Seeing is Believing (Cuttersville #3)(34)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Not until Thanksgiving, unless my mother guilts me. They say Catholics can load the guilt on their kids, but my mother is the master of Jewish guilt. If I meet a hot girl between now and then, though, my mother can forget it.”

Said the guy who had never once had to doubt his parents’ love for him.

Piper, on the other hand, was never going to leave Cuttersville.

It was the way it was.

           Chapter Eight

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” SHELBY ASKED BRADY shrilly.

He paused in the foyer and turned back to see his cousin standing with her hands on her hips.

“Really? I am not one of your kids.” He wouldn’t care that she was inquiring except that she was acting nuts. Like she might ground him if she found condoms in his backpack. “And I’m thirty-one, in case you’d forgotten.”

“What? I was just asking,” she said begrudgingly. “If you’re going to see Gran, I was going to see if you could give her some of the tomatoes from my garden.”

Uh-huh. “I’m not going to see Gran.”

“No? Alright, then.”

She was dying of curiosity, he could tell, but Brady wasn’t about to oblige her. “See you later. I won’t be back for dinner.”

With that, he left Shelby writhing in agony as to what he was doing, and he hopped in his car and backed out of the drive, the gravel crunching beneath the tires a reminder of his childhood. He had the windows open to the beautiful September weather, and the air smelled clean, fragrant. Like freshly cut grass and wood baking in the sun. It wasn’t a bad thing to grow up in a small town. He’d had a lot of freedom to roam about and he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. When had he started to feel so discontent?

He wasn’t sure. Had it just been teen angst or had it been something else? A desire to escape family? Prove something?

It was too hard to step back into the battered Converse shoes of his teen years and come up with any legitimate answers. All he knew was that when the letter arrived with his acceptance into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he had never felt so excited about anything in his whole life. Even nailing Joelle for the first time hadn’t brought quite the same heady buzz, and that was saying a lot because he’d been finessing entrance into her pants for months. When he’d been given the green light, he’d thought he’d died and gone to heaven. But not even that first full sexual experience had felt as good as knowing he was going somewhere. Getting out.

Now where was he? He drummed his fingers on his steering wheel.

Nowhere.

Right back where he started, equally as broke, and with the same piss-poor attitude. Only now he had failure weighing him down. Not only had his art ambitions come to a whole lot of nothing, but his post-art compromise career had ended as well. That left him wearing the label of big old loser, in his opinion.

Which was why he should not be spending any more time with Piper Tucker. She deserved better than what he had to offer.

But that hadn’t stopped him from calling her and making arrangements to meet her in the cemetery. As he pulled up to the Lakeview Cemetery, with nary a lake in sight, now or at any time in the past, Brady saw that Piper was already there. Of course. She was punctual. Reliable. Considerate.

No, he didn’t have anything to offer her in terms of a future or a relationship. He knew that. Had already established that in his head. So why did he keep circling that stupid thought? Because it was stupid.

But the truth was, he had something to offer her now. He had charm and skill in satisfying women. It was going to give him a great deal of satisfaction to satisfy her, something Brady suspected had never really been offered Piper. She was a giver, not a taker. Obviously he had his selfish reasons for wanting to have sex with her, but he could at least justify to himself that he was giving something to her. Regular good Samaritan, that was him.

He snorted at his own thoughts.

Piper was leaning against the weathered fence posts, wearing a flowy pink skirt that was shorter than what she had left Shelby’s in that morning. It gave a nice view of her legs, though he was disappointed to see that her cle**age was covered with a tight white T-shirt. But then he thought about how that particular shirt would look wet, like how she had looked Friday night after taking the dog out, and he was instantly hard and appeased. He didn’t always have to see the cle**age. Sometimes a little mystery was good for the soul. Since his soul needed some help, clearly picturing Piper with her br**sts pushing through wet cotton was a good thing.

It was messed-up logic and he knew it, but hey, he wasn’t hurting anyone.

Parking next to her truck, he shook his head at her choice in vehicles. He supposed it made sense for a girl raised on a farm, but Piper looked too small, too feminine, to drive such a large, utilitarian car.

“That’s quite a truck there,” he told her when he stepped out of his own car, which looked small and pathetic next to hers. It felt like his nuts had shrunk, and he didn’t like it.

She smiled. “My dad chose it. He figured if I was the biggest thing on the road I’d win in a collision.”

That didn’t surprise him at all. Danny Tucker was a practical man. But it made Piper look like a kid driving her dad’s truck without his permission. Brady was smart enough not to mention that thought out loud, however. “I always wanted a truck when I was a teenager,” he told her honestly.

“Why? So you could do doughnuts in the snow?” She peeled herself off the fence as he came closer, her hand nervously going up to her neck, in a gesture he was starting to recognize.

“No. So I could park it in a cornfield somewhere and convince a girl to do it in the truck bed with me, under the stars.” It had seemed wildly romantic and sexy to him at the time.

Now that he thought about it, it still did. He hadn’t done the dirty outside since he’d left home. It was hard to get it on in public when the only outdoor space you had was the stoop to the intercom buzzer of your apartment building. Cops tended to object to pulling out body parts on a sidewalk.

“Oh, yeah?” Piper brushed past him, giving him a flirtatious smile. “I guess that never worked out for you.”

“There’s still time,” he said, following her like a tail-wagging mutt.

“You in the market for a truck?”

“No. But I figure yours would work just fine for us.” Now that the idea had popped into his head, he was kind of liking the thought of tossing some blankets into the back of Piper’s truck and climbing in with her.