Page 34 of Take Me Tender

He rolled down his window and let the salty breeze mix with the air-conditioning, his head bursting with all that had happened in his first hour of the morning.

Nikki’s non-reaction to their night before.

Their fleeting concern over the missing Fern.

His chef delivering a blow to his heart: “Some of that stuff, you have to know, Jay, some of that stuff is tasteless. They mix it with Gatorade or fruit juice and then…”

His snot of a cousin finishing him off: “You’re the family’s Peter Pan.”

Christ. No wonder he was desperate to escape that house. More caffeine and male companionship were what he required to restore order to his life. To regain the simplicity he craved.

He pulled into the parking lot of Gabe’s café a few minutes later. At this time of day, late morning, it was too early for the mixed-sex lunch crowd. Now, the patrons were most likely to be all-male—day laborers eating almuerzo because they started work at dawn, or starving surf dudes just in from their first go at the waves.

The coffee he ordered at the counter came quick and its heat burned his palm through the paper cup. He inhaled the bitter scent and the greasier one of the fish and chips the guy in front of him had purchased. Then he turned toward the L-shaped seating area, looking for an empty spot among the crowd of occupied white plastic tables and chairs.

“Jay!” The voice’s gender was already an unhappy prospect. But when he looked in its direction, he couldn’t avoid Cassandra’s come-hither wave. “Over here.”

Putting a polite mask on the beast he felt inside, he threaded his way toward her. Maybe she just wanted to say hello.

Yeah. Because that’s just the way his luck was going. Everything his way, and it wasn’t going to take an act of Congress to get Nikki back into his bed tonight.

Wait—was that what he wanted? Nikki for more than just one night?

But that wouldn’t simplify anything, he knew, and he shoved the notion from his mind as Cassandra gestured to the chair beside hers and shut the laptop that had been open on the table. “Keep me company,” she said.

He shrugged, accepting his fate. Why not? Sure, she was female, but he’d always found her one of the more restful sorts. And that’s what he needed. A few quiet moments to get his head together.

She smiled as he settled into the plastic chair and moved her own steaming cup away from the table’s edge. “I didn’t get to say much to you earlier this morning.”

“You looked as if you had places to go and people to see.”

“People I thought to see, anyway. I’m hoping to catch up with Gabe here this morning. It’s his usual payroll day. But…”

“But?”

With both hands, she pushed her long fall of hair over her shoulders. “But Gabe has an annoying habit of going AWOL.”

Another voice joined the discussion. “AWOL assumes I have someone I’m required to report to.”

Ah, the person in question. Both Jay and Cassandra glanced up, and Jay couldn’t help but wince. The other man looked like a walking bender: His black hair was uncombed, his dark, five-o’clock shadow would have been edgy two days before, but now, paired with rumpled khakis and a half-buttoned shirt, he looked like Bogey’s better-looking, taller twin, just off The African Queen.

Gabe flopped into the chair on the other side of Jay and reached a long arm across the table to grab Cassandra’s cup. He threw back his head to take a swallow, then snapped it forward again, his eyes bugging as he slammed the drink to the table. “What is that?” he choked out. “Surely we don’t heat and serve lawn fertilizer.”

“Herbal tea. I brought my own bag over from the shop. You provided the boiling water.”

Cassandra’s smile beamed sunshine, but it seemed to hurt Gabe’s eyes. He squinted and half-turned his face away. “Damon,” he yelled in the direction of the counter. “Bring me a quart of coffee, will you? Black and bitter.”

“Just like your mood,” Cassandra said, her voice as sugary as her smile was warm. “How fitting.”

“We can’t all be vegan and virtuous, Froot Loop,” he retorted. “Christ, what the hell’s wrong with you? Your cheeks are too rosy and your hair’s too damn shiny. And can’t you give all that smiling happiness a rest?”

His mood lightening, Jay sat back. Maybe it was perverse of him, but the battle of the sexes didn’t feel so life-and-death when he watched others engaged in it as well. Hell, maybe he could take some tips from Gabe and handle Nikki just as he handled Cassandra—which was not at all, and while wearing a bewhiskered scowl.

Except Cassandra didn’t appear the least put off by her landlord’s ill-temper. “You promised to meet me at the Chamber of Commerce meeting last night. You weren’t there.”

“That was last night? No. Last night was Tuesday. Your meeting is Wednesday.”

“And this is Thursday. Gabe, did you have a blackout or something?”

“No!” His scowl deepened and he looked around him, as if getting desperate. “Where’s my coffee?”

Jay curled his own cup close to his chest. “I’m not sharing.”

Cassandra leaned across the table. “And I’m happy to inform you you’re now the chairperson of the parking committee. As those things inevitably go, in your absence, you were elected.”

The other man’s head swung back to pin her with his bloodshot gaze. “God damn it, Cassandra. You put my name in, I’ll bet. That’s not fair.”

“Don’t blame me. I’m the one who sent you a reminder e-mail.” She shrugged. “It’s not my fault you bury yourself.”

“I’m not six feet under—not yet anyway, and when I go, I’m starting to think of taking you with me.” He yanked her laptop toward him and flipped up the top even as she made a strangled sound of protest. “And you didn’t send me an e-mail. I’ll prove it.”

Just then, Gabe’s quart of coffee arrived. It distracted him from Cassandra’s computer and as she half-rose to reclaim it, the screen bloomed with a photo of Nikki. Without thinking, Jay grabbed the other woman’s wrist to stop her from shutting it down once again.

He heard Cassandra’s nervous clearing of her throat. “I, um, took some pictures with my cell phone at the restaurant opening. You know, I thought I might use them to, uh, advertise the shop or my dress designs or, um…”

Jay barely heard her. His attention remained focused on the screen as a Nikki slide show started. It was that damn dress, he decided, that made it impossible for him to look away. He’d never fully appreciated the back view, and he could see it in this shot, one in which she was standing beside the glass wall and gazing out over the ocean.

Her hair tumbled to her shoulders, a riot of sun-shot brown, and then there were the delicate wings of her shoulder blades that his gaze bumped over on its way to that intriguing sway at her back. God! How had he missed that last night? He wanted nothing more than to bare it for his touch—to give it a raunchy roll with his cock as he sucked on that innocent spot on her nape so often left naked by her little-girl-gone-grown-up braids.

She didn’t know how horny that innocuous hairstyle rendered him.

That photo dissolved too soon and another emerged. It was Nikki and he on the dance floor, their gazes locked together. He could remember that moment, his eyes focused on her mouth and how tempting her just-tongued lips looked. How ready for his kiss. In his mind that instant morphed into one from last night, when he watched her body claiming his wet cock, sliding inside her as she came.

It was back, that buzz in his blood, that incredible, drug-like high he’d found when her orgasm had triggered his. No lay had ever been better for him, no matter how quick or lazy or downright dirty. No bed partner, no woman had ever fascinated him, touched him, fucked him like Nikki had.

The dance floor photo faded and he found himself reaching out for it, his fingers slipping back to the tabletop as the next one materialized. It was he and Nikki again, the two of them leaving the party, his arm around her shoulders.

Her bound to him…where she belonged.

And then it hit him. The euphoria he found in her body. The panic when he’d woken and she was gone from his bed. The way she had of making him so freakin’ crazy.

This was it.

It.

What he’d never really understood. What he hadn’t truly believed in until this moment. He couldn’t have been more blown away if he’d come downstairs on Christmas morning and found a red-suited fat guy spreading presents under the tree.

His breath backed up in his lungs as he realized what had happened. Damn it.

Damn it!

Those receptors in his brain had finally opened up and he…he was in love with Nikki.

Prickly, independent, not-even-certain-she-liked-him Nikki Carmichael.

Could it be true? Could it be as simple as that?

That his life would never, ever be simple again?

The photo faded. The next was Nikki alone, a close-up shot that did justice to her unusual blue and green eyes, the cut of her cute nose, the red of her mouth, and the jut of her stubborn chin. Apparently Cassandra had Photoshopped the image, because now the color leached away, turning Nikki’s face to stark black-and-white and giving Jay a new perspective of her looks. With his attention not so riveted on her mouth or her unusual eyes, there was something about her…

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