Getting Lucky (27 page)

Travis was kidding. Well, he was ninety-percent kidding. And TJ knew it. But it still bugged him to think about someone else wanting Hope.

“You’re hilarious,” TJ told him.

“You might want to go with him,” Delaney said to TJ.

“Why’s that?”

“Hope’s at the Come Again too.”

Yeah, he’d figured. But clearly she was having a good time. She’d come to Sapphire Falls on an adventure, and Lord knew, meeting some of the other people in town could be adventurous.

“Hope’s pretty used to doing her own thing,” he said. “Doubt she’s missing me.”

“Oh, come on,” Delaney said. “She’s hanging out with Peyton and Lauren and Phoebe and Kate right now, but I’m sure she’d love it if you showed up.”

“Peyton’s with them?” TJ asked, trying to act nonchalant. Hope’s little sister. The first family she’d really been with since her mom died. One of two people who were the only family she had left in the world. He swallowed hard. How was she? Happy, upset, regretful?

“Yeah, she’s working at the Sweet Shop now,” Delaney said. “She was there when we were talking about it and Hope asked her along.”

Uh huh. And how
was
she? Was she sad? Was she considering telling Peyton who she was? Had she already?

But he couldn’t exactly swoop in there and ask her all of those questions.

“And Michelle’s in town,” Delaney said. “According to Peyton, anyway. We didn’t see her down there, but it’s early.”

But for
that—
he could definitely swoop in there.

Hope had been in town all day. If Michelle was back this weekend, she would have heard about Hope. She’d be looking for her, in fact.

Yeah, he needed to go to the Come Again.

“Okay, talk to you later,” TJ said as he stood.

Delaney grinned. “Call if you need backup.”

He wasn’t going to need backup. Michelle was going to mind her manners and everything would be fine.

Probably.

Ten minutes later, TJ strode through the doors of the Come Again.

He glanced around quickly but didn’t see Hope or Michelle.

Peyton was sitting at one of the tall tables in the corner across the dance floor with a friend. He couldn’t see who it was, with her back to him, but it looked like Peyton was drinking soda. Interesting, but not his biggest priority at the moment.

“TJ!”

He turned toward the voice and found that Travis and Lauren were still there. They were sitting at a table with Phoebe and Joe.

He pulled out a chair at their table. “So false alarm.”

“What do you mean?” Phoebe asked.

“Heard that Hope was here with you guys and that Michelle was in town.”

Phoebe’s eyebrows went up. “Is she? Oh, this will be good.”

“She’s not here,” TJ pointed out.

“Not yet.”

“Even so,” TJ said, admitting that the chances of Michelle showing up at the Come Again were about as good as the sun coming up tomorrow. “Hope left.” And he was wondering how long he had to sit here and bullshit with his friends before he could leave to go back to the farm without it looking pathetic.

“Hope didn’t leave,” Phoebe said with a grin. Her eyes focused on something behind TJ and she pointed. “In fact, it doesn’t look like Jason’s going to be letting her go for a while.”

TJ turned slowly, already sure he wasn’t going to like what he was about to see.

Hope was involved. Which meant it was going to drive him crazy.

Sure enough, it took him only three seconds to locate her this time. She was on the dance floor in the arms of another man. And not just any other man. Jason Gilmore—
Doctor
Jason Gilmore, if they were being specific. Jason was twenty-eight, good-looking, charming, a hometown boy who had returned home with his medical degree in hand to heal the sick and improve the lives of those in Sapphire Falls.

To hear people talk, the man could cure any illness with the simple laying on of hands.

And until that moment, it hadn’t annoyed TJ one bit.

Now, however, Jason was laying his hands on Hope. And TJ cared a lot.

Then there was the matter of her clothes.

She was wearing cut-off denim jeans, and he suspected Phoebe had something do with how they’d been chopped. She had a tendency to cut them short.

Hope was also wearing a fitted baby-blue T-shirt and had her hair pulled up into a high ponytail.

And the I’m-so-fucked clincher—she wore cowboy boots on her feet.

They had to be borrowed. TJ could tell they were scuffed enough that they’d been worn by a girl who actually
wore
boots for reasons other than dancing on a Saturday night. But scuffs or not, they looked hot.

Hope looked hot.

She looked like…a Sapphire Falls girl. And that did something to TJ’s gut—and lower—that he could no more stop than he could prevent snow falling at Christmas time. He was a country boy who had been raised to love, appreciate, respect and want country girls. Reacting to denim and ponytails and boots was in his blood.

His brain might know that Hope wasn’t a true country girl, but his body only saw denim and skin. A lot of skin. A lot of skin that he knew smelled like wild flowers and felt like silk.

Dammit
.

That woman.

TJ sighed and turned back to the table. Everyone was watching him for a reaction, and hell if he knew what that reaction should be. Part of him wanted to stomp over there and pull them apart. That would be an understandable response if she was really his girlfriend, he supposed. Though Jason wasn’t doing anything inappropriate.

On the other hand, the fact that he
wanted
to stomp over there and pull them apart made him nervous. He didn’t want any more drama. He didn’t want jealousy and distrust and fights and stress. Even if it was fake. His entire relationship with Michelle had been about those things. Michelle had flirted—and more—with men to get TJ’s attention and to goad him into reacting to show he cared.

He’d cared all right.

She’d made a damn fool of him repeatedly.

She’d always known exactly the right buttons to push to get him going, and his possessiveness had given her some kind of strange thrill.

He was not going to do that with Hope. Or anyone. But definitely not with Hope. She was a sham girlfriend who was leaving. Sometime. Eventually.

In any case, he was not going to be a fool over her. He was not going to make a scene. He was
not
going to get possessive and stupid and crazy.

“You okay?” Phoebe asked him.

Phoebe had grown up in Sapphire Falls. She’d left for a few years to get her teaching degree, but she’d come home to teach as soon as she’d graduated. She was a hometown girl through and through. Which meant she knew every bit of his history with Michelle and had been there to witness a lot of it.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not going out there?”

He shook his head and grabbed the glass of root beer the waitress automatically brought for him. Everyone knew that he’d given up alcohol…and why. He and Michelle and alcohol had never been a good combination.

“Really?” Phoebe asked. “
You’re
not going over there to cut in where another guy is dancing with your girl?”

Yeah, yeah. It was unusual for him to be relaxed and laid-back about a woman.

He was laid-back about the women he dated in other towns, but no one here got to see that or got to know those women. And he was laid-back about them because he didn’t really
care
. He liked them. He treated them well. He loved the time he spent in the two towns about thirty minutes in either direction from Sapphire Falls. But he wasn’t invested. He wasn’t committed. Those relationships were not even exclusive.

One woman was a veterinarian who was devoting all of her time and energy to her practice and didn’t have time for a relationship. She and TJ got together when they needed to let off some steam. She liked it hard and fast and dirty and kicked his ass out of bed at five in the morning when she headed to work.

Another was a single mom of two who had a girls’ night out once a month and needed a guy she knew and trusted to remind her that she was a woman in addition to being a mom. She needed someone who knew his way around a G-spot but who was happy to head home to his own bed after rocking her world for a couple of hours. The kids stayed at Grandma’s house and she got an orgasm
and
to sleep in the next morning without having to make breakfast for anyone. TJ loved the phone calls from both of those women.

“She’s dancing with him,” he finally said of Hope. “No big deal.”

He wasn’t committed or invested with her, either.

Except…he was.

TJ’s grip tightened on his glass but he didn’t show a bit of the tension to Phoebe.

“Hope is completely different from Michelle,” he said. That was absolutely true. And he’d do well to remember it too. Hope didn’t seem like the type to play games. She wasn’t dancing with Jason to make TJ jealous. He was sure she was dancing with him because she’d wanted to dance and Jason was a willing partner. Or something.

Of course, she was playing
his
online-girlfriend-gone-crazy game. And she seemed to be enjoying it.

And what did he really know about her anyway? Everything she’d said to him from minute one could have been a lie. She seemed to be rolling with all of the other lies—like being madly in love with him, for instance—easily and happily.

He hadn’t known her since she was finger-painting in kindergarten like the other women he’d dated in Sapphire Falls. He had no idea if she was even really into essential oils and such. She could be dumping vanilla extract into hand lotion and
telling
him it was a cure-all.

Hell, maybe his shoulder wasn’t even better. Maybe she’d just talked him into it. Maybe her sweet smile and sexy ears and gorgeous breasts had brainwashed him into
believing
he felt better.

Maybe—

The scent of honeysuckle hit him a millisecond before he heard her say hi.

He looked up at Hope standing by his side, smiling at him as if she had never been happier to see anyone. And that was all it took for him to be right back under her spell.

“Hi.”

“Dance with me.” She held out her hand.

He stood and took it. Without a glance around the table—that would show only knowing smiles—he pulled her to the bar. They needed to talk.

There were people clustered at the bar as well, but he wasn’t going to be seeing any of them around his mother’s table in the near future. If any of them overheard anything stupid or pitiful come out of his mouth, at least they wouldn’t bring it up over pot roast.

“Come on. Let’s dance,” Hope said, tugging on his hand when she realized they were moving away from the dance floor.

He pulled her around in front of him, tucking her between him and the bar and lowering his voice. “I don’t do jealous, Hope. If you’re trying to get me worked up dancing with Jason, it won’t work. If you’re trying to get
him
worked up by dancing with me, you can forget it.”

She looked up at him. She had to tip her head back with him so close. “You don’t do jealous?”

Of course he did. He didn’t
want
to. He’d thought he was over it. He was thirty-two and knew better. But did he fucking
hate
seeing her with another man? Definitely.

“I don’t do games,” he said.

“Good.”

She pressed into him and TJ was sure she could feel that being close to her was affecting him.

“I was just dancing, TJ. He asked and I like to dance, so I said yes. No games. Nothing underneath it. Nothing more to it.”

He couldn’t help himself. He lifted his hand and ran his fingers over the ends of her hair. He liked it up away from her face. He could see the length of her neck and every one of her earrings and the way her freckles started darker over the bridge of her nose and got lighter as they dotted her cheekbones toward her ears. But he couldn’t help the thought of gripping that ponytail and using it to angle her head perfectly for his kiss or to tip her head back and expose her throat for his lips and tongue. And he could easily imagine pulling the elastic band loose so that her hair would spill over his pillow while he…

He took a deep breath. “Sorry. Maybe I do still do jealous.”

She tipped her head to one side and got that look in her eye that said she was realizing something, and TJ cursed internally. Why did he do that? Why did he say stuff like that?
Dance with me, TJ. No thanks, Hope.
Why couldn’t he have
that
conversation with her?

“So she used other guys to manipulate your feelings, huh?” she finally said. “She liked it when you were jealous? Geez, TJ, the sex must have been
really
good. You put up with a lot of bullshit.”

Her reaction surprised him. Which shouldn’t have surprised him.

“Yes, I did,” he said. “And…it was.”

It had been. The sex had been really good. And he was mature enough now to admit that he’d chosen getting laid over his pride more than once.