Chapter 3 – Kaityln
THREE
KAITYLN
Early Saturday morning, I stood just outside the door of my salon waiting for Tag. Throngs of New Yorkers buzzed by me while I checked email on my phone and tapped my foot. I was ten minutes early, but it still felt like I’d been waiting forever.
I wasn’t even certain why I’d agreed to another date.
No, not a date.
A meet up?
A rendezvous?
God, no, definitely not that.
Last night, when he’d ridden home with me in the cab and walked me to the elevator doors, it was all so date-like. Which only proved how long it had been since I was on a date, because last night had been a business meeting, if anything.
A reunion?
A…I didn’t even know.
All in some misguided effort by the McGraws to drag me home to save the Swinging D .
As if. First of all – I wasn’t saving something called the Swinging D.
Ugh.
Even though I knew the ranch was named the Swinging D because Duncan McGraw, the original owner, hanged the first man who tried to steal some of his land, and that man’s name happened to start with a D.
However, given the name also sounded slightly pornographic, it made me that much more stubborn.
And second, no one in that family ever took a minute to know me. I was just the oldest Calloway girl. The oddball. Smarty Sunshine. Why in the world would I go back and help them now?
Because Ethan McGraw is your brother in-law now and you love your sister?
Stupid guilty conscience.
Fine, but nobody needed me to go back home. If the McGraw family wanted to ask for some outside financial consulting, I could do that from New York. Which I would be doing for my mother and sisters.
But mostly, I’d be doing it for Harmony.
Harmony, who texted me daily after I left for college. Harmony, who, in so many ways, tried to make me feel normal when my default setting was… different.
I couldn’t say my other sisters, Bliss and Amity, and even my brother, Boone, hadn’t tried too. But they were years younger than me and so young when I left home, that we really had nothing in common.
But talking to Carter and giving him some advice was literally the least I could do for my family. I just needed Tag to understand it would be via Zoom because I wasn’t stepping foot in that town again.
I spotted his hat first. The only un-ironic cowboy hat in Manhattan, and he was a head taller than everyone around him. I watched as a group of teenage girls filmed him on their phones as he walked by.
The cowboy hat and aviators were just frosting on the cowboy cake.
He’d invited himself to my spa appointment, and because I was a little evil, I hadn’t put up a fight. This wasn’t a facial and pedicure kind of spa appointment. No. I liked things a little more…intense.
“Sunshine,” he said, with that up ticked corner of his mouth. I could see my reflection in his aviators and I schooled my smile into something a little more reserved.
“Kaitlyn,” I corrected him.
He looked up at the name over the door of the salon.
Rejuvenation Athletaspa.
“That doesn’t sound relaxing,” he said.
“It’s not.”
I could not see what he was thinking behind those glasses, and I wanted to take them off of him. “How about we go do breakfast first? Get one of those bagels everyone says are so good here.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “Breakfast is included with my treatments.”
“What kind of breakfast?” he asked. “A bacon and egg breakfast or a berries and sludge breakfast?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Am I really going to get a facial?” he asked, looking at the tinted windows and the thin elegant men and women coming out of the doors wearing big glasses and careful expressions.
“You did say you had clogged pores, but, no. There are any number of treatments you can select. But remember, you invited yourself to this, so you have to be a good sport. ”
“I’m always a good sport.”
“Then we shouldn’t have a problem.”
“I’ll just do what you do,” he said.
Oh, the fool. My treatments were…painful.
For me, time was money. So I needed the most effective treatments in the least amount of time. Which called for extreme measures.
Beauty was pain after all.
He swung open the large door of the spa and allowed me to step in front of him.
I didn’t realize how nervous I was until the smell of lavender and eucalyptus surrounded me and my shoulders lowered. Finally, I was able to take a deep breath.
Why was I nervous?
Because someone from home was visiting and that almost never happened? Or was I nervous because this was Tag, and once upon a time I had a small, tiny, insignificant crush on him?
Ridiculous. Any teenage infatuation I’d had for this man had long since been buried.
Was it because the teenager I’d had that little crush on had grown into the most masculine and appealing man I’d seen in ages?
Maybe?
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
“You look like you’re having a pretty intense conversation in your head.”
“I’m not.” I lied.
Behind the front desk stood Esme, a tall woman with caramel skin tones and the most perfect complexion in all of New York City. She was stunning, and before I could stop myself, I snuck a peek at Tag’s reaction to her .
He was checking out the marble detailing in the lobby.
“Hi, Esme,” I said.
“Ms. Calloway, so happy to have you back. And I see you’ve brought a friend.”
“An acquaintance,” I corrected her. “From out of town.”
Esme nodded. “I have your schedule ready. Your…acquaintance can choose his treatments from the menu.”
“I’ll do whatever she’s doing,” he said. He turned to watch an attendant wearing scrubs walking down the hallway to a treatment room with an IV bag.
Evil me, smiled. “Are you sure? Some of these treatments involve a little bit of…discomfort.”
“Why do you choose things that aren’t comfortable?” he asked me.
“Because they’re effective.”
He shrugged. “Am I going to have to get naked?”
I could have sworn Esme gasped.
It was the Taggert Durham effect.
Day in and day out, the most exquisite male models, famous musicians, actors and professional athletes walked through the doors of this spa, and Esme was unfazed.
There was something about Tag that just hit different.
Maybe it was all that testosterone. Maybe it was because he looked like he could lift any woman up and pin her to a wall if he wanted. Maybe it was the way he walked that signaled he could make a girl see stars.
So the idea of Tag stripping down, buck naked? Yes, perhaps I, too, shivered a little on the inside.
“Only if you wish,” Esme said. “However, most guests will leave their undergarments on. I’ll show you to your dressing rooms,” Esme said.
“Why are the massage ladies wearing scrubs? And what’s up with the IV bags?” Tag asked, as he followed me through the hallway of the dressing rooms.
“I told you this is not an ordinary spa,” I said.
“I am not here to have anything put up my butt.”
“You’ll change into your robes here,” Esme said, looking like she didn’t hear him when I knew she had to. She opened one door, then a second across the hall. “And the first treatment room is on the right. Shock and Awe.”
Tag lifted an eyebrow and removed his cowboy hat. “Shock and Awe, huh, Sunshine?”
“You insisted on coming along,” I reminded him. “And my name is Kaitlyn.”
He leaned against the doorway of his changing room, slowly unbuttoning his shirt. “Why Kaitlyn?”
I kept my eyes glued to his as if I didn’t see that slice of skin he was revealing with every button. As if I didn’t care.
Because Kaitlyn was a normal name. I went to college with girls named Kaitlyn who always seemed to have their shit more together.
Their hair behaved. Their clothes fit better. The never got zits.
I used to watch them. Studied how they could fake a smile on a dime, turn a man’s head with a smirk, or shut down an advance with a glare.
They taught me the devastating eyebrow raise.
Of course these girls weren’t always named Kaitlyn, but they became a brand in my head. A type, that if I was going to make it in New York finance, I knew I would need to become.
So, when I typed up my first resume, I used the name Kaitlyn Calloway.
When Berkley hired me and questioned why the name on my driver’s license was different, I simply said Kaitlyn was my middle name, and what I preferred to use professionally. No one batted an eye because Sunshine was a ridiculous name…and thus Kaitlyn was born.
“What’s wrong with the name Kaitlyn?”
“Other than it not being yours, nothing. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Doesn’t fit you,” he said. It threw me the way he said it. Like he knew me. Like he had an opinion and authority about who I was, and the name Kaitlyn was selling all of that short.
“I disagree,” I said, and finally broke eye contact to take in his naked chest and it was… wow. Very wow. Thick with muscle, sprinkled with hair. He looked like a man who worked hard, day in and day out, and had no reason to go to a gym.
He looked like he could lift me up and press me to this wall and not give me a choice about it.
Heat flooded me. Just the idea… all that strength. Power. That will of his…
Oh God, this was the crush, but worse.
“Whatcha thinking about, Sunshine?” he asked, his voice low, like he knew what I was thinking about and he liked it.
“I’m thinking if you’re done getting naked in the hallway, there is a robe in your room. Put it on over your underwear and I’ll meet you in the treatment room.”
That I managed to sound prissy instead of breathy and horny was a miracle.
He chuckled. “I wasn’t planning on walking into the Shock and Awe room with my dick hanging out, if that’s what you think I’d do.”
“I have no idea what you’ll do, Tag Durham” I said. “I never have. ”
I closed my own dressing door behind me and leaned against it. Jeez. Full-grown Tag was a force to be reckoned with. Suddenly, the fact that I, too, was going to be mostly naked under a robe with him during this…intense treatment… felt very risky.
Get it together, I told myself. You eat nails for breakfast and no one has ever gotten under your skin.
Ever.