Chapter 14
Fourteen
C arter was hungover as hell. Rolling onto his back, he stared up at the ceiling and willed himself not to puke.
After leaving Josie’s house, after making an ass of himself, he thought, he’d come home and finished off a bottle of Fire Creek that had been in the cabinet.
It had been a horrible, awful, stupid mistake.
Gingerly, he sat up, put his feet on the floor, and focused all his energy on not tossing his proverbial cookies. She was making him crazy. He was so turned inside out by her that he literally didn’t know if he was coming or going, and he didn’t even know how the hell it had happened.
Forcing himself to get to his feet, Carter walked from the bedroom to the bathroom under his own steam. He was buck naked and smelled like a barroom.
Shower, he thought. He needed a shower. He needed to never smell bourbon again.
Or for someone to just kill him and end his misery.
That would work. He could call Emmitt. Emmitt would happily end his life since his stunt with the library book on erectile dysfunction had apparently blown the gossip mill wide open.
Emmitt was less than pleased with him, to put it mildly.
Turning on the taps, he waited for the water to warm and leaned his aching head against the cool tile. He pressed his whole face against it and let out a groan at the relief it provided.
The pounding on the door only echoed the pounding in his head. “Fuck. Just fuck.”
Turning the taps back off, he cursed again.
It would take a million years to get the water hot at this rate.
Whoever was at his door, he intended to make them go away quick.
He was in no mood. Rather than get dressed, he just grabbed a towel from the shelf and wrapped it around his waist as he half stumbled to the door.
Yanking it open, he found himself face-to-face with the woman who was responsible for his misery.
Josie stood there, looking almost as miserable as he felt.
There was just enough meanness in him to appreciate that.
He let his eyes wander, taking her in from head to toe.
She was wearing a sweater dress and a pair of the high-heeled boots she favored, but there were dark circles under her eyes, and she looked more than a little green around the gills.
“You look awful,” she said.
“You don’t look much better.” The retort was snappy, his tone clipped. He didn’t know what the hell she was doing there, but it probably wasn’t good.
“Let me in, Carter,” she said, clearly in no mood to tolerate his shit.
“Afraid somebody will see you out there?”
“No. But I am afraid of freezing my tail off. Stop being an asshole!”
He shrugged and stepped back, leaving the door open for her to come inside. He was being a dick, and it was only partially because of the hangover. Crying over her wasn’t an option, so that left being a first-class prick.
“What do you want, Josephine?”
“To talk. There are a few things we need to clear up,” she said softly.
“Like what?”
“Jordan Simmons.”
Just the name made him want to punch something.
He didn’t believe for a second that Josie had any interest in that pompous little shit.
It had been a knee-jerk reaction when he’d first seen them together.
Jealousy was an ugly feeling, and one he wasn’t accustomed to.
But later on, when he’d been thinking more clearly, it had bothered him for other reasons.
If Josie walked down Main Street with Simmons, people would smile and nod, perfectly pleased with the pairing of the current minister’s daughter and the minister in training.
It didn’t matter that Simmons was a first-class asshole and a sneaky piece of shit.
He played the game, he looked the part, and everyone in town bowed and scraped to him.
Meanwhile, they looked at him like he was something dirty they’d stepped in.
“I don’t have fuck-all to say about Jordan Simmons. He’s a smarmy shit, and we both know it.”
She raised her eyebrows at that. “Funny, you seemed to have a very different take on things the other day.”
“I flew off the handle a little. That’s what I do.”
“No, it isn’t. You don’t have some wild temper. You don’t yell or scream or get mad…except with me. I make you crazy,” she said. “Because I’m a giant pain in the ass.”
He didn’t disagree with her. Every bit of that was true.
She was also sweet, and so damn pretty it hurt to look at her sometimes, and funny, and unfailingly kind.
And her being a pain in the ass wasn’t always a flaw.
At times, it was one of the things he liked best about her. His cupcake didn’t take any shit.
“You do make me crazy,” he said. “In a lot of ways.”
She moved deeper into the room and perched on the arm of the couch. “You’re right to be mad at me, to tell me to stop being so scared of other people’s opinions. The only opinion that ought to matter to me is yours.”
That brought him up short. Standing there in nothing but a towel and reeking of bourbon and heaven only knew what else, he just couldn’t make sense of it.
“Why would my opinion be the only one that matters?”
“Did you mean what you said last night? That you wanted to be the man who loved me?”
Fuck, he had not meant to say that. Being pissed and drunk made him too damned honest for his own good. But there was no taking it back.
“Hell, Josie…I am the man who loves you. Do you honestly think I’d have snuck around and carried on the way I did with you for any other reason? If all I wanted was to get laid, I could have done that without working nearly as hard.”
“Well, that’s pretty.”
He chuckled a little. In spite of his shitty mood, his aching head, and the fact that his guts clearly no longer wanted to stay on the inside, her caustic tone still managed to tickle him.
“It’s the truth. There are a lot of women in this town who would have been more than happy to parade around with me…
at least for the short term. That’s what I am to most of them.
Short term. The guy you have fun with before you go and find one to settle down with who has a good job, and a solid future, and a stable income. ”
“You have all those things. I know how hard you work to help Savannah with Revision,” she protested. “You’re not just an employee there, Carter. You’re a partner.”
“People don’t see me that way. They don’t want to.
They’ve got ideas about who I am, and they’re comfortable with ’em.
Same way with you. People wouldn’t bat an eye if you walked out with Simmons because, to their mind, you all belong together.
The one place you don’t belong would be with me.
” It hurt to admit that. It stung like a hundred slivers of glass slicing into him at once.
“They’re wrong,” she said softly. “I’m a hypocrite, Carter.
I curse. I drink. I have hot, steamy affairs with the town bad boy.
And I do it all while looking down my nose at people who look down their nose at me.
I’m not perfect. I’m not even good most of the time.
I just hide all the wickedness so no one sees. ”
“That isn’t true. Well…not all of that is true.”
Josie shrugged. “Close enough to the truth. But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to pretend to be something I’m not. Especially if it means I can’t have you.”
Carter didn’t want to hope. He was afraid to let himself. “I can’t keep being your secret, Josie.”
“I’m not asking you to be. I came here this morning to invite you to church with me.”
He blinked at her. Then he blinked some more. “What?”
Josie smiled, even though it did little to alleviate her general appearance of misery.
“I talked to my mom. Really talked to her about things that I—let’s just say that she helped me see myself a little more clearly.
And she also told me that if I wanted to be with you, I needed to just do it and stop hiding.
She also said that there isn’t a more public way of announcing to the whole of Fontaine that you’re seeing someone than going to church together. ”
Carter couldn’t wrap his head around that. Not any of it. Not Deborah Marcum telling her daughter to date him openly. He sure as hell couldn’t fathom Josie asking him to attend church with her. By Fontaine’s standards, that was practically announcing an engagement.
“You’re gonna have to run that by me again,” he finally managed.
She rolled her eyes and then enunciated very carefully. “Will you go to church with me?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” she said.
Carter felt panic rearing. He hadn’t stepped foot in a church other than attending funerals since he was a kid. But to walk into church with the preacher’s daughter and sit there during the sermon under his disapproving eye? That just sounded like the very definition of hell.
“I’ll make you a deal, Josie. I’ll go to church with you tomorrow morning if you go out with me tonight. I’ll pick you up, take you to dinner. We’ll sit out in public in full view of everyone and act like two people who don’t have a thing to hide.”
The smile that curved her lips was so beautiful it took his breath away. She looked happy and freer than he’d ever seen her.
“I’d like that. I’d like that a lot. But now, I have to get to work. If I’m late, Doris will murder me.”
“Probably not murder…Doris’s real talent lies in just making you wish you were dead.”
Josie walked over to him and stood up on her tiptoes. She kissed his cheek and then wrinkled her nose. “Carter, I hope you’re planning on taking a shower sometime soon because you reek.”
“I’ll get on that,” he said. “How much wine did you drink last night, Josie?”
“Enough that I’m going to have to use all my patience and a lot of prayer to survive Doris today,” she quipped as she turned toward the door. “Where are you taking me tonight?”