Just What I Needed

  He stood and said, “I’m a sucker,” without any real malice in his voice. Grabbing a handful of my hair, he tilted my head back and kissed me.

  Holy hell, did he kiss me. The kiss was short, but there was nothing sweet about it.

  After ending his onslaught, he eased back slightly so he could gaze into my eyes. “That was in case your douchebag ex is still watching.”

  “Uh. Okay.” Eloquent, Trinity.

  Walker lowered his lips to mine again for a slower kiss. A deeper kiss. A kiss packed with raw hunger that sent me spiraling. I had to clutch his shirt to ground myself and keep from getting dizzy.

  When he pulled back, my dazed look brought out his satisfied male grin.

  “What was that one for?” I managed.

  “That one was just for me.”

  Swoon.

  “I have your number so expect a call from me soon. Real soon, because I cannot wait to see you again.” Then he was striding out the door.

  As I tried to unscramble my brain, I was aware of a few things:

  The man took kissing to a whole new plane.

  I couldn’t wait to hear that gravelly voice on the other end of the line when he called me soon. Real soon because he couldn’t wait to see me again.

  My euphoria faded fast.

  Not only had I given him a fake name, I’d given him my old phone number. There was no way he could get in touch with me.

  So I left the bar in the same type of crappy mood I’d arrived in.

  Happy Hour. What a freakin’ lie. Happy Hour could suck it.

  Two

  WALKER

  After washing off the dirt from another lousy day on the Smith Brothers’ job site, I slipped on board shorts and a tank top. A swim in my pool would erase the remnants of this shitty week and I could start the weekend with a better attitude. I snagged a beer out of the fridge and barely had a chance to enjoy that first frosty sip when the doorbell rang.

  Tempting to ignore it since I suspected a family member lurked on the other side wanting something from me. Again. I didn’t bother to check the security camera before I disengaged the locks and opened the door.

  My older brother, Brady, stood on the threshold, one hand on his hip, the other holding a cell phone at eye level. Right in front of my face.

  I heard the click as he snapped my picture. “What the hell, Brady?”

  “I’m texting Mom proof that you’re alive.”

  “She’s sending you to do her dirty work these days?”

  He lifted a brow. “These days? As the oldest it’s always fallen on my shoulders to make sure none of you stray too far from the flock.” He slipped his phone into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “So you gonna let me in or what?”

  “As long as you’re not here to preach the doctrine of love.”

  “I’ll endeavor to not wax poetic about Lennox for at least fifteen minutes,” Brady said dryly.

  “Smart-ass.” I stood aside to let him in.

  He headed straight to the kitchen.

  I followed him and wondered how he wasn’t roasting in this heat and humidity in that suit. But then again, Brady had damn near been born in a suit, tie and wing tips. Our clothing choices were only one of the many differences between us.

  Brady rummaged in my fridge until he found a Grain Belt beer. He twisted off the cap, took a long drink and leaned back against the counter.

  I mirrored his pose across from him. “Mom really sent you over here?”

  “Dad did.” He lifted the bottle for another sip. “Which we both know means Mom put him up to it. I planned to give you another week before I showed up to grill you.”

  “Considerate of you.”

  “I thought so. Anyway, why are you avoiding the family, little bro?”

  Little bro. Right. I topped him by two inches and thirty pounds. It’d be easy to slip into the bullshit banter we normally did, but the concern on his face gave me pause. “I’ve been busy. I deal with people all damn day, so on the weekends I want to chill at home. Alone. Mom doesn’t get that. She wants . . .” I’d been scarce because I didn’t want to explain this to any of them. Especially not to Brady. I swigged my beer. “Never mind.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Never mind Mom wants . . . what? You to remodel the guest bathroom again and you’re avoiding her?”

  “Hilarious. But that’s not it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Look. Can we just drop it? You can report you were successful and I’ve promised to be at the next Lund family weenie roast.” I reached down and yanked a loose thread from the waistband of my shorts. I crossed to the garbage can to throw it away.

  “Walker,” Brady said sharply.

  I slowly turned around. “What?”

  “It’s me.” He threw out his arm not clutching the beer. “We don’t do this polite dancing-around-the-subject crap. Quit being a dick and talk to me.”

  “I’m being a dick?” I repeated.

  “Yeah. This Mr. Nice Guy ‘I’m all right’ attitude is passive-aggressive. So quit throwing me softballs. Step up to the plate and let fly.”

  Asshole knew a sports analogy would incite me. But he asked for it. “Okay, Mr. Oblivious. Ever since you and Lennox started proving to everyone how disgustingly happy you are, at every opportunity, Mom has been a hard-core pain in my ass about finding the right woman and settling down because, as usual, she wants me to be exactly like you.” I held up my hand to stop his automatic protest. “You’d think she’d learn, after all these years, to stop trying to make me into a blond, blue-collar version of you. But no. She’s redoubled her efforts. Every conversation I’ve had with her in the past three months has been focused on who she plans on pairing me up with if I don’t find a woman on my own. I’m tired of it. So I stopped putting myself in those situations.”

  Brady didn’t say anything for several long moments. Then he sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “Mom just wants you to be happy.”

  “Then she should just let me be. I do things on my own time frame.”

  “How well I know that.” He set his beer on the counter behind him. “How are things at work?”

  It surprised me he’d asked; I couldn’t remember the last time we’d talked about anything going on in my life. I shrugged. “One job is chugging along slower than everyone would like. I tried to tell them that restoration of this building would take twice as long as new construction, since every exterior structural change has to be approved by the historical preservation committee. Come to find out that’s not the problem. My crew has been able to finish exactly one interior room. Even that was a struggle.”

  “Why?”

  “The interior designer they hired is a nutjob. She wanted the walls to have flair. I told her the walls need to be structurally sound. She actually asked if I could keep three random sections of the lath-and-plaster wall intact and ‘open’ so her designs could pay homage to the ‘bones’ of the building’s past.” I shook my head, still in total disbelief about that idiotic idea. “Yeah. No problem. There’s no reason to fix the water-damaged sections of the walls and ceilings because cracked plaster looks so freakin’ cool covered in shimmery blue paint as it’s falling down on top of you.”

  Brady laughed. “You could totally mess with Mom and tell her you’ve got your eye on a feisty interior decorator, but neither of you wants to pursue a relationship outside of working hours until the job is done. That’d buy you . . . what, another year?”

  “You are one devious bastard. No wonder no one screws with you at Lund Industries.”

  He flashed me a sharklike smile. “Only one person I want screwing with me.”

  I smirked back at him. “How is the lovely Lennox?”

  “Amazing.”

  “Annika was singing her praises the other night when I went over and fixed her broken closet door.”

  “She loves working in Annika’s department. I love the fact she’s kept PR’s office budget in line for the first time in two year
s.”

  “You two totally geek out together about numbers, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I finally found a woman who understands that talking about a balanced P&L and above-average quarterly projections makes me hot. One of these days you’ll find a woman who’ll gaze at you adoringly while you yammer on about the benefits of using your big tool to hammer on hard wood.”

  “Wow. I’m disappointed you didn’t work ‘nailing her’ into that sentence.” I drained the last of my beer. “In all seriousness, I am happy for you, Brady. I don’t want you to think I resent you.”

  He raised both eyebrows. “Wait. You don’t blame me for Mom’s recent matchmaking threats?”

  “Oh, I totally blame you. I just wanted to clarify that I don’t resent you.”

  “Good to know.”

  I shrugged.

  “So let me clarify something. You’re not involved with anyone right now purely to spite Mom? No offense, but that’s some fucked-up logic.”

  “Mom doesn’t have that much control over my life—my job does. I’ve been busting ass since this spring trying to keep my various projects running on schedule. At the end of a long workweek, I’m too freakin’ tired to hit the bars. After the other night, when I did meet a woman I might be interested in? She gave me a fake name and number. That just drove home the point I suck at the whole dating thing.” Heaven knew I had plenty of bad experiences to back up that statement.

  Brady cocked his head. “Wait—run that by me again.”

  There was no way to spin it so I didn’t look like a loser who needed my mother’s matchmaking skills, so I didn’t bother. “What’s hard to understand? I. Suck. At. Dating.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah? That’s why you guys call me a magnet for crazy?”

  “That’s better than Nolan insisting you only date women who need fixing,” Brady reminded me. “But still . . . you haven’t brought a woman to any family thing since before I met Lennox.”

  “Exactly. I’m out of practice for this dating shit since I’m team captain of ‘Hit It and Quit It.’”

  “I’ve seen you in action. Chicks fall all over themselves for a chance to run their fingers through your long golden locks or to stroke your beard.”

  “Piss. Off.”

  “I’m serious. The last family brunch you attended at the club? Lennox kept pointing out the women who were checking you out in all your lumbersexual glory.”

  I repeated, “Piss. Off.”

  He held up his hands. “Don’t snap at me because you’re so busy trying to avoid Mom’s attempts to fix you up that you’re missing other opportunities.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Love Connection? So why did my most recent opportunity give me a fake name and number?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me what happened.”

  Like I wanted to relive that. “Forget it.”

  “No can do. Talk.”

  “Fine. I had an early-evening appointment with Bob Higgins at his office downtown. He was a total douche and I needed a drink to wash away the bad taste I’d gotten from the meeting, so I walked into the first bar I saw. I’m scouting the joint for a place to sit and I’m there . . . maybe a minute when this sexy brunette marches up, twines herself around me and lays a big wet kiss on me. My first thought was that it was a ‘Kiss a Stranger’ bachelorette party dare.”

  “Was it?”

  I shook my head. “Her friend had ditched her and then her ex and his new squeeze showed up in the bar. She wanted to save face . . . by sucking mine, evidently.” Just thinking about that kiss was enough to get me riled up again because it was good. Damn good. And she knew it was too.

  “Dude. That stuff never happened to me when I was single.”

  “It doesn’t happen to me either. We started talking and I found out her name is Amelia Carlson. We shared a brief rundown of our crappy days. Things were going really well. She wasn’t looking over my shoulder to see if the ex was paying attention to us. She was invested in the conversation—so was I. I made sure she knew I wasn’t playing her, looking for a quick hookup. Sounds freakin’ lame, but we connected and she agreed to go out with me. But before I could pin her down for a day and time, Dallas called in a panic.”

  “Did her damn car die again?” Brady demanded.

  “Yes. So when I got there, I told the tow truck driver to drop it off at my mechanic’s place. I don’t know why she’s so dead set against buying a new car. It’s not like she doesn’t have the money.” Then something occurred to me. “Maybe it’s a college thing. She wants to struggle like her friends who have shitty cars and no cash?”

  “Who knows with Dallas? Maybe she should’ve been looking for the ‘check engine’ light instead of looking at the sky for an astrological sign. Back to the story about fake-name-and-number chick.”

  “I called her around noon the next day. The number was out of service. I tried off and on to get ahold of her. So, like a chump, I went back to the bar, thinking maybe she’s a regular. I sat at the same table watching the door. Two hours passed and no sign of her. I was getting ready to leave and I recognized our cocktail waitress from the night before. She remembered me, so I asked her if Amelia—the woman I was with—is a regular at the bar. She looked confused and then she said the woman I was with wasn’t named Amelia. At my look of surprise, she said she noticed the woman’s name when she signed the credit card receipt, because it was unusual, some sci-fi name like Tris or Trillion. But definitely not Amelia.” I scratched my beard. “That’s when I knew she’d been dicking with me from the start.”

  Brady was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t know what to say except that sucks.”

  “So the ‘Amelia Carlson’ I thought I’d made a connection with doesn’t exist. It burns my ass. It was a harsh reminder to stick with hookups from here on out.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “While the situation sounds fishy, your ‘Screw her’ reaction doesn’t ring true, Walker.”

  I scowled at him. “How so?”

  “Sounds like you’re giving up.”

  “How am I supposed to track her down when I don’t know her name? And besides, even if Carlson is her last name, do you know how many thousands of Carlsons there are in the Twin Cities?”

  “Did she tell you what she does for a living?”

  “She’s an artist.” I paused. “That part wasn’t a lie because her fingers were discolored by paints.”

  “See? Now you’re thinking. What else did she tell you? Anything about the ex-boyfriend so you could track her through him?”

  I stared at Brady. Hard.

  “What?”

  “Why are you pushing me on this?”

  He stared back. “Because I don’t see you doing a damn thing except standing around whining and wringing your hands like a jilted Victorian maiden.”

  My jaw dropped. “Victorian maiden? Who are you and what the ever lovin’ fuck did you do with my brother?”

  He laughed. “I’m serious, bro. Track her down if for no other reason than to let her know it wasn’t all that hard to track her—her fake name and number didn’t give her anonymity. Be proactive instead of reactive.”

  That skated close to stalking behavior. But if I didn’t come up with a plan, Brady would; he was loyal, and as a Lund corporate executive he’d use every resource available to him to find information. While I appreciated that he had my back, I had to