Love is a Battlefield: Games of Love, Book 1 (11 page)

As if a tea party was the slightest bit more important than the Scottish Highland Games.

He’d been prepared to admit his wrongdoing. It went against every one of his grains to talk to a woman the way he’d talked to Kate at the bar the other night, but he’d let his anger and yes, he was willing to admit, a little machismo, get in the way of his better judgment. So when he went to her house, he’d had a peace offering in hand—an apology prepared and ready to go. She didn’t know him very well yet, but he rarely said or did things he didn’t stand behind one-hundred percent. So apologizing wasn’t something he made a regular habit of.

But then she’d shown up at the door to her house wearing the flimsiest dress he’d ever seen, all soft white waves and ruffles. He’d thought it was part of her charm, the way she exuded easy femininity, the way the bare strip of her thigh flashed only when she wasn’t aware of her own majestic movements.

Now he knew better. She’d been playing a game. Playing him. He had few requirements for his relationships with women, but among them honesty and sincerity were at the front of the line. A lithe body draped in an ultra-feminine dress and floating with the light scent of cherry blossoms was not. He didn’t care how hard his body protested.

And it protested. Hard.

He turned the invitation over.

“You should go,
caro
,” Irina said with a smile. She wrapped the plaid around his waist and began sticking pins along the hem. At his inquiring look, she added, nodding at his hand, “To that party.”

“I wasn’t invited,” he muttered. The back of the invitation had a few words scrawled along the bottom. Flora Folio. It was probably the name of the printer—Kate must have been getting ready to print and send her invitations. And Cornwall Park’s address was right there, looking him in the face. She was that sure of herself.

Irina tsked and whisked the kilt away from his legs. “No? Pity. Maybe it would help you relax. You’re wound tighter than a virgin’s backside.”

Julian choked as he pulled his clothes back on. “What did you say?”

She ignored him, clicking back into businesslike efficiency. “Your kilt will be ready for the final fitting in two weeks. You’ll be a masterpiece—no one makes my work look as good as you.” She pulled back the curtain and started chatting amiably with his mother, looking back only briefly to offer him a wink.

He didn’t move, his mind working fast.
A virgin’s backside.
There was potential there—quite a bit of potential, actually.

He shoved the invitation back in his pocket and joined his mother and Irina, waiting politely for them to finish talking before heading out the door.

The warrior inside him itched for a fight—not the fierce clan battles of Scotland or a battle of honor against a neighboring village
maga’lahi
warrior on a remote Pacific island, but something petty and small. Something that would sneak underneath a certain woman’s skin and cause her to itch and writhe without any way to alleviate the discomfort.

And he knew how he was going to do it.

“You look awfully pleased with yourself,” a small, feminine voice said.

Julian looked up to find his sister, Beth, leaning in the doorway of their mother’s kitchen, watching him eat
oyako-don
like it was the first meal he’d had in a week. His mom always made the traditional Japanese egg-and-chicken rice bowl in the weeks leading up to the Games. The dish had been Harold’s favorite. He’d always said the protein provided a man with everything he needed to fight and to fuck—though that last part was offered in a low undertone meant only for Julian’s burning ears.

“That’s because I am pleased with myself, little sister.” It had been a few days since he’d visited the tailor, and things were definitely looking up.

He stood and gave her a hug, but she disentangled herself with a frown. She was fifteen, the age when affection ruined the painstaking effects of teenage angst. She was a beautiful girl, with his same skin tone, her eyes a lighter shade of brown and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, but her hair was cut at a cross angle to her face, and she had so much eye makeup on she might have been an eighties pop star. He wondered how much time she was spending alone at the house.

“I haven’t seen you around the house very much. How are things?”

She shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

“That’s it? Nothing new around here?”

“What do you want to know?” Beth said. “Mom works a lot, as usual. And Nala is almost never here—she’s got a boyfriend now.” Nala was seventeen, apparently the age when affection came back in full force and attached itself to a teenage male partner.

Beth hovered above the table, so Julian kicked out one of the kitchen chairs—the same black-and-brass upholstered ones that had been in his mom’s house for twenty years. The woman never updated a thing.

Beth looked at it with a cynical eyebrow raised. Cynical and pierced. Julian wondered how well that had been received. The day he’d come home with his tattoo, a swirling traditional Micronesian pattern across his upper arm and back, his mother had cried. Even after he’d explained—told her it was the story of his heritage, an important reminder to honor
all
his warrior roots—she’d had to close her eyes every time she saw it for the following three or four years.

“So, what—are you living here now?”

Julian felt a twinge of guilt. His and Beth’s was not a particularly close relationship—he’d started following the Games ten years ago, when he was eighteen. They’d all expected him to move home for good when Harold died, but Julian always found some way to put it off. He needed more time training. He needed to spend a few long winters in Arizona, building up a savings cushion to supplement the small life insurance policy Harold had left behind along with several years’ worth of medical bills.

And now—now he was so close to the Rockland Bluff Whisky sponsorship it would have been ridiculous to cut back his SHS commitments. The money would be enough to let his mother quit working for good. To send both sisters to college with room to spare.

“You don’t have to worry anymore,” Harold had said gruffly the day he’d married Chika in a little ceremony at City Hall, followed by a party at the local pub. It was a day that changed everything, when Harold bestowed their little family with his name and the good cheer that followed him wherever he went. Julian had never realized how much they’d struggled until that moment—financially and emotionally.

“It’s my job to provide for you both now. That’s what a real man does, Julian. Provides. Remember that.”

And he remembered. He remembered every time he sent a check home, and every time he lifted one of the weights to throw across the field wearing the bold Wallace plaid. But there were limits to his dedication.

“Live in a house with three women?” Julian laughed off his sister’s scorn. “No thanks. I’m staying at the apartment until after the Games.”

“And then?”

Julian shrugged and returned his attention to his plate. That depended on a lot of things, not the least of which was finding a way to get Kate Simmons and her Jane Austen book club off his back and out of his mind.

“You’re going this year, right?” he asked, almost as an afterthought. Although Beth and Nala had liked the Games well enough as little girls dressed in dancing shoes and with big, bouncing curls in their hair, it was an embarrassing spectacle to them now. Kate was right.
Teenagers.

“Well, you know…” Beth looked at her fingernails, which were painted a dark black.

“I’d like it if you came.”

Her eyes snapped up. “Oh. Okay, then. If you want.” She grabbed a soda from the fridge. “But I’m not wearing one of those skirts.”

“Then don’t. It’s not for everyone.” He said the words seriously, a man who’d learned the hard way it took quite a bit of confidence to wear a kilt—and to look good doing it.

He went home to his apartment not too much later. His mom had gone off to do something called Bunco, and his sisters retreated to their respective caves on the second floor of the house, leaving him sitting in the dated living room by himself, watching television on a ten-inch screen and feeling ineffective. It was difficult, sometimes, to remember they had lives that didn’t involve him, but that was to be expected when he spent so much time away. It was no one’s fault but his own.

The night threatened to stretch ominously before him. It was still early—only about eight o’clock—and a quick check in his fridge revealed two lonely little beers. Two beers that wouldn’t be nearly enough to cover the feeling of deflation that was wrapping itself shamelessly around him like a pink, hand-knit shawl. One with lace around the edges.

It was only natural—the feeling of deflation. It was the aftermath of making a debilitating blow to the enemy but not being allowed to watch while she fell, shrieking, to her knees.

The debilitating blow had been accomplished that morning thanks to Flora Folio, the invitation printer. It hadn’t been hard to track them down. He’d waited a few days, of course, to make sure Kate and her little Jane Austen book club had time to put their order in. Let her think she’d won. That was the first tactic of any good battle—silently retreat from the playing field, all the while crouching, taking tiny steps backward, never moving your eyes from the real prize.

Then he’d paid the invitation shop a little visit.

It was shameless. He’d gone in with Michael, both of them donning their most charming smiles. Julian wasn’t stupid. He knew what effect his physique had on members of the opposite sex. Highland athletes were one step away from football players when it came to attracting women. They had a tendency to fall in line at the sight of the first flexed muscle.

Michael had immediately laid on his signature charm, which Julian never could quite figure out. “Ladies, we’re in need of your help.”

The two women in the shop, a young college-age girl whose long, straight hair looked like it weighed more than she did, and a middle-aged woman with fingers dyed black from the printing press they ran in the back, melted into a single puddle of obliging hormones.

Julian leaned on the counter and toyed with a display of fabric bookmarks, smiling with as much feeling as he could muster any time one of them looked his way.

“My friend here is a man in love.”

The bookmark stand went crashing to the ground. Both women pretended not to notice, listening with rapt attention as Michael wove a ridiculous tale of passion, betrayal and a secret marriage proposal no one could know about. The women devoured it, their eyes getting rounder and mistier with each word. The younger one occasionally shot wistful glances Julian’s way, like she wanted to comfort him for all the agony of the love he was trying so hard to endure in stoic silence.

It took all the willpower he had not to haul Michael out of there on the spot.

But it had worked—every last drop of sentimental overflow.

He and Michael had brought a box of invitations with them, its contents based on an almost exact replica of the mockup Julian had taken from Kate’s house. But they were really Julian’s own creation, the result of hours of hard work with PhotoShop and his laptop. The plan was to switch out Julian’s box of invitations with the ones Kate had ordered.

Michael convinced the women their box contained an enormous diamond ring and an even bigger cache of all Julian’s affections. They only needed Flora Folio to allow them to make the swap.

“In the name of love,” Michael had pleaded.

And like that, it was done. Kate would get his box instead of the one she’d ordered.

Julian had hung one of the invitations he’d created on his refrigerator. It was a masterpiece of juvenile sabotage. He’d changed the location from the park to the local city dump. That part had been easy. The real achievement was the silhouette of a dancing couple in the corner. They weren’t dancing anymore.

They were having sex. Doggy-style. Right there on an invitation to a Regency garden party, about to be sent out to several hundred old ladies who were fond of knitting and kittens.

It was risky. Risky and devious and pure genius all in one.

Laughing, Julian popped the top off one of the bottles with his fingers, the sharp edge digging underneath his nail. He wished Michael hadn’t abandoned him for the night to go on a date with some woman he’d just met. Julian wanted to celebrate. To rub his victory in Kate’s face—and continue rubbing until it covered her whole body, his hands working it in, slipping underneath the soft silk of her dress.

No. He needed beer. Beer and television and maybe a cold shower.

He blamed some of his restlessness on the apartment. It was empty and a little sparse, but not in the modern New York loft sense. The obligatory couch, bookshelf and HD television set took up most of the space. The only thing that made it remotely his own was his stepfather’s tartan on one wall and a wood carving of a Chamorro
latte
stone on another. He liked the way the two pieces sat looking at each other, his two sides at perfect angles. It was the same feeling he recreated every time he put on his kilt and draped the tartan sash over the tattoo on his shoulder.

It wasn’t at all like Kate’s house. Hers had practically oozed soft femininity, all her ridiculous romantic illusions stored in the twin dog statues guarding the fireplace and the vases full of flowers set all over the place.