Full Hart, page 26
“Or a ring,” Zoe added. “I bet it’s a ring. I bet Grantpa is asking Nana to marry him.”
Anticipation became a living entity inside Joy, and her pulse began to beat loudly inside her ears. She swallowed. Was he? Was that what this was?
“Nana, open it!” Maeve shouted in her tiny almost-three-year-old voice.
Nodding, with her heart in her throat, Joy opened it.
It was empty.
What the what?
She lifted her gaze to her family, but in her peripheral vision, motion caught her eye. Grant was getting down on one knee.
Her hand covered her mouth, and the box fell to her lap. He had a beautiful ring in his fingers.
“I was right!” Zoe cheered.
“Shh,” Krista warned.
“Well, I was,” Zoe murmured, giving her mother the stink eye.
“We’ve all given our blessing,” Heath said.
“Not that you need it,” Pasha added.
“Joy Hart,” Grant started, “will you continue this wild ride of life with me? Marry me and be the missing piece of my heart.”
A smile broke free on her face. “I see what you did there. Wild and heart.”
He grinned back at her and winked. “I’ll admit, I had some help.”
Rayma waved her hand. “It was me. I helped him with the wording. Just because I switched majors from marketing to social work doesn’t mean I still don’t know how to sell people on a product.”
Joy laughed through her nose. “Thank you, dear.” Rayma smiled proudly and snuggled into her man’s arms.
Joy turned back to Grant, tears stinging the back of her eyes. Tears of pure happiness, of course. She was sixty-eight years old, and her boyfriend—a younger man, no less—was proposing to her.
“So, Mum, what’s your answer?” Rex asked.
Her head nodded so hard and so fast, she’d probably have to go see her chiropractor for an adjustment later in the week, but she didn’t care. She slid off her chair to meet Grant on the floor, and he slid the simple but beautiful diamond onto her finger.
“I’m a little hard of hearing,” Rayma said cheekily, cupping her ear. “I can’t hear nods very well. What’s your answer?”
“My answer is yes!” Joy said through a barrage of tears and a tight throat. “Very, very much yes.”
Then out of nowhere, all the adults leaped up and loud pops echoed around the room as streamer cannons were set off and the room filled with long, thin strips of colorful paper.
Another pop sounded, and Heath came into the living room with a bottle of champagne. He must have been storing it in the snow.
“So many flower girls, Nana,” Zoe said excitedly. “I can’t wait to walk down the aisle in front of you.”
Joy ran her hand over the back of her granddaughter’s curly red head. “Me either, angel.”
“This is the best Christmas ever!” Thea cheered, her little fists in bunches as she shook them.
Grant helped Joy to her feet, and they accepted their flutes of bubbly, then they gazed into each other’s eyes. “Yeah, it really is the best Christmas ever.”
He leaned in next to her ear so only she could hear. “It will be once Santa comes out to play tonight.” Then he kissed her warm, most definitely blushing cheek and clinked glasses with his soon-to-be sons-in-law and their wives while Joy stared at the Wild Man she was madly in love with. He was now her fiancé and would, very soon, be her husband.
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Whitley Cox
Book 1
The Young Sisters
NOT OVER YOU
Rayma and Jordan
Get it here—>https://books2read.com/not-over-you
Leaving KU December 24, 2023
Available everywhere Jan 1, 2024
CHAPTER ONE
Christmas four years ago …
“I’m not so drunk I can’t do the alphabet backward, but I really shouldn’t be driving,” Rayma said, throwing on a lazy smile as she held her sleeping infant niece against her chest and closed her eyes. “Plus, I’m also fine just staying right like this for the rest of my life.”
“Eve might have some say in that,” Heath, Eve’s father, and Rayma’s brother-in-law said with a chuckle deep and raspy enough it had Rayma opening her eyes and suppressing the groan in her chest. Her sister’s husband had a seriously sexy voice to go along with his seriously sexy body and even though Heath was obviously off-limits, Rayma couldn’t control what his voice did to her lady parts. “Gets mighty hungry every forty minutes or so.” He draped his arm around his wife’s shoulder, Rayma’s oldest sister.
Pasha sighed and nodded, appearing sleepy herself. “That she does.”
“Well, just pump them titties and hand me a bottle. Me and Miss Eve are perfectly happy right here.” She kissed the top of Eve’s head. “Until she shits of course, then you can have her back.”
“Of course,” Pasha said dryly.
“Where abouts in town do you live?”
Rayma glanced toward the voice. Officer Jordan Lassiter. A newbie cop with the WestShore RCMP. He worked with Krista—Pasha’s sister-in-law—who was a staff sergeant. Since he was new to Victoria and had no family around Krista took pity on him and invited him to Christmas dinner with their loud, wild, heavily laden with testosterone and alpha males family.
Joy, of course, Rayma’s surrogate grandmother or mother, but basically her fairy godmother and guardian angel, kept bobbing her eyebrows at Rayma, then angling them toward Jordan.
Rayma knew the moment she sat down at the Christmas dinner table tonight and her seat was next to Jordan’s that this was a setup.
Nana Joy had good taste. Jordan was fine. But he’d also been pretty damn quiet all night, and when he did speak, he was crazy-polite and gave off serious goody-goody vibes.
Not her type. Though maybe it should be.
She kept picking duds.
“You gonna answer the man?” Joy asked from where she sat next to her boyfriend, Grant—another very handsome man, even if he was sixty years old.
“Sorry,” Rayma said with a yawn. “Didn’t mean to be rude. I live near the University of Victoria. Gordon Head area. Close to that sexy silver fox over there.” She pointed to Grant.
Grant took her teasing in stride, smirked, and shook his head. “Not heading home tonight, I’m afraid.”
Rayma pinned her gaze on Joy. “Yeah, Nana. Get yours.”
Brock, the oldest of Joy’s four sons and the one with the hardest head grunted.
Rayma rolled her eyes.
“I live in Cadboro Bay so I don’t mind driving you home,” Jordan said. “It’s on my way.”
Joy’s dark blue eyes glimmered.
Rayma rolled her eyes at her fairy godmother then smiled before turning back to Jordan. “That’d be great, thank you.”
“We can bring your car to you tomorrow, honey,” Joy said. “Just leave us your keys.”
“Love you, Nana,” Rayma said sleepily.
Eve started to grunt and aggressively bob her head on Rayma’s chest.
“I know what that means,” Pasha said, getting up from her spot on the couch and coming to retrieve her offspring. “She starts rooting before she even fully wakes up.”
“I love that stage,” Joy crooned. “They’re such primitive little beasts when they’re babies.” She cast her gaze around the room at her sons. “Some of them never really lose that primitive side, however. They just learn to speak—though still mostly in grunts—and wipe their own asses.”
“I think we’re supposed to be offended by this,” Heath said, bouncing his seventeen-month-old son Raze, Eve’s older brother, on his knee.
“Should be,” Brock said.
“But when the shoe fits,” Rex, brother number three, said with a yawn.
“You wear it proudly,” Chase, brother number two, finished.
Everyone chuckled.
Rayma’s eyes found Jordan’s bright green ones. “I’m ready when you are.”
He nodded and got up from where he’d been helping the oldest two of the kids—Zoe and Connor—do a puzzle. “I can go.”
They stood up, said their goodbyes, and thank-yous to Joy, Grant, and everyone else, then with fuzzy feet, a full belly, and an even fuller heart Rayma slid into the passenger seat of Jordan’s white Dodge Ram.
“You can fiddle with the seat warmers here if you want,” he said, turning over the ignition, then pulling out onto the quiet road covered in a thin layer of dusty snow.
Nodding, she turned up the seat warmers until her butt was just shy of being on fire.
“Are you at UVic?” Jordan asked, after a couple of minutes of them awkwardly driving in silence.
“Yeah, business and marketing major, second year.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah.”
More silence.
Ugh.
She hated awkward quiet which was probably why she’d been called a chatterbox more than once in her life. A filterless chatterbox no less. Which was why she found herself grasping for a topic of conversation.
“So how long have you been a cop?”
“A little under a year,” he said. “Finished at the academy in Regina, then did a posting up in Fort St. John for a year, and was transferred here at the end of January, to the WestShore precinct.”
“And how do you like Victoria?”
“Expensive,” he said with an uncomfortable chuckle. “But it’s beautiful.”
“Indeed, it is.”
“Are you from here?”
Rayma shook her head. “Baltimore, actually. Moved here to be closer to my sister.” That was at least what she told people when they asked why she moved clear across the continent, particularly since she’d finished her last year of high school in Victoria while living with Joy. She stayed because Pasha moved here, but she originally moved in with Joy because she was getting into too much trouble back home, and then when she went to visit Pasha in Seattle, got into the ultimate kind of trouble that nearly killed her.
Joy intervened because that was just the kind of woman she was, and helped Rayma get through some of her PTSD and set herself back on a better path.
Now, Victoria felt more like home than Baltimore ever did, and despite how fucking expensive it was, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
“Where are you originally from?”
“Charlet Heights. It’s on the border of Quebec and Ontario. On the Quebec side though. A couple of hours outside of Montreal. Big ski hill, touristy, but otherwise small as fuck.”
Rayma snorted. That was the first bit of humor he’d used. First curse word, too. She didn’t detect any French accent, but he was probably just good at hiding it. She did that with her east coast accent. Once in a while—particularly when she was drunk—it slipped out a bit but usually people had no idea she wasn’t as west coast as they come.
“Did you like growing up in a small town?” Based on the way he said small as fuck, she was going to guess that his answer was going to be a big, fat no. But sometimes people surprised you.
For a moment, just a moment his expression turned dark. Scary dark. Had she not been looking at him, she would have missed it. A thrill raced through her at the idea of getting to peel back a layer on this mystery goody-goody cop.
Jordan shook his head. “Not particularly. Too easy for everyone to know everyone’s business.”
“Ah, it was that kind of town.”
“Sure was.”
“And did you have business for everyone to know and talk about?”
A muscle ticked in his strong, angular jaw and his throat moved in a swallow. Rayma couldn’t help but notice that the man had a very nice profile. Long-ish nose, but not too long. Sharp features, masculine, and for a guy who could not be a day over twenty-five, she could see he didn’t have any trouble growing a beard based on the shadow that was starting to form in on his jaw and chin.
Her pussy clenched.
He cleared his throat. “Hard not to be talked about in a town that size, whether your business is interesting or not.”
Well, that was a vague, beat-around-the-bush kind of answer if she ever heard one.
Which only meant one thing: he did have business that had been talked about, so as soon as he could, he got the fuck out of there and moved to a city where nobody would recognize him if he went and bought condoms at the drugstore.
“Address?” he asked, his voice coming out grittier than it had a moment ago.
“I’m on Torquay in a basement suite a couple of doors up from the elementary school.”
He nodded and turned off McKenzie onto Shelbourne.
Since it was nighttime on Christmas day, the streets were uncharacteristically quiet. The orange glow of the streetlights reflecting off the snow cast an ominous, almost purple hue to the low gray clouds. As much as some people grumbled about the snow, Rayma loved it.
She loved getting bundled up in gloves, warm socks, a scarf, knit cap and big puffy jacket and going for a walk through the fat, falling flakes at night. It was a magical time and some of the few fond memories she had about her parents and her family involved the icy flakes.
Her parents had been ridiculously strict, but one thing they allowed was no matter what time of night, when it started to snow, whoever noticed it first had to alert the rest of the house, then they all got bundled up, Rayma, her four older sisters and their parents, and they went out for a walk.
“Left side or right side of the road?” Jordan asked, breaking through her memories.
He’d turned onto Torquay and had slowed his roll to a crawl.
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Three doors up on the left. The house with the purple and blue Christmas lights.”
“Got it.” He sped up just a little, still keeping his speed to that of a snail, and pulled up to the curb in front of her place.
“Thanks,” she said, opening her door. He didn’t shut off the ignition, but he did climb out of the truck, too, meeting her around the front near the grill. “What are you doing?”
“Walking you to your door?” He phrased it more like a question. Like she was the crazy person, and it was brutally obvious what he was doing. “You’ve been drinking and this driveway is on a downslope. Krista would fire me, or one of those giants would kill me if you slipped and broke something when I could have prevented it.”
Her lip twitched, but she took his offered arm. “Well, thank you. How … gentlemanly of you.”
He snorted. “Sure, we can go with that.”
“Just self-preservation?” she grinned up at him.
His smile made her belly grow warm. “No … not completely. I genuinely do not want you to fall. But those five guys back at the house are an intimidating bunch. Not to mention their women.”
They navigated their way down the driveway until it was flat again. Rayma removed her arm from his and they walked single-file along the side of the house to the door for her basement suite. “Oh, I’d say their women are scarier than the men. Hands down. I’d take on Brock before I’d take on Krista.”
She reached for her door, but then turned to face him.
He was adorably scratching the back of his neck. “Yeah, I think I might agree with you on that.”
Nibbling on her lip, she let her eyes roam his face for a moment. “So uh …”
He scratched the back of his neck again and tipped back onto his heels.
“Did you want to come in?” she asked, her body ablaze from having put herself out there, opened herself up to rejection, and exposed her soft underbelly.
His throat moved. His lips twisted. His bright green eyes turned … apologetic.
Shit.
Before he could even say anything, she started to backpedal. “Sorry. Never mind. I’m sure you have a girlfriend. I thought … never mind. Thank you for the ride, Jordan. I appreciate it. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Drive safe. I’ll see you around.” She shoved the key into the lock and turned it, but didn’t have a chance to open the door before she was flipped back around and her back was pressed to the door.
“Shut up, Rayma,” he said, his growl dark and dangerous and sending flames licking up the inside of her abdomen. The goody-goody cop was nowhere in sight.
She swallowed and blinked up at him.
“I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m also not going to come in. I like you. But if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”
She went to open her mouth, but he shook his head and she snapped her lips shut.
No man had ever made her stop talking like that. With just a barely discernible head shake.
But something in his green eyes made her want to obey.
“My next full day off is the twenty-eighth. Do you have it off?”
She nodded.
“I’ll take you on a proper date.”
She nodded again and licked her lips, her eyes falling to his mouth and the way it moved when he spoke.
“Give me your phone.”
Like her neck was made of springs, she just continued to nod, but did as she was told and grabbed her phone from her coat pocket. She unlocked it and handed it to him.
Still bracketing her against the door with his frame—a frame she somehow hadn’t realized was so big—he used his right hand to punch his number into her contacts and send himself a text message. “Now we have each other’s numbers. I will call you tomorrow. Not text, but call.”
“Okay,” she breathed, more aroused than ever.
“It was nice meeting you, Rayma. Obviously, this was a set-up, by Joy, right?” Her eyes were still focused on his mouth and the way the lips tipped up on one side ever so slightly. “Hmm?”
Her eyes flipped up to his. “Sorry? What?”
That half-hitched grin turned into a blinding smile, a blinding smile with a splash of cockiness. “This was a set-up, right?”
