Chapter 1 #2
Short jokes were not the best way to endear anyone to her.
“It’s like this, Carter…I could have spent the night with anyone in this town, and it would be a scandal.
But spending it with you, when you’re known for being the biggest manwhore to ever live and breathe, is especially bad.
My father would never forgive me, and my mother would either die of the shame or make me wish I had. ”
That stung more than a little. Carter knew his reputation.
Hell, he’d made a point to cultivate it in just that way.
His mother had always warned him about breaking hearts, and he’d figured out early on that girls didn’t get their hearts broken if they didn’t expect the heart to ever be involved.
But to have this little girl, and he wasn’t just talking about her height, tell him that he wasn’t good enough to be seen with, that cut deep.
It didn’t matter that she’d said nothing that wasn’t true.
He knew just how vicious Fontaine’s gossip mill could be.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, he rocked back on his heels. “I get it, cupcake. I’m good enough to save your ass, but not good enough to be seen with. There are extra sweatpants in the top drawer. Get dressed, and I’ll drive you to get your car.”
Carter turned away and headed into the living room.
His apartment was the upper floor of Revision, his cousin’s salvage and antique store.
He worked for Savannah, delivering furniture and hauling shit that she couldn’t carry, and did some woodworking on the side with Bennett.
The rest of the time, he did construction and odd jobs, none of which helped to alleviate his image as a ne’er-do-well.
Still, looking around the place he’d made for himself, he was proud of it.
The heart pine floors he’d refinished himself.
The exposed brick he’d chiseled free of layers of plaster, paint, and wallpaper.
The furniture was an eclectic mix of old, new, and handmade.
The apartment had been his way of saying that he wasn’t what other people thought of him, even if few people ever set foot in it.
He wasn’t afraid of hard work. He just didn’t like doing it on other people’s terms.
The bedroom door opened, and Josie emerged, drowning in a pair of his sweatpants and his shirt.
It shouldn’t have looked good on her, and a part of him deeply resented the fact that it did.
She’d insulted him, she’d looked down her nose at him, and yet, staring at her in clothes that hung off her like shapeless sacks, he still remembered how she’d looked in that tiny slip of a dress. There was something about her.
“I don’t have any shoes,” she said.
“You had them last night,” he shot back. “You’ve got pretty good aim with them too. Besides, I don’t think those mile-high heels would be the best fashion choice with your current ensemble.”
She glanced down at the baggy T-shirt and sweats, tugging the pants up and folding the waistband over again, and then another time for good measure. They still dragged the floor.
“Probably not,” she agreed. “But I really loved those shoes. They made me feel tall.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that was probably the bar you were dancing on,” he offered as he grabbed his keys off the table by the door. “You didn’t keep your shoes on long enough for them to do that.”
Opening the door, Carter took one look at the steps and then looked back at her. The iron steps were treacherous under the best of circumstances. With the rain from the night before, her bare feet, and pants that were long enough to trip both of them, he just scooped her up in his arms.
She smacked his chest. “Put me down!”
“No,” he said, and kept walking.
“I can walk, Carter. This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to be carried just so you can feel like a he-man!”
“I feel like a he-man, regardless.” He couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face.
She was so tiny and yet so prickly—like a rabid little hedgehog.
“I’m carrying you because if my driving you home would be the height of humiliation for you, winding up with a concussion at the bottom of my steps would probably be even worse.
Especially since I happen to know you’re not wearing any panties under that getup. ”
She blushed, her cheeks turning bright pink. “Speaking of which…where are my panties? I found the dress hanging in the bathroom, but the panties are nowhere to be seen.”
“You really did throw up a lot. It went everywhere,” he said. “As for the panties…I need a souvenir, don’t I?”
“Forget it. Just get me back to my car so I can put this whole mess behind me,” she said through clenched teeth. Her jaw was so tight it was a wonder the muscles didn’t simply snap.
Reaching the bottom of the steps, he didn’t put her down, but continued to carry her until he reached his truck.
Opening the door, he deposited her on the ancient and cracked vinyl seat in a repeat of the previous night’s actions.
He walked around to the driver’s side and was climbing behind the wheel just as she reached behind her and dug out one high-heeled shoe that was protruding from the seat.
“I don’t guess the other one is in here, is it?” she asked.
“It might be. I’ll poke around later and see if I can’t find it,” he offered. “Of course, I can’t exactly bring it to you now, can I?”
It still stung. Hell, he knew his reputation. It had never bothered him before. Why it was pissing him off now was a mystery.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. Yes, he did know. He wanted her. Somehow, without him realizing it, Josephine Marcum had become one of the sexiest women he’d ever met. Beautiful, smart, feisty as hell, and all bundled up in a petite, curvy body…yeah, he was sunk.
“If you find my shoe, just bring it to the library. Discreetly, of course,” she said primly.
He couldn’t stop the grin that spread across his face at her tone. She’d be a wildcat if she ever let loose, he thought. “I like that.”
“What?”
He was poking the bear, or the wildcat, in this case. “Your librarian voice, all prim and proper. You’re sitting there in my pants, not a stitch on under them, and still on a moral high horse tall enough to kill you if you fall.”
The glare he received in response to that made it completely worthwhile.
“I really don’t like you.”
Carter smiled wider. “Then maybe you should give me back my pants.”
As they pulled onto the road, she made not a sound. But if looks could kill, Josie Marcum would have laid him out in two seconds flat.
They’d reached the end of Main Street, where it connected to the highway that would take them back to the scene of the crime, when Josie began to flail about in the seat.
Carter turned toward her just as she managed to unbuckle the seat belt and slide all the way down to the floor.
She was tucked under the dash like a stowaway.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“My parents!” she hissed back at him in a low whisper. “They’re coming this way!”
Carter looked up and saw them across the intersection. They were facing them, but with the sun so low in the sky, he doubted they would have seen her.
“You don’t have to whisper. The truck’s engine is loud enough that they couldn’t hear you if even if you yelled…which you do seem to do an awful lot.”
“Carter, I can’t let them see me like this!”
The desperation was real. She wasn’t being melodramatic or carrying on for effect. And it wasn’t embarrassment either. This was something else altogether.
“Why, Josie? Just tell me why.”
She looked up at him, and the hurt he saw in her eyes was almost too much to bear.
“Because I can’t disappoint them. Ever. They saved me, and everyone in this town knows it. If I don’t live up to that, Carter, I’ll never live it down.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he demanded, coasting through the light after it changed.
William Marcum gave him a wave, but there was little warmth in his smile.
Of course Carter knew he hadn’t done a whole lot to endear himself to the local ministerial association.
The bastard son of a drunken criminal and a girl who should have known better, everyone in town had expectations of him, but none of them were good.
“It means that everyone in this town looks up to them. They always tell Mommy and Daddy how good it was of them to bring me home, what wonderful people they are to have adopted a child from such a horrible place. If I embarrass them?—”
Frustrated, he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “Fucking hell, Josie! They’re not going to send you back!”
“No,” she agreed. “They won’t. But I don’t ever want them to wish they had.”
He hated Fontaine in that moment. Josie’s being adopted was no secret.
And over the years, he’d heard the talk often enough.
Everyone always told her how lucky she was, how grateful she ought to be.
But what that really boiled down to was people saying she’d gotten lucky and had been given something she hadn’t earned or didn’t deserve.
Ultimately, they were saying the same thing to her that they always said to him. You’re not good enough .
“Your parents love you, and you don’t put conditions on that,” he said softly, reaching down to help her up off the floor.
“It feels like there are conditions,” she admitted. “Make good grades. So I did. Make better grades. So I did. Don’t date that boy because he’s trouble, so I didn’t. I’ve never once gone against the things they’ve told me to do…until last night. And you see what a disaster that turned out to be.”
“It doesn’t look so bad from here,” he answered. “You’re more than where you come from, Josie Marcum.”
And so was he, even if no one would ever believe it.