Only in Vegas…

It has to be Vegas’s glitzy, seductive atmosphere that made Sarah Tyler trade her straitlaced persona for that of a cardsharp in a red halter dress and heels. But when the Chicago vet wakes up next to her longtime crush—with a ring on her finger—she knows she’s in serious trouble.

Fifteen years ago, Sarah was madly in love with JD Damico, her brother’s best friend. She didn’t expect to ever see him again…until the bad-boy-turned-Hollywood-photographer persuaded her to accompany him to the city of sin for a whirlwind weekend. Now Sarah thinks they’re lawful husband and wife. Only, JD isn’t a stick-around kind of guy. Worse, he no longer believes in happy endings. Or does he?

Book 3 of The Tylers

Calling His Bluff

Amy Jo Cousins

Mills and Boon E Contemporary Romance

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Dedication

For my sister, without whom my wardrobe would be all black, my musical education would have stopped in the ’90s and my adventures would be far less awesome. I know you scratched “I haet Amy” inside the closet door in our room twenty-five years ago, but I loved you even when you couldn’t spell. You’re my own personal rock star, Kelly. Can’t imagine life being nearly this much fun without you.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter One

After the second drug deal went down on the corner, with the dealer shooting hard looks her way in between casual reaches into the open window of cars that were too nice for this shitty neighborhood, Sarah’s freak-out reached epic proportions.

And J.D. still wasn’t answering the door.

She gave it fifteen seconds before she became a statistic on a news graphic about how even the cold winter weather didn’t have a suppressant effect on the violence in Chicago’s less-gentrified neighborhoods.

“Dead meat. That’s what he is.” Sarah clenched her jaw tight to stop herself from grinding her molars together. She fisted her hands at her sides and bounced a little on the balls of her feet, toes sore already in spiky high heels. She glanced back at the corner. The dealer slouched toward her, skullcap pulled low over his eyebrows. “As soon as he answers the door, I’m going to kill him.”

She stabbed a finger at the cracked plastic button of the doorbell buzzer and then pounded again on the solid steel door. Her left hand drifted down toward the nylon medical bag resting at her hip, her constant companion. Maybe she should grab a scalpel, just in case. She could find it in an instant in the precise order of her bag, even one-handed and in the dark.

And why wasn’t he answering the damn door?

“Open up before I get mugged!” she shouted at the door.

And this was the last time she’d listen to Christopher Robin Tyler. She imagined with pleasure the feel of her brother’s thick neck throttled between her hands.

If she ended up as body parts found in a Dumpster, she was going to haunt her brother forever and do nothing but call him by the two names Tyler had stopped answering to years ago.

“You’re corpse number two, Christopher Robin. I swear it.” She shook her head as she heard her brother’s words echoing in her ears. This time, she could hear the slickness of a con in his voice in the message he’d left guilting her into this crazy trip. “Remember J.D.? Didn’t you always like him? He’s back in town and his cat is dying or something. You gotta go see him right away. Like now.” Yeah, right.

Remember J.D.? Sometimes it felt like she’d never gotten over the man, much less forgotten him, which was a sorry way to feel about a guy she’d never even kissed. Except for the one time…

And as soon as she was done murdering J.D., she was heading straight back to her brother’s pub to hunt her sibling down and kill him. Let Grace try to protect him. Her sister-in-law wasn’t standing after dark in the middle of this abandoned warehouse district west of the Loop in Chicago, dressed in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit that might as well have had Mug Me written across it in fluorescent letters. She loved Grace, but fair was fair. Her brother was a dead man.

He might at least have mentioned that her old crush was staying in a wasteland. She’d imagined J.D. inhabiting an upscale, fifty-story Lincoln Park condo building. In that scenario, the “I just ducked over from a cocktail party at that chic little place around the corner” excuse could have justified the Armani. God knows she wasn’t going to admit that she’d gotten desperate enough last week to click the “Will Attend” RSVP link in one of the urban professional speed-dating emails that kept arriving in her inbox with intimidating regularity. She’d obviously ended up on a mailing list for hopeless losers who were sucking black holes of relationship doom, attracting men who hid their wedding rings. Telling her brother she couldn’t help his best friend because she was on her way to be so fucking charming for sixty seconds at a time that the perfect man would fall in love with her across a tiny bistro table was a fast lane to eternal sibling torture. She’d bypassed the Loop and headed for the warehouse district with a sigh.

If she’d also gotten a little thrill out of the idea of J.D. seeing her at her polished best, Tyler didn’t need to know that, either.

Now she just looked like an idiot. Like an overdressed veterinarian suffering a breakdown from the idea of an old, unrequited flame wanting to see her.

An uneven thumping noise, muffled but audible, came through the door.

“At last,” she muttered, and then banged on the door again for good measure. “Get a move on, poky!” She smoothed nervous hands over her long, straight dark hair and felt her stomach twist again.

Fifteen years. That’s how long she’d gone without seeing the man she’d adored with the white-hot passion only a teenager can sustain. Fifteen years of dating the wrong men and wishing secretly, in the dark corners of her heart, that J.D. Damico would come back home and sweep her off her feet.

Hence the satisfaction of being in Armani.

The threat of imminent death was putting a crimp in her enthusiasm, however.

“What’s the holdup in there?” she called out.

An enormous clatter and crash of metal followed hard upon her words, sounding like a thousand steel toothpicks being dropped on the floor of the devil’s workshop. When the curses that followed threatened to rattle the door on its hinges, she was glad she couldn’t quite make out the words.

“Whoops.”

She smiled brightly and nodded as another SUV drifted over to the curb, pulling her stalker’s attention away from her. A reprieve from dismemberment. Lovely.

“I am going—” thump “—as fast—” thump, thump “—as I can.” The words rumbled through the door, halfway between a growl and a shout. On the last word, the door was yanked inward to fly on an arc that only stopped when it crashed into a brick wall. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

Her apology died on her lips as she opened her mouth. The snotty comment had her snapping her jaws shut with an audible click. She took a deep breath and tried to remember that she’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. Waiting, too, for J.D. to see her at last as someone other than the gawky kid who tagged along after her brother all the time. In her fantasies, J.D. had been waiting for this moment, too.

Backlit as he was by a flickering yellow-gold glow, she couldn’t see J.D. clearly, but she could tell that he was on crutches and that a fiberglass cast covered one leg from the base of his toes to halfway up his thigh. He seemed to be wearing black sweatpants, the ragged edge of one chopped-off leg brushing against the top of the cast. A gray Chicago Cubs T-shirt covered heavily muscled shoulders and bunched up under his armpits where it caught on the cushioned pads of the crutches.

So much for him wanting to impress me. At least I know why he’s being obnoxious—he’s clumsy and in pain, not to mention freezing to death. Who wears a T-shirt in March in Chicago?

She’d have known him in an instant, even if he was dressed like someone she could’ve bumped into in her brother’s pub. She couldn’t stop smiling. She hoped she wasn’t going to throw up.

He stood in the doorway, staring at her blankly, eyes flickering from her face to her feet to her medical bag and back again.

She resisted the urge to run a hand over her hair or check to see if her fly was open. She’d been heading to a speed-dating event, for Christ’s sake. This was damn near as good as it got for her, appearance-wise. Maybe J.D. was stunned into silence by how much she’d changed.

She could break out a Sharpie and scribble e.e. cummings poetry and Edna St. Vincent Millay quotes on her pants, if that would help him remember who she was. Although it would be a crime to do that to this cashmere-wool blend.

As the moment stretched out, J.D. still staring at her wordlessly, teenage memories of overwhelming awkwardness thickening her tongue and tripping her feet came flooding back in a wave of heat and self-consciousness that she felt as a flush she knew was visible on her face. Fuck. This was exactly how it had happened in high school, too. One minute she was cool and easy with J.D., always happy when he would seek her out in a quiet moment and sit with her. The next minute she was excruciatingly aware of the thick curve of muscle wrapping his shoulder, and unable to speak in his presence.

If he didn’t say something, soon, it was possible she would dissolve into an actual puddle of goo and embarrassment on the sidewalk and never speak to him again.

His grin rescued her.

The white flash of teeth in that cocky smile beneath high, tanned cheekbones and dark shining eyes sparked memories of a skinny teenager who’d claimed there was Cherokee mixed with the Italian blood in his family.

“Hot damn,” he said, the slow grin spreading over his face. He grappled with his crutches, swinging over to rock her back in a fierce hug. “Sarah Tyler!” He pounded her back with one hand. She hung on and tried to keep him upright.

After a moment, he pushed her back and held her at arm’s length. “Holy shit, girl. You’re all growed up, aren’t you?”

She rolled her eyes. Yup, nothing like feeling twelve again. So much for J.D. seeing her as a competent and hopefully foxy adult woman.

“Get your ass in here, girl, and tell me why I haven’t seen you around Tyler’s place since I got back.”

So. The big reunion moment was over, she guessed. That was it? Tendrils of irritation crept into her attitude.

J.D. left her standing in the doorway and thumped off across the cavern of a room to the back corner. His dark hair was tied back in a stubby ponytail at the back of his neck. Oh, no. She shot off a quick prayer that he hadn’t turned into an artistic type. Sarah had always thought of J.D. as the rough-edged boy of her youth, a bruiser more than a finicky, flighty artiste, even as she’d read about his growing celebrity as a photographer. After spending a bit too much time at her brother’s North Side Chicago pub, she’d gotten over her romantic notions about dating artists or musicians easily enough. She’d learned to spot the type that would lecture her for three hours about Scorsese or the history of jazz. But based on the crowds of young women that inevitably gathered around the guys who painted or played or took pictures, she was atypical.

Artists, bah. Nothing but trouble, and you always had to foot the bill for their foolishness, too. Of course, she hadn’t fared any better with her most recent disastrous relationship choices, even if she’d very consciously tried to choose an ordinary, kind of boring, stable guy. One who never would’ve been caught dead in the chaos inexorably taking over this space. “Shut the door, will ya?” The words were more command than request.

“Yes, sir.” She flipped what she considered a properly respectful one-fingered salute at his retreating back.

She tried to slam the door; a nice loud bang would express her frustration at the anticlimactic nature of this fucking long-awaited reunion, thank you, but was surprised to find that she needed to throw her whole body weight into it to swing the door shut. It finally closed with an annoyingly soft click.

Heat blasted her like she’d stepped into a sauna. Sweat sprang out on the back of her neck and along her hairline almost instantly. She was not sweating through her Armani. No way.

She looked for somewhere to hang her coat. Someone had clearly begun converting a warehouse here. She saw more unidentifiable mechanical equipment lying around than she did furniture. But having started this project, it looked like the money had run out before getting a tenth of the way through. The pile of aluminum tubes against one wall explained the clattering crash from before, but it didn’t look promising as a coat rack. She draped her coat over her arm instead and headed into the cavern of a room, sweating in her pewter-gray suit.

She had always thought J.D. had done well with his photography. That he had more sense than the flighty artists she knew. Apparently not. Or maybe it was just his congenital inability to stop in one place for longer than six months. She could see it now. He’d have decided that moving back to his hometown sounded great, but now that he was here, the urge to hit the road again, just like he’d done fifteen years ago, would leave this long-term project abandoned for someone else to clean up.

The left half of the open room was obviously where civilization had attempted to regain a toehold. A kitchen area that looked as if it had been hammered out of galvanized steel stretched along one wall and a fireplace hearth big enough to roast an ox claimed the back, complete with a roaring fire. An enormous wood-plank table with benches and an oversized leather couch, all of the furniture equally worn and battle-scarred, anchored the room, running parallel to the walls. The rest of the walls were exposed brick and steel beams that radiated industrial cool. Also, actual coldness, she bet. She couldn’t even fathom what it cost him to keep a space this big warmer than an equatorial jungle in Chicago’s deep freeze.

Since teetering towers of boxes covered most of the table and bench setup, she dropped her stuff on the wide arm of the couch and flapped a hand at her face as she watched her long-lost love hunt through the kitchen cabinets for god knows what.

In the brighter light provided by metal-shaded lamps suspended from the ceiling on thick chains, not to mention the fierce glow of the fireplace, she could see him better. His thick, straight black hair looked almost reddish in the firelight, but she was sure that it would show blue-black in daylight.

He squatted down to peer into a cabinet under the sink, crutches leaning against the counter, his injured leg sticking out to one side as he bounced comfortably on the other heel. With his hands at the ready in front of him, J.D. looked like a baseball catcher, preparing to glove a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.

Two minutes in his company and she was already remembering that half the time when she was around J.D. she’d have been tempted to wing a baseball at his fat head if one were to hand.

“So, where’ve you been hiding out these days? Still spending all your free time at the library? Sorry about the heat, by the way. The cat’s under the couch, if you wanna get on your hands and knees and take a look.”

Her head was spinning. No way was she going to mention that she actually did still volunteer for a shift or two a week, shelving books at her local branch, although she couldn’t be sure what would come out of her mouth if she opened it, since her brain was still caught on freeze-frame with images inspired by the “get on your hands and knees” thing.

Her dirty mind was as active as ever around J.D. Fifteen years hadn’t changed that at all. Good to know.

“Just working a lot.” And licking her wounds. She’d been ducking her family a little bit lately. Okay, a lot. But there were only so many times you could go back to that well and admit that you’d just figured out you’d been suckered by yet another guy who was some kind of compulsive liar who was going to end up on one of those daytime talk shows, throwing a folding chair at a psychotic ex.

“Well, thanks for the house call. No rush, but if you take it with you when you go, that’d be great.” Something rattled as he ducked his head into the cabinet. “Bet you still spend all your time rescuing scabby alley cats, don’t you? Nothing ever changes around here.”

He hadn’t even looked over his shoulder as he spoke to her.

She jerked back as if she’d been smacked. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Did he think she was some kind of loser who hadn’t changed since high school?

So much for fifteen years of fantasizing. “If you think I cancelled my plans and came all the way out here to relieve you of your sick cat…”

He stood, a pair of wine glasses precariously balanced in one hand.

“Got a hot date?” His voice rang with skepticism.

She clenched her teeth together. The last thing she wanted him to know was that she’d been on her way to an evening of relentlessly awkward conversations that would undoubtedly have left her feeling like a used-car salesman.

Deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Don’t strangle the injured man.

“You know, you can always bring the cat by the clinic in the morning, Damico,” she said. “I don’t normally run a pickup and delivery service.” This wasn’t the kind of desperate to see her she’d hoped for.

“Hey, I’ll pay you to get that cat out of here,” he said, closing the cabinet. “No kidding.”

Pay her?

Pay her?

First embarrassed, now insulted. She cocked her hip and planted a hand on it.

“Don’t be an asshole. You’re practically family. I’m not going to charge you. Did hanging out with celebrities and bazillionaires in Hollywood rot your brain?”

“Easy, girl.”

“Don’t ‘easy’ me, Joey Damico. I expected more manners from the guy who rescued my bikini top when it came off after I did a high dive into the deep end of the pool.”

Great. Now she was thinking about him seeing her topless. She wondered if her face had actually turned purple yet. All of her reactions felt slightly off, as if she were both over- and underreacting at the same time. She wondered if she looked as strange as she felt, like her skin was made of broken mirror shards, reflecting a hundred different emotions at once.

J.D. wobbled on his crutches and for a second she thought he was going to topple. She sprinted to his side and braced him with a hand on his elbow.

“Whoa, watch the wine glasses,” J.D. said. “I was lucky to find these two.” Stepping back, she rescued the crossed stems of the glasses from his one-handed grip and caught the wine bottle that he’d clamped to his side with one elbow. “Ah, c’mon, Sarah. Share a glass with me.” She ducked her head as he reached up to tousle her hair in that infuriating, older-brother way he’d always had. In an instant, the vibe between them mellowed. Her shoulders relaxed and some of the stiffness left her spine. “And you know I could never stand that name. Just J.D., okay? Whenever someone calls me Joey, all I can hear is my mom shrieking my name out for the whole block to hear.”

She wrinkled her nose. Growing up, every neighborhood had them: the parents who embarrassed their kids because they were crazy or drunk or oblivious to social norms like putting on clothes before leaving the house. J.D.’s parents had managed to be all that and worse.

“Fine. One glass. How are your folks?” She didn’t really want to know. She wanted to know if he was dating anyone. Her brother had only given her the sketchiest of details about J.D.’s recent divorce.

“Dad’s horrifying the neighbors down in Florida, last I heard, with Mom following behind him to apologize. Some things really don’t change.” He grinned with his mouth shut, a twisted line that sank into bitterness. Bracing his hands on the crutch’s crossbars, he swung over to the couch and indicated with a toss of his chin as he passed it that she should drop the bottle and glasses on the end table. Then he changed the subject, lightening the mood once more.

“I saw your mom the other day at Tyler’s pub, looking fantastic as always.” J.D. had always worshipped the Tyler matriarch with the pure love of a boy whose own mother was a walking disaster. “She recognized me instantly, of course. But she could have warned me about you. I hardly recognized you when I opened the door. You grew up just fine, Sarah.” He winked at her. “Didn’t you have a crush on me at one point?”

She stuck out her tongue at him, pleased that she could take his teasing with barely a flutter of uneasy excitement, and went to search the kitchen for a corkscrew.

“Yeah, well, as a girl I was easily impressed. Remind me to beat up my brother for not keeping his mouth shut about it. And of course Mom recognized you—you were standing next to my brother. The terrible twosome, reunited. You’ll have to come to her birthday party next month.” She ducked her head, as if J.D. might be able to see on her face the dozen voice mails about party planning she’d ignored from her family. Although, he was probably the one person who’d understand wanting to avoid family for a while. “Ah ha,” she said after another moment of searching the cluttered drawer. She lifted the corkscrew in the air, and then strolled back to the couch, where J.D. had eased himself down onto the cushions.

No longer able to restrain her burning curiosity, she heard herself asking, “You got a new celebrity girlfriend we should put on the RSVP list?” Yeah, that was subtle. And sheesh, it was hot in here. Seriously. A drop of sweat trickled down her spine. No sweating in Armani, she reminded herself. Dropping the corkscrew in his lap, she headed off into the dimmer corner of the apartment. “Is there a bathroom back here somewhere? And maybe some beachwear for this sauna you’ve got going on?” she said. “I’m inappropriately dressed.”

He groaned and tilted his head back to rest on the high cushions of the couch. The light flickered around the edges of his profile, outlining the bump on his nose. It had been broken by a wild curveball thrown by her brother a dozen summers ago. “In the corner. Look in the closet for a T-shirt and shorts if you want. I keep workout clothes down here. Bedroom’s upstairs. And I never should have sent Tyler the picture from that magazine,” he called after her. “I go to one Hollywood premiere with the supporting actress and your brother tells everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius.”

She found the bathroom back by what looked like a weight room, barbells and weight plates stacked along the walls. She pushed the door halfway shut behind her and started to shuck off her clothes while she shouted back to him. “You could have knocked him over with a feather when the next picture he saw was your wedding picture. Same blonde, different slinky ten-thousand-dollar dress.” Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she hoped she could blame the flush in her cheeks on the heat of the fire.

“Get a grip, girl. You’re just two old friends sitting in front of a fire while drinking some wine.” She brushed a strand of long brown hair behind one ear and smiled at herself in the mirror. “Yeah, he’s an old friend who just happens to be a phenomenally hot man too injured to escape.”

Oh, for crying out loud. Now she was flirting with herself in the bathroom mirror. She shut her eyes, threw every fantasy of seeing Joseph David Damico naked out of her brain, opened her eyes and turned to the open-faced linen closet. The uninstalled door was propped against the wall next to it. Now that she knew he hadn’t changed as much as she’d feared, she saw this place a bit differently, too. It had gone from a barely habitable, starving-artist space to a cool, incomplete renovation. Reaching inside the open closet, she grabbed the first things she found and pulled them on.

“Where is the ex-Mrs. Joey, sorry, J.D. Damico, by the way?” she asked, determined to nail down details about the dreaded ex-wife. “All the lunchtime construction boys at the pub were hoping for her autograph.”

“Lost her in the Amazon,” was his reply, but she decided to wait until she returned to the living area for a translation. This place was like a cavern.

Leaving her own clothes neatly folded on the counter, she flipped off the light and padded back to the couch in her bare feet. She twisted one hand in the loose waistband of the silky running shorts and used the other to yank the wide neck of one of J.D.’s old baseball T-shirts back up her shoulder.

He was still sitting on the couch, two glasses of deep red wine on the table at his knees, watching her walk toward him. Her own gaze bounced around the room so she wouldn’t have to look directly at him. Even though only her legs and arms were bare, she felt like she was naked and under a spotlight. She was extraordinarily self-conscious about wearing his clothes, the scent of his laundry detergent rising all around her, the slippery nylon sliding between her bare thighs.

“That’s a nice look for you, Sarah Bearah.”

The childhood nickname had an unfortunate effect on her maturity level. She stuck out her tongue at him.

That’s twice now. What are you, twelve?

When she reached the couch, he patted the cushion next to him.

She didn’t even need her mind to protest, “Bad idea!” She was already sinking to the floor next to the couch. She patted the cushion herself. “Throw your gimpy leg on up there. You know you want to.” With a groan, he stretched out, leaving her face a less-than-comfortable twelve inches from his lap. She scooted a little closer to the head of the couch, and he pulled a pillow from beneath his head and tossed it to her.

“You’re so right. Sit on this.”

“Thanks.” She scooched the pillow under her butt and propped her arm on the couch. Manageable. Closer to his face, which was distracting, but much less so than his crotch, which would have made coherent, non-blushing, non-stammering conversation absolutely impossible. “Your ex-wife’s lost where?”

He grimaced as he handed one of the glasses of wine to her.

“She’s not lost. In fact, I guess you’d say she found herself.” He took a swallow of his wine and stared at the glass. “What I said was that I lost her in the Amazon. That’s where we broke up. She was filming, of course, and I was working on the scrapbook for the movie.”

Sarah snorted into her own glass at his use of the casual term. J.D.’s “scrapbooks” as he called them had started out as a private project and become all the rage, first with the filmmakers in Hollywood and then with the general public. The first scrapbook had been a gift for his friend, Ben, the director of a small but beautiful documentary about a Hollywood legend’s relationship with his daughter, who directed him in her first independent film. The documentary had explored the intense relationship between father and daughter, actor and director, during the shooting of the film. J.D.’s photos had captured slivers of private time away from the cameras, intimate moments with the cast and crew that made you feel like you’d been allowed to peek through a window on the set.

“I love that you call them scrapbooks,” she admitted and looked up at him. He had his head propped on one hand and was staring at her with unwavering dark eyes. “That makes it sound a little less like celebrity gawking when I buy one.”

His grin and chuckle had her stomach doing tiny flip-flops. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire, though she decided she’d blame that one on the heat of the room.

“It was pure hero worship for me when I did that first one. I don’t think I’d ever admitted to anyone, myself included, that I wanted to be a photographer until I started working on that documentary, even though I made my parents pay for all those classes when I was a kid. But I’d been watching him in the movies my whole life.” He rolled his shoulders back and looked up at the ceiling. “He was always the good guy, you know? Even when he was playing an outlaw.” She saw his cheeks lift in a faint smile at the old memories. “I asked his permission the first time I took his picture. He laughed at that. The man has twenty cameras on him when he takes the trash out.”

“That was the picture on the cover, right? It’s a beautiful shot.” And it was. He’d captured the older actor leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree. You could tell from the tension in his face and the angle of his hips that he was in some physical pain. But his head was turned slightly away from the camera, as if someone had just called his name, and his shoulders were thrust back as if he was ready to step forward and shoulder the mantle of his role once more. “It shows that he’s still the good guy.”

“Yeah, he is. He’s the whole reason I have a career now. Him and Ben.” J.D.’s attention shifted back to her. He wrapped his fingers around the neck of the wine bottle and ignored her protests as he splashed more cabernet into her glass. Droplets of red wine puddled on the back of her hand where she’d tried to shield her glass. She licked the rich berry wine off her skin and rubbed her hand against her warm thigh to dry it.

“What do you mean?” she asked when he didn’t pick up the thread of their conversation.

J.D. seemed to have lost his train of thought. He was staring blankly at her mouth. When he blinked and lifted his eyes back to meet hers, she saw him reconnect with the conversation.

“He saw the book I’d made for Ben, my director friend, and he asked if I’d make him a couple dozen more so that he could give them as gifts to his daughter and some of the crew. Someone showed it to the director of this historical film that was being shot, and he called me.” He shrugged. “Everything else just fell into place.”

“And how did this lead to you losing your wife during filming in the Amazon?”

She stretched her arms over her head and recrossed her legs, seeing J.D.’s gaze wander again as his T-shirt rode up above the sagging waistband of his silky shorts on her hips. So she was watching as his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

“Sarah. Tyler. Is that a tattoo?”

Shit. Talk about a reason to blush. She loved the delicate scrollwork of the old-fashioned ace of hearts playing card that rode her hip, invisible unless she was wearing a skimpy swimsuit.

Or saggy shorts.

But a tattoo was so not what people expected from her. It was just one little secret thing she’d done for herself, a reminder of a side of her personality that she kept hidden from almost everyone. But making a big deal about it would only intensify J.D.’s curiosity. And right now it was her curiosity that needed to be satisfied.

“Duh. A million people have them, Damico.” She tugged the hem of his T-shirt back down and hoped her casual dismissal would put him off. “The lost wife?”

He tore his gaze away from her waist.

“I thought the director told me it would be the chance of my life. Turns out I should have heard, ‘I want a chance at your wife.’ Lana’s part was a small one, but I was happy that we’d be working together for the first time.”

“And the director cast your wife just to get her to come to the Amazon with you and then hit on her?” Her mouth dropped open. “I mean, I know the movie business is supposed to be sleazy, but come on. Yuck.”

“To be fair, I don’t think the director even knew we were married. Lana and I didn’t exactly bring anyone to Vegas with us for the wedding. It was pretty spontaneous.”

“Okay, but surely everyone on set knew the two of you were together.”

“Not exactly.” He sat up abruptly and grabbed the thigh of his uninjured leg with one hand, kneading it. “Sorry. I get muscle cramps now that I’m using this leg so much.” He set down his wine glass and bent forward to massage his leg with both hands. “It was only Lana’s second role, and she didn’t want people to think she expected any special treatment just because she was married to a hotshot Hollywood photographer. She’s pretty cool like that. So she asked me not to let anyone know we were married.”

He winced again, and before she gave any thought to what she was doing, she waved at him to sit back and rest and started to knead the hard knot out of his thigh.

Talk about whoops.

His flesh was warm beneath her hands, almost hot, even through the thick cloth of his sweatpants. She could feel the long ridge of his quadriceps muscle flexing beneath her fingers as she applied pressure to the knot.

Right. Keep talking.

What had they been talking about?

The super cool ex-wife. Right.

“So, you, ah, fell for that one, huh?”

“Thanks. Yeah,” he sighed and leaned back against the arm of the couch. “Well, she was spending all of her free time in the director’s trailer between takes, but I figured what was the harm?”

“What was the harm?” she repeated in disbelief. She quit the massage and smacked him on the kneecap. “Is there something in the water down there that made you stupid?”

“The director’s name is Jane.”

“Ah.” She stared at him, struggling to keep her face expressionless. “I see.”

“Live and learn.”

A heartbeat more and she couldn’t help it. The giggles just spilled up and out of her throat until she had to cover her face, because each time she glanced at J.D. he just looked more offended.

“I’m sorry,” she said and snorted as she tried to stop laughing. “It’s not funny.”

“Funny? No.” But his eyes were crinkling up at the corners and he shook his head as he started to smile too. “Ridiculous? Just a little bit.”

“Poor J.D.” She smiled and hugged his knees sympathetically. “That must have been pretty painful, your wife sleeping with the director.”

“It was.” He toasted her with his wine glass. “Not quite as painful as when I walked in on them in our trailer, and then tripped as I was storming out. That’s how I got this.” He rapped his knuckles against the cast.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. And even that didn’t hurt as much as finding out my leg hadn’t been set properly, so it needed to be rebroken and reset unless I wanted a permanent limp.”

“Ouch. Again.”

“Yeah, it’s frigging raining bad luck over here.”

She swigged back a healthy gulp of wine as empathetic shudders made her neck crawl. “I would’ve kept the limp.”

“Thought about it. And even though the cast comes off in a couple days, it’ll be weeks of physical therapy before I’m sure I won’t have one. But it did have one good side effect.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“By the time I was done cursing all doctors, both north and south of the border, I wasn’t that pissed off at Lana anymore. Maybe she broke my heart, but at least she only did it once.”

“Cheers to that,” she said and leaned forward to clink glasses with him, although she would have been happier to hear that he despised his ex and never wanted to hear her name spoken aloud again.

J.D. snagged her hand when she went to sit back. Braceleting her wrist with his thumb and forefinger, he rubbed the rest of his fingers against the skin of her arm.

“Enough about my drama. What about you? How’s your love life these days?”

She tugged against his grip, but he didn’t let go.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m off men completely.”

“You too?” He pulled her toward him, and since she was tired of leaning forward, she slid off the pillow and eased closer to him. “And here I was just thinking of asking you to climb on top of me.”

“Shut up,” she scoffed and reminded herself that he’d always teased her like this.

Okay, maybe there’d been a little less sexual tension when she was twelve.

Maybe a lot less.

“I am not climbing on top of anyone these days. Male or female,” she added in response to the speculative glint in his eyes. “I am officially a no-climbing zone.”

“Come on, Sarah Bearah—” he winked at her “—Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like?” He flipped her palm over and pressed his lips to the crease at the base of her thumb. She felt the warmth of his breath float over her skin and wondered if teasing shouldn’t be outlawed even if both people were old enough for consensual sex.

Ever wondered? It felt like she’d spent far too many years of her life wondering.

The breath she’d inhaled what felt like an hour ago burst out of her in a huff. She shook herself awake from what was essentially a sexual daydream. Time to put a halt to this little game.

Before she could open her mouth to say a word, a piercing ring blasted from a phone across the room, followed almost immediately by a click and a recorded message. A voice like maple syrup poured into the room after a loud beep.

“Sugar, I got your message. Now, get off your high horse and call me so I can say I’m sorry about Jane, okay? I didn’t fly to Chicago for my health. And are you seriously planning on staying here? It’s like two polar bears crapped a giant frozen poo and they built a city on it. I’m so cold my teeth are chattering. Right. So, that judge you saw in the Dominican Republic? He’s not, in fact, a member of the legal profession. So, you know, teensy problemo. And since we gotta deal with that, I wanted to talk to you about Ben’s new project, too. There’s a role that’s perfect for me, and you know he’ll do anything for you.” The slow sugar drawl dropped to a new level of husky. “Just like me, baby. Call me, husband.”

The last drawled word seemed to echo through the open warehouse space.

Holy. Shit. She was holding goddamn hands with Joey Damico, at last, and he. Was. Married.

Of course he was. And to a woman who talked like a frigging porn star. Way to make a regular woman feel inadequate.

“She’s such a drama queen.” J.D. squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but he was sort of grinning with one side of his mouth, like he was more exasperated than angry. She realized that he was still holding her wrist in his hand. His fingers began to move against her pulse, which jumped like a rabbit as heat pooled in her belly. Still, her brain locked onto that one word—married—like a heat-seeking missile. “Where were we?”

She tilted her head down and gave him a stern look from beneath lowered brows. “Stop it. You’re a married man. Maybe.”

“I’m really not. Lana’s sweet—morally challenged but sweet—and the ins and outs of the Dominican legal system aren’t her strong point. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about.”

When his fingers stroked higher on her arm to the sensitive skin inside her elbow, she broke out the big guns, “Stop teasing, or I’ll get my big brother to beat you up.”

“Hmm.” After a moment, he let go of her wrist with a rueful grin. She scooted back a bit, needing a little breathing room. On second thought, she leaned forward and grabbed the wine bottle.

“Tyler would actually kick my ass, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s right,” she said and nodded as she poured. More wine might not be a good idea, but she’d never been this thirsty in her life. Still, she stopped at half a glass.

“Ah, well. Maybe next time.”

She could have tossed the wine all over him when he winked at her and sat back as if it was no big deal. When she opened her mouth and the words she was thinking rolled right out, she realized that any wine, in fact, might have been too much while sitting half-dressed on the floor next to the man on whom she’d had a massive crush for most of her formative years. One who’d left town, married some wannabe starlet, and hadn’t even had the courtesy to get a real divorce.

“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.

Chapter Two

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.”

“I’m not sure he believed me. I did inform him that he was sure to see the guinea pig again, just probably not in a form his kid would want to play with.”

“And?”

“I think he finds my sense of humor lacking.”

“No kidding. So what’s he here for?”

“Aside from a second opinion on the possibility of squeezing Squeak out whole from either end of the snake? Apparently the little fluff ball put up quite a fight.” Jackie didn’t share Sarah’s sense of propriety. Her eyebrows wiggled. “The long and skinny one took a couple of hits to the snout. Needs a little patching up.”

“Ah, the glamour. TGI Friday.” Sarah laughed out loud and shook her head as she stepped into the exam room. Who was she kidding, having a mental flirtation with J.D. Damico? The man spent most of his time with the glitterati of Hollywood, and she would spend most of her morning bandaging a boa.

Besides, J.D. had been nothing but a horrible tease to her when she was a girl. She shouldn’t get her brain all twisted into knots over him. No doubt he’d just been yanking her chain when he kissed her.

Anyway, knowing J.D., he was probably already planning on skipping town. Halfway renovated loft condo or not.

Hours later, Sarah bruised her knuckles for the third time, whacking them against J.D.’s armored tank of a front door. He can’t be gone already, she told herself.

Could he?

Even as a kid, he’d barely waited to turn legal before throwing everything he owned in the back of a rattling gray Chevy Citation and hitting the road for freedom and adventure, aka anything that got him away from his parents. She was pretty sure the only reason he’d stuck around for as long as he did was that he didn’t want to disappoint her mother, who asked about his homework every day when she checked on her own children. If J.D. could have offered himself up for adoption, he’d have done it in a heartbeat. But still, the moment he was legal, he’d made a break for it.

Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Sarah, she scolded herself. Not even shoot-from-the-hip J.D. would throw a pregnant cat out on the street in the middle of winter. Plus, it would be pretty hard to sell that condo in its present “a bomb just exploded” condition. There could be a million reasons why he’s not home, you loon. Just because the man doesn’t have a nine-to-five job doesn’t mean he never leaves the house. Even artists need to hit the store for toilet paper and toothpaste every now and then.

Or he could be out with his ex. Correction, not so ex.

Or worse, maybe he’s locked in with her and they’re not answering the door.

She had stopped pounding on the door while berating herself, and in the silence she heard the faint inquiring mews of a cat.

All of a sudden she felt incredibly stupid.

What was she doing here?

The man obviously did not need her help any longer. Although he’d been desperate for help with the cat, it wasn’t as if he’d picked up the phone the next day to call her. He hadn’t even bothered to thank her for messengering over some supplies the next morning. She’d sent kibble and vitamins and a brush, for crying out loud. Showing up on his doorstep was more likely to seem flirtatious than professional.

She bumped her elbow against the neck of the wine bottle sticking out of the medical bag that hung at her hip, a fine pinot noir she’d picked up at a neighborhood wine shop earlier in the day. She pressed her lips together and remembered that she’d slicked a coat of plum gloss on them before stepping out of the car. Had unearthed a dusty comb from the depths of her bag and run it through her straight hair, too.

Likely to seem flirtatious?

Good grief.

She had to get out of here before he came home and found her camped out on his doorstep. And then say a prayer in gratitude that this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where the neighbors minded each other’s business.

“You lookin’ for J.D.?” a woman’s voice called out.

Lovely.

“Uh, no.” But she clearly was. God, she hoped she hadn’t been spotted pounding on his door like her pants were on fire. The two women standing on the sidewalk sported four-inch stilettos and skirts that weren’t much longer. Both sported extravagantly dyed fake-fur jackets and matching Easter-egg colored blunt-cut wigs.

Well, neighbors came in all different shapes and sizes, she guessed. And some didn’t live on your street, so much as, well…work there.

The women were still watching her, eyebrows arched and hips cocked to one side.

“Yes, well, I was just, you know, checking to see if he was home. I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

God, she felt like an idiot.

The taller of the two women smiled at her. “I know whatcha mean, honey. Almost all the guys who come see me just happen to be in the neighborhood, too.” Her companion snorted a little. Sarah was pretty sure she was laughing. “Did he stand you up?” the first woman asked, jerking her chin at J.D.’s door. “And after you brought the wine, too.”

The sensation of being smashed on a slide and examined under a microscope grew stronger. Heat raced over her face as she concentrated on not stuttering.

“No, we’re not…you know,” she waved her hands in front of her chest. The women looked at her as if they knew very well indeed. This was getting worse. “I’m just a friend.” Skeptical looks. Her voice squeaked higher. “His veterinarian. He’s got a cat?”

She hated it when her voice rose up at the end of perfectly simple sentences, making her sound like a teenybopper looking for approval. It was a habit she’d almost completely eliminated. Except when she got nervous.

Getting busted by a couple of hookers in a transparent attempt to put the moves on a guy, who had made it clear by the simple fact of not calling that he was uninterested in repeating the mind-blowing kiss they’d shared, made her nervous.

Go figure.

“Yeah, I saw that cat,” the shorter woman was nodding. “Took him half the morning to corner that damn thing in the alley. Man must be awful lonely to chase a mangy cat that hard. Maybe you should stick around with that wine.”

Strange. J.D. clearly didn’t want an animal. Why would he have rescued a stray at all? It was difficult to come up with an explanation that made sense, particularly given that she was still in the middle of the most peculiar conversation of her life.

“But you should put some lipstick on, honey. You’re too pale,” the first woman advised.

Excellent. Now she was getting makeup tips. And she was already wearing lip gloss, damn it.

Her feet were stiff with cold, her nose was starting to run and she’d had her fill of humiliation for the day. It was time to go console herself with a decent meal and some company that didn’t charge by the half hour. Maybe read a nice, sedate, nineteenth-century novel.

“Either of you ladies like pinot?” Time to hit the road.

* * *

Her attempt at cheerful self-deprecation lasted all of fifteen minutes. Until she got a ticket.

More precisely, three.

With her forehead resting on the steering wheel of her car, Sarah gave serious consideration as to whether her day could possibly get any worse.

Then she remembered that Officer Dubinski, rhymes with Buttinski, had offered to take her down to the station, in cuffs of course, if she thought that would improve her mood, and decided it could indeed be worse.

But it was just that she had car insurance. The insurance card itself maybe wasn’t the first thing you came across in the explosion of crap that fell out of her glove compartment the moment you opened it, but it was in there somewhere. And she hadn’t thought there was a time limit on finding it.

And she had stopped at the white line. But that last tap on her brakes must have happened just as the tires hit a patch of ice, because the car had slid forward a foot or two before coming to a complete stop.

And she knew that her passenger side rearview mirror was cracked. Some idiot parking his car must have clipped the mirror the night before, but the dealership said they had to order the part since her Jeep was so old, and it wouldn’t be in until Monday. She couldn’t work without her car.

It just seemed so unfair that she hadn’t done anything wrong and was in all this trouble anyway. When she tried to explain that to the officer, he’d flashed a palm in her face to stop her monologue. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can tell your side of it in court, lady.”

Now he was sitting in his cruiser, parked behind her, and she was too nervous to pull away from the curb. She was so angry her hands were shaking. She’d probably step on the accelerator and drive right into a parked car. But after it became clear that the police officer was more than capable of out-waiting her, she finally shifted her car into drive and pulled away from the curb. Her gaze jumped to her rearview mirror every two seconds until the cruiser finally got off her tail.

Now she didn’t want a meal. Or a book. She wanted to skip town. In lieu of that, she’d settle for some sympathy, damn it, for J.D. not calling her and for the hookers and for Officer Buttinski. And maybe a couple stiff drinks. She knew just where to go to get them.

Of course, in classic Chicago style, all the open parking spaces on the residential streets had been blocked with buckets, brooms and folding chairs by people who wanted to save the spaces after going to all the work of digging them out. She spotted one last unclaimed gap on the block, only to watch as it was stolen from her by a jerk in a Hummer who definitely had a tiny penis.

That was it. She’d had it.

Her tires skidded as she slalomed halfway into a spot blocked by two green plastic lawn chairs and slammed on the brakes. She was out of the car in two seconds, and she had a chair in each hand moments later. She was about to pitch them onto the parkway when she came to her senses.

Did she really want a rock through her windshield?

Two minutes and a quick search of her med bag later, the chairs were stacked neatly just off the curb and a hot pink Post-it that broadcast her apology was anchored to the seat with a chunk of ice. So sorry—Emergency! Leaving soon & will put the chairs back! Her Jeep was parked neatly in the stolen space.

She was still risking that her car would get attacked with a shovel, but if she had to drive around the block for one more minute, she was going to lose her mind. Or commit vehicular suicide.

Finally, she’d made it. The one place where she knew everyone would be on her side. She’d managed to wrap up early enough that it was still before five, so there shouldn’t be anyone around except for her favorite people. She yanked open the door to her brother’s pub, the original Tyler’s, and prepared herself for some sympathy.

“…I just felt sorry for Sarah because she was always mooning around about some guy she liked.”

This was not happening to her.

* * *

“I was just yanking her chain.”

It was a good thing he hadn’t actually sat down yet, J.D. thought, as he took another step back from the long wooden counter in front of him.

Tyler had both hands flat against the bar. He looked about two seconds away from hopping it and coming after J.D. with fists swinging.

“You kissed my sister?”

He couldn’t blame the guy. When you ask your friend to check up on your sister, you don’t really mean it in a carnal way.

“I asked you to talk to her, Damico. Tell me if you thought she seemed a little off. I didn’t tell you to put the moves on her.” Tyler wasn’t smiling at all. The man seemed pretty pissed, actually.

“Hey, I was doped up on pain meds when you called. Plus, I haven’t seen Sarah since she was a kid. I wouldn’t know if she seemed a little off if I talked to her all day.”

“Yeah, well, see with your eyes, not with your hands.” When Tyler yanked at the bar rag hanging from his belt and started polishing the counter in front of him like it was inspection time at the barracks, J.D. figured it was probably safe to sit down. Which was necessary, because after five days without crutches, his leg still ached like a son of a bitch. “Sarah doesn’t need her chain yanked by the likes of you. Dude, you don’t even know if you’re still married.”

Maybe not so safe yet.

“No way. I paid. I got the papers. Only one married here is you, bro. Thank god.”

He glanced reflexively over his shoulder when he heard the gentle creak of a hinge and shivered as a small gust of cold air hit the nape of his neck. He hoped whoever it was would take the heat off him. The petite blonde who came barreling through the front door of the pub, two small children hanging off her hands, fit the bill.

J.D. shook his head and smiled at the sight of the classic Gold Coast beauty, blond hair up in a twist and designer suit hanging flawlessly on her small frame. She definitely merited a second glance. Even though she was married to his best friend.

Grace kicked off her high heels, which skidded to a stop at the base of the jukebox, and walked across the spotless hardwood floor of the bar in her stocking feet.

J.D. had been out of the country when she conned her way into an under-the-table waitressing job at Tyler’s pub, using a fake name while she hid out from some cold and manipulative family members. It didn’t surprise him much that she’d fallen for Tyler. Women always did sooner or later. What did surprise him was that his buddy had fallen just as hard.

“I’ll trade you your children for a glass of pinot grigio,” Grace suggested to her husband. She threw J.D. a grateful glance as he scooped two-year-old Isabelle onto his lap, pulling out one of the baseballs he always had on hand somehow to start a tame game of underhand toss with four-year-old Daniel. “Thanks.”

“My children, huh? Were they that bad?” Tyler asked as he poured the wheat-pale wine into a glass and swirled it. He took a sip, nodded and passed it to his wife, who took a rather longer swallow before answering.

“I should never have told Chef Paul about Take Your Kids to Work Day.” Paul was her partner in the crowning jewel of her restaurant conglomerate. Grace narrowed her eyes. “He just happened to be working on a new dessert menu today.”

“And?” After a couple of decades, J.D. could read his friend’s face at a glance. Tyler loved listening to his wife, even when she was like this, a little cranky, a little frustrated and in dire need of five minutes to vent before she could relax. He shook his head.

“Have you ever seen a couple of toddlers after they’ve taste-tested three cakes, two ices and a torte?” she asked. “It’s like having two overgrown hamsters on speed, only you’ve lost their exercise wheel, so they just keep running around the room.”

Sure, Grace was a sweetheart, no question, and a beautiful woman, but Tyler was grinning for crying out loud. Charmed to his toes by her cheerful kvetching. And J.D. had to admit that once he might once have envied the joy his friend took in his family. After all, hadn’t he spent most of his childhood wishing his own family was normal?

Yeah, well, he’d been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt. It wasn’t until after you got home that you found out that the colors of your new purchase bled into mud the first time you tried to throw it in the wash. Thanks, but no thanks. It was abundantly clear to him that he’d do better to keep his romantic entanglements to an emotional minimum. It would lower his chances of getting kicked in the teeth, at least. Or of busting his other tibia. Playing honorary uncle was enough.

J.D. was watching Daniel dive headfirst under a table, chasing the baseball after a missed catch, when he noticed that Grace and Tyler had stopped talking.

He glanced over his shoulder.

She must have lunged over the bar at him. Grace’s hands were wrapped around her husband’s neck as they shared what looked like a mind-blowing kiss. Feeling like a Peeping Tom, he turned back to the kid.

But he couldn’t block out their voices.

“Think your mom will want to babysit tonight?”

“She can be bribed.”

Tyler’s voice was husky and Grace’s laugh scraped low in her throat. Okay, so maybe he could understand the appeal of that, but Grace was one in a million. J.D. decided he’d wait for their conversation to start up again before he turned around. After a couple of minutes, though, the wait was getting ridiculous, so he settled for calling out to the ceiling, “Jeez guys, get a room, will ya?”

Daniel trotted over and rested the baseball, clutched in his two small hands, on J.D.’s thigh. “Yeah, Mommy. Get a room.”

The kid would probably be using that phrase again. He giggled as his parents yelled at J.D.

“Thanks a lot, Damico.” Grace wadded up a bar napkin and bounced it off his head with a precision throw.

He winked and grinned. “Any time, Grace. That’s what’s so nice about being ‘Uncle’ J.D. I get to hand them back to you just when they’re getting impossible.”

“I should be so lucky.”

But she belied her words when she grabbed her daughter off his lap and proceeded to torment her by blowing raspberries on her round belly. J.D. slipped his camera out and framed the shot in an instant, shoving his Nikon back in his pocket before Isa could stop giggling. He kneaded his thigh when his hands were empty again. Losing the cast had been frigging awesome and the therapy was helping, but he still ached. “Wanna babysit tonight?” Grace asked him.

“Not now that I know what you two plan on doing with your free time. I don’t need the mental pictures, thank you.” He grabbed one of the juice-filled sippy cups Tyler had set on the bar and passed it down to Daniel, who was waiting at his knee like a terrier. J.D. figured the boy was old enough for a real cup, no lid, but he’d learned from past experience that unless he wanted to take responsibility for mopping up any spills, he’d better keep his mouth shut.

“Besides, I’m off in a couple hours.”

“Let me guess. Malaysia? No, you’ve been there. Zanzibar?”

“Been there, too. Nice island. Spice trade. Big carved wooden doors everywhere. Excellent beaches.”

“So?”

“Vegas.” He tilted his head back to take another swallow of his beer. “The film I worked on might, uh, win some kind of MTV award.”

“My buddy, the rock star.”

“Shut up, Tyler. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

Grace was swaying with Isa and pelting J.D. with questions about whether he’d meet U2 and what he’d be wearing. J.D. tried to explain that it wasn’t what it sounded like. It was not a big deal. The film had won an MTV technical award of some kind. The director must have had some kind of belated guilt attack about the whole thing with Lana. Either that or the fact that his coffee table book of photographs had driven a surge of interest in the film had apparently gotten his name on the invite list for the ceremony. Which was, with various other non-flashy awards, being conducted a month before the main show and would probably involve wine from a box and a choice between underbaked chicken and overcooked steak.

“It’s just an excuse for a party, really,” he explained. “Everyone gets dressed up, drinks too much and pretends for a night that they’re as famous as the people on the other side of the camera.” Time for a change of subject. “So where’s your little sister, Tyler?”

“Sarah or Maxie?” Grace asked as she snagged a handful of pretzels from a bowl on the counter.

“He better be talking about Maxie.” In response to his wife’s look, Tyler said, “J.D. has already seen plenty of Sarah.”

A man had to defend himself. “Hey, the whole thing was your idea.” He turned toward Grace. “It was your husband’s idea to have me check her out, and now he’s pissed because I gave her one lousy kiss.”

“I asked you to check on her, not ‘check her out,’” Tyler retorted with air quotes.

“Stop!” Grace threw her hands in the air. She pointed at her son. “You, go to the kitchen and ask nicely for some tortellini and broccoli. You can pretend to eat the broccoli if you go now.” Daniel went. Grace passed her youngest back to J.D. and ducked behind the counter to pour herself more wine. Propping her elbows on the bar, she rested her head on her interlaced fingers and grinned at J.D. “You, tell me about that kiss. No, wait. First things first. Why were you checking her out?”

“On, checking on,” Tyler protested. “I wanted J.D. to see if he could feel her out.” As he snagged the baby from J.D.’s lap, he gave his friend a sharp look and said, “I said out, not up, buddy. Don’t get any ideas. I told him how we’re a little concerned about Sarah.”

“Worried sick and not a little pissed off is what he means,” Grace added in a helpful and pleasant tone of voice. J.D. knew that Grace and Sarah had formed a close bond from day one. The two women joked that they didn’t need to bother with the “in-law” part of the phrase “sister-in-law” since they were already sisters, separated at birth. “We’ve been trying to get her in on the planning for Susannah’s birthday, but she’s been blowing off all our calls.” He knew that the Tyler kids went all out for their mom’s birthday every year. It was a family tradition that he couldn’t imagine Sarah skipping out on, but maybe she’d been busy with work. “Plus, it just wasn’t like her to miss Daniel’s birthday last week.”

Or maybe it was serious.

“She forgot her godson’s birthday?” Shoot, he could find her right now and tie her to a chair until she explained what was going on with her.

“Well, not exactly. I mean, she sent over a gift and a card, but she made up some excuse about why she couldn’t make it to the party. We haven’t seen her in weeks. If she blows off Susannah’s party, I’m calling the police.”

J.D. settled back into his seat with a sigh. She’d remembered the boy’s birthday, hadn’t she? She came from a terrific family, but everyone needed a break from time to time. With a family like his, that break was better made permanently. All the same, he could see why Tyler and Grace were worried. Sarah had always been the responsible, quiet one, despite her unbelievably bad taste in high school boyfriends. She’d dated a kid who was busted for stealing equipment from the AV club in the hopes of making a porno, after breaking up with a guy who was caught taking bets on the football team. What were the odds?

Still. The memory of an ace of hearts etched on smooth skin flashed before him. Maybe he didn’t know Sarah as well as he thought he did. Maybe none of them did.

“What did Aunt Sarah send you for your birthday, buddy?” he called to Daniel as the boy wobbled back into the room clutching a bowlful of pasta. Spotting a disaster in the making, he scooped the kid up and deposited him in a chair, pushing his bowl away from the edge of the table.

“A book ‘bout dinosaurs.”

J.D. shook his head, reassured. That was Sarah. If the girl wasn’t trying to splint the broken leg of a squirrel, she was sitting somewhere with her nose in a book.

“I don’t know. All I can say is that she seemed fine to me. Better than fine,” he added with a grin.

“Watch yourself, buddy.”

“Aha, which brings us back to that kiss,” Grace lunged for the topic as if it were one of her children about to run off a cliff. “C’mon, J.D., fess up. Pretend you’re a girl and give me all the gory details.”

“The man is wearing a ponytail,” Tyler said as he swooped his baby girl through the air on a roller coaster ride before handing her off to Grace.

J.D. tugged on his hair where it was tied back with a leather cord. He was starting to think that this entire conversation was a remarkably bad idea. “What kind of details?”

“Was it good?” Grace, cool and classy woman that she was, looked like she was about to start breathing heavily and maybe drooling. She bounced her daughter on her hip. “Did she enjoy it?”

Tyler stuck his fingers in his ears and started humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

“Aw, Grace, I was just fooling around. I don’t know if she enjoyed it or not.”

“Well, did she stick her tongue down your throat or just sit there like a bump on a log?”

The visceral memory of that kiss slammed into him and his stomach dropped like he’d just crested a hill at high speed. She damn near climbed me like a tree was what he wanted to say. At first she hadn’t moved and he thought that he’d crossed a line, that he’d pushed the teasing too far this time and pissed her off. But then her mouth had melted beneath his and a second later he’d felt her hands gripping his hair as fiercely as his own were pulling her up higher against him.

Even Lana showing up in Chicago with her fantasy that they were still married couldn’t block that memory, although the hassle of dealing with his ex-wife’s efforts to track him down and lure him back as some kind of career move had complicated his life enough to be distracting.

He’d avoided thinking about that kiss ever since that night because each time he did, he relived the entire thing in every snatch-your-breath-away detail, and he wasn’t comfortable with the fact that its impact hadn’t faded at all in two weeks. To recover, he kept forcing himself to strategize about how to convince Lana that that door was closed for good.

Thank god Tyler was humming.

“She definitely didn’t just sit there.”

Grace’s “Excellent!” was drowned out by Tyler’s “Dude, that’s my sister!”

“Shush.” Grace stopped her husband’s mouth with her palm. “So tell me, what’s the plan?”

“Plan? There is no plan. It was just one lousy kiss!”

Tyler chorused, “That’s right! No plan!” and punched a fist in the air as he poured water from the soda gun into Daniel’s sippy cup one-handed. J.D. shook his head and said, “The last genius step of this plan gave me these—” he yanked up a sleeve to show off the scratches where the damn alley cat had nailed him “—and still poops in my house.”

“Hey, I just thought you’d borrow a cat. Not go all Great White Hunter on me.”

“Yeah, well, give me a couple of painkillers and I come up with all kinds of great ideas.”

“It was just an excuse to get her over there. I asked J.D. to talk to Sarah. The two of them always got on like secret pals when we were growing up,” he explained to his wife.

“Okay, A, that was a decade ago.” The door creaked open, drafting cold air inside. J.D. was grateful for whatever customer would put this conversation on hold. “And, B, I just felt sorry for Sarah because she was always mooning around about some guy she liked.”

“Mooning around?”

The new arrival’s voice was female. And deadly.

Yeah, he had a feeling that his gratitude that someone had walked in on this conversation was going to be very short-lived. He gritted his teeth, smiled and prepared to take his punishment like a man.

J.D. swiveled around on his stool in slow motion, but not even one hundred and eighty degrees gave him enough time to figure out a way to take back the words that had just come out of his mouth.

“Hey, Sarah. You look, um…” Scary, would have fit neatly at the end of that sentence. Her eyes were slits and her heeled boots clicked sharply on the floor, measuring out a straight line that brought her slowly closer to him, step by precise step. “So, figures of speech are funny things, aren’t they?”

“I was mooning,” the words were ground to a powder between clenched teeth, “over you,” she stabbed him in the shoulder with a pointed finger he was pretty sure she wished were a knife, “you jackass.”

“Right,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Sorry about that. Didn’t notice at the time. Won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right about that.” She turned to her brother. “And you! Is it too much to ask for a little sympathy around here? I’ve had an awful day.” She waved Tyler off before he could even open his mouth. “My car was hit by someone last night who didn’t leave a note, surprise, surprise. Today, two hookers told me that I should try to get a little color in my face if I want a man, and Officer Buttinski wrote me three, count ’em, three tickets because he’s got the heart of the Grinch at the start of the movie. And you—” a hand flung out like the finger of death in J.D.’s direction “—you ask for my help and then kiss me? And you can’t even call to say thanks or explain the damn kiss? So I come here for a little comfort, a little empathy, and what’s the first thing I hear when I walk in the door? ‘I felt sorry for poor, moony Sarah!’”

* * *

She stood in the middle of a silent room.

Even Daniel was staring at her, jaw dropped, head braced back and a little to the side, as if braced for the next bombshell to explode. She did a mental review of her outburst and grimaced.

“Sorry ‘bout the language, kiddo,” she whispered at him. He grinned.

The answer to her challenge, when it came, was completely unexpected.

J.D. rose off his bar stool, tugged on his stub of a ponytail for a second, and then held his hand out to her in a gesture that Sarah’s boiling-over brain was having a hard time understanding.

“Sounds to me like you need to get out of town for a bit. If I say thank-you and promise to explain the next time I kiss you, do you wanna go to Vegas tonight?”

Well, that cleared things up. Not.

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