by Grant, Pippa
“Cooper was with me the whole day.” It comes out automatically. I’ve had teammates I would’ve fed to the wolves at the first opportunity, but I’ve owed Cooper Rock more than my life for most of the time I’ve known him, and it’s second nature to defend him.
Even to his little sister.
Okay, especially to his little sister.
“Start pulling them off or go away. And don’t damage my paint.”
I turn to the wall and gently pry off the nearest towel printed with her face. It’s attached with a thumb tack. She’ll probably have to spackle and repaint her whole wall. “He was. He couldn’t have done this.”
“News flash, Cole. We have teenage cousins who’ll do anything for gas money.”
I get one tea towel off the wall while my stomach grumbles a protest that I’m missing my cheat day hamburger, but when I turn to toss it on her table, food is the last thing on my mind.
Her cabinet doors are even more interesting than her living room. They’re also painted.
I think.
They sparkle over swishes and swirls of gold, blue, and black. It’s almost like staring at the universe on a clear, dark night, except they’re her cabinets. Her countertops are white marble, the perfect complement to the cabinets. The floor is wide-planked gray wood, and the backsplash is a soft aqua green glass reflecting the designer coffee maker and planter of three succulents on the otherwise clean counter.
I glance at Tillie Jean. “Your kitchen—”
“Is none of your business.” She’s scowling, which both feels wrong but also inspires a naughty teacher fantasy that makes my cock leap to attention.
If her hair weren’t tied up in a bun and she wasn’t in a Crusty Nut blouse with the top two buttons undone and giving me a peek at her cleavage, I swear my cock would be behaving itself.
I turn back to the wall and grab another Tillie Jean Face Towel and make a hesitant attempt at peace. “I thought you liked it when Cooper pranked you.”
“When he pranks me good. This is lame. It’s the tea towel incident revisited except not at all funny. Even if he put these all over town, it’s like…it’s been done.”
“Tea towel incident?”
“People on my shit list don’t get that story from me.” She frowns at me, a one-eyed, squinty frown. “Your burger’s ready.”
I blink. “What?”
“Go back and eat your burger.” She pries another towel off the wall, revealing more white paint that I’m positive is a design choice and not the path of least resistance in getting her kitchen finished.
She also completely ignores me, which makes me mad. Again.
“Did you get a text?”
“Thirty-seven years in food service. I know when a burger’s ready, dude. Yours is up.”
“You’re not thirty-seven years old.”
“But I feel like it tonight.”
Any other day, she’d probably accompany that statement with a wide Tillie Jean smile—number four hundred twelve—and top it with a but you’re welcome to make me feel young again, big guy wink.
Tonight, she doesn’t.
And right now, I miss the happy-go-lucky, freckles-in-summer, mischief-in-winter, big-hearted woman that she is around every other person on the planet.
Every other person who’s not me.
She stifles a yawn. “Seriously, Max, go get your burger. I don’t need help. I forgive you for being an ass, okay? We can be friends. No biggie. If you can’t leave for your burger, leave for your fries. They’re no good after they’re—oh!”
Gone is the cranky, tired woman ready to give up on fighting for the night, and in her place is a firecracker with pink rising in her cheeks and horror making her mouth go round.
“TJ?”
She ignores me and dashes out of the kitchen.
I glance around her kitchen one more time, then set aside the towel in my hand and follow her.
And immediately wish I hadn’t.
Not just because she’s in her bedroom, climbing onto her four-poster bed, but because her bedroom has charcoal walls broken up with wispy ivory and pink sketches of rose buds, and her bed is draped with twisted black sheets and wrapped with soft pink gauzy stuff hanging between the posts, and now I’m thinking about fuzzy handcuffs and feather boas and leather.
My mouth is dry.
My gut is quaking.
My dick wants out to play.
And this is Cooper’s sister.
His baby sister.
His very, very off-limits baby sister who’s standing in the middle of her bed, reaching a hand up to the ceiling fan blades, making her shirt lift and exposing a slice of skin that reminds me of a ripe summer peach.
If ever there was a recipe for a panic attack, it’s the idea of getting caught in this bedroom with this woman with my dick straining in my pants.
I have to swallow three times before I remember how to form words. “What are you doing?”
“A-ha! Hand me the vacuum, Growly Bear. Someone sprinkled glitter on my ceiling fan blades.” It’s like she flipped a switch and all of her mad disappeared, which is also something I’ve seen before, and one more reason I dislike Tillie Jean. How does she get over being mad so easily?
“Get. Down.”
“I knew it couldn’t be so obvious that he’d stop with just papering my walls with tea towels.” She teeters over her bed.
I reach for her hips to steady her, pretend I’m grabbing one of the damn mascots that management had competing to be the team’s new primary mascot all season, and don’t pull it off.
I am definitely grabbing Tillie Jean Rock by her very shapely hips, right here, next to her bed, and my body knows it.
“Vacuum?” she repeats. And then she does the last thing in the world that she has any business doing.
She runs her fingers through my hair. “Oh, look at that. You still have glitter. I didn’t mean to do that, you know. I really didn’t. Every time I see you, I think, Bad Tillie Jean. All that glitter wasted. It could’ve been ruining Cooper’s chances at endorsement deals instead.”
“Tillie Jean.”
“You shouldn’t growl my name like that. I like it, and I don’t want to. I wasn’t dating Chance Schwartz seriously, you know. At first I was excited that he was into me, then it was like, this rush to sleep with him, especially since I was off-again with Ben at the time, except he wasn’t very good—which you probably figured out—and he was really into himself. Like, way into himself. I knew what I was involved with.”
“Please stop talking.” One, because I don’t want to know.
Two, because she could just as easily be describing me.
She turns, and now I have a face full of Tillie Jean boob while my hands are still gripping her hips.
If Cooper walked in here right now, I would be a dead man.
I would be such a dead man.
“What would it take for us to be friends like I’m friends with Luca and Emilio and Trevor and Robinson?” She’s still running her fingers through my hair, and my scalp is in heaven.
I don’t like people touching me.
Not as a general rule.
Tillie Jean could give me a scalp rub all night, and my scalp—and my skin, and my hair, and my face, and my whole damn body—wouldn’t mind a bit.
I jerk back out of reach. “Get down. You can clean the glitter tomorrow.”
“Why are you so—” A car door slams outside, cutting her off, but only for a second. “Oh! Aunt Glory must’ve sent a delivery.”
She bends, plants her hands on my shoulders like she’s planning to use them as a vault, and freezes.
Our faces are inches apart.
Not even.
I can see the darker blue ring around her irises, the brush strokes of lighter blue fanning out from her summer sky irises, and I can’t look away from the way her eyes are dilating as her breath gets heavier.
The tiniest threads of pink in the whites of her eyes.
The hint
of coffee on her breath.
The quiver of her nostrils.
The heat of her fingers on my shoulders and the firm muscle in her ass. I’m not trying to grab her ass, but my hands are big, and they’ve been sitting on her hips, and my fingers naturally go all the way back to those sweet round globes.
“I’m getting down,” she whispers. “Your hamburger is here.”
I suddenly don’t give a damn about my cheat burger.
Kissing Tillie Jean to shut her up a few weeks ago wasn’t a fluke.
It’s what I’ve wanted to do for weeks. Months.
Years.
I don’t have ten million reasons I hate Tillie Jean Rock.
I have ten million reasons that I hate that I like her.
“Get back, you mangy goats,” someone says distantly, and I realize who I am, where I am, and what I need to do.
“Get down,” I say again, except this time, I grip her hips tighter, lift her off the bed, and set her on her feet.
And then I retreat.
Tillie Jean Rock is my teammate’s sister. She’s off-limits.
She’s—she’s—
You know what?
She might as well be my sister. And that’s how it’ll be.
Yes.
Yes.
This is the perfect plan.
As far as I’m concerned, Tillie Jean Rock is now my sister, and therefore, disgusting and repulsive to my body.
That’s my truth now.
Just as soon as I get this boner from hell under control.
10
Tillie Jean
“Let’s call a truce, Tillie Jean,” I mutter to myself while a whole-body shiver dances from my scalp to my toenails approximately two seconds after I walk out of my front door two mornings later. “Let’s be friends. Let’s put the past behind us.”
A concrete garden gnome snickers, and another one moons me.
No, I’m not kidding.
There’s a freaking terrifying mutant garden gnome holding his pudgy concrete hand over his mouth while his eyes twinkle with the light of hell and another one right next to him peering over his shoulder while he holds his pants down, exposing two round concrete butt cheeks, and two dozen more garden gnomes are lined up alongside them right at the property line between my house, handed down to me by my great-aunt Matilda, and Max Cole’s winter house, which he’s renting from my great-uncle Homer.
My brother can’t pull off a decent prank to save his life this winter, but Mr. Two-Faced Growly Bear is sending a freaking garden gnome army after me.
How do I know Max set them up?
Because I know Uncle Homer put them in his basement a few years back after the sight of them made me take out his mailbox with my car, which I don’t think about. When I think about an army of garden gnomes in the basement of the house next door, I can’t sleep, but having them stored and forgotten in the basement is so much better than having them running around next to my property line.
Also, Cooper wouldn’t prank me with garden gnomes.
He just wouldn’t.
I shudder again.
“Dead,” I say, pointing to each and every one of them. “You are all dead to me.”
I swear to god, one actually makes noise, and that’s all it takes to make me shriek and dive for my car.
Unfortunately, the four-block drive to Crusty Nut doesn’t relieve the shivers.
Or the images from my brain.
Neither does an eight-hour shift.
And when I get home, Max’s Mercedes SUV isn’t in his driveway, but the gnomes are still there.
“There are freaking rules of engagement, Max Cole,” I mutter to myself.
And then I march inside, brew myself a very, very strong, very large afternoon latte, and pull up my big girl panties.
There’s vengeance to be had.
“I’d ask what you’re doing, except then I wouldn’t have plausible deniability,” Annika says from somewhere behind me thirty minutes later.
I straighten and turn to face her.
She’s not alone, and the sight of my older brother walking his goat with his pregnant wife makes me smile. “Hey, it’s my favorite people.”
Sue bleats out a greeting, so I bleat back at him.
“Are you torturing your neighbor, or the garden gnomes?” Grady asks.
I lean over and move one more gnome into formation in the middle of Max’s yard.
With gloved hands, for the record.
Gloves that I’ll be burning as soon as I’m done here.They touched garden gnomes.
I shudder and almost dry-heave, but I’m nearly done, so I grab the last gnome and put him in place.
“Aren’t you the one who had nightmares after Cooper made us watch that old Gnomeo and Juliet trailer on YouTube last year?” Annika says.
I tilt my head to the side, clamp my teeth around the bite valve connected to the tube sticking out of my small day pack and hanging over my shoulder, and suck. Warm mocha latte floods my mouth, and I sigh in relief. “Don’t wanna talk about it,” I say as the liquid courage reassures me that I can, in fact, finish this job.
Grady looks at me, then at Max’s house, then at the gnomes, then back to me, and I swear he pauses with a significant glance at my day pack along the way. “What, exactly, did Max Cole do to you to make you brave enough to touch garden gnomes in the name of retribution?”
“He set them up along the property line. This is not my doing.”
My oldest brother starts to grin. “Tillie Jean, do I need to have a talk with your neighbor about how we court ladies in this town?”
“Shut up and move that last concrete thing, please.”
Annika tilts her head. “Did you really put them in the shape of a middle finger?”
“They didn’t put themselves in that shape.” I suck on my hydration bladder of coffee again, ignore that voice whispering that hydration bladders are for carrying water on long hikes, not coffee in the front yard, and say a prayer of thanks that garden gnomes cannot, in fact, line themselves up, and that even if they could, I’m deadly with a tire iron.
Which I’ll be sleeping with under my pillow until these fucking gnomes are gone.
Uncle Homer swore they didn’t move, but I heard Pop talking about animatronic garden gnomes, and between that one garden gnome moving—and yes, that’s why I took out the mailbox—and the thing that we don’t talk about that happened when I was four, I. Hate. Garden. Gnomes.
“That’s really impressively creative,” my sister-in-law says. “Especially the part where the top of the middle finger is the one mooning you.”
“Can we please stop talking about them like they’re real?”
Grady hands me Sue’s leash and takes the last garden gnome.
Without gloves.
“I wouldn’t let him touch you for like three weeks if I were you,” I tell Annika. “That’s how long it’ll take all the cooties to come off his skin.”
She laughs while Sue rubs against my leg. I peel off my own gloves, making sure to not accidentally touch the parts of them that were touching garden gnomes, to rub his goofy one-horned head. He has the funniest smile ever, and he loves Annika more than he loves my brother, and I’m okay with that.
“How’s your ankle?” Grady asks after finishing my dirty work for me, but not before I realize Max Cole has once again made me stretch outside my comfort zone.
Dammit. “Completely back to normal. Can you hold Sue again? I need to do a little B and E.”
Grady takes his pet back, but he’s staring at me like I’ve lost my mind. Annika’s choking on her own spit.
She’s really adorable when she’s choking on her own spit. I can totally see why Grady married her.
“B and E? What, exactly, are you doing?” she asks me.
“B and E. Braiding and erasing my memories.” And if they believe that’s what B and E stands for, then I’m very worried for their offspring.
“Tillie Jean! You’re breaking into M
ax’s house.”
“Uncle Homer asked me to check on something.”
“I’m not watching this,” Grady mutters.
So he says.
But he and Annika and Sue are still standing on the sidewalk, more or less playing lookout to make sure my cousin Chester, the sheriff’s deputy, doesn’t catch me, after I’ve slipped into Max’s side window and done what I needed to do in his house with the other item inside my daytime hiking backpack, which is something I’d intended to put in Cooper’s house, but not anymore.
Now, Max Cole is in the circle of people who will lose at winter prank wars.
“Yep,” I announce as I slide back out the side window. “The windows do open without squeaking. I’ll report back to Uncle Homer.”
Annika’s squinting at me, her dark eyes suspicious. “You like him, don’t you?”
“Uncle Homer? He’s a good guy, even if he can’t remember us half the time anymore. But he lets me have his chocolate pudding anytime I go visit him at the nursing home. Were you around the summer he bought that tractor with the trailer bed because he wanted to be a farmer pirate and also Shipwreck’s original trolley? He swore he was going to transport people up and down Blackbeard Avenue on the trailer like they were having hay rides.”
Grady squints at me like he’s wondering if I’ve had too much coffee again today.
Hello. Of course I’ve had too much coffee. But I’d rather talk about Uncle Homer. “I was never sure if he was extra fun, or if he never got over that bump on his head that Mom and Dad used to whisper about from time to time.”
“Let’s go with extra fun,” Grady says.
I nod. “I like that better too.”
Annika bumps shoulders with Grady. “You’re going to let her distract you?”
He grins. “She’s not ready to face the truth yet.”
Her entire face melts into sappy cartoon hearts. “Ah. And you would know a thing or two about that?”
When Annika came home two years ago, I was in my last phase of off-again with Ben and quite happy without all the drama Grady was going through.
I was also trying to kick the coffee habit and loving the freedom that came with being done with getting my associate’s degree from the local community college so I had more time to paint and travel into the city for drinks with Cooper’s teammates’ wives and girlfriends, and other friends who moved there.
