Jill Shalvis: Messing With Mac

She wasn’t upset she had to make her own way in the world. In fact, it was a challenge she appreciated.

What she resented was how it had happened, so abruptly, even cruelly, without a thought to her feelings.

Saying that her family wasn’t close was something of an understatement. Her family was selfish, all of them, including herself. They each cared more about their immediate world than each other, all of them including herself. Taylor hated that, and as her heels clicked across the bare floor, she yearned for it to be different. She yearned for more. She needed…something.

It wasn’t often she allowed herself to need, but she needed to now. Sitting on her bed, she pulled out her cell phone and called Suzanne.

“How’s my unit coming?” Suzanne asked. “Nearly ready for me?”

Taylor could hear pots and pans clattering, and smiled, feeling soothed already. For as long as she’d known Suzanne, she’d smelled like vanilla, had some sort of food stain on one part of her person or another and was always in the middle of whipping up something mouthwatering.

“Your unit is coming along,” Taylor assured her. “You’ll be opening Earthly Delights in no time.”

“I’m ready.”

“Me, too.” Hopefully she’d be right next door opening her own store as well. If she could afford to get away without a tenant’s monthly cash flow. She sighed. “I can’t wait to have you around again.”

The clanging slowed. “I thought you were enjoying your solitude.”

“Yeah, well, not as much as I thought I would, it turns out.”

Now the clanging stopped all together. “Taylor? What’s the matter?”

Damn it, she’d given herself away. Caring deeply for her friends and opening up to them were two different things entirely, at least for her. She didn’t open up easily.

Correction: she opened up never.

But complicating the matter was the simple fact that she didn’t really even know what was wrong, she only knew she felt this unsettling and vague…need. For what exactly, she had no idea. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“You sound…sad,” Suzanne accused.

“I do not.”

“Never mind. I’m coming over right after I finish up here. I won’t be but another half hour. I’ll bring ice cream, and you can tell me everything.”

Ice cream happened to be Suzanne’s cure-all for anything and everything. It usually worked, but this seemed bigger than even ice cream. “Chocolate?”

Taylor asked pathetically. “Double fudge chocolate?”

“Chocolate,” Suzanne promised. “Give me thirty minutes, hon, tops.”

Tempting, oh God, it was so tempting. But no matter how much she loved Suzanne, Taylor had never been able to tell her about her own painful past, about her distant family, about losing Jeff, and some how she knew that what she was feeling now was all tied up with that. And she couldn’t go into it, not now, not after so many years of burying it, because she was afraid that if she did, if she let it out, it would destroy her all over again. “I have a Historical Society meeting this evening.” True enough. “But maybe tomorrow, okay?”

“Promise?”

“Promise. Kiss Ryan for me.”

“I wish you’d come stay with us so you could get away from the renovation, at least at night.”

“I’m fine.”

“I just don’t like you there in the heart of downtown, all by yourself in that big old empty building.”

“No one is going to bother me because the place is so old and empty. Don’t worry about me, I’m safe.”

“Of course I’ll worry, but that won’t stop you from doing as you please. Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Absolutely.”

Taylor flipped off the cell phone, and had just slipped it back into her pocket when Mac spoke in that low, husky voice of his, nearly causing her to leap right out of her skin. “You didn’t move out.”

Damn. “Well aren’t you observant.” Slowly, on her own terms, she shifted on the bed to face him.

Big mistake.

First, sitting on the bed while he was standing right next to it made her feel a little bit shameless, a little bit…hungry.

Horrifyingly so.

And second, there was the way he was looking back at her-eyes heated, glinting with that edgy, unreadable expression that made her thighs tighten.

Did he wonder how combustive they’d be in this bed, the way she wondered? Not that she intended to follow through on that wondering, but…

“I don’t know who you were just talking to,” he said. “But they were right. It’s not safe here at night, no matter what you think.”

“Of course it is.”

“The building is deserted, and in obvious renovation. You know damn well this street gets heavy foot traffic on a daily basis. You never know who’s going to come pawing through here looking to steal supplies or tools.”

“I lock up.”

He let a rough snort.

“I’m staying, Mac.”

“There are going to be times where there’s no electricity. No water. No gas. This isn’t going to be the Ritz, Princess. This is going to be little more than camping at best.”

She hadn’t had luxuries in months, but hell if she’d admit that. Or the fact that she was slowly selling off her beloved antique collection just to keep afloat here. He thought her a spoiled princess, so be it.

What he thought was no skin off her nose.

And if he really believed she was going to back off the first challenge in her entire life, the first chance she’d ever had to prove herself, to get by on her own, he was sorely mistaken. She’d continue her spaghetti and canned tomato diet for as long as it took. She was going to do this, and do it right, and not even for him, the first man to make her feel a twinge in the heart region in ten years, would she give it up.

“I’ll make sure I have batteries and drinking water,” she said.

He stared at her for one, long, unwavering heartbeat, then shook his head. “Are you always impossible and stubborn, or is it just me?”

Trick question, that.

He certainly hadn’t been the first man to find her difficult, and she doubted he’d be the last. But only one thing mattered to her, her battered pride. No way was she going to admit she couldn’t afford to go anywhere for the duration of the renovation, not to him, not to anyone. “I’m staying, Mac.”

“Through the dirt and noise, through the inconvenience, through the danger?”

The only possible danger came from him and him alone, but she doubted he’d appreciate the irony. “Through the dirt and noise, through the inconvenience, through the ‘danger.”’

“Taylor-”

“Wow, my name,” she marveled, cocking her head. “You do know it.”

His jaw tightened. “You’re doing this, aren’t you? No matter what I say.”

“I’m doing this.” She had no choice. “No matter what you say.”

SOUTHVILLAGE’S NIGHTLIFErivaled the Sunset Strip as the busiest, most energetic area in Southern California. And yet the crowds it attracted weren’t wild or aggressive. Instead the attitude was a sort of laid-back and easygoing elegance.

The town’s founders had perpetrated this atmosphere with one goal in mind.

Wealth.

The old adage turned out to be correct-build it and they will come. The place had roared in the twenties, declined in the thirties and forties and rebelled in the fifties and sixties. True to the circle of life, it had been given a face-lift, slowly over the past twenty years, and had been turned into a gold mine.

As a result, there was never an available parking spot. Swearing, Mac circled the block. Then again. Damn it, he’d had a long day, all he needed was one little spot. Somewhere. Anywhere.