Page 9 of Inviting Trouble
Mad turned outside of the bathroom in the hallway. “I’m sorry. Thank you. I’m just worked up. I want to play it cool, but I’m more likely to blurt something stupid.”
“Just be yourself.”
“Yeah, that’ll work,” Mad said under her breath. She could do hanging with the guys, she could do insults, she could do hip checks and high fives. What she couldn’t do was flirt. When she wanted a guy, she baldly stated it, usually after a game of basketball, softball, or a really good sparring match at the dojo. Parker Shaw was way beyond want. At least he had been. Hell, maybe once she managed to get close to him again, she wouldn’t even be attracted to the clean-cut straitlaced military man he’d turned into. Maybe she was freaking out for nothing.
Charlotte nudged her shoulder. “I have complete faith in you.”
Mad’s throat got tight. They returned to the bar and the women fussed over her makeup. “Shut up, bitches. I’m still the same.” Awkward, nervous, and in over her head.
“Well, you’re a very pretty bitch now,” Hailey said.
Mad’s cheeks burned and she quickly took her seat at the bar. Next thing she knew Charlotte had ordered the next round and, after her third tequila, Mad blurted, “I’m not a virgin.”
No one was surprised.
“You are twenty-six,” Hailey pointed out. The book club had treated her to dinner for her birthday last week. She still couldn’t get over how damn nice women friends were to each other. Guys never picked up the tab for dinner.
“I didn’t wait for Park and now it’s too late,” Mad confessed, getting to the heart of the matter.
“Honey, no one waits ten years,” Charlotte said in a sympathetic tone.
“Fuck it,” Mad said, pounding her fist on the bar.
By the time Hailey dropped her off back home, well into the appointed party time for a grand entrance, Mad was flying high with the women’s words of encouragement and a healthy dose of alcohol-fueled confidence. All she needed now was to change into jeans for that hot girl look Charlotte recommended.
“Look out, Park, here I come,” she muttered under her breath, making her way unsteadily to the front door for her bigta-dahentrance.
Chapter Three
Parker Shaw settled in on the comfortable old brown sofa, his former bunk, with a beer and took in his adopted family, the Campbells, gathered around him. “Damn, it’s good to be home.”
“It’s good to have you home,” Joe Campbell said, clapping a hand on Park’s shoulder. The older man was as close to a dad as Park ever had. “I’ll get the food. Josh, give me a hand.”
“We missed your ugly face,” Josh said, palming Park’s face and giving it a shove.
“Yeah, yeah,” Park said.
They headed to the kitchen. It was just him, Ty, Alex, and Alex’s toddler daughter, Vivian, who kept climbing the stairs and sliding down on her butt. She kept Alex running, making sure she didn’t take a header. She’d climbed over the baby gate so many times Alex had finally removed it for her own safety.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Ty said, smacking the side of his leg. Ty had given him a signature Ty hug earlier at the airport, which involved a lot of enthusiastic pounding on the back.
“You too.”
Bit by bit, he felt himself relax from his long day of travelling from the Air Force base in Germany to Eastman, Connecticut. As each of his family members walked in, he felt that hole in his heart fill a little more. He’d missed his family. But he’d needed to prove himself, to be the man Joe had raised him to be. Joe had taken Park in when he was ten, even offering to be his foster dad, but Park’s mom wouldn’t sign the papers. And the kicker was, Joe had already been a single dad to six kids. For that, Joe would always have the honorary title of dad.
“Where’s everyone else?” he asked Ty. But what he really wanted to know was where’s Mad? He’d seen her only a few times over the last ten years and had been careful to keep his distance. It was the only way to make the goodbye easier on her. Ty had told him Mad hadn’t handled his leaving well at all the first time, picking fights and getting in trouble at school. He didn’t want to disrupt her life; he wanted her to be happy.
“It’s too hard on her,” Ty had said on Park’s first visit home for Christmas. “She worries about you and then she gets angry and lashes out in ways that only end up hurting herself. Keep your distance and it’ll help keep her on the right track.”
Park swallowed hard. Mad had always been extra special to him. The little pip-squeak he’d missed out on in his own messed-up family. The little sister who lived.
Ty clapped him on the back. “Just until you’re home for good. It messes with her head too much otherwise.”
Park had reluctantly agreed. He protected her at all costs.
Now Ty was giving him the update on everyone. “Jake’s up in Maine with Claire. We’ll see him next weekend at the wedding.”
Park grunted. Jake was the oldest Campbell and about to marry the movie star Claire Jordan in a private Christmas Eve wedding at her log cabin in Maine. He couldn’t wait to hear that story, how Jake snagged the sexiest woman alive.
