Love, Laughter, and Happily Ever Afters Collection (33 page)

“So come over after. That’s around when the girls eat on the weekends anyway. Say yes, Tessa. I like spending time with you. I’ve been thinking about you all week.”

Definitely ruined for all other men.

“Okay, yes. And you can put me down for takeout veggie paella.”

* * * * *

“I’LL CALL ABBY and ask her to stay here with you two,” said Brian firmly, as he filled up his plate with food and took a seat at the table across from Tessa. “I have third quarter open house conferences until late that night. And since Becky’s folks are going to be there too for Becky’s classes, you girls would be unchaperoned until after nine o’clock.” He shook his head. “No can do, Sky-bug.”

Seeing his daughter wind up with what looked to be a hell of a pitch, he settled in for a fast one.

“Dad, I’m almost fourteen. I can totally stay home alone. Becky’s older sister used to babysit Becky and her little brother when she was fourteen.”

Becky echoed that last rebuttal point, her expression serious, her fast-bobbing head silently cheering her friend on for all thirteen-year-old girls everywhere.

“During the day, sure,” Brian volleyed back, glad that he’d done his research for this particular battle—the girls seemed to forget that parents actually talk to each other when their children are busy plotting. “But that was never at night. Again, sorry, kiddo. Discussion closed. We can pick this argument up again when you actually are fourteen.”

Game, set, match.

Skylar sighed in a you’re-lucky-I-love-you way and the two girls grabbed their plates and headed out back to their fully stockpiled tent, Becky praising Skylar for being
so close
this time.

Tessa just chuckled, waiting until the girls slid the patio door shut before teasing, “Do you honestly believe you’re going to suddenly be able to loosen those apron strings next year?”

He gave her a look that cried out
Judas
, and she chuckled even louder, miming the zipping of her mouth shut and throwing away the key.

“Ha!” he let out in disbelief. “If I thought that had any chance of working, I’d steal that invisible key and bury it in my pocket.”

Brian watched as Tessa paused in surprise and then tipped her head back to laugh so hard she almost fell off her chair. He’d never seen her without those colorful weekly-changing streaks in her hair—without it, her ink-black hair framed her face with a softness that made her look more delicate, vulnerable. Infinitely more memorable.

And when she laughed. Jesus. The effect could stop traffic.

It didn’t take much for her dainty fairy-like features—dark catlike eyes, petal soft skin, and full, just-kissed lips that curved up at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling—to become the picture of unabashed joy.

That’s what it was. Joy. Her eyes would fill to the brim with the stuff, and transform into those—for lack of better description—‘dancing rainbow eyes’ that Beth used to always go gooey over whenever she’d see it happen on smiling, cherubic children. Shining with humor, arched like two little half-moons over high, laughing cheekbones, those eyes alone could make anyone in a fifty-yard vicinity smile.

A stark contrast to the week prior.

For days after that night, he hadn’t been able to shake the image of her telling him about her heartbreaking past, her eyes brimming with tears she simply refused to shed, her broken-angel features almost haunting in its pain.

He stared at her in wonder. “Seriously, Tessa, how is it that you can still laugh like that?”

“Like what?” She blinked, little bursts of laughter still seeping into her voice.

“Like the universe hasn’t taken everything out of you and crushed your spirit, like it hasn’t squeezed the humor out of your soul with its selective brutality.”

She looked startled for a moment, but then recovered with a slow nod. “Sometimes I forget you know exactly what that feels like.” Shaking her head, she said softly, “For a while, I couldn’t laugh. Especially after Willow died. It’s not easy to keep laughing. You have to be open to surprises, work at not shutting yourself off to them. When you focus so much on surviving, nothing is a surprise because you’ve prepared yourself for everything. That’s why nothing is funny anymore. You can’t laugh if you don’t let the unexpected sneak up on you and take you by surprise.”

She gave him a determined look and stood up. “Here, try this—go over to that window and look outside. Mentally catalog everything you see.”

He looked out at the pitch-black scenery on the other side of the glass. “Everything I see in the dark?”

“Just do it. There’s enough street light. Be quiet and concentrate.”

The woman was cute when she was being bossy.

A tiny bit curious over where this was going, he turned and did as he was instructed, staring off into the night and taking inventory of the neighbor’s fence off to the right, the house with the weird rock garden out front, three SUVs… He heard her shuffling around behind him. “What are you doing back there?”

“Stop getting distracted. Keep going,” she said sternly.

When she fell all but silent behind him, he focused back on the bizarre task at hand. Street curb, tree, fire hydrant…

“Okay, now turn around and tell me what you see.”

He pivoted toward her and heard it before he saw it—the airy hiss that registered in his brain a split second too late.

Followed by an ice-cold splatter webbing over his face.

Gaping, he swiped a hand down his face to clear the stuff out of his eyes.

The woman had actually sprayed him with a can of whipped cream.

Tessa’s jaw fell open and she backed up a step. “I swear, I didn’t know it was going to do that. I was just aiming for your mouth.”

With a slow, simmering smile, he wiped the rest of the cream off on the sleeve of his shirt as he stalked toward her. “You’re so going to get it.”

Her eyes flicked down to take in just how much white foam was now staining his partly rolled sleeves and her lips twitched in a flagrant lack of remorse.

Despite the fact that she was laughing at his expense, he smiled wider. Mostly because he’d just added that escaped grin to the tally of things he was going to collect on.

“Now, Brian. Let’s be rational,” she tried reasoning. “You can’t blame me for that food canister malfunction.”

Another tiny giggle.

Check.

The closer he got, the more he wondered why exactly she wasn’t even trying to run—

He found out moments later when she launched the whipped cream toward the dining room and bolted in the opposite direction toward the sliding patio door.

Clever little prey. Too bad she put too much stock in the bottle of whipped cream.

He snagged her by the belt loops and crushed her body back against his. The sudden explosion of ear-singeing curse words at full soprano intermixed with those drunken fairy giggles of hers had a ball of laughter building in his chest.

Naturally, she followed that up with the last possible thing he expected.

Rather than attempt to escape, she instead spun around and grabbed the two sides of his half-buttoned flannel shirt—or as Skylar called it, his country music award outfit—and rammed her face into the opening. She smooshed her face against the plain black t-shirt he wore underneath, and wrapped the two flannel sides around her head like a protective bubble from any whipped cream retaliation. Her laughter continued, of course, buried though it was against his chest.

“
This
is your defense of choice?” He burst out laughing. “The ostrich-head-in-the-sand move?”

He took a few steps forward and cracked up harder when she shuffled back quickly to keep pace. He was certain if the girls were to happen upon them in the house now, hopped up on candy as he was sure they’d be, they’d freak out thinking they were seeing an ass-backward centaur.

Two muffled words vibrated against his sternum.

“What was that?” He grinned, deliberately mishearing her. “Was that an ‘I’m sorry?’”

That smoked her out.

“I said, ‘You’re welcome,’” she flung out quickly before diving back in.

Not nearly quick enough, however.

An indignant cry pierced the air as he smeared a dollop of salvaged whipped cream down across her face.

“Thank you, sweetheart.” He kissed her forehead between side-splitting chuckles. “That was the first belly-deep laugh I’ve had in years.”

She gave him an adorably disgruntled pout, and used his shirt to wipe her face before eventually chuckling and smiling up at him from ear to ear. “You should laugh like that more.” Her eyes twinkled with more of that infectious joy. “It sounds good on you.”

SUDDENLY, SHE FELT his warm hand cup her cheek and slide along her jawline. Just a gentle, mild little caress to swipe away a smudge of whipped cream at the corner of her mouth. But for some reason, it inspired her tongue to flick out and curl around the pad of his thumb.

Oh my.

An intense fireball of hunger flashed,
burned
in his eyes and then without a sound, he pivoted, grabbed her hand, and quickly towed her to his bedroom.

The door slammed shut behind him, cloaking them in darkness.

“You drive me crazy, you know that?”

God, his voice had dropped even lower, to a sexy thunder down under rumble.

“Crazy in a good way or a bad way?” she managed to ask as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light.

“Both.” He circled slowly around her as if she were a dangerous animal…he was getting ready to pounce on. “You have no filter whatsoever. Not with what you do or say, and especially not with how you react.”

“That’s not
my
fault. You can just point that finger at yourself, buddy,” she grumbled back before snapping her mouth shut.

Alright, so maybe he was right about the filter thing.

“
What
?”

Man, if looks could strip. She’d never felt this naked before, this out of control. Inwardly, she sighed. The guy just brought out the uncivilized in her.

Oh well. She came this far—may as well see where this ride ends. “You heard me.” Her chin came up defiantly. “I can’t think when you talk in that ridiculously sexy voice. Or when your biceps suddenly double in size in the middle of even the simplest of tasks, like lifting a coffee mug. And don’t get me started on your eyes. My god, I almost walked into a wall the last time you smiled and your eyes went from that soft ocean blue to deep turquoise. I mean who does that?!”

It was like she just couldn’t stop talking.

When he came to a standstill and stared at her like she’d lost her mind, she huffed, “It’s simply not reasonable to expect a girl to have a filter with all that steamy-eyed, bicep-bulging, talking-like-a-wet-dream-voice-over madness going on!”

Silence.

Huh, so where might one
buy
one of these filters, she wondered.

With a quiet curse, he stomped toward her and picked her up by the waist, not even pausing in his stride as he kept right on walking to the bed. Well, if he going to take her for a ride…

She speared her hands into his thick, tousled waves and nearly purred with pleasure.

“Stop being so damn open,” he rasped, sounding like a man about ready to do the unimaginable, his lips a whisper away from hers.

“Stop being so damn irresistible,” she threw back, digging her heels into the carpet until his body ran flush into hers and bulldozed her straight back, flat onto the bed.

The air wedged in her throat as she watched the outline of his granite-etched jaw clench and release. He was so beautiful.
Oh to hell with it.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and touched her lips to his throat. The quiet male hiss she heard shot her attention down to the fact that he was more than a little happy to see her. Impressively so. And her sigh of pleasure against his throat served as a live current of electricity that she felt run through him…everywhere.

His hands slid into her hair and tilted her head back before he brought his lips crashing down onto hers.

“You’re so mind-screwingly sexy,” he muttered gruffly against her lips before his tongue made another sweeping raid in her mouth. “For chrissakes, I feel like I have zero control around you.”

FOR ONCE, Tessa didn't have a snappy comeback for him. And despite his current state, which was anything but funny, Brian grinned over that as he flicked his tongue out to slide along the seam of her lips in triumph.

But then he nearly bit his own tongue off.

“I like making you lose control,” she whispered, sliding a hand down past his waistband.

He jackknifed upright and flipped her onto the bed, pulling her hand up out of his boxer briefs to pin both of her wrists behind her back, wedged against the mattress.

She wriggled against him. “You’re always holding my hands down. Don’t tell me, you have a thing for bondage?” she teased as she tried to escape his grip.

When he couldn’t stop his hips from bucking sharply against hers in response, she stilled and met his gaze. “Um…do you? Because if that’s what you’re into, we can uh—”

Keeping her wrists in place with one hand, he clapped the other over her mouth in exasperation. “Don't you
dare
finish that sentence.”

Her body stopped squirming finally but there were still the equivalent of floating cartoon question marks in her eyes.

She was going to be the death of him.

“Have I fantasized about bondage?” he rumbled, his voice straining at the seams. “Of course. What guy wouldn’t want a woman at his sexual mercy for a change?” He let out another silent oath when her eyes sparked with naked, hungry curiosity. “Do I want to try it with you? Probably, one day. It’d be hot as hell.”

“And if you don’t stop talking, that one day is going to be today—all your work deadlines bedamned. So for the love of God, stop pushing me before you sentence us to an even longer bout of hot, hard, take-you-six-ways-to-Sunday sex.”

CHAPTER SEVEN