The Street Where She Lives

there looking extremely sorry to be doing so.

Mel’s heart drummed against her ribs, but she plastered a bored smile on her face. Garrett held out a stack of mail to Rachel. “I’m sorry to intrude,” he said softly.

“You’re not intruding.” Rachel tossed the mail to the table. “Not at all, but if you’ll excuse me-” Without waiting for an answer, she vanished.

Ben shot Melanie a long, talk-to-you-about-this-later look that made her feel about five years old, and followed Rachel out.

Which left Garrett standing there alone-tall, dark, brooding. And yummy. What would he say? They hadn’t spoken much since their hot, animalistic tryst, and never about what had happened between them. But they also hadn’t been alone in all this time.

They were now. Would he bring it up? Or maybe reach for her with those sensual hands, and-

“Why did you do that?” he demanded in a harsh whisper. “Bringing up the past, their past, like it’s any of your business?”

Shocked at his accusatory, furious tone, she laughed, but Garrett didn’t even crack a smile in return so hers slowly faded. “My sister’s past is my business.”

He pushed away from the doorway and moved across the room with grace and strength unusual in a man so tall. That she knew exactly how graceful and strong he was in minute detail, really burned.

“Not when you’re being purposely hurtful, it isn’t,” he said.

“I wasn’t.” She watched him reach into the cupboard for a mug, then pour coffee into it as if he belonged here.

She knew her sister considered him a good friend, but that she’d never managed that kind of relationship with him bugged the hell out of her. Was she such a bad person? And she resented how at home he was in Rachel’s house, all while acting as if the two of them hadn’t once been naked and wild together. “Not that I should have to explain myself to you,” she added, her words coming to an awkward halt when he handed her the steaming mug of coffee. She stared down at the drink.

“Don’t you like coffee?”

They were fighting, she thought, confused, and yet…he’d offered her a drink. Oh, wait. She got it. He wanted her again.

But nothing in his dark-blue eyes suggested sexual invitation.

What was wrong with him anyway? Men were always thinking about sex, always planning their next conquest.

Weren’t they?

“It’s not poisonous,” he said lightly, while she continued to look suspiciously into the mug.

“I take sugar and milk.”

Silently he doctored the mug, then poured himself his own. Black.

“I care about my sister,” she said a bit too defensively when he just looked at her. “I don’t want to see her hurt again.”

“If you care about her as you say, then you’d see that she’s glowing, glowing, for the first time in far too long.”

He let her stew about that while he drank. In his big hands the mug looked so small, so dainty, and she got sidetracked remembering how small and dainty she’d felt in his arms. How warm and safe. Damn him.

“I think it’s clear she’s glowing because of Ben,” Garrett said. “So excuse me if I’m being too forthright for you, but wanting to destroy that doesn’t seem like a caring, sisterly thing to do.”

She stared at him. A dentist. A nobody. “Did you just call me a bad sister?”

Considering, he drank some more coffee. “Do you really care what I think?”

She didn’t face such blunt honesty often. Her boss was never honest, her co-workers far more interested in furthering their careers than being truthful. She didn’t have a lot of close friends…okay, she had no close friends. As for her lovers, she was rarely up-front with them, or them with her, for that matter. “Look…”

“Garrett,” he reminded her, a little smile playing around his lips.

She knew his damn name! “You know what? You’re right, I don’t care what you think of me.”

“Then you won’t care that I think you’re trying to get between them for purely selfish reasons.”

Melanie stared at him. How often did a man talk to her so…so openly? Certainly, she’d never been called on the carpet like this, and she had to say it was shockingly…arousing. He wasn’t going to lie, he wasn’t going to bullshit.

Oh, man. She wanted him again. She really did. And she wasn’t the sort to deny herself. With a toss of her hair she smiled. “You think you know it all, don’t you? Well, isn’t it your lucky day.”

He cocked a brow. “Really? Why?”

“Because it just so happens I like a guy who knows it all.”

A little smile curved his lips. “Is that right?”

Oh, yeah. Males were so pathetically easy. Thank God.

He nodded once, agreeably, and…turned away? He went to the sink and washed out his mug, replacing it in the cupboard before heading toward the door.

Melanie watched the lines of his sleek back, his nice tight ass, and was reminded that his body made her mouth water.

But he was still walking away from her. “Garrett?”

“Not this time, Melanie.”

She couldn’t have heard him correctly. “Um…what?”

“A one-night stand isn’t going to be enough for me. Not with you. If you ever want more, you know where I live.” Then the cocky bastard walked out on her.

ON MONDAY, Ben picked Emily up from school. He liked to do that when he didn’t have to get Rachel to a doctor’s appointment or if he wasn’t busy taking pictures or writing. He liked picking her up in person, if only to spend an extra twenty minutes a day with her. In the car with him was the wriggling Patches pacing the passenger seat, waiting hopefully for the center of her universe to join them.

The middle school sat on a relatively quiet street of South Village, and like so many others it was a historical building. It had been one of the first schools built here in the late 1800s, though it’d been redone three times due to fires. Now a brick building with white trim, mock verandas and vines crawling up the sides, it seemed like a place out of time. Ben might have sat there in 1890 in his horse and buggy waiting for his daughter.

But then the bell rang, and kids-all pierced and dyed, wearing hip-huggers, bell-bottoms and leather, carrying laptops and cell phones-emerged from the building in droves. He had to laugh at himself, as his daughter was right in the middle of them, looking decidedly twenty-first century.

She walked out alone, but halfway down the path, someone called out to her.

Ben tensed when he saw it was a boy about her age. He wore jeans and a plain T-shirt-nothing tattooed, torn or slashed. A normal kid. He said something to Emily, to which he got a shrug as a response. After a few more moments of trying, he gave up.

Emily kept walking.

The boy watched her go with an expression on his face Ben knew all too well. Rejection. Not knowing a thing about the kid, Ben’s empathies were firmly in his court.

Emily, oblivious to the heartbreak behind her, looked up and saw Patches waiting for her. With a squeal, she tossed her backpack into the car and followed it in, grabbing the puppy and hugging her close. A love fest ensued, with lots of girl smiles and puppy kisses.

“Hey, sweetness.” Ben knew better than to lean in for his own kiss. Public displays of affection were equivalent to the torture rack for twelve-going-on-thirty-year-olds. “Don’t look now, but he’s still looking.”

She rubbed noses with the puppy. “Who?”

“The boy you were talking to.”

Horror crossed her face. “You were watching me?”

“No, I was waiting for you.”

Given her expression, she didn’t see the difference. “Dad, just drive away. Quick!”

But he couldn’t drive away. The street had come to a standstill, thanks to an accident in the intersection one