Before Jamaica Lane (2 page)

The guys, with the exception of Cam, looked a little nonplussed by her thinking. Her fiancé, however, pulled her close and stared into her eyes in a way that made my chest compress with emotion. ‘I love it, baby.’ He kissed her softly. ‘Thank you.’

A mixture of happiness and envy rooted me to the spot for a second. I adored the fact that Jo had someone in her life who worshipped the ground she walked on, but I often wondered to myself if there would ever come a day when a guy would look into
my
eyes as if there were nothing else in the world worth looking at.

Ripped from my musings by the group’s teasing of
Jo, I laughed with them all as we wandered into the warm bar together. We were perhaps dressed too formally for the casual atmosphere, but since we were a pretty laid-back bunch, not one of us was really put out by Jo’s little adventure. In fact, I think even the guys secretly thought it was cute of her.

It was
definitely
cute of her. She was a sweetheart, so when she did stuff that was unbelievably cute – like hauling our asses to a different county just so Cam could have a drink on a street with his name on it – I was never surprised.

My dad had spoken of her since the moment I’d met him. At first I’d been resentful of this little kid who’d had my dad for the first thirteen years of her life while I’d grown up with just the specter of him. My mom had never said a bad word against Dad, and being a somewhat precocious kid growing up with friends whose divorced parents were acidic around each other, it struck me as kind of odd that Mom wasn’t mad at the guy who hadn’t stuck around when I’d come along. I’d begun an investigation, wearing down my mom for months until finally she broke.

I remember how incredibly angry I was at her that she had never even told my father that I existed.

After she met Dad while she was studying abroad at the University of Glasgow, they’d begun an intense affair that Mom abruptly ended by going back to Phoenix at the end of her program. It wasn’t until she got back to the States that she discovered she was pregnant
with me. She wouldn’t confess until many years later that the reason she didn’t get in touch with my dad was because she loved him so much, and she didn’t want him coming into her life out of obligation. I loved my mom, but she wasn’t infallible. She was young and she made a selfish decision. At thirteen I couldn’t see past that for a while. It took us time to get back to a good place.

Time I would later regret ever wasting.

The fact that Dad dropped his entire life in Scotland to come and be a father to a little girl he didn’t even know he had until I reached out to him was a testament to the kind of man he was. He uprooted his whole life to become a part of mine. But in doing so he left Jo behind.

When Cam first contacted my dad about getting back in touch with Jo, I thought about how much my actions had changed her life. With a father in prison and an alcoholic mother, my dad, who was a longtime friend of Jo’s dad, had been the only stable parental figure she and her brother, Cole, had in their lives. Of course, Dad didn’t know until we returned to Edinburgh that Jo’s mom, Fiona, had become such a severe alcoholic, leaving Jo to raise her kid brother on her own. Dad and I were carrying around our own little weights of guilt because of that.

However, the guilt was eased whenever I spent time in Jo and Cam’s company. After everything she’d gone through, Jo had finally found a guy who saw how incredible
she was and treated her with the respect and love she deserved.

As I sipped the pint of lager Nate had bought me, I looked around at my friends. Here I was, surrounded by people who had been through hell and come out the other side to find the person they wanted to spend the rest of their life with.

Besides Jo and Cam, there was Joss, my fellow half American, half Scot, who fled to Edinburgh to escape an empty life back in Virginia. When I thought about all that Joss had lost, I honestly didn’t know how she’d kept going. I knew how it felt to lose my mom when I was twenty-one, but I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Joss to lose her entire family when she was only fourteen years old. From all accounts she was still pretty messed up about it when she moved in with Ellie and met Ellie’s brother, Braden. Apparently they’d had their ups and downs because of Joss’s issues, but had finally gotten through it all. They were getting married in three weeks.

Then, of course, there were Ellie and Adam. I was pretty close to Ellie because we shared a similar romantic idealism, and she’d told me the entire story of her and Adam. She’d been in love with her brother’s best friend for years, but he hadn’t noticed her until her eighteenth birthday, and he didn’t make a move on her until a few years after that, and even when he did he said it was a mistake. Apparently he didn’t want to ruin his friendships with her and Braden. There was a
lot
of
back and forth until Ellie was ready to walk away from him for good, but when my beautiful and strong friend was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Adam finally stepped up to be with her. Luckily for us all, Ellie’s tumor turned out to be benign, and luckily for Adam, he’d come to his senses just in time to win Ellie over for good. They’d been engaged for a while but had only recently told us, now that she had an engagement ring sparkling on her left hand.

I was surrounded by love, and not some cheesy, overbearing, faux in-your-face kind of love, but real, intimate, I-know-all-your-quirks-and-habits-and-still-love-you kind of love.

‘You’ve got your final dress fitting on Monday, Joss,’ Ellie suddenly said, taking a sip of her mojito.

She was sitting next to Adam, who was squashed in beside Jo and Cam in the only available booth at the back of the room. Joss, Braden, Nate, and I were standing crowded around the table, and I was cursing myself for letting Jo talk me into the four-inch heels I was wearing.

Leaning into Braden, Joss replied, ‘Thanks for the reminder. I’ll have to brace myself against Pauline’s caustic remarks.’

Cam frowned. ‘Why did you buy a dress from this woman if she’s such a cow?’

‘The dress,’ Jo, Ellie, and I answered in unison.

After having been in Edinburgh for only three months, I was honored when Joss asked me to be one
of her bridesmaids. Her university friend Rhian had come up from London for the weekend, and we’d all gone on the hunt for Joss’s dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses. After a few arguments with Ellie regarding color, Joss had settled on champagne for her girls. We’d ended up in this bridal store in New Town where the owner, Pauline, made scathing remarks about our lack or overabundance of assets.

We were too busty, too flat, too skinny, or too fat …

We were about to head out of there when Joss stepped out in a dress the bitch had recommended and Ellie burst into tears.

Yup, it was that beautiful.

Clearly, Pauline knew how to dress brides – she just didn’t know how the hell to talk to them. Or to people in general, for that matter. I’m not exactly the most confident person, and have more than my fair share of insecurities regarding my body, so I came away from that store feeling like a heifer of giant proportions.
Thank you, Pauline
.

Joss laughed and looked up into Braden’s face. ‘Apparently the dress is good.’

‘I’m getting that,’ he murmured. ‘Still, I’m more looking forward to taking it off you than anything else that day.’

‘Braden,’ Ellie bemoaned, ‘not in front of me.’

‘Stop kissing Adam in front of me and I’ll stop making sexual comments to my wife in front of you.’

‘She’s not your wife yet,’ Nate reminded him. ‘No need to rush it.’

I snorted. ‘Nate, your commitment phobia is showing again.’

He turned to me in mock horror. ‘Where?’ He patted his cheeks anxiously. ‘Get it off me.’

Brushing my thumb across an imaginary speck on his cheekbone, I reassured him. ‘There it is. All gone.’

‘Phew.’ He took a swig of his lager and looked toward the bar. ‘I’ll never get laid with that thing on show.’

‘Charming,’ I murmured.

He grinned cheekily at me and nodded toward a group of women standing at the bar. ‘Duty calls.’

He sauntered casually across the room and came to a stop beside a girl standing with her friends. The friends shimmied to the side as Nate and the girl began flirting their asses off. The girl was gorgeous, of course – beautiful features, long dark hair, creamy skin, extremely curvy. Probably a little overweight, like me, but unlike me, she carried it well. I had to say that about Nate. He didn’t really have a type – he didn’t care if the girl was skinny, plump, busty, or athletic. As long as she was cute and a woman, he was attracted to her.

As soon as Nate smiled at the brunette she was a goner.

I wasn’t surprised in the least. At five foot eleven, Nate wasn’t exceptionally tall, but with his combination of a trim physique honed by martial arts, a gorgeous
face, and the kind of charisma you just couldn’t buy, most women wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if they towered over him in heels if it meant being on his arm for the night.

Not me, though. Nate would never see me in a sexual way, so there was no point in even allowing my thoughts to go there. I think I knew more about the real Nate than most people did, so it wasn’t hard to put him in the friend zone. I could switch off whatever attraction I had to him because I knew it would never go anywhere. I’d rather have Nate in my life as a friend than not have him there at all. For all of his commitment issues and the unashamedly playboy mentality toward women, he was a really good guy underneath it all, and a really good friend.

‘Well, she’s a goner,’ Joss commented softly.

Turning toward her, I raised an eyebrow when I saw her smirking at Nate and the girl. ‘He never makes them any promises.’

She laughed. ‘No need to defend him. I know Nate always makes himself clear, but we’re talking girls here. Sometimes they just hear what they want to hear.’

‘Yeah, but Nate’s got this down to an art. It’s like a sixth sense or something. As soon as he feels even a slight change in their attitude toward him, he’s out of there.’

‘I can’t wait for someone to knock him on his arse,’ Ellie joined in, smiling wickedly in Nate’s direction.

‘Me neither.’ Jo flicked a pointed glance up at me
before looking away, and I pretended I was too stupid to understand her meaning.

I changed the subject quickly. ‘Did you guys see Cam’s new tattoo? Cole designed it,’ I told them proudly.

Cole Walker was the best kid ever. Jo had done an amazing job raising him and the best thing that had ever happened to the both of them, other than each other, was Cameron MacCabe. He and Cole were incredibly similar – both artists, both cool nerds – and Cam had commissioned Cole to design a new tattoo for him.

It was awesome.

A stylized ‘C’ and ‘J’ were hidden in the jagged vines and sharpened curlicues of Cole’s tribal design.

‘Ooh, let’s see,’ Ellie begged with a grin.

Cam shook his head. ‘It’s on my ribs.’

‘Oh, come on, it’s not like we’re going to pass out at the sight of your abs,’ Joss teased.

‘They’re good abs.’ Jo patted Cam’s stomach proudly.

Braden took a sip of his whisky. ‘Personally, I don’t want to see his abs. They might … provoke my envy.’

Adam nodded in deadpan agreement. ‘Mine too.’

‘Fuck off,’ Cam muttered, his lips curled up in amusement.

‘Oh, if he’s going to be such a spoilsport …,’ I grumbled, digging through my handbag. Feeling the paper between my fingers, I tugged and pulled it out, unfolding it to hold up the signed drawing of Cole’s design. ‘Here, this is the tat.’

As the others looked at it, Jo smiled up at me. ‘You’re keeping that?’

‘Sure, and I got Cole to sign it too.’

She laughed. ‘You’re only going to make his crush on you worse.’

I shrugged, not caring. ‘He deserves to know how awesome he is.’

‘No arguments there.’

We smiled at each other as the others complimented Cole’s talent.

Nate soon returned to the group, and the brunette returned to her friends but kept her eyes on Nate.

‘Are you not …’ I asked curiously, pointedly looking in the woman’s direction.

‘Oh, aye.’ He grinned boyishly. ‘But I told her it was my mate’s birthday and I wanted to hang out with him for a while.’

True to his word, Nate stayed with us until closing. We were all getting ready to leave when his breath whispered across my ear. ‘I’m off.’

I turned around to stare at him, spying the curvy brunette in my peripheral vision. ‘Okay. Have fun.’

He winked at me and then kissed my cheek. ‘Always do.’

After saying good-bye to the group, Nate took the girl’s hand and departed the bar. Jealousy needled at me as I stared at the empty doorway. My friend was the master of seduction. If he wanted to get laid, he could.

Unfortunately, for some of us it wasn’t nearly so easy.

Edinburgh

Dad and I came to the decision to stay in Edinburgh not just because of the empty black hole Mom’s death had left for us in Arizona – although that sure was a big part of it – but because I’d lost my job, my way, and my enthusiasm for pretty much everything. Mom had been diagnosed with cancer when I was sixteen. She fought it, but it came back three years later. When I was twenty and a junior at the University of Arizona, I took a few months out from studying to go home and be with her.

She passed away two days after my twenty-first birthday.

It took a lot of persuading from my dad to get me to go back to college, but I did, graduating with a master’s in Information and Library Science a few years late. I got a job back in Phoenix at our neighborhood public library, but three months before Cam got in touch with us our small library was closed due to lack of funding and I was out of a job.

It was really crappy timing, since I was just beginning to get back on my feet after losing Mom. The trip to Edinburgh couldn’t have come at a better time.

‘Uh, excuse me.’

I blinked out of my daze and leaned across the counter of the library help desk, giving the exasperated girl in front of me a patient smile.

The library was split into two divisions – User Services and Library and Collections. I worked in User Services, on a staff of about forty-five people. Out of those forty-five people at least nine of us had a degree in library science. Only two were librarians – my manager, Angus, and my supervisor, Jill.

Ellie’s stepdad, a professor of classical history at the University of Edinburgh, had given me a reference at the main campus library that helped me get an interview. Unfortunately, there were only so many librarian jobs to go around; I did get a job, but as a library assistant. I didn’t feel too bad about that. I was just happy to have a job in my profession.

Normally I spent either the morning or the afternoon at the help desk in the forum of the library or in the reserve section, and the other half of the day in the office doing administrative work. I preferred being front of house and interacting with the students. I’d been there only eight months, but already I was familiar with a number of students, and had a great rapport with them and my colleagues.

‘How can I help?’ I asked loudly over the chatter of noise in the forum.

Beyond the security gates at the main entrance of the library was an area around the staircase that students
had taken to using as a hangout. At the far end of the hall was the help desk, where they could manually check out their books, and beyond us was the reserve section, where they could check out material for either three hours or one week, depending on the proviso put down by the course head. The fines we made them pay if the reserve material was overdue were heavy, to say the least. We’re talking two pence a minute, which is roughly three cents a minute. Doesn’t sound like much, but if a student didn’t return the material for a week, or two, or a month … Yeah … you see where I’m going with this. My least favorite part of the job was telling students what their fines amounted to in the reserve section.

The girl leaned in close, her cheeks flushed. ‘I’m partnered with a student who has an accessible room. Unfortunately, we can’t get into that room right now because of … students and certain activities going on in there.’

When she blushed harder, I instantly understood and glanced over my shoulder at Angus, who was taking a folder out of a filing cabinet. Angus, a bald, good-looking forty-something with kind eyes and a sharp sense of humor, overheard her comment, and his lips twitched with laughter as he said, ‘Your turn.’

I grimaced but smoothed my face into perfect serenity when I turned back to the student. ‘Of course.’ Rounding the main desk, I caught up to the girl, whose whole body was rigid with embarrassment. God, I hoped I was walking into a little mild making out and
not full-on sex. Horny little bastards. ‘I take it your friend forgot to lock her room last time she used it?’

The accessible rooms were small private rooms on the first floor, with lockable doors. They were reserved for any of our students with a disability. Those students were permanently assigned a room for the semester; however, more times than I’d like to count, I’d been tasked with kicking students out of the rooms not only for using them when they shouldn’t have been but for utilizing them as hotel rooms.

Having caught two students going at it in the less-than-hygienic men’s toilet, though, I was no longer surprised by anything.

As we rounded the staircase, I had to forcibly ignore the smell of coffee floating toward me from the student café. I would so much rather have been sitting down drinking a latte than playing whatever you called the opposite of a brothel’s madam.

‘She must have forgot.’ The girl pressed her lips together. ‘But that’s not really the point.’

I supposed I had to give her that.

When we reached the first floor, I flicked my long hair over my shoulders, threw them back, and marched into the main room, striding past study booths, study pods, and a bunch of giggling students who sat across from the accessible rooms. Attempting to look like I meant business, I looked back at the girl. ‘Which one?’

She pointed to room three.

Drawing in a breath I marched forward, gripped the
handle, and thrust the door open, only just refraining from squeezing my eyes closed.

A girl squealed as a guy growled, ‘What the …’

I watched with my arms crossed over my chest as he quickly pulled up his zipper and she righted her dress. She slid off the desk, clinging to the guy, her eyes bright with laughter.

‘This is not a hotel room,’ I told them calmly. ‘And the library is not a rendezvous point.
Capice?
’

‘What are you, Al Capone?’ The boy laughed, gently pushing the girl toward me and the door.

I sighed heavily. ‘Just have a little consideration for the general public, okay?’ My eyes quickly looked him over as I raised an unimpressed eyebrow. ‘No one wants to see that.’

The girl giggled while the guy laughed me off, brushing past me.

That would make it the fifth time since I’d started working at the university that I’d thrown someone out of one of those rooms for inappropriate behavior.

And they say a library is a boring place to work.

I’d returned from my tour of duty at the help desk to work in the reserve section. Tidying up and keeping an eye on the help desk, I was thinking about what to cook tonight for me and Nate, since he was coming over to work at my flat, when Benjamin Livingston showed up.

Trying to act cool, I slipped past the bookshelves and hurried behind the desk in case he required some
assistance. A huge part of me hoped that he did, while the other part was terrified that he would.

The guy was beautiful – and not like Nate’s obvious man beauty, but in this rugged, outdoorsy, I-can-chop-wood-with-my-bare-hands kind of beautiful.

I’d helped Benjamin out a few times. Of course, I hadn’t managed to speak more than a few words to him, and they had been muttered under my breath in case they came out in the wrong order, which my words tended to do around a guy I was attracted to. From what I could tell by the resources Benjamin borrowed, he was a postgrad student in history. I usually saw him a few times a week, and lately I’d begun to really look forward to seeing him.

At six four, Benjamin Livingston was all broad shoulders, crooked smile, and light green eyes I could swim in. The last time I’d seen him, I’d fantasized about screwing him behind the book stacks. It occurred to me after he left that I may have developed a bit of a crush on him. I was trying to work through my shyness, in hopes of having an actual conversation with him.

I don’t know where my inadequacy with the male species originated. Because Mom was sick for a good portion of my adolescence, I didn’t have the same free time as other kids, since I tended to mother my own mom quite a lot. Plus, I was shy with boys at school. I had two dates in high school and only one of them ended in a makeout session that was memorable only for its sheer awkwardness

College was pretty much the same until after my sophomore year. I stupidly decided to get rid of my virginity by getting tipsy and sleeping with a senior I barely knew. It was awful. It hurt, it was awkward, and once he was done he rolled off me and left. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt more humiliated, more empty, or more inconsequential, and I took a severe hit to my confidence. Really, I’d just been so afraid to try again after that, that I didn’t. And then in my junior year it became clear that Mom wasn’t getting better, so I left to take care of her.

By the time I went back to college I was so conscious of my inexperience with men that it just made me morph from an outgoing woman into a preadolescent with a speech impairment. Moreover, the fact that I was so body conscious played a huge role in my lack of seduction skills too.

‘Hi there.’

My eyes widened a little as Benjamin approached the desk, shuffling his backpack up, his biceps flexing nicely under his blue shirt as he did so.

He smiled at me, that adorable lopsided grin. ‘It looks like I’ve got a fine to pay.’ He passed resource material over to me and I took it while I stared into his eyes.

You can do this
.

To function I was going to have to look away. It was like staring into the sun for too long.

Fingers trembling, I scanned the material and then flinched at the fine that appeared on the screen.

‘Ouch. That bad, eh?’

Did I mention he had this divine Scottish accent that made me want to lick him?

I took a deep breath, shoving that thought aside. ‘It’s overdue by three days, so that’s eighty-four pounds.’

He winced. ‘Won’t be doing that again. What kind of rate are you guys charging?’

It’s not my fault! It’s the library gods!
‘Two pence a minute,’ I replied quietly.

‘Ah, okay.’ He smiled reassuringly at me as he handed me his bank card. ‘My own fault for ignoring the reserve section rules.’

It took less than a minute to pay his fine, but that forty seconds was forty seconds during which I could have asked him anything. Instead I worked mutely and couldn’t even meet his eyes when I handed him back his receipt and card.

‘Well, thanks.’

My eyes were trained on his chin as I shrugged.
Shrugged? What the
…

‘ ’Bye.’

My own chin lifted slightly in acknowledgment.

And then he was gone.

So much for that whole conversation thing.

Turning around with a deep groan, I slowly bumped my head off the wall, back and forth, back and forth.

‘Uh, Liv, you okay?’ Angus’s voice spoke behind me.

My cheeks flushed at having been caught, and I jerked around to face my boss. ‘Just checking building stability. It’s all good.’

Angus raised an eyebrow at me. ‘How about your mental stability?’

‘That’s definitely next on the agenda.’