Amy Cousins - Calling His Bluff

Only in Vegas…

It has to be Vegas’s glitzy, seductive atmosphere that made Sarah Tyler trade her straitlaced persona for that of a cardsharp in a red halter dress and heels. But when the Chicago vet wakes up next to her longtime crush—with a ring on her finger—she knows she’s in serious trouble.

Fifteen years ago, Sarah was madly in love with JD Damico, her brother’s best friend. She didn’t expect to ever see him again…until the bad-boy-turned-Hollywood-photographer persuaded her to accompany him to the city of sin for a whirlwind weekend. Now Sarah thinks they’re lawful husband and wife. Only, JD isn’t a stick-around kind of guy. Worse, he no longer believes in happy endings. Or does he?

Book 3 of The Tylers

Calling His Bluff

Amy Jo Cousins

Mills and Boon E Contemporary Romance

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedication

For my sister, without whom my wardrobe would be all black, my musical education would have stopped in the ’90s and my adventures would be far less awesome. I know you scratched “I haet Amy” inside the closet door in our room twenty-five years ago, but I loved you even when you couldn’t spell. You’re my own personal rock star, Kelly. Can’t imagine life being nearly this much fun without you.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

After the second drug deal went down on the corner, with the dealer shooting hard looks her way in between casual reaches into the open window of cars that were too nice for this shitty neighborhood, Sarah’s freak-out reached epic proportions.

And J.D. still wasn’t answering the door.

She gave it fifteen seconds before she became a statistic on a news graphic about how even the cold winter weather didn’t have a suppressant effect on the violence in Chicago’s less-gentrified neighborhoods.

“Dead meat. That’s what he is.” Sarah clenched her jaw tight to stop herself from grinding her molars together. She fisted her hands at her sides and bounced a little on the balls of her feet, toes sore already in spiky high heels. She glanced back at the corner. The dealer slouched toward her, skullcap pulled low over his eyebrows. “As soon as he answers the door, I’m going to kill him.”

She stabbed a finger at the cracked plastic button of the doorbell buzzer and then pounded again on the solid steel door. Her left hand drifted down toward the nylon medical bag resting at her hip, her constant companion. Maybe she should grab a scalpel, just in case. She could find it in an instant in the precise order of her bag, even one-handed and in the dark.

And why wasn’t he answering the damn door?

“Open up before I get mugged!” she shouted at the door.

And this was the last time she’d listen to Christopher Robin Tyler. She imagined with pleasure the feel of her brother’s thick neck throttled between her hands.

If she ended up as body parts found in a Dumpster, she was going to haunt her brother forever and do nothing but call him by the two names Tyler had stopped answering to years ago.

“You’re corpse number two, Christopher Robin. I swear it.” She shook her head as she heard her brother’s words echoing in her ears. This time, she could hear the slickness of a con in his voice in the message he’d left guilting her into this crazy trip. “Remember J.D.? Didn’t you always like him? He’s back in town and his cat is dying or something. You gotta go see him right away. Like now.” Yeah, right.

Remember J.D.? Sometimes it felt like she’d never gotten over the man, much less forgotten him, which was a sorry way to feel about a guy she’d never even kissed. Except for the one time…

And as soon as she was done murdering J.D., she was heading straight back to her brother’s pub to hunt her sibling down and kill him. Let Grace try to protect him. Her sister-in-law wasn’t standing after dark in the middle of this abandoned warehouse district west of the Loop in Chicago, dressed in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit that might as well have had Mug Me written across it in fluorescent letters. She loved Grace, but fair was fair. Her brother was a dead man.

He might at least have mentioned that her old crush was staying in a wasteland. She’d imagined J.D. inhabiting an upscale, fifty-story Lincoln Park condo building. In that scenario, the “I just ducked over from a cocktail party at that chic little place around the corner” excuse could have justified the Armani. God knows she wasn’t going to admit that she’d gotten desperate enough last week to click the “Will Attend” RSVP link in one of the urban professional speed-dating emails that kept arriving in her inbox with intimidating regularity. She’d obviously ended up on a mailing list for hopeless losers who were sucking black holes of relationship doom, attracting men who hid their wedding rings. Telling her brother she couldn’t help his best friend because she was on her way to be so fucking charming for sixty seconds at a time that the perfect man would fall in love with her across a tiny bistro table was a fast lane to eternal sibling torture. She’d bypassed the Loop and headed for the warehouse district with a sigh.

If she’d also gotten a little thrill out of the idea of J.D. seeing her at her polished best, Tyler didn’t need to know that, either.

Now she just looked like an idiot. Like an overdressed veterinarian suffering a breakdown from the idea of an old, unrequited flame wanting to see her.

An uneven thumping noise, muffled but audible, came through the door.

“At last,” she muttered, and then banged on the door again for good measure. “Get a move on, poky!” She smoothed nervous hands over her long, straight dark hair and felt her stomach twist again.

Fifteen years. That’s how long she’d gone without seeing the man she’d adored with the white-hot passion only a teenager can sustain. Fifteen years of dating the wrong men and wishing secretly, in the dark corners of her heart, that J.D. Damico would come back home and sweep her off her feet.

Hence the satisfaction of being in Armani.

The threat of imminent death was putting a crimp in her enthusiasm, however.

“What’s the holdup in there?” she called out.

An enormous clatter and crash of metal followed hard upon her words, sounding like a thousand steel toothpicks being dropped on the floor of the devil’s workshop. When the curses that followed threatened to rattle the door on its hinges, she was glad she couldn’t quite make out the words.

“Whoops.”

She smiled brightly and nodded as another SUV drifted over to the curb, pulling her stalker’s attention away from her. A reprieve from dismemberment. Lovely.

“I am going—” thump “—as fast—” thump, thump “—as I can.” The words rumbled through the door, halfway between a growl and a shout. On the last word, the door was yanked inward to fly on an arc that only stopped when it crashed into a brick wall. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

Her apology died on her lips as she opened her mouth. The snotty comment had her snapping her jaws shut with an audible click. She took a deep breath and tried to remember that she’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. Waiting, too, for J.D. to see her at last as someone other than the gawky kid who tagged along after her brother all the time. In her fantasies, J.D. had been waiting for this moment, too.

Backlit as he was by a flickering yellow-gold glow, she couldn’t see J.D. clearly, but she could tell that he was on crutches and that a fiberglass cast covered one leg from the base of his toes to halfway up his thigh. He seemed to be wearing black sweatpants, the ragged edge of one chopped-off leg brushing against the top of the cast. A gray Chicago Cubs T-shirt covered heavily muscled shoulders and bunched up under his armpits where it caught on the cushioned pads of the crutches.