Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113270 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 566(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
“Hey.”
Soft, feminine notes of a night I should but can’t remember grip me by the balls and stop me in my tracks. It takes a couple seconds for recognition to kick in, but when it does, the news gets even worse.
It’s not just any woman. It’s Breezy, my neighbor Bennett’s sister, standing on my snowy front porch in heels and tailored pants I’d bet cost more than my entire truck and making it so hard to breathe, I feel sickish. She’s beautiful.
But if I fucked with her while I was too drunk to remember, I’m about to be in a whole world of trouble.
Breezy is a city girl through and through. She lives in New York. She runs prestigious art galleries. She probably spends her days drinking expensive coffee and having dinner dates with men who have seven-figure bank accounts.
And her brother hates me. Oh boy.
It’s not out of the ordinary to see her in Red Bridge on occasion—she makes frequent weekend stops to visit her brother and sister-in-law Norah and her niece Autumn, and she’s close friends with Norah’s sister Josie and her husband Clay, but the way she’s standing on my porch like she just came out of my house is a new one, to say the least.
“Uh…hey,” I eventually manage in reply.
“So…thanks for last night,” she says.
“Uh…you’re welcome.”
My memory might as well be Swiss cheese with all the holes it has, a barely there scrap of last night clinging to the edges. Drinking at The Country Club. Randy dragging me out before I ordered another round. Something with that woman Maybelline Ross needing a ride home. Snow. Maybe headlights.
And then…nothing. A blackout curtain.
My stomach drops. I look at her—polished, confident, heels not even wobbling in the snow—and then at myself, boots, old jeans, flannel, and looking like a dumbass covered in snow and mud from wrestling sheep.
The two of us mixing is a recipe for disaster.
She doesn’t give me any more details on what last night entailed, instead moving down my front porch and crouching gracefully near one of my escape-artist sheep to stroke his head.
“Oh, I remember you, Crosby,” she says through a soft laugh. “You’re a little troublemaker, aren’t you?”
Breezy and Clay had a run-in with Crosby over a year ago, on the day of Clay and Josie’s wedding, on their way into town from the airport. They had to drive the obstinate bastard all the way home in Clay’s back seat because of his Oscar-worthy performance as an injured damsel, but her remembering him by name still comes as a surprise.
Crosby bleats and looks up at Breezy like she’s the fucking sun, clearly in love with her, and she gently pats him between the ears.
With one final pet, she waves to the rest of the herd that’s managed to surround her. “Bye, cuties,” she tells them lovingly, their role switching quickly to beloved pets from what I know them to be—woolly terrorists.
“Bye, Tad.” She leaves me with a wink and a smile, and the pit in my stomach collapses even deeper.
I don’t know what happened last night. Hell, when I woke up this morning, I didn’t even know she was in my house.
Probably because you drank your weight in whiskey—and Randy’s weight too.
She’s on the move, heading across my yard and straight for Bennett’s house, walking through snow and ice and obstacles she wouldn’t have to if I had the wherewithal to do the gentlemanly thing and offer her a ride, but I’m fucking frozen, mind swirling with foggy memories. Drinking. Snow. Breezy Bishop. At my house. All night long.
Surely she slept on the couch. Or in the guest room. Or…
The more I think, the less I know.
I’m not an expert in much these days—and I don’t pretend to be.
But I’ll be damned if two plus two on this one isn’t adding up to a four-by-four to the head when Bennett Bishop finds out I slept with his sister and have zero memory of it.
4
Breezy
It’s been years since I’ve taken a nap—or even slowed down enough to consider it—but at a little after five in the evening, I’m already yawning so much I’m seriously considering it.
Last night wasn’t exactly restful with Tad Hanson, in all his drunk, gentlemanly glory, popping in on me every five minutes for the first hour after we arrived to make sure I had enough blankets and pillows and knew my way to the bathroom. Even after he was done and passed out in his own bed, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling for another full hour, my body heavy with travel, grief, and too many thoughts.
By the time I unlocked the back door of Bennett and Norah’s house this morning with a key I’ve had since before the two of them got together, I’d only slept a whopping two hours, and exhaustion was a second skin. But Norah was already in the kitchen with Autumn, and the sweetest smell in the universe—coffee brewing, toast in the toaster, the faint pureness of baby shampoo and sugar clinging to my niece’s curls—was enough to soften all my rough edges and give me a second wind.