Lucky in Love (5 page)

"Dammit, Lucky, what were you doing back there?" His words were harsh, but his hands were gentle when he untangled me from the chrome legs of the fallen chair and lifted me to my feet. "You need a keeper," he muttered, as he brushed some glass shards off my shirt.  He froze when he realized where his hands were and how close I was to him. I had opened my mouth to make a smart-ass retort, but no words came out.

We were nearly nose to nose in the cramped corner of my kitchen, sandwiched between the dinette table and the fridge. He was watching me with an intensity that both fascinated and terrified me. The fascination part was winning, though, and I suddenly wanted him in a very bad way. 

Right up until Nate cleared his throat.

I jumped away like he'd poked me with a cattle prod, whacking my head on the corner of the fridge. Chance quickly moved out of my way and shot Nate a glare when he chuckled. "I hate to interrupt, but we really should finish up here."

Chance sat back down and folded his arms, looking at me, but speaking to Nate. "I think it would be better if we moved our conversation to my hotel. It was a mistake for me to even come here in the first place."

"Right," I said, before I could help myself. "Time for the famous Chance Atkins disappearing act. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."

He pushed himself back to his feet and carefully rotated his sore shoulder. "I don't know if I could take much more of this welcome home treatment anyway. Next, you're going to find a way to accidentally cut off one of my fingers or something."

"Welcome home treatment? You've got some nerve, you arrogant nitwit!" I sputtered, but Nate stood, too, and stepped between where the two of us stood bristling like Dobermans over a mailman squeaky toy.

"What about the insignificant little fact that someone just shot out my window?" I demanded, shifting my wrath to Nate. Nate smiled
placatingly, even white teeth gleaming like an actor's in a toothpaste commercial.

"Don't worry. My partner tracked down the van. It was on I-94 and already 20 miles toward Chicago. We're following him now for a bit to make sure he truly is on his way out of town."

He put a hand on my shoulder, turning me toward the broken window, and pointed to a blue sedan parked across the street where the van had been. That's Randall Fisher. Fisher's going to keep an eye on things here for a while to make sure everything stays copacetic."

"Should I still call the local police?" I asked.

It occurred to me that if the Fisher guy was there, and obviously Nate and Chance had things covered on their end, I probably didn't need to freak out my pot-growing neighbor downstairs if it wasn't necessary. Gary was a super nice guy, despite his hobbies, and he always checked on Louie for me when I was out of town. Plus, he made me an awesome pan of brownies once. 

"I'll leave that up to you," Nate answered, "but we've really got it covered. Local police would probably just muddy the water at this point."

Nate zipped his computer back into its case and tucked it in the duffel again. "I'm really sorry about the circumstances, Lucky, but it was good to meet you." The way Nate said my name in that Texan drawl of his was undeniably cute, and he looked like a Cabela's model, but it was Chance that I couldn't take my eyes off as stalked around the living room, grabbing his coat, shoes and painkillers.

Nate bounded down the steps to the big red Chevy Silverado parked in the driveway. Chance stopped on the landing and I stood in the doorway.

"It was good seeing you, Lucky," he said quietly. He started to say something else, but then his face closed up again. "Be happy."

I didn't want him to go. I'd spent years alternately despising him and desperately missing him and now that he was right here with me, I didn't want him to go. I scrambled for something to say that would buy me another moment or two, but then he was going down the steps to get in the truck with Nate. Nate quickly backed out in the street, beeped once, and then sped down the block.

And with that, Chance Atkins disappeared again.

Chapter 9

I closed the door on the grey, drizzly afternoon, and breathed out a sigh. No more crazy Candy and her crackhead cohorts. No more flirtatious cowboys or drunken wedding mishaps. No more Chance. Life could go on as usual.

Without Chance.
 

I plunked down on the couch, and Louie, who was usually less than friendly, seemed to sense my pensive mood. He hopped up on to my lap, and started kneading his paws into my stomach, like the world's weirdest ab exerciser.  Absently rubbing Louie's fuzzy head while his rumbling purr echoed through the room, I contemplated my life.

I had a job. Granted, it was just admin work at a local law office, but I was fortunate to have it, since the economy was such crap, and the lawyers, mostly members of the old boy's club, didn't seem to mind that my idea of business casual was to come into work dressed like a vintage pinup model.

I had friends. Paralegals from work that I went to 5:00 Friday parties with. Smart, interesting and quirky people that I'd met through the swing dance class I belonged to, or the book club I was a member of. Addy, who hopefully would be a lot more fun to hang out with once she returned from her honeymoon with her sanity intact. Julian, who I watched soap operas and old movies with, and who had introduced me to the joys of Bingo.

I went out and did things—I wasn't a hermit. I had a standing Saturday lunch date with my mom at Cracker Barrel. I went on thrift shop and estate sale bargain hunts. I even dated once in a while. Like Clive Lambert, a junior partner with the firm I worked for, just last month. Even though he talked about his mom incessantly and had a weird habit of pulling on his earlobes. Bad example, but he was a date, so he counted.

Hm.
There had to be more.

Oh, wait! I had hobbies! I was forever tinkering with the Roadmaster. I made original, badly-sewn outfits with my sewing machine, rescued offbeat treasures from junk piles, hunted down vintage dresses from obscure designers and read trashy romances. I had a little potted herb garden on my balcony, and sometimes the plants in it even lived for a few months before they turned brown and croaked or I bumped them and they took accidental headers down to the pavement below. I had an actual exercise routine and walked a couple miles a week, usually taking the route that went right by Dairy Queen, because even athletes need sugar fixes sometimes.

But that was about it.

My life abruptly began to feel a lot more boring than it did the morning before, and it wasn't because hitting people with cars and getting my windows shot out was my idea of a good time. It was Chance's fault, I thought bitterly. He'd flicked that spark back just to yank it away again.

There were times over the past decade that I'd convinced myself that I'd forgotten all about Chance. After all, for a lot of years, he was just my annoying brother's annoying friend that practically lived at our house. One of my earliest memories of Chance was when I was six years old. I punched him in the nose because he held me down while Jack stole my favorite Barbie, cut off all her hair, used a Sharpie to make her anatomically correct, and zip-tied her to the top of our Christmas tree. I got grounded to my room, while Chance got three chocolate chip cookies, a wad of gauze and lots of sympathy from my mom for his bloody, grotesquely-swollen nose. Mom said we had to be nice to him because he had a bad home life, but I was just mad because I had to miss
Punky Brewster
.

After that, Chance made sure to keep a safe distance from me, and I disdainfully ignored him whenever I saw him, which was often. Then, when I was in third grade and he was in fifth, he offered to fix a flat tire on my bike. I gratefully agreed, revising my opinion of him as an annoying jerk, and he finished the job in no time.

Moments later, I was riding to the store, happily clutching a fistful of change to buy some Peachy-Os. I popped an impulsive wheelie, and to my surprise, my front tire immediately parted ways with my bike. When gravity kicked in, the bike's forks hit the pavement and I flew headlong over the handlebars, breaking my fall with my chin and knocking myself out cold. When I came to, I stumbled home to my mom, covered with blood and looking like the victim of a zombie attack. I had to dump a glass of water on Mom to bring her out of her faint before she could drive me to the ER for stitches. Despite his protests that the bike incident was an accident, our temporary truce ended and Chance and I were back to war. 

Our feud continued for another six years, but high school and my idiotic teen hormones changed everything. One day, I inexplicably quit seeing Chance as an extension of my demonic brother, and started noticing him for what he actually was: a friendly, attractive, athletic and totally crush-worthy guy. I wrote cheesy little sonnets in my diary about his green eyes, his flashing, devil-may-care smile, and his endearingly double-dimpled cheek. Instead of glaring daggers at him, I started staring at him moodily instead. Rather than holding up my end of our usual sarcastic banter, I'd clam up and blush whenever he was around.

But Chance was totally dense and still didn't see me as anything more than Jack's sister. My demented, yet observant brother, however, immediately recognized my infatuation for what it was: the perfect opportunity for the biggest, awesomest, most humiliating sibling prank he had ever pulled.

From the time that Addy and I walked into school that fateful morning, bitching to each other about an upcoming Biology test that neither of us had studied for, mean-spirited teenage mirth and spiteful snickering rippled down the halls at us in waves. No one would meet our eyes, and it seemed that even the teachers were having a hard time looking our way without laughing. Addy, who was captain of the cheerleading squad and the most beautiful, insecure girl at our school, was convinced it was because of her new haircut and bolted into one of the girl's bathrooms to cry and possibly throw up.

I was following her in when Anthony, a sweet, soft-spoken senior who sometimes tutored me in math, came out of the boys' room holding a bright red flier. He frowned when he saw me, black eyebrows drawing together behind his glasses.

I suddenly knew that no one was laughing at Addy.

"What is it, Anthony? It's about me, isn't it?"

He looked horribly uncomfortable, but held out the garishly-colored sheet of paper. I looked down at it with a feeling of dread in my gut.

Dear Diary,

Today, I got my period. It was weird, and gross, and
—

Jack. I was absolutely going to kill him this time. I could make it look like an accident—I had already read a bunch of Agatha Christie books and planned the whole thing out. The only reason I hadn't actually murdered him yet was because it probably would have made Mom sad, but this was the last and final straw. She'd understand after I told her what he did.

But if this was it—just the period thing—I could deal with it. Hope rose in me. Maybe he just picked the page he thought would embarrass me the most…

A couple of the football players walked by at that moment, reading aloud and guffawing at a purple piece of paper. "Dimples deeply score his cheeks, been dreaming of my Chance for weeks."

Oh, Jack was so dead. That was my lamest poem, written while I was sick with a cold and high on cough medicine a couple of months before.

I ducked into the girls' room, while Anthony averted his eyes in pity. I burst into the last stall where Addy sat sobbing. Shocked out of her tears by my narrowed eyes and bared teeth, Addy cringed away from me.

"
Wh-what is it, Lucky?"

"Jack," I hissed. I missed the slightly dreamy expression that came over her face at my brother's name, since I was staring at another Xeroxed page of my diary that was taped to the bathroom wall. This one didn't have any words—just a very badly-drawn, but clearly labeled picture of Chance.  And I'd signed it, for Pete's sake.

I racked my brain to remember what class Jack was in at the moment.

Gym.

Fists clenched, I headed out of the bathroom at a dead run, dodging two freshman girls who giggled but fell back quickly when they saw the expression on my face. Addy, once she realized what was on the paper that I'd been staring at, raced down the hall behind me, yelling for me to stop. I couldn't. I had a premeditated murder to commit.

I threw open the metal doors to the gym so hard that they banged off the painted cinderblock walls and scanned the crowd. Teen chatter, deafening over the echoing thud of basketballs, stopped short as all eyes turned toward me.

"Jack!" I hollered, heedless of the gym teacher goggling at me. "Where the fuck are you, you slimy little rat bastard?"

My nemesis climbed slowly out from under the bleachers, followed by a distinctly mussed-looking, large-breasted blonde who sat behind me in my remedial math class. That was my brother—ever the ladies' man. Addy gasped behind me, but I was too caught up in my rage to note it.

"'Sup, Lucky?" He swaggered out into the middle of the basketball court.

Then he winked.

It was that wink that put me over the edge. His eyes widened sharply a fraction of a second before I tackled him, sending him sprawling. I straddled his chest, effectively pinning his arms to his sides, and like Ralphie in
The Christmas Story
, I proceeded to beat the smug, shit-eating grin right off his face.