Finish What We Started (2 page)

Chapter Two

Five years earlier

“Come on, Candace.” Megan yelled it right in her ear. “You’re totally going to win.”

“I don’t want to win.” She didn’t even want to be in the bar. She needed to be studying for her Toxicology exam, not prancing around on a stage.

“Of course you want to win. You’ll get ten thousand dollars.” Megan turned her by the shoulders and applied more gloss to Candace’s lips. Julie was using way too much hairspray on her.

She hadn’t done a pageant since she’d put her foot down at fifteen and told her mother enough was enough. The next seven years had been blissfully hairspray-free. But ten thousand dollars...There was so much she could do with that much money. She needed some new lab equipment. Next semester’s textbooks. It made her Glasgow dream not so unrealistic. She hated these competitions and her parents would have a stroke if she ended up in a beer advertisement, but if it got her to Glasgow it was worth it.

Megan was eyeing her chest. “Plump up your boobs.”

“My boobs are fine.”

Julie was scrutinizing the other entrants—women who didn’t look like they were being forced to enter the contest. “All right look, Candy. Your tits are fabulous. Best tits in all of Alpha Nu. I’m just saying that chick over there is freaking huge, and you might consider plumping a little.”

Candace looked down at her chest. Julie grabbed the hem of her T-shirt and yanked, pulling the scoop neckline down until the lace of her bra was clearly visible.

“Oh yeah. That’s good.” Megan nodded her approval, then opened her eyes wide. “You know what she needs?”

Julie dragged her eyes away from the other contestants. “What?”

“I don’t need anything.” But no one was listening to her. She rolled her eyes and groaned.

“Shorts. She’s got great legs.”

“Damn.” Megan started digging around in her massive purse. “I don’t have any scissors.”

“No.” Candace said it with force. “You’re not cutting my jeans.”

Julie’s eyes gleamed with an unholy light. “So we switch. Put you in Megan’s shorts.”

Megan was a good five inches shorter than Candace and at least one size smaller. “No.” Candace shook her head, but they were already towing her toward the bathroom.

“We’ll be right back,” Megan hollered at the DJ. “Just give us one minute.”

They shoved her in the handicapped stall and piled in behind her. Megan had her shorts off in a flash. Her friend stood in pink cotton bikinis, her tiny denim shorts in her hand. “Come on. Hurry up.”

“Damn it,” Candace protested, “I’m going to look ridiculous.” But she unbuttoned her jeans and eyed the shorts. Ten thousand dollars. “Those will never fit.”

Megan was swimming in Candace’s jeans. Not a good sign. Candace stepped into the shorts. Yup, they just barely covered her butt cheeks. Julie tucked her T-shirt into the waistband of the shorts so that her cleavage was front and center.

“Masterpiece,” Megan declared. “Your legs are, like, seven miles long with those shoes on.”

“You’re gorgeous. Well, more gorgeous than usual.” Julie smiled gleefully. “You are so going to win.”

They escorted her back up to the front of the bar, Julie pulling her hand and Megan walking close behind, rubbing her shoulders like Candace was a prizefighter or something. She looked around the bar at the crowd. It was a raucous place that usually had a live band on weekends, outrageous drink specials and women never paid a cover.

The promotions crew from Black Sam Ale, a popular local craft brewery, was in the bar holding a contest for a new Pirate Booty Girl, which accounted for why the place was packed more than usual. Candace hadn’t been aware of the contest when she had been railroaded into leaving her textbooks and going out with her old sorority sisters. Apparently, her friends had found out about the event and preregistered her weeks ago.

Posters tacked up on the walls and table toppers showed a buxom model with her face covered by a question mark wearing the Pirate Booty Girl costume. Candace groaned. The thing looked like a ridiculous, slutty Halloween costume. The model’s breasts were hiked up by a purple velvet corset laced up on the outside of a frilly white blouse that was just barely decent. She had on a black lace skirt lifted so high by black lace petticoats that the model’s “booty” was showing. And to cinch the deal, black leather over-the-knee boots and a hat with a giant feather.

“I can’t wear that.” She pointed to the outfit. “That’s embarrassing.”

“No,” Megan said, “that’s awesome. You’d be the new face of Pirate Booty.”

Candace snorted. “No. I’d be the new ass of Pirate Booty.”

Julie stared at her for a minute, then leaned in and asked, “Hey, do you really, really not want to do this? It’s a ton of money and you’ve got a great chance of winning, but you don’t have to, you know.”

The DJ was on the stage revving up the crowd. The volume of the place ratcheted up about ninety notches. When a girl wearing a Pirate Booty T-shirt came over to where they were standing and leaned in to yell “Is one of you girls Candace Claesson?” she raised her hand. Ten thousand dollars was a hell of a motivator.

The promo girl handed her a card with the number seven written in big, bold print. “Hi. I’m Jill. Here’s your number. Just hold it in front of you when you go out there so everyone will know it if they want to vote for you. Ready?”

Candace looked back at her friends. They wore matching maniacal grins of encouragement.

“Go get ’em, tiger.” Julie waggled her fingers at her in a shooing gesture.

“The honor of Alpha Nu is depending on you,” Megan shouted.

She looked back over her shoulder while she followed Jill to the stage. How prancing around with her boobs and ass hanging out brought honor to her old sorority was beyond her.

Just think about the money. Just think about the money.
She repeated the mantra over and over as she climbed up to the stage and joined ten other girls. All the other contestants seemed thrilled to be up there as they eyed the competition. Candace recognized a couple of other women from campus. Susie Bradshaw was the social director of another house. Veronica Dixon of Alpha O had worked with Candace’s house on a joint homecoming party. Candace couldn’t remember who the redhead was at the end of the lineup, but she was familiar from somewhere.

Her friends were at the bottom of the stage cheering like idiots. “Work it, Candy!”

The contest got underway and each of the girls pranced or jiggled their way to the front of the stage, displaying their assigned number with abandon.

Ten thousand dollars.

With that incentive, and despite Candace’s earlier misgivings, she decided to have fun. The crowd was raucous, and the DJ was rowdy. The hype was contagious. When her name was called she exaggerated her stride and did a full-on model walk to the edge of the platform, paused and thrust out a hip. She shifted ever so slightly so that her butt was aimed to the crowd, then slapped the number seven card on her ass. A coy over-the-shoulder look emphasized by a dramatic hair flip of blonde hair, and then she sashayed back to her spot.

The crowd went absolutely nuts. Megan and Julie looked like they were going to lose their minds. Her friends had been joined by a bunch of guys wearing baseball team uniforms and apparently they had been converted to Team Candace. The remaining three girls did their thing and the voting started.

The DJ stood in front of each girl and called for applause. There was some sort of hokey Applause Meter that moved a hand on a huge dial to give a score.

The other contestants were gracious, mostly, when they lost. There were a few snide comments involving silicone (uh, no) and bleach (totally not necessary), but the girls she knew from school congratulated her as they left the stage.

Candace stood alone on the platform and eyed the crowd, the Pirate Booty staff and her friends. She’d planned to spend the evening studying endless notes on toxicology, page after page of pharmaco-toxicokinetics. She might have even branched into viral diseases. If things got really exciting, there could be a cup of coffee with whipped cream and cinnamon in it for her. Instead, she’d managed to cover a decent chunk of the missing tuition for her first semester at vet school in Glasgow. Not so shabby.

Megan practically strangled her in a hug when she rejoined their crowd. “I knew you’d win. I just knew it.” Her enthusiasm was a bit frightening.

“Meg’s just excited because she can’t wait to lord it over the girls at Delta.” Julie cast a gaze at their friend, who was celebrating with abandon with the baseball team and anyone else in the vicinity. “Besides, she’s drunk.”

“And she’s going to kill herself in my pants.” They watched Megan dancing—and tripping—over Candace’s jeans. “And I’m dying to get out of her shorts. They’re strangling me. My spleen has migrated to my lungs.”

Julie laughed and yelled over the din of the celebrating crowd. “What was with that walk up there? You killed it!”

“I don’t know. I guess I figured what the hell, ya know?” Or maybe she had been possessed.

“Well, whatever it was, it was inspired.”

The Black Sam people monopolized her for the next half hour. There were contracts to sign and a photo shoot to set up. All of it took longer than necessary because they were constantly interrupted by guys offering groan-worthy pickup lines.

A dark-haired man brought her a beer. It wasn’t even a Black Sam. “Hey baby, wanna swab my decks?” This was followed up with the raising and lowering of his eyebrows in a comically suggestive manner. “I’ve got a yacht.”

“I get seasick,” Candace told him with a sympathetic shrug. Jill, the PR lady, shooed him away.

After five minutes a short blond guy sidled up next to their table. “You hear that?”

Jill sighed and slapped her pen on the table.

“Hear what?” Candace asked.

“The ocean wants you to join me for a drink.” He held out his hand for her to come away with him. To what? Some sort of seaside palace of sexual joy?

She dropped her hand in her lap. “You have excellent hearing. The ocean is, like, a thousand miles from here.”

He smiled and it was kinda cute, but still. “I’ve got my car. We could go find the ocean.”

“I don’t think so, but thank you anyway.”

Jill waved at him as he walked away. “You’re going to get a lot of that, even more than you did before.”

She could put up with a photo shoot and some poorly lobbed come-ons for this kind of money. Being the new face of Black Sam wasn’t so bad, even though the Pirate Booty Girl’s costume was mortifying. It was the means to an end.

“You might as well sleep with me. I’m going to tell everyone you did anyway.”

Ten grand, Candace. Ten grand.

* * *

“Just go talk to her.”

Lee snorted at his brother Mark. “Right.”

Jesus, she was beautiful. Way too beautiful to give him a second glance. He couldn’t stop looking at her, though. She must be a professional model, the way she’d walked across the stage. She’d strutted as if she knew exactly how gorgeous she was, how she must be affecting every man in the room.

“I know she speaks English.” Mark tipped the rim of his bottle in her direction. His brother was one of those guys who could talk to girls whether he was interested in them or not. And he was fun and funny and good-looking, so women always liked him. Lee never felt that confident.

The lady was sitting at the table with one of the Black Sam people, trying to talk over the din of the bar. There were a bunch of papers on the table, and they looked busy. Not that any of the jackasses in the bar paid any attention to that. A long string of hopefuls streamed to the table and got shot down like lead basketballs.

There was a lull in the music and Lee and Mark heard the latest pickup line delivered by the center fielder from their team. “Do your luscious legs hurt from running through my dreams last night?”

He and his brother groaned and rolled their eyes.

“Seriously, man. You like her. Go talk to her.”

“Nah.” Lee shook his head, then took a long pull of his beer—an English ale. Certainly not that Black Sam shit. He didn’t care how luscious their beer girl was, he still wasn’t drinking that piss.

The PR lady got up from the table, held up her index finger indicating she’d be “one minute” and left the blonde alone at the table. In shark-infested water.

Any girl who looked like she did could surely take care of herself. Besides, he’d look as much like an idiot as the rest of them. He had a split-second fantasy about doing that suave film move where the guy sidles up next to the girl being harassed, kisses her cheek and says, “Sorry I’m late, honey” and chases off the creeper, giving the girl a chance to see what a great guy he is. It always worked in the movies.

“Goddamn it, Lee. Fine.” Mark set the beer down with a
thunk
. “I’m gonna go do it, then.”

Before Lee could make a case against it, Mark left his stool and sauntered the several feet to where the woman sat alone, her chin propped up on her palm. He gave Lee an evil grin over his shoulder.

Mark extended his hand and she promptly shook it. He leaned in and said something to her and she smiled. Her teeth were perfect just like the rest of her. Lee couldn’t hear the conversation but they chattered away, their heads damn near stuck together. Holy shit, Mark had just sat down on the abandoned stool. Lee huffed. He was going to kick his brother’s ass.

He took an angry swig of beer and glared at Mark’s head until both of them turned to look at him. Mark raised and lowered his eyebrows several times just to get his goat, but the woman smiled at him, then turned back to Mark. They kept right on talking like the two of them had been separated at birth.

Lee ordered another beer from the roaming waitress and then immediately regretted it. He should just go. What the hell was he sitting around for anyway? It was loud and smoky, and he should quit while he was still all right to drive. Besides he needed to get up early to do some chores at his mother’s house.

The happy couple was joined by her two cute friends, one of whom was dressed very strangely in pants several inches too long. She was really drunk and the extra fabric of the jeans wasn’t helping as she tried to stay upright. The sober friend held the shorter one’s hand and talked with Mark’s new best friend. The blonde called Candy slumped on her stool for a second, then nodded her head. The other two left, the sober one towing the other behind her, stumbling and clueless.