Better Than You (The Walker Family Series Book 3)

Lauren Gilley’s Walker Family Series:

Better Than You

Keep You

Dream of You

Fix You

Better Than

You

Lauren Gilley

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and places are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblances to real persons or places is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 Lauren Gilley

F
or me, this series began with a vision of Tam – a broken boy – and the girl who loved him unwaveringly. But as
Keep You
took shape, so too did the rest of the family, all of them making their unique voices heard. I started to wonder how different the wedding must have looked through Mike and Delta’s eyes, and then I realized that they wanted to tell their story. This book is a bit of a prequel, and a bit of a parallel telling of the events that occurred in Ireland. It doesn’t tell the complete story – because that wouldn’t be fair to Tam and Jo’s book – but a part of it. If you’re reading this, I hope with all my heart that you enjoy it, because I so enjoyed writing it. And I hope you’ll come to love the family and want to read all of their stories.

Jo Walker was convinced that her brother’s fiancée was nothing but a pampered, demanding,
perfectionist princess. But so rarely is a person ever just what she seems from the outside.

This is Delta and Mike's story, as told from their perspectives, accompanied by all their preconceived notions and biases. Jo doesn't know all there is to know about her future sister-in-law, or her older brother, for that matter…

1.

“L
et me make some phone calls,”
were the first words out of Dennis Brooks’ mouth the day his only daughter graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia’s Terry School of Business with dual degrees in marketing and management. Delta’s middle name may have been Charity, but it was something she hadn’t wanted – nor did she want now – from her father. The resulting argument when she’d told him “no” had been the kind that left her with a headache like screws being twisted through her temples, but she’d won.
“Fine,”
he’d snapped, and strode out of the bedroom she would call her own for only a fortnight before her meager savings were put up as a security deposit on an apartment and her best black suit was put to good use in a business meeting her pretty straight teeth and stunning post-college resume had cinched for her.

Delta had been born into money, and despite all the hype she’d ever suffered about rich children having no appreciation for hard work, she knew the exact value of every dollar her parents had ever lavished upon her. And it was why her father’s help was declined, and why
(despite the plummeting economy) she’d walked into Nordstrom in Buckhead with nothing but a diploma and now, one short year later, held a management position with sights set on climbing higher. No one was rich because they were lazy – they were rich because they worked their asses off and she
was not
going to be a disappointment to her family.

“Um, Ms. Broo
ks?” One of the new sales associates – a reedy, nervous, twitchy thing with limp hair and a rough complexion who was probably five years Delta’s senior – peered over the top of the cosmetics counter mirror Delta was using to check her lipstick.

A firm believer that employees in a high-end department store should look the part – makeup, heels and tasteful clothing choices lent sophistication and authority in a world in which it was sorely needed – Delta wanted to pull the girl down into the free makeover chair and attack her with the entire Clinique product line. Instead, she smiled, checked that none of the poppy seeds from her sandwich at lunch were stuck in her teeth, tidied a strand of he
r dark hair, and asked the associate, “Yes?” as she straightened.

She had her long fingers laced together and worked them nervously. Her face held nothing of the confidence it should have – retail was not the sort of business where a meek disposition did anyone any good – and she took a deep, frightened breath before she spoke. “There’s been…well, there’s been a bit of an incident over at the fragrance counter.”

The week before Thanksgiving, the mall and the store were bustling with shoppers, obnoxious Christmas music already blaring over the intercoms. Having just come from the rear of the store, Delta wouldn’t have heard an “incident.” “What happened?” she asked, already moving.

The associate
hustled to keep up with her. “Well, two customers, they, um…”

“Knocked over an entire display of Taylor Swift perfume.”

“Yes!”

“I can see that.” And she could. The pretty little bl
ue bottles with their cursive script were smashed to bits on the tile and two associates were hastening to clean up the broken glass before someone slipped and sued the store. The clumsy clods who’d done the smashing stood off to the side, dazed and helpless and trying not to look like they’d just embarrassed themselves.

One looked like h
e should have been knocking stuff over in Hot Topic instead: leather jacket and too-tight jeans, those Converse sneakers people still insisted on wearing, a mess of dark hair that probably took longer to style than her own. Typical mall rat. He had clearly not been the one scoping out the teenager perfume.

No, that had been his friend. Tall – six-two or six-three, maybe taller – big football shoulders, shirt and tie and sleeves
rolled up, good gray slacks and not the ill-fitting kind men his age usually scrimped by with. Blonde and square-jawed and very Captain America.

Cute
, she thought, and then squared her shoulders and put on her manager face and strode up to them, neatly stepping over the smashed shards of a bottle one of the associates was trying to collect into a dust pan.

“Gentlemen,” she greeted and both of them glanced at her with a start. “
I trust you’re finding everything alright this afternoon?”

The one with the black hair jammed his hands in his pockets and turned away from her. But Captain America stared at her stupidly. He had green eyes
, she noticed. Very green.

“I’m sure one of our associates can help you find a fragrance more to your liking, though I’m afraid courtesy would demand that you not
destroy
products you find offensive. You will of course be required to compensate the company for the merchandise.”

He finally found his voice.
“Yeah…yeah of course.” He raked a hand through his blonde
hair and it stood up in short spikes. His green eyes widened. “I didn’t mean to knock all that shi…stuff over though. I swear!”

“You wer
e trying to purchase it then?” She motioned to the mess at her feet. “The…” The name of the stuff escaped her. “
Taylor Swift
perfume?”

The guy with the black hair snorted into his hand.

“No. Well, I mean…” A blush rose along the hard lines of his cheekbones.

“If you’ll meet me over
at the register.” She indicated one on the far side of the fragrance counter with a practiced wave and a smile her best friend had always told her was “totally Cleopatra.” “Then we can take care of this little…incident.”

He blew out a loud breath through his nostrils.
“Yeah. Sure.”

Her first week on the job, Delta had watched a woman with a whole unruly pack of children wreak havoc upon the shoe department. When the youngest of the bunch – he’d been maybe four – snapped the heel off one half of a  two-hundred-ninety-
eight dollar pair of Cole Haan pumps, Delta’s then-manager had slipped the shoes beneath a counter somewhere and the woman had walked away without paying for the damage. The manager had been fired, and now Delta was a manager, and no one, not even a flustered, blonde, doofy football-looking guy with poor taste in perfume, was getting a pass.

He’d
wrangled his embarrassment by the time he met her on the other side of the counter and the color had bled out of his cheeks, his smile steady and just the right, controlled amount of sheepish. Which was a bit of a shame; he’d been cuter when he was upset.

“I wasn’t actually trying to buy any of that,” he said as she started ringing up the sale.

“Uh-huh. Linda, how many bottles was that?” she called over her shoulder to the associate.

“Five!”

“I’m buying a gift,” he continued.

“What a lucky girl she must be,” Delta said and knew from his silence that he had no idea if she was sinc
ere. “Your total comes to three-hundred and five dollars and ninety-eight cents.”

To his credit, he wasn’t making a face when she glanced up at him. “
Will that be all or would you like to purchase something besides broken bottles?”

**

“Saturday’s my birthday!”
Stephanie had said only a hundred times. She’d tossed her hair and batted her false eyelashes.
“What are you getting me?”

Mike
hadn’t known – what did he get the girl he was not-dating, sort-of-dating, maybe-dating but didn’t want to be doing anything with? Okay, that wasn’t fair. He wanted to be doing
something
…but even if she was his sister-in-law’s friend, and even if she looked great on paper, she just…wasn’t doing it for him. She didn’t really like him. Under the smiles and sex and perky exuberance, she didn’t give a damn about him. And he didn’t give a damn about her. They were so blonde and professional and preppy together and…well, Tam wasn’t the only one sick to death of the two of them.

So Saturday was her birthday. And after one too many insistences on her part that she couldn’t stand teen pop (she was only into Jack Johnson and John Mayer and, quote, “deep music”) he’d decided a bottle of teen pop perfume might be just the thing to shut her up about her birthday and drive the final, irreparable wedge
between them he was too chicken-shit to do all by his lonesome.

His shopping trip freaking sucked so far.

Except for the barely there smile the girl on the other side of the counter was giving him. It wasn’t a happy smile, or a smile that found him smart or charming. It was a cutting, condescending sort of smile. And for some reason, Mike found that terribly attractive.

The body didn’t hurt either.

She was tall, long and lean and leggy, with dainty ankles and delicate wrists and a finely-boned face that bespoke of generations of careful breeding. Her hair was dark, and her dark, tightly arched brows said the color was natural. Her eyes were rich coffee, lipstick dramatic red. She should have been on a runway somewhere modeling for Nordstrom rather than working one of its registers. The gold nametag pinned to her cream poplin shirt read
Delta
, and wasn’t that just Old South and ridiculous?

Bitch
, the look Tam shot him from under his fringe of hair said, and that was true. It didn’t mean she wasn’t hot, though. And it didn’t mean he wasn’t interested.

“Actually,” Mike
said and shook off the last clinging shreds of embarrassment.
Totally shameless
, his sister Jess had said of him once, and it was true: he had no shame. “I still need that gift.” Her eyes were devoid of all expression as she stared at him, nude painted fingernails drumming along the top of the register. “Can you suggest anything?”

A sigh picked up her shoulders and dropped them again. She opened her mouth, thought better of it, and a quick, false smile made an appearance. “Who are you buying for?”

“A chick.”

Her brows lifted.
“Really? The perfume wasn’t for
you
?”

He’d stepped right into that one. “A friend,” he amended with a grin.

“Your girlfriend?”

“Just a friend.”

“Do you know what she might like – ”

“Nope.
And I couldn’t care less.”

Her head tilted, dark hair rustling against her shirt front. Her smile didn’t change, but her
face became somehow disapproving. She’d probably spent hours perfecting her ice queen routine in front of the mirror. “Charming.” She gave another little sigh. “I’d go with Juicy or Jessica Simpson if she’s really just a friend and likes a warm scent. Coach or Dolce if you want to impress her.”

Like hell was he shelling out for Coach for
Stephanie. He wasn’t even really thinking about Stephanie at this point. “What would you wear?” he asked, smiling, proud of himself.

She looked taken aback. And then her lips pressed together into a red line and she regarded him a long, unimpressed moment. He hadn’t run across anyone this hard to flirt with in…well, ever.

He didn’t think she would answer, but finally she said, “Clinique Happy.”

“I’ll take one of those, then.”

**

“A harpy,” Tam said as they stepped out into the echoing, gray depths of the parking deck and headed for the car. “I’m not kidding.”

“I dunno.” Mike was leaving the mall in a much better mood than the one in which he’d entered. He smelled a challenge. And he’d always loved those. “Maybe she’s one of those poor little rich girls Daddy didn’t love enough. I bet you get a few drinks in her and the ice starts to melt.”

“Even if that’s true
.” Tam tidied the long spikes of his hair and made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “Who gives a shit? She’s just some chick at the mall.”

“See, this is what’s wrong with you.”

He groaned.

“You don’t see the
possibility
in anything, man. Yeah, she’s a chick at the mall. But she’s a hot chick. And maybe she’s the hot chick I can get to go to dinner with me.”

“And her
stunning
personality makes it worth the effort?”

Mike sighed. Friends since the seventh grade, Tam’s advice usually came from a good place. Unfortunately, it was usually tainted by the guy’s overly sober perspective on everything and his general contempt for everyone. Tam’s home life had been the stuff of nightmares growing up – and Mike took that more seriously than anyone – but sometimes, and he felt guilty about it, he wished some of his own
carpe diem
philosophy had rubbed off on the guy. Always fast and inconsistent with the ladies, in the last few years Tam had been living in a dark head space in which he didn’t even relish the chase. It was an itch that got scratched. Miss too-good-for-everybody Delta at the Nordstrom counter couldn’t even get a whistle or an up-and-down glance from him.

Whatever.