Opposites (Never) Attract (Calloways vs. McGraws Book 2), page 12
I expected a bit more of a fight, but not a second after I gave her the instruction, she was falling into my arms. I caught her, snugly up against my chest, as I pulled her off Shirley.
She glanced up at me, the Swinging D ball cap perched on her head, some stray hair blowing around it, and those deep bourbon eyes cut right through me.
Damn, this girl had grown up.
She turned me on in her fancy business suits and she turned me on dressed up like a cowgirl. Her brain turned me on. Her smile turned me on.
Fuck. I think I’m in trouble.
“Thanks,” she whispered, her long lashes sweeping down over her eyes.
“My pleasure,” I said, my voice rumbling through my chest. Pink climbed her cheeks and I thought about pleasuring her.
Carter cleared his throat and I caught his eye. Slowly, he arched one eyebrow, and Ethan, beside him, crossed his arms and stared at me. The message was very clear. No touching our sister.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. They weren’t going to be real pleased with my dirty mind when it came to their new half-sister. Things were seriously complicated enough. I took a step back and forced myself to drop my arms from her waist.
“I need a ride home,” she told me. “It was nice being a McGraw for a day, but confrontation with my mother awaits.”
I nodded and turned to Carter. “Had to fire Donald.”
“Fuck,” he cursed. “Drunk?”
“As a skunk. And sloppy. I finished out his work for today, but I need to keep an eye on the south pasture. We’re expecting those calves any week now.”
“Got it,” Carter said. “I’ve got parent-teacher shit today. Apparently, all three of my kids aren’t behaving in class.
“You don’t say,” Ethan drawled, under his breath.
“Zoey is only in kindergarten and she keeps taking some kid’s blanket during quiet time. The teacher put her on the other side of the room and she sneaks over when the teacher isn’t looking and takes the kid’s blanket. Like…who does that?”
It sounded pretty on par for Zoey. The girl was a menace. A sweetheart, but a menace. All of them were, to be honest. Carter had his hands full.
Mrs. Walker and Mac did a lot of the babysitting. But Mrs. Walker was starting to hint at retirement and Mac was as much a menace as those kids were.
“Anyway,” Carter finished. “I’ll head back out as soon as I can.”
“Oh, Carter,” Sunshine said. “If you’re heading into town, can you drive me back to my house?”
The Calloway house was very literally on the way. But I wasn’t ready to see her go yet.
“Nope. Carter is probably already late,” I said. Predictably, Carter looked down at his watch and swore. “Besides, I want you to tell me what this big idea is to save the ranch.”
“No. You don’t,” Ethan said. “Because we’re not doing it.”
“We’re definitely not doing what she suggested,” Carter said, removing the saddle from Gus. “It’s insane.”
I studied Sunny’s face, which seemed unperturbed.
“What is it?” I asked her, even more curious.
“I’ll tell you in the car,” she told me, with a small smile. “You’re going to love it.”
“No way,” I said, as soon as she got the world crypto out.
We were in my truck, headed towards the Calloway place.
“Yes, way,” she said. She had the window rolled down and her hand out in the breeze. She still wore the hat and looked like every country song I ever loved.
But she was nuts to think the solution to our problems was some made up fake money bullshit.
“It’s never going to happen. Crypto isn’t real. Everyone knows that.”
“Oh, crypto is definitely real. It’s just…tricky unless you know what you’re doing. Which I do,” she said. “Turn right up here.”
“Sunshine,” I growled. “I know the way to your home.”
“Right,” she said. “Force of habit.”
“Telling people what to do?” I asked, with a smile.
“No, thinking…” she shook her head. “That I am invisible in this town, you know?”
I snorted. “The Calloway Sisters are far from invisible.”
“Did you…” she stopped. Bit her lip.
“Did I what?”
“Ever date one of my sisters? I mean, it’s a small town and they’re beautiful. I imagine Harmony would have told me if she’d ever dated you, but Amity and Bliss and I are practically strangers.”
I immediately pulled the truck over to the side of the road and turned to look at her.
“You seriously think I would have dated one of your sisters, then messed around with you without telling you first?”
She squirmed and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “You said it yourself. It’s a small town. It’s not like there are a whole lot of options for…female companionship.”
“Female companionship?” I squawked. “You think I fuck prostitutes?”
“No. Wait. Are you calling my sisters prostitutes?” she shrieked.
“No,” I shouted back. “Of course not. I also never fucked them. I don’t just fuck women for the sake of fucking.”
“I know that! You dated Jenny Masters for two solid years back in high school.”
I smiled fondly, remembering my old girlfriend who’d moved to California to raise bees and babies. “I liked Jenny. And I did fuck her. A lot. But I have had relationships since then.”
“See? It’s not out of the blue that I would think you’d date one of my sisters.”
“No. It’s out of the blue that you think I wouldn’t tell you. I know it would make you uncomfortable and you’d deserve to know.”
The wind went out of her sails and it was a pleasure to see.
“That’s…nice, I guess.”
“I’m a nice guy.”
“You are,” she laughed. “How come you’re not married?”
I put the car in drive and pulled off the side of the road. “Not interested.”
“As in, you haven’t been interested in a woman enough to marry her, or you’re not interested in marriage at all?”
I shrugged and studied the road that I knew by heart.
“Not a lot of women are like, ‘sign me up’, for this kind of life. And the ones that think they are end up leaving.”
“That can’t be true,” she said. “Not every woman leaves.”
“The important ones do.”
“Are you talking about…your mom?” she said, softly.
I bristled. Yeah, I wasn’t totally oblivious to the fact that my failure to commit long term to someone might have something to do with my mom’s abandonment. But I didn’t want to go there. Denial was my friend and there wasn’t a practicing therapist in the Gulch.
“Guess we both have family drama,” she said, with a sigh.
“That we do.”
I took the left down the long driveway to the Calloway house. It was a little cabin nestled among some hills and the same creek where the boys took Sunshine today. The cabin was so small it made you wonder how five kids and two adults lived there all together without burning the place down.
And there was only one bathroom.
“I really don’t want to deal with this,” she admitted, looking at the black and white cottage with the new roof and wild garden, where she grew up. One of Monica’s sculptures that she made out of flattened Diet Coke cans glinted in the sun, keeping away the worst of the crows. And the alpacas were thankfully all fenced inside.
“Can we…” she waggled her eyebrows at me.
I shook my head and laughed. This woman was a potent combination of silly and sexy. It went to my head like moonshine. “You can’t keep putting this off with sex. Deal with your family drama and then we’ll play some more. Yeah?”
A gleam lit her eyes. “What are we going to do next?”
I leaned in, until I felt her breath across my face. The cab of the truck was intimate. Hushed. I wondered what she would let me do to her, here in front of her house. It felt like when we were this tight, this attuned to each other, she’d do anything I asked.
Anything.
It was heady, this power. Humbling.
“Feels like our orgasms have been a little lopsided,” I said.
“That’s because you-”
I put my thumb against her lips. Heavy enough to silence her, heavy enough to remind myself how soft her mouth was. How hard and rough my hands were. Her lips parted as she sucked in a breath, and I felt the damp of her tongue, and my jeans got tight.
“Next time we play, I’m going to take us some place private and you’ll get on your knees…”
A hungry whimper came out of her throat and my cock got real excited.
“I’ll let you take my cock out. Nice and slow. And I’ll let you lick me. You want to do that?”
She nodded, her eyes wide.
“I’ll let you tease me. Suck the head until I’m dying to push deep into your mouth. All the way to your throat. You think you can take that? You think you can take me in your throat, the way I like it?”
She nodded again.
“Say it,” I said.
“I’ll let you push your cock where ever you want.”
I groaned. This woman, fuck. She could give as good as she could get.
“Yeah, I’m going to tie your hands behind your back when I do this, sweetheart. Not too tight, just tight enough so you realize you can’t stop me while I fuck your delicious mouth. You understand?”
She nodded again.
“You good at sucking dick?”
She averted her eyes and the moment broke. Shit. Too far? Or maybe she didn’t know, or was self-conscious?
I got it. It was intrusive as hell. I’d dated more than one woman who’d acted like she was doing me a favor when she went down on me.
But that’s not how I liked it. I can’t imagine any guy liked it like that. A begrudging favor. I wanted a woman who got so into it, she could make herself come.
That’s how Sunshine was going to do it for me.
“I’ll show you exactly what I like and I’ll make it good for you, too,” I said, removing my thumb from her lips. “So when I do come in your mouth and you swallow every last drop I give you, the only thing you’re going to be thinking about is how badly you want to come.”
“Tag,” she breathed, leaning toward me.
“Now, get out of this truck before I change my mind and make you suck me off right here in front of your momma’s house.”
She made a low sound, a hungry growl, and I knew if I slipped my hand between her legs I could feel how hot and wet she was through the denim.
My dick pulsed with need.
I leaned over her and pulled the handle to open the passenger side door for her.
“Go on, now,” I said. “You got shit to do.”
“You’re a tease.”
“Just making you work for it, honey.”
She got out of the truck and turned to look at me before shutting the door. She still wore that hat, but her cheeks were pink and her short blond ponytail was windblown and wild. So far from the sleek, sophisticated woman in New York.
“Did you say all that stuff to distract me from the conversation I have ahead of me?” she asked.
“Did it work?” I asked her.
Her smile was pure mischief. “I’m really looking forward to the next time I see you, Tag.”
She shut the door and I watched as she straightened her back and lifted her chin.
Yeah, Sunshine Calloway was no coward. She would have dealt with her shit, whether I’d distracted her or not. But now, we were both thinking about the next time we got together.
Damn. It was going to be good.
TWELVE
SUNSHINE/KAITLYN
When I was sixteen, my dad drove me to the airport to leave for Columbia. I was sure
my family would come visit me in New York. They would want to see the iconic city, and they’d be so proud of how hard I’d worked to put my stamp on it.
Mom was scared of flying, but she would get over that, wouldn’t she? For me?
She didn’t.
Harmony had come a bunch of times over the years. She’d stayed in my dorm room the first few years, and then come for a week when I’d gotten my first job and my own studio apartment. We got rush seats to all the Broadway shows and went shopping at the second-hand shops on 7th Avenue.
Dad came a few times. Only staying a night, maybe two. I’d take him for bagels and Chinese food because he could eat his weight in dumplings. We’d walk around Central Park because he needed to see trees and not buildings, and he’d ask me questions about my work and I tried to answer him in ways he would understand.
Bliss came once. She went to the Village while I was working. Got a tattoo. Made out with a drummer for a punk band she’d convinced me to go see the night before.
Basically, I hadn’t seen her much beyond one dinner, and not again until she came home to grab her bag and head back to the airport. She’d smelled like cigarettes and bad decisions.
Mom never came.
She called. She texted. But she never came to visit me.
I found it really hard to forgive her for that.
So, because she didn’t come to visit me, I didn’t visit her. I might not have understood that was what I was doing, but underneath all the weekends at the office and the vacations I didn’t take because of work – resentment raged.
Until Dad died. A sudden heart attack at fifty-eight and he was gone. A collapsed artery. No chance to get him to a hospital in time. It was fast and they told me he didn’t suffer.
For him, I came home.
I tried to think back to that time. Had my mom tried to tell me the truth about who my father was then? I remembered her asking me to stay longer, telling me she had so much she wanted to tell me. But I’d been sick with grief and loss. Mixed with the guilt that I hadn’t come home to visit more when he’d been alive. There was always supposed to be more time.
And there was that raging resentment.
I didn’t linger after my dad’s death. I went back to the city and threw myself into work. Burying my feelings under money and success, until the only thing I cared about was making partner.
The front door to the house opened, making the scarecrow statue my mom had made out of flattened diet coke cans shimmy, pulling me from my memories. Mom and I stared at each other over three feet of cracked red brick pavers that led to the porch I’d helped my dad put in when I was in fifth grade.
The truth was, I had been a shitty daughter.
So, yeah, my mom had made mistakes. But I had, too. I could start there.
“You planning on coming in?” she asked. She sounded unsure. Worried. Part of me wanted to pounce on that feeling, make her feel worse. But that part was small and exhausted. Mostly, I was just…sad.
“Was that Tag dropping you off?” she asked, when I was quiet.
I nodded. Tag, who had filled my head with dirty, distracting thoughts so I couldn’t obsess over my confusion and hurt feelings.
Tag, who had so quickly become a safe space in this town.
“He’s a good man. Always lending everyone in town a hand when they need it,” my mother said.
She took a deep breath and I suddenly felt bad for her. How scared she seemed. Small, too. My mother was an artist. Sort of. A woman with big ideas and spotty follow through. When we were little, she’d take us for midnight picnics. She’d feed us cake for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner. She was chaos, and for another kind of kid…probably magic.
It wasn’t her fault that I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just never understood her and she never understood me.
“Well, come inside,” Mom said, opening the door. “We should just have this out.”
I shook my head and took a couple steps towards her. The world felt different in cowboy boots. I didn’t hate it. “I don’t want to have it out, Mom. What’s done is done,” I said. “Getting angry and shouting isn’t going to change anything, and you already told me what happened.”
Mom’s lips trembled and she shook her head. “Getting angry and shouting might make you feel better.”
I laughed. “I don’t know, Mom. Seems like a lot of work.”
She laughed, too, until it caught on a sob. She pressed her fingers to her lips like she was trying to keep it all in. But then it all came pouring out.
“I was young and in love. Stupid, stupid in love. I couldn’t make myself get over him. No matter how I hard I tried.” she said.
“I think what I don’t understand is…he didn’t pick you, Mom. He picked his family over you and he got married and you still…” I trailed off, wondering why she hadn’t respected herself more.
“Honey,” Mom licked her lips and seemed to search for the right words. A giant bumble bee flew around her hydrangea bush. A breeze lifted the ends of her reddish-grey curls. “I hope you never get your heart broken the way he broke my heart. It was…” she shook her head and I stepped closer again. “Humiliating. Life changing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“So, when he came back, sniffing around my door like a kicked dog, begging…begging for a chance to talk to me. To see me. To touch…anyway,” she shrugged. “It took a stronger woman than me to say no.” She stepped forward then, her eyes liquid and soft. “Yes, it was wrong, but it wasn’t a mistake. It brought me you.”
“Mom,” I said, all but rolling my eyes. We didn’t need the sappy stuff.
“I know I failed you in a lot of ways. You were…so different from me that it made me doubt myself around you. You got so old so fast that I didn’t know what you needed. I felt like I missed my chance to be important in your life. I saw how your father was with you, your real father, the man who raised you. I saw how he loved you and how you leaned on him. I thought maybe that was all you needed-”
“It wasn’t,” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I needed you, too, Mom.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice breaking. The tears that had been pooling in the corners of her eyes finally falling. She wiped them away fast, like she didn’t want me to see them.
