Muffin Top (Page 22)

He had her there. Damn it. “Fine. I like to win.”

“So, let’s go show that bitch queen how it’s done.” Frankie took the welcome packet from her hands and pulled out a piece of paper with the words Antioch High Decathlon written across the top. “Let’s go figure out where the 1843 cornerstone is.” When she didn’t move, he turned on the charm, lowering his sunglasses so she couldn’t miss the amusement in his blue eyes. “Come on. Play with me.”

“Have you ever see me run?! It is not a pretty sight.”

His gaze zeroed in on her boobs. “Looking forward to it.”

She sighed. “I’m only doing this under protest.”

He pushed his sunglasses back up. “Whatever it takes to help you sleep at night.”

Oh, she knew what it took to really help her sleep after last night’s epic sexually frustrated tossing and turning. However, since riding Frankie wasn’t on the list of activities for the Antioch High School reunion decathlon, she was going to have to make due with her hand and her imagination. In last night’s fantasy, they’d been back at the B and B. He’d walked out in just the towel, dropped it, gotten on his knees, and feasted between her thighs. She’d come so hard all over her fingers that not making noise had not been an option.

“You look guilty,” Frankie said with a smirk, as if he knew exactly where her mind was.

Ignoring his statement and the heat it brought to her cheeks, she said, “I know where the cornerstone is.”

She took off across the street and toward downtown at a brisk pace. Sure, it was July, but a little power walking in the heat was better than that cocky look in Frankie’s eyes right now. She just had to make sure they found every item on the scavenger hunt as fast as possible so they could get back to her dad’s house and she could hide in her room.

Jeesh. What was it about going back home again that turned a person into who they were at twelve?

Lucy was not a nice person. How did she know this? Because she was enjoying herself way too much as she watched Frankie try to charm the location of the next item, a golden wolf’s tooth, out of Henrietta Campher.

For her part, Henrietta was having none of it.

Henrietta had run the Wolfsbane Antiques and Collectibles on Main Street since the La Brea Tar Pits were trapping saber-toothed tigers, and she’d heard every tall tale and sales pitch that had come with folks selling off Grandma’s spoon collection that had been used by one famous person or another. So the more times Frankie complimented the steel of the woman’s spine or the way her hair had maintained such a striking shade of red—his favorite color—the more she rolled her eyes at him from behind her thick glasses.

“Now tell me again how you got saddled with this goliath?” Henrietta asked Lucy.

The look of shocked disbelief on Frankie’s face almost made the fact that they’d been busting their asses for the past four hours on the scavenger hunt from hell worth it.

“His name is Frankie Hartigan, Mrs. Campher,” Lucy said from her spot by the stuffed squirrel dressed up to look like a pirate. “He’s a firefighter back in Waterbury.”

From her spot behind the counter, Henrietta sipped from the straw stuck through the opening of her can of Diet Dr. Pepper before responding, “I’m not asking for a résumé, I want your meet-cute. Isn’t that what they call it in the movies?”

Just the idea of Henrietta sitting down and watching rom-coms on Netflix was blowing Lucy’s mind, making it difficult to remember their cover story. All she could think about was how embarrassed she’d be if she got outed for bringing a fake date to her high school reunion to Mrs. Campher of all people. It would be epically bad.

“This is a great story,” Frankie said, jumping in to fill the dead air. “My brother, who unfortunately did not see the light and join the fire department but instead became a cop, met a woman.”

“I don’t care about your brother. I care about her.” She hooked her thumb toward Lucy.

“I’m getting to that,” Frankie said.

Ignoring the man, Henrietta turned to Lucy. “Does he do everything this slow? I mean, some things are nice at a leisurely pace—walks, jazz, and making love, for instance—but storytelling ain’t one of them.”

Lucy would have answered, but there was no way she could do so without letting go of the laugh building up inside her, especially when she spotted the offended and confused expression on Frankie’s face. The poor guy had probably never been shot down so completely in his life.

“An asshole was hitting on her.” The words came out of his mouth in a rush as if he hadn’t been planning on saying them.

Henrietta’s eyes went wide with interest, and she turned her attention to Frankie. “Go on.”

“He was telling her she wasn’t the hottest thing on the planet just the way she was.”

No. No. No. This wasn’t good. This was the truth. It wasn’t the funny story about him spotting her crossing the street that they’d worked out. This was real-life humiliation used as story-time fodder.

She wanted to open her mouth and say something—anything—to shut Frankie up, but she was frozen like she was stuck in some kind of living dream where she couldn’t move. This was hell. This was like being in high school all over again before she’d gained the brass balls to take on the world with her chin high.

Damn. It wasn’t that you couldn’t go home again, it was that you shouldn’t because it was like returning to a time when you were your most awkward self all over again.

“So,” Henrietta said. “This man was an idiot and an asshole.”

Frankie grinned at the older woman, crossed over to the counter, and leaned on his forearms. The move wasn’t lost on the older woman, who snuck a look at the way his biceps peeked out from his T-shirt sleeves.

If he noticed, he didn’t play it up. Instead, he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I went over to Lucy and said I was sorry I was late for our date. Then I helped the asshole see the need to vacate the premises.”

“Did you punch him in the face?” Henrietta asked with a bloodthirsty expression.

Frankie shrugged his broad shoulders. “Didn’t need to.” He crossed over to Lucy and wound his arm around her waist, pulling her in close. “And that’s how I ended up as the lucky guy dating Lucy Kavanagh.”

Finding jeans that fit her ass and the dip of her waist was a problem. What wasn’t a problem? Finding the right words for almost any situation. There was a reason why she’d gone into crisis communication: she didn’t panic, and she always knew what to say.

But standing in the middle of the antique and collectibles shop next to a Queen Anne dressing table and a cabinet of paste jewelry from the 1920s, she couldn’t string a sentence together. Why? Because Frankie Hartigan was doing the unthinkable—he was taking one of those really shitty moments that was repeated too often in her life and tweaking it so instead of being at the butt of the joke, she was the center of the story’s action in a good way. She had no idea what to do with that.

Henrietta didn’t seem to be similarly affected as she gave Frankie a considering look. “Top drawer under the stuffed cock.”

Of course that’s where it was. Lucy walked over to the rooster that had fallen under the taxidermist’s knife. It was a Brahma and stood almost three feet tall, with pure white feathers accented by a smattering of black plumage that went down to its feet. It stood next to a sign that said Cock of the Walk on top of an old library card catalog cabinet. She opened the little drawer with a tiny picture of Wolfie clipped to the front and pulled out one of the gold wolf teeth found inside.