Seeing is Believing (2 page)

Women in Chicago didn’t smile like that. At least not those he worked with day in and day out at a marketing firm. Or he had, until he’d been laid off three days earlier. Professional women were confident, aggressive, independent. He liked that.

But he liked that smile on Piper’s face, too. More than he should.

“How are your dad and mom?” he asked. He’d seen Amanda a few years back when she’d been visiting her father in Chicago, but they had talked mostly about the city, the good restaurants to hit, and Brady’s job. Amanda had only briefly mentioned that Piper was in college, and Brady hadn’t given much thought to what was going on back here in Cuttersville.

It felt odd to be back home, in a house that hadn’t changed, even as everything around it had. Brady had thought that he would be swamped with emotion when he came back after his self-imposed exile, but really so far he’d felt nothing but a mild sort of pleasure and curiosity.

“Great. My dad’s looking at a good crop this year, and my mom sort of has her hands in everything. She raises purebred poodles, sells real estate, and is president of the PTA at my brothers’ school.”

That was kind of a humorous image. When Brady had first met Amanda fifteen years earlier, she had been a bored rich girl. “No kidding? And what about you, Piper? You living in town now? Got a boyfriend or a husband or anything?”

It would be easier if she did. Stop him from thinking thoughts about her naked body that he shouldn’t be thinking.

But a hint of color rose in her cheeks. “No, no boyfriend or fiancé. And I still live with my parents in the farmhouse. I guess that sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it? Especially to someone like you who left home right out of high school.”

He’d left home all right, chomping at the bit to get the hell out of Cuttersville. And twelve years later he was starting to wonder what he’d been running from. The success he’d wanted, expected to find in Chicago or New York, hadn’t arrived, and he had given up painting altogether three years ago. It hurt to pick up a pencil or brush and know that he couldn’t replicate on paper what he saw in his mind.

“If you’re happy, then there’s nothing lame about it.”

She nodded, then said, “Do you want me to put your shirt in the dryer? The shoulders are soaking wet.”

He’d forgotten about the damp cotton clinging to his skin. The house didn’t have air-conditioning, and it was still summer temperatures. He wasn’t cold. But neither was he going to refuse a perfectly legit chance to take his shirt off in front of her and see her reaction.

“Thanks.” Brady peeled it off, and wondered what the hell he was doing. Hadn’t he just told himself this girl—seven big, long years younger than him—was off-limits? And here he was going for the flirt.

But he supposed every man had a bad habit. Some drank, others smoked, quite a few gambled to excess, and hell, some did all three. His weakness was women. He liked to flirt, liked to make women smile and laugh. He loved to wine and dine and sixty-nine a woman. Nothing wrong with that if both parties knew the score. Brady wasn’t the settling-down kind. He had been born restless, and this trip back to Nowheresville for no good reason was further proof of that. He should be back in Chicago, pounding the pavement for a job, yet he’d decided to come home for some strange reason.

Because he’d found himself angry and bitter and maybe even a little scared for the first time in his whole life. That was why he’d come home. Like being back in Cuttersville would solve any of the mess his life had become.

But he might as well enjoy himself while he was here.

So he bunched up his shirt and stood, stretching a little so she had a good shot of the pecs and his ripped stomach. All those hours at the gym should be worth something. “The dryer still in the basement? I’ll just toss it in.”

Piper’s eyes had gone wide. He was almost sorry he’d stripped the T-shirt off. She looked horrified, not flirtatious. But then her eyes dropped down, just a little, and she ran her tongue across thick, plump lips. “Oh, I’ll get it,” she said, her voice a sweet, husky whisper.

Damn, he knew that look, felt that vibe, could practically smell the attraction that had sprung up between them. Good thing the twins were upstairs sleeping or he’d be severely tempted to taste Piper Tucker from tip to toe.

This was not a woman he could fool around with.

It was a mantra he was going to have to repeat all week long. Along with the friendly little reminder to himself that Shelby would tear his head off, and Danny Tucker would rip something even more important off him, if they found out he was fooling around with Piper. And Amanda? Hell, she might be the worst of all. She wouldn’t tear something off Brady. She’d string him up by his nuts, spray him with honey, and let the bees at him.

Piper was extra special to them, because Danny hadn’t known she existed until she was eight years old and her worthless stepfather had dumped her in Danny’s driveway.

Not a woman he should be messing around with. Repeat ten times twice daily and maybe it would sink in.

Yet he still found himself moving in just a little too close to her when he handed over the shirt. “That’s sweet of you. I left my travel bag in the trunk.”

“No problem. I . . .” Piper looked over his shoulder.

“What?” Brady half turned, expecting to see one of the kids standing in the doorway. Good thing he hadn’t given in to his very inappropriate urge to kiss her.

“Nothing.” Piper darted her eyes back to him. Then behind him again. Her cheeks flushed. Her head tilted, sending her wavy light brown hair cascading over her forehead and right eye.

“What are you looking at?” She obviously saw something back there. “A mouse?”

“No. Nothing.” Step one, step two, she shifted around to his side and stood stiffly, tugging her tank top down again.

Then Brady knew what it was. What he’d forgotten about Piper Tucker from all those years ago, the summer he had been fifteen and she’d arrived in town.

“You still see ghosts, don’t you?”

Chapter Two

PIPER STARED AT BRADY IN ASTONISHMENT. “I . . .
I . . . don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

Only she wasn’t all that great of a liar. She couldn’t even look him in the eye as she spoke.

But she wasn’t about to admit that a ghost of a man with blond hair was standing right behind Brady, smiling and nodding his head up and down.

“Come on, Piper. I remember. You used to ask me to draw pictures for you. Pictures of the ghosts you saw.”

Dang. She couldn’t believe it. Why would he remember something like that? And why were they having this conversation while he wasn’t wearing a shirt? She had almost whimpered when he’d exposed his chest to her. Brady had filled out a bit in the last twelve years. In all the right places.

“I was just a kid. I had an active imagination.” Her parents had forgotten about her imaginary friends and ghost sightings. Or at least they never mentioned them to her anymore. It wasn’t something Piper ever wanted to discuss with anyone, least of all Brady Stritmeyer, a lifelong crush she clearly hadn’t quite gotten over.

“Bullshit,” he said.

She was surprised that he hadn’t just dropped it. And that he was swearing at her. Raising an eyebrow at him, Piper clutched his damp shirt, glad she had it to mask her clammy and trembling hands. If there was one thing she was good at, it was changing the focus of a conversation from her to someone else. So she said, “I do remember the one time I had you sketch my mom in Victorian clothes. She was so upset that her hair was pinned back like that, even in a drawing, but she made an effort to fake that she liked it. How is Chicago, by the way? My mom said you work at a marketing company. That sounds interesting.”

It hadn’t seemed like a good fit to Piper, but then she had reminded herself she knew nothing about him except the impressions of an eight-year-old girl of a teenage boy. People matured, changed. Not that she had changed much, but maybe he had.

“It’s not really interesting at all.” He gave her a slow grin, shaking his head. “Don’t try to change the subject on me, Piper. That sketch you had me draw was the ghost in the mirror. I remember it distinctly. You were all sorts of worked up about it, insisting she had something to say.”

Piper felt her cheeks heat. She remembered it distinctly, too, and it embarrassed the hell out of her. She was standing in front of a shirtless man—something that didn’t happen all that often to her—and she was being reminded of the odd little kid she’d been.

“You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” she asked him. Most people didn’t. Or if they did, they still thought the person who saw them, who could talk to them, was strange.

“I’m not sure if I do or not,” Brady said with a shrug. “There were certainly a lot of unexplainable noises and doors closing around this house back in the day. If it wasn’t ghosts, I don’t know what it was.” He studied her so intently that she fought the urge to squirm. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

It was a test. She could feel it. So she stared him straight in the eye, heart pounding too swiftly to be normal, and lied. “No.”

Then she blew it by darting her eyes to look past his shoulder. The ghost had started waving, which was distracting and weird. The movement caught her attention and she reacted by looking, which of course Brady noticed. He half turned.

“What’s behind me, Piper? Red-Eyed Rachel?”

No, she was in the doorway to the kitchen. Piper could see her out of her peripheral vision. Knowing she couldn’t form another lie on her lips, she just shook her head and figured he could interpret that however he chose.

“Nothing? No ghosts?”

She fisted his shirt tighter in her hands. Why didn’t he just drop it? “I should get your shirt in the dryer.”

Whatever reaction she expected from him, it wasn’t for him to turn and punch the Blond Man in the direction of the gut.

“No!” she shrieked instinctively. It didn’t matter that the ghost was dead and couldn’t feel anything. It was so shocking, so disrespectful, she couldn’t prevent her reaction. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth when he turned back to her, smug.

“I knew it.” He tilted his head and said over his shoulder, “I’m sorry, whoever you are. But I was trying to prove a point.”

Piper left her hand fall. “He’s not there anymore. You scared him, I think.” There was no point in denying her reaction. But she didn’t feel like sticking around to have Brady gloat or grill her on her freakish ability. So she headed for the basement door off the kitchen, skirting past Rachel, the cold of the beseeching apparition tripping goose bumps over her arms.

He followed her. She could feel his presence falling into step behind her, but she refused to look. Flicking the switch at the top of the basement steps, she tried not to think about how much she hated Shelby and Boston’s basement. The house was almost a hundred and fifty years old and the basement was a true hole in the ground. Support walls had been added over the years and the laundry area was lit with flourescent bulbs, but the dark still clung to the corners and there was a musty, decaying smell. When she had been about fourteen she’d seen a dark shape moving around down there, a malevolent spirit that didn’t seem quite human, and she’d avoided it ever since.

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone. And I didn’t mean to upset you,” Brady said behind her.

Hanging on to the railing, she took the rickety steps down into the gloom. “I’m not upset.” Lie. Total lie. Piper despised lying to anyone else, or most importantly, to herself, but she didn’t want to admit to Brady that she didn’t like to be Ghost Girl to anyone, least of all to him.

She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and he bumped into her, his thighs brushing her backside in her barely there cotton shorts, his bare chest warm against her back for a brief second.

“Sorry.” His hands touched her arms as if to steady himself.

She was grateful he couldn’t see the burn in her cheeks in the dark. The goose bumps were back, full force, and she was painfully aware that she wasn’t wearing a bra and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. “It’s fine.” But it really wasn’t. She wasn’t good at casual flirtation. She took everything too seriously, too literal.

So when he turned her around, slowly, she let him, but she dropped her eyes, not wanting him to see her confusion. For a guy like Brady, touching a woman’s arms in the dark was no big deal, she was sure. The same couldn’t be said for her. She wasn’t particularly experienced with men. Actually, come to think of it, she had no experience with men. Over the years, she’d had small pockets of interaction with boys, but not men. Brady was over thirty years old and she felt like a child next to him.

“I didn’t hurt the ghost, did I? It was kind of impulsive, actually, just trying to get a reaction from you. I’m not going to get sucked into hell or anything, am I?”

Piper raised her eyes to study his face in the murky light, astonished. “How would I know?” she asked him, honestly.

He gave a soft laugh. “I don’t know. I guess I thought if you can see them, you know what they want.”

“No. I have no idea what they want. But that spirit just disappeared, like the smoke in the breeze when Boston lights a cigar on the front porch. So I think you’re safe.” Piper wasn’t feeling particularly safe in the basement, though. There was a tingle on the back of her neck and she was uncomfortable not being able to see the room behind her.

“I think it’s cool that you see ghosts. It makes you special. I wish I had a talent of some kind.”

If that was special, God could keep it. She didn’t want any part of being different. She frowned at Brady. “You do have talent. You’re an amazing artist.” That was something he created, not something that just showed up like dead flotsam bobbing around him.

He shrugged, his muscular shoulder raising upwards, a disparaging smirk on his handsome face. “I was mediocre at best and now I’m not anything. I don’t paint anymore.”

“You don’t?” Piper was almost as shocked as when he’d sucker-punched the ghost. “But you’re so talented.” She remembered the way he had been able to pick up a sketchbook and produce a lifelike image in just a matter of minutes. He had painted butterflies on her bedroom wall and she had danced around her room, pretending she was as graceful and beautiful as those monarchs he had created. She couldn’t believe that he could have insecurities about his abilities. Insecurities at all. She tended to think those were her province and hers alone.

“No, I’m really not. I’m average.” His voice was soft, distracted, like he wasn’t really thinking about his artistic career at all.

The way he was looking at her . . .

Piper swallowed, heat coiling between her thighs into a hard knot of desire.

“I can’t get over your hair,” he murmured, his finger reaching out to brush it off her cheek. “It’s beautiful. And it feels as good as it looks.”

“Thank you.” Her hair was too long, she knew that. It wasn’t stylish to have it so thick and wavy, cascading down the middle of her back. But she had a hard time cutting it. Part of her irrationally feared if she cut it, it wouldn’t grow back. And sometimes, when she debated a cut that would expose more of her face, she could hear her stepfather’s voice reaching out from the past like a horsewhip to tell her that she was disgusting, that no one should ever have to look at her ugly mug.

That Brady, of all people, would look at her the way he was, meant a lot to her, even if he was just being nice.

The corner of his mouth turned up. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

It was too close to the truth and she didn’t like it. “You ask a lot of questions,” she told him. “The twins ask less questions than you do.”

He laughed. “Sorry. Guess I should back off.” Shifting to the right, Brady took the shirt out of her hands and moved towards the washer and dryer.

Disappointed by his defection, she cursed that she still hadn’t completely conquered her childhood habit of blurting out whatever she was thinking. If she was savvier about these kinds of things, she would have smiled and laughed. She would have leaned closer to him or done some such nonsense that she had never learned. Amanda was a class-A flirt, but that particular talent didn’t pass from stepmother to stepchild, not even after years of watching her mom coax and cajole whatever she wanted out of her father by flashing him a little leg or trailing her nails down his chest. Piper couldn’t think on her feet like that.

She just said whatever came to mind or she said nothing at all.

Which apparently resulted in men walking away from her. While she might not know what to do with Brady Stritmeyer all in her personal space, she didn’t like him vacating it either.

Piper glanced down at her taut nipples and sighed, silently apologizing to them.

For a brief few minutes, the girls had optimistically thought they were going to get to come out and play, and she was sorry to say that wasn’t going to be the case.

Not with Brady, anyway. Actually, it wasn’t ever really the case. Crossing her arms over her chest, she followed him to the dryer, watching the pull of his jeans over his butt as he bent over.

A girl could look.

Brady turned and caught her.

And a girl could get busted looking.

* * *

HITTING VARIOUS BUTTONS ON THE DRYER, NOT REALLY
sure how the ancient thing worked, Brady tried to get a grip on himself. He was in trouble. Real, honest-to-God, he-was-going-to-lose-his-testicles kind of trouble. Because he had seriously been contemplating kissing Piper Tucker.

What the hell was wrong with him?

Not only was he considering going there with a woman who was totally off-limits if he wanted to live, he had confessed he wasn’t painting without hesitation. He didn’t talk to anyone about his failed attempt at being an artist. Not a single person. He went to his soul-sucking job and he went home and he went out with various friends and women and he pretended that nothing was wrong when everything was.

He was a first-rate fake, having perfected the art of happy-go-lucky man around town. It was the only art he had been successful at. Yet no one knew that, and he had told Piper all of twenty minutes after being in her company.

But it was those eyes. They were enormous, giant pools of understanding, and they looked at him like he was something important. It was disarming. Appealing. It had been a long time since he had looked at a woman and thought she was as beautiful as he thought Piper Tucker was. Her cheeks were flushed with health and color, her lips were full, her eyes the rich color of hot chocolate. And her hair . . .

It made him think of period films where the proper lady was shown in her boudoir with a lace nightgown on, her thick, luscious hair spilling around her as she brushed it with an elegant comb, contemplating getting fucked by her secret lover.

Brady kind of wanted to be the secret lover. Like, a lot.

Which made him an idiot.

He turned to her in frustration, and not just because of the stupid dryer. “This thing is a thousand years old. I can’t figure it out.”

Piper reached around him and pushed a button. The dryer started up immediately.