No Bunny But You (Holiday Romance Series) (8 page)

“You like doing this kind of thing, don’t you?
Building things.” Drake and she had finished the posts and moved on
to cutting the boards to go around the edges, tying the foundation
together.

“Yes. It’s fun sometimes.”

He sidled around her, putting a plank across the
flooring and brushing his hand against hers in the process.

Molly took a deep breath to calm her jittery insides,
unintentionally sucking in a breath of man smell. Unlike a lot of
guys on a job site, he smelled really good.

Together, they cut the pieces while the concrete set
up, eventually erecting the gazebo frame. They worked with a steady
rhythm that confirmed everything she believed about him. He knew
more than he gave himself credit for.

Raising the roof beams to a pitch later in the day,
they each perched on separate ladders. Molly watched Drake
stretching out, his strong arm hammering in the spike to hold the
truss upright.

“Great. That’ll keep it strong and stable while we
put the sheathing on the roof. We’ll put decking, felt over that
and then those cute shingles I found.”

He climbed down, watching as she hammered her roof
support on to the hub he’d just installed.

“Here, let me help.” Drake climbed up her ladder,
reaching to steady the beam.

She could have told him she didn’t need him to help
in that way, but Molly said nothing as he leaned into her again.
God help her, she was loving it. She needed to get a grip.

“There.”

Feeling the rumble of his voice with his chest up
against her back, Molly just finished nailing in the spike and
waited for him to step off the ladder. When Drake did, she started
stepping down the rungs, not realizing until both feet were on the
ground, that he’d kept his hold on the ladder. Turning slightly,
she found herself face to face with the one guy she needed to keep
at a distance.

“You do this good,” he said softly, his arms
bracketing her where she stood with her back to the ladder. “Of
course, you do
this
better.”

Molly started to ask him tartly to get out of her
way. But he leaned in suddenly, kissing her parted lips, his mouth
against hers…and then after several seconds of his hard body
pressed to hers and his mouth hot on hers….she lost her mind and
kissed him back.

All day she’d told herself to be strong, not to think
that the man pressing against her and looking at her with hot eyes
was the wrong man to kiss. She didn’t just want a few minutes of
naked fun on the front seat of a pickup. She wanted more—all of him
or none of him. At least, that’s what she’d been telling herself
for the last year and a half.

But she couldn’t stop kissing him, drowning in the
heat of his mouth on hers, lost in the sensation of him pulling her
against him. He felt good everywhere—his broad shoulders, his
pelvis pressed against hers. Oh, God, his pelvis pressed right
there!

Molly flashed to what she wanted—a tangle of clothes
and skin and thrusting hunger.

“No!” She wrenched herself out of his arms. Her chest
rising and falling in gasping breaths, she pushed back. Clearing
her throat, she took a breath and said again, “No. Drake, no. We
can’t do this.”

His chest rising and falling, too, he looked at her
with dark eyes. “Why not? I thought we were doing a really great
job of it, just now.”

“You’re…my friend,” she struggled to get the words
out. “Not just some guy I get naked with.”

* * *

“You’re drunk!” Molly hissed a week later, acutely
aware of the women congregated at the tables on the green lawn. The
Women’s League Spring Tea was the start of the events leading up to
the Easter Picnic.

This was the first real event that mattered in her
bid to wow the League members with her skill and convince them that
they hadn’t been wrong in accepting Cheryl’s recommendation of her.
Looking at her red-faced, wobbly employee in the bunny suit, she
wondered if maybe they could have done better.

“I-I’m fine, jush fine,” Ty Michaels stumbled as he
stood facing her on the green lawn off to the side.

“No! You’re not!” Molly grabbed him by his
fur-covered arm and pulled him toward the garden party tent she’d
been using as her headquarters.

“Jush give me a few minutes and I’ll be—I’ll be
fine.” Ty let her pull him into the tent. “Do you have a bathroom
here? I need a bathroom.”

“Good grief!” Taking him by the paw, she hurried into
the small kiosk that housed the garden’s bathrooms. When she’d
opened the door to the men’s bathroom and shoved Ty in, she held
her hand to her thundering heart and tried to think.

This was a disaster! There was no way she could put a
drunk Easter Bunny out there to interact with the Women’s League
members and the various underprivileged children invited to this
shindig.

Pacing back and forth in the kiosk’s small hallway
outside the bathrooms, she furiously considered her options. None
of the other bunnies she’d interviewed was likely to be free at a
moment’s notice, but she scrolled through the recent calls on her
phone and tried.

She got voicemails at the first three, an out-right
refusal on the fourth and spoke to a man with a bad case of the flu
when she tried the fifth number. Putting on the suit herself wasn’t
an option because she had to direct the rest of the tea party,
otherwise, Molly would have gotten into the furry get-up in a
second.

Ty still hadn’t come out of the bathroom. He’d
probably passed out in there and she’d have to drag his comatose
body out before the underprivileged kids arrived.

In desperation—not knowing who else to call—Molly
pressed on Drake’s number. They hadn’t talked in the week since he
kissed her in front of the skeletal gazebo. Having swung between
conviction that she’d done the right thing and a deep, aching
regret that she hadn’t kept kissing him back, Molly had barely been
able to get the garden party arranged. She hadn’t talked with him
because she just hadn’t known what to say.

“Hello?”

She’d never heard such a comforting sound as him
saying that one word.

“Drake?” Her voice wobbled on the one word.

“Molly?” When she didn’t respond immediately, he said
again, “Molly?”

“Yes.” She tried not to burst into tears.

“What’s the matter? Molly?”

She could hear the concern in his voice and moisture
leaked out of one eye, despite her determination. “He came drunk,
Drake. My Easter Bunny is drunk out of his mind. I just shoved him
into the men’s bathroom.”

“Geez! You’re kidding. This tea party is the lead-up
to the big day. What are you going to do? Is it too late to get
another person to play the bunny?”

She sucked in a sobbing breath. “No, but I tried and
I can’t get any of them to pinch hit?”

“None of them? How many did you call?”

“Five. I called five people who contacted me about
the job—some of them were pretty bad,but I have to have someone. I
can’t get any of them and I don’t have any other cartoon character
people to call!”

“Okay.” His tone was bracing. “Don’t freak out. Who
else could you get to fill in? Just for today?”

“Okay, okay. Let me think.” She took a couple of
stabilizing breaths. “It has to be someone who can get here right
away. And someone who’s good with kids….”

A sudden thought occurred to her in a blinding
moment. Drake. He could do it.

In a rush, she blurted out, “You. You’re the only one
I know who could do it.”

“Are you crazy?” He was clearly irritated. “I don’t
know kids or stuffed animals or any of that crap.”

“Drake,” she said, staring blindly out the kiosk
door. “One out of two isn’t bad. You can get here. You’re my only
hope.”

“Then you need to get another hope, honey, because
this guy isn’t an Easter Bunny.”

* * * * * * * * *

Drake shoved at the bunny head he wore, trying to get
the eyeholes aligned where he could actually see the garden in
front of him.

“It’s the Easter Bunny! The Easter Bunny!”

A bunch of kids across the chilly garden spotted him
and began running toward Drake.

Austin was suffering from one of its occasional “cold
fronts”, but it was just his luck that the League members didn’t
think it was necessary to cancel for the weather.

Just his luck—it wasn’t raining.

As children surrounded him, he caught fragments of
phrases through their screams of delight.

“Look it’s a big rabbit!”

“He has an Easter Basket!!”

Bracing himself for what looked like an onslaught of
miniature munchkins, Drake reflected again why he’d never
particularly liked kids—or thought they liked him. When he was
suiting up in the furry outfit, Molly had reminded him that bunnies
didn’t talk, so he had to keep his mouth shut. Since words had
always been his talent, he was left feeling somewhat
unprotected—despite the bunny suit, the huge feet and the head with
the monstrous ears—and unsure what the hell to do.

Clomping forward in the gigantic bunny feet, he felt
the first running child thump into him.

“The Easter rabbit!” The small boy clutched at him,
clinging to his leg and making forward progress difficult.

Aware of the other twenty kids running his way, Drake
wished he’d gotten a few more tips on what exactly he was to do.
Molly stood a little to his side, but since he couldn’t talk,
asking her now what to do wasn’t an option.

Damn friendship or whatever the hell this was now.
When she’d made her plea for help, he couldn’t really say no.
Letting Molly down wasn’t even a choice he considered—even if that
meant wearing huge furry feet and letting himself be mobbed by a
bunch of insane midgets.

Even if she had ended their kiss by pushing him
away.

He needed to have his head examined. It hadn’t
occurred to him not to respond when she’d called in
desperation.

What was the matter with him?

Sure, she’d have been in a fix unless he helped her
out, but things between them had shifted since those kisses. He
knew more than anyone how important this gig was to her, though.
And what was important to Molly was important to him.

Idiot that he was.

Soon Drake was surrounded by a gaggle of children,
all clutching at his arms and trying to hug his waist. He could
even feel several kids, pulling at his big, fluffy bunny tail.
Weird.

Through his mesh “eyes”, he saw that they ranged from
about ten to twelve to some really small ones he guessed were only
three or four. Since the little ones seemed to want to cluster
around his legs like chicks under their mother—and he didn’t want
to step on them—Drake finally knelt down. His huge head made it
difficult to bend over to see where they were, but he tried.

Kneeling with one fur-covered knee on the damp spring
grass, he was suddenly hugged by a half a dozen small bodies and he
shifted in an attempt to balance their weight.

“Did you brwing eggs, mister bunny? Chocowat eggs?” A
small boy with dark hair and eyes had acquired a limpet-grip on his
leg. “Do you have them in your basket?”

The older kids stood around him in a ring while Drake
tried to keep from tumbling over from the force of little kids
clinging to him.

“He has ears! Look at his big ears.”

“And this funny, furry tail.” A mid-sized girl
giggled as she tugged at the rear of his costume.

“Back off, Kesha,” an older girl told a small one
authoritatively, pulling her off his knee. “Give the bunny some
room to breathe.”

She took Kesha by the arm and picked her up. He
couldn’t help being relieved, even as he noted she seemed
accustomed to the role, almost like a mini-adult.

“He has a basket! An Easter basket.” A young boy
clutched at the wicker handle and tugged. “Look, there are eggs in
here. And candy!”

Soon the adult child-handlers—he couldn’t think what
else to call them—soon ringed him also, the adults calling to the
kids to mind their manners and not grab candy from his basket, much
as the older girl had.

Bent down as he was, Drake saw the smaller children
up close. They were still hugging him—even his back—and he could
see their faces which were all different colors; black and brown
and beige. There was even one really white kid with flaming red
hair. Their expressions were filled with earnest—he didn’t know
what else to call it—love. They seemed to love the bunny.

“We need to let the Easter Bunny stand up.” Molly
appeared at his side, and she and the child-handlers removed
several kids that were still clinging to him like starfish to an
underwater rock. Hearing the chatter and the enthusiasm emanating
from them, Drake found himself smiling inside the damned bunny
head.

Okay. Happy kids were nice to have around…not that
kids were always happy.

“Let’s go over to the gazebo and make some baskets to
hold all the eggs you’ll get at the Easter Picnic.” Molly urged the
children toward the summer house that he guessed now held unadorned
Easter baskets, stacks of pastel-colored tulle, heaps of bright
green plastic pretend grass and stacks of spools of ribbon.

At least that was what he saw stacked in the back of
Molly’s Beetle.

Getting to his big bunny feet, he found a smaller
child and an older girl on either side of him. Forming some sort of
junior escort, the little girl took his furry paw in her hand, like
she was accustomed to having a big rabbit walk beside her. Drake
looked down into the mocha face she innocently lifted to him and
retrieved the paw from her long enough to brush it across her small
braid-covered head. She smiled sweetly as she again clutched his
paw.

“This way to the gazebo.” Continuing to urge the
group of kids along, Molly seemed to be functioning as his voice,
since he couldn’t speak.

Drake walked across the grass, the little girl still
holding one paw while the older girl held his other paw. They all
climbed the shallow steps to the gazebo that he and Molly had built
before their steamy kiss.