NEXT TO ME (A Love Happens Novel Book 1) (4 page)

“Gleeson.”

“Oh... yes. Hi. I just recently purchased a house. From Donna. And she gave me your name and number. I need to have a security system installed. A really good one.”

“Okay, great. Easy enough. I’m going to transfer you back to Mike and he’ll take care of everything for you.” His voice was all business, polite but succinct, and she could sense him reaching for that dreadfully silent hold button.

“Wait! I’d like... I need to have the best. I’m... Well, I’m in your neighborhood and I have some questions and concerns that I think you could better help me with.” It was total bullshit, but it kept him on the line.

“No problem. We have a number of different options, depending on your specific needs, building restrictions and budgetary concerns. I can personally assure you Mike will provide an excellent system that will meet all of your expectations.”

Knowing the opportunity was lost, and truly needing the freaking alarm installed as soon as possible, Ali had no choice but to agree. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Anytime.” A beat later, he added, “Oh, and congratulations on your new home.”

The line went silent before she could respond.

She had never given him her name or address, not in the two voice mail messages she had left him and not now during this call. And he hadn’t asked her for them.

The next morning her doorbell rang, momentarily freaking her shit. Shaking off the unease—because Danny wouldn’t be so polite as to ring the bell—she walked toward the front door, knowing Scorpio was coming to assess and update her system. Peering through the peephole, she saw a young guy with longish blonde hair and a good start on a surprisingly sexy beard. He smiled and pointed to his chest, where the Scorpio company logo was clearly visible over the left front pocket of his black polo shirt. How the hell did he know she was looking at him? It was unsettling. And he didn’t look like someone named Mendoza.

Opening the door a sliver, she peeked her head out. “May I help you?”

“Hi, Ms. Ross? I’m Grady Foster from Scorpio. Here to get your alarm in order.”

Grady. From her original phone call all those weeks ago.

He didn’t look as she had imagined him then. Maybe because she had not imagined a late twenty’s-something, somewhat scruffy looking, male underwear model. As her brain worked through this latest snag, he dug into his back pocket and held out his hand.

“Here’s my drivers license.” Misreading her silence for suspicion, his voice was friendly as he assured her he was exactly who he said. “You can trust me, ma’am. If you look closely, you’ll see I gave the DMV my true weight. Now the vast majority of people lie about such a thing, but not me.” He slipped the license back into his pocket. “If I’m up front with them, then you know I’m solid, right?”

And with those charming words and that boyish smile, their friendship began. He’d never once come on to her, or given a single sign he was even considering it, and for that Ali liked him even more. Oh, there was no doubt he was a lady killer of the highest order, but she needed a friend more than anything else and Grady Foster, along with Donna, were her first real ones since she began her new life.

The sudden light that flooded onto the shadowed brick paver patio next door caught her attention and her heart ricocheted against her chest. Ten minutes to eight and he was home. Ali was more nervous than she’d been in her entire life, including the time when she was nine and stood before the stone-faced 4-H judges with her potted perennial garden, determined to beat the other entries and win the grand prize—a paid trip to summer camp at Lake Timpoochee. That she had nailed, this she was hoping to.

Tonight had to go well. He had to like her. Because somehow, despite their limited interaction and her less than honest intentions, she already liked him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sam Gleeson hated being late. Only the sound of someone scraping their teeth across a fork as they ate and country music ranked higher on his list of pet peeves. It had been drilled into him as a kid, and then literally during his military years, to be punctual for everything or face the consequences. Plus, it was just plain rude to keep people waiting. That little life rule is what had him taking a quicker than normal shower, and that was saying something. There had been times when he could be in and out in under three minutes flat. A person tended not to lollygag when there were other dudes hovering nearby, all vying for the warm water—versus the hot water—of a makeshift shower, in temporary barracks dead center in the middle of a cracked desert. It beat the hell out of a baby wipe bath in the field any day of the week, though. Sitting utterly still for long minutes at a time, hours even, while smelling like a baby’s ass was only slightly better than the scent of his own sweat in sweltering triple digit temperatures. Why the baby wipe people couldn’t make one that smelled like pine trees or new car scent was beyond him. Any chemist worth his salt could easily create the formula.

Hours of watching and waiting, knowing the shot he needed to make could come at any minute, or maybe not until fucking tomorrow, gave a guy time to think about such things.

Raking his fingers through his damp hair, Sam jogged silently down the carpeted stairs, grabbing the bottle of Cabernet off the kitchen counter before heading out the back door. “Let’s go, Pete. We’re late for our date.”

The puppy bounded past him, a ball of happy energy, running sideways toward his new neighbor’s porch. It seemed Pete had a little crush on the girl next door, too.

Sam had never even seen her move in. No large moving truck had blocked the narrow street, with uniformed guys carrying box after color-coded box through the propped open front door. No beat up and borrowed pick-up truck had backed into the driveway, kitchen table and chairs bungee-corded in the bed. He considered himself a highly observant person, both by nature and training, and he’d seen nothing. The house had been vacant, sitting silent with the faded shutters closed one day, and the next he’d heard the unmistakable sound of Eminem filtering through the open windows as the charming old house suddenly came back to life.

And just that quick, Ali had walked into his world.

He had never been one for signs, that was more Donna’s thing, but the timing of it had him thinking. Wanting more than the physically beneficial, short-term acquaintances he had sought out in his younger days, Sam had been exploring the idea of a more permanent situation. Finding someone that he could look forward to coming home to and who didn’t have outrageous expectations and demands that he would feel obligated to fulfill. The last fucking thing Sam wanted to do on the weekend was go antiques shopping or worse, hit the club scene in the Gaslamp District. Did all this mean he was looking for a wife? Hell, he wouldn’t go that far, but the possibility had occurred to him. The thought of one woman for the rest of his life—or no new pussy ever again, as Asher had so eloquently put it—didn’t send him running like it used to.

Donna had hugged him like he’d just touched the face of Jesus when he had mentioned this to her last month. Minus the part about no new pussy.

“Aww, my Sammy is growing up,” she had gushed, amidst the utter chaos that was her kitchen. His sister had a hard and fast rule in place which required him to make the nearly hour long drive from his office downtown to her house in Chula Vista once a month for dinner. They would catch up on each other’s lives as Sam ate a gourmet meal from a dining table covered with everything from broken crayons to last week’s unwashed laundry. He swore there were war ravaged areas in Fallujah that were less a wreck than her home. Donna was good at many things, including cooking, but she sucked at housekeeping. Their old man was probably rolling over in his grave because of it.

Despite their eight year age difference, the two of them had always been close. As a boy, Donna was the one who took care of him, filling in for their absent father, who was career military and therefore a husband and father second and third respectively, and their mother, who spent her lonely days smoking menthols and drinking gin at the local country club until she’d pickled her liver to death when he was seven. It was Donna who taught him how to ride a bike without training wheels, how to throw the perfect curve ball, and how to properly ask a girl to the homecoming dance. The only time Sam had ever truly defied her was when he enrolled in West Point, ignoring her pleas for him to attend a regular university, join a fraternity and eventually become a mediocre doctor or shady lawyer. Instead he had stood firm on his decision to follow in their father’s footsteps, a misguided attempt to gain not only his attention, but his approval.

Sam had picked out the old man’s mahogany casket two years ago, having never received either one. He didn’t regret the years he spent in the Army, though. Just the opposite, in fact. It had brought him to the place he was today, his company thriving and his bank account growing. Joining forces with Asher Coleson, who was former Delta Force and still a highly sought after recruit for the CIA, to open Scorpio had been a satisfying endeavor for them both. Sam took care of the domestic assignments while Ash, who preferred to live his life from the outside looking in, took charge of any foreign jobs. Their bond had been created and solidified during their years in the Army, teaming up for countless operations, both black and otherwise. As tight as brothers, it had made sense for that partnership to continue into civilian life. Could he say they were the best of friends? Not really, no. Ash wasn’t the easiest guy to get close to, and while Sam was sure there were deep, dark reasons as to why, he’d yet to hear the guy voice them. A shared bottle of Jack had loosened his lips one night, after an intense mission had gone sideways and two of their teammates had been killed, but all Sam’s drunken memory could recall was snippets about love and hate, and a girl named Olivia.

Ash never spoke of it—or her—again.

But for Sam, the next natural step in life loomed large. Fed up to fucking here with high maintenance women, the type with caked on make-up and closets full of designer clothes, he’d been laying low for the last several months, wondering if he could find a woman who wanted him simply for him. Not because of the mythical superman aura that surrounded Special Forces veterans. Not because he could cover their rent when they spent too much money at Neiman Marcus. And sure as shit not because he could make their cheating ex-boyfriend jealous or worse, their overprotective daddy mad.

Christ, he could hear Ash’s voice in his head now, telling him to grow a pair because he sounded like a fucking girl instead of a man with his pick of immoral women, willing to satisfy his every whim. Maybe Mendoza was dosing his coffee with estrogen. Pretty soon he’d be feeling bloated and a little moody. It would go a long way toward explaining why his usual slap and tickle routine with the ladies wasn’t cutting it anymore.

“Knock, knock,” he said, stopping at Ali’s open doorway, not wanting to cross the threshold until she invited him in. Pete had no such qualms. “I brought wine. And a dog with no manners.”

She smiled and waved him in from her spot at the kitchen island, kneeling down to greet the bouncing puppy. “Who needs manners when you’re this adorable, right, Pete?”

Her living room, which was open to a large, updated kitchen and casual dining room, was shadowed, the only light coming from a cluster of fat, white candles burning on the coffee table in front of an ivory slip-covered sofa and the bright light over her commercial-grade gas cooktop. The atmosphere might have looked staged for seduction, if it wasn’t for the hushed sounds of a popular reality show playing on the huge flat screen TV occupying one wall.

Obviously a girl who took her television seriously, Ali stood leaning forward against the kitchen island, an opened bottle of white wine and a half empty glass on the counter in front in her. Her gaze never strayed from him as he slowly walked toward her and Sam wondered if she was using the barrier of the large, granite-topped island to keep him at a distance. If so, it wasn’t working. The heat in her eyes as she assessed him from head to toe told a different story. The woman was a hot, blonde contradiction wrapped in a lithe body and she’d piqued his interest like no other had in a long damn time. He knew she’d been watching him every morning, always huddled in her deck chair unabashedly tracking him as he finished his run, but never saying a word. And after her less than subtle dismissal of him last night on the beach, her surprise invitation for coffee this morning was that much more interesting. But if she thought he would play nice, letting her make all the moves while they danced delicately around their attraction to each other, she was wrong.

“It’s red,” he said with a shrug, walking around the island and handing her the bottle of Cabernet, her sky blue eyes widening as he reached his hand out and ran it along a soft lock of long hair, where it curled down to lay against her chest. “Pretty.”

“Thanks,” she whispered, both to the gift and the compliment, as she placed the wine in a rack alongside several others, her hand a little unsteady. “Color doesn’t matter to me. If it’s wine, then I’ll drink it.”

Sam didn’t move, hovering in the space she had just occupied, her reaction to him fascinating. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a woman nervous. The vipers he seemed to attract always went straight for the jugular.

“I have a vast array of beer for you to choose from. A plethora, really.” She ticked them off on her hand. “Light, lager or ale. Blonde, dark, or fruit flavored. Did you know that they sell beer flavored ice cream in Germany? And that a beer enthusiast is called a cerevisaphile?”

Skittish to confident in a matter of seconds? Yeah, this girl was going to be trouble.

Nodding at the pale ale she held out to him, he twisted the cap off and tossed it on the counter. “I don’t think I want to be known as anything ending in phile. But I could get on board with the ice cream.”

Making a face, she motioned him to the sofa, glass of wine in her hand as she settled on the opposite end from him. They watched in silence as Pete circled a spot on the sisal area rug next to them before lying down, asleep within seconds.