Calling His Bluff. Amy Jo Cousins

stuck his fingers in his ears and started humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

      “Aw, Grace, I was just fooling around. I don’t know if she enjoyed it or not.”

      “Well, did she stick her tongue down your throat or just sit there like a bump on a log?”

      The visceral memory of that kiss slammed into him and his stomach dropped like he’d just crested a hill at high speed. She damn near climbed me like a tree was what he wanted to say. At first she hadn’t moved and he thought that he’d crossed a line, that he’d pushed the teasing too far this time and pissed her off. But then her mouth had melted beneath his and a second later he’d felt her hands gripping his hair as fiercely as his own were pulling her up higher against him.

      Even Lana showing up in Chicago with her fantasy that they were still married couldn’t block that memory, although the hassle of dealing with his ex-wife’s efforts to track him down and lure him back as some kind of career move had complicated his life enough to be distracting.

      He’d avoided thinking about that kiss ever since that night because each time he did, he relived the entire thing in every snatch-your-breath-away detail, and he wasn’t comfortable with the fact that its impact hadn’t faded at all in two weeks. To recover, he kept forcing himself to strategize about how to convince Lana that that door was closed for good.

      Thank god Tyler was humming.

      “She definitely didn’t just sit there.”

      Grace’s “Excellent!” was drowned out by Tyler’s “Dude, that’s my sister!”

      “Shush.” Grace stopped her husband’s mouth with her palm. “So tell me, what’s the plan?”

      “Plan? There is no plan. It was just one lousy kiss!”

      Tyler chorused, “That’s right! No plan!” and punched a fist in the air as he poured water from the soda gun into Daniel’s sippy cup one-handed. J.D. shook his head and said, “The last genius step of this plan gave me these—” he yanked up a sleeve to show off the scratches where the damn alley cat had nailed him “—and still poops in my house.”

      “Hey, I just thought you’d borrow a cat. Not go all Great White Hunter on me.”

      “Yeah, well, give me a couple of painkillers and I come up with all kinds of great ideas.”

      “It was just an excuse to get her over there. I asked J.D. to talk to Sarah. The two of them always got on like secret pals when we were growing up,” he explained to his wife.

      “Okay, A, that was a decade ago.” The door creaked open, drafting cold air inside. J.D. was grateful for whatever customer would put this conversation on hold. “And, B, I just felt sorry for Sarah because she was always mooning around about some guy she liked.”

      “Mooning around?”

      The new arrival’s voice was female. And deadly.

      Yeah, he had a feeling that his gratitude that someone had walked in on this conversation was going to be very short-lived. He gritted his teeth, smiled and prepared to take his punishment like a man.

      J.D. swiveled around on his stool in slow motion, but not even one hundred and eighty degrees gave him enough time to figure out a way to take back the words that had just come out of his mouth.

      “Hey, Sarah. You look, um…” Scary, would have fit neatly at the end of that sentence. Her eyes were slits and her heeled boots clicked sharply on the floor, measuring out a straight line that brought her slowly closer to him, step by precise step. “So, figures of speech are funny things, aren’t they?”

      “I was mooning,” the words were ground to a powder between clenched teeth, “over you,” she stabbed him in the shoulder with a pointed finger he was pretty sure she wished were a knife, “you jackass.”

      “Right,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Sorry about that. Didn’t notice at the time. Won’t happen again.”

      “You’re damn right about that.” She turned to her brother. “And you! Is it too much to ask for a little sympathy around here? I’ve had an awful day.” She waved Tyler off before he could even open his mouth. “My car was hit by someone last night who didn’t leave a note, surprise, surprise. Today, two hookers told me that I should try to get a little color in my face if I want a man, and Officer Buttinski wrote me three, count ’em, three tickets because he’s got the heart of the Grinch at the start of the movie. And you—” a hand flung out like the finger of death in J.D.’s direction “—you ask for my help and then kiss me? And you can’t even call to say thanks or explain the damn kiss? So I come here for a little comfort, a little empathy, and what’s the first thing I hear when I walk in the door? ‘I felt sorry for poor, moony Sarah!’”

      * * *

      She stood in the middle of a silent room.

      Even Daniel was staring at her, jaw dropped, head braced back and a little to the side, as if braced for the next bombshell to explode. She did a mental review of her outburst and grimaced.

      “Sorry ‘bout the language, kiddo,” she whispered at him. He grinned.

      The answer to her challenge, when it came, was completely unexpected.

      J.D. rose off his bar stool, tugged on his stub of a ponytail for a second, and then held his hand out to her in a gesture that Sarah’s boiling-over brain was having a hard time understanding.

      “Sounds to me like you need to get out of town for a bit. If I say thank-you and promise to explain the next time I kiss you, do you wanna go to Vegas tonight?”

      Well, that cleared things up. Not.