Tempt Me Tonight (10 page)

“I still can’t believe it,” Joe muttered under his breath. Hell, if he hadn’t found her bra, he might have gone back to thinking it was a dream.

“I can,” Kenny said, wiping at his mouth with a napkin, the footlong stretched carefully across his lap.

Joe eyed his best friend. “You can?”

“I knew.”

Joe leaned forward slightly in disbelief. “You what?”

“I knew she was coming.”

Jesus. “And I guess you were too busy to pick up the phone.”

“Well, I probably only found out around the time she was getting there. I was feeding the chickens and cows ’til dark, then I took a shower, and
then
Deb told me.”

Joe only sighed, still irritated. “And if you already knew, why the hell did you sit here and let me tell you the whole miserable story?”

Kenny grinned. “It didn’t exactly sound miserable, dude.”

No, he guessed not. But he hadn’t gone on about how her departure had left him feeling so burned—and he didn’t intend to.

He also hadn’t gone into the details of exactly what had happened, either—like the way her luscious mouth had sunk down on him, or how she’d eased herself so warmly onto his erection. Unlike Trish, he didn’t go broadcasting
everything.
“Tell Debbie I said thanks for the warning, too. I hope she won’t miss those free oil changes.”

Kenny shrugged again. “You know she’s loyal to Trish.”

“Well, for Deb’s sake, I hope Trish is good with cars.” He didn’t mean it, but it pissed him off to know Trish had run her little plan past Debbie. Everything
about
this was beginning to piss him off. When Trish had shown up, he’d thought it had been about him and her and hot, hard need—now he felt like the whole damn world had been in on it. “Debbie probably knows more about this than
I
do, so why
did
Trish leave?”

When Kenny shrugged yet one more time, Joe wanted to slug him, but he ate a French fry instead and tried to keep his cool. “According to Deb, Trish just wanted to have sex with you—nothing else.”

For the first time in his life, Joe felt like a cheap, tawdry one-night stand. Which was odd, since he’d had his fair share of cheap, tawdry one-night stands, and they’d never made him feel cheap or tawdry before. “So she was just using me. For sex.”

“Something like that.” Kenny looked preoccupied with his footlong again.

Joe raised his eyebrows. “Does she do that often?”

Kenny shook his head as he managed to wrangle another bite. “As far as I know, only with you. Deb thought it was like revenge, like she was trying to hurt you or something.”

Joe didn’t answer, didn’t mention he’d had a similar thought, until finally Kenny glanced up from his food, looking a little more serious now. “Did she?”

Joe pressed his lips into a grim, straight line. Kenny knew good and well that Trish had been the one and only heartbreak of his life. But he hadn’t liked talking about it then—and he still didn’t want to talk about it now. “Just would’ve been nice of her to say good-bye, that’s all.”

“Doesn’t sound like too much to ask,” Kenny agreed. “Unless…you think back to the past.”

Joe arched one eyebrow in Kenny’s direction. “She said she was over that. If she wasn’t, she should have thrown a drink in my face or called me a son of a bitch—not come to my house looking to get laid and then go sneaking off after I fell asleep.”

Kenny squared his gaze on Joe. “You know, a lotta guys would see this as the perfect fantasy come true. Chick comes to your door, does the dirty with you, then disappears so you can go right on like it never happened.”

Joe couldn’t deny that, but didn’t answer this time, either. Even so, Kenny’s expression said he knew exactly what Joe wasn’t saying. Back in high school, they’d both planned to marry their girlfriends and live long, happy lives here in Eden. For Kenny, it had worked out, and for a guy with a fairly shitty job and not much money or opportunity coming his way, Kenny was about the happiest guy Joe knew. Joe hadn’t spent the last fourteen years pining over Trish, but no way could she ever be just a chick, a one-night stand.

“Is she staying at her mom and dad’s place?” he asked.

“Nope.” Kenny shook his head. “So happens she’s taken up residence at the Red Roof Inn—room 117 to be exact. I saw it on a note on the fridge under a Spiderman magnet,” Kenny concluded with a wink.

“Good to know,” Joe said. And a hell of a lot more convenient than her parents’ house.

“What are you gonna do?”

“She forgot her bra when she slipped out. Figure the least I can do is return it.”

Beverly stood behind the counter at the Waffle House, looking out on the blistering hot kind of August day that made you smell the blacktop in the parking lot when people opened the door to come inside. The lunch rush had passed, every orange booth and stool was empty, the whole place still, and Patsy Cline crooned something mournful on the jukebox that managed to echo Beverly’s emotions today.

She’d worked here so long that she felt as much like a fixture as the griddle or the rows of waffle makers. Her feet were tired, her back sore. She felt pathetically older than her thirty-four years.

She should be someplace else. And she didn’t indulge
unreasonable
fantasies—she wasn’t standing here wishing for the Greek Isles or the French Riviera or palatial mansions or sandy beaches with cabana boys. She just wanted a nice little home where she and Carissa could spend more time together. She wanted to be sitting on a porch swing right now, petting a dog and watching the occasional car pass by, or working in a flower bed, maybe with her daughter by her side. She wanted a husband who would be home soon, kissing her hello, maybe offering to take them out to supper and a ride afterward.

Up the two-lane highway out the front plate-glass windows, she spied a big hulking red semi hurtling westward, coming this way. The yellow and orange flames painted on the sides, fanning back from the chrome grill, told her it was Butch—a trucker from over near Aurora who took this route across to Interstate 65 once or twice a week.

The soft reaction between her thighs made her anxious, wondering if he’d stop. He didn’t always. But when he did, and if she had time for a break or it was near the end of her shift, she usually ended up in his extended sleeper cab, where they could make each other feel good for awhile.

She didn’t know much about him—he was a long-haul trucker, owned his own rig, and hauled retail products like canned food or lawn mowers or whatever else needed to be moved from one place to another. He was at least forty, wore flannel in the winter, faded T-shirts in the summer, and a Mack Truck cap that squashed down his blond hair. He was starting to gain some weight the last few months. She didn’t know his marital status and didn’t want to. She just needed a little secret pleasure in her life, and Butch seemed to be the only guy providing it the last couple of years.

The truck’s horn sounded—a musical little
beepity-beep-beep
as it went sailing by the Waffle House without ever slowing down. It meant,
Can’t stop today, baby, but on the way back through.
Beverly wasn’t sure whether she was let down or relieved. Her body suffered a twinge of disappointment, but she decided it was just as well.

When she’d first started sleeping with Butch, maybe she’d thought he was the man who was going to give her what she yearned for—that porch swing, that family ride out for some chicken or burgers on a Sunday evening. He wasn’t rich, she knew, but he drove a top-of-the-line truck, and he’d once told her he owned some acreage behind the house he’d built—enough hints that he made a healthy living. And he might not be the snazziest guy around, but he wasn’t bad-looking—and he knew how to give her an orgasm, which was nothing to sneeze at.

But sometime during the last six months she’d begun to accept that some sex in the back of his truck wasn’t adding up to a future. She almost laughed at herself now to realize—
Hell, Bev, it only took you a freaking year and a half to figure it out.

All she really wanted in life was to be loved and to provide a good home for her daughter, and she wasn’t sure she’d succeeded with either yet. God, Carissa was thirteen. Beverly didn’t have much longer before her girl would be grown and gone and probably filled with unhappy memories of the shabby little apartment they rented over Sophie’s Hair and Nails, and how many hours she spent alone or with her grandpa because her downtrodden mother worked weekends and sometimes nights, too.

Bev let out a sigh. Why couldn’t
Joe
just fall in love with her? She could make him happy, she knew it. And she knew he wanted to be more of a father to Carissa than he was being—just because the
DNA
hadn’t been quite
right,
quite
his.
He was a good man, good enough to care for a girl who didn’t carry his genes just because the timing had been close. And he was a hell of a
sexy
man, too. He’d been a cute-as-hell boy, but the
man
he’d grown into—damn, she could almost come just thinking about him.

“Christ,” she muttered. Talk about slow to realize something. She’d been pining and hungering and lusting for Joe her entire adult life, always hoping for some miraculous shift in his feelings. Each and every time she saw him, she hoped for it, she waited for it, trying to believe in the power of positive thinking. And she occasionally earned a gorgeous smile that, for a second, made her think,
Yes, yes, finally, he’s beginning to soften, to care, not just for Carissa, but for me, too
—yet it never lasted, was never real.

And now Trish Henderson was back in town? And Joe had seen her, maybe had sex with her? She felt sick to her stomach just thinking about it. She’d always thought Trish was too prissy for Joe—she remembered the night she and Joe had done it in her dad’s ancient Impala, handy because it had a huge backseat, when she’d convinced him he shouldn’t keep waiting for a girl who must not love him since she was leaving, and who would probably never really come back no matter what she’d promised. She’d thought he was better off without someone who felt the need to look beyond him for fulfillment.

Bev had spent all these years knowing that no matter who Joe slept with, Trish was the only girl who’d ever really meant something to him—and maybe that should have depressed her, but it’d had just the opposite effect instead. Because as long as Trish was gone, off somewhere a world away living some entirely different life, there had remained that little bit of hope that he would finally decide to settle down, and that he’d make Beverly the one.

Only now that Trish was back—hell, Bev had no idea what this even meant. Was Trish here to stay? Or just to tease and torment Joe some more? Either way, it meant the chances of Joe ever loving
her,
making a family with her and Carissa, were even slimmer than before.

Hell. What was a woman to do when her only hope was stolen?

Just then another toot of an air horn drew her gaze from where it had dropped to a bin of dirty plates below her. A red eighteen-wheeler with flames burning along the fenders angled its way into the truck parking area situated alongside the regular lot. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch as Alan Jackson began to sing “Where I Come From” on the jukebox.

Out of habit, Bev smoothed back her hair and hefted up her bra a little. Butch wasn’t going to marry her—or even love her—but she still wanted him to like what he saw. And who knew, maybe she was wrong. Maybe he
would
fall for her. He’d come back, hadn’t he? He’d gotten up the road and decided to turn that big rig around just for a few minutes with her.

When the door opened, he wore a gray tee with the sleeves cut out—and maybe he’d lost a couple of pounds since she’d last seen him. His eyes—blue like Joe’s and one of his best features—glimmered with flirtation. “What’s shakin’, darlin’?”

“Thought you must be too busy for me today, Butchy,” she said, trying to look interested yet offended, and glad Floyd was in the breakroom, leaving her to behave however she wished without having to lower her voice.

“I thought I was, too. Runnin’ hellaciously late if I want to get any miles behind me tonight. But…”

“But?”

His grin held just a hint of lechery. “But it’s a hot day, and it’s gonna be a long week on the road. Headed all the way to Phoenix, baby. I decided I couldn’t make it without stoppin’ to see you first.” He jerked his head slightly in the direction of the truck lot. “Head outside with me a while?”

She might be better off without it, but her body was glad he’d come back—she needed some release and knew Butch would give it to her. He wasn’t the only one who suffered through hot days and long, lonely nights. Lowering her lashes seductively, she reached up to undo the top button on the front of her striped uniform blouse, opening it just far enough to show some cleavage—a promise. “Let me tell Floyd I’m going on break.”

After finishing lunch in Kenny’s truck, Joe got back in his own and headed home, thinking about returning Trish’s sexy bra. From there, he wasn’t sure what would happen, but he’d figure it out as he went.

Pulling into the driveway, he walked around back. To the right sat a small metal barn he’d erected for the Cobra, with work space for any other projects he wanted to tackle at home now that the car’s restoration was done. To the left stood the same old slanted shed that had always been there, housing the lawn mower and gardening tools. Sunshine, a stray cat who’d stuck around when he’d taken pity and started feeding her about five years back, was about to drop a litter of kittens, and the last time that’d happened, she’d parked them in a hollow spot under one side of the shed. Through Debbie, he’d lucked into a connection with a Brownie troop of little girls who’d all wanted cats. This time, he doubted he’d be so lucky.

His saggy-jowled old dog, Elvis, came ambling around the corner of the house to greet him. His little sister had come up with the name because their mom had loved Elvis and because he wasn’t “nothin’ but a hound dog”—a beagle/basset mix. “Hey, bud,” he said, bending to give the dog an easy scratch behind the ears. “I haven’t seen you since yesterday morning.” He eyed Elvis with suspicion. “You been out puttin’ the moves on that little blond collie over at Mrs. Crowley’s?” Elvis usually stuck close to home, where he led a wild life of naps on the front porch and the occasional stroll around the yard. So when Joe didn’t see him for a day or two, he figured Elvis was out looking for love.