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“GET OVER HERE, TORTELLINI, you Benedict Arnold.” Daphne tugged on the dog’s hot pink martini glass collar she so loved, pulling her pup back inside and away from the bad, bad man. She always made sure the dog was wearing that collar when she poured herself a happy hour cocktail. After all, it was better not to drink alone, and that way her dog had a glass too. How’s that—her own dog betraying her by welcoming that awful man? She could hardly believe her disloyal dog dared even lick the hand of that rat bastard. Frankly she should’ve bitten it in defense of her owner.
We’ll talk tomorrow. He had some nerve. Talk tomorrow. As if he didn’t blow out of town like an Alberta clipper that dumped a pile of snow and was gone in an hour. Only at least those weather systems left behind something useful, so maybe you could make a snowman or go sledding. Whereas all he left behind was an embittered young woman who’d felt used and discarded and never understood what she’d done to deserve it. How on earth could that man be related to sweet, lovable Violet? It seemed impossible. And what did this mean? Would she have to deal with this traitorous jerk now? What if they had conflicting ideas about the property? He’d said something about the market being hot and selling it. But he’d better get used to the idea that she was keeping it. End of story. Violet’s letter said whoever this nephew guy was would do whatever she wanted. She hadn’t considered that the biggest asshole around would show up on her doorstep wanting to unload the place. Her home. Her home. She could not let Brady McGovern get the upper hand and sell the place out from under her, leaving her homeless. In a hot market, she’d not even be able to buy something else with whatever proceeds she ended up with. And then where would she be?
Daphne decided she needed a soothing cup of tea and then she’d do ten minutes of meditation before falling asleep for the night. It was her only hope of actually not waking in a fit of rage every hour on the hour.
~*~
IT SEEMED LIKE SHE’D barely drifted off to sleep when she heard a loud pounding on her door. She pulled her eye mask onto her forehead and saw faint traces of light seeping through the edges of the curtains, so it must’ve been morning, right? She glanced at her phone and saw that it was 5:55. a.m. Who pounds on someone’s door at that hour, unless there’s a fire and they need to get you out?
She creaked out of bed, and Tortellini, excited that the day was about to begin—like it or not—ran circles around Daphne as she walked along the short hallway and down the steps to answer the front door. She flicked on the light and peered out the security peephole only to see the face of Satan. In the form of that dirty rotten scoundrel Brady McGovern. Keeping the chain latched, she opened the door an inch or so.
“What are you doing? Why are you bothering me at this ungodly hour?”
“Good morning, sunshine!” Brady said with an exaggerated grin. Ugh, he did always have a gorgeous smile: nice straight, white teeth and cute little dimples perfectly punctuating his mouth. One of those smiles that finds you in a mad make-out session in the middle of a fraternity party and then the next thing you know you’re having wild monkey sex in the guy’s room. Thank goodness she hadn’t done that with him, but she might as well have under the right circumstances. “I brought you a coffee.” He tried to insert it through the inhospitable crack she’d left exposed.
Daphne could barely keep her eyes open, and what minimal daylight there was pierced her retinas in a particularly rude manner. This was no way to start what was promising to be a not-so-banner day.
“How do you know I even drink coffee?” Tortellini was goosing Daphne with her wet nose, in her own way announcing she needed to go outside. The last thing Daphne wanted to do was give this man a chance to inch any closer. But it wasn’t fair to Tortellini to make her wait there with legs crossed.
“Oh, fine,” she said, unlatching the chain. Maybe her dog would tackle the jerk and he’d spill hot coffee on himself. But then again, maybe he’d spill it on her dog and she didn’t want that. She shook her head and rolled her eyes.
Tortellini tore out of the foyer, blew past Brady, circling around briefly to give him a few nudges with her nose, and ran to the front yard where she quickly took care of business. In the meantime, Brady had insinuated his way into Daphne’s home, shoving a coffee cup in one of her hands and a big box of trash bags in the other.
Daphne shook her head and wrinkled her brow. “What is this for?”
He aimed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the adjacent side of the building. “We’ve got a lot of cleanup to do. Turns out old Aunt Violet was a bit of a hoarder. Place is filled to the brim with shit.”
Daphne gasped. “Shit! How dare you!” Her tired eyes grew wide with outrage. “Violet had a lovely collection of things that made her heart happy. And besides, what is it to you what’s in that house? It all belongs to me!”
“To you?”
“Yes, Violet left it for me. She knew I would treat it with tender loving care.”
“Care? It’s a bunch of garbage that needs to be carted off to the dump.” He took a swig of coffee. “Sorry, my time’s all off. Been up since four. I went online and found several reputable businesses that will haul off junk within days.”
“Haul off junk?” Glaring at him, she shook her head. “There will be no hauling off of anything!”
“I took the liberty of filling up a couple of trash bags already.” He pointed toward three large garbage bags filled to the brim along the curb.
Her eyes grew wide. “You what?”
He pointed at her eye mask, still perched on her forehead. “Nice look, by the way.”
She shrieked and began to pace. “Who the hell gave you permission to saunter in here and act like you own the place?”
He shrugged. “Well, I do own the place.”
She pulled off her eye mask and tossed it on the nearby sofa. “Half the place. Apparently.” Under her breath she muttered, “Curse Violet for remembering his wretched existence.”
“I heard that.”
Daphne lifted a brow and shrugged. “Good. In the meantime, let me make myself abundantly clear: you do not have my permission to throw those things out.” She pointed with unmistakable emphasis at the menacing bags. “You need to drag those back into the house this instant. And make sure you don’t break anything.”
“But we need to clean this place out. I want to get it listed and sold, so I can go back on the road again.”
She laughed a short, unhappy laugh. “So like you to screw me and run.”
He turned his head and squinted. “Come again?”
“Huh.” She pursed her lips. “Probably the last words I heard out of your mouth before you left me.”
He gulped. She seethed. It was all coming back to her. He’d stayed overnight at her place after graduation. Sometime before dawn, he’d taken her on the kitchen table, and then in the shower stall. They’d fallen back asleep, and later he woke her as he’d inched down her body, burying his mouth in her pussy and bringing her to climax twice. He’d joked to her about making her come again as she’d drifted back to sleep. Yet he was gone when she woke the next time. From lover to ghost in the blink of an eye.
“Look, Daphne, let’s let that be water under the bridge.” He ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair.
Under the bridge my ass. Why do they always want to let bygones be bygones when they’re the offenders? God, she hated that he looked so good. And that he looked so much like he did the last time she saw him in the early morning light, his blue eyes twinkling. Only he was more of a man now, filled out, his shoulders and chest strong and his waist tapered in that sexy way she couldn’t resist. How was it possible that this jerk had, out of the blue, just shat himself into her life like this? It had taken her too long to get over him because of the way he’d abandoned her. It left her so unable to trust a guy. Because, well, who does that? Who leaves without a word, a note, nothing? It would have been downright gentlemanly of him to dump her via text.
Closing her eyes for a minute, she put herself back to that night. They’d made love. Wait, yuck, that sounded soooo stupid and gullible when she thought of it like that, particularly knowing now that they were simply two horny college kids in the throes of a last hurrah before the real world encroached. “Made love” sounded like they cared, and while she thought they both did, clearly he hadn’t, so in hindsight, she had to think of the whole affair more transactionally. They fucked.
Yet she knew that to her it was more than that. They had only been dating a couple of months, but still, it felt like they’d been together much longer. Which was all the more reason his abrupt departure stung as much as it did. It was as if they’d been teammates, but she thought they were playing to win while he was merely playing to get traded to a better team. Or something like that.
“If by ‘that’ you mean you ghosting me after banging me senseless for the better part of graduation night into the following morning, well then, no. I’m not going to view that as ‘water under the bridge.’” She made air quotes as she used a mocking tone. “Maybe it’s cool for you to just fuck and run, but it’s pretty disgusting behavior, and in my book anyone who does that deserves to have a place in the Dickhead Hall of Fame.”
He scrunched his nose. “There’s no such thing.”
She shook her head like she was talking to a complete idiot. “Well, there should be. And if there was, you’d be front and center. Your picture would be featured at the box office. On the tickets, for that matter. And there would be a giant statue of you smack-dab in the middle of it. Where you would be memorialized as the asshole that you are.”
He whistled long and low. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“A woman scorned? Are you kidding me? I fell asleep thinking I was falling in love with you and woke up to realize that instead I should have always hated you. And now here you are, trying to railroad my dear friend Violet’s home into a sale so you can get on the road again? And while you’re at it, screw me yet again by leaving me homeless? What, is there some woman you need to sleep and run with?”
“This is not the time or place for this discussion,” he said, a hint of pleading to his voice. Shame that groveling wasn’t going to work for him. The day Brady ditched her was the day Daphne became Hard-hearted Hannah toward him. She had no intention of extending him even the slightest of courtesies: not for his jet lag, not for the loss of his aunt (and obviously he didn’t care about that), not for his need to get back to wherever he wanted to go. But right now, she wanted to get back to sleep.
“You’re right, Brady. This is not the time or place. Right now, the only thing this is the time for is me returning to sleep. So forgive me, but I’ve had enough of this discussion.” She grabbed her eye mask and pulled it over her eyes, then slammed the door, only then realizing no way would she be able to find her way back to bed blindfolded, so she pulled it back over her head and stormed upstairs, hating the sway that Brady McGovern had on her, even all these years later.