Trouble on Tap (7 page)

“This place comes totally furnished—including a bed—just minus a shower. And have you looked at the rental market in Salvation lately? It’s awful.” Luciana continued her verbal battle. “Anyway, if you don’t say yes, I’ll just keep nagging until I wear you down.”

Looking at Olivia, knowing he’d walked away from her before the explosion and that she’d never want him after, hurt him in a way he couldn’t even begin to describe—even if he
had
been that sort of touchy-feely bullshit kind of guy. But the pain was good. It was real. As long as he ached, he wouldn’t forget the Marines…the friends…he’d left behind.

He turned toward Oliva, the move bringing his knee into contact with hers. Something sparked in her blue eyes, but she dropped her gaze before he could figure out what. Disgust, no doubt.

“Luciana’s right,” he said. “The cabin
is
perfect. I’ll even help you move in.”

Ignoring the unspoken question making his sister’s eyebrows arch, he downed the dregs of his lukewarm coffee and hoped like hell he hadn’t just made another life-altering mistake.

The paper straw wrapper crinkled between Olivia’s fingers as she refolded it for the fifth time in the ten minutes since Luciana had left The Kitchen Sink with her sleepy kids. Like an idiot, she’d stayed behind in the vain hope she could actually work with Mateo the Surly. She’d switched sides in the booth so she sat opposite him and then held an entire brainstorming session for the fundraiser by herself. She’d talked, thrown out ideas, wondered aloud—he’d glared at his coffee mug.

Awkward didn’t even begin to cover it.

Walking on the beach in January in heels and a dental-floss bikini for her first
Sports Illustrated
cover? That was awkward. Having to tell her ultra-conservative boss at her first non-modeling job that her douche of an ex-boyfriend had posted pics of her playing with her tits to a revenge-porn site? Most definitely awkward. Meeting her sisters’ true loves for the first time while covered head to toe in mud? Totally awkward.

Sitting here trying to pull words, let alone ideas, out of Mr. Grumps-A-Lot bypassed all of that. She’d nearly bitten her tongue off in an effort not to call him on his silent and glowering bullshit. Judging by his attitude, he bore some inner scars to go with the one’s crisscrossing the left side of his face, but damn, a woman could only gnaw the inside of her cheek to stop from screaming for so long before she ended up with a hole in her face.

The waitress paused by the table, ticket in hand. “Can I get you folks anything else? How about a free refill?”

“No.” Mateo didn’t bother to look up or even make a pretense at civility.

The waitress blinked her wide eyes a few times, slid the ticket to the middle of the table and skedaddled away.

Screw this
. The man had gone from gregarious heartthrob to man most likely to hit you with the gigantic chip on his shoulder. How in the hell she’d ever fucked him on a semi-regular basis—let alone fallen in love with him—mystified her. There were snarling beasts she’d rather work with more than Mateo Garcia. In fact, she had. She’d done a magazine photo shoot with a lion. The big cat’s teeth had looked eight-feet long when she’d snuggled up to him, but it had still been a pussy cat compared to Mateo.

“This isn’t going to work.” Olivia crumbled the straw wrapper and stuffed it under the corner of her plate. “Let’s agree to let Luciana think we’re working together on the fundraiser…”

That got his attention. His head snapped up and his hazel eyes sizzled with a dark intensity that made her breath catch. “But we won’t be.” He finished for her.

“Nope.” She grabbed the ticket, completed a quick tip calculation and doubled it as way of an apology for Mateo’s attitude.

His large hand engulfed the coffee mug as he lifted it for a drink, every motion measured and efficient. Then he set it back down on the saucer without even the slightest clink. “You think you can just put together an event all by yourself?”

“Absolutely.” Flaming lava sizzled through her veins. He could push all he wanted; she’d never backed away from a challenge or a dare. She’d
earned
her reputation as the wild Sweet triplet.

He shook his head, not even a single strand of his dark-brown hair moved out of line. It was as if his entire self—not just his abs—was carved out of granite. “Good luck with that.”

She raised her chin and stared him down just like she had every handsy photographer who thought she was too dumb to realize he didn’t need to feel her up to get the right shot. “You don’t think I can do it?”

The bastard didn’t even blink. “Negative.”

Anticipation pushed her forward in her seat. Oh, this was going to be classic. “Why not?”

His gaze dropped down to the deep V of her cherry-red top and the pulse in his temple pulsed. For a second she didn’t think he was going to say anything, which was good because she’d just forgotten her own name. His focus inched northward across her generous cleavage, up her neck and to her lips—leaving a heated trail across her skin without ever making a move. The last dry spot on her panties surrendered.

“Why not?” He dropped his attention back to the coffee mug in his white-knuckled grasp. “Because you’re all unicorns and rainbows and puffy pink clouds.”

“What does that even mean?” Besides the fact that Mr. Tough Recon Marine had watched a few too many Disney movies.

“That this is a job that takes organization.” He flipped up a finger. “Discipline.” Up went finger number two. “And follow through.” A third popped up. “None of which are your strong suits.”

She didn’t need to count off with three fingers in response to his ridiculousness. She only needed one—but she kept that middle finger sheathed. Instead, Olivia added enough sugary sweetness to her voice to knock Mateo into a diabetic coma.

“It also takes creativity and a willingness to try something new—not to mention something more than a piss-poor attitude and a cute butt.”

He smirked. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. At least you have the hot-ass part down pat.”

And to think she’d cried—
cried
—over him.

He reached to pull the bill from her grasp.

She swiped it away before he could get it and slid across the booth. Her bank account balance may be pathetic, but there was no way he was buying her lunch. She wasn’t about to owe him anything. “Well, don’t worry. You don’t have to put up with my questions or idiotic attempts at putting together a fundraiser that would actually help this community. And I’ll find somewhere else to shower so I won’t be darkening your doorstep.”

His hand clamped down on hers, setting off an electric jolt that went straight to all the places it shouldn’t. “We’re in this together.”

“Why?” Now that came out shakier than it should have.

“Because I gave Luciana my word that I’d help you with the fundraiser, and I always keep my word. Always. Come on, I’ll drop you off at the brewery.” He tugged the bill free from her grasp. “I’ll meet you at the veterans’ center at ten a.m. tomorrow, then you can see for yourself that this project is too much for you.”

Since Olivia’s office at the Sweet Salvation Brewery looked like Armageddon at the dust bunny convention, she marched down the hall to Miranda’s. Her oldest sister’s office was all chrome and dark wood—perfect for the fast-rising Harbor City business executive she’d been before they’d inherited the brewery from their crazy uncle Julian. The only thing that kept the office decor from perfectly toeing the company line was the Live Free, Die High poster leftover from when their uncle ran it.

Miranda and Natalie were hunched over the desk going through paperwork that Olivia would bet dollars to stilettos was some organizational plan the efficiency expert middle triplet had come up with to squeeze an extra half percent of productivity out of the brewery.

While Miranda and Natalie were the exceptions to the all-Sweets-are-crazy rule, she was the Sweet who proved the rule. Still, when she needed to bitch, there was nothing like the triad.

Miranda looked up from the paperwork on her desk. “You look like you’re about to set fire to the place. Lunch didn’t go well?”

“Lunch was fine; it’s Grumps Garcia who isn’t.” She flopped down into the seat next to Natalie, who hugged her beloved clipboard tight. “Why did I let Luciana talk me into moving into the cabin behind his house?”

“What?” Both sisters exclaimed at the same time, their identical blue eyes round with surprise.

God, she really needed to think before she spoke. That was
not
how she wanted to drop the news to her sisters. “No offense, but Uncle Julian’s just doesn’t have the space for one more person.”

There, that totally sounded better than “my best friend offered up the cabin behind her super-hot brother’s house and my hormones wouldn’t let me say no, even though I should have because he is a total ass.”

Ass. Oh God, his was still amazing. It filled out his uniform pants like they’d been custom made. She shifted in her seat, pressing her thighs together as discretely as possible.
Crap! Stop thinking about Mateo’s ass.

“We’ll make room at the house,” Miranda said. “We always find a way.”

Here her sisters were trying to clean up her mess of a life, just like when they’d been growing up, and all she could think about was Mateo. You could take the girl out of Salvation, but you really could never take the Salvation out of the girl.

“True, but the cabin is already there,” she said. “It’s vacant. Plus Luciana won’t charge me any rent.”

Natalie’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you worried about paying rent?”

She dropped her chin to her chest. What was that she’d
just
told herself? Oh yeah, no talking without thinking.

“Spill it, Olive Breath,” Miranda said.

Oliva sighed. Time to put all of her humiliations out on the table. “I lost my job.”

“I thought you’d quit,” Natalie said.

“They
asked
me to quit—but that’s not all.” Olivia slumped back against the chair, taking a second to gather all the pebbles that had been glued together into a giant boulder that had rolled over her life and smashed it to bits. “I made some really crappy investments and lost most of what I’d made modeling, which wasn’t a shit-ton to begin with because you don’t even want to know the number of times when a designer paid in clothes instead of cash. So I’d gotten the marketing job to pay my bills, never worrying about the morals clause in the contract.”

Her chest tightened and she swallowed back the bile thinking about her ex always brought up. “Have either of you heard of My Ex’s Pics?” She paused while her sisters shook their heads. “Me neither, until my then shitball of a live-in boyfriend, Larry, posted naked pictures of me to it. I can’t get the site’s owner, some assprick who hides behind a fake name, to take them down and my lawyer says everything was totally legit because I gave the pictures to Larry as a gift and he, in turn, sold them to this revenge-porn site.”

Tits and ass. She could never get away from being more than two boobs and a butt for some men. Sure, she’d chosen to go into modeling, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t more to her than how she looked. “I had to tell my very conservative boss about the photos. He made noises about how sorry he was as he handed me a box to put all my stuff in and asked for my key to the office back.” Anger, white-hot and immediate, burned its way up from her toes. “I went home ready to murder Larry and let the jury fry me if they wanted, but our condo was empty. He’d liquidated everything in our bank account. He’d sold all our furniture plus most of the designer clothes I still had from the old days and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Turns out he owed some bad people a lot of money and when my investments went south, so did his credit rating with the bookie, so he didn’t have any use for me anymore and he’d skipped—which turned out to be lucky for me, because I’d look like shit in an orange jumpsuit doing twenty to life for murdering the bastard.”

She barely had time to suck in a shaky breath before her sisters’ arms were holding her tight, squeezing away all of the bad things she’d experience, all of the hateful words burned into her memory and all of the heartbreaking disappointments that she’d left unsaid. Things may have changed for her sisters, with their new focus on the brewery and their boyfriends, but one thing hadn’t—the bond of the Sweet triplets. No one and nothing could tear that apart.

Olivia hadn’t realized just how much she’d missed being with her sisters until that moment. She returned the hug before Miranda and Natalie took their seats again.

“So here I am, the crazy Sweet triplet who fucked up her world all over again.” She gave a hoarse chuckle. “Just like when I brought the documentary crew home with me one Christmas and left before New Year’s with practically the whole town waving pitchforks and burning torches in my rearview mirror.”

Now
that
had been a disaster. She’d meant to bring positive attention to the small town and had ended up making it a laughingstock—especially the mayor.