Read, Write, Love (Love in Bloom: The Remingtons, Book 5) Contemporary Romance (24 page)

She ran her eyes down his arm. “Hey, what happened?”

Margie brought Emily her coffee as Wes walked into the diner. “And then there were three.”

“Hey, Margie.” Wes slid into the booth beside Emily. Each of the Bradens were blessed with thick dark hair, though Emily’s was straight and shiny, Luke’s was coarse and wavy, and Wes’s was a shade lighter and he kept it cropped much shorter than his brothers’. His cargo shorts and tank top were streaked with dirt, as was his forehead.

“Hey, sugar. I’ll bring your usual over in just a sec.” With her hand on her hip, she looked Wes over and shook her head. “Were you out on the trails already today?”

Wes raised his hand. “Guilty as charged. Checking out new trails. Tough life, but someone has to do it.” Wes ran a dude ranch and spent his time teaching well-paying clients how to rope and run cattle, ride horses, skeet shoot, and fish. He also took them on overnight pioneering adventures. Wes eyed Luke and Emily, then the pile of drawings on the table. “Did I miss anything?”

“What are you doing here?” Luke had recently helped Wes on a pioneering trip with a group of clients. He’d wound up going head-to-head with one of them and was arrested for assault. Even though the charges against Luke had been dropped, Luke was still dealing with what it said about him. He’d been thinking of nothing but ever since.

“Em said she was meeting you for breakfast.” Wes shrugged. “I was hungry.”

“I was just asking Luke what happened to his arm.” Emily arched a finely manicured brow.

Luke shrugged. “It’s nothing. I cut it on a fence, but I did just run into Daisy Honey, who cleaned it up for me. You guys remember her?” He thought of the way she’d ripped the tape from his arm and her snarky comment. She was feisty, and he liked it.

“Isn’t she the girl who had that horrible rep about sleeping around in high school?” Emily drank her coffee and opened one of her folders. “God, I felt so bad for her.” Trusty was like any other small town, where gossip spread faster than weeds.

“Hot little blond number?” Wes asked.

“Not anymore. I mean, hot yes, but she dyed her hair darker. I guess she got tired of dealing with all the crap, and just for the record, I don’t think those rumors were true.” Luke could relate to dealing with crap, and a memory was snaking its way into his mind. He couldn’t quite grasp it, but he had the distinct feeling that it had something to do with Daisy.

“I see that look in your eye, Luke. Careful. You’re the last thing a woman dodging a prickly past needs.” Wes held his gaze a beat too long. One of his key employees, Ray Mulligan, had quit a few weeks earlier, leaving Wes and his business partner, Chip, to lead every group that came to the ranch. Wes had been snappy and short-tempered ever since.

Luke was all too aware of his own reputation, and the arrest didn’t help much. He wasn’t big on lasting relationships. Or rather, he didn’t connect well on deeper levels with people. Give him a horse and he could practically tell what they were thinking, but people? Women? Whole different ball game. It was only recently that he’d begun to wonder why that was.

“Dude, what’s that supposed to mean?” Luke held his brother’s gaze. Having been raised by their mother after their father, Buddy Walsh, took off with a dime-store clerk from another town while their mother was still pregnant with Luke, all of his siblings were protective of one another. Luke was the same, and usually their fierce family loyalty served them well, but at times like this, the last thing he needed was to be judged by Wes.

“She’s had enough of a bad rep. She doesn’t need yours following her around.”

“Shit, Wes. You know damn well that arrest wasn’t my fault. You saw what went down.” The muscles in his jaw twitched.

“I wasn’t talking about the arrest.”

Emily slid a folder across the table to Luke; then she unfurled a set of architectural drawings, her eyes darting between them. “Can we not play Neanderthal today? Please? I have client meetings to attend to.”

Margie brought Luke and Wes their breakfasts, and Emily slid the drawings to the side. “There you are, boys. Em? You want anything else?”

“No, thanks, Margie. I’m good.” Emily watched Luke skim the file. “Want me to explain it?”

Luke set the file down. “Nope. I just want you to do it. I don’t need to decipher the details. I want the bathroom and bedroom attached. It was shortsighted of me not to do that in the first place. I just didn’t like the idea of there not being a guest bath.”

Wes shook his head.

“What?” He knew damn well what Wes was thinking. His brother was a planner. He mulled over every detail of his life, which was a good thing in his profession, and he thought Luke was impetuous, that he didn’t think things through. The truth was, Luke was a pantser—hard and fast. He ran from planning too far ahead or in too much detail like a rebellious teenager. Most of the time, his gut instincts were right, but sometimes, where they might have been right at the time, after thinking things through, he realized that the next idea he had was better.

In Luke’s eyes, those changes would have come after his decision was made even if he’d planned things out first, like Wes did. That thought process was so far from Wes’s that they often butted heads.

“Don’t you want to go over the specifications?” Wes asked.

“Hell no. What I want is to get home and check on my new foal. I trust Emily’s judgment, and she knows my budget. She’s banging out a few walls, moving some plumbing around.”

“Hey. Nice to know you value my job so much, you ass.” Emily took a piece of toast from his plate and bit it, then smirked at him. “It’s a one-bedroom apartment for a ranch hand. Why on earth would it need a guest bath? If you’d only listened…”

“Sorry, Em. You know I value what you do, and yeah, maybe I should have listened.” Luke shoveled his food into his mouth and lifted his chin in Wes’s direction. “Don’t you have a playdate?”

“Yeah,” Wes said with a sly grin. “With a petite little brunette and a set of books.”

“Clarissa?” Emily pointed at Wes. “I knew you two would hook up.”

“She’s my bookkeeper, not my girlfriend, and we’ve never hooked up.” He put his arm around Emily with a sigh. “If you put as much energy into your own love life as you do mine, then maybe you wouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’m dating.” She scrunched her nose. “Sort of. I think. Ugh. Do you have any idea how hard it is to date in this town?”

Luke and Wes both laughed, deep, loud, knowing laughs.

“Right. I guess you do, but it’s easier for guys. You guys have dated half the women in Trusty and it just makes the women you haven’t dated want you more. It’s not like that for girls.”

“It sure as hell better not be,” Luke said. He might be her younger brother, but he’d learned from the best four older brothers a guy could have how to protect his sister. Part of protecting her meant making sure she didn’t put herself in a position to become the talk of the town. That was better suited for the men in the Braden family—or at least it had been. Luke had changed. He’d always been restless, and that included being unable to settle down with just one woman, but since buying the ranch two years ago, that restless itch had calmed, and he’d become far more focused. He liked working with his hands, being around animals, and not being told what to do. The ranch was a perfect fit, and he was finally ready to make changes in his personal life, too. He wanted to be with one woman, a woman who would understand him, love him for who he was—his inability to plan and all. Someone who valued family, loved animals, and wasn’t looking for something more than he could give. But that took opening himself in ways he didn’t even understand himself, and he had no clue how to go about any of it.

Wes finished his food and locked his eyes on Luke. “I’ve got to run. Bro, just tread carefully with Daisy, that’s all. You know what she’s been through.”

Twenty minutes later Luke climbed onto his Harley and headed back toward his ranch, thinking about Daisy and what she’d gone through in high school. Maybe they weren’t so different after all.

(End of Sneak Peek)

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LOVE IN BLOOM release:

TAKEN BY LOVE,
The Bradens

Love in Bloom series
,
Book Fifteen

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Love in Bloom
novel

Seaside Dreams

Seaside Summers, Book One

Love in Bloom Series

Melissa Foster

BELLA ABBASCIA STRUGGLED to keep her grip on a ceramic toilet as she crossed the gravel road in Seaside, the community where she spent her summers. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Bella had a prank in store for Theresa Ottoline, a straitlaced Seaside resident and the elected property manager for the community. Bella and two of her besties, Amy Maples and Jenna Ward, had polished off two bottles of Middle Sister wine while they waited for the other cottage owners to turn in for the night. Now, dressed in their nighties and a bit tipsy, they struggled to keep their grip on a toilet that Bella had spent two days painting bright blue, planting flowers in, and adorning with seashells. They were carrying the toilet to Theresa’s driveway to break rule number fourteen of the Community Homeowners Association Guidelines:
No tacky displays allowed in the front of the cottages
.

“You’re sure she’s asleep?” Bella asked as they came to the grass in front of the cottage of their fourth bestie, Leanna Bray.

“Yes. She turned off her lights at eleven. We should have hidden it someplace other than my backyard. It’s so far. Can we stop for a minute? This sucker is heavy.” Amy drew her thinly manicured brows together.

“Oh, come on. Really? We only have a little ways to go.” Bella nodded toward Theresa’s driveway, which was across the road from her cottage, about a hundred feet away.

Amy glanced at Jenna for support. Jenna nodded, and the two lowered their end to the ground, causing Bella to nearly drop hers.

“That’s so much better.” Jenna tucked her stick-straight brown hair behind her ear and shook her arms out to her sides. “Not all of us lift weights for breakfast.”

“Oh, please. The most exercise I get during the summer is lifting a bottle of wine,” Bella said. “Carrying around those boobs of yours is more of a workout.”

Jenna was just under five feet tall with breasts the size of bowling balls and a tiny waist. She could have been the model for the modern-day Barbie doll, while Bella’s figure was more typical for an almost thirty-year-old woman. Although she was tall, strong, and relatively lean, she refused to give up her comfort foods, which left her a little soft in places, with a figure similar to Julia Roberts or Jennifer Lawrence.

“I don’t carry them with my arms.” Jenna looked down at her chest and cupped a breast in each hand. “But yeah, that would be great exercise.”

Amy rolled her eyes. Pin-thin and nearly flat chested, Amy was the most modest of the group, and in her long T-shirt and underwear, she looked like a teenager next to curvy Jenna. “We only need a sec, Bella.”

They turned at the sound of a passionate moan coming from Leanna’s cottage.

“She forgot to close the window again,” Jenna whispered as she tiptoed around the side of Leanna’s cottage. “Typical Leanna. I’m just going to close it.”

Leanna had fallen in love with bestselling author Kurt Remington the previous summer, and although they had a house on the bay, they often stayed in the two-bedroom cottage so Leanna could enjoy her summer friends. The Seaside cottages in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, had been in the girls’ families for years, and they had spent summers together since they were kids.

“Wait, Jenna. Let’s get the toilet to Theresa’s first.” Bella placed her hands on her hips so they knew she meant business. Jenna stopped before she reached for the window, and Bella realized it would have been a futile effort anyway. Jenna would need a stepstool to pull that window down.

“Oh…Kurt.” Leanna’s voice split the night air.

Amy covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. “Fine, but let’s hurry. Poor Leanna will be mortified to find out she left the window open again.”

“I’m the last one who wants to hear her having sex. I’m done with men, or at least with commitments, until my life is back on track.” Ever since last summer, when Leanna had met Kurt, started her own jam-making business, and moved to the Cape full-time, Bella had been thinking of making a change of her own. Leanna’s success had inspired her to finally go for it. Well, that and the fact that she’d made the mistake of dating a fellow teacher, Jay Cook. It had been months since they broke up, but they’d taught at the same Connecticut high school, and until she left for the summer, she couldn’t avoid running in to him on a daily basis. It was just the nudge she needed to take the plunge and finally quit her job and start over.
New job, new life, new location.
She just hadn’t told her friends yet. She’d thought she would tell them the minute she arrived at Seaside and they were all together, maybe over a bottle of wine or on the beach. But Leanna had been spending a lot of time with Kurt, and every time it was just the four of them, she hadn’t been ready to come clean. She knew they’d worry and ask questions, and she wanted to have some of the transition sorted out before answering them.

“Bella, you can’t give up on men. Jay was just a jerk.” Amy touched her arm.

She really needed to fill them in on the whole Jay and quitting her job thing. She was beyond over Jay, but they knew Bella to be the stable one of the group, and learning of her sudden change was a conversation that needed to be handled when they weren’t wrestling a fifty-pound toilet.

“Fine. You’re right. But I’m going to make all of my future decisions separate from any man. So…until my life is in order, no commitments for me.”

“Not me. I’d give anything to have what Kurt and Leanna have,” Amy said.

Bella lifted her end of the toilet easily as Jenna and Amy struggled to lift theirs. “Got it?”

“Yeah. Go quick. This damn thing is heavy,” Jenna said as they shuffled along the grass.

“More…” Leanna pleaded. 

Amy stumbled and lost her grip. The toilet dropped to the ground, and Jenna yelped.

“Shh. You’re going to wake up the whole complex!” Bella stalked over to them.

“Oh, Kurt!” Jenna rocked her hips. “More, baby, more!”

“Really?” Bella tried to keep a straight face, but when Leanna cried out again, she doubled over with laughter.

Amy, always the voice of reason, whispered, “Come on. We
need
to close her window.”

“Yes!” Leanna cried.

They fell against one another in a fit of laughter, stumbling beside Leanna’s cottage.

“I could make popcorn.” Jenna said, struggling to keep a straight face.

Amy scowled at her. “She got pissed the last time you did that.” She grabbed Bella’s hand and whispered through gritted teeth, “Take out the screen so you can shut the window, please.”

“I told you we should have put a lock on the outside of her window,” Jenna reminded them. Last summer, when Leanna and Kurt had first begun dating, they often forgot to close the window. To save Leanna embarrassment, Jenna had offered to be on sex-noise mission control and close the window if Leanna ever forgot to. A few drinks later, she’d mistakenly abandoned the idea for the summer.

“While you close the window, I’ll get the sign for the toilet.” Amy hurried back toward Bella’s deck in her boy-shorts underwear and a T-shirt.

Bella tossed the screen to the side so she could reach inside and close the window. The side of Leanna’s cottage was on a slight incline, and although Bella was tall, she needed to stand on her tiptoes to get a good grip on the window. The hem of the nightie caught on her underwear, exposing her ample derriere.

“Cute satin skivvies.” Jenna reached out to tug Bella’s shirt down and Bella swatted her.

Bella pushed as hard as she could on the top of the window, trying to ignore the sensuous moans and the creaking of bedsprings coming from inside the cottage.

“The darn thing’s stuck,” she whispered.

Jenna moved beside her and reached for the window. Her fingertips barely grazed the bottom edge.

Amy ran toward them, waving a long stick with a paper sign taped to the top that read,
WELCOME BACK.

Leanna moaned, and Jenna laughed and lost her footing. Bella reached for her, and the window slammed shut, catching Bella’s hair. Leanna’s dog, Pepper, barked, sending Amy and Jenna into more fits of laughter.

With her hair caught in the window and her head plastered to the sill, Bella put a finger to her lips. “Shh!”

Headlights flashed across Leanna’s cottage as a car turned up the gravel road.

“Shit!” Bella went up on her toes, struggled to lift the window and free her hair, which felt like it was being ripped from her skull. The curtains flew open and Leanna peered through the glass. Bella lifted a hand and waved.
Crap.
She heard Leanna’s front door open, and Pepper bolted around the corner, barking a blue streak and knocking Jenna to the ground just as a police car rolled up next to them and shined a spotlight on Bella’s ass.

CADEN GRANT HAD been with the Wellfleet Police Department for only three months, having moved after his partner of nine years was killed in the line of duty. He’d relocated to the small town with his teenage son, Evan, in hopes of working in a safer location. So far, he’d found the people of Wellfleet to be respectful and thankful for the efforts of the local law enforcement officers, a welcome change after dealing with rebellion on every corner in Boston. Wellfleet had recently experienced a rash of small thefts—cars being broken into, cottages being ransacked, and the police had begun patrolling the private communities along Route 6, communities that in the past had taken care of their own security. Caden rolled up the gravel road in the Seaside Cottage community and spotted a dog running circles around a person rolling on the ground.

He flicked on the spotlight as he rolled to a stop.
Holy Christ. What is going on?
He quickly assessed the situation. A blond woman was banging on a window with both hands. Her shirt was bunched at her waist, and a pair of black satin panties barely covered the most magnificent ass he’d seen in a long time. 

“Open the effing window!” she hollered.

Caden stepped from the car. “What’s going on here?” He walked around the dark-haired woman, who was rolling from side to side on the ground while laughing hysterically, and the fluffy white dog, who was barking as though his life depended on it, and he quickly realized that the blond woman’s hair was caught in the window. Behind him another blonde crouched on the ground, laughing so hard she kept snorting.
Why the hell aren’t any of you wearing pants?

“Leanna! I’m stuck!” the blonde by the window yelled.

“Officer, we’re sorry.” The blonde behind him rose to her feet, tugging her shirt down to cover her underwear; then she covered her mouth with her hand as more laughter escaped. The dog barked and clawed at Caden’s shoes.

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” Caden didn’t even want to try to guess.

“We’re…” The brunette laughed again as she rose to her knees and tried to straighten her camisole, which barely contained her enormous breasts. She ran her eyes down Caden’s body. “Well,
hello
there, handsome.” She fell backward, laughing again.

Christ
. Just what he needed, three drunk women.

The brunette inside the cottage lifted the window, freeing the blonde’s hair, which sent her stumbling backward and crashing into his chest. There was no ignoring the feel of her seductive curves beneath the thin layer of fabric. Her hair was a thick, tangled mess. She looked up at him with eyes the color of rich cocoa and lips sweet enough to taste. The air around them pulsed with heat. Christ, she was beautiful.

“Whoa. You okay?” he asked. He told his arms to let her go, but there was a disconnect, and his hands remained stuck to her waist.

“It’s…It’s not what it looks like.” She dropped her eyes to her hands, clutching his forearms, and she released him fast, as if she’d been burned. She took a step back and helped the brunette to her feet. “We were…”

“They were trying to close our window, Officer.” A tall, dark-haired man came around the side of the cottage, wearing a pair of jeans and no shirt. “Kurt Remington.” He held a hand out in greeting and shook his head at the women, now holding on to each other, giggling and whispering.

“Officer Caden Grant.” He shook Kurt’s hand. “We’ve had some trouble with break-ins lately. Do you know these women?” His eyes swept over the tall blonde. He followed the curve of her thighs to where they disappeared beneath her nightshirt, then drifted up to  her full breasts, finally coming to rest on her beautiful dark eyes. It had been a damn long time since he’d been this attracted to a woman.

“Of course he knows us.” The hot blonde stepped forward, arms crossed, eyes no longer wide and warm, but narrow and angry.

He hated men who leered at women, but he was powerless to refrain from drinking her in for one last second. The other two women were lovely in their own right, but they didn’t compare to the tall blonde with fire in her eyes and a body made for loving.

Kurt nodded. “Yes, Officer. We know them.”