Getting Lucky (9 page)

She could have argued. She could have told him that she hadn’t planned the trip at all. She’d found the photo of Dan and Thomas and her mom the day before she’d hit the road. She also didn’t have any gaps that needed filled. She had a great life that she loved. She did not have a list of questions and she didn’t really need Dan to be anything at all.

But there was a little bit of her that thought having concerned and attentive TJ Bennett around might be kind of nice.

And
that
was crazy. She hadn’t truly needed anyone in longer than she could remember. And as he’d pointed out, they’d just met.

Yikes.

She took a deep breath. “You sound like a shrink.”

“Almost a year of therapy now.”

“And yet you’re still kind of an asshole.”

“I’m not trying to get over
that
.”

“Well, I’m very well adjusted, thank you.”

“And yet you’re standing on the end of my dock willing to take your clothes off and, I’m guessing, do whatever else I ask you to do. You’re trying to get closer to me and please me, and the easiest way is through sex.”

“You have a lot of sexual energy. I was in the moment. Geez. So sorry to make you look at my boobs.” Hope couldn’t believe that her pride was feeling piqued. She was typically a live-and-let-live girl. If TJ didn’t want to have sex with her, that was his prerogative.

But it irked her.

“If you didn’t have an estranged father and plans to stay around for a while, I’d be happy to look at your boobs,” he said mildly. “But I like the boobs I get involved with to leave the next morning. You’re not going to be doing that. Are you?” He looked almost hopeful.

She frowned. “No.”

Probably not. She didn’t know. Nothing about the trip had gone according to plan so far. Which just went to show that she was already screwing up the live-like-Melody thing. Melody didn’t make plans and was a master at going with the flow.

“Then keep ’em covered up.”

“I think I know why you’re an asshole,” Hope said, crossing her arms.

“Oh?” He didn’t look particularly interested in her answer.

“It’s because you’re conflicted. You
are
a protector, you do want to help me, but for some reason you’re trying to fight that.”

“Because you can’t fix crazy,” he said flatly. “I learned that the hard way. Avoiding it is the easiest thing.”

“You don’t strike me as the type to take the easy way out.”

“Let’s put it this way—I put my time in.”

“In the circus?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’ve cleaned up more than my share of monkey shit. I’m out. Someone else can worry about your cage.”

“Where’s your monkey now?” she asked, maybe a little beyond fascinated at the moment.

“Around.”

“Does she still make a mess once in a while?”

“She does.”

“That you clean up?”

He didn’t answer.

So he
did
still clean up after this monkey sometimes. That was interesting.

“She must be something.”

“She is.” His tone didn’t make it sound like it was a compliment.

“I think of monkeys as screechy things that climb all over everything and throw stuff around.”

“That’s about right.”

She smiled up at him. “If you don’t want me to be fascinated, you need to stop being interesting.”

“You’ve been on the road a long time by yourself. I’m not that interesting.”

“I drove almost straight through. It was only a couple of days. And I had a very nice conversation with an older couple at the truck-stop diner. They were interesting too. You’re not the first.” But he was the one whose lap she wanted to curl up in while he told her all of his stories.

Hmm. He might not be so far off on the crazy thing.

He frowned. “You just strike up conversations with strangers at truck stops?”

She didn’t comment on the fact that he was acting protective again, but she did absorb it. She wasn’t the type to need someone to be protective. She wasn’t used to it at all and logically thought it was very likely to make her feel claustrophobic pretty quickly.

Still, his comment made her feel warm.

“I strike up conversations with people almost everywhere I go.” She’d inherited that from her mother. “Truck stops have the most interesting mix of people to talk to.”

“That’s not safe.” He said it with exasperation.

“I don’t take candy from them,” she said with a smile. “I talk to them. I don’t tell them personal details, I don’t leave with them and I don’t give them my phone number. I just talk to them.”

“Still, they could— Whatever.” He shook his head. “Don’t care.”

He was trying not to care, she’d give him that. But she thought he was kind of failing. And that, stupidly, made her feel even warmer.

“I’ve heard some amazing stories,” she said. “I’ll tell you a few if you’re nice. I’ll tell you about the guy who taught piano lessons for almost forty years before he finally made it to Carnegie Hall. I’ll tell you about the woman I met who has lived for a year in every state in the United States. Or the couple who has run a marathon on every continent.”

“I won’t be that nice.”

She didn’t know if he meant to be funny, but he was. “You’ll find that I’m interesting too.”

“Sure. That’s one word. And I don’t want to be interested.”

“Okay.” She shrugged. “So tell me more about your monkey. Tell me she’s a big old ugly gorilla.”

“I don’t want to talk about my
ex
-monkey.”

“I’ll keep my shirt on if you agree to tell me.”

“It’s my shirt.”

“I can put mine back on,” she offered, looking at the wet wad at their feet.

It was white. Putting it on would be like standing in front of him naked.

Clearly, he knew that.

“Why do you want to talk about her?”

Because she might be becoming a little fixated on him. “What kind of monkey is she? An orangutan? A baboon?”

The corner of his lips twitched again. “She’s whatever type of monkey Curious George is.”

Hope frowned even though his sort-of smile made her stomach flip. “He was pretty cute.”

“Yep,” TJ agreed.

Oh, great, so the ex was cute.

“And a huge troublemaker,” TJ said. “Cute only goes so far.”

She studied his face. He didn’t look heartbroken right now. He looked mildly annoyed. That meant he didn’t hate this woman. She reminded him of a cute, if somewhat troublesome little monkey. Great.

“But you’re divorced. So the cute didn’t go far enough,” Hope pointed out.

“We’re divorced because she fell in love with someone else.”

Oh. Well, shit. Still, she couldn’t help it—she wanted to keep him talking. “So why are you still cleaning up after her?”

His jaw tightened for just a moment, but then he said easily, “She calls me to piss him off.”

“Does it work?”

“Every time.”

“Why do you keep answering?”

“Because I don’t care if he’s pissed off.”

Seriously, this was interesting. How could he not see that? “What kind of cleanup jobs are we talking here?”

He sighed.

“I can take this shirt right back off.” She raised the hem a couple of inches.

He rolled his eyes. “She gets into squabbles in public.”

“Squabbles? Like arguments?”

“Like someone ends up with beer dumped on their heads.”

Hope felt her eyes widen. “What else?”

“She gets stranded by her
friends
at bars, she runs out of gas, she gets lost, she runs out of money in L.A. and has no way to get home, she gets arrested for breaking into someone’s apartment because the key wouldn’t work—because she was at the wrong building. That kind of stuff.”

Hope blinked at him. Wow. That was…beyond Curious George. And there TJ was, the big protector, the big hero, no matter what he said.

“That’s quite a circus.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

She grinned in spite of herself. “You couldn’t just walk away from the monkey crap?”

“The lights, music and cotton candy kept me sucked in for a long time.”

Yeah, she wasn’t going to delve into what kind of cotton candy he was talking about. At least, not yet.

There were things swirling under the surface with TJ Bennett. Lots of things. Things Hope thought she wouldn’t mind having swirling around her.

She frowned at that thought. She was not the type of woman to get into trouble like the ex-monkey did. No way. None of that would ever happen. Which meant there would be nothing for TJ to clean up. That sounded like it would be perfect—what with his aversion to cleaning up monkey crap now. But she knew that wasn’t the case. TJ wasn’t simply the monkey keeper. He was the ringmaster. No matter what he told himself.

“So what kind of monkey am I?”

That corner of his mouth ticked again. “A capuchin. For sure.”

“Those are the ones that organ grinders use, right?”

His smile increased slightly. “Yes.”

“They’re cute.”

“They are.”

Well, that was nice. “I’ve only ever seen them being cute and sweet,” she said with a shrug.

“Oh, they’re a pretty aggressive breed.”

“Is that right?” What did that mean?

“Yep, they’re very territorial. They pee all over to mark their space.”

She gave him a look. “And what about that reminds you of me?” Territorial, she was not. She’d never been jealous or possessive about anything she could think of.

“The noise,” he said.

“The noise?”

“They make a lot of noise.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re quite the expert on monkeys.”

“Lots of experience.”

He said it blandly, but she got the impression he was amused. As was she. Except for the comparison with the crazy ex and the noisy monkey.

“How’d you get hooked up with your ex-monkey anyway?” She had to ask.

He didn’t answer at first, and she reached for the hem of the shirt again.

He sighed. “We were young. Met her in high school,” he said. “And she was cute. I had a crush. She needed some help, so I stepped in and we started a crazy, bad pattern.”

“What kind of help?”

He clearly didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway. “Her stepdad was abusive. He hit her, I went over and beat the crap out of him and told him if he ever touched her again, I’d make it worse. He believed me and it never happened again. She was,” he cleared his throat, “grateful.”

“She married you because she was grateful?”

“You’re nosy, you know that?”

“You’re interesting.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

She again started to lift her shirt.

“She broke my heart in high school. Twice. Then came back to me when her life went to hell and she needed someone. That time she stayed. She was unpredictable, fun, wild. I was her hero. Then I realized that’s all I was. And that she fabricated about seventy-five percent of the crap she got into to keep things working between us. All we had was the victim-hero thing. She was only turned-on by me when I was swooping in to fix things. Eventually, it fizzled out.”

“Wow, you seriously are—”

“Over it,” he said firmly. “No more drama, no more craziness.”

“I am not dramatic and crazy,” Hope protested.

“Oh sure, the pretty hippie girl who showed up on my front lawn out of the blue looking for her estranged father, who’s willing to take her shirt off for me within a few hours of meeting me, who talks about auras and is already nosing into my personal life, isn’t a bit crazy. That’s all totally normal. Plus, the long-lost family you came to meet is a mess. Honey, you have drama written all over you.”

Well, at least he thought she was pretty.

She frowned. “No.” She shook her head. “I’m very self-sufficient. I don’t get caught up in drama. I’m the one who helps other people.” And she wasn’t a hippie. Exactly. That was kind of a gray area, so she let it go.

He leaned in as if he was going to tell her a secret. “The crazy ones always say that.”

She blew out a breath. “I’m not crazy and I’m not undressing just to manipulate you.”

“You did it because you want to have sex with me? After knowing me for three hours and me being an ass for two of those three?”

“Two and a half,” she said. “And, yeah.” She shrugged. “We have chemistry. I’m drawn to your positive energies and power.” There, that would make him roll his eyes.

It did. “You’re in Nebraska. You can’t go around stripping and talking about positive energies.”

She laughed. “People in Nebraska don’t know about nudity and energy?”

“Not your kind of nudity and energy.”