11. God Damn, He Looks Good
God Damn, He Looks Good
Bree
‘I t is hot,’ Zoe says, fanning herself on my front porch.
The babies are asleep inside, where it’s cool. Missy insisted on us sitting on the front porch in the hopes of introducing the girls to Arlo, and I feel like I might throw up at the prospect. I saw him leave with his dog just before Cara and Zoe arrived, so I am just hopeful he’s out for the rest of the day.
‘You think you’re hot now? Wait until you see Bree’s new neighbor ,’ Missy says, and I roll my eyes.
‘Really?’ Cara grins and Missy nods.
‘Oh my god, yes, he is a smoke show, and Miss Breanne clearly has some undisclosed history with him.’
‘You do?’ my twin asks, holding my gaze, and I nod, yes, feeling suddenly ashamed. I never told her about him.
‘We,’ I’m stuck between downplaying what we had and hyping it up to more than it was, ‘hung out for a while.’
‘Hung out? You mean y’all were fuckin’?’ Missy, tactful as ever, asks, and I shake my head.
‘No, we never… it wasn’t that. I mean—’ I chew my lip as they all fall silent, and I meet Zoe’s attention. ‘I loved him. We were together. He’s the only man I ever loved that way.’
‘You never told me you’d loved anybody that way.’ Zoe’s voice is surprised and sad, and I reach out my hand for hers.
‘It was the year you and Luke got married. I was staying with Grandma, and you two were so happy and in love. We hardly talked that summer, twinnie, and then it ended. You were a newlywed, and life moved on.’
‘Bree, you could have told me.’
I swallow hard and nod. I could have. I should have.
‘How did it end?’ Cara asks sweetly, and I quickly try to decide what to tell them. The whole truth isn’t mine to tell.
‘He broke up with me, that was that.’ I shrug and sit back in my seat, the memories of the heartbreak real and raw and as painful as ever.
‘Just like that?’ Zoe pushes, and I nod.
‘Yeah, first love, done.’ I try to smile.
‘Is he the reason you haven’t gotten serious with anybody else?’
I take a breath. Is he? I never really thought about it, but no, it’s not him. I moved on.
‘No, I just never met anybody I wanted something with. You know that.’
‘Holy shit, that’s him ,’ Missy whispers excitedly, and I glance up as Arlo walks up the path with his dog. ‘Hey, Arlo,’ she says with absolutely zero chill, standing and waving as he heads toward his front door.
God damn, he looks good.
Arlo Harper was hot as fuck at twenty. At almost forty, he is indescribably hot. At twenty, he was all ripped and tanned, with sporadically tattooed skin, and his hair was always that perfect styled-to-look-messy kind of deal. This Arlo is something else. There’s some salt seasoning up his dark blond hair and neat beard now, and that playful sparkle he always had in his eyes has been replaced by something else, something strong and serious, something he’s very much aiming my way.
The first time I saw him I was immediately defensive—this young man storming into my grandma’s yard, but once I actually looked at him, I knew I was in trouble. I was right. I should have trusted my instincts. He broke my heart just like I knew he would. Looking at him now, though, good lord, would it be weird if I rubbed up against his leg and purred?
‘Um, hey, ladies.’ He flashes a nervous smile that makes my stomach flip. I remember that smile well. It’s the one he used when it was just us, when we moved towards getting handsy and breathless, as though he couldn’t believe we were there together. I swallow hard, and I hear Cara suck in a breath next to me at the sight of him.
‘Hi, I’m…
‘You must be Zoe,’ Arlo cuts her off as my twin approaches him and reaches out her hand across the bush. ‘Bree told me a lot about you.’
‘Wish I could say the same, Arlo, but I didn’t know you existed until today.’ I hear the tension in her voice. She wants to kill him for being my first heartbreak, and she doesn’t even know all the details.
‘How are you liking our little town?’ Cara asks, sensing the impending ass-kicking and trying to diffuse it, and Arlo shrugs.
‘I haven’t had much of a chance to look around yet, to be honest.’
‘Oh, you should get Bree to show you around.’ My soon-to-be sister-in-law offers helpfully . ‘She’s the police chief, so she pretty much runs the town. There’s not an inch of it she doesn’t know.’
‘I may just do that.’ Arlo’s eyes meet mine, and I have to look away, fighting to steady my breath. This is so fucking weird.
‘You should join us at the bar next Friday. We’re getting together, and you can meet our guys,’ Missy says, smiling, and Arlo grins. Good lord, that grin.
‘All of you?’ he asks, and Missy nods before he turns his attention to me, ‘your guy too?’
I feel Cara and Zoe’s sideways glances, and Missy practically bursts as she turns to look at me, her eyes wide.
‘No,’ I say, not giving him an inch, and he smirks.
‘I might see y’all there.’ He steps back as my heart races and my blood heats. ‘I need to feed my dog, so I’ll leave y’all to it. Great to meet you, ladies.’
And then he’s gone, and the girls, one by one, turn to me.
‘Really?’ I say. ‘You should get Bree to give you the tour. You should join us at the bar,’ I mimic, and they laugh as we turn and head back to my porch.
‘Breanne, that slice of prime man meat is still into you,’ Missy says, and Zoe cackles.
‘Stop it.’
‘Oh, take a bite, Bree. Please, for me,’ Cara whines, surprisingly.
‘Should I tell my brother you said that?’ I snap, and Cara shrugs.
‘Once he sees him, he’ll understand.’
‘ Jesus .’
‘He is very, very nice to look at, Bree,’ Missy says, still gazing towards Arlo’s cottage.
‘Girls, please, just let it be, okay?’ I meet all their gazes in turn.
Zoe holds my gaze, and I know I’ll be hearing more about this in private, but for now, I just want to snuggle my niece and nephew and forget that the only man who ever got close enough to break my heart is right next door.
Nineteen Years Ago
‘M ornin’ short stuff.’ Arlo grinned as he leaned back against the van, his muscular arms folded across his chest. Shit, he was hot.
‘Quit calling me that.’ I held out the plate. ‘Grandma asked me to bring you this and said to tell you there’s lemonade in the fridge.’
He took the plate and turned to place it on the hood. ‘What would you prefer I called you? Fairy? Little bug? Pixie?’
‘How about Breanne, or, since we don’t know each other, Miss Campbell.’
I popped my hip and folded my arms to match him, and he laughed, throwing his head back, and, damn, I loved that sound. I loved the way he teased me because it always ended in him laughing like that. It had been a couple of weeks of this, me trying to hate him, trying to keep up the defenses and keep him at arm’s length, and a couple of weeks of Arlo smiling and winking and laughing in a way that made my stomach jump and twist.
‘Or I could just get to know you better?’
My cheeks heated, and I knew he would notice. It’s not that I didn’t know how to talk to boys. I’d been doing just fine back in Forest Falls, but he wasn’t a boy. Arlo was a man, regardless of how old he was, though I didn’t think he was much older than me. He was drop-dead gorgeous with those stupid ice-blue eyes and that stupid sharp jawline, stupid muscles, and stupid perfect hair. He was a man, and he made me feel like an inexperienced, clueless little girl.
‘Aren’t you too pretty to be a part of some big bad motorcycle club?’ I said without thinking, and he grinned widely—shit.
‘You think I’m pretty, pix?’
‘Shut up,’ I growled, turning on my heel to stomp away. He called me pix. He’d shortened pixie and gave me a fucking nickname, and I should hate that, but something about it has me fighting a smile.
‘I think you’re pretty too, short stuff,’ he called out, laughing as I threw up my middle finger before disappearing back into the safety of Grandma’s house.
Inside, I closed the door and leaned back against it, my heart pounding in my chest as I covered my face and my smile with my hands. I shouldn’t like this guy. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it.
Ever since I could remember, that goddamned van had been parked outside Grandma Dee’s house. Random men in leather vests, dipping in and out of her house to use the bathroom or drink some of her insanely good lemonade, and it was just part of life. I started questioning who they were when I was about five but was just told they were friends of Daddy’s. Once I was old enough to know what the stupid vests meant, that these men were bikers, they were part of a club, I had more questions. Daddy told us he used to be part of a motorcycle club, and when he left to become our dad, the club wanted to look out for his parents, and that was that. Zoe just accepted it. Doug, too, and maybe the fact that they were in relationships from a young age, so they didn’t come up and stay with Grandma Dee for weeks on end in the summer or as often on weekends as I did, meant it just didn’t get under their skin like it did mine. Or maybe it was because I wanted to be a cop, and the idea of my dad being involved in anything illegal ate at me. I hated that I didn’t know all the details of his time with the Bone Roses. I also didn’t want to know. I’d heard stories, okay, fine, I’d searched and found stories, and I didn’t always like what I saw… But, then along came Arlo.
This man, with his glacial eyes and electrifying smile, was crumbling my walls to dust. I’d made a promise to myself to stay away from the stupid bikers in their stupid van, but each day I was at Grandma’s, I was fighting the urge to climb up in there with him a little more.
I heard Grandma’s chuckle and lowered my hands to find her shaking her head at me and laughing.
‘He is a handsome one, Breanne,’ she said as she walked away.
I want to head inside and take a shower. The hot weather has me feeling sticky, and I just want to climb into my clean bed with fresh, clean, cooled-down skin, but I can’t settle. He is right there, and apparently, he is here to stay, so I need to talk to him—clear the air or something.
Picking up my cell, I stand and stomp my way to Arlo’s front door, knocking with more force than necessary.
He opens the door and leans against the door frame in black sweatpants and a white t-shirt that shows a ghost of the tattoos underneath, and I take a defensive step back as though being too close to his hotness might make me forget how he hurt me.
‘Short stuff.’ He grins, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Can’t get enough of me, huh?’
I scoff and shake my head, then take a breath. ‘Look, if you’re going to be living here, I figured we should talk, clear the air.’
‘Clear it of what?’
‘Arlo, we have a lot of history.’
He shrugs, uninterested. ‘Not really. It was a hot couple of months a very long time ago.’ I wish I could stop the hurt at hearing him diminish what we had to basically nothing. I wish I hadn’t audibly gasped when he said it. ‘I’m a different person now, Bree, and I’m sure you are too.’
My lips part. I want to say something. I want to defend those people we once were and the love they shared. I just can’t seem to find any words.
‘Listen, we don’t need to hash out the past. We both moved on. Now we’re neighbors, so if you ever need a cup of sugar or you need me to keep a spare key when you go on vacation, I’m your guy, but I don’t really think we need to clear the air of anything.’
‘Okay, I just…’ the cell vibrating in my hand stops my train of thought and halts my speech as I raise it up to see the message.
Unknown: Princess, I don’t want you talking to other men. Turn around and leave. Now.
Exhaling sharply, I lock my phone and step back.
‘Bree, you okay?’ I hear Arlo ask but don’t answer. ‘Bree?’ His hand reaches out to touch my arm, and I pull back, out of reach. He’s watching, and he doesn’t like me talking to Arlo, so him touching me would be even worse, I know it.
‘Yes. I’m fine.’ I step off Arlo’s porch as I feel his eyes boring into me. ‘I have to go.’
As I reach my porch, the phone in my hand vibrates again, and I release a weak sob as I raise it up, the tears rolling down my cheeks as I read the message.
Unknown : Good girl.