this is a terrible idea, I follow her inside, expecting much of the same as I get in my roughly-same-shaped house next door. Small living room, kit
chen and dining room combo, two bedrooms, a powder room, and a main bath between the two bedrooms, with utilitarian but clean furniture that is from this decade, upgraded with family pictures here since they’re all tight and that’s what people tight with family do.

  They show off their family pictures.

  Sometimes on blankets and pillows even.

  Instead, I walk into an art gallery.

  There’s no television in Tillie Jean’s living room. Only bright paintings on the muted gray walls. Her couch is a low modular thing that looks more like a pile of ivory cushions than furniture, and the only family portrait in the room is a large digital frame flashing candid shots of her brothers, parents, friends, and extended family on a white end table that looks like it, too, belongs in a museum instead of inside a small two-bedroom house in a dinky mountain town.

  I should add this to the list of things about Tillie Jean Rock that drive me up a wall—well-rounded in unexpected ways—but I can’t.

  I should also keep up before she catches me gawking, as she’s headed through the doorway at the back of the room that I expect leads to the kitchen. Unfortunately, I get stuck looking at a painting that seems like it’s a woman peering around a tree, except the tree is made of a complex pattern of stripes in bright colors that shouldn’t go together.

  It’s oddly soothing. And peaceful. And the woman—she has as much mischief in her bright lavender eyes as Tillie Jean has in her—

  “That’s not what Cooper did.”

  Caught.

  I jerk my head away from the painting and follow TJ into the kitchen, where the first thing I see is—wait.

  What are those?

  Tillie Jean grabs a handful of her own face and yanks.

  Towels.

  Holy shit.

  Cooper papered half her kitchen with tea towels with her face on them.

  And it’s quite the face she’s making on the towels too. One eye shut—much like she was staring at me at the front door, except her other eyeball is half-rolled into her head, with her mouth twisted open and her tongue showing.

  For the first time since I left the guys up at Cooper’s house, telling their funniest family memories that left me unsettled and in need of a break from people who grew up with the kind of normalcy I thought was a lie, I’m smiling.