Just the Way I Like It (2 page)

Mac laughed. “I don’t know about that. She just said that she’s the granddaughter of one of the women at The Style.”

The Style was the hair salon in Oscar, Nebraska—Mac’s hometown, where he and Sara lived. Sara was friends with the woman who owned the salon as well as most of the regulars.

“Great. So if it doesn’t work out, I’ll also have to worry about upsetting Sara’s friend and their relationship too,” Kevin groused.

“See, one of your problems is caring too much about everyone else—what they want, how they feel, how they feel about
you
,” Mac said.

“One of my problems?” Kevin repeated. “I have more than one? Other than the three of you?”

Mac ignored that. “Just focus on you and what you want. It will be fine.”

“Since when is caring about others a character flaw?” Kevin asked.

“Let’s talk more about the girl for me,” Dooley interrupted. “I have a couple of other criteria to add.”

Mac laughed. “We already know that she has to like
The Simpsons
and no fake fingernails.”

Kevin shook his head, trying not to think about the Bible-study girl. It didn’t matter. He could say no. Not that he would. He was too nice for that. That nice thing being one of the reasons other girls had given for not dating him. Or for not dating him for long.

But he’d had his share of not-nice times too. He’d become a Christian in early adulthood. He’d made the most of his rowdy high school days and his wild college days.

Being nice wasn’t a bad thing, and he didn’t want to be with a woman who thought it was. At least he knew he shouldn’t want to be with a woman who thought being a nice guy was a bad thing.

He sighed. The thing was, being a good, moral person meant also being honest. And honestly, he liked naughty girls as much as the next guy. Not that he did anything about it. Anymore. But it was seemingly a constant battle between what he knew he should do and what he truly wanted to do.

Or who.

“Fake fingernails are disgusting,” Dooley said. “But what I was going to say was that if Kevin’s girl knows all the words to ‘Jesus Loves Me’, I want a girl who knows all the words to ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’.”

Sam laughed and Mac wrote that down on the paper in his hand.

“’Jesus Loves Me’ is a lot shorter song than ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’,” Sam pointed out.

“And,” Dooley went on. “She doesn’t have to actually sing it. She can just say the words. In a low, sexy voice. While she’s undressing.”

Yeah, ‘Jesus Loves Me’
wouldn’t work too well as a stripping song.

“Oh, or ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’.”

Kevin decided not to mention that he wouldn’t mind dating a woman who knew that song too.

“And,” Dooley said dramatically, “I need a woman who can and will make chocolate chip cookies every Thursday.”

“Why Thursday?” Mac asked.

“Why not?”

Mac wrote it down.

Dooley was messing with them and Kevin shared the sentiment. The idea of their friends setting them up simply because they were all happily married was silly. That wasn’t how love worked. Love happened. It found you when you were ready.

Or sometimes a few years before you were really ready.

He shook off those thoughts before his chest started hurting.

He spent way too much time thinking about the past and the girl who got away as it was. It didn’t do any good. It didn’t change what had happened. It wouldn’t bring her back. And now, after this long, there was no point in wishing things could have been different.

Yeah, maybe he could find someone else.

But he wasn’t optimistic that he’d find it by giving his friends a list of criteria and having them work on matching it.

“She needs to like beer too,” Dooley said. “I don’t want to be spending ten bucks on a silly fruity drink. Beer or tequila will get her buzzed just as easily as all those fancy liquors and I won’t have to pay for a paper umbrella.”

Kevin shook his head. He was the only one of their group who knew how hard Dooley worked to sound like a jerk sometimes. In reality, Dooley wasn’t looking for love for far better reasons than Kevin had. Kevin just didn’t want to get hurt again. Dooley had a lot going on in his life that made a relationship with a woman a low priority.

“Beer. Got it,” Mac said, writing it down. “This list is getting long. I’m thinking we should do in-person interviews. We could set it up like the Miss America pageant. They all have to answer questions and show off their talents.”

“Sure,” Dooley said, as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world. “I’ll bring the ice cream cones.”

“Ice cream cones?” Kevin asked. Even as he said it, he realized he should know better.

“I’m thinking that’s a perfect way to find out how good she is with her tongue.”

“I need a French fry, Kev,” Sam said.

Kevin gave him four. Sam threw them at Dooley one at a time.

Dooley just grinned and sat back with a smirk as they bounced off his chest. “Every single one of you is thinking of ice cream right now and if at least one of you doesn’t take a cone home to your wife, I’ll be sorely disappointed.”

“Sara doesn’t need an ice cream cone to mimic anything,” Mac said. “If I want a demonstration of her tongue technique—”

Sam vaulted out of his chair and stomped to the kitchenette singing
You’re an asshole
over and over.

“I don’t know about the pageant idea, though,” Dooley said. “If you have a bunch of girls parading around in swimsuits, Sara will never buy edible body powder for you again.”

Sam was still singing too loudly to hear the comment.

“Who said anything about swimsuits?” Mac gave him a grin that said he’d definitely been thinking about swimsuits. Skimpy ones.

“This whole thing is ridiculous,” Kevin said, also pushing himself out of his chair. “You don’t fall in love with someone based on a list of criteria.”

“Oh, come on, Kev,” Mac said, watching him cross to the coffeepot. “Give us a few more things. I bet we can find your dream girl.”

Uh-huh. Sure.

How would they go about finding a girl who was a good girl on the outside—went to church, did community service and was sweet to his mother—but who could be naughty and uninhibited when the two of them were alone with a horizontal surface?

How would they find a woman who would happily become a part of the important things in his life—the friends who were more like a family, the older women the four guys helped by taking care of their houses so they could stay living independently, the youth center where their whole gang spent time—but would also open an account at Tease
,
the adult store downtown, and become a regular?

Women who sincerely had those two sides—the wonderfully sweet and the deliciously sexy—weren’t as easy to find as these jokers thought. Sure, Mac, Sam and Ben had found them. They’d gotten lucky.

As Sam returned and Mac made some other comment about having sex with his sister, Kevin thought:
Really lucky
.

If they were going to ask for criteria, then he could give them a few difficult ones as well.

He wasn’t the saint they liked to think he was. Only a few years ago he’d been a big shot football player with girls offering to do things that would cause even Mac to raise his eyebrows.

“I have a couple of criteria to add,” he said.

The guys turned to look at him.

“Think you can find me a girl who likes Chinese food,
Seinfeld
re-runs, knows at least eight of the Ten Commandments, has a favorite Old Testament verse and would be willing to wear vibrating panties to a restaurant and give me the remote?”

The guys stared at him.

“Is that allowed?” Sam finally asked.

“Allowed?” Kevin asked.

“By, you know—” Sam pointed upward.

“Well, if I’m goin’ to hell because of vibrating panties, then I expect you guys to all be saving me a good seat when I get there,” Kevin answered.

He was sure vibrating panties weren’t covered
specifically
in The Book, but it was, at least, a gray area. He knew the basics, he knew the absolute no’s. But it seemed that there were lots of maybes.

“That’s um…a tall order, there Kev,” Mac said.

“Then you guys better get to work.”

Chapter Two

Jessica and Ben

“I cannot believe he came down here.”

Muttering, Jessica tugged at the dress where it clung to her hips. The hips that definitely filled the dress out more than they had before she’d had their daughter. It had only been three months ago. No one got their pre-baby hips back after only three months. Did they?

She carefully walked up the sidewalk to Ruth’s Cantina in the three-inch heels she was most definitely not accustomed to. But this was Ben’s favorite outfit. It was electric blue leather. What guy wouldn’t like it?

Plus, she needed the big guns tonight.

There was only one other sexy dress in her closet, and where the black silk flowed over her body, the blue leather was fitted and helped keep some of her new-mom curves in check. Not that Ben really cared, and she loved him for that.

He even got turned on when she wore her nursing scrubs at work. Mostly because he knew that she had a thong on underneath. The only exceptions to that rule had been pregnancy months five through nine. Then again, he’d claimed her maternity shirts were sexy too. He’d even loved her bare belly swelled big with their seven-pound-six-ounce baby, Ava.

She understood how he wanted her—she felt the same way about him. But being new parents to a baby that slept only two consecutive hours at a time put sleep ahead of sex on the priority list most nights. Even though Ben took equal shifts with Ava, Jess still felt exhausted and un-sexy the majority of the time.

They both knew this stage would pass, but it made nights when Sam and Dani could babysit extra special. Sam was completely smitten with his niece and loved having her whenever possible. He was used to staying up all night with his overnight ambulance crew shifts, so waking with a baby every couple of hours didn’t faze him much. The same couldn’t be said for his wife, though, and Jess was concerned Ava was a potent birth control method for her Aunt Dani.

Still, Jess and Ben both knew that taking Sam up on his offers to babysit was good for them. It gave them alone time and much-needed sleep. They made love, but didn’t pull out any lingerie or prolonged foreplay and they were more eager to sleep for the Ava-free hours they had than to try out any new positions or toys.

But tonight was different. Ava had slept for four hours at one point last night, Jessica was properly caffeinated for staying up a few more hours, and she liked Kevin enough to keep Ben from spying on him on his blind date.

Even if it was with the girl she and Ben had set him up with.

Watching the date was, no doubt, interesting, but Ben had better things to do.

Like her.

They weren’t working tonight, he wasn’t on call and they had a babysitter. She was
not
sitting in a Mexican restaurant and watching Kevin’s date. Even if they had the best enchiladas in town.

The electric blue leather dress would do the trick, or Ben would be sleeping in the guest room for the foreseeable future.

She spotted her husband across the room. He was tucked into a booth and was texting someone. He was probably sending his observations of the date to Sam and Mac.

She pulled her fingers through her hair, wet her lips, tugged the dress down again and headed for Ben’s table.

His didn’t notice her at first because his head was bent over the phone.

“You know, I have the intense urge to take you out of here right now and really give you something to text your friends about.”

He looked up quickly. His eyes widened, then slowly traveled down to her black, high-heeled boots—the ones he called her hooker boots—up to the inches of bare leg between the top of the boots and the bottom of the dress. Then he sat back to fully take in the sight of her in the blue leather that showed more skin than it covered up. Finally he met her gaze. “Sam doesn’t like it when I tell him details of my sex life.”

She laughed. Her brother hated all references to their little sister, Sara, being anything other than a sweet, naive virgin—in spite of the fact she was now married. Apparently he felt the same way about her.

“Then you’ll have to keep it to yourself.” She held out her hand.

He looked her up and down again, then glanced past her to Kevin’s table. Then back to her. “I can’t.”

Jessica felt her eyes widen. “What?”

He looked pained as he said, “I promised I’d stay.”

She put a hand on her hip. “I got into this thing again and you’re saying no?”

He cleared his throat, his eyes on the cleavage that had gotten more noticeable since Ava. “I thought you’d spend the night sleeping. You deserve a night off.”

“I also deserve hot sex with my husband that lasts longer than twenty minutes.”