Exclusively Yours (4 page)

And speaking of interesting, Joe couldn’t believe Keri thought his sole aim in inviting her along was to humiliate her. So maybe
inviting
wasn’t quite the right word for what he’d done, but he hadn’t realized until she’d thrown that accusation at him they weren’t on the same page. Hell, they weren’t even in the same chapter.

Maybe he’d totally misread the vibe he’d gotten in the restaurant. He could have sworn she’d also felt the flicker that lingered from the burning inferno that used to be their chemistry, and when she agreed to the ridiculous offer he’d expected her to turn down flat, he thought she was as interested in fanning that little flame as he was. Instead she’d taken what was a half-joke, half-refusal gone wrong and blown it into a revenge plot of Shakespearean proportions.

And Joe was left looking and feeling like an asshole. There was no way to explain to her the proposal he’d come up with in the car on the drive to the restaurant had been nothing more than a chickenshit way of refusing the interview without outright saying no. He’d started thinking it might be fun when she gave him the same look that turned his head in high school, and he
really
got on board when she closed her eyes and moaned after taking a bite of the cheeseburger. When she agreed to the stupid plan, he assumed she was on board, too, and the cool and calm demeanor was a bid for not looking too eager.

Now he knew it was merely stoicism in the face of anticipated emotional torture, and that royally sucked. If he backed down now he’d have no control over what she printed, plus he’d have to explain why he hadn’t made it through day one, which couldn’t be done without making a massive fool of himself.

“If you’re going to stand around and stare at your ex-girlfriend all day, get out of the way first.”

Mike’s voice dragged Joe back to what he was doing—which was, apparently, standing there with a tie-down strap in his hand, mooning over Keri Daniels.

He tossed the strap to the older of his younger brothers and straddled the first machine. “Got the keys?”

Mike held up a handful, then tossed him the correct one. “You know Terry won’t let anybody back out of the driveway until every key is accounted for. She’d staple them to our foreheads if she could find a staple gun strong enough to penetrate our thick skulls.”

Joe fired up the ATV, backed it down the ramps and pulled it off to one side. After giving the look of death to Mike’s four boys, who were watching him like turkey vultures, he climbed back onto the trailer.

“Lisa likes her,” Mike said, since he was taking his own turn at watching the family drama unfold.

“Key. How can you tell?”

“Body language. We’ve been married sixteen years, Joe. I can tell when she needs to take a piss at this point.”

“But you can’t tell how she feels about unballing your dirty socks?”

Mike took a swipe at him, but Joe hit the throttle and laughed as he unloaded Joey’s machine. He glanced over at the campsites to see his namesake practically jumping up and down, so he gave him another look of death for good measure before climbing up the ramp again. Through the corner of his eye he saw Keri holding an armful of riding gear, looking utterly baffled.

“She wants to get pregnant.”

Joe’s head snapped around.
Pregnant?
“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Lisa wants another kid.”

“Oh.” That made a little more sense than what he’d initially thought, but not much. “You guys are barely surviving the four boys you have, and Lisa is actually planning to throw a party when Bobby starts first grade in the fall. Are you sure?”

Mike nodded and tossed Joe the key to Danny’s ATV. “She said it straight out. Said it might be a girl this time.”

“Or it could be a boy. And it ain’t like twins are unheard of in the Kowalski family. Think about it, Mike. Six boys. We’d have to hire people to drive all your campers and machines here.”

Mike laughed, but Joe could see the tension in him. Though two years younger, he often seemed like the oldest now, and Joe wasn’t the only one to notice it lately.

“You know what you need? Let’s get these suckers unloaded and go for a brothers-only ride.”

“The boys will have a fit,” Mike said, but his face lit up just thinking about it.

The Kowalskis rode their ATVs at a wide variety of speeds. When the little kids were on their own machines and Grammy was along, half-dead pack mules made better time. When the two youngest boys rode with their parents and Grammy was napping, the entire crew could be a little more adventurous. Sometimes
all
the children were left with Leo and Mary, allowing Joe, Kevin, Terry—and last year her husband, Evan—Mike, and Lisa to go bombing through the trail system.

But the brothers-only rides, those were special, with a high pucker factor. Just Joe, Mike and Kevin—testosterone, mud, rocks and a combined twenty-one hundred cc’s of four-wheel-drive power. It was almost as good as sex, although the attrition rate was generally higher.

Mike cast a glance at his wife, scoping out her mood. “Lisa’d be pissed if the boys are underfoot while she’s trying to get everything set up. Remember ’04 when she made me sleep in the screenhouse?”

Joe called out his sister-in-law’s name and beckoned her over. “We feel a need for speed.”

Lisa was a short, fragile-looking brunette with a tall, not-so-fragile attitude. “You are
not
going riding with all this work left to do.”

Joe flashed his winningest grin, but she’d been a Kowalski wife for sixteen years and was raising four of her own. She’d built up an immunity. “Forget it.”

“Keri and I will take the boys into town for pizza in a few days.” She wasn’t immune to bribes involving freedom. “You and Mike can sneak off and ride up to that hidden grassy spot you guys like so much. It puts color in your cheeks.”

As always, the promise of sex free of juvenile interruption made her cave like a wet napkin. “One hour. And you guys pull lifeguard duty for the first trip to the pool.”

“Three hours, two lifeguard duties, and we’ll keep the boys out for ice cream, too.”

“Two hours, all of the above, plus s’mores duty tonight.”

“Done.”

After Lisa walked away, Joe grinned at his brother. “Piece of cake.”

“Never works for me.”

“That’s because you’re her husband. She likes me better because she doesn’t have to wash my underwear. Plus I’m better lookin’.”

Mike laughed. “You keep telling yourself that while I’m getting laid out in the woods, my friend.”

“You just like it out there because the mosquito bites make your dick look bigger.”

Joe ducked Mike’s swing and launched Danny’s machine down the ramp. Keri was watching him, and he thumbed the throttle a little, making the engine rev. She tossed her hair back when she laughed, just like she had in high school, and Joe pondered his chances of a little trip to the grass clearing of his own.

Thoughts of Keri, a bed of grass, and a bottle of Deep Woods OFF! lotion got all jumbled in his head until he had to douse himself with a mental cold shower. Heading out for a brothers-only ride with a hard-on that wouldn’t quit was a recipe for masculine disaster.

“Cheese.” Keri smiled at the clothesline she was trying to knot around a tree.

By her count, it was the eleventh boring picture of her Bobby had taken since Joe’s departure. “Don’t use up your camera on the first day.”

“You’re pretty.”

“Thank you.”

“Aunt Terry said you probably had work done, like Daddy did on his truck at the body shop.”

She glanced at Terry, who seemed
very
interested in the knot she was tying across the site. “Nope. No work done.”

“She said you were probably plastic and Uncle Kevin said he’d give you a feel and let her know and then Uncle Joe punched him in the shoulder and said the only thing he’d feel is his A-S-S getting kicked if he tried.”

“Robert Joseph Kowalski!” Lisa descended on the boy and started shooing him away. “Put the camera away and hit the playground, short fry.”

Terry was still intent on her knot, which was kicking her ass if the redness in her face was any indication. Lisa gave Keri a sheepish grin, then went back to her own knot tying.

Keri probably would have minded the plastic comment a lot more if she wasn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about Joe’s hitting Kevin for offering to feel her up. He’d been possessive like that in school—without crossing over the line into controlling—and she’d felt like a treasured princess. While she didn’t feel exactly regal right now, standing on a cooler breaking fingernails in the name of clothesline, it was kind of sweet. Not sweet enough to get his butt out of the sling, but enough to give her a little tingle.

Terry, the overachieving show-off, was done with her share of clothesline hanging, so she popped open a soda and sat on another cooler. “The guys will be back any minute, Lisa. Got your quarters ready?”

Lisa blushed and Keri was dying to be let in on the inside joke but she couldn’t bring herself to ask Terry what she meant. They’d managed to avoid direct communication for two hours now, and she figured careful planning and pure stubbornness could extend the streak to two weeks.

Then again, she didn’t want to spend fourteen days with two decades of tension weighing on her, and they weren’t in junior high anymore. Plus, she had two rolls of unexplained quarters in her bag. So she took a deep breath and looked right at Terry. “What are the quarters for?”

“The bathhouse showers.” For a second Keri thought those terse three words were all she was going to get, but then Terry took a deep breath of her own and seemed to relax. “When the guys ride like that they get…wound up. All that testosterone and grunting, I guess. Anyway, Mike always drags Lisa off to the bathhouse as soon as he gets back.”

“Tick check,” Lisa muttered, but she was damn near as red as Terry had been a few minutes before.

“So…who checks Kevin and Joe for ticks in the shower?” Keri asked.
Finally
her knot seemed secure. She tugged on it and, when it didn’t pull loose for the umpteenth time, jumped off her cooler.

Terry shrugged, but her dimples—which were never quite as pronounced as Joe’s—made a brief appearance. “I guess they have to take matters into their own hands, so to speak.”

Keri went from warm and fuzzy to hot and bothered just like that. Back when she and Joe were doing everything but
it
, he’d shown her how he took matters into his own hands, so to speak, and that wasn’t an image a girl forgot.

Only now the image morphed into an older Joe, naked and soapy and…

Holy crap, it was hot again all of a sudden. If she’d known being around Joe would be like suffering from menopause, she might have rethought her career path. Or at least packed some herbal tea or something.

“Don’t you even think about it, Keri Daniels.”

Keri could almost see the fork in the road of maturity rising before her. She could take the high road and assure Terry her interest in Joe was strictly professional, or she could take the low road, which she had no doubt was the path Terry would be traveling on for the next two weeks.

“Oh, I’m thinking about it, Teresa Kowalski.”

“Her last name is Porter,” a voice called from a camper, and all three women jumped. While it was impossible to overlook the four boys playing some demented cross between football and basketball on the playground, Keri had forgotten about Steph. Oops. Hopefully she was a little more discreet than her younger cousin.

Terry was glaring at Keri, no doubt trying to warn her away from Joe without saying the words out loud. Fat chance of that, since they’d be sharing a cabin every night, with his pajama status still to be determined.

“I should fire up the grill and throw on some dogs,” Lisa said with the air of somebody desperately trying to smooth over a rocky patch in a conversation.

“No sense in that until after the guys get back,” Terry pointed out. “Especially since Mike will have some excuse for needing your help in the bathhouse.”

“Gross!” Stephanie yelled. “FYI, I’m putting my headphones on now.”

Lisa waited a few seconds, then grinned at Terry. “Don’t even use that tone with me. You and Evan spent more time in the bathhouse than anybody.”

Terry’s smile slipped a little and even Keri could tell Lisa was giving herself a mental slap upside the head. Her mom had given Keri the details she knew over a hurried breakfast that morning, but there weren’t many.

Evan Porter had left his wife three months before, moving into a tiny studio apartment over the Laundromat. Nobody seemed to know why, but there’d been no hint of another woman. Or another man, for that matter.

“Don’t the RVs have bathrooms?” she asked, feeling some pressure to fill the conversational pothole.

Both women laughed, but it was Lisa who said, “I’ll take your lifeguard duty at the pool for three days if you can have sex with a Kowalski man in that shower without knocking the camper right off its levelers.”

“I’ll hide your bug spray if you even try to have sex with my brother in the RV—or anywhere else for that matter,” Terry said, and the way Lisa gasped made Keri think it was a dire threat indeed. “Go ahead, Keri, laugh at me. But once the sun starts going down you’d duct tape your own thighs closed for a bottle of Deep Woods OFF!. Trust me.”

“Since she’d be the only woman for ten miles not reeking of DEET, she’d have guys trying to gnaw their way through the duct tape within minutes,” Lisa countered.

Keri was blessedly saved from having to comment on that interesting visual by the restrained rumble of approaching ATVs. There was an obey-or-die speed limit in the campground, but as soon as the three Kowalski brothers rounded into view—putting sedately along—Keri could see they’d done some serious hell raising somewhere. Men and machines both were covered in dirt and mud, and about the only clean thing she could see were three grins’ worth of white teeth.

Joe expected her to subject herself to
that
?

Their arrival brought the boys swarming back from the playground, while Stephanie, Leo and Mary emerged from campers.

“Finally, I get to have some lunch,” Leo yelled.

Though it had been far too long since she’d last seen him, Keri’s adoration of Leo Kowalski was total and unabashed. He was a deceptively short and wiry man, but she knew he could probably bench press one of those four-wheelers if he got stubborn about it. He’d worn his hair in a gray crew cut for as long as she could remember, and he was the source of the pretty blue eyes. Mary, who had become the quintessential Grammy, gave the kids their dimples.

Many years before, Keri had been terrified of Leo Kowalski. Her own father was a quiet sort—other than the five-iron incident—and Leo was like a firecracker of energy with a built-in megaphone. She didn’t know what to make of the man who very loudly threatened his children with such dire consequences as having their asses kicked up around their ears and trips behind the woodshed. Of course, neither Keri nor the Kowalski kids knew what a woodshed was and he’d never laid a hand on them in anger, but that didn’t make the promises any less foreboding. She’d discovered after only a few visits it was Mary and her wooden spoon a kid really had to watch out for.

But what Keri liked most about Leo and Mary right then was the fact they’d greeted her as if it had been eighteen hours, not years, since they’d seen her. No melodrama, resentments, admonishments or exuberance. They were just…normal.

Unlike the rest of them. Joe, Mike and Kevin were shouting over each other to tell the family about their ride. There were words like off-camber, high-sided and roost being thrown around that could have been German for all she knew, but the gist of it was they’d ridden to the edge of breaking their idiot necks, but had come home in one piece.

Now they were filthy, starving and—judging by the smoking way Joe kept looking at her over his nephews’ heads—as wound up, so to speak, as the women said they’d be.

Sure enough, Mike was beckoning to Lisa. “Hold off on lunch for a few minutes so I can shower this mud off. You should come check me for ticks, too.”

“Lucky bastards,” Kevin muttered before heading to his tent for a change of clothes.

Keri wasn’t sure what was up with the plural bastards until she saw Joe moving toward her. Other than a raccoon mask of white where his goggles had rested and his hair, every inch of Joe looked as though he’d taken a mud bath and skipped the rinse.

“Don’t you even think about touching me,” she warned.

“I think there’s a tick on my back, so you should come to the bathhouse and check me over.”

She could tell by his expression the only thing keeping him from claiming the tick was in his pants was the presence of the kids. “Nice try, Kowalski. As filthy as you are, a tick couldn’t find your skin with MapQuest and a GPS.”

He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to make do on my own.”

Again with the freakin’ hot flashes. She watched him jump on his four-wheeler and head for the cabin, trying like hell to kill the visual of Joe making do on his own.

When he passed by a few minutes later with a duffel bag tossed on the ATV’s front rack, she was still trying. She watched him turn up toward the bathhouse, seriously reconsidering her refusal. There couldn’t be an interview if she let Joseph Kowalski die of some tick-borne disease, could there?

Then came the realization everybody else was watching her watch Joe, followed closely by the thought he was heading to the bathhouse not because the cabin’s shower was too small, but because it didn’t have one. Or a toilet. What if she had to go pee in the middle of the night?

Flash.
“Say cheese!”