Calling His Bluff (22 page)

He held himself still as relief washed over him, laughing out loud to release some
of the tension.

Then he realized he would still have to tell her the truth sooner rather than later,
and the slow churn of acid in his stomach started up again.

“Which one of my conspirators cracked under pressure?” he asked after he collected
himself, still holding out the chair for her.

“Grace.” She gave in and sat, brandishing her fork and knife at the food in front
of her as if to say,
don’t give me any trouble.
“Although it wasn’t so much cracking under pressure as it was bragging.”

“Bragging? How so?”

To his surprise, she blushed again and ducked her eyes.

“She claims that right before I showed up at the pub that afternoon, she was about
to tell you that what I needed was…was,” she pressed her lips together and looked,
if it was possible, even more uncomfortable, “‘a good sweaty wrestle between the sheets,’
were, I believe, her exact words.”

J.D. knew that if he grinned he was a dead man.

* * *

Sarah braced herself for J.D.’s laughter. Instead, he dropped a casual hand on her
leg. The long, lean muscles of her thigh tensed beneath his fingers. She told herself
to stop flinching when he touched her.

“It’s nice that she thinks I’m good for you, but I didn’t need anyone to give me ideas
about you, Sarah. I started having ideas all by myself the moment you stepped out
of the bathroom wearing my shorts and T-shirt.”

His hand slid up and down her thigh, his palm raising heat with the friction, but
his fingertips didn’t touch her. She felt the ghost-like traces of them anyway, skimming
the seam that ran up her inner thigh.

“Well, that’s certainly a surprise,” she said and was immediately embarrassed enough
to shove a forkful of chicken, cheese, ranchero sauce and tomatoes into her mouth.
She needed to stop herself before anything even more embarrassing came out.

J.D. raised his eyebrows at her.

“You didn’t seem to be very interested in me,” she heard herself saying.

Seriously? Could she not control herself even a little bit? She doubted his glamorous
ex trolled for compliments.

He took a bite of burrito and chewed slowly while staring at her. After he swallowed,
he raised one finger.

“First, I did kiss you that night.”

“As a joke!”

He leaned back in his chair and slid his legs forward to tangle with hers. His knee
pressed against her thigh.

“Second, I invited you to Vegas.”

“And tried to ditch me as soon as we arrived.”

Why was she participating in this conversation? The last thing she wanted was to have
a long talk about how she wasn’t good enough for a man like J.D.

“I like to think I made up for that brief moment of insanity later.” J.D. grinned
and his eyes narrowed and Sarah knew he was thinking of the taxi. And the elevator.
And the suite. She blushed and felt herself shiver. “Besides, don’t you like surprises?”

She snorted in disbelief. “No woman likes surprises, J.D.” He opened his mouth to
argue with her, but she shot him down before he got the first word out. Patting the
back of his hand, she said, “We pretend that we do so that we don’t hurt your feelings,
but deep down we’re really wishing you had let us in on the secret ahead of time.
So we could have brushed our hair and touched up our lipstick. Or shaved our legs.
The only woman I know who likes a surprise is my mother, and even she—wait. That’s
it!”

She commanded his silence by brandishing a forkful of burrito, and only winced a bit
when she spattered the table with rice and beans.

Her mother. Who liked surprises. Whose children were at a loss as to what to give
the woman who needed nothing and only wanted her family with her on her birthday.
She hadn’t participated in any of the family discussions so far, but she’d figured
out the perfect plan over burritos and awkward conversation.

She was a genius.

She saw J.D. take a slow, controlled breath across from her and knew that his patience
with her was wearing thin. Tough. She was a genius, and if her idea came with the
side benefit of changing the subject, well that was just happy coincidence, wasn’t
it?

“We’re throwing my mother a surprise birthday party,” she announced, spreading her
hands gracefully and taking a bow in her chair.

J.D.’s expression remained carefully neutral. “We are?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she hurried to reassure him. The poor guy was shocked. “Not you
and me. I mean my family.” That her brother- and sister-in-law were included in this
family group went without saying. “You’re off the hook, no worries.”

When he pressed his lips together and shook his head, she felt vaguely guilty again
without knowing why. J.D. started to eat his cooling meal and Sarah found herself
babbling to fill the silence.

“I know it doesn’t really seem like a big deal. You’ve probably been to all kinds
of amazing parties. But we’ve never really gone all-out with a surprise party before.
Usually everyone including Mom is in on the party planning, but we could do a full-on
surprise party this year.” She couldn’t seem to stop herself from shooting out words
in a rapid-fire patter. “Maybe we’ll even have it at the pub… Tyler can tell Mom he
needs her to help out one night, maybe the night before her birthday. So that we’re
all together at midnight! And then we can toast the first minute of her birthday together.
Maybe we can have a whole day of birthday events planned for her? Or would she be
too tired after a big party? I’ve gotta call Maxie—she’s the best planner. Got a mind
like a general on the night before an invasion, that girl. Where’s my day book?”

She needed to leave the room. Grabbing her cell phone off the kitchen counter as her
mouth kept moving and words continued to come out somehow, she stumbled into the hall
and sank to her heels next to the little table that was her depository for mail and
keys. Her bag sat on the worn wood floor at the feet of the table, where she left
it every night so that she’d always know where to find it. She pulled her little spiral-bound
planner out of an interior pocket.

What was wrong with her? She was running her mouth like she was afraid to let quiet
descend for even a moment. Was she worried about what J.D. might say next? Or worried
that they wouldn’t have anything to say to each other at all?

It was stress, pure and simple, over J.D. and their ridiculous marriage, the shame
of needing a divorce when she was the kind of woman who’d only ever meant to marry
once and this most recent and unreasonable guilty feeling that she’d done something
wrong again, that she’d hurt his feelings. She dropped her head on her knees and drew
in a deep breath. Time to get a grip. After another moment, she dragged herself to
her feet. Twisting the planner between tense fingers, she stepped back into the kitchen
and braced herself to face J.D. as soon as she entered the room.

Relief and worry took turns battling for first place when she saw that he wasn’t at
the table any more. He was standing at the kitchen counter, his back turned, neatly
boxing up her barely-touched food. She watched him shake his head at the emptiness
of her shelves as he slid the container into the fridge.

Even though his jacket and keys were still in the hall, she felt like he was moments
from walking out the door. And though she hadn’t wanted him to come tonight, had been
irritated by his arrival, she was suddenly panicked at the thought that he was about
to leave.

J.D. turned and spotted her. Dropped one of those casually charming grins that disappeared
so fast it was a memory almost before she took it in.

“No sense in wasting it. You can have it for breakfast.”

“A burrito? For breakfast?”

More importantly, would he be staying the night to sit down to breakfast with her?

She couldn’t ask. She didn’t know what the answer would be. Was too afraid that it
might be another swift grin and polite brush-off and that would really be the end
of her.

“Sure. The only thing better is cold pizza.”

She’d lost track of what they were talking about.

“J.D., I—”

“You have to call your family, I know.” He chucked her under the chin and turned sideways
to squeeze past her into the hall without brushing up against her. “I’ll get out of
your way so you guys can get the party planning going. Call you later.”

He shrugged into his jacket, jogged down the stairs and ghosted out the door before
she could think of anything to say.

“What just happened?” she asked out loud of her stairwell.

The man had all but admitted that he’d come over for sex and a meal, if not in precisely
that order, since he’d seemed hungry enough for food to settle for the burrito first.
Which rankled a little, upon reflection. Then, after ten minutes of conversation,
he was out the door. Gone. Without so much as a “Sorry, but I’ve changed my mind about
that tumble in the hay. No need to get your pants off.” She knew she’d put her foot
in it with all of her questions and arguing, but still.

She was working up a righteous head of steam about being spun around like a top by
the cavalier whims of one J.D. Damico, and then her brain started to play back their
conversation.

You didn’t seem to be very interested in me.

And then you tried to ditch me.

We’re throwing my mother a surprise party!

The words played over and over again in her mind, her own voice growing in whininess
as she listened to herself. How pathetic. Between basically telling him that she was
surprised he would ever be interested in her to making him think that she was going
to corral him into throwing a party for her mother, she couldn’t have made herself
sound more tedious and ordinary if she’d tried.

The lightbulb in her brain blinked on with a sickening yellow glow.

She was boring him.

Sarah glanced around her kitchen and almost let loose a gust of hysterical laughter.
The buttery-yellow paint on the walls was warm but faded. Hanging over the rolling
butcher-block wine cart was a print of a cartoon cow with a stalk of straw in its
mouth and a dialogue balloon above its head reading, “I said hay, bartender.” She
had a mug with a drawing of the Paris skyline drying on the rack next to the sink.

J.D. didn’t need a mug with a picture of Paris on it. He’d actually been there, no
doubt with some fabulously leggy sexpot on his arm. A woman who knew that every man
who saw her wanted her. A woman who certainly didn’t talk to her lover about throwing
birthday parties for her mother.

She briefly contemplated killing herself, if only so that she wouldn’t have to linger
through the slow death from embarrassment she was certainly going to endure the next
time she saw J.D.

However far from now that might be.

But deciding that suicide would make her even more pathetic, she dragged herself over
to the counter, dug out the family-size bag of potato chips from the cabinet and the
pint of sour cream and onion dip that was the only other thing in the fridge aside
from the now painful to look at Mexican takeout. Pointing herself toward her bedroom,
she prepared to huddle under the covers and gorge herself on fat and sodium.

She grabbed her cell phone tight with one hand. She was pretty sure that as her mortification
built, she was going to start to cry. And when the crying got to the puffy-eyed, runny-nose
stage, she was going to need a sister.

* * *

What a man really wanted at a time like this was a brother.

Since J.D.’s parents hadn’t seen fit to give him a sibling of either gender, he called
instead on the bonds of blood brotherhood that had been established by two twelve-year-olds
and a penknife more than twenty years ago.

Though his eyes still wanted to roll up in their sockets whenever he thought of how
many times he’d had to stab himself in the finger to get enough blood to satisfy Tyler,
he was happy that he could use that pain and suffering as an excuse to drag Tyler
out at ten o’clock on a Monday night. A man needed a bro when he wanted to bitch about
some girl.

It was harder to bitch about the girl when she was your bro’s sister, of course.

Harder. Not impossible.

J.D. took a long pull of his beer and debated whether or not whiskey might be a better
choice. He set his sweating pint glass back down on its coaster, studying the golden
light glinting off the rows of spotlessly clean bottles behind the bar as he tried
to figure out how much pain he wanted to be in tomorrow.

“I cannot believe that I am sitting in this bar on my only night off this week,” Tyler
said from next to him. The pint in front of him had barely been touched and he looked
none too eager to bend his elbow. But the bond of blood brotherhood was strong. “You
know this is going to cost me later with Grace, right? I bet she’s gonna make me put
on a tux and go to the symphony with Spence and Addy.”

“Don’t be such a baby. The symphony is cool.”

“Says the guy with the ponytail.”

“Bite me.”

J.D. grinned.
This
was why he’d called Tyler. Because no one could get him out of a bad mood faster
than the guy who’d spent his life battling to hold his own as the one man amongst
the Tyler women.

The Tyler women.

The momentary balloon of good humor he’d found hissed out of him. As much as he’d
always envied Tyler his family, it didn’t take twenty-twenty vision to see that the
Tyler women were a force to be reckoned with. One that could overwhelm a guy before
he blinked. Although individually they were fantastic, as a group they could be, let’s
face it, more than a little scary. But Sarah had always been different.

Sarah had always been the exception. To everything.

He drew lines in the condensation on his pint glass and scowled at the polished wood
of the bar. Tyler sat next to him, comfortable in the silence. J.D. knew his friend
would sit there until dawn, if that was how long it took to find out what was wrong.