Calling His Bluff (4 page)

“I wouldn’t sleep with you for all the yen in China. Or Japan. Or wherever,
Joey
Damico. You were the first in a long string of guys to steal my heart and hand it
back to me in pieces.” She shook a finger at him. “And since you started the trend,
I figure you should get the blame for every jerk and jackass who followed.”

“Me?” The shock on his face looked genuine but she refused to feel sorry for him.
“What did
I
do?”

She pushed her head forward and stared him down, but his look of confusion didn’t
even hint at any guilt.

“What?”

“You kissed me,” she enunciated with precision, just in case his hearing was as defective
as his conscience, “and then five minutes later you were making out with Jessica Blackwell
in the bathtub.”

“I never—when?” he demanded, swinging his legs over her head and dropping his feet
on the floor by her side with a thud. He set his wine glass on the end table and turned
back to her. “When did I kiss you, and who’s Jessica Blackwell?”

The last three words did nothing to improve her impression of him. She waited for
him to remember.

After a minute of their glaring at each other, it became clear that that was not going
to happen.

With pleasure, she enlightened him.

“July, 1995.”

“July ninety-five…” His forehead wrinkled and then smoothed as she saw the memory
return to him. She sat up straighter and waited for his apology. It had been a long
time coming.

“But you were only, what? Twelve!”

She could hear from the disbelief in his voice that she’d be waiting for that apology
forever.

J.D. ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging a few loose strands that fell against
his chin as he shook his head.

“You were twelve, and I was saving you from kissing Tad Kipling, who I believe you
referred to as ‘that sweaty-palmed toad from square-dancing class.’ You kids were
playing spin the bottle in your mom’s basement and I pretended the bottle was pointing
at me when I came downstairs to check on you, because I could see you squinching up
your face at the thought of kissing him. I rescued you!”

She had forgotten. He was a man, and men never understood anything.

“You kissed me, and then two minutes later you were sucking face with Jessica Blackwell!”

Apparently she’d lost all control over both her brain and her mouth.

“Let me repeat. You were twelve. I was fifteen. Jessica Blackwell was sixteen. She
had her own car and wore a 36D bra.” He nipped the wine glass out of her fingers before
she could throw it at him. “I’m sorry, honey, but you never stood a chance.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she muttered and threw herself down onto the concrete
floor so that she could stare morosely at the far-off ceiling. “I was twelve. Don’t
expect rationality from a preteen.”

A light flashed.

She propped herself up on her elbows and glared at him as he dropped a camera into
his lap.
When did he bring that out?

“Hey! Don’t take my picture when I’m pouting. Jackass.”

He smiled at her and she felt herself blush.
Damn it.

“Sorry. If it’ll help, I apologize for handing your heart back to you in pieces. In
my own defense, I have to say that I wasn’t aware that I had it.”

“Yeah, you’re forgiven. I got over it in my twenties.” She waved a hand in his general
direction. “I’m thirty-one. Old enough to know that the kiss wasn’t
that
good.”

She rolled onto her side, ready to laugh at the end of a good joke, the same way he’d
done earlier after pretending to hit on her. Of course, she knew she was kidding herself
when she called it joking. A part of her still felt like that twelve-year-old girl
watching her crush drive off with the beautiful blonde girl who had the car and the
boobs.

She smiled at her own foolishness and was about to sit up when two glowing gold eyes
flashed out at her from beneath the couch.

“Hey,” she lowered her head back to the floor, “there’s a cat under here.” When she
popped back up, J.D. was looking at her with raised eyebrows. Suddenly she remembered
why she’d shown up on his isolated doorstep in the first place. “Right, you have a
sick cat. What’s wrong with kitty?” She ducked back down to peer under the couch.

“I can’t believe you’re a vet, by the way. You couldn’t stand the sight of a bloody
skinned knee when we were kids.”

“Yet another thing I got over,” she said and snapped her fingers at him. “The cat,
J.D.?”

“How should I know what’s wrong with the stupid thing? It’s been under the couch ever
since it walked in off the street a few days ago. The only time it came out was when
it got cold in here. I found it sleeping in the ashes of the fireplace, so I stoked
up the fire, cranked the heat up to eighty, and I’ve been sweating my ass off for
two days while it hides out.”

Half an hour and two cans of tuna later, she had the cat in her lap, willing to trust
her for the moment. She ran her hands over its body and looked up with a grin.

“Congratulations, J.D. You’re gonna be a daddy.”

Over his protests that he “couldn’t have a cat let alone kittens,” she explained that
she’d send someone over with more food and some special vitamins the following morning.
Meanwhile, she changed back into her suit and gathered up her things, having decided
that it was definitely time for her to get going. She left him with some last-minute
instructions.

“Keep her warm. That was a good idea. Give her all the tuna she wants tonight and
refill the dish of water I put out if she finishes it. And J.D.?” She stopped at the
door and turned back to look at him. He was standing in the middle of the room, leaning
on his crutches, backlit again by the glow of the fire. Even now, with muscles that
weren’t there when he was a teenager and longer, straighter hair that was still escaping
from the blunt ponytail, there was no mistaking the graceful and supremely controlled
kid she’d watched and wanted for years.

“Yes, Dr. Evil?”

“Better find something to call her instead of ‘stupid cat.’ She’s yours now.”

She stepped outside into the frigid March air and headed toward where her Jeep was
parked at the curb, leaving him to muscle the door shut behind her. Plastic bags and
old newsprint pages blew past her ankles in the winter wind.

“Hey Sarah.”

He was standing in the doorway, one hand outstretched as if to hand her something
she’d left behind. She opened the car door and slung her bag into the backseat before
jogging back up to the building.

“What, did I forget some—”

He grabbed the collar of her coat and yanked her up against him, his other arm a tight
band across her lower back, pressing her hips into his. She thought she’d go cross-eyed
as he bent down toward her, his mouth a hairsbreadth from hers. She could smell the
cabernet on his breath and felt the warmth of it feather over her.

“I didn’t want you to go off thinking you’d had my best effort at kissing all those
years ago.”

Then he lowered his mouth to hers and she closed her eyes as J.D. kissed her for the
second time since she was twelve years old.

Two weeks later, she was still feeling that kiss. She’d nearly rear-ended a canary-yellow
VW Bug at a stop sign because she was daydreaming about the taste of his mouth.

It wasn’t fair.

She’d been waiting her whole life for someone to match the slow roll and tumble in
her stomach that she’d felt when she was twelve and her brother’s best friend kissed
her on the lips.

It was so unfair that the first and only person to make her feel that way again was
that very same boy, now all grown up and far more dangerous than when he was fifteen.

Not to mention the whole “still married” thing.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t run into some good kissers in the years bookended by J.D.
Damico. He wasn’t the first man to cup his hand against her cheek and slide his palm
around to the nape of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair along the way. And he
wasn’t the first man to grab the front of her jacket to pull her even closer. Or to
pause for a moment, his mouth hovering over hers, to nip at her bottom lip.

But that mouth.
Damn.
The moment his lips pressed to hers it was like someone had slid a hand up her thigh
and whispered, “Lie down with me.” And the sudden wash of wanting him was a sharp
cramp that left her breathless. His tongue in her mouth was a tease. The moment had
passed too quickly, leading her to do some tugging of her own. She’d wrapped
her
hand behind his neck to pull his mouth back down to hers.

A horn blasted behind her and she stepped on the gas without thinking. Slammed on
the brakes and waved the car with the right-of-way through the intersection, making
the “Sorry!” face at the other driver, who flipped her off. She stopped thinking about
the kiss for ten seconds and managed to get across the four-way-stop intersection
and into the itty-bitty parking lot that scraped alongside the veterinary clinic where
she worked.

She bumped the medical bag on her hip up against the metal plate at the back entrance
so that the security scanner could read the card in the outside pocket. The door unlocked
with a beep. She appreciated the high-tech setup at this clinic, but she would’ve
put up with just about anything to get out of her previous clinic, from padlocks on
the doors to gas lanterns for light.

She didn’t know what it was, but something about her attracted older married men who
were too self-aware to indulge in a midlife crisis by having an affair with a twenty-two-year-old
blonde bombshell. It was as if they took one look at her and thought, “Hmm, the calm,
quiet brunette in the corner there, what about her? Looks studious but pretty. No
one could accuse me of going for flash there. And then maybe I can still get the Porsche.”

She had only fallen for that with her first boss because he hadn’t gotten around to
mentioning the fact that he was married until six months into their relationship.
She’d needed a new job fast, particularly since things ended so badly. After she “accidentally”
dropped a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble on his foot, he threatened to call the cops.
She threatened to call his wife. She had avoided even speaking to her second boss
whenever possible, only to find herself being chased around the examining table mere
months later by another man having a midlife crisis, who promised he could help her
“lighten up.”

Blech.
Now she worked for a woman, which was the selling point that had brought her on board.
That and the off-street parking.

She really did have terrible luck with men. The first man she’d fallen for had broken
her heart without even knowing it, and things had gone downhill from there.

Sighing, Sarah headed into the bathroom that doubled as an employee locker room. She
spun the dial on her locker with one hand while she started stripping off her winter
gear with the other. She grabbed her last clean lab coat, crammed her coat, hat, scarf,
gloves, boots and medical bag into the too-small locker and bodychecked the door shut.
She wouldn’t need any of it until this afternoon’s house calls.

She spent half of each week making house calls—a stroke of genius on her boss’s part.
There were plenty of wealthy pet owners in Chicago’s Gold Coast who were willing to
pay top dollar for the convenience of not having to cart a pet off to the vet’s office
and spend the morning in a waiting room.

Although the pet owners were asked to have little Fluffy or Killer confined to an
easily searchable area like the bathroom, she did spend a fair bit of time on her
hands and knees peering under king-size beds and trying to coax out spooked animals.
Still, it was a growing part of their business. Soon she might not need to put in
any hours at the clinic except to do paperwork or the follow-up on complicated cases.

This afternoon, she even had an appointment in the warehouse district. It would probably
wrap up early, so maybe she would drop by J.D.’s to make sure he was following her
instructions with the kitty. Give him some pointers on what to do when the kittens
started coming. Bring him a bottle of wine to replace the one they’d split the other
night.

Maybe jump him where he stood when he opened the door.

He was the one to push you away,
she reminded herself. He’d backed off halfway through a kiss that had been seriously
blowing her socks off, looking startled, like he hadn’t meant to take things that
far.

Yeah, she was ready to show him just how far they could take things.

Down, girl. It was just a kiss. And he’s married, maybe.

“Who am I seeing first?” she called out as she walked down the hall to the front desk.
The day’s clients were already tangling and yowling in the small lobby.

“I put them in exam room two. They were freaking out the rest of the clients.” Jackie,
their nurse-receptionist, smacked a new patient file into her hand and grimaced.

“Who?” There was little that shook the normally unflappable Jackie after two decades
of animal handling. She’d seen, or stepped in, almost everything. “Is someone foaming
at the mouth?”

“No, thank god,” Jackie said. “Mr. Thompson and his seven-foot boa constrictor. Apparently
the snake doesn’t like cages, so it’s just, you know, crawling all over him. People
were practically scooting out the door to keep their distance. Yuck.”

“No snakes for you, Jackie?” She flipped open the file.

“Nothing that moves on dry land without feet. The snake ate Mr. Thompson’s son’s guinea
pig, Squeak, this morning.” For the first time that morning, Jackie grinned. “He asked
if we could get it back.”

Sarah bit her lips together.
Always avoid making fun of the clients,
she reminded herself,
at least on the premises.
“I assume you told him there would be no Squeak retrieval today.”