Matched, page 20
Mikey growled.
Will took that as a yes. He took another bite. Swallowed.
Damn good ice cream. “Girl who can make ice cream like this doesn’t come around every day.”
“Shove it.”
“You want, I can put in a good word for you.”
Mikey leveled a flat stare at Will. The kind that usually meant nothing good was about to come out of his mouth. Might could’ve meant one of them would end the day sporting a black eye too.
Will should’ve asked Lindsey if she had any valuables in here she didn’t want getting broke.
“You playing matchmaker like your girl now?” Mikey said.
“She’s staying out of this one. Told me she liked Dahlia too much to make the girl suffer.”
Mikey shoved to his feet and paced in front of the fireplace. “She said something about us?”
“You believe it if I tell you?”
“No.”
Will shrugged again.
Mikey scraped a hand over his bald head and made a quick turn. “You know what? Who needs this shit? Lots of girls out there. I’ll just—I’ll just go find another one.”
First time Will had ever heard Mikey hurting over a girl.
He shivered one of those shivers he got when Sacha took it in her mind to tell him something.
Lindsey saw more than she believed.
“Could go get her back, man,” Will said to Mikey.
“No point.” Mikey pushed a fist into his other hand. “Even if I was a one-woman kind of guy, she doesn’t want me. And I—I don’t deserve her.”
Where was Mari Belle when a guy needed a good sigh? “Then get over it. We gonna write songs today, or you gonna be a girl?”
Mikey eyed the guitar he’d brought over. Then Will’s ice cream. “Suppose we’re writing.”
And for a few hours, they were almost who they used to be. No girls, no pressure, no family problems. Just two buddies working on making something big while a dog snoozed at their feet.
Same as they’d done almost half their lives.
LATE MONDAY afternoon, Lindsey was debating how many ibuprofen it would take to get rid of her headache when her assistant buzzed in. “You have a visitor, Miss Castellano.”
She grimaced. She’d successfully avoided Will since Saturday night, but there had been something in his expression that had told her their conversation about who she was wasn’t over. And that it wouldn’t be over until he said it was over, not even if she managed to avoid him the entirety of the next two weeks.
Who she was wasn’t his business.
But she had to wonder if she could interpret her match-o-meter readings about him better if she did know who she was. No one else made her doubt her career and her choices. Not the way Will did.
The people in Bliss thought she’d turned her back on their core beliefs. But Will didn’t care about Bliss. He simply believed in her gift. He accepted it. He didn’t think it made her weird, and he didn’t question it. He quite possibly understood it and accepted it better than she did.
The problem was, she didn’t want the gift. And she didn’t know how to explain it to him.
“Send him in,” she said to her assistant.
The door opened, except it wasn’t Will who strolled through her door.
Lindsey straightened her lips and her backbone.
Four. She should’ve popped four ibuprofen, at least an hour ago.
She nodded once. “Mikey.”
He was in his usual Billy Brenton ball cap, a red pullover, tight jeans, cowboy boots, and his growly face was firmly in place. He shut her door with an ominous click.
But the bloodshot eyes and sadness radiating from him suggested he wasn’t here to reinforce Mari Belle’s message from Saturday.
Lindsey leaned back and gestured to the two chairs across from her desk. “Make yourself comfortable. Coffee? Water?”
“Are Dahlia and me a good match?”
He had a droop in his posture, stubble on his cheeks and the desperate look of a heartbroken man.
“Are we a good match?” he repeated into the silence.
She gave herself a mental shake. “Do you think you’re a good match?”
“See, I know the answer to that question, and it doesn’t answer the one I asked you.”
Were he anyone other than Will’s best friend, she would’ve suggested he take his hostility and shove it somewhere the sun didn’t shine, then had the firm’s security help him with that. “We’ve met once? Twice?”
He paced behind the two brown leather chairs opposite Lindsey’s desk, a flurry of color against the dark paneled walls. “Don’t go talking in circles around me,” he growled. “I got other bones to pick with you too.”
“In case you missed the sign on the door, I specialize in bad matches. Specifically, in terminating marriages at the request of the people who make their decisions about the validity of their relationships for themselves.”
He stopped and turned to fully face her, pulling himself to his full height. “Are we a bad match?”
Every instinct Lindsey possessed instructed her to evade the question. This was Will’s best friend. If she gave him bad love advice, if she gave him false hope, or if he decided she was lying because he wasn’t inclined to believe her, she’d be screwing things up for one of the few people in Will’s life who had always loved him simply because he was Will.
No pressure. No pressure at all.
But was Will right?
Did she truly own who she was? Or had she been hiding from herself, messing with her own cosmic balance by ignoring what made her unique?
“I don’t know Dahlia well,” Lindsey said, “but she strikes me as the sweet, kindhearted type of woman it would be all too easy to walk all over.”
Mikey paced more, adding a knuckle crack to it. “Are we a bad match?” he repeated.
“And I don’t know you well,” Lindsey said, “but I have been subjected to dozens of BillyVision episodes, and you don’t strike me as the type to settle down, never mind with a small-town, plain girl like Dahlia.”
He rounded on her. “Don’t you ever call her plain.”
Lindsey lifted a practiced brow. “Is she your usual type?”
“My usual type sucks.” One corner of his mouth started to hitch, but a scowl took over. “Jesus. I can’t even make a blow job joke.” He pointed at Lindsey. “Last time. Are we a bad match?”
“I don’t know what she’s putting in her ice cream, but it appears to be working.”
Mikey growled.
Lindsey swallowed a smile. Wasn’t so hard with the way her heart was suddenly tripping as though she’d had too much coffee. “I barely saw you together,” she said, fully aware that she was tiptoeing a line that a divorce lawyer probably shouldn’t toe, “but I did not notice any overt signs that you were a bad match. For whatever that’s worth.” She didn’t particularly want to tell him, but she did want to know how it felt to say the words aloud. And it felt easy. Not right, not wrong. Not simple, not complicated. Just easy.
“So we’re not a bad match,” Mikey asked.
“How much do you like her?”
He dropped into a chair and thrust his head into his hands, then mumbled something.
“I’m sorry?”
Mikey eyed her from beneath his ball cap, gray eyes swimming with sadness. The guy looked more pathetic than Wrigley. “She dumped me.”
“You want her back.”
There went the suspicious eye again.
“Why are you here, Mikey?”
He slouched. “To tell you to leave Will the hell alone.” And even with the pain and the heartbreak and the desperation still haunting his expression, there was a steely rigidness behind his words.
There went her shivers again. First Mari Belle, now Mikey.
She’d hurt Will fifteen years ago. She knew that.
But such strong warnings from his sister and best friend all these years later made her wonder what she didn’t know.
Lindsey grabbed one of her business cards and scribbled Bliss Bridal’s number on the back. “The Battle of the Boyfriends is coming up. I believe you’re acquainted with Pepper Blue. She’s on the planning committee. She’ll get you registered. And then you go grovel. Go grovel and beg and promise Dahlia everything you can give her, but don’t you dare lie to her. I don’t do good matches—that part’s up to you. If you want her, go get her. If you don’t, leave her alone. But don’t blame me for your choices.”
He took the card. “If you hurt Will—”
“There is nothing you can threaten me with that could possibly be any worse than what I’ve already threatened myself with,” she said.
Not because she wanted to admit it, but because Mikey mattered to Will.
“I hate it here.” Mikey fanned the card against his fingers. “Cold. No sweet tea or fried okra. You’re here. But I got a notion I might be staying.”
“How lovely for all of us.”
Mikey stood. “I wasn’t here,” he said.
“I can agree to that on one condition.”
He crossed his arms.
“When you marry her, don’t even think of asking me to give a toast.”
“Ain’t gonna be a problem.” He stepped toward the door. “And don’t hurt Will.”
“He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
Mikey’s growly face popped out again.
“But I’m glad he has friends like you watching out for him,” Lindsey said with a sweet smile.
“I really don’t like you,” Mikey grumbled.
“And I’m okay with that.”
She was such a liar.
She didn’t mind being disliked. But she did mind being hated by Will’s closest friends and family for reasons she didn’t fully comprehend.
Mikey left her office, and she turned to log off her computer. Five minutes later, she was on her way home.
Chapter Sixteen
AS SOON AS Lindsey walked into the house, she heard Will. He was talking to someone, but when no one answered, she realized he was on the phone. She pulled her shoes off, then made her way through the kitchen.
“Been getting a lot of work done,” he was saying. “Yeah. Good songs. Wrote one for you too, Aunt Jessie. I call it ‘Shut That Door and Take Off Them Muddy Shoes Before You Ask Me for Sweet Tea.’”
Even as her heart still tripped after Mikey’s visit, Lindsey smiled. That was Will. Her Will, the Will she remembered.
He was right. He knew who he was.
“Wanted to write one for Sacha too, but she’s not answering today,” he said. “You know anything about that? Where she might be?”
Lindsey started toward his voice.
“Now, hold on,” he said. “You’re changing the subject on me, and Mari Belle’s overreacting. All y’all keep acting like I don’t have the sense God gave a rock, but I—”
Lindsey paused in the doorway to the sunroom. Will stood at the window, facing away from her, phone to his ear, ball cap backward and curls peeking out. He was in a green plaid overshirt and the jeans Lindsey loved—the things that denim did to his rear did things to the smileys on her panties. But even with the broad shoulders and ass to admire, her gaze lingered on his white socks.
She wasn’t a sock person. Honestly, who was? But she was a home person. And Will, in socks in her home, was home. Snow fluttered outside, barely visible in the rapidly darkening evening. And a blizzard warred with a beach sunrise on her match-o-meter.
She breathed slowly, deeply, savoring the subtle scent of him that had lingered in her house since he arrived.
Home.
She’d called this structure home since she bought it. But it had never been this warm kind of home before.
“Not fair to judge her on who we were fifteen years ago,” he said.
Lindsey froze.
“Sacha ain’t wrong on this, Aunt Jessie. I need to be here. And you need to listen to her. You need to give Lindsey a chance. People change. For the better as often as for the worse. You the same person you were before you met Donnie?” Will’s voice was getting thicker, his drawl stronger. “Lot of life lessons happen in a decade. And I ain’t Momma. Don’t you start too. Not when you’re throwing out your lifelong best friend for a guy you haven’t known more than two years.”
A rough tongue licked Lindsey’s hand. She blinked against an unwelcome sting, and went to her knees to scratch Wrigley’s fur. “Who’s a good boy?” she murmured.
She saw Will turn in her peripheral vision. Wrigley flopped to the ground and showed Lindsey his belly, so she gave him a good, double-handed belly rub.
Thirteen more days, and she’d have to say good-bye to Wrigley too.
“Looks like my dinner just got here,” Will said into the phone. “Gotta go. You go talk to Sacha and make up, then tell her I said hi and call if y’all need bail money again. I mean it, Aunt Jessie. Get on back to causing trouble. Love you.”
Will pocketed his phone and turned all the way to face Lindsey. “Hey.”
Wrigley’s tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. Lindsey kept rubbing until she found the spot that made his leg twitch. “Bail money?” she said as evenly as she could manage while Wrigley’s leg fired away.
“Sacha does moon worship sessions in ol’ Farmer Beauregard’s cotton fields every full moon, and she and Aunt Jessie are always out looking for the legendary Pickleberry Springs treasure where they ain’t always welcome. Don’t mean any harm, but some of the sheriff’s deputies got sticks up their butts.”
The man had an interesting family, she’d give him that. But it didn’t change the fact that they didn’t like Lindsey. “So dinner’s on you tonight?”
He stepped toward her, hands in pockets, taking his sweet Southern time. “Your turn to cook. Got everything you need in there. Fresh okra for frying, turnips for soup, pig snout for kabobs…”
“Great. I’ll call Mari Belle for the recipe. She might could tell me how to make sweet tea too.”
“Getting the hang of it, lawyer lady. I’m impressed.” He held out a hand, but she didn’t know if it was an offer of a truce, that they forget what she’d heard and how many members of his family hated her, or if it was a simple gentlemanly offer to help her to her feet.
Either way, she took his hand.
Though everyone who mattered to him told him to walk away, though Lindsey herself told him to walk away, he was still here.
And she was still glad.
He didn’t stop with pulling her to her feet though. He also pulled her against his warm, solid body. He pressed his cheek to hers, threaded his fingers through her hair, cradled her head. “Missed you.”
I missed you too. “Songs dry up?”
“No. I missed you.”
She leaned into him, forcing air into her lungs, then out again. His breath on her neck should’ve inspired those good tingles and his fingers in her hair should’ve made the smileys on her panties sit up and beg for attention too.
Instead, her skin itched and her chest couldn’t expand big enough. She didn’t need to feel trapped with Will. He wouldn’t hurt her. He didn’t mean to crowd her.
Still, she yanked away. “Back in a minute.” And she darted out the back door.
The winter air enveloped her, the darkening sky hazy with snowflakes that spread into infinity. Her nostrils stuck together, and the rush of cold air was like ice in her throat. But her lungs opened, and the tension in her shoulders faded to a shudder.
“Lindsey?”
Will was tucked into the doorway, a shadow against the bright lights from inside the house.
“Tell me about your parents,” she said.
He scuffed a socked foot against the doorframe. She wanted him to hug her again, but she also wanted him to stay where he was. She wanted him to answer, and she wanted him to tell her it was none of her business.
She wanted him to enforce her three-week rule, with all the requisite precautions of not getting attached, because she was failing at staying within her own boundaries.
“Don’t remember my daddy,” Will said. “Everybody says my momma was crazy in love with him, but he wasn’t dependable. In and out of her life, couldn’t keep a job, spent some time in prison. Mari Belle remembers him coming by from time to time. He’d say the right things, my momma would take him in, and then he’d be gone. One day, nearabouts Christmas, she saw him kissing another woman. Went crazy mad, started drinking, and didn’t stop till she was dead.”
“Were you living with your aunt then?”
“She took us in after.”
Lindsey rubbed her hands over her arms, loneliness and pain and fear crashing through her on behalf of the little boy he’d been, of the loss he’d suffered. “That’s awful.”
“Don’t remember much of it. Mari Belle does, but she doesn’t talk about it.” He stepped outside, stocking feet and all. “We got lucky. Probably better off with Aunt Jessie and Sacha anyway.”
He stopped an arm’s length away from her.
“After spring break”—she sucked in another icy breath, blinked back the sting behind her eyes—“what happened?”
She didn’t want to know. The don’t-fall-harder rule demanded that she let it go. But she had to know.
Because he mattered. He mattered, and she’d hurt him, and she didn’t want to hurt him again.
“Truth?” he said.
She didn’t answer. And her baby-eater glare at the implication she didn’t want to know the truth was half-strength.
He shifted toward her, but then rocked on his heels and blew into his fist. They could’ve had this conversation inside, where it was warm. They should’ve. But she had already waited too long to ask him.
“Wasn’t pretty,” he said.
“How not pretty?”
“I loved you.” His voice came soft, lyrical, sad. Neither of them had ventured into L-word territory, and hearing it from his lips put a pang in Lindsey’s chest. “I loved the way you smiled at me, the way you threw yourself into life, the way you knew what you wanted. The way you kept going and trying and smiling even when your friends were snubbing you. I didn’t have much direction then, but you made me want it. Made me want to be somebody, so the next time we met, you couldn’t tell me I was just some bubba.”
