CALLIE (The Naughty Ones Book 1) (4 page)

I’m tired, though—so fucking tired of the constant monotony. Every day is the same. I handle the stuff Dad’s too busy to get to, hand off what I can to my two executive assistants, and then do my part in Global, the firm I started with Woody and Freddie right out of college that has not only made me wealthy in my own right, but also does the one thing I could never sacrifice or compromise on. We use a huge chunk of our influence to help drought-ridden countries find a way to sustain agriculture and employ teams of experts to create sustainable programs and green initiatives.

When that’s all done I’m at the damn parties.

Have I said yet that I hate that my life has been reduced to rubbing elbows with these idiots? Well I do. That’s why I feel like shit for being in a foul mood when I finally get to Althea and Gill’s place an hour and a half late.

“God, the almighty Jack actually made it? What brings all that sexy black hair and grey eyes to my humble little party?” she teases when I manage to squeeze through the crowd to kiss her and wish her happy birthday.

“Now, Althie, you know I would never miss one of your shindigs, even if I am running on three hours’ worth of sleep and a late lunch that burned off hours ago.”

The little blonde chuckles and looks not at all impressed with my hangdog expression as she kisses my cheek and shakes her head.

“You rich boys are all so full of it. Gill was the same before I found him and gave his poor pathetic life meaning.”

“True. So true. Without my little hellcat, I was nothing but a successful businessman and bachelor playboy. Yuck,” the man croons, smiling when her giggles turn into a moan as he plants a hard kiss on her lips.

“Forgive a simple rich boy for asking Althie, but what exactly is it that’s so wrong with us?”

Althea snorts and rolls her blue eyes, giving me a “you’re so stupid that I’m surprised you can tie your own shoes” look.

“Boy, you all think your lives will come to a terrible end if you relinquish some of that control you have on your precious companies. Now I don’t know if my little old public school had a different dictionary, but I sure remember what
delegate
means. As far as I can tell, you could use some of that tonic, boy.”

“Blasphemy,” I gasp, making her giggle with a hand to my heart and a look of horror that’s ruined by my grin. “We strong rich boys know no compromise.”

“Too true.” Freddie laughs, coming up to the group with a grin that never seems to leave his face. “Why if we let just any old body run our companies and delegate out to the experts we hire, things would go to pot in the blink of an eye.”

She snorts at our teasing and just shakes her head at the old argument.

“Hey, man. Where’s Woody running around?”

Freddie fist-pumps me before looking out over the room with a sad sigh as Althea excuses herself to scuttle back to the kitchen with a greedy gleam in her eye.

“He’s around here somewhere.”

Noting his lack of concentration, I glance in the direction he’s looking and see a toffee-colored fall of silken hair and a pair of legs that make my mouth drool with lust. Definitely a leg man. And boobs. And ass. Okay, I like it all.

“Who’s that?”

My interest is definitely peaked now and I feel my boy down south stir with interest when I catch a tiny glimpse of her profile before she walks away with a short redhead with a good rack.

“Don’t bother, man, she’s not available,” Freddie gripes, grabbing a drink from a passing waiter.

“You already staking a claim there, Cage?”

Damn, too bad. I could definitely use a good roll in the sack after the two-month drought I’ve been on since I woke in my bed and realized I didn’t have a clue how I got there.

Scared the hell out of me that I’d been so stressed that I obviously had sex and blanked the rest out.

I do, however, remember a tattoo that still makes me laugh, but I have to say that I can only laugh now after I got tested and realized I’d dodged a freaking bullet.

I’ve never fucked without protection, not once since my dad gave me a vomit-inducing sex talk and tossed a box of condoms my way. Till the night I let myself go and did something that could have changed my life forever.

As the woman and her busty friend disappear from sight, I shake off my thoughts and turn to Freddie.

“She’s taken already. I met her at the door and started flirting till she very kindly pointed out she’s pregnant. Trust me, bro, if some guy’s lucky enough to have planted one in that fox, she’s definitely taken for life. Lucky bastard.”

My own shrug and the vague recollection of honeysuckle and laughing hazel eyes shakes me to the core, but I push it away and focus on spending the next hour catching up with my friends.

Hormones and Misunderstandings

Callie

I’m so angry that I could level a city and still pick my teeth with the bones of my victims.

It’s been over a week since Althea’s party and nothing. Nothing! So now I’m not in the greatest of moods, and as you can guess, I’m totally ready to tear heads and take names for the toe tags they’ll need later.

“Stop glaring at me before I freak and roll the van, Callie. Jesus, you’re getting so creepy with the mood swings. I considered borrowing my brother’s old football pads just to come to work,” Luci mutters, her hands white-knuckling the wheel as we speed down the freeway to deliver a cake that I shouldn’t have had to make, but ended up doing because Luci took the order and somehow managed to get Dot to ask me.

Like I can say no to my Dotty poo!

“Well stop telling your entire family about my situation. Your mom called me this morning and asked if I wanted to use her psychic. And your dad kept telling me that God will show me the way. As if I’m important enough to get my own freaking North Star or something.”

              “I didn’t tell her a thing, Callie. She called me and started jabbering on and on about what the great Giselle said in one of her readings. It really was too spooky for words, chickie,” she whispers on a shudder, forcing me to cross myself superstitiously, just in case.

“And, anyway, that was yesterday and you were in a fine mood. What crawled up your bum and started laying eggs this morning?”

This crying shit has got to stop. How am I supposed to pretend not to have feelings if I keep crying like a loser?

              “Nothing. Gosh. I don’t know. I mean I was fine and then I woke up and my belly looks like it mutated overnight, and I just feel…I feel…awful. It’s like I woke up and I just had this thought that I’m going to be telling my baby the same shit my mother told me when I was a kid and I…
I don’t wanna do that
.”

Luci takes an exit off the freeway and I see her turning into a really swanky neighborhood minutes later as I try to pull myself back together and wait for another one of her little pep talks.

“Okay look,” she says, braking at a huge gate that encloses a freaking castle.

The place is magnificent. Wowza.

“You have got to stop letting what happened to you drive you crazy. You’ve got this whole family now who loves you, and you also had a fantastic childhood. Gruffy is nuts, sure, but her and Gramps raised you right, with love and all that other crap that kids need to become decent little human beings. It’s not like you got the crapshoot, honey.”

Yeah okay, fine. That’s true.

“But what if I can’t answer? I love Bill, Ted, Murray and the stepmoms, and Bill’s ever-changing love interests, and yes, I had parents in Gruffy and Gramps that I wouldn’t trade for all the water in the desert, but I still wonder, you know. It’s killing me to know that I fucked up so majorly, and that I could do that to my own kid.”

              Luci pulls in once the security guy confirms our delivery and we putter up the long drive at a snail’s pace, coming to stop near a huge front door wider than my entire bedroom wall.

“You have got to relax and let life take its course, Callie. If you find him, great, I’m happy that it worked out and you have a name to give the bean when he’s all grown up. If not…let’s not forget that this chump left you in a hotel room and had you kicked out the next morning. Maybe you aren’t meant to find him,” she points out as we make our way to the back of the van and prepare to lift the big-ass cake that took me two days to make.

It’s a masterpiece, though, even I have to admit. It’s a three-tiered chocolate monster with a flower theme, done up on green icing with handcrafted flowers of every color, size, and species.

              The front door opens and a cute little brunette of indeterminate age comes sailing out, all smiles and huge grey eyes that make my heart flutter.

“Oh hi! Thank you so much for doing this on such short notice. My son put me in charge of this one thing and it just slipped my mind. You’re saving my life. Oh! So beautiful. Come in, come in, and set it up in the sunroom. The ladies will be here for my niece’s shower soon and I want it all to be perfect.”

She keeps chattering happily as Luci and I make our way into the house behind her, my knees protesting under the weight of the monster that is big enough to feed at least sixty.

By the time it’s in place, I think my back may never recover and I have to stifle a giggle at Luci’s growls when the client starts up about some shit about her stylist that I don’t need to hear right now.

All I want to do is go home and maybe die there to escape the back-cracking pain we’re both in right now.

“Mom, these ladies have a business to run. They do not want to hear about your hair debacle or Jean Paul’s magic styling hands.”

Oh, that voice is sexy and I feel my pain disappear when my bits sit up and take note. I haven’t even turned around yet and I just know the face and body that come along with that husky, deep drawl will have my shorts blazing.

When I do turn I feel my mouth hit the deck and my eyes start rolling like I just hit the jackpot. I was right. He is fine. I think I may look like a gaping idiot right now, but I can’t stop myself.

Luci somehow recovers first and I want to lick her toes when she nudges me and clears her throat.

“Um, okay, well, we should go,” she titters, hooking her arm into mine to pull me out before I do something stupid like fall at his feet.

              Something about him is familiar, and I have the urge to get closer to see the eyes before Luci tugs me again and starts really making a beeline for the door.

“Oh wait, we need to pay you!” the mother yells, making Luci groan and mutter at me out the side of her mouth. “Jack, darling.”

“I’ll transfer the money directly to their account right now, Mom. They probably don’t have the time to hang around waiting for a check. Is the short fat one pregnant? Christ, Mom, you let her carry a wedding cake in her condition?”

Did he just call me short and fat? Fat!

“You—”

“That would be great! Bye!” Luci yells, dragging me out and slamming the door before I can completely lose it.

“He called me fat!”  I yell. “That pompous asshole called me fat.
Fat
. Like I really need anyone to point out that I’m going to be as big as a house not too long from now. What a total asshole! What a pig. I should call Bill and borrow his gun and…and—”

“Okay, calm down. I’m sure he just meant that you were, uh, looking glowingly healthy in your pregnancy. He was just annoyed that you carried the cake in your condition.”

“My ass,” I mutter when she ducks into the van and leans over to unlock the door.

I’m still cursing when I hear a chuckle from the door and turn to see the idiot I almost slobbered all over laughing at me.

“I need you to e-mail me your account details so I can pay you!”

“Pay this, bitch,” I yell back, flipping him the bird with both hands and a lot of teeth that would make my dentist proud.

Luci doesn’t even wait for me to close the door before she pulls off in a screech of tires and gravel, her eyes pleading with me not to hang out of the window and finish my point.

“Can pregnant women take antipsychotic medication?”

It takes almost all the trip on the way back for me to calm down, and then we’re both laughing our asses off.

“I bet they never order another cake,” I wheeze.

“God. With your luck, I bet they do.” She cackles, her mirth spurring my own to the point that we’re raving loons by the time we pull into the parking lot of Delights.

“Hey, ladies, what’s so funny?” Dot asks when we fall into the kitchen, just winding down as Luci wipes her eyes.

Dot is eyeing us sceptically from her place at the table where she’s putting together a few ingredients to take with us to tonight’s party where we’ll be catering a cold buffet.

Dot’s one of those “be prepared” girls and I know that whatever she’s got in that emergency stash of hers will probably end up saving whatever disaster befalls us. It’s all inevitable, not that I want to sound negative, but at one of these things, especially with rich chicks, you know something will go wrong.

With Dot at my back, it’s never an issue.

“The client’s son called Callie fat and she went all Menendez on him. Jesus, Dotty, you should have seen how hot this guy was. Callie just about left a drool string from her lips to the floor, she was that besotted, and then he goes and gets mad because she’s carrying the cake and,” she pauses to draw breath through her laughter and I shrug at Dot’s questioning look, “he just…he called her short and fat, though I don’t think he meant it to sound the way it did, and she went all mental on him. She even started muttering about borrowing Bill’s gun and teaching the rich boys of San Fran what it means to insult a woman’s weight!”

I said that all out loud?

              Now I’m just a little sheepish and I make a pact with myself never to threaten a client or one of their family members with violence again.

“No. What an asshole.”

“Yeah. But I am so totally over it now. Oh are those mini éclairs?”

What I do know right now as I stuff my face and listen to Luci and Dot plan tonight like a pair of generals is that I’m totally okay with things as they stand.

It’s ironic that it took me going nuts, because a man I was halfway in lust with called me a whale, to realize that Luci is right. I have to just go with the flow here and stop stressing about whether or not I will ever find my mystery man, because if not, I’m likely to lose my marbles and either attack someone or go completely crazy.

I choose éclairs and laughter with my friends.