The Café between Pumpkin and Pie

by Marina Adair

  Anger.

  Had he come home sooner, he would have seen the problems the company was facing, witnessed how hard Huey had struggled to save it, and, maybe, he could have said good-bye to one of the few people who saw more in Hudson than his mistakes.

  The only good thing about the delay was that he’d missed seeing his SOB of a father, who’d headed back to Florida the second he realized he’d been removed from Huey’s will.

  Even though Hudson had kicked some serious ass alongside Uncle Sam’s toughest and brightest, his dad made it clear that Hudson was still the family screw-up. So he’d come back to Moonbright prepared to take the brunt of the blows over Huey’s decision to leave everything to his grandsons.

  Hell, he’d come prepared for anything—except the Ghost from Halloween Past sneaking up and weaving her magic around him.

  He knew kissing Mila would blow up in his face. Just as he’d known it was wrong not to correct her from the start. But when she’d glared up at him, those dark brown eyes sparkling with enough fury to have sent another soldier’s balls retreating, he’d been amused. Turned on, even.

  For the first time since hearing about Huey, he’d found himself smiling.

  Mila had shocked the hell out of him when she yanked him into the closet. Shocked him more when she’d shrink-wrapped herself around him as if she couldn’t get close enough. And that kiss—holy hell. He’d never bought into the mumbo jumbo of the Moonbright legend, but it was as if he was under her spell.

  Only, just like back in high school, her kiss was meant for Ford. Not the troublemaking twin. However, Mila was no longer the naïve girl next-door, and there was no need to pretend to be Ford in order to save her from a cruel trick. So, he had zero problem letting her know exactly which brother had rocked her world.

  Most women would have apologized for the mistake, then thanked him for being a knight in freaking armor. Not Buttercup. She’d come at him shoulders back, chin tilted high, five-foot-nothing of stubborn, pissy woman, holding him personally responsible for the bamboozle of a lip-lock and accusing him of cursing her with seven years of bad kisses.

  As ridiculous as that was, now she was flaunting this Mr. Right list and, unlike his brother, Hudson was lucky if he ticked off even a single box.

  Right back at ya, babe, he thought, walking up the ladder to access the engine compartment. He wasn’t sure the last time Huey had checked the hydraulic fluids or reset the avionics, so he intended to give the Bell 206 JetRanger a thorough inspection before he took her for a spin. She might have a good decade and a half on her, but the way Huey kept her polished, she looked brand-new—on the outside. The internals needed some love—and fast. Their reimagine-rebrand-revive inaugural flight was in less than a week.

  Even splitting time between his law practice and the hangar, Ford managed to book six new, big-city commuters into their existing clientele. It was easy money and good money. The kind of regular clients they needed to dig the company out of the red.

  “Why are you messing around, playing this game?” Ford asked, handing him a wrench.

  Hudson loosened the fastener to the engine compartment and lifted the cowling. “She made it clear she wants you. You saw that list. I’m not on it, but guess what, Bro? You’re the one who inspired it. Been there, done that, not going to compete with you again. Boxing a shadow is a no-win situation.”

  Hudson had spent his formative years being compared to his twin, whose charisma and flashy achievements cast a shadow wider than the coastline of Maine. Most of the time Hudson laughed it off. Or pretended to. When required, he could fake anything: calm during combat, cool headed when landing in a hot zone, and confident when uncertainty was eating him alive.

  Why the hell couldn’t he fake indifference with Mila?

  Even thinking about that list put him back in the mind-set of being the kid who wasn’t good enough—a place he hated going. So he locked her and that kiss in his “Do not break seal” compartment and moved on. But Ford, nosier than a group of pageant moms, couldn’t keep himself from tampering with the fucking seal.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and you need to set aside the past,” Ford said. “In the here and now, it was you she kissed. She may have had the name wrong, but it was you. Both times. It was so good that after all these years, she came back for seconds.”

  Hudson would be down for thirds, but they were looking for different things. Mila was the exact kind of woman he’d spent his entire adult life avoiding—sweet, sensible, and with a big HEA stamped into her DNA.

  “Even though she’s lived in New York, deep down she’s still that small-town girl trying to spread her wings and go after what she wants. She doesn’t need another person trying to anchor her here,” he said, swapping the wrench for a screwdriver. “I wouldn’t do that to her.”

  “Kind of like how you just up and joined the Marines without telling me, so I could have the big college experience? Guess what, dumbass? It was fun, but it wasn’t with you.”

  “Considering what a mess I was back then, that’s probably a good thing.”

  “You put my wants ahead of yours and that’s bullshit. We’re a team. Or at least we were until you got it in your head that you had to leave in order for me to excel.” Ford wadded a greased-up rag and threw it, tagging Hudson in the head. “Like you were somehow protecting me, even though I’m eleven minutes older. Newsflash, I can excel just fine on my own.”

  “We’re not going there.”

  “Of course, we’re not,” Ford mumbled. “What are you going to do about Mila?”

  That was the question of the hour. Hudson had left the Thirsty Raven telling himself he was done. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. Only, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Caught himself staring out his bedroom window in hopes of catching a glimpse of the girl across the street, the way he’d done when they were kids.

  His crush on Mila had been immediate. First day of middle school, one look and he was spun. Not a bad way to start a move to a new town. Only while he was looking her way, she was looking Ford’s.

  “Nothing,” he finally said. “It wouldn’t work. She probably still doodles in her diary, and I’m jaded as hell. She’s got a list. I’m not anywhere on it.”

  “Put yourself on it,” Ford said. “Since when do you let a piece of paper and a few words stop you from getting what you want?”

  He pulled his head out of the compartment and met Ford’s gaze. “When there’s a job in L.A. waiting in the wings.”

  “Jobs fall through all the time. Even if she does get it, that could be months away. I’m not saying get down on a knee, but don’t let this chance go to waste.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, I’ve been steering clear of her all these years because of bro code, but—”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  Ford smiled. “That’s what I thought. She’s going to get that worldly experience you think she needs. Why not with you?”

  Ford had a point. Once Mila set her mind to something, nothing would stop her. Not even a three-month expiration date. If it wasn’t him, then it might be some other prick, who would take advantage of her loyal and selfless nature, and then Hudson would have to kill him.

  He might not be her Mr. Right, but neither was the guy on that list. A man’s worth couldn’t be measured by the number of checkmarks in fucking boxes.

  He was going to prove it.

  Mila was about as comfortable in confined, dark places as she was with confrontation. Which was why she waited for Ford outside the courthouse rather than meeting him at the hangar—where Hudson would be preparing for his afternoon flight.

  She needed to clarify the events of Halloween night that had led to her mistaking Hudson for Ford. She might be easy to fool, but she wasn’t the kind of person to kiss one brother and then kiss the other. Even if that wasn’t what had happened. The way she saw it, Hudson had tricked them both. The only way to avoid the awkwardness, and keep things profession
al, was to get it all out in the open.

  Mila burrowed deeper into her coat as a crisp November wind whistled through the large white columns of the courthouse, the cold stinging her nose. The weatherman had called for gentle breezes and mild temperatures. He’d lied. Which was how Mila ended up downtown in the red-leather fashion-before-function jacket Kira had forced her to buy. It was during one of Kira’s famous “expand your horizon” lectures, when buying the coat was easier than re-explaining that Mila preferred to keep her eyes on the road ahead, not in the clouds.

  “Never again,” she mumbled, her breath turning to vapor. She stamped her feet to keep them warm. She was but a button away from becoming a snowman.

  “Hey,” Ford said, clearly surprised to see her there. “Did we have a meeting?”

  Wow. This was the first time Ford had ever spoken to her in public and acknowledged her as more than a passerby.

  “No.” She shivered, and he ushered her inside City Hall. “I wanted to talk to you about the other night when I, uh, took Hudson in the closet.”

  He raised a brow. “Took or shoved?”

  She covered her face and groaned. “That’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I wasn’t kissing him—”

  “You mean me?”

  “Yes, I intended to kiss you, but not because I still have a crush on you.”

  “But you still intended to kiss me?” He looked a little too pleased with himself.

  “Keep up, Ford. I was kissing you to get rid of the curse I got when we played Seven Minutes in Heaven. Or when Hudson and I . . . You know what I mean.”

  “Do I? Because, trust me, if I’d played Seven Minutes in Heaven with you, Hudson would have kicked my ass.”

  “Why would he kick your ass?” For some reason, Ford’s answer seemed like the most important thing in her world, right then.

  “Because he had a thing for you. He’s always had a thing for you. From the time we moved in with Huey and he first saw you in the yard. Then you sealed it when you danced with him to ‘Earth Angel.’ ”

  She gasped. “That was in sixth grade and I stepped on his toes the entire time.”

  “And you apologized every time. That was his favorite part.” Ford shrugged. “That’s what he wrote in his diary anyway.”

  “You read his diary?” She was offended on Hudson’s behalf.

  “Your first question should have been why a dude keeps a diary. And yes, I read it. You’d be happy to know that you were in several entries.”

  “Like what?”

  Ford ran a hand through his hair and looked over his shoulder as if he were being followed by a covert government agency. “Hud is going to kill me for telling you this, and if he asks, I will deny everything. But I guess Abigail and some of her friends heard about your crush on me.”

  She snorted. “The whole town heard about my crush on you.”

  “I didn’t,” he said honestly. “I never gave you a second look because I knew how gaga Hud was. But Abigail thought it would be funny to send you into the closet and lock you in there. I guess they were going to egg you when you came out.”

  Once upon a time, she and Abigail had been friends, played Barbies, had sleepovers. Then Abigail had grown boobs, which launched her to an entirely different social stratum, leaving Mila behind. She never understood how someone who had been such a close friend could suddenly turn so mean.

  “She knew I was terrified of the dark.”

  Ford shrugged. “Hud figured it was something like that, so he did his hair like me, adopted my attitude, which I had plenty back then, and went to the party to make sure you weren’t waiting alone.”

  “He hated parties. And he went there just to save me?” Here she’d thought Hudson only ticked off a couple of her boxes.

  “And he let everyone think it was me,” he said.

  Mila groaned, because something else dawned on her. “He was trying to tell me who he really was and, when he found out it was my first kiss, he tried to stop it.”

  “No regrets, Mila,” came a soft and husky voice from behind.

  A warm glow oozed through her at the sound of her name sliding from his lips. Heart beating hard, she turned to find Hudson in his fly-boy uniform, looking hot and hard and edgy in the sexiest way possible.

  “I thought you had a flight planned this afternoon.”

  “I do.” He reached out and took her hand. “With you.”

  Chapter 6

  “Where are we going?” Mila shouted into the mouthpiece.

  It was a legitimate question, since they were three thousand feet up, with nothing but the choppy waters of the Atlantic below. In the near distance she could see a row of small islands, lush and green, with fiery autumn trees peppered throughout. On the closest island stood a modest cedar-shingle house with a large dock that jutted out into the ocean. A lighthouse was perched on a nearby bluff, shining a golden glimmer over the rocky shoreline at its base.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Excitement bubbled. “I love surprises.” Especially when she was on the receiving end.

  Maybe it was the altitude or maybe it was the pilot, but everything she thought she knew suddenly looked different. It was as if she’d been gifted a new perspective. From the ground, it was hard to see past the way things were, but up here she got a glimpse of what could be.

  They flew until the sea kissed the sky and the spun-cotton clouds reflected the beginnings of a crimson glow on the autumn-painted horizon. As they circled back, the lighthouse came into view and she noticed a clearing in the trees bordering the steep cliffs.

  “Are we landing there?”

  “You aren’t very good at surprises, are you?” Even over the headset, the low gravel of his voice had her heart thumping against her ribs. Then his eyes met hers, warm with bemusement and, as usual, giving away nothing about the reason behind this unexpected outing or why he was so determined to keep their destination a secret.

  Then again, Mila had a secret of her own. One that involved her feelings and how they were slowly shifting.

  “I’m just not used to being on this side of one,” she answered honestly. This was an entirely new experience. As the caretaker of the family, she wasn’t accustomed to actually being cared for. It not only felt novel; it felt good. No, more than good—it felt romantic.

  “We’ll have to work on that.”

  There were a lot of things Mila was interested in working on with Hudson. As they rounded the island once again and Hudson took the helicopter lower, Mila knew she was going to get that chance.

  The sound of the propellers cutting through the air rumbled in her chest. The whirring blades stirred the leaves below and forced the meadow weeds and surrounding trees to bend at their will. The landing was so smooth, Mila barely felt the touchdown.

  When the engine stopped, Hudson opened the door and walked around the back of the helicopter. Mila tracked his every move—she couldn’t help it.

  He was tall and leanly muscled with broad shoulders and a solid chest that was built for cuddling. Naked cuddling. After a full, long night of no-promises sex.

  He opened her door. “Let me help. It’s a big step down.”

  “Is that a jab at my size?” she said with no heat.

  “No, it’s an excuse to get my hands on you.” As promised, his big, manly hands spanned her waist and he lifted her from the seat and let her slide, oh so slowly, down his body until she was safely on the ground. Only he didn’t let go right away, holding her snug against him, so all their good parts lined up. “And I think your size is pretty fucking perfect.”

  Man, was she ever in trouble. Tingles sizzled, starting in her belly and moving to all the essential parts so quickly she could scarcely breathe. Stupid tingles, they were at the center of this mess. This problematic, complicated, and incredibly sexy mess that, as far as she could conclude, would only be solved one way.

  “Buttercup,” he whispered. “You keep looking at me like that and we’re both going
to be in trouble.”

  “I’ve never gotten in trouble,” she said, sliding her hands up his chest. “I’m beginning to think I’ve been missing out.”

  Hudson groaned and rested his forehead on hers. “If we go there now, I won’t be able to show you the best part.”

  “Funny, I was thinking by going there, we’d get to the best part faster.”

  “When we go there, it will be slow, and long, and will take all night and into the next day.” The last part he whispered, his lips hovering over hers until she was certain he’d kiss her.

  Careful, he’s better at this than you. “I’ve always been a night person.”

  “I’ve always been a you person,” he said, and a giddy zing ran down her spine.

  “Take this.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “It can get cold out here.”

  Mila began to tell him she was more turned on than cold when he slid his warm, soft, incredible-smelling jacket over her shoulders.

  “There are gloves in the pocket.” He pulled the edges of the jacket together and zipped her up.

  She took in his long-sleeved but lightweight shirt. Gray, filled to perfection, and nowhere near thick enough to combat the frigid ocean wind. “What about you?”

  “I always come prepared.” He reached into the helicopter and pulled out another jacket along with a light gray scarf, which he wrapped around her.

  “Lucky me.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” On the same breath, he lifted her hand to his mouth and blew on it, warming it before tucking it in his pocket.

  That was how they walked the property, holding hands inside his cozy pocket, while she wore his jacket, as if they were in school and she was his girl. It was cute really, an innocent show of affection that had her heart rolling over in her chest.

  He led her through a field, colored with blue and purple wildflowers gently swaying in the ocean breeze. Most of the island remained untouched, like a state park with hundreds of pine trees lining the meadow and reaching all the way to the cliff’s edge.