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  Murph kicked his boot off and looked up. “Meaning?”

  “Low-class trash, desperation, a way of life.” In other words, the Dantes.

  He shrugged. “So tell her it’s not like that with us. Tell her we’re rich.”

  “No,” I said grimly.

  Our eyes met. “That’s stupid.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Sounds like you don’t trust her.”

  It did sound that way, didn’t it? I stayed silent.

  Murph’s dark eyebrows went up. “You’re selling yourself short, Finn.”

  I shrugged.

  He got to his feet and shook his head. “It’s not like you, buddy. I don’t get it.”

  I watched him walk off to join the others. I heard whoops and hollers as Beck let go of the rope and careened into the water. I sat down on the cooler. Murph didn’t get it, and I barely did either.

  All I knew was I wasn’t going to lose Janey over being a pawnshop guy. And I also wasn’t going to try to make it okay for her. It either was okay in her eyes or it wasn’t, and I wasn’t going explain myself to make it so.

  I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be okay with her.

  And that scared me way more than it should have, considering she’d only been in my life a few days.

  Which put me in a tight spot.

  Janey’s spot was tighter, though, because she was scared of everything.

  I was only scared of losing her.

  When I thought of all the shit I’d had to be afraid of in my life, and that list was long, starting with my dad, going straight through to Afghanistan, it was humbling and fucking annoying to think that Janey Mac could spin me up like this.

  Thirteen

  ~ Jane ~

  TURNS OUT KATIE’S event had been overbooked too. Guess it was becoming an epidemic in the annals of Destiny Falls catering.

  Katie and I exchanged a look as the mother of the bride tried to explain how it had happened, her face red from drink and exertion. She wasn’t doing a good job and finally hissed, “Just make do,” and marched off to dance with her new son-in-law.

  In unison, Katie and I turned to survey the larger-than-anticipated crowd picking lobster appetizers and champagne spritzers off of trays.

  “Make do with what?” Katie murmured.

  “I can run out and grab more champagne,” I offered. “And put out lobster traps.”

  “Where is Sid?” she muttered, and as if in answer, her phone rang. It was Sid, her most experienced staff member. He’d been in a car accident. He was okay, but he was not, definitely not, going to make it, Katie stared at me, blank-faced. I knew that look. It was the same thing as nodding as if you had a plan, when inside you were screaming.

  I grabbed a tray and started serving. I saw it as pre-karma. Also, I liked her.

  It’s best to build emotional debt in people you like because why do it to the people you don’t? Who wants to stick around to collect?

  I came home midday with food on my clothes and the deep-down satisfaction that comes from knowing your clients weren’t the only insane ones.

  My car crunched up to the house and Max bounded out to greet me. I petted him, and he drooled on me, then hurtled around the house to chase innocent things around the meadow.

  I started to go inside, then stopped. Finn was inside, playing guitar.

  I stopped and listened. Rich and ghostly, it drifted out to where I stood in the warm afternoon air. I didn’t know the tune. It sounded entirely improvised, building off some core bluesy beat. It was sexy, dark, rough-edged, both simple and complicated, with long rhythms and complex riffs, so soulful it almost felt reverent. A sultry prayer. I stood and let his music pour over me like a force of nature, coming down through the blue-and-gold summertime day.

  Music was in Finn. Inside of him, deep, moving through him like a river. You could feel it in every thread of sound and note.

  Damn. He was really, really good.

  I need to be tapped in like that.

  I suspected it would not come during the Sandler-Ross’s event.

  Which is why it felt so good knowing Finn was inside, making that music, waiting for me.

  The house was cool from the shade of a huge oak and the fan overhead and the river breeze coming up through the open windows. Finn sat on the couch, guitar in his lap. He was barefoot, wearing faded jeans and a loose black T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved, and his jawline was dark and scruffy. He was playing, one ankle kicked overtop his knee.

  “Hi,” he said, looking up, still playing.

  “Everyone gone?” I asked, bending over to unstrap a shoe.

  “All gone.”

  “Good. I need to rest my eyes.”

  “Right.”

  The silvery-steel song changed, became slower and more bluesy. I held on to the back of a kitchen chair and kicked off the shoe while he watched.

  “Those are nice shoes,” he said.

  “They are.” Four hundred dollars of nice, and worth it. They were comfortable and looked great. Also, they were Fluevogs. “Fluevog,” I told him.

  He paused in his playing. “Güten tag.”

  I laughed. “Gesundheit. Fluevog. It’s the name of the shoe company.”

  “Ah. Does all your stuff have a name, Janey? Your sheets and your shoes and your clothes?”

  “Yes, Finn,” I said patiently. “Your clothes have names too. Hat, shirt, pants.”

  “Keep going.” He swept his thumb down the strings and a steely cascade of notes tumbled out.

  I grinned as I reached down to undo my other shoe.

  “You need cowboy boots,” he told me, and I said, “I absolutely do not need cowboy boots. Why do I need cowboy boots?”

  “Because they’ll be comfortable, and you’ll look sexy as hell.”

  Hm. He had a point.

  I slid off the other shoe and crossed to him. He looked at my shirt more closely. “Some wedding.” I stood in front of him and he touched his index finger to one of the stains on my shirt. “Food fight?”

  “I helped Katie out. I like her.”

  He pinched my shirt and pulled me down to his mouth. “I don’t think she likes you.”

  We kissed and he revved me up with one hand on my hip, the other at the nape of my neck, his tongue doing its thing in my mouth until I simply surrendered and lowered myself to straddle him, a knee on either side of him, guitar clumsily between us.

  When we broke apart, I was breathless.

  “Hm,” I said. “I think I’ll get in more food fights.”

  His return smile was good. He rested his palms on my knees.

  I reached down and touched the neck of the guitar between us, strumming the strings awkwardly. “Were you serious about teaching me to play?”

  “Sure. If you were serious about learning.”

  “Very. I loved listening to you play outside just now.”

  His gaze became more appraising. “Did you?”

  I nodded. “It was like a prayer.”

  He looked startled.

  “A sexy prayer.”

  He grinned. “Janey, you’ve got quite a way of seeing things.”

  “Yeah. Nuts. I know. But you pray with your music, Finn. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s amazing.”

  “You think?” Beneath me, his thighs shifted, like his body couldn’t contain movement. His head tipped to the side.

  I nodded firmly. “I know. You’re tapped in.” I strummed the guitar again.

  “To what?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” For some reason, the words came out much softer than I’d intended. Our eyes were unwavering on each other. I didn’t know what Finn was tapped into. Just that it was deep and soulful, like an ocean, and that I wasn’t even close.

  He slid his hands up the tops of my thighs a little more, until the guitar stopped his journey.

  I strummed the guitar again and murmured, “Can’t believe some girl didn’t marry you off before now.” I slid a sideways glan
ce up.

  His blue eyes were waiting for me. “Lots of girls have wanted to marry me."

  “Oh really? Well, aren’t you something?”

  He laughed. “But I didn’t want to marry them. I’ll bet you’ve had guys after you.”

  Well, no. Being “after” someone was different than wanting to marry them, and no one had ever asked or even hinted at marrying me. Because if you never slowed down, no one could catch up enough to even make it to a third date, let alone pop the question.

  His thighs were hot and hard beneath my bottom. His thumb stroked my knee. “And babe,” he said, “you got to remember: The people praying the hardest are probably the ones who’ve got a lot of answering to do to God.”

  I considered this skeptically, then nodded, because what did I know about any of it, except that I was like a kid at a candy-store window, peering in.

  I reached down and gave the strings another clumsy strum. “So, will you teach me?”

  “Yep.”

  And he did, right then, kept me sitting on his lap and just turned the guitar around, and taught me “Pride and Joy.” I didn’t play it well, but I played it, and once I did it straight through, I lifted my head and grinned at him. “Hey, I got it. And I played all four of them!”

  A corner of his mouth tipped up. “Yeah, I noticed that little one-chord shortcut you did on ‘Born Under a Bad Sign.’”

  I lifted my eyebrows at him. “But I sang it good.”

  “Yeah, Janey.” His gaze traveled down my chest and back up. “You sang like a rock star.”

  Our grins met in the middle. He was quiet a minute. “You should come watch my band play.”

  All the laughter went out of me. I swallowed. “Sure,” I said vaguely. “When?”

  “We have a gig at the Red Cat next weekend.”

  “The Red Cat…Tavern?”

  One dark brow arched up. “You know the place?”

  “The Sandler-Rosses don’t like the Red Cat Tavern,” I told him.

  He laughed. He thought I was joking. “The Sandler-Rosses are a bad source of information.”

  Yeah, but I didn’t need their opinion to guide me. I had history.

  I’d spent a lot of time in dive bars and taverns, dragging out my mother, who’d originally gone in thirty years earlier to drag out my father. The dragging didn’t work. But good ole boys didn’t mind. My father was a big talker, a fair mayor, a shitty father, an abusive spouse, and the most powerful man I’d ever known. He had charisma, and he cast it out like a weapon, a big, burning orb of charisma, and somehow no one ever noticed he was a righteous sonuvabitch who needed to be taken down a few times more and a whole lot harder than anyone had ever had the guts to.

  Certainly not my mom, and hell no, me.

  But I still didn’t go into bars. They were the past. I was done with it. And soon, it would stop hunting me down.

  Right?

  Finn watched me. “So, want to come?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly. Like he understood. Like I wasn’t an asshole. Or a coward.

  Which I wasn’t. I was just determined. Never to be like my mom.

  I knew this was going to happen. Finn’s blue eyes were going to start seeing straight through to the empty center of me.

  His gaze was still on me. I felt exposed and embarrassed. Then, instead of saying, Okay, well, this has been fun, but you’re too much of a whack job, so see you around, or something understandable like that, he leaned his head back against the couch and said, “Are you going to live your whole life in fear, Janey?”

  I straightened sharply on his lap. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look at me.” I touched the stains on my shirt. “I can handle anything. I served a party of one hundred this morning in those heels.” I pointed across the room. “Nothing can stop me.”

  He wasn’t smiling. “That’s stress. You handle stress. You rock stress. You eat stress for breakfast. I’m talking about fear.”

  Oh.

  “All that”—he touched the stains—“is surface stuff.”

  “They’re battle scars,” I told him proudly.

  He slid the tip of his index finger to one of the stains, which happened to be directly overtop my nipple. He looked at me and slid finger over, then pinched, very lightly.

  I let out a breath, and my head dropped back a little.

  “See, Janey, here’s where I’m stuck.”

  “I feel as though you’re moving right along.”

  He slid the guitar out from between us and pulled me forward until our groins were smashed together and my knees were sunk deep into the couch, sliding under the back cushions.

  “You’re wound so tight you whirr,” he said.

  “Tightly wound is not necessarily a bad thing,” I explained, arching my back so he could touch me somewhere else. “Tightly wound means being in control and getting stuff done.”

  “Yeah, you’re a human motor of getting shit done, Janey,” he agreed. “But you’re not honest.”

  I went still, like a deer in the woods.

  “You like dirty, but you won’t admit it. You want more, but you ask if I can be the one to make you. Push you into it.”

  I swallowed.

  “You care way too much what other people think, you’re scared of losing control, and you’re still running.”

  “From what?”

  He looked me dead in the eye. “Home.”

  Okay, he had a point. I pretty much had run away from home, but that was a long time ago. “How can I still be running from home, Finn?” I asked irritably. “I’m almost thirty years old.”

  “Exactly.”

  I didn’t understand what that meant, but I got distracted when he tugged the collar of my shirt to the side and licked the curve of my neck.

  “And I’m not scared of losing control,” I added, mostly so we didn’t start talking about home.

  “No?”

  “N-no.” I didn’t like how he was looking at me. “Not much,” I amended.

  He tumbled us around and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on the couch. He grabbed hold of my wrists and pinned them above my head, but slowly. Real slowly.

  “What are you doing?” I asked nervously.

  “Checking.”

  “What?”

  “How much out of control you can handle.”

  “Not much,” I said, willing to concede the point.

  “So you’re scared?”

  “Fine.”

  “Let’s push it.”

  I stared at him.

  His hard, dark eyes held mine, calm and watchful. “Were you serious, when you said you wanted me to push you?”

  “We were talking about ginger at that particular moment,” I said, my voice real low.

  “I’ll talk about anything.”

  “Okay, now I’m scared.”

  His eyes never left mine. “The other night, you told me to ‘just do it,’ to make things happen. That if we waited for you, we’d never get there.”

  “Oh, right,” I whispered. “Yeah, that’s right. I almost forgot.” I was definitely scared now, scared and light-headed, because of how he kept saying ‘we’ and how I really, really liked that.

  “Babe, I can stop.”

  “I don’t even know where you’re going,” I said kind of wildly.

  “And you love it.” His mouth was close to my ear. “You love not knowing, being out of control. You want it, but you’re scared.”

  “Okay, right, entirely, yes. I am scared.”

  Our eyes locked. “So should I stop?”

  My body was right now hotter than it had ever been, because I now knew that Finn knew I was a total nut job, and that it was okay with him.

  I was absolutely not stopping.

  You don’t hit the brakes when you meet someone who thinks your kind of crazy is okay.

  I opened my mouth to f
orce air into my lungs. “No. I mean, you should keep going.”

  He kissed me.

  “What are you going to do?” I whispered against his kiss.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  I shook my head.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I’m thinking we can either tie you up, or try the ginger, or take you out and make you come on the roof of my car on the side of the road.”

  I stared at him in horror. He started to smile. The remote heaviness I’d felt in him since I heard his music coming through the air was lifting, dissipating, all in the face of dirty sex. How like a man. But really, it was good. It’s just….

  “The side of the road?”

  He shifted on top of me. “I’d bring a blanket.”

  “Well, sure, because you’re a gentleman.”

  He grinned. “You want to be found out.”

  “I absolutely do not want to be found out. What do you mean?”

  He laughed, low and amused. “You have discovery fantasies, babe. Face it, you’re an exhibitionist at heart.”

  I stilled. It was true, I was.

  “But we can wait on that,” he allowed.

  “This is why I’m with you, because you’re so sensitive,” I said, acting tough and condescending, but inside all I wanted was to hear the rest of his ideas.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. I shuggled down a little, to get under him. “So…?”

  Oh, he knew me so well. I felt the smile take hold deep inside him. I smelled his smile and felt his smile and heard the smile in his voice when he leaned close to my mouth and said, “You choose.”

  I swallowed. “Choose?”

  “You want to be tied up, or you want the ginger?”

  I stared.

  “Or none of the above,” he added belatedly.

  I opened my mouth because there wasn’t enough air in the room. “I just… If we… I don’t…”

  “Okay.” He started rolling off me.

  I pulled him back down. “Ginger,” I whispered as low as I could.

  He laughed.

  “So, how’s it work?” I asked when he seemed perfectly content to just kiss me while I melted down in small, hot tremors.

  “Calm down, Janey,” he murmured, kissing down my neck.