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She smiled, lifted her arm, and tugged on a couple of his pain-in-the-ass curls, her expression tender enough to bring him back to cold reality. He was an ex-cop. She was the president’s daughter. He was scrap metal. She was pure gold. Beyond all that, he had a dead zone a mile wide inside him, while she bubbled with life. “Lucy …”
“Oh lord …” She rolled her eyes and flopped to her back. “Here we go. The speech.” She deepened her voice in exaggerated imitation of him. “Before this goes any further, Lucy, I need to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea. I’m a cowboy, wild and free. No little filly can ever tame a man like me.” She sneered. “As if I’d want to.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.” It was exactly what he’d intended to say—not so sarcastically, but she had the general idea.
“Let’s get this straight, Patrick.” The tip of her finger poked his bicep. “I may be screwed up about my future right now, but I know it includes kids. That rules you out, so all the complications your paranoia is conjuring up are a waste of your limited brain power. You’re for entertainment, Mr. Shade. The missing ingredient in my lost summer. And here’s what you need to understand.” She flicked his chest. “When you cease to pleasure me, I’ll find somebody who can. Clear?”
“Pleasure you?”
“I like the sound of it.” Her eyes grew serious. “This is about sex. Nothing else. You’d better be clear about that, or this stops right now.”
“Me?!” It was exactly what he wanted to hear—what he needed her to know—but he didn’t like her attitude. What had happened to the well-bred runaway bride he’d picked up? “When it comes to you, nothing can just be about sex,” he said.
“That’s what you think. I want sex. The dirtier, the better.” Her eyes landed on his crotch. “Got any more licorice?”
He should have flipped her to her back right then and given it to her, but her flippancy irritated him. “I’m tired,” he heard himself say, barely believing those words had come out of his mouth.
“Figures,” she retorted. “You’re a lot older than me.”
“Not a lot.” He sounded like a petulant asshole, but before he could decide what he wanted to do about that, she was sliding out of the berth, her bare skin squeaking against the vinyl.
“Thirty-six and going downhill,” she chirped. “That’s okay. I’ve changed my mind.”
He didn’t want her to change her mind, but she was already humming a happy little tune and pulling on what passed for her clothes. First, she tugged that skimpy white top over her head. The hem caught on one rosy nipple, hung there for a moment, then sprang free. Next, she took way too much time wiggling into the bottoms. When she reached the door of the cabin, she turned back to him.
“Get some rest, lover boy. I have big plans for you. Let’s see if you’re man enough to keep up.”
He smiled as she disappeared—happy, if only for the moment.
LUCY SKIPPED UP THE STEPS, so full of herself she could hardly stand it. The rain had cleared, and a sliver of moonlight tried to cut through the clouds. She’d never talked to a man like she’d talked to Panda. She’d laid out her terms, said exactly what she wanted to, and hadn’t cared a bit how he felt about it.
She dashed across the lawn, this time giving the horseshoe stake a wide berth. She couldn’t imagine Ted ever doing to her what Panda had done. Although she could imagine him doing it to Meg. Not that she wanted to. She grimaced and shook off the image.
She and Panda … Two mismatched people … One vasectomy … This was exactly what she wanted from her lost summer. A chance to be really bad.
As she stepped up on the deck, she thought about how people made bucket lists—everything they wanted to accomplish before they died. It occurred to her that she was working her way through a kind of reverse bucket list, doing things she would already have gotten out of her system if she’d been part of another family. Crazy hair, unsuitable clothes, tattoos. She’d dumped the perfect boyfriend, dropped out, and now she’d taken an unacceptable lover. She’d thought she didn’t believe in meaningless hookups, but had she only convinced herself of that because meaningless hookups were unrealistic for the president’s daughter? No wild monkey sex for Lucy Jorik.
Until now.
Could this be the key? What if doing all the things she’d missed was precisely what she needed before she could move on with the next part of her life?
She locked the sliding doors behind her, changed into dry clothes, and climbed into bed, but she was too worked up to sleep. A reverse bucket list …
She got out of bed and grabbed her yellow pad. This time she had no trouble finding the right words, and before she was done, she had a perfect list. This was exactly what she needed.
She flipped off the light and smiled to herself. Then she thought of the licorice whip and shivered. She turned into the pillow, got out of bed again, and unlocked the sliders.
No doubt about it. She’d gone bad. And it felt so good.
“READING TIME,” BREE SAID, OPENING the door to the cottage’s small front porch just as she’d been doing for the past two weeks, ever since she’d made up her mind about this.
“It’s summer,” Toby protested. “I’m not supposed to read books in the summer.” But even as he complained, he got off the living room carpet and followed her outside.
The porch was only big enough for a pair of ancient brown wicker chairs and a small wooden table. She’d set up a lamp from her bedroom so she could read after Toby went to bed, but she was so tired by the end of the day that she generally dozed off first. She had better luck keeping up with her new adult reading list between breaks from molding candles, painting note cards, or experimenting with a new beeswax furniture polish.
As she opened the book they’d been reading, she asked herself once again why she was putting herself through all this. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. It was mid-July. She wouldn’t be able to begin harvesting this year?
?s honey until early August, if she was lucky, and as always, she was frantic about money. She’d been trying to create new products, but that took a financial investment for materials, and how many of her products would actually sell? At least she’d begun to see tiny cracks in Toby’s dislike of her, the same cracks that had formed in her own resentment toward him.
