My Kind of Wonderful (25 page)

Sophie sighed into the awkward silence between her and Lake Patrol Hottie. Actually, it was probably just her who felt awkward because he stood there looking perfectly comfortable and at ease.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

“Don’t be. He didn’t die.” She backed to the bench next to the driver’s seat and dropped onto it in sheer woozy exhaustion. “What I said was that he’d
passed
. As in he passed on
me
.”

And that was all she planned on saying on the subject.

Ever.

But apparently he didn’t get the memo because he crouched on the deck so that they were eye level and said nothing.

She ground her teeth. The wind was back, dammit, and the boat began to rock. “Look, I said I’d move. I just need a minute.”

He nodded and… stayed right where he was.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“Just waiting to see if you need any help.”

She eyed him suspiciously, but he seemed to mean it. He really would assist her if she needed it. But she didn’t need it. Not from him. Not from anyone.

Somehow she crawled behind the wheel. She started the boat before suddenly remembering she had to untie the boat first.

But her lake patrol guy was already on it, handling the ropes like he’d been born to the task, using his foot to push on the hull so it didn’t scrape against the dock and get damaged. He then tossed the rope into the boat. “You’re good,” he said.

She stared at him. Was he kidding? She wasn’t good, she was a hot mess and they both knew it, but then again he’d meant the boat, not her, and she knew that too. Still, she appreciated his unsolicited help. “Thanks,” she said.

He nodded. Waited a beat. “Need help finding the throttle?”

This actually made her smile. “You’re a real charmer, you know that?”

“Yep, I’m fresh off the boat from charm school.”

“Where was it, Timbuktu?”

“Close,” he said, offering no further explanation.

Fine. Whatever.
Over mysterious men, over men
period
, she hit the gas. When she glanced in the rearview mirror a minute later, he was still standing there on the dock, hands shoved in his pockets, watching her go.

T
he very last thing Jacob Kincaid had expected on his first day back in town was a run-in with a mysterious, green-eyed, temperamental cutie. Somehow she’d managed to pull him out of his own head while also irritating and amusing him at the same time.

She’d also made him feel alive.

Since that messed with his head more than a little bit, he got in his new Ford truck and took a ride. The truck had been a present to himself for making it stateside in one piece. It drove well, but his attention was distracted by his first view of Cedar Ridge in a long time.

It felt like a lifetime since he’d walked away from his family—his mom; twin brother, Hud; and the rest of the Kincaids—when he’d been an eighteen-year-old hothead. He hadn’t been back.

Until now.

He’d been a lot of things in his lifetime. Brother. Son. Friend. Army Special Forces officer.

He was none of those things at the moment, though he intended to change that. He had begun by leasing a small cabin on the lake only a mile outside of town, a place that had once upon a time been the only true home he’d ever known.

Not that he’d admitted this until recently, and then only to himself.

The cabin sat on the northeast shoreline of the lake and was quiet and peaceful—two things his life had most definitely
never
been.

Something else he intended to change.

When he’d arrived late last night, he’d picked up the keys and spoken briefly to the Realtor, who’d tried to convince him to buy the cabin instead of renting.

But Jacob no longer made quick, rash decisions.

Although he had just chased away the first civilian woman he’d had contact with in a while and he’d done so pretty quickly and rashly.

Yeah, he could’ve definitely done better there, he admitted. Clearly he was
way
out of practice being sociable. Maybe he was more messed up than he’d thought because he’d actually gotten a kick out of the way her eyes had flashed temper at him, at the world. It’d been like trying to deal with a fiercely angry, beautiful, injured feline and in spite of the sharp claws, she’d given him something he hadn’t felt in a damn long time.

Adrenaline. The good kind. And after eight years in the military life, also a taste of the real world.

Town was… the same. Small, but geared to the tourists who came through to ski. The streets were filled with expensive clothing boutiques, art galleries, jewelry shops, a few cafes, bars, B&Bs, and the like. At age eighteen,
Jacob had been climbing the walls here, bored, slowly suffocating.

Now, after having been overseas and seeing more shitholes than he cared to remember, he could see in Cedar Ridge what others did, a unique quaintness and charm.

He didn’t want to run the risk of stopping and running into anyone he knew. His estranged family deserved to be told first, but the need for caffeine overruled self-preservation. Striding into a coffee shop like he was on a mission, he bought coffee and a bagel to go, and headed back to the cabin.

Unscathed.

Red’s boat was still gone, and relief filled him. And if there was also a twinge of something that felt suspiciously like disappointment, he didn’t examine it too closely.

Instead, he found several paddleboards leaning against the side of the cabin and decided, What the hell. He took one out onto the water, paddling himself into oblivion so that maybe he’d sleep that night instead of figuring out how to reach out to his family after all this time now that he was on leave, or thinking about the reason he’d been given a month of bereavement leave in the first place.

The next morning, Jacob woke up to find his arms pleasantly sore from all the paddleboarding he’d done to clear his head. The chilly June air sliced through the window he’d left open and right through him as well, sharp and pine scented. From flat on his back he could see a sliver of the lake, the surface littered with white caps, much rougher and choppier than it had been the past few days.

He lay there a minute, unable to shut off his mind. It kept flashing images. Images of his closest friend,
Brett, dying in his arms in the desolate wasteland that was Afghanistan. Images of the look on his twin’s face when they’d fought that long-ago day. Jacob hadn’t seen Hud since. Images of his mom, who with her dementia couldn’t keep time or place or people straight but never forgot who he was.

Even Red had somehow wormed her way in; tough and snarky, yet she’d shown him a fleeting glimpse of vulnerability too. The combination had caught his interest.

And attracted him.

Not that he had time to go there. Nope, he was concentrating all his energy on figuring out how to approach his family. Day three and he was still drawing a big zero on that front. He’d given no advance warning of his arrival because, hell, what did one say after nearly a decade of radio silence?

But today was the day. He’d stalled enough. And at the thought of what lay ahead for him, his gut tightened.

Nerves. Crazy, since it’d been a damn long time since he’d been nervous about anything.

He rolled out of bed, showered, dressed, and headed out, once again on the hunt for food he didn’t have to make himself. Halfway to his truck he glanced through the clump of trees lining his property to the lake.

The Lucas
was back, moored on his dock again.

Changing directions, he headed down there and eyed the boat. No sign of Red, but he heard something from below deck. A… moan?

Walk away, soldier.

But hell. He couldn’t do it. “Hello?” he called out. “Red?”

The ensuing silence was so thick that he could tell she’d stopped breathing. “I’m boarding,” he said and when she
didn’t respond, hoping she wasn’t aiming a gun his way, he went for it. As he did, she struggled above deck.

She wore a white tank top and a short, flowery skirt that flirted with her thighs. She had a forest-green sweater in one hand and a pair of high-heeled sandals dangling from the other.

With one look, she perfectly conveyed her annoyance as she sagged to the captain’s chair and dropped her head to her knees. “Why you?” she moaned. “I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with my karma? It’s like the bitch went on vacay. On another planet.”

“Nice to see you again too,” he said dryly. “You wanna tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” she said to her knees, more than a little hint of the South in her tone. “I always talk to my knees while a stranger asks me twenty questions. Nope, I’m great. My glass is totally half-full.”

This made him smile. Call him sick but he loved snark on a woman. “Are you okay?”

“Fan-fricking-tastic. Only way today could get better is if I was scheduled for an appendectomy. Without drugs. In a third-world country.”

Snark and a bad ’tude, like she wouldn’t hesitate to kick someone’s ass if she needed to. Didn’t get hotter than that. He crouched next to her so that he was level with her face, not that he could see it since it was still pressed into her legs. “You’re not supposed to—”

“—moor here,” she said, very carefully not moving a single inch. “Yes, you ever so helpfully mentioned that yesterday.”

“I was going to say you’re not supposed to look down when you’re seasick, it makes it worse.”

“Oh.” She hesitated and then turned her head to look at him. “And you’re not supposed to be nice when I’m not. But thanks—oh crap. Oh shit,” she whispered miserably as the boat rocked.

Jacob instinctively reached out and rubbed a hand over her back. “Have you tried Dramamine?”

“Yes. It doesn’t work. I’m getting a patch today.”

“That’ll help,” he said.

She nodded and sat up. “I’m sorry I’m back here. I just need to stay docked for the day, okay? I know the cabin’s for sale and no one lives there, so I don’t see a problem with that.”

Other than she was getting off without having to pay the fees, which he suspected she couldn’t afford. “Just so you know, the cabin’s no longer empty,” he said, fully intending to also say that she could keep her boat on his dock as long as she needed.

But she made a sound that might have been a snort of laughter or a sob. A little terrified it was the latter, he rose up to his full height just as she gasped, then moaned, and… threw up.

An inch from his shoes.

Welcome home, he thought.

Find more at
http://jillshalvis.com/books/nobody-but-you/

A
fter fighting a brush fire at the base of Cedar Ridge for ten straight hours, Aidan Kincaid had only three things on his mind: sex, pizza, and beer. Given the way the day had gone, he’d gladly take them in any order he could get them.

Not in the cards.

He and the rest of his fire crew had finally managed to get back to the station. They’d been there just long enough to load their plates when the alarm went off again.

“What the hell!”

“Gonna break the damn bell and shove it up someone’s—”

“This is bullshit…”

Whoever said no one could outswear a sailor had never lived in a firehouse. Ignoring the grumbling around him, Aidan pushed his plate away and met his partner Mitch’s gaze.

“Gotta be a full moon bringing out the crazy,” Mitch said.

“Maybe the crazy just follows you,” Aidan suggested.

In turn, Mitch suggested Aidan was number one. With his middle finger.

They’d been playing this game since first grade, when Mitch had stolen Aidan’s lunch and Aidan had popped him in the nose for it. As punishment they’d had to pick up and haul trash for the janitor for two weeks.

The two of them had become best friends and had spent the next decade being as wild and crazy as possible.

Eventually they’d grown up and found responsibility, going through the fire academy and now working as Colorado Wildland firefighters for their bread and butter, volunteering on the local search-and-rescue team as needed. And here in Cedar Ridge they were needed a lot. Lost hikers, overzealous hunters, clueless novice rafters—you name it, they’d been called to save it.

Tonight’s fire call came in as a possible suicide jumper off the courthouse, which at five stories was the highest building in town.

As they pulled up, they could see a woman had climbed out a window on the fifth floor. She stood on a ledge that couldn’t have been more than a foot wide. Wearing nothing but her bra and panties.

“Well, at least Nicky left her Victoria’s Secrets on this time,” Mitch noted.

Nicky was a bit of a regular.

And Mitch was right. The last time Nicky had gotten upset was after finding the town’s councilman she’d been sleeping with going at it on his desk with his assistant. She’d stripped all the way down to her birthday suit before covering herself in Post-it notes. Aidan wondered what had set her off this time.

“I changed my mind,” she screamed, jabbing a finger down at them. “I don’t want to die! He’s not worth it!”

No Post-it notes this time. A bonus. The police had blocked off traffic, but the scene was still chaotic.

“Somebody get up here and save me!” Nicky yelled. “If I fall and die, I’m going to sue every one of you for being so freaking slow! Honest to God, what does a girl have to do to get a rescue around here?”

“So she’s changed her mind,” the captain said dryly to Aidan and Mitch. Aidan and Mitch exchanged glances. No one could reach her from inside the window. And climbing out on the ledge wasn’t an option; it was too narrow—and decomposing to boot. And thanks to the layout of the building and the hillside, their truck couldn’t get close enough to the building to be effective either.

They all knew what this meant. One of them was going to have to follow the half-naked crazy chick out onto the ledge. There were a few problems with this.

Aidan and his team had a reputation for being unflappable and tough as nails, but the truth was, plenty unnerved them—including a half-naked crazy chick on a ledge five stories up. They’d just learned to do whatever needed to be done, no matter what.

“Let the fun begin,” Mitch muttered.

Plan A was for the captain to head inside and attempt to talk Nicky back inside the window. Since Plan A had a high potential for going south, Plan B was to be run simultaneously—head to the roof and begin setting up rigging for an over-the-roof retrieval.

Through it all, Nicky never stopped screaming at them, alternately begging them to hurry and hurling insults their way.

Then came the cap’s radio message: “Yeah, so she’s declining to crawl back in the window because there’s no press here yet. Last time she was front-page news.”

Onward. The team found a good anchor spot on the roof. As Mitch and Aidan were the two most senior members of the unit, one of them always took lead. Mitch looked at Aidan. “Okay, go make like Spider-Man and rescue the damsel in distress.”

“Why me?” Aidan asked.

“It’s your turn.”

“Hey, you’re the one who likes her undies,” Aidan pointed out. Not that he objected to a rescue, any rescue, but this one had shit show written all over it.

“I weigh more than you do,” Mitch said logically.

Only because he was six foot four to Aidan’s six two, but whatever. The team got the line set up, and then Aidan got into his five-point harness and hooked himself to the first of the two lines. Mitch hooked up to the second one just in case Aidan got into trouble, and the rest of the unit prepared for go time.

Aidan dropped over the edge. The plan was to rappel him down until he hung ten feet above Nicky. He’d then kick out from the building at the same time that his team lowered him eleven more feet, bringing him to just below her, putting him between her and the fifty-foot drop. He’d attach a harness to Nicky, and the team would give them enough slack so that Aidan could rappel down with her.

And the team indeed lowered Aidan to just above Nicky. Aidan kicked out. But as usual, nothing went to plan. Just as he started to swing back toward the wall, Nicky leapt off the ledge like some rabid raccoon and wrapped herself around him.

Not more than a hundred and ten pounds, she clung to him like a monkey as they hurtled at neck-breaking speed toward the wall. Aidan managed to grip her tight and twist in midair so that he was the one to slam into the brick.

Even as lightweight as she was, it still hurt like hell.

“Jesus Christ,” Aidan heard the captain and Mitch say in stereo as they watched helplessly—one from above, one from below, at the window.

They didn’t know the half of it. With Nicky’s legs wrapped and locked around Aidan’s waist, her arms squeezing his head like a grape and her breasts literally suffocating him, he couldn’t breathe. Somehow he managed to turn his head sideways to suck in some air, but he still couldn’t see. “I’ve got you,” he said. “I’m not going to let go, but you need to loosen your grip.”

Nicky was too busy screaming in his ear to hear him, not loosening her grip at all. “Omigod, don’t you fuckin’ drop me or I’ll sue you the most!”

Mitch had dropped over the edge as soon as Nicky leapt onto Aidan’s back. He was rappelling down as fast as he could, laughing all the way. Aidan couldn’t see shit but he could hear him clearly, the asshole.

“Got his six,” Mitch said into the radio as he came even with Aidan, still laughing. “Though I can’t tell where Aidan ends and Nicky begins.”

You can kill him later, Aidan promised himself. “Listen to me,” he said to Nicky. “I’ve got you. I need you to stop yelling in my ear and look at me.”

She gulped in a breath and relaxed her hold only enough to look at him. Her eyes were wide, wet, and raccooned from her mascara.

“I’m not going to let go of you,” he assured her, staring into her eyes, doing his best to give her an anchor. “You hear me, Nicky? No one’s falling to their death today.”

She nodded and started to cry in earnest at the same time. Aidan preferred her screaming.

“She’s not attached to anything,” the captain reminded them via radio.

“You don’t have to worry about that, Cap,” Mitch responded. “She’s not letting go of Aidan.”

Nope, she wasn’t. She’d embedded her nails into him good, and her legs were crossed and locked at the small of his back, but at least he could breathe. “Just get us down,” he said.

As the team lowered them, Mitch kept alongside, offering encouragement, cracking his own ass up as they went.

On the ground, Aidan’s new companion was peeled off of him and taken away for further evaluation. Aidan took his first deep breath since the rescue had begun. Aching in more muscles than he’d realized he even had, he gathered his gear.

“You okay?” their captain asked. “You took a few hard hits up there.”

“I’m fine.” He could feel where he’d have bruises tomorrow, and he was pretty sure his back had been scraped raw from the demolition derby collision with the brick wall, but he’d had worse.

Mitch grinned at him. “Man, you just had your bones totally jumped by a nearly naked chick. We almost had to resuscitate you. ‘Fireman Asphyxiated by Boobs, news at eleven.’”

Their captain eyed Mitch, and then Aidan. “You remember we have a strict no killing each other policy?”

Aidan reluctantly nodded.

“I’m going to lift that rule for a one-time exception,” the captain said, cocking his head at Mitch.

Mitch’s smile faded. “Hey.”

But the captain had walked away.

“Whatever,” Mitch said to Aidan. “If you kill me, you’ll never find out what I know.”

Aidan gave him a long look. “You never know anything.”

“I know lots, starting with a rumor that you’re about to get a blast from the past.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I hear Lily Danville’s back,” Mitch said.

Aidan froze at the name he hadn’t heard in a very long time. Years. Ten of them to be exact.

Mitch raised a brow. “Gray hasn’t mentioned it?”

No, Aidan’s older brother had not told him a thing, which raised the question.

Why?

“How did you hear?” Aidan asked.

“Lenny. He caught the gossip at the resort. Your family runs the place, how did you not hear this?”

Lenny had gone to high school with them and now worked at the Kincaid resort as a big-equipment driver. Aidan stared at Mitch, unable to process that everyone had known before him.

Lily Danville… Damn. Turning, he started to walk away.

“It’s no big deal,” Mitch said. “It’s not like you’re seeing Shelly anymore, right? You’re a free agent, so if you want to try to get Lily back… Hey, wait up.”

Aidan didn’t wait. And it was true he wasn’t seeing Shelly anymore. Technically, they’d never been “seeing” each other. They’d had a satisfying physical relationship whenever they
both felt like it, and neither of them had felt like it in over a month now. He hadn’t thought about her once since.

But Lily Danville…

He hadn’t seen her in forever, and yet he still thought about her way too often.

“Hold up,” Mitch called out. “Your half of the gear’s still—” He broke off when Aidan kept walking. “Seriously?” And when Aidan didn’t so much as look back, Mitch swore and worked to gather the load, making some of the newbies help. He was quiet on the ride back to the station but only because they weren’t alone and also because he was playing a game on his phone.

Aidan reached over and swiped his finger across Mitch’s screen.

Mitch swore, nearly lost the phone out the window, and then turned to glare at Aidan. “You owe me a Candy Crush life.”

“Tell me more about Lily being back.”

“Oh,
now
you want to talk? You done pouting then?”

When Aidan just gave him the I-can-kick-your-ass gaze, Mitch grinned. “You know you were.”

“It’s all over Facebook,” one of the guys said from the back. “The news about Lily.”

“Aidan forgot his password,” Mitch said. “A year ago.”

Aidan ignored him, mostly because his brain was on overload. Lily. Back in town…

He’d long ago convinced himself that whatever he’d felt for her all those years ago had been just a stupid teenage boy thing.

Seemed he was going to get a chance to test out that theory, ready or not.