A Will and a Way (22 page)

“I noticed.”

Josie’s tinkling laugh made heads turn, but she didn’t bother giving the gawkers the time of day. “Greg has the same kind of thing, but it’s quieter. More subtle.” Her smile turned oddly shy as she fiddled with her flatware. “I guess it just suits me more now. Will and I were like…fireworks. All flash and lots of bang. With Greg it’s more bonfire. Just as spectacular, but the heat is more…sustained?” She wrinkled her nose. “Was that as cheesy as it sounded in my head?”

Betty swallowed the knot of pure envy that lodged in her throat. “No. Not cheesy. Perfect.” Suddenly self-conscious, she straightened her own place setting. “Will said your mother became ill?”

“Alzheimer’s. God-awful disease.”

The succinct response was an answer in itself. “I’m so sorry.” She fiddled with her napkin. “I lost both of my parents and my husband rather suddenly. It doesn’t feel like a blessing at the time, but…”

“There’s no good way,” Josie finished for her. She smiled, but this time it was too bright and more than a little brittle. “Mom getting sick pretty much put an end to my free-wheeling days.” Propping her chin in her hand, she rolled expressive dark eyes. “So much...nothing happened after the last time I saw Will Tarrant naked. I closed my business and nearly had my soul sucked out by a leech of a corporation. Crocheted blankets for everyone else’s babies. Remained blissfully unaware as termites attempted to eat my childhood home out from under me,” she said with a rueful laugh.

Betty’s heart ached, but Josie just tossed off that metric ton of heartache with a shrug.

“Then, after over a decade and a half of perfecting my maiden aunt act, I blew it all by getting the father of the groom drunk at my niece’s wedding and blowing
him
in a bathroom stall.” Her lips curved into a cunning smile. “That was Greg, by the way. There’s nothing I like more than sparking that man’s match.”

Betty gasped, but it dissolved into a helpless giggle. Casting a glance over her shoulder to be sure no one could overhear, she stretched across the table to speak in a whisper. “Will and I…we didn’t even make it into the bathroom.”

Josie blinked then made a sharp buzzer noise. “
Errrrgh
. I’m sorry, that’s not quite enough information. You didn’t make it to the bathroom before you did what, exactly?”

Taking a deep breath, Betty tried to gather the courage to equal her new friend’s tantalizing bluntness, but she just didn’t have it in her. “We just fooled around in a dark hallway.”

A gusty sigh stirred her hair and Josie fixed her with the same stare Betty used to use on Donnie when she had to do the nightly homework probe. “How much fooling around? First base?”

Without conscious thought, Betty nodded and kept nodding as Josie motioned her through to second base, her dark eyebrows lifting with impressed encouragement as she kept on bobbing her head.

“Third? Home?”

“Third,” Betty answered firmly. “Not home.”

“So we do have things in common.” Josie snickered. “Were you at bat or fielding?”

She started to answer then realized she wasn’t exactly sure which would be the correct answer. “I was…the recipient,” she replied. “That would be fielding, right? He would have been running the bases.”

“Very nice.”

Josie beamed as the server appeared with their salads. Betty couldn’t help but marvel at the way she masked the salacious nature of their conversation with nothing more than that brilliant smile. The dazzled young man wandered off and the smile melted into a saucy grin. “Just scrumptious,” she cooed, picking up her salad fork as Betty reached for her water once more. “Tell me, did he gorge himself on the buffet or were there only finger foods?”

Betty sputtered and coughed, hurriedly covering her mouth with the heavy linen napkin as Josie looked on in wide-eyed concern.

“Oh, dear. Go down the wrong pipe?” she asked, all innocence.

Shaking her head, Betty coughed and laughed, but speech was out of the question. She watched in awe as Josie took a dainty bite of salad and chewed as if they’d discussed nothing more than swapping crochet patterns. Another full minute passed before she recovered enough to drop the napkin back to her lap and pick up her own fork. “Good gravy, how did the two of you
not
end up together?”

“Good gravy,” Josie murmured as if she’d said something worth committing to memory. Apparently satisfied that she had it filed away, she shrugged and went after her salad again. “Of course we couldn’t end up together. We’re too much alike.”

“Well, there is that,” Betty said dryly.

“That’s why Greg and I work together. He needs someone to loosen him up, and he keeps me grounded without tying me down.”

“Without tying you down? I thought you two just got married.”

“We did.” Josie grinned and wigged her ring finger to show off a glittering wedding set. “I mean, he’s helped me be me again, and I sow my wild oats with only him. Of course, I think his being friends with Will for so long kind of greased the wheels, if you know what I mean. His ex-wife was even more straight-laced than Greg, so you can imagine how tightly wound that guy was when I dragged him into that bathroom.”

Betty didn’t have to imagine. She knew exactly how hard up Greg must have been. She had been. And now look at Josie. Her skin glowed with contentment. The roses in her cheeks didn’t come from a swipe of blusher. Watching this new friend go after her salad like an assassin on a tight schedule got the wheels in Betty’s head turning at a slow grind.

What if she could convince Will to be a one-woman man for just a little while? Lord knows she didn’t want to ever get married again, but maybe if she could stop worrying about the end of the relationship so much, things could take their natural course. It was entirely possible that by the time Will grew tired of her, she might be done with him, too. After all, she wasn’t twenty anymore. She’d given up girlish dreams of a forever kind of love years ago.

She’d been raised in the land of Frito pie and football. No one knew better than a Southern woman the power of using a strong offense as a defense. But perhaps they could talk it out. Set some kind of timeline more concrete than ‘for as long as it’s working’, but less legal than ‘till death or dissolution us do part’. A month. Surely they could get the lust out of their system and start to get on each other’s nerves within a month. They could set a date, and then she wouldn’t have to fret about which of them would strike first. Still, one didn’t simply toss a lifetime of turning the tables away over Cobb salad.

“So you and Will were lovers.” She turned every ounce of Scarlett she had loose on the last syllable, drawing it out until it practically reverberated between them. Then, she pursed her lips and waited. It was an obvious prompt, but a powerful one. It was a trick her old Sunday school teacher, Miss Martha Baines, had wielded like a sledgehammer. One designed to tempt the biggest sinner to confess. “And you just happened to end up married to his best friend.” Lifting her water glass, she added Miss Martha’s patented smirky smile. “How’d you manage to pull that off?”

Josie blinked then grinned as she dropped her fork, eager to unburden her soul. “Oh, they made it easy.” She took a sip of her own water. “You’ve never met two men with such a complicated love-hate relationship. I’m telling you, if they weren’t so uber-het, I would have happily volunteered to be the filling in a T-A-S sandwich.”

Betty had no idea how to grant absolution for that particular confession, so she sidestepped. “Uber-het?”

“You’ll never meet two manlier men.” Heaving a put-upon sigh, Josie pursed her lips in an exaggerated pout. “Sadly, I’ve made them so paranoid about it they both jump if they come within less than a foot of each other. God forbid they actually touch and make all my homoerotic dreams come true.”

Heat flashed through Betty as she imagined herself fielding overtures from the two men, one smooth and subtle and the other brash and bold. She remembered the crazy fantasies Will’s desktop dirty talk stirred, and the next thing she knew, she was picturing the ultra-urbane Greg Stark wearing a brown UPS uniform. Her cheeks burned hot enough to wilt the lettuce on her plate. She stared down at the crumbles of green-veined bleu cheese on her on salad, unable to meet Josie’s gaze.

“See what I mean?”

The soft sing-song in the other woman’s voice told Betty that Josie knew exactly what she was thinking.

Clearing her throat, Betty gave up any pretense and lunged for her water goblet once more as Josie signaled their waiter.

“We’ll need a bottle of truly voluptuous red wine and that dessert I warned you about earlier,” she said when the eager young man appeared. “Two spoons, extra ice cream and whipped cream, but no cherries. We have no use for those.” Josie added a smile so sweet it screamed ‘Troublemaker’ as she handed the man the remains of her salad. “If you can somehow turn these salads into a couple orders of really crispy French fries, I’ll triple your tip and my friend here will kiss you smack on the lips.”

Betty gasped and started to protest, “Me? What? I will—”

The server, who couldn’t have been much older than her own son, grinned down at her and whisked her plate away with gratifying speed. “Yes, ma’am!”

By the time Josie returned Betty to the office, they were obviously tipsy, Greg had moved beyond agitated to aggravated, and Will was beside himself. Three hours was more than enough time to nullify a friggin’ arms agreement. He didn’t even want to know what the two of them could have talked about all that time.

Will lowered his feet from Betty’s desk but refused to rise as the two women stumbled through the door arm-in-arm and giggling like teenagers. He probably should be as annoyed as Greg was, but seeing the two of them so obviously enjoying each other’s company, he couldn’t quite muster it.

Thankfully, Greg had no reservations about charging into the fray.

“We don’t customarily take three hour lunches, ladies,” he announced as he strode from his office.

He was peeved because Josie stopped replying to her husband’s text messages an hour ago. Since then, Will had taken even more of an earful from his best friend. The harping didn’t bother Will much. After four decades of friendship, he had enough knowledge of Greg’s inner workings to know his buddy wasn’t really worried, either. He just wanted something to fret about. Greg loved fretting almost as much as he loved taking a stand and making proclamations.

“See?” Josie covered the fact that she tripped on the door rug by throwing herself at Greg. “He gets all uptight and bossy.” She beamed a smile bright enough to rival the sun as she ran an appreciative, if inappropriate, hand down Greg’s chest to his stomach, then let her fingers curl around the buckle on his belt. “And stiff.”

Greg groaned, and the women both snorted with laughter.

“I love it when you get stiff,” Josie said, tipping her face up in a blatant invitation for a kiss.

Rolling his eyes, Greg manacled her wrist and pulled her hand away from his belt. “Okay, time to go home.”

“Really?” Josie’s dark lashes fluttered. With a breathy sigh, she pulled from his restraining grasp and slid both hands up to cradle the base of his skull. “I thought you said you had
so much
work to catch up on.”

Will had to give old Greg credit. He tried icy, but it was hard for a guy to really sell it when he had a scorching hot woman wrapped around him. “I think it’s obvious to everyone you’re not about to let that happen.”

Her lips curved into a smile, and she pressed a kiss to Greg’s jaw. Having seen enough of their necking to last a lifetime, Will turned his attention to the willowy blond slinking into the kitchen area. He launched himself from the chair and caught her just as she stumbled against the doorjamb.

“Easy there, Ms. Asher.” Wrapping his arm around her waist, he turned so she’d be snuggled up against him as tight as her partner in crime was against his partner. “Have a good time?”

The pointed tips of her small breasts made their presence known through the layers of clothes between them. He slid a leg through hers, and she bowed. God, he loved the way she responded to him. He rewarded her with a nuzzling kiss just beneath her ear. She tipped her head to grant him better access and he took it. The gauzy material of her skirt bunched as she instinctively started to ride his thigh. A strangled growl caught in his throat and he went from semi-hard to super-sonic in no time flat.

“Hm? Oh yeah.” Her voice was soft and smooth as heated honey. “She’s real nice.”

“Nice isn’t the word most people associate with Josie.”

She slid her hands up and into his hair. If she hadn’t done the exact same thing to him a half-dozen times, he’d have thought the two women had spent their liquid lunch trading tips. As it was, he wanted to know exactly how loose the wine he smelled on her breath had made her lips. Or Josie’s for that matter. He leaned his head back, denying her access to his mouth. For once in his life, he wanted to talk before the kissing, but he wasn’t so far gone that he’d waste a whole lot of time examining the reasons why. She swirled a lazy pattern along the underside of his jaw then took a playful nip at his ear lobe.

“You’re one to talk. I have some messages for you here somewhere,” she murmured against his skin.

“You girls talk about me?”

“Of course.” She tipped her head back enough to squint up at him. “Do you really know a woman named Desdemona? I thought she was funnin’ me when she said it, but—”

“Stop.” Needing at least a couple answers and a horizontal surface before he was willing to be distracted, he pulled her hands from his neck and held them captive between them. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about the way she moved against him. Christ, he could feel the heat of her. “I don’t know any woman but you.”

“Mm-hmm. Good answer.” She shifted to her tiptoes, but her lunchtime love affair with a grape played hell with her center of gravity.

The top of her skull caught his jaw. His teeth clacked hard and he fell back against the counter.

Betty went along, practically turning his pratfall into porn as she rubbed against him like a cat in heat. “
D’jeet
yet?”