Chapter Nineteen
Tiffany cracked open an eyelid and moaned. Tequila waited until the next morning to make you suffer. The sneaky bitch. Pounding reverberated through her head. Not her head, the door.
“What?” She worked her tongue off the roof of her mouth to get some moisture going. Yuck. Her teeth had fur on them.
“Rise and shine, princess,” Thomas called. “We’re burning daylight here.”
“Okay.”
Sweet baby Jesus. She’d planted a drunk, sloppy kiss on Thomas last night. Shit, and she hadn’t stopped there. Bloody tequila—there was a reason she didn’t drink the stuff. She’d told him about her boob job and nose job and the Botox. She dropped back onto the bed with a groan. Maybe she could stay here for the next sixty years of her life and he’d get tired of waiting.
“Don’t go back to sleep.” He almost hammered the door right off its hinges.
“Okay.” Face him she must.
Here came another day of staring at Dakota’s sullen face and angry eyes. Dakota used to follow her and Luke around, his little face alive with curiosity, chatting as fast as his mouth could move. He’d adored his older brother to the point of hero worship.
Luke loved Dakota right back. Nothing was ever too important for him to drop it and deal with Dakota. And Dakota needed a lot of dealing. She’d been jealous as hell at the time. But Luke had been gone for seven years. So who had been listening to Dakota chatter in those years? Not Lola, that was for certain.
Lola. Tiffany snorted. Debbie Wilson from Iowa had a lot of explaining to do. After Luke’s father was jailed for embezzlement, Daddy had advised her—very strongly—to keep her distance from Lola. With her own money intact, Lola got on with her life, single in all the ways she needed. Luke left, Tiffany drifted, and Lola launched into her life as a socialite. So what had happened to Dakota? He’d gotten lost in the shuffle.
“Are you up?” Thomas went at the door again, dragging her out of her misery. “Don’t make me come in there after you.”
He’d do it, too. She’d made enough of a dick of herself. Having him come in there and see her would be the final insult. If she felt this bad, it stood to reason she wouldn’t be an oil painting this morning.
“I’m coming.” She fell out of bed and staggered into the bathroom.
Her reflection greeted her and she shrieked. Her sexy sundress hung around her like a rumpled dishrag. Michael Kors would slit his wrists if he saw what she’d done to his dress. Leftover mascara gummed her lashes together and made track marks under her eyes and down her cheeks. She laughed. That was no princess blinking back at her. Ryan would need a clinic to recover. Ryan. Shit. He’d have plenty to say.
She ran warm water and did some damage repair. Her phone pinged. She didn’t need to check caller display to guess who that was. Best get it over with. After washing and drying her face, she went to find her phone. It was halfway under the bed, lighting up like a Christmas tree with the calls from Ryan.
She hit his number and waited.
“Tiffany,” he greeted her.
“Hi there.” She tried to keep it light. A threatening silence loomed back at her. “So, um, last night.” Time to get this out in the open. “I had a bit too much to drink.”
“You know how I feel about drinking.” Ryan sighed. The weight of his disapproval settled across her shoulders and she sat on the edge of the bed. “Last night took me by surprise. I have never known you to get drunk like that.”
“I was just a bit buzzed,” she said.
“I think the more important question here is where you are, Tiffany.” Ryan continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“What?” Her mouth dried up. Ryan had that I know something tone.
“After last night, I was concerned about you. I did a bit of checking around. Your father said you were at a spa, but I called and you’re not at any spa you normally frequent.”
Frequent? Tiffany took her phone away from her ear and glared at it. Who spoke like that? He sounded like a banking commercial. “No, I’m not,” she said. “I needed some time to think, so I went somewhere different.” She glanced around her expressionless hotel room. Way, way different, in fact.
Silence stretched between them as Ryan waited for her to tell him more. No way was she doing that. His clipped tone could’ve cut glass. “Are you going to tell me where?”
“No.” Her stomach tightened. He wasn’t going to like that, but telling him the truth was so not an option. “I wanted to be alone to think, and I went somewhere nobody knew me.”
“Is this still about the other night?” Ryan sighed, bending the phone lines with his heavy exhalation. “Your father said you were upset. Is that what getting drunk and behaving out of character is about? I thought we’d settled this, Tiffany.”
“No, it’s not, we have, I’m okay about that. I just had too much to drink.” She was babbling and she shut her mouth.
“The issue isn’t how much you drank, it’s why you felt the need to do it. The call, I put down to the drinking. We’re not going to even talk about that. It was a symptom and now I want to hear the cause.”
“Tequila?” She giggled.
“Don’t be flippant, Tiffany.”
Oops. She dug her toes into the rough pile of the carpet. Ryan would turn this into a big deal. He wasn’t one to let things roll. Her bright red nail polish stood out against the beige carpet. She’d drunk dialed and tried to get her almost fiancé to have phone sex with her. Ryan acted like she’d run naked down the Magnificent Mile. “It was just a stupid call.”
“Don’t trivialize this, please,” he said, frost tightening his clipped vowels. “You upset me with that so-called stupid call, and I believe I’m entitled to an explanation.”
Ryan never yelled or got mad. He got meaner and sharper. She scrunched her toes together, yanking back on the urge to shout back like a thirteen-year-old. Ryan made her feel like a child, and it was bullshit. He was mad because she wanted to have phone sex. How dumb was that? Most men she knew would’ve liked a call like that.
Thomas would’ve played. She shoved that thought away. Facing him and that sloppy kiss still loomed in her future. “You know what, Ryan,” she said, done with this conversation and squirming, “you’ve got your explanation. I got drunk, I get horny when I’m drunk, and I called you. End of story. Done.”
“This conversation is not done.”
“Ah-ah.” So deliciously and childishly satisfying. “This conversation is done.”
“Tiffany.” His composure sounded a little frayed around the edges. “Do not hang up this phone. We have to talk about this. I need to—”
“You know what, Ryan? You do a lot of talking. I’ve really had enough of your talking.” This beat the crap out of phone sex. Almost.
“Tiffany.” His voice rose. “I don’t like this side of you at all.”
“I’m not a polygon, Ryan.”
“What?”
“A polygon.” She took a note from Dakota’s book and drew out each sound with a silent “idiot” hanging on the end. “A plane figure with at least three straight sides and angles, and typically five or more.”
“I know what—”
“Well, I’m not one of those. I don’t have sides. I’m all one big piece, and some of those pieces are wonderful and others are messy. Deal with it.”
“This isn’t the girl I’m going to marry speaking,” Ryan said.
Hot anger jabbed through her gut. “You aren’t going to marry me because you never asked.” She relished how her voice bounced off the walls. “You assumed I would say yes. Well, what if I don’t say yes? Did that even occur to you? No, it didn’t. Well, Ryan, think about this. I might not want to marry someone who thinks a drunken call is a federal offense. Think about that.”
She hung up before he could speak again. Her phone rang almost immediately. Her hand hovered over it. She should pick it up. Her heart pounded so fast, she thought she might throw up. She didn’t want to pick up. Not picking up, though, was only going to make him madder.
“Are you coming?” Thomas yelled through the door.
“Just wait.” She shoved her phone deep into her bag. It stopped ringing and she breathed a sigh of relief. Her phone started up again. She kicked the bag under the bed and ran for the shower.
* * *
Tiffany inched out of her room and into the hideously bright day.
Thomas greeted her with another of his big smiles. “You okay?”
Dakota pretended she didn’t exist, which, given her state that morning, was fine by Tiffany.
“No.” She avoided Thomas’s knowing look and jammed her sunglasses on.
“Hey.” Thomas snagged her arm and tugged her in front of him. Blue eyes, kind, warm, and caring, soothed the jangled edges of her nerves.
“I think I might have sort of broken up with my boyfriend.”
“What?” Thomas jerked his head back. “I was asking about your hangover, but this is a lot more serious. How do you sort of break up with your boyfriend?”
A small huddle of men surrounded the trailer with the Miura. Legs akimbo, arms across their chests as they discussed the car loudly. A couple of small boys stood beside the men, miniature versions of their bigger counterparts.
“What year is she?” a man called out.
“Seventy-two,” she said.
“Back to the boyfriend.” Thomas turned her face back to him. His hand pressed warm against her chin. “Either you broke up with him or you didn’t.”
She shivered under the intensity of his blue-eyed gaze. “I got mad at him. He said I had sides, I said I didn’t, I had bits and some of them were messy, so he could deal.”
Thomas’s grip on her arm tightened a bit. “That’s it?”
“I’ve never spoken to him like that.” Tiffany’s head reeled a bit. Might have been the hangover, but probably more the conversation with Ryan. “I told him I might not want to marry him anyway.”
“And he said?”
“I don’t know. I hung up.” Her phone started ringing again.
Thomas looked down at her bag. “You going to get that?”
“Nope.”
“What kind of torque does this baby have?” a voice called out from the fan club.
“Almost three hundred pounds,” she called back.
The fan club clucked that over in their huddle.
Thomas tugged her a step closer. “That doesn’t sound like a breakup to me.”
“I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted to marry him.”
“And how much of that is the tequila talking?”
“None of it.” He stood there, looking all self-righteous, just like Ryan. “None of it was the tequila talking. Last night, okay, tequila all the way, but this morning, I was sober.” Suddenly, Tiffany had a gut load of men and their crap. All of them. “You’re all the same, all of you.” Dropping her chin to her chest, she deepened her voice. “I’ll tell you what to think, Tiffany. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that because you’re not so good at thinking, anyway. Let me do that . . .” Tears crept up on her. Damn, stupid things.
Big arms wrapped around her and pulled her closer. “Whoa.”
The fight bled right out of her and she leaned her cheek against the hard expanse of his chest. He smelled of man and laundry detergent, his tee soft against her skin. “Too much?”
“Maybe a little.”
She sighed into the warm comfort he offered.
“What happened last night?” His voice rumbled through his chest. “I left you and you went to bed.”
“Nothing.” Swift heat rushed up her neck and over her face. “I called him and he got mad.”
“What about?” Broad hands swept the skin of her back and took the tension away with them.
“Why do you want to know?”
His nose brushed against her ear. “Tell me.”
“Why?” She squirmed inside. This could get so humiliating, but tucked up against the strength and heat of him, she ached to confess all her secrets.
His laughter vibrated against her. “Because I like you, Tiffany.”
That thrilled her right to the toes of her Jimmys.
“And because there’s a little something going on between us. If you’re engaged and ready to marry this guy, then I’m not going to step on anybody’s toes. But if this guy is the jerk I think he is, then you deserve better.”
A small sound squeaked out of her throat. The blood roared through her ears. “You’re hitting on me.”
“Not right now.” His arms tightened. “So tell me.”
He scared the crap right out of her. The words were one thing, but there was no denying how much she liked hearing them. And she really shouldn’t because things were way, way messy enough. She wrenched out of his dangerous hold and stalked over to the men surrounding the Miura. “I’m not talking about this anymore. Or ever.”
Tiffany spent the next fifteen minutes discussing specifications with a rapt audience. She tried to ignore Thomas, but he didn’t make it easy by standing there watching her. He also didn’t move too far away from Dakota the entire time. That situation wasn’t getting any easier either.
They got on the road a short while later. Dakota gave them the address of the shop where Luke worked.
Tiffany wished she could swap places with Dakota and hide out in the back. The bellowing bass coming off Dakota’s headphones made short work of that idea.
She sipped the coffee Thomas had bought her and ate tiny pieces of her muffin (also procured by Thomas). Her belly roiled and her head pounded with a combination of anxiety and hangover. The muffin was the wrong side of fresh and tasted like it had been pounded out with another ten million just like it, but she ate the entire thing anyway. And enjoyed it.
“How’s your hangover?” Thomas broke the silence between them. A smug smile curled around his mouth.
Tiffany cursed the heat creeping into her cheeks. She’d hoped they could go the entire day without having to discuss any of this. At least this way, she wasn’t obsessing about seeing Luke. Or Thomas’s latest confession. She threw a surreptitious glance over her shoulder to make sure Dakota wasn’t listening. “Not so good.”
Dakota glanced up and gave her the death stare.
“My head is fine.” Thomas’s smile grew bigger.
“Okay.” She sighed. Smug so didn’t suit him. “Get it over with.”
“What?” He looked genuinely confused.
Tiffany glared at him. “Don’t be a dickhead.”
“What?” Surprise morphed into injured.
“You know what I’m talking about. Me going on and on about my stuff.” She waved her hand over herself. “Making a complete ass of myself, getting tanked on tequila and throwing myself at you.”
“That was you throwing yourself at me?” He made a noise of disbelief in the back of his throat. “And here I thought you were just a friendly drunk. If I’d known you were throwing yourself at me, I definitely would’ve paid closer attention.”
“Seriously?” Tiffany shook her head. He was going to compound her humiliation by making fun of her. She took a huge gulp of coffee and scalded the back of her throat.
“Come on,” he said with a laugh. “You had too much tequila, Tiffany. Nobody got hurt, nothing stupid happened. Lighten up a little.”
Easy for him to say. She folded her arms across her breasts. Lighten up? Was he kidding her? She’d gone and made a total idiot of herself. She’d like to see how he’d feel if he had done the same. Actually, try as she might, she couldn’t see him making a big deal about it. What she could see was him flashing that big, beautiful grin and making a joke out of the whole thing. Maybe, and at the very most, looking a bit sheepish. “I feel stupid.”
“Sure you do.” He shrugged one big shoulder. “But it’s over now.”
“Really?”
He made a face. “Hey, if it makes you feel any better, remember I was the one that said I’d give my left nut to sleep with you.”
Actually, it made her feel a lot better. “We were drunk,” she said. “I think we should agree to discount anything the other one said.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You were drunk. I was lightly buzzed and I still want to sleep with you. I think I made that clear earlier.”
Her mouth dropped open and she had to shut it fast. “You can’t say things like that.”
Dakota’s head was down, his music still going as he tapped into his phone.
“Sure I can. And when you quit ducking and diving, you’ll admit you feel the same way. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen or anything, just like to put these things out there.” Thomas shrugged. “Anyway, how do you want to go about looking for Luke?”
“I don’t know.” Her brain cycled to catch up with the subject change. Clearly, Thomas thought the other part of their conversation was over, and she sure as hell wasn’t going back there.
“I think we should go straight to the store. If we get lucky, we’ll run into Luke. If not, we might find someone who knows him.” He went silent for a moment. “You guys going to be okay?”
“Luke and me?”
“Yup. Last I heard, you couldn’t be in the same room without making the walls shake.”
“I’ve grown up since then.” Sort of. He had a point, though. Those last months with Luke had been one battle after another, both of them drawing as much blood as they could. Luke had a vicious mouth on him. She did a mental flinch. She hadn’t exactly done herself proud with her comebacks. The demolition job on the Miura being number one on that list. “I’m going to calmly explain what I want and get him to come back with me. Then I’m going to give him back the Miura and we can be on our way. It sounds like your business with him is going to be a hell of a lot more serious.”
“Yeah.” Thomas grimaced at the windshield. “I have a whole lot that needs saying when I see Luke, and he’s not going to like any of it.” He paused. “How do you think Luke is going to react to his brother?”
Tiffany dared another glance at Dakota.
His fingers whirred across his screen. From this angle, it was the only sign of life.
“Dakota adored Luke when he was a kid. He really looked up to him.”
“And Luke?”
“Luke took care of him,” Tiffany said. “He didn’t have a lot going for him. I know it’s hard to see now, but he was the cutest kid.” She kept her tone low in case Dakota could hear anything through the raucous pounding his ears were taking. “Lola never had a lot of time for him, and their dad . . .” She didn’t know how much Luke had told Thomas.
“He’s in jail, right?”
“Right.” She breathed a sigh of relief. This would all be easier if Thomas knew everything. “Embezzlement. Lola had her own money tied up, so it didn’t touch her. But even before that, their dad was not really the kind of dad who noticed his children much. When Luke was a kid, their father used to keep filling up his bank account, and other than staying out of his hair, that was all their father did for them. Luke’s parents were divorced, but his mother was great.”
An old sadness gripped her. It wasn’t long after the death of his mother that things with Luke had changed. “After his mom died, Luke seemed to want to spend more and more time with Dakota. Like he was all that Luke had.”
And that was what had just about killed her. She had wanted, no, needed Luke to turn to her for comfort. Instead, he had virtually cut her out, spending as much time with his brother as he could. Always polite to her, but cold and distant. That was when she learned how to push his buttons. And push them she did.
Looking back now, it was hard to believe that was her. She’d pushed and Luke had struck back. In the beginning they had used sex to keep the connection alive, but soon the verbal skirmishes grew too awful for even that. Then Luke had turned to other women to ease his pain. She couldn’t say any of this out loud. It burned enough to even think about it.
“How do you want to handle the drug thing?” Thomas turned off the main road onto a quieter street.
Tiffany blew out her breath. “It’s not like either of us really has any say in how Dakota lives his life and what he does,” she said. “And he sure doesn’t want to know what I think about his life.”
“You have a point.” Thomas gave a wry smile. “But I can’t leave it at that. I’ll try talking to him.”
“Good luck with that.” Traffic slid around them. Normal people having a normal day, with no idea of the time bomb ticking down in Thomas’s truck.
“Whatever happens, we’ll have to tell Luke,” Thomas said.
Tiffany shook her head slowly. Luke’s day was about to slide into the toilet.