AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mick rolled his eyes.
“Sorry,” Jared said with a laugh. “I guess I’m just not used to Mick Winchester, Derryville’s number one player, walking away from a sure thing. You obviously love her.”
Mick gaped. He hadn’t mentioned that part to Jared.
“Do you think I have gotten as far as I have in my career by not being able to do a bit of deductive reasoning?”
“I guess not,” Mick mumbled, wishing Jared didn’t have to sound so satisfied about it. What was it with married men that they just couldn’t be happy until every freewheeling single guy they knew had also fallen into the sucker pit known as commitment?
“Your way of trying to get her to see a future for you two is to make her think you don’t want her?”
Put that way, the plan sounded pretty stupid. “That’s not the way it was.”
Jared just raised a brow. Typical. Jared always believed in lending lots of nice, silent rope, until the person he was questioning had tied the noose around his own neck and leaped right off the gallows. “I hate that you’re always right.”
“It’s a gift. I can’t help it.”
“Gwen must have to slap you silly regularly.”
“At least she doesn’t send strippers to my book signings.”
Mick snickered, remembering that particular incident.
“So, any other bright ideas for building a future with Caroline?” Jared asked, not distracted from the subject at hand.
Mick instantly stiffened. Jared’s words hit too close to home: hehadbeen seeing a future with Caroline and was angry at himself for falling into that same old bad habit. “Who says I see a future with her?”
“You do, or else you’d just keep sleeping with her and move on in a few weeks when she left.” Jared made it sound like a complete no-brainer. It probably was.
“It isn’t just geography,” Mick said, knowing there were deeper, more serious issues keeping him and Caroline apart. Her lack of trust. His anger at that lack of trust. But he didn’t want to get into that part with Jared; it seemed too much of an invasion into Caroline’s past to discuss with anyone else her parents fucked-up relationship.
“So, you plan to sit back and watch her go back to California, hoping she’ll regret leaving, quit her job and come back here to join the Bingo club and sort your mail for you?”
“No,” he replied, not having to give it a moment’s thought. “She’d never be happy with that life. Caroline loves what she does. She was smothered, kept in a box disguised as a nineteen-inch television set for the first eighteen years of her life. I’dneverwant to put her back there.”
He paused, listening to his own words echo through his brain, wondering why he hadn’t realized that before, long, long ago, when he’d been fuming, cursing her, missing and aching for her when she’d first gone away. Too young. Too selfish. Too stupid. Too…whatever.
Jared tilted his head and leveled a steady stare at him. “Then I guess it’s you who has to change.” He brushed past Mick and unlocked the driver’s side door of his car. Once Mick had walked around to the other side and gotten in, Jared added, “It seems to me you can be pretty happy with any life, Mick. You just have to decide whether you want one without her in it.”
Somehow Mick didn’t even have to think about that one. It was another no-brainer.
CARO HAD NO idea where Mick was Thursday evening, and frankly, she didn’t care. At least, that’s what she told herself.
“You can stay out all night for all I care.”
She tried to ignore the clock, knowing she would probably stay awake until she heard him come home, she flipped aimlessly around the channels on his big-screen TV. Since it was nearly midnight, she had her choice of late-night talk shows, repeats or old movies. So far, nothing was ringing her bell. But it sure was fun flipping the channels of a TV that cost more than some cars.
She finally found a station playing oldMoonlightingepisodes and got interested in spite of herself. Somehow, she’d always had a thing for the flirtatious playboy type. Huh. Fat lot of good it had done her.
Trying to decide whether Bruce Willis looked better young and with hair than he did now and bald, she didn’t even hear the front door open. She had no idea Mick had returned home until he walked into the family room.
She instantly froze and straightened on the sofa. After grabbing the remote from the next cushion, she tried to punch the power button and only succeeded in muting the sound.
“You’re up late,” he murmured, looking at her from the entrance to the room. He leaned against the jamb, arms crossed. His legs were crossed, too, the toe of one shoe resting on the floor beside his other foot. The position pulled the fabric of his jeans tight against his thighs and hip. And crotch.
Sucker.
“I’ll go upstairs,” she murmured, dropping the remote and walking toward the door, determined to keep this a strictly roommates101 interlude. No way was she going to ask about the smell of beer and cigarette smoke on his clothes. Nor did she really want to know why his hair was all messed up. For all she cared, some local dairy queen could have been rolling around with him in a pumpkin patch, and she wouldn’t have wanted to know a thing.
