Full Coverage: Boys of Fall (6 page)

“Mom, I’m taking Randi to a party in New York in two weeks.”

Teresa gave him a look he’d seen directed at his sister a million times. It said “I can’t believe how stupid you are”.

“Nolan—”

He pushed his chair back and stood. “Mom, this isn’t up for discussion. It’s a party. In New York. I’m not putting a down payment down on a house in Quinn. I’m not turning in my resignation. I’m not screwing up my future or flushing my options or potential or anything else down the toilet. I’m taking a woman I like to a party.”

“A party in New York.”

“Yes.”

“With your publishing people.”

Nolan smiled. “Yes.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

He nodded. “I do, actually.”

“What is Miranda Doyle going to talk to a bunch of fancy New Yorkers about?” Teresa asked. “All that girl knows is cars, football and beer.”

Nolan took his mother’s upper arms, pulled her close and kissed her forehead. “I happen to know they all drive cars, have heard of football and have tried beer.”

Teresa did not look reassured. Nolan closed his computer and gathered his notes.

“Where are you going now?”

“To shower for my dinner date at Randi’s.”

He heard his mother’s very heavy sigh as he headed toward the stairs.

“Well, do me one favor at least,” she called after him.

He knew what was coming. “What’s that?”

“Double condom.”

Nolan paused on the bottom step. “I’ll take six or eight. Just in case,” he shot back.

Then he loped up the stairs, grinning, as his mother yelled, “That’s not funny!”

* * *

R
andi added
a lime to her basket and started to turn away. Then grabbed another before continuing down the produce aisle. She had tequila and salt but she’d hate to run out of limes tonight.

She felt a little warmer just thinking about Nolan’s lips closing around the lime where it rested—

She turned right at the end of the aisle, and ran directly into Lacey Andrews.

“Oh, sorry!”

Lacey grinned at her. “What are you making him?”

For one second, Randi was surprised. Then she sighed. “Where did you hear?”

“Rhonda told Donna at the post office.”

“Are you stalking me?” Randi asked.

“Do you mean, did I stop by the grocery store for carrots I didn’t need because I heard you were making Nolan dinner? Yes.”

Randi accepted the inevitable. Everyone in Quinn knew she was making dinner for Nolan tonight. They probably knew about the party in New York. There was no sense in playing dumb.

“Steak,” she said in answer to Lacey’s first question.

“Good call.”

Yeah well, steak, burgers and anything else that went on the grill were her go-to’s. She was an okay cook in the kitchen, but she was pretty great on the grill.

And steak went with tequila. Probably.

“Do you know if he likes dessert?” Randi asked. Lacey knew Nolan. She and her ex-fiancé had lived in San Antonio before Garrett had died, and they’d spent some time with Nolan.

“He likes dessert,” Lacey confirmed. “But the basics—pie, cookies, brownies. I wouldn’t worry about getting fancy.”

Randi almost slumped in relief. She’d looked up some recipes for things like tortes and tiramisu but she’d been nervous about getting them right. Not that she really knew what went into making a torte. Or even what a torte actually was.

“Brownies? Really?” Pie was a little beyond her skill level too, but cookies and brownies she could do. Even from scratch. Those were a specialty.

Lacey nodded. “He likes stuff like meatloaf and spaghetti and roast chicken—normal, home-cooked type stuff.”

Well, Randi could do all of those. She was feeling better and better all the time.

“How about appetizers? Do you think I should do something there?” Appetizers around here were chicken wings and mozzarella sticks, and if you ordered both you didn’t have to worry about ordering a meal. Was the same true in New York?

Lacey gave her a smile. “No, I wouldn’t worry about it. Steak, baked potato, green beans, brownies. You’re set.”

Randi looked at the other woman, wondering if it would be awkward to hug her in the middle of the grocery store. “Really? I don’t even need to do fancy potatoes?”

Lacey tipped her head. “What are fancy potatoes?”

Randi dug her phone out of her back pocket and swiped her thumb across the screen, pulling up the recipe for roasted red potatoes with parsley. She’d never used parsley in her life.

Lacey shook her head with a smile. “No. Bake them. You’re fine.”

“Thank God.”

Lacey put a hand on her arm and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Thank you.”

Randi frowned as she slid her phone back into her pocket. “What do you mean?”

“For asking him to dinner. He’s such a great guy and I know that everyone here thought of him as kind of a nerd in high school. But he’s just so…great,” she finished, as if that was the best word she could come up with. “Thanks for giving him a chance.”

Whoa. Randi shook her head. “I’m not giving him a chance.” She sighed. “That’s not what I meant. There’s no chance.” She shook her head again. “There’s no reason I
wouldn’t
give him a chance.”

Dammit. She couldn’t even talk
about
him without sounding stupid?

“What I mean,” she said slowly, “is that I like Nolan. This is not some big favor or chance I’m taking here. I want to see him tonight and I’m really glad he’s coming over.”

Lacey smiled. “Well, he really likes you too.”

“He told you that?” Obviously there was some chemistry between them and he’d asked her to the New York party. So yeah, she figured he liked her. But did he
like
her?

And since when had they all gone back to seventh grade?

“A long time ago,” Lacey confirmed. “You’re the one he always wanted a shot with but never got.”

Randi shook her head. That definitely wasn’t right. “You’ve got the wrong girl.”

“No, it’s you.”

“No, I was…not his type.” There hadn’t been any spark between them in high school that she could recall. There had been no flirting, no hot looks, no mention of body shots.

She hadn’t actually known about body shots in high school. Probably. She couldn’t remember when she’d learned about body shots, to be honest. But she hadn’t done them in high school. She’d done other stuff though. Plenty of it. And now that she thought about it, those were the things that made her less Nolan’s type than the school-and-grades thing. She’d drunk beer and made out and snuck into places she wasn’t supposed to be and snuck
out
of places she
was
supposed to be. Nolan had studied and tutored other people. While she’d been staying out late partying, he’d been staying up late reading. While she’d been taking road trips to see live bands, he’d been taking road trips to science camp.

She hadn’t been his type because she hadn’t taken anything seriously. While he’d taken everything seriously.

Except football. There they’d switched roles. Blitzes and option plays had been serious stuff to her. Nolan didn’t know a fumble from a formation.

Lacey looked puzzled. “You don’t think so?”

“No way.”

“You’re sweet, funny, talented, beautiful. What was his type?”

Not turned on by motors and transmissions. Not neck deep in football from August to January. Not pulling a C in history class.

Nolan had known everything there was to know about World War II, the sixties, the Reagan years, countries she’d never heard of, political theories that made her yawn.

He’d filled in for their history teacher for a week when he had gallbladder surgery and they couldn’t get a sub. Nolan had covered Hitler’s rise to power pre-World War II and, interestingly, those were the only things Randi still remembered now from nine months of American history fourteen years ago.

“We just had nothing in common,” Randi finally answered Lacey. “I was taking motors apart while he was working on math extra credit. I took shop class. He took advanced-placement English.”

Lacey smiled. “Well, I’m glad you found something in common now,” she said. “Really. I know you’ll have a great time tonight.”

“Thanks.”

Randi watched Lacey move off to pick out cantaloupes. Then she headed to the meat counter. And tried to tell herself they did indeed have something in common now. And that a book about Coach Carr and a love for tequila body shots was enough to keep them both interested for one night.

What they were going to do in New York, she had no idea. But one concentrated effort to not come off as an uncultured,small-town Texas tomboy at a time.

S
teak
, baked potatoes, green beans and brownies.

He was in heaven.

Add in a beautiful girl in a short skirt who smelled like peaches, and it was heaven in heaven.

“Did your mom teach you to cook?” he asked. Randi’s mom was a nurse and her dad was an over-the-road trucker, home only two or three nights a week.

She nodded. “She tried. I frustrated the hell out of her, though.”

He took a bite of the steak she’d grilled and gave a little groan. He looked over to see her watching him with a surprised but pleased look.

“It’s good?”

“It’s really good.” He chewed and swallowed. “Why did teaching you to cook frustrate the hell out of her?”

“Because I thought it was a waste of time.”

“How so?” He took another huge bite.

“You spend an hour, sometimes more, doing it and then it’s over in like fifteen minutes,” she said. “Drove me crazy.”

“You spend hours fixing cars,” Nolan pointed out.

“Yeah, but in the end you have a running car,” she told him with a smile. “That will last and actually
do
something.”

Nolan sipped the iced tea that was sweetened perfectly. “So it’s not an attention-span thing.”

She shook her head. “If I love something, I can do it for hours.”

The temperature in the room spiked a few degrees. At least for Nolan. He had several ideas about how to keep her occupied for hours. The way she’d paused with a forkful of potatoes halfway to her mouth and cleared her throat before taking the bite made him wonder if she’d had a similar thought.

“You’re a good cook, even if you don’t really like to do it,” he commented after they’d both swallowed.

“Thanks. I got better at it, but I still don’t like to spend a lot of time on it. And there have been multiple times I’ve put something in the oven and gone out to the garage and two hours later come back to a smoke-filled kitchen and a ruined casserole.”

Nolan smiled. “You love being in the garage.”

She nodded, but her eyes were on her plate. “I get caught up. I’d much rather have dirt under my fingernails than bread dough.”

“Why do you love the motors and stuff so much?” he asked. “Did your dad teach you?”

She looked up and Nolan wondered if she was embarrassed by how much she loved the garage and working on cars.

“My dad was always tinkering with stuff and he taught me a few things in the beginning, but he wasn’t around much. I learned a lot of it by hanging out down at the shop when I was younger. I’d go by after school and take cookies in, and the mechanics thought it was cute and funny, so they’d teach me about the parts of the cars and how they all worked together. Then, when I got older, I’d hang out with the high school guys I knew that worked on cars.”

Randi had always had a reputation for liking the older guys at school. Like the juniors and seniors when she was still only in junior high.

She took another bite, watching Nolan, and he wondered if she was waiting for him to ask about those rumors.

“Did you take those guys cookies too?” he asked, unable to help himself.

She’d dated Matt, a guy four years older than her, for almost a year.

She shook her head. “Those guys taught me about cars in exchange for other things.”

Nolan chewed casually. Even as anger and jealousy began to simmer. What the hell had those guys been doing messing around with a girl so much younger? Hell, for some of them, it would have been a crime.

“Beer and cigarettes.”

Nolan swallowed and looked over at her, aware that he was gripping his fork as if it was a weapon rather than an eating utensil. “What?”

“My parents weren’t around much and with Dad out on the road, he never remembered how many beers he had left in the fridge or cartons of cigarettes he had in the cabinet. So I was easily able to take the boys stuff in exchange for them letting me help rebuild cars.”

Nolan wiped his mouth and turned to drape his arm over the back of the chair. “That’s all Matt wanted?” he asked pointedly.

“Oh, Matt.” She nodded. “No, I gave Matt more than that. But not in exchange for working on cars.”

“In exchange for what then?”

“You mean what did
I
get in exchange for letting him round the bases with me?” she asked.

There was a glint of mischief in her eyes that made Nolan certain she didn’t feel like a victim in any way. “Yeah, what did you get?”

“I learned all about French kissing and how great having a guy’s hands on me felt and how to put a condom on the right way and that sex could be really fun and great.”

Nolan sat blinking at her.

Randi smiled. “I know now that I’m really lucky. Matt actually loved me, and he was really gentle and sweet and…good at it. All of my sexual firsts were with him, and they were great. I know now that’s unusual and not all girls can say that.” She took a long drink of her tea, watching Nolan over the edge of the glass. “By the way, I’ve since thanked Matt for that.”

Matt still lived in Quinn. He was married to a girl who graduated in the class above Randi and Nolan and they had four kids.

Nolan felt a strange emotion go through him, thinking about Matt and Randi.

Gratitude.

Not jealousy, not judgement, not indignation. Gratitude that it had been Matt to be Randi’s first everything. Which was crazy, of course. He was
grateful
that Matt had treated Randi right all those years ago? Long before she was
his
…what? Randi wasn’t his anything—then or now.

Still, it was definitely gratitude. He couldn’t have handled the idea that Randi would have been used or manipulated by an older guy.

If she had, he would have had to confront Matt. And that may not have ended well. For one, Matt was well liked in Quinn. Starting something with him wouldn’t have endeared Nolan, now the outsider, to anyone. For another, Matt was a rancher. He worked outside with his hands. Nolan sat at a desk behind a computer. He would have been hurting the next day, for sure.

“So it was good?” he finally asked when he found his voice.

She nodded. “I was young. He was a lot older. That maybe wasn’t a great setup. My dad would have come unglued if he’d known. But…” She shrugged. “It was good. Matt treated me well, I liked him, and I was able to tell my friends all about sex, and I got all the awkward first-time stuff out of the way.”

Don’t ask. Do not ask that question
. “Awkward first-time stuff like what?”

She shrugged. “Figuring out what to do with the condom after? What do you
say
after? Is it okay to tell him that you want him to do more of something? Is it okay to tell him you want him to do less of something else? Can I touch him there? How does it feel if he touches me there? Am I doing the blowjob right? What if I do swallow?” She sipped her tea again. “All of that usual stuff.”

Nolan stared at her. Those were all excellent questions. The insight that women thought all those things was fascinating. But hearing Randi talk so casually about sex, so…confidently…was a major turn-on. Because she was definitely confident about it. And matter-of-fact. And it struck him that that was new.

Randi didn’t talk to him confidently. Until today when they’d been talking about football. And now, about sex.

Why wasn’t she always confident talking to him?

But that was it. He knew it. Now that it had occurred to him, he realized that all of those times over the years when their conversations went wacky and she seemed fidgety around him, it was because she was feeling uncomfortable.

He hated that.

And he was kind of amazed by it. Why was Randi Doyle uncomfortable around
him
?

Nolan took a deep breath and set his fork down. “So you figured everything out with Matt?”

She nodded. “Pretty much. I figured out what I like, what I don’t, how to do certain things, how to not do other things.”

Damn, he wanted to know every single thing she’d figured out.

“I like to think that I helped him get better too,” she added. “He had a lot of experience when I met him, but practice makes perfect, you know.” She sipped again.

Nolan shook his head. She was…surprising. In so many ways. He thought he’d known her, or at least all about her. He’d known her his whole life. He’d been fascinated by her for years. But he realized that he knew very little, actually. He knew what was on the surface—she was a beautiful, sweet girl with a wild streak who knew cars and football, had a reputation for liking bad boys, and who hadn’t taken school very seriously. Which hadn’t mattered; she owned her own business now and drew customers from a huge radius because there didn’t exist a machine with a motor she couldn’t fix.

But there was more underneath, stories that he’d never heard, facts he’d never guessed. And he wanted them all.

“So cookies and blow jobs,” he said casually. “Those are your specialties.”

She wasn’t offended. She didn’t even look surprised. She grinned. “And transmissions.”

Of course.

Randi was…a new story, a lead he had to follow, an in-depth investigation he had to conduct.

“But you’re best at transmissions?” he asked, leaning back in his chair, settling in for a long period of discovery. He loved this part of a new story—the interview, the wide open questions, the possibility of uncovering something that neither of them was expecting.

She gave him a look. “I didn’t say that.”

“You’re widely known as the best mechanic in five counties.”

She nodded. “Because I don’t advertise the cookies and blow jobs. Or get paid for them.”

“Right. So those are more like a hobby.”

She laughed. “Something like that.”

Nolan again appreciated how comfortable she seemed. He decided to test a theory. “I was thinking when we go to New York that maybe you’d be interested in Broadway. I could get us tickets for any show.”

Something in her eyes changed immediately. “I don’t know much about Broadway.”

“Or we could go to a few of the museums.”

She shrugged. “I can’t take too many days off. Maybe we should just go for the party.”

“And the shopping,” he said, catching on immediately to what was going on.

“I can get something before we go,” she said. “Just give me an idea of what I might need.”

“Somewhere around here sells cocktail dresses?” Nolan asked, knowing that was not the case. She’d have to go to San Antonio at least.

“I can get something online.” Randi pulled her foot up onto her seat and wrapped her arms around her leg. “Will we be walking a lot that night? I’d love to do heels but not if there’s miles to go on foot.”

He wanted her to wear heels. High, sexy, strappy heels. And a short dress that would show off her legs. And he wanted her hair up so that after the party, back at the hotel room, he could slowly take it down and run his fingers through it.

And he knew all of that sounded domineering and like he knew far too much about heels and dresses. But he’d been to enough of these parties now to know what he liked, and he wanted to make Randi feel like a princess. Deep down, all women loved to be pampered, didn’t they? Even the ones who actually knew the difference between a lug nut and…other kinds of nuts.

“We’ll have a car that will drop us off right in front,” he told her. Even if he didn’t want her in heels—which he really did—it was cold in New York. He couldn’t make his Texas girl walk in Manhattan in February.

“A taxi?” she asked, almost looking excited.

“A limo.” He was going to do this right.

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed.

“You want to ride in a cab?”

“Well, it’s one of the things that you think of when you think of New York,” she said. “And I’ve never been in a cab.”

“Okay, then we’ll take a cab when we go shopping,” he said.

“And can we have a street hot dog?”

“Um, sure.” Cabs and hot dogs? She certainly wasn’t demanding.

“The Rangers are in town while we’re there,” she said.

The Rangers. That meant nothing to Nolan. “Football?”

“Hockey.”

Hockey. Something he knew even less about than football. But Randi loved her sports, and if he was going to get her dressed up and eating crab puffs, then he could watch guys skate around for a couple of hours he supposed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She gave him a bright smile, and Nolan realized that there was very little Randi couldn’t get from him with that look on her face.

“Do you know anything about hockey?” she asked.

“Is that the one with the black and white ball?” he asked, teasing.

She laughed. “Okay, so we’ll each need a tutorial before the trip. You need to know about hockey and I need to know what to expect at a party like this.”

“Guess we’ll have to see each other again before that.”

“Well, I hope so.”

They sat smiling at each other for a long moment.

Finally, Randi said, “You want to have dessert on the couch?”

He most definitely wanted to have dessert on the couch. Her. She was all the sweetness he needed. And he wanted to have her on the couch. Then on the floor. Then maybe against the wall.

Something must have shown in his face because she said softly, “I have brownies.”

“I love—”

“Or tequila.”

So he wasn’t the only one thinking about an alternate dessert.

Nolan stopped and pulled a breath in through his nose. He’d known that Randi had dated a lot of guys. Rumor had it that she’d been—as much as he hated the term—easy. Now, he realized that she’d simply owned her sexuality early. She clearly liked sex and was confident about it. Again, he was stupidly grateful to Matt for making it a positive thing for her. Nolan knew, somehow, that every physical encounter for Randi had been consensual. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d seduced at least half the guys she’d been with.

But he didn’t want her to think that this was all there was. A book, a party and sex. He wanted more than that from her.

“I love brownies,” he told her.

She studied his eyes. Then nodded. “Okay.”

Nolan helped clear the table before they headed into the living room with brownies and coffee.