Page 28 of His Southern Temptation

“So what’s your problem, Mary Sunshine?” Jack smirked over the rim of his coffee cup, his expression one of a man who’d slept soundly next to a warm, willing woman. Being a newlywed had turned his usually taciturn cousin sickeningly cheerful. Lucky was glad he’d left his gun in the truck—in his current mood he just might shoot Jack. He even had the extra bullets he’d taken from Taylor the other night.

Taylor.

Holy hell. She made him crazy. One minute all he could think about was tugging on a little nipple ring with his teeth before traveling lower to see if she tasted as good as he remembered. The next he wanted to wring her neck for putting herself in the sights of a goon for one of the local assholes he used to bust as a cop. It had been a long damn night.

“Here you go, darlin’.” The waitress plunked the plates holding his breakfast on the table in front of him, poured a cup of coffee, and placed the carafe in front of him.

“Lucky, you okay?” Beck paused from eating and gave him the doctor/patient once-over.

Screw Beck’s medical degree. He sure as hell wasn’t talking him into another B12 shot. That bitch hurt for a week.

“I’m fine. I didn’t sleep so well.”

“Well, you didn’t get laid,” Jack stated with certainty.

“And you’d know because getting some on a regular basis gives you Magic-8-Ball super powers?” Lucky took a big gulp of coffee. He placed down the cup. “How would you know that?”

“Because you don’t have the look of a guy who’s missing sleep because he was with a woman all night.”

“And what does that look like?”

“It looks like him.” Jack pointed at Beck, who blinked twice before a shit-eating grin split his face. “He either slept with a woman last night or he jumped out of something high and dangerous.”

“Both, actually.” Beck dropped his napkin on his plate, grabbed his coffee cup, and leaned back in the booth like he owned the place. “I met a woman when I went skydiving yesterday. She was here on one of those post-divorce, find-your-inner-goddess-trips and I spent the night with her. Those rooms at the Bellemeade Inn are really nice.”

Lucky shoveled his food in faster, barely tasting the eggs or the coffee that washed them down. If they started talking women he’d lose his mind, or at least the part Taylor hadn’t trashed already. She was his weak link, the one who got away but never let go. The crazy part was that they’d never really been together, done the whole relationship thing. They had never been in sync. At first she’d been too young—he’d barely noticed her except to be slightly embarrassed by her hero worship. Then, at the end of his junior year of college, he’d caught sight of Taylor in her skimpy cheerleading uniform on Main Street and rear-ended the local preacher’s wife.

The joke, it seemed, was on him.

Gone were the braces and the awkward glances, replaced by womanly curves, tempting smiles, and real possibility. Hiding his attraction nearly killed him at times—raging hormones in his early twenties didn’t help—but you didn’t hit on the little sister of your best friend. Especially when she was an innocent and you…weren’t.

A year later, hidden deep in the barn during a lake party, he’d finally given in, peeling off her clothes and making love to her with a passion that scared him shitless. It had also knocked some sense into his lust-addled brain. She could do so much better than the reckless, screwed-up second son of a local farmer who was weeks away from Marine boot camp and the dangerous life of a soldier. Taylor was a good girl in the truest sense of the word, and when he’d touched her, the last thing he’d wanted to be was good.

So he’d left her alone to live her own life. And now he wanted that life to be with him.

Beck started talking again, interrupting his thoughts. “At least the room was nice until I got a call to come bail this asshole out of jail.”

“I wasn’t arrested, so there was no bail,” Lucky said.

“Wait! What?” Jack asked, his coffee mug hitting the table with a thump.

Lucky explained the events of the night before, only leaving out the part where he groped Taylor in the maintenance closet. Jack’s expression morphed from curious, to mortified, to downright thunderous by the time he explained who Mr. Clean worked for and the look he’d leveled at Taylor.

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