Smittened (3 page)

Just last week, Mikey had promised Mari Belle—again—that he’d look out for Will, since Will was here in Bliss because the girl who tore him to shreds fifteen years ago was here too.

Will had texted earlier to ask if Mikey had a place to stay tonight. When Mikey had answered that he was set and asked the same in return, his buddy had ceased communication. Now, Will’s phone was rolling straight to voicemail. No surprise—everyone from his manager to his publicist to a million other people with a stake in the Billy Brenton empire would want to know their lead man was okay. Mikey caught some rumors on Twitter that he’d been spotted at a store in the next town over. Mikey had also called Mari Belle. Good to hear her voice, like always, but would’ve been better if it hadn’t been because Mikey had let Will down.

Let them both down.

The fire chief had said they wouldn’t know the cause of the fire until the fire inspector came out, but he’d been willing to lay odds it was the space heater Mikey hadn’t turned off.

So with all that in his mind, Mikey rolled out of bed in the otherwise empty room around 2:00 a.m. He pulled his clothes back on—he’d showered and gone to bed naked, but his smoky jeans, shirt, boots, and jacket were all he had to his name here in Bliss right now—and then ventured out of the bedroom in search of a snack.

House across the street was dark. No more flashing lights.
 

Just…empty blackness.

Mikey rubbed his arms and went on to the kitchen. The freezer was loaded down with ice cream—so that’s why his hostess didn’t want him inside it—and despite the lack of furniture in the house, Mikey thought he might find a piece of paper.

Couldn’t sleep. Might as well write a song.

That sparsely furnished thing bothered him. So did the zoo, but he had an inherent distrust of cats. Getting on out of here first thing in the morning was a dang good idea. Had a friend of a friend he could call for a ride to get a rental car if Will was still hiding, and then Mikey would get himself some new clothes and a hotel room and wait out his buddy.

He helped himself to a carton of something called—he squinted in the low light glowing over the range—
Chocolate Orgasm
?

His having an orgasm over chocolate ice cream was about as likely as the creek back home running whiskey instead of water. Still, he dug a spoon out of a drawer, popped the top of the plain brown carton, and dug in.

Chocolatey goodness coated his tongue. Not too sweet, not too bitter.

Pretty dang good, actually.

He took another bite, and went poking in the drawers for a pen and pencil. Like the living room and his bedroom, the kitchen was stocked enough to be livable. Weren’t enough plates and cups to handle the masses; barely enough other stuff to heat up a can of soup or fix up a plate of spaghetti.

Mikey had played in Vegas long enough to know when to take a bet, and he was betting his hostess was having some money problems.

Her lizard in the glass tank in the corner stared at him, making judgments on Mikey for making judgments on Lizard Boy’s mama.

He’d seen some weird stuff during his days on the road, but this was high up the list.

Should’ve stayed in a hotel. Still could. Quick phone call would get him a taxi.

Instead, he pulled out the drawer on the other side of the dishwasher and found what he was looking for. Kind of.

There was a small pad of blank paper and some pens, but he had to dig under some consignment shop receipts to find it.

And maybe it was the Chocolate Orgasm ice cream mellowing him out, or possibly he was nosy, but he pulled out the receipts and looked closer.

Dahlia
. Her name was Dahlia.

And it appeared that she’d sold near about everything that should’ve been in her house.

“
Mrroowl
?”

He shuffled the receipts back into the drawer. The black and orange cat that had been playing with a feminine product when he walked in was circling his legs and rubbing on his pants.

“Ain’t happening, cat,” Mikey muttered. He took the pad of paper to the long counter that jutted out under a row of cabinets between the kitchen and the dining room. Wasn’t a kitchen table to sit at—she’d sold that for two hundred bucks last week, her receipts said—but he’d written lyrics in worse conditions.

Eaten a lot worse ice cream too. Stuff was killer. In the good way. Not orgasmic, but still killer.

He bent over the paper under the cabinets, scribbled a line.

The cat jumped up on the counter and walked between him and the paper, flicking its tail at his nose. He gave it a nudge. Then another nudge. On the third nudge, it finally moved, and he went back to tapping his pen on the paper. Somewhere else in the house, another cat yowled.

They went on like that for a while, Mikey writing, the cat butting in, Mikey pushing it away, other cats making a racket.

“What are you doing?”

Mikey jumped. His head collided with something solid, and a piercing pain shot through his skull. “
Ow
!
Shit
!”

“Oh, ducks,” she muttered.

Mikey blinked and clenched his jaw shut. Damn cabinets.
 

Soft fingers landed on his shoulder. “Are you okay? Is it bleeding? Do you need ice? Wait—
are you eating my Chocolate Orgasm
?”

Suddenly the fingers were gone, and so was his ice cream. “That’s a prototype,” she shrieked. The red streaks in her hair stood up on end, and her face morphed into angry clown mode.

He didn’t much like her right now for having a house with cabinets he could hit his head on. He rubbed the sore spot where a knot was already forming. “You might could think about putting bumpers on those things,” he said.

“You
might could
think about not being an ice cream stealer,” she shot back. “
Argh
. You ate the whole thing!”

“Begging your pardon,
ma’am
, for not knowing which of the seventy-eight cartons were off-limits.”

Uh-oh. There went the freeze-ray eyeballs. She could’ve directed them to his head to help control the swelling, but nope. They were aimed right at his nose and more likely to be turned onto his private parts than to be used for any good.

Women.

“They’re
all
off-limits,” she said in that
I will kill you and chop your body into a million pieces that I will store between my seventy-eight cartons of ice cream
voice. She punctuated her statement with a thump of the empty carton.

He strolled back around the counter and went to the freezer. Because he wanted ice, and she was pissing him off, and if there was one thing he was good at, it was pissing right back. “Chill, lady. It’s just ice cream.” He flung the door open, grabbed the next container he saw, and put it right to the sore spot on his head.

She made a noise like a feral animal, and darned if the cats at her feet didn’t stop circling to look at him and hiss too.

And suddenly he had no more ice cream in his hand, he’d been unceremoniously shoved halfway across the kitchen, and she was shrieking a lecture at him like—well, like Mari Belle had when he and Will had borrowed her nail polish collection to paint lines for their short-lived underground armadillo racing venture when they were nine.

Turned out armadillos weren’t so easy to catch, if you could even find the live ones.

He tuned back in to Dahlia’s shrieking in time for the grand finale. “And you’re an entitled, selfish, thoughtless jerk.”

He held his hands up. “Now slow on down there, Ms. Opportunist—”

“Oh, don’t you even—”

“I don’t know what you want from me, but I ain’t staying in a death trap.”

“It wasn’t a death trap until
you
were dumb enough to bend over under a cabinet. How long have you been over six feet tall? Did that happen yesterday? Last week? Still getting used to your height? Please. Your being a klutz isn’t
my
fault.”

Damn female logic.

She had a point.

He
was the problem.

“Here.” She shoved a frozen gel pack at him, and the anger shooting off her mellowed. “Are you feeling dizzy? Nauseous? Any numbness in your extremities?”

“What, was there something
special
in your ice cream?” he said like an ass.

“Estrogen,” she said. “You might notice some swelling in your boobs and shrinkage in your package for a few days.”

He straightened and almost hit his head on the cabinet a second time. “
Wha—
”

She tipped her head back and laughed, and Mikey
did
get a little light headed then. “Shit.”

Her laughter slowed to giggles, but then she looked at him, and darn if that smile of hers didn’t go bigger. She laughed again, this time with her shoulders getting into the action, scrunching up toward her face while she rocked forward and let the laughter overtake her.

Definitely feeling the effects of hitting his head.

Because watching her laugh—that was a darn near beautiful sight.

He put the gel pack to his head, felt a smile of his own creeping out. “You ain’t funny.”

Her gray cat gave him a
don’t-be-a-dumbass
look, then bent over and licked its privates.

“I’m very funny,” she said, still giggling, her cheeky grin making her skin glow and her dark blue eyes sparkle.

She was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt as pajamas, he noticed.

Nice. Good taste.

His eyes drifted lower.

Black pajama pants with bright red lips.

His crotch twitched.

Trouble
, he reminded himself.

But, hey, he knew her name now. That eliminated almost half the problem with sleeping with her. Not the bigger half, but knowing her name made him feel less like an ass. “You having money issues?” he heard himself say.

All her amusement died right quick, and she went stiff as a dead armadillo in springtime. Her skin paled to the color of snowflakes, making two freckles on her left cheek stand out starkly. She shoved her glasses back up her nose. “First you eat my ice cream, then you insult my house? Starting to see why Billy left you.”

Defensive. He was right on. Had some smarts in him every now and again.

Wasn’t so sure it was smart to want to know her story, though. Didn’t like to let the girls
too
close. Arm’s length was his usual MO. “Everybody struggles sometimes,” he said when he should’ve kept his trap shut. “Should’ve seen how me and Billy lived before we hit it big in Nashville.”

Her claws retracted. Not all the way, but enough for him to see she was softening to the idea that he wasn’t out to kick her while she was down.
 

He liked her softer. Looked more natural on her.

“Winter’s slow for an ice cream shop owner,” she said.

“You sell your furniture every winter to get by?”

Her eyes narrowed again, and he was honestly surprised she didn’t hiss and take a swipe at him. Her orange cat looked to be wanting to do the same. “I have everything I need, thank you very much.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

She grimaced.

Bingo. “He stole your cash, huh?”

Her jaw dropped. “How—why—”

“I’m a songwriter, sweet pea. Always looking for the good story.”

“You—you’re—
argh
.”

He was. He was
argh
with himself too. Wasn’t always looking to get pissed on a lady’s behalf—he’d done that plenty for Mari Belle, and that hadn’t ever got him anywhere—but the thought of somebody doing Dahlia wrong had Mikey wanting to hit something.

Girl could use her tongue to slice a guy up, but the way she hugged herself made him think she wasn’t all that tough. Maybe a little lonely too.

He propped his hip against the counter and grinned at her. “Go on. Grab another carton of ice cream and tell Uncle Mikey all about it.”

“You’re a dirty old man.”

“Not yet, sweet pea, but I’m working on it.”

She shook her head. “C’mon, Parrot. Dean and Sam, you too. Let’s go back to bed.”

Another flash of lonely welled up and threatened to choke Mikey. “Might could help you find out what’s wrong with that Chocolate Orgasm. Was missing something.”

He was missing something. Was called his brain. Needed to let the lady go.

But she cocked an interested brow at him. “Was it now?”

“Some fudge,” he improvised. Because the ice cream had been dang near perfect.

She studied him a minute, all dark blue eyes and well-deserved suspicion. When he thought she’d turn around and walk away, though, she popped open the freezer.

Mikey leaned forward.

She dug through the cartons and came up with one from the back. Then she grabbed a fresh spoon, popped the top off the carton, and gave him another speculative look.

“Fudge,” she said.

She scooped out a heap of the chocolate ice cream and lifted the spoon to his lips, her deep blue gaze holding him captive. He opened his mouth and hoped if she happened to look down, she wasn’t the type to throw a man out in the cold just because being fed by a woman was a lesser-known personal fetish.