Authors: Jasmine Haynes
Two more minutes and he would have
had his cock out of his jeans and buried inside her. Without a condom. With her
parents only yards away.
He’d lost it. Completely. He hadn’t
cared when she’d told him to stop. He’d only wanted her like a wild man, the
need to burn them up together greater than his common sense. Greater than
anything.
She was right. He had to go. He
had to clear his head.
Easing out the back door, he didn’t
even say he’d call her. Outside, with the late afternoon sun blazing down on
his head, he stopped, leaning back against the wall. Searching for something.
Some sort of explanation.
Things had gone totally out of
control the day he found Jace in Taylor’s bed. No, long before that. Life had
gone to hell the day Lou died. Nothing had been the same since. Nothing ever
would be. Taylor and Jace’s marriage just made the whole situation worse.
He didn’t have a goddamn clue what
to do about Randi any more than he knew how to fix what had happened to them
all the day they laid his brother in the ground.
* * * * *
There was nothing else to do but go
out and meet her fate. Just as she had the day she came crawling back home to
tell her parents she’d left Mick.
With one last deep breath, she
opened the walk-in. Her dad probably wouldn’t talk to her for a few days. Maybe
a month. But he’d get over it eventually, he always had. Even if it took a
year. As a last desperate attempt at reclaiming her modesty, she grabbed her
shirt off the stool and pulled it on.
She smelled her father before she
saw him. He’d worn bay rum cologne for as long as she could remember, the scent
part of her childhood—the good, when he patted her head for high grades at
school, and the bad, when the only communication they shared was the waft of
bay rum as he passed her in the hallway of the small house she grew up in.
The burn of embarrassment still
flamed in her cheeks as she turned to him. “Pops, I—”
“You hussy.” His complexion was
more apoplectic than hers felt. A vein throbbed at his temple, and his white
hair stood on end as if he’d tugged at the roots. “How dare you comport yourself
in such a manner in my store?” He stabbed his chest with a thick forefinger. “
My
store.
My
work. My reputation might have been ruined in this town.”
He’d called her a hussy. From him,
it was tantamount to calling her a whore. She shoved aside the pain.
“I don’t think any customers would
have walked into the freezer, Pops.”
“That is not the point. You could
have scandalized your mother. Did you think of that? How she would have felt
walking in on that...” He sputtered, trying to find the word. “Walking in on
that filth.”
He had a point. She hadn’t thought
of that, at all.
“You are a disgrace to this family.
You have always been a disgrace. I have tried and tried to teach you properly,
but you do not listen. You do not care.”
“Pops, I do listen. I just forget
sometimes. And I make mistakes.”
He slashed his hand through the
air. “Do not make excuses. No more. I am done speaking to you since it does no
good.”
David stepped from an aisle of
racks. “Mr. Andersen, I’m to blame for what happened. It wasn’t Randi’s fault.”
David. He hadn’t left her. She
almost sagged with relief. But how much had he heard?
The finger-pointing switched from
Randi to David. “And you, I do not even know you, and you do horrible things to
my daughter in my store. I do not accept your explanations.”
This time the old man stabbed David
in the chest for punctuation. David resisted the urge to break a finger already
crippled with arthritis.
“Sir, I understand how you feel,
but you’re overreacting.”
“Overreacting?” The elderly man’s
eyes bugged out of his head. “Overreacting, do you say? I do not speak to you
either, despoiler of young women. I do not speak to you
ever
.” Still
glaring at David, he pointed yet again at Randi. “And never again do I speak to
this harlot.”
His blood boiled. If the man had
been anyone but Randi’s own father, David would have belted him. They’d been
caught in a compromising position, but Christ, the old man was going way too
far. For Randi’s sake, he held on to his rising temper.
“Let’s calm down. You don’t have
any right to call your own daughter a harlot.”
Randi’s dad threw his hands in the
air, waving them almost in supplication or impotence, his rage was so great.
“She is my daughter no more.”
The moment was almost surreal.
“Sir, we need to be reasonable and drop the name-calling.”
Mr. Andersen’s rage simply boiled
over. “You, Mr. Pimp, get out of my store.” Then he turned, his arms still
flailing ineffectually in the air. The scent of his overly-strong cologne hung
behind as a tangible reminder of his words.
The silence was long and loud,
broken only by the whirring of the fans and street traffic wafting in through
the open windows. Randi didn’t say word. She was in shock, that could be the
only explanation.
“Jesus, I’m sorry. But he didn’t
have the right to say that about you.”
Randi shrugged, then picked up her
clipboard. “Don’t worry about it. It was my fault. You didn’t know.”
What the hell? David grabbed her
arm. “You’re just going to let him say that shit to you?” He couldn’t fathom.
He’d come from the loins of a woman who’d taught him the meaning of sticking up
for yourself. The meaning of self-respect. No matter what happens, never give
that up. Admit you’re wrong, sure, but you can’t allow another human being to
demean and degrade you, even your own father.
Randi hugged the clipboard to her
chest. “You saw what good it does to challenge him. He didn’t listen to you
either.”
“It doesn’t matter if he listens.
It matters that you...” He stopped, tipping his head to stare at her. He wanted
to shake Randi. He had the sense to understand that while her father had not
used a single swear word, he’d cut her to ribbons. Christ, it had been a
freaking bloodbath.
And she just took it. No matter
what she’d done, the old man
didn’t
have the right. “You’re just going back
to work?”
“He didn’t fire me. He only stopped
speaking to me.”
“I don’t think I get what’s going
on here, Randi.”
He’d been incredibly stupid coming
here in the mood he’d been in, edged as it was with anger and some weird need
to dominate her. His mother would have whupped him upside the head for the way
he’d acted. He didn’t know his own mind these days or understand half the
things that motivated him.
But he did know that Randi Andersen
needed more than a few nights of hot sex. She was on the rebound from far more
than just a marriage gone bad.
She was on the rebound from a
father that could call his daughter a whore. He could tell her old man he had
no right to treat her that way, but it would take more than that to fix what
was wrong with Randi accepting those words so blithely.
David didn’t have a clue how to
show her. He couldn’t even fix his own freaking life.
She spoke first. “You know, I don’t
think I feel like doing laundry or having dinner tonight. If that’s okay with
you. Let’s just skip it.”
He realized now that’s how she
phrased most things, as a question, asking for permission. She cajoled him into
helping her fill her gas tank, she let her landlord get away without making
necessary repairs. Hell, when the dog had jumped on the bed that first night
and practically nosed his balls, she’d freaked out like a little girl, afraid
he’d get mad at her. She didn’t allow just her father to mistreat her,
accepting abuse was actually a part of her makeup.
He forced this decision on her. “Is
that what you want? To skip tonight?”
She glanced briefly at the floor,
her chest rising with a deep breath. David himself wasn’t clear on what answer
he wanted her to give. But at least she finally gave one.
“Yes, that’s what I want.” Then she
shooed him toward the back door. “You better vamoose before Pops comes back.”
She needed time. She needed space.
Hell, Randi Andersen needed a lot more than that.
He just wasn’t sure he was the guy
to give her anything.
She absolutely hated that assessing
look in David’s eye. It reminded her of the way her father looked at her every
time he stopped speaking for a day or a month or a year.
David had backed off just the way
she told him to, along the aisle from which he’d first appeared. She knew he
wasn’t backing down from her father. He was backing away from
her
.
It had to happen sometime. At least
the break came at the beginning of the relationship. Not that two dinners and
two nights of some very hot sex made a relationship.
It was just rather debilitating that
he’d seen her true weak colors. Somehow, it felt worse than the ending of her
marriage, though exactly why, she couldn’t say.
Randi tossed the clipboard onto the
bench. It slid across the Formica and tipped over the edge, clattering to the
concrete floor. She left it there.
Quitting time was another hour’s
worth of clock ticks. She couldn’t stand it. Not one more tick, not one more
tock. Outside, the sun hit her like a spear right through the eye, and she dug
in her purse for her sunglasses. Not there. Not anywhere. She’d forgotten where
she left them last, story of her life.
All she wanted was to lay on her
bed, wrap herself around a loving bundle of fur, and forget. Forget about
David—because he wasn’t coming back—and forget about what happened in the warehouse.
To forget. That’s all she wanted right now.
It would have been easier if David
wasn’t sitting on her porch when she got home.
* * * * *
The answer to his problems hadn’t
hit him like a bolt of lightning or the hand of God. Instead, it had seeped
into his brain like a frosty mug of beer nursed over half an hour rather than
slugged back in five minutes. The half hour of his ride from Scandia Haus to
his own driveway. He’d sat for a minute, hands on the wheel, then flipped a
U-turn.
It was simple, really. He’d failed
to hold his family together after Lou’s death. They’d almost fallen apart,
drowned in the loss, and the fix, in the end, had not come from him. It had
happened on its own. With Taylor and Jace falling in love. His mom was happy.
His dad was happy. Everyone was happy. Instead of accepting it like a man,
David had run like a green kid getting his first kick of sand in the face. A
man did not run from his responsibilities. A man didn’t quit his job or divest
himself of his family. A man didn’t pick up a young woman on the side of the
road, then dump her three days later after
he
did an unconscionable
thing.
Lou wouldn’t have done that. But
David could still fix things.
Randi needed him. He couldn’t fight
her battles for her, but he could make sure that she fought them for herself.
She was special. He’d known that last night when she gave herself so sweetly.
He’d known it when he watched her come. When he’d held her as she slept. The
awkwardness this morning, even his anger with his dad, well, that had all been
part of finding himself. And he’d done it. He couldn’t walk away from Randi if
he tried. She needed him. With care, he could help her reach her potential.
He only had to wait on her porch
for fifteen minutes, the dog at his feet. He liked the picture they greeted her
with.
Of course, as soon as she heard a
commotion out at the road, Royal didn’t stay put.
Randi’s truck rattled through the
driveway ruts, rolled to a stop, then she stared through the windshield at him.
Finally, she climbed out, dropping
a hand to the dog for a quick scratch, a soft word, then she seemed to suck in
a breath and close the distance between them. With him sitting the few steps up
on the porch, they were almost eye level.
She shaded her eyes. “I didn’t
think I’d see you again.”
“We have unfinished business.”
Her gaze fell to her tennies. He
looked at her bare, tanned legs, then the strip of skin between her waistband
and the bottom of her skimpy camisole thing. On a guy, it would have been
called an undershirt. Over it, she’d thrown a short-sleeved shirt, but hadn’t
buttoned it.
She fiddled with the keys in her
right hand, then lifted her purse to her chest like a shield. “Unfinished
business. You mean what we were doing in the cold room?”
There was certainly that. But there
was also a lot more. He held out a hand, beckoning with his fingers. “Come
here.”
She shuffled a few steps closer.
He leaned forward, grabbed her
hand, and reeled her in. “I think we should forget about the cold room.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed.
“Yeah. Let’s forget it.”
“I think we should start over.”
She tipped her head, forsaking her
shoes to look at him. “Start over how?”
“Well, first I ask you how your day
was, and you say it was fine, but you’re tired.”
“Oh.” The sadness in her eyes at
the warehouse hadn’t dissipated.
“How was your day, honey?” he
murmured.
“It was fine, but I’m tired,” she
whispered.
“Then I take you inside, give you a
glass of wine, run you a hot bath, fix dinner, and feed the dog while you’re
soaking.”
“I don’t have any wine, and I’m not
sure there’s enough of anything to make dinner.”
“I’ll improvise. Then after dinner,
I’ll carry you into the bedroom and make sweet love to you all night long.”
She didn’t smile or laugh or fall
into his arms. “David. Why are you really here?”
“You had a bad day. I caused the
problem. I want to fix it.” What he didn’t say was that after all that sweet
lovemaking, he’d help her see that she had to tackle the issue with her dad.
He’d go with her, hold her hand, whatever. But he’d tell her all that later,
when she lay drugged with passion, when he could make her see what she had to
do.