Zack knew to prepare for the unexpected, but his first surprise of the weekend was that Shelby had a set of pipes on her. She made a sly comment that singing didn’t count as talking as far as their lap dance bet went, then turned on the radio. Billy Brenton’s “Goin’ Creekin’” came on, and she belted it out like a karaoke champ. Zack switched the station, and she immediately went into “Enter Sandman” as though she’d learned it in the womb.
This girl needed a night at karaoke. Or better yet, the Savannah Smiles Dueling Pianos Bar.
The old Metallica song finished, and he switched stations again.
Shelby squealed and clapped her hands. “Oh, you should hear Braden sing this. It’s hilarious. He says it, ‘All ’bout da bass, no tubble.’”
Zack grinned at her. “You made it four miles. I’m impressed.”
“That was ten miles if it was an inch. Don’t you go cheating, or I’ll have to teach you how a Southern lady gets revenge.”
“Does this involve calling your friends? Because that Tara is kinda cute.”
“Oh, you think you could handle her? Bless your heart.”
Zack’s sisters would love Shelby. So would his brother.
“Honey, you know that’s not the nicest thing I could say to you, don’t you?” Shelby said.
He cut a glance at her, and his grin widened. She almost looked genuinely worried about his intelligence. “My momma says I should take any blessing I can get,” he said.
Her jaw audibly snapped shut as Meghan Trainor sang about bringing booty back.
“Go on, say it,” Zack said. “I maybe could be fixing to say one of these Southern insults to my sisters next time I see them.”
“Might could, honey, and it’s fixin’ to. No g on the end there.”
“Bless my heart,” he said.
Shelby giggled.
But then she sucked in one of those about-to-ruin-it breaths. “I’m sorry. About getting sick the other night. You were real sweet to take care of me.”
Zack puffed up his chest and gave his belly a scratch. “I reckon that moonshine got too big for its britches and took it out on your poor little ol’ self, Miss Shelby. Bless its heart.”
Her laughter pealed through the car.
Home run.
“Oh, honey,” she said through her laughter. “You need to leave the Southern to us Southerners.”
“I maybe might be able to learn,” he said.
There she went again with the giggles. “Stop. For the love of my ears, stop.” She propped her cast on the console between the seats and twisted to face him. The movement stirred the air, and he caught a whiff of flowers and determination.
His favorite combination—sexy and strong. And the smart-ass turned him on.
No denying it. He liked being challenged.
“Tell me about your family,” she said.
He did, bits and pieces at a time, telling her stories of his childhood and his travels. He also coaxed out more tidbits about her life. Her little family, her worries about her kids and how her divorce would affect them, her thoughts on going back to school, how she’d stumbled into her ex-wives club.
“Truth time,” she said. “Why haven’t you ever gotten married?”
The afternoon thunderstorms were catching up with them, blossoming darker and faster all around them. He could’ve dodged the question on account of the weather, and needing his full concentration on the road, but other than the word married making him flinch like a normal male, he didn’t have anything to hide. “Never found a woman worth giving up my freedom for,” he said.
“Lame,” she declared. “How old are you?”
“Don’t you Southern women know not to ask a gentleman his age?”
She bawked like a chicken.
Zack choked so hard on a laugh, he almost drove off the road. Didn’t see that one coming.
“Now, tell Auntie Shelby everything. Did your one true love break your heart and marry your best friend? Do you have a secret baby you’re supporting, and you don’t know how to tell your family? Or are you secretly in love with one of those cousins?”
Zack patted her knee. “Sugarmuffin, you’ve been reading too many of those books again, ain’t you?”
“Quit with the Southern. And I’ll have you know, you can learn a lot about life from a good Mae Daniels or Ava Bee novel.”
“Men don’t read romance novels.”
“Jackson does. And that man has one happy wife.”
Zack opened his mouth. Then shut it again.
Shelby smirked. “Exactly. So. Out with it. You kiss like a devil, so I know it’s not a matter of batting for the other team. What’s your deep dark secret?”
“No secret. Just not the marrying kind.”
His cheek warmed. She was squinting at him, trying to see through him. He could feel it. Lightning streaked across the sky a ways behind them, but it wouldn’t be long before the storm enveloped them. A little town was coming up on the back road he’d picked. He’d pull over and they’d get some dinner while they waited out the storm.
“You don’t want a family?” Shelby said.
“Got plenty of family,” he said with a grin.
“Of your own.” There was no snark, no sass, no bless your heart coloring her voice. Just honest curiosity.
He cut a glance toward her, and found those hazel eyes puzzling over him, as though he’d missed some key gene in the womb.
“I want to see the world,” he said. “Every country before I’m sixty. That’s the goal.”
“Can’t exactly travel with kids,” she said quietly.
“Not true. My brother and his kids travel all the time. His wife’s from California, so they’re always on the road, coming and going and seeing everything in between.”
“But you—”
“I can retire from the Air Force in seven years,” he said. “Between savings, my pension, and rental income, if I’m smart, I can afford to travel full-time until I get tired of it. Six months or six years. Just go. See those pyramids. Walk the Great Wall. You know how cool it would be to set foot on Antarctica? Stand on top of Mount Everest? I want to eat Indian food in India, do Carnival in Brazil. See all of it. The whole world. With nothing holding me back.”
Big, fat raindrops splattered his windshield as he crossed the town limits and spied a gas station with a barbecue joint attached. He might not have been raised in the South, but Miss Mitzi had told him when he first arrived at Gellings that the best food was always at the gas stations.
Shelby had gone eerily quiet. Zack pulled into the parking lot on the side of the building and glanced at her. Her lips were pursed, and he had the strangest notion that dim light in her hazel eyes was a form of pity.
“You’re right,” she said quietly. With no argument, no sass again. “I should travel with my babies. They deserve to see what’s out there.” She looked over at the restaurant and reached for her door handle, but then stopped and turned back to him.
Those Marilyn Monroe lips of hers pursed out as though she were debating the wisdom of blessing somebody’s heart. “And you know what?” she said. “I wouldn’t trade them for the world. Even when they’re whining, even when they haven’t let me sleep in weeks, even when they make me want to pull my hair out. Because they make their own world, and there’s not a pyramid or a mountain or a food in the world—not even sweet tea—that could ever be better than being their momma.”
She flashed a guilty smile and fanned herself with her good hand. “Whew. And that’s quite enough of that. Have you ever had fried pickles, Sergeant Butter Biscuits? Can’t leave the South without having true Southern delicacies, and I’d bet my daddy’s best shot glass this place has some dang good fried pickles. Last one in has to buy.”
She flung her door open and dashed through the thickening rain for the door. Zack followed, but his heart suddenly wasn’t as in it as it should’ve been.
Parenthood was something other people did.
Biological necessity, Zack always assumed. And he’d never had it. He’d been around enough babies in his life to get his fill. Besides, his sisters and aunts and cousins always traded horrific birth stories, talked about calls from the principal’s office, running the kids here and there and everywhere. And his brothers-in-law and uncles and male cousins talked about not getting sex anymore, about spending too much money on sports equipment and piano lessons, about never getting the time for a fishing trip.
But if they talked about the adventure and the world of parenthood, Zack hadn’t heard it.
Not the way Shelby talked about it.
He stepped into the small side room, but the barbecue didn’t smell quite as rich as it should’ve, the checkered tablecloth wasn’t as bright as he expected, and the thought of sweet tea turned his stomach.
Shelby tilted a glance at him and tsked. “Getting old there, Sergeant Saggy Pants? Need me to get you a wheelchair to get your old bones back out to the car? And I’m getting dessert too, since you’re buying. Can’t top peach cobbler, unless it’s August peach cobbler.”
If she knew she’d just shifted the plates under his world, she didn’t show it.
And Zack Montgomery didn’t like being the only one shaken up.
So he did the only thing he could justify in his mind.
He kissed the Southern right out of her.
The second half of the drive to Savannah took forever. Shelby had half a mind to ask Zack to pull over and join her in the backseat—she’d packed twelve condoms, just in case, and she was pretty sure that coming off her period meant she wouldn’t be too fertile, but still. Even tripling up, they could go four rounds. And they could buy more condoms.
She didn’t know what had shifted, but since the storm hit, Zack had put every ounce of his energy into making her feel like a proverbial woman. The Clairol proverbial, not the biblical proverbial, which Shelby never would’ve told her momma, rest her soul. Even back on the road, Zack kept a hand on her thigh, or squeezed her fingers hanging out of her cast. His voice was lower—still ornery as an old goat, except with enough sexy to make Shelby’s skin itch from her toes to her hairline.
So when they arrived in Savannah and he drove them to a parking lot down by River Street and then pulled her down an alley to a raucous bar instead of checking them directly into a hotel, she nearly lost her mind.
She hadn’t had sex in years.
She hadn’t enjoyed sex in longer.
And if Zack Montgomery gave half as good an orgasm as his smoldering lady-killer eyes and steamy-sinful kisses promised, Shelby figured she’d probably be dead by morning.
In the best possible way.
But he paid their cover and pulled her into the loud, crowded, humid bar with two pianists onstage, pounding and wailing their hearts out.
Zack kept her by his side, her bad arm tucked between them, and pushed to the bar where he ordered two mojitos. Then he led Shelby to the side, and while the two piano dudes launched into some classic Billy Joel, he pressed against her and swayed.
“Dance with me,” he ordered.
She’d wanted an experience.
Pressing against his hard body—hard everywhere—with a drink in hand while live music and fresh beer and hot young waitresses flowed around them was an experience.
She wasn’t Shelby Thermokopolos, the underemployed, divorced mother of two.
She was Shelby Thermokopolos, the brave, beautiful, and free.
Her laughter surprised herself. And when she hooked her good hand behind Zack’s neck and pulled him down for a kiss, she surprised herself again.
But then she lost herself in the kiss, in the moment, in that floaty space outside her body where she was watching a carefree young woman dance a ritual as old and natural as anything Zack Montgomery would ever find in his world travels.
But tonight, she got to be his world.
The bar was crowded, the music boisterous, the fun almost overwhelming. The dancing, the singing along, the kissing—it all flowed together until Zack grabbed her hand again and pulled her back out of the bar. It might’ve been fifteen minutes, it might’ve been two hours, but their drinks were long gone, the magnetism between them stronger than Earth’s pull on the moon.
“You’re about to get naked,” Zack breathed in her ear when he reached the car. Instead of shuffling her into the seat, though, he popped the back end and pulled out both their bags. Three minutes later, they entered a hotel, and five minutes after that, their room door closed behind them with a definitive click.
Shelby sucked in a breath.
Brave. Bold. Worldly.
She was no one’s wife. Tonight, she was no one’s mother. She was simply a woman.
And this woman needed to be worshipped.
She ran a hand down his white polo. “This is a one-time thing,” she purred.
Purred.
Shelby Thermokopolos was purring.
Zack reached for the button on her jeans. “If by one time, you mean a dozen times before Sunday, yes.”
His mouth crashed against hers—lips, teeth, tongue, all of it. His hands went under her shirt, her hands went down his pants.
And hel-lo, was that all him?
“Oh, my sweet lattes,” Shelby moaned. “I hope you know how to use that thing.”
“Very well, as a matter of fact.”
He nipped and licked his way down her neck, took special care with peeling her out of her shirt, paid attention to all the right places—her breasts, that perfect spot where her neck met her shoulders, the sensitive skin on the inside of her elbow—and he didn’t say a word about her stretch marks or the extra pounds she hadn’t been able to shake off her middle.
Instead, he caressed her, explored her with hot, hungry, strong hands, and murmured reverent little sweet everythings. “You’re beautiful, Shelby.” “You feel amazing.” “You taste better than ice cream.”
She could’ve easily fallen in love with him without much more prodding.
Instead, she put her mind to stripping him of his shirt, exploring that wide, solid chest—tracing a scar here, a birthmark there—then flicking her tongue over his nipples while she shoved his pants down and stroked the hot, silky skin over his impressive erection.
“Gonna kill me, Shelby,” he gasped.
“At least you’ll die happy.”
He wheezed out a laugh, then carefully flipped her onto her back for a hot, searing kiss that she felt everywhere. Mouth to mouth, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat.
She wanted him.
She wanted him now, and she wanted him later, and she wanted tonight to never end.
But since neither of those were a possibility, she rolled to her side, keeping her bad arm out of the way, and reached behind him for the box of condoms. He didn’t blink or laugh or hesitate when she handed him two. “Gonna have to help, sweetheart,” he said instead.
She took her time rolling them on, testing his thickness, squeezing to feel him pulse in response, aching between her legs by simply looking at him. “Jesus, Mary, and Starbucks,” she whispered.
This time, while she cradled his shaft, he threaded his hands through her hair and lifted her face to his. But this kiss was different. Slow. Thorough. Deep.
One of those kisses that made her skin pebble and her heart swell.
One of those kisses that touched her soul.
Zack settled her back on the bed again and leaned over her. Without conscious thought, she spread her legs and looped them around his back. “Zack—”
“Shelby.” He whispered it, and then he pushed into her, hard and hot but slow. Reverent.
He was different. Thicker, longer, and present. With his body, but also with his mind. His full attention.
She wasn’t a duty. She wasn’t an obligation. She was a woman he wanted.
For today. For tomorrow.
But he wanted her. Stretch marks and smart mouth and baggage and all.
This was what being loved was supposed to feel like.
She gasped and rocked into him, threw her good arm around his shoulders, squeezed her eyes shut against the threat of tears. Her cast banged awkwardly, but Zack drove into her harder.
“Don’t stop,” she whimpered.
“Bossy,” he grunted.
Shelby choked on a surprised laugh, and Zack hit the right spot inside her.
“Oh, god,” she moaned.
“You know it,” he said.
She laughed again, but then he hit her special spot again, and suddenly her inner muscles clenched. “Zack…” she cried.
“Let go, sweet Shelby. Let it go.”
And she did. Sweet cappuccinos, colors exploded behind her eyelids and her whole body quaked, from her core out to her fingertips and beyond.
Zack let out a passionate curse, pumped once more inside her, and then moaned her name.
He collapsed on top of her, and she buried her nose in his neck, breathing in the scent of raw, satisfied male.
He was one of those men who could’ve been with any woman he wanted tonight.
And he’d picked her.
And while she wasn’t watching, her heart had picked him.
Whoops.