Lost Perfect Kiss: A Crown Creek Novel Read online

  “Come on, baby,” I begged as it choked and sputtered. I had this complicated ritual to get old Grimmy started. “Come on,” I cooed, tapping the accelerator halfway down three times before flicking into neutral at the same time I turned the key.

  My classmate, when she saw this ridiculous dance I performed every time I started my car, had laughed and rolled her eyes, but it hadn’t failed me, until now.

  “Fuck you, come on,” I whined. But Grim sensed fear. You had to have a firm hand, and a calm heart. He could look deep inside of you like some oracle of your purest intentions. Sometimes he decided you just didn’t really need to run to the grocery store.

  Thankfully, this morning Grim smiled upon me and deemed my need to leave worthy enough to choke to life. I revved his engine precisely two more times to make sure he wasn’t joking around with me, then pulled out of the driveway.

  After the triumph of getting Grim started, it almost seemed criminal that I had to turn him off again so soon. I pulled into the Kings’ driveway and contemplated leaving him running, but I couldn’t afford the gas. Not until I got my first King-sized paycheck.

  I stopped and grinned to myself as I headed to the back door of the Kings’ house. That was a good one, but there weren’t many people who shared my love of a good pun. My friends online might, but no one in person. I’d have to remember it and tell it to Abby next time I talked to her. Which might not be for another few weeks.

  I entered through the back door. Mrs. King had given me a key, and Duke, their old dog, only raised his head a curious inch before flopping back down again. “Some watchdog,” I snorted. Then I looked around. “Gabe?” I called. “It’s Everly. You ready?”

  I had only ever been inside the King house when there were people all around. They’d always thrown barbecues when the boys got home from a tour—even in the dead of winter—and as their neighbors we had an open invitation. But the house had always been full of noise and the clatter of people as curious as I was about the brothers and our town’s claim to fame. I’d never been in here when it was silent.

  Mrs. King had held her job as a part-time library clerk since before I was born, gamely smiling and answering questions about her sons before directing people to the non-fiction section. That’s where she was now. And I knew that Mr. King helped out at Andolino’s Garage whenever they had a particularly finicky car come through. Claire worked for a developer in Reckless Falls, I knew that. But I had no idea where Finn, or Beau or, yeah, Jonah might be. I hadn’t expected to be alone when I came by to pick up Gabe and take him to his physical therapy appointment. I had to trust that one of them had told him I was coming in the first place.

  The silence was thick. I felt strangely like a prowler and had to resist the urge to turn around and head right back out of the door again.

  “Gabe?” I called, more forcefully now. I poked my head into the living room, stepping around the inert, snoring Labrador that lay like a rug in the middle of the room. Back in the sunroom, I could see the sheets were thrown back on the empty hospital bed. I’d have to change those when I got back.

  “Gabe?” I said again, spinning in a slow circle in the center of the living room. The house was so quiet I could only hear little sounds. Background noises. The muffled tick of a clock somewhere. The whoosh of the heat in the vents. The faint patter of rain on the windows.

  And from above me, a thump and a muffled cry.

  I was running even before I registered where the sound was coming from. I took the stairs two at a time, landing in the unfamiliar upstairs. “Hello?” I called, throwing open each door in turn. Empty bedrooms and overstuffed closets were all I could find until I threw open the last door in the hallway.

  It thudded into something hard and unyielding.

  “Motherfucker!” Gabe cried.

  The hard and unyielding object had been his head.

  I clapped my hand to my mouth, dropped down to a crouch, and reached through the gap to the other side of the door. “Shit, did you fall?” I worried, reaching out and trying to find a pulse at his neck out of instinct.

  He batted my hand away with an angry growl. “Who the hell are you? What are you fucking—ow!” he cried again as I tried to slide into the bathroom, only to thump the corner of the door into his head again.

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him. “I’m your nurse and—“

  I slid all the way into the bathroom and trailed off, my words dying in my throat.

  There, sprawled flat across the bathroom floor, was all six feet and many extra inches of naked and vulnerable yet still strangely frightening Gabe King. Scars and tattoos decorated his torso like a roadmap, twining in a network of pathways leading down to...

  I tried to jump back but my heel hit something and I sat down heavily—

  On the open toilet.

  “Fuck!” I cried, leaping back up again. I was too late. My ass now sported a perfect “o” of toilet water.

  “Ow!” Gabe grimaced as I jostled into him. “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Lost my balance.” I did not tell him that the sight of his cock had made me literally fall over. I was a nurse. Cocks shouldn’t get me flustered. I took a deep breath and looked at it again to desensitize myself and promptly got doubly flustered. “Were you bathing alone?” I demanded, trying to mask my agitation with irritation. The toilet water was gradually seeping into my underwear. Thank god it had been flushed. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  He grimaced and hauled himself up onto his good elbow, then pinned me with eyes that were way too green and familiar. “I was thinking,” he said, through gritted teeth, “that my brother hired a nurse from next door to pick me up for PT and I didn’t want to smell like a wet gym sock when she arrived. Guess it’s my good breeding and all,” he said pointedly. “You mind grabbing me a fucking towel?” he asked as I wrested my eyes away from his fairly impressive penis once more.

  “Oh, yeah.” Some fucking professional I was. Burning up with shame, I grabbed a fluffy towel from the rack and draped it over his groin. He let out a sigh of either relief or exasperation, I couldn’t tell, and pushed himself higher on his elbow. “Here, I’ll help you.”

  “Please,” he scoffed, waving me away.

  “You have two broken ankles and five broken ribs,” I reminded him. “Let me get behind you.”

  “You can’t lift me. Look at you.”

  “I’m five foot nine.”

  “And a hundred pounds soaking wet.”

  I was a sturdy one hundred and sixty pounds and I’d thrown shot-put in high school. “You’d make a terrible guess-my-weight guy at the county fair,” I chuckled. “Stick with your day job.” I wedged myself between the door and his head. “Lift your head for me?”

  “You’re not going to be able to lift me.”

  “How about you shut up and let me try?”

  He twisted his head to look at me. “You say you’re my nurse? Thought they were supposed to have nice bedside manners and shit.”

  “I’m not actually a full-fledged nurse yet,” I snapped. And then I slipped my arms under his back and hauled stubborn, naked Gabe King to his feet.

  Chapter Four

  Gabe

  She lifted me.

  This random pissed off chick—who kept staring at my accidentally exposed cock like it had offended her—just wrestled all two-hundred and twenty pounds of me upright without the slightest grunt of exertion.

  It was humiliating. It was emasculating. It was...

  Fucking impressive.

  She twisted me and turned me and at the last minute slammed the toilet closed before depositing me right down on the lid. “Now, where are your crutches?” she asked. “All the way over here? You were trying to reach them when you fell, weren’t you? You’re lucky they didn’t land on your head.”

  “I’m sorry, but…” I said, staring at this girl who’d appeared out of nowhere—like some kind of blue-eyed, body-building guardian angel—right when I’d l
ost my fucking balance in the shower like the old lady on a Life Alert commercial. I’d literally fallen and couldn’t get up. “I should know you, right?”

  “Everly,” she said, in this resigned tone of voice. Like she was used to reminding people about who she was. “From next door.”

  Everly. The name conjured up flashes of wide eyes under a heavy fringe of bangs. A solemn, staring girl in unfashionable hand-me-downs standing on the other side of the creek while my siblings and I played in the backyard. Watching but never joining in.

  Those memories didn’t jibe with the blonde badass currently invading my personal space while I sat naked on a toilet. “So you’re my nurse now?”

  “I’m studying to be an RN,” she said with stiff pride. “I take my boards in a couple weeks.”

  The humidity in the bathroom was making little hairs fuzz up from her tight ponytail, haloing her in blonde. She had full cheeks and full lips that gave the impression of softness but her eyes were cold blue steel. There was something about them that made the back of my brain tickle. I’d seen her before, of that I was certain, but then again, of course I had, she was the neighbor girl after all.

  As if she could tell I was studying her, she stared right back. Openly, without even trying to sneak glances or be subtle about it. There was something about how direct her gaze was that made my skin heat up in a way that had nothing to do with the lingering heat of the shower. My cock stirred as if it liked the attention. “Um,” I said, angry at how vulnerable I was right now, “that’s cool and all, but can I have my crutches now?”

  “No.”

  “Are you trying to hold me hostage or something?”

  “No.” She rolled her eyes. “First I need to check your vitals.”

  “I’m naked.”

  “I’m a nurse,” she huffed. “You think yours is the first naked body I’ve ever seen?” I couldn’t tell if it was the heat in here that was coloring her cheeks or if it was something else.

  She leaned forward and stared into my eyes for a moment, then grabbed my wrist. I held my breath as she pressed two fingers to the pulse I was inexplicably hearing in my ears. I willed my cock to stay where it was and not enjoy the feel of her fingers on my skin so damn much.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she stepped back with a nod. “Now, do you remember what you were doing before you fell?”

  I blinked at her. I’d traveled the world and had crowds screaming my name. I’d had my own TV show with ratings good enough to warrant talk of a new season. But this chick didn’t seem impressed by any of that and I was surprised at how annoyed that made me. She was all business and seemed bound and determined to ignore my naked discomfort. “Getting out of the tub because I heard someone prowling around downstairs,” I snarked. “Somebody who showed up a lot earlier than she needed to.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “Mm hmm, and tell me what happened just after you fell?”

  I tightened the towel around my waist. “My nurse slammed a door into my head.”

  “Okay and do you remember why I’m here?” she asked.

  “You mean other than to give me the third degree?”

  “I’m checking for a concussion,” she said primly. “Making sure you’re not confused about recent events.”

  “Oh, recent events are pretty damn confusing, I’ll tell you that much. But no, I remember you’re supposed to take me to my first PT appointment.” I reached out. “And in order to get to it, I’m going to need my crutches so I can go get dressed.”

  “No way I’m letting you dress yourself,” she said. “You need assistance, especially with lifting your arms over your head. How many ribs did you break again?” But she handed me my crutches.

  I grimaced, scrabbling with one hand to keep the towel wrapped around my waist while trying to maneuver around her with the other. The towel fell again. “Fuck it,” I growled. “Mine isn’t the first naked body you’ve seen, right?”

  “Nope,” she said, her scowl deepening. “Now, where are your clothes? Don’t tell me you have to come all the way up here to get dressed. Why are you even on the second floor, anyway?”

  “This is where the shower is,” I said, hauling myself as fast as I could to my old bedroom.

  But she was right on my heels, scolding me like some kind of human blue jay. I swung myself into the doorway and reached out.

  “Hey!” she cried as I shut the door in her face. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Getting dressed in private?” I answered, hobbling over to my bed and taking a deep, panicked breath.

  Plenty of chicks had seen me naked since I broke up with Noelle. But every single one of them had been too busy trying to save my life to give a shit about how I looked in the nude.

  Everly-from-next-door should have felt the same way. She was another nurse, after all. But for some reason it mattered to me this time. It mattered that she saw me, scarred and crippled, weak and so out of shape that little hobbled sprint down the hallway had me feeling out of breath.

  I gritted my teeth as the crutches dug into my armpits. My ankles were screaming from the slight weight I was putting on them now.

  I’d swung my legs out at the last minute. Which saved me from slamming my head into the rock face and scrambling my brains like an egg, but left me with two shattered ankles. Pins and screws were holding them together now, and I swore I could feel those bits of metal grinding around in there. I’d just finished washing myself but the pain was already making cold sweat prickle at my hairline. I looked down at the side of my old bed.

  The two big Frankenstein boots were sitting there, staring me down like a guilty conscience. I’d graduated from plaster casts that couldn’t get wet to these monstrosities, but at least I could take them off. The bath Everly had interrupted had been the first time I’d been alone in the bathroom in months. It was pathetic how good it felt to have some privacy and some fucking dignity and...

  I heard a decidedly unfeminine curse out in the hallway. The door slammed open.

  I snapped my head up and stared at the red-faced Everly in open disbelief. “What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded, yanking the covers off the bed and holding them against my over-exposed dick.

  The expression on her face reminded me of the one my dog made when he stopped being gentle playing tug-of-war and started growling and yanking. “You’re my patient, which means you’re my responsibility,” she said, planting her hands on her hips. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you get dressed and risk falling again on my watch.” The way she said “my watch” landed like a sack of guilty bricks against my chest.

  I held up my good hand. “Seriously, Everly. I don’t need...”

  “Sit,” she barked.

  For some reason, I sat.

  She nodded. “Let’s find you some clothes.” She started yanking open drawers. “Here you go.”

  “That’s my brother’s shirt,” I said. She was pretty but she was really starting to piss me off.

  She rolled her eyes. “Who cares?”

  “Me?”

  “Fine.” She rummaged around some more. “How about this?”

  I threw up my good hand in surrender. “I haven’t worn that in ten years and I told my mother to throw it out, but whatever.” I shrugged. “Give it here.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t hand it over. Instead she stalked over to the side of the bed and stood in front of me.

  I looked up at her from where I was sitting and took in the determined set of her mouth and the little worried furrow between her eyebrows. She seemed to be scrutinizing me as closely as I was her and for a moment we just looked at each other in complete silence. Again I had that tickle in the back of my brain.

  Noelle was a chatterer. She liked to fill my ears with her every thought, a never-ending flood of words that sometimes threatened to drown me. In the years since I’d ended it, I wondered more than once if she hadn’t kept talking in order to keep me from thinking. Because maybe, if I had a chance to
catch my breath, I might have realized what she was up to behind my back.

  Everly was obviously not a chatterbox, so I just stared back at her. It was like a weird game of silent chicken. Whoever talks first, loses.

  Finally she exhaled. “Lift your arms,” she said, holding the shirt over my head.

  My brief triumph over winning the standoff was overthrown the second I tried to do what she asked me. I lifted my arms and grimaced. “That’s as far as I can go.”

  Her soft mouth screwed down into a frown. “When’s the last time you took your painkillers?”

  “I didn’t.” I raised my chin defiantly.

  “What?”

  “I’m not taking them.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Some people think so, yeah,” I said.

  She shook her head. “So you’re taking nothing for the pain of five broken ribs, a laceration, and two broken ankles?”

  “Ibuprofen.”

  “That’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Why are you being so stubborn?”

  I glanced up at her. She’d grown up next door to us but I was only noticing her for the first time. I wondered if the feeling was mutual. Being in the public eye meant it was close to impossible to know how much information anyone had about you. Had they heard of you? Were they obsessive fans or completely clueless? Or were they haters who spent time on web forums typing in ALL CAPS about how you ate babies for sport? You knew nothing about them but they thought they knew everything about you.

  Did she have any knowledge of what had gone on in my life these past few years? Did she know about my break-up with Noelle St. Lucia, the breakup of the band, my stint in rehab? My slow climb back into relevancy with a cheesy-ass reality show where I went around the world doing extreme sports?

  She knew about my accident, that much was clear, but as far as I could tell, she didn’t know anything else about me.

  And to my surprise I found that suited me just fine.