Love, Tussles, and Takedowns (6 page)

Not because she could
feel
his focus on her, though his eyes were now closed.

CHAPTER FOUR

“SO WHY ANTIQUE ARMS?” asked Hudson as he followed Lia across the street toward what appeared to be a town square of sorts.

The most unusual one he’d ever seen.

Lia waved at a woman manning a funnel cake food truck that was parked along the street before turning back to him with a thoughtful look. “I sort of fell into it, I guess. I worked part time at Spencer’s all through high school and got sucked in by the unique intricacies of each weapon, and the windows to the past each provided. And while I was never really interested in the fabrication aspects, I absolutely loved the authentication part. It was like solving a puzzle, unraveling every chapter of the weapon’s story. Antique weapons are one of the most striking combinations of art and innovation, science and history. In most, the story of a man along with his town or country. Each shows forward thinking beyond what most could imagine at the time, all for the basic human struggles.”

Her eyes twinkled with humor. “
Aaand
that particular geek-out is exactly why folks always say I’m more like Jack Spencer than his own sons.”

“Ah, mystery solved. So you’re not ‘officially’ a Spencer. I was wondering.”

She laughed. “What gave it away? The fact that I’m full-Chinese while my brother Caine looks like a Swat Team Ken doll, just like my foster dad?”

“I was going to go with a humor-challenged Captain America, but we can use your description.” He grinned when her mouth fell open in a mischievously awed I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that…I’m-so-going-to-use-that sort of way. “But see that’s exactly what threw me off,” he continued. “You call the guys your brothers. Minus the foster.”

Her soft smile was quietly affectionate. “The guys wore me down. The Spencers took me in after my parents died when I was a freshman. Sometime during my junior year, the three of them decided they didn’t like me calling them their foster sibling anymore. So they proceeded to play the copycat game with me whenever I referred to any of them that way. Drove me freakin’ crazy. While Max used to parrot everything I said in an annoying imitation of my voice, Gabe—being the quintessential little brother that he was—would copy every single thing I did as well. Hell, even Caine, who was already a grown-ass cop living out of the house at the time, would jump in on the copycat torment whenever he’d come by to visit. Despite all their differences, in
this
, they’d always been a united front.”

Having grown up an only child, Hudson couldn’t even imagine what that whole scenario would’ve been like. To him though, it sounded kind of great. “So how long did it take them to break you? A few months?”

“Ha! Try weeks. Even when I spoke in Chinese just to try and throw them off, they’d just barrel right along doing a valiant job keeping up, even as they completely butchered the language. They were relentless. I remember Max even got detention once because of it. He’s a year older than me but we were in the same economics class. I’d made the mistake of correcting the teacher when he made a joke about Max and I clearly sharing the same genes. Max deemed it a tangential offense and started in on the copycatting all through class until the teacher sent him to the principal’s office. Caine and Gabe decreed later that Max was clearly within his copycat rights, and while they never went on record about it, my foster parents seemed to be rather supportive of the whole thing also. Even to this day, if they ever hear me say the phrase, ‘foster brother,’ even when it’s justifiable in its usage—like, say in an introduction—they slip right back into copycat torture.”

She walked them into a bazaar or open market of sorts and led them over to the food booths. “So yes, my brothers were fairly dogged about deleting the word foster from my vocabulary in reference to them. My foster parents never pushed me about it though.”

The shift in her tone made it clear that a part of her had wanted them to.

Hudson suddenly felt an insanely strong desire to pull her into his arms to comfort her.

What was it about her that made him want to protect her?

As he looked around, he saw various town folks eyeing him up and down, studying him as if they were committing his features to memory so they could describe it to a police sketch artist later. It was the same last night in the brewpub too. They were all clearly protective of her as well.

And for some bizarre reason, he was envious of them. That they knew enough about her to be protective.

That they’d get to keep feeling protective of her.

Even long after he left town today.

It occurred to him then that Lia hadn’t said anything for a few minutes. She was just leaning against the railing beside him watching the scenery, giving him a little interruption-free time for him and his thoughts.

A comfortable silence. That’s what they were in right now. No smartphones to fill the quiet, no teasing hand-waving in front of his eyes to bring him back to reality.

When he ghosted his hand over the small of her back to get her attention, she turned and smiled as if she were finally seeing the sun peek out from behind the clouds. Gazing at him for a moment without standing, he felt her silently checking to see if there were more clouds on his horizon, one leg swinging gently like she had all the time in the world to wait for him.

Never had he met anyone like her before.

“Hungry yet?” she asked as she stood.

Yes.
More than he’d been in a long time, in fact. But not in a dirty way. He just felt hungry, period. Eager. For whatever was going to come next in their day.

And since it’d been a good six months since he’d felt like that, he didn’t want to rush through it.

“You said you needed to stop by your shop first for a bit, right?” He looked across the street and saw a small shop bearing Lia’s name and an emblem of pre-Civil War rifles. “Why don’t you go take care of what you need to do first? We can meet up for breakfast after you’re done.”

“Are you sure? I’m actually only open by appointment on weekend mornings since I’m usually doing on-site appraisals or auctions for clients.”

“Take your time. I was actually going to check out that toy shop across the way. One of my friends works with the community outreach programs out where our troops are deployed in the Middle East, and I know they rarely get things for the kids so I was thinking of sending her some cool toys that she could ship over for them to hand out.”

She smiled. “Okay. How about I meet you in the town center in about a half hour?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

A plan in theory, perhaps.

But in reality, the second Lia stepped foot into her shop, two people immediately stopped him in the street to essentially ask him ‘what his intentions were’ with their Lia. The kindly old woman in the hand knit sweater who stopped him first was perhaps just as fierce in her warnings as the gruff biker dude that growled out a brief, “Don’t you dare hurt that sweet woman.”

He’d managed to get two-thirds of the way down the main street when he saw that half his time was already up and if he wasn’t mistaken, Lia was already at the town center, getting chased around the grassy area by a screeching swarm of kids.

“I take it you’re Lia’s mystery guy. The one everyone’s buzzing about this morning,” said a cheerfully amused voice from the next bench over.

Hudson had always been good with faces, but not names. “You were at Luke’s wedding a few weeks back, right? You’re the brother of one of the other groomsmen.”

The man’s eyebrows hopped up in recognition. “You were in the wedding party too—Luke’s friend from high school. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you there for a second. And yeah, I’m Brian Sullivan. Good memory. Connor’s my brother.”

Hudson looked over at the kids, wholly astonished to see them now quiet, and marching in a military-grade single file behind Lia holding what looked like… He squinted. “Are those play-fort sized
Lincoln Logs
?”

Brian chuckled. “This town has some very unique amenities.”

Clearly.

Seeing the children now gathered around Lia, silently hanging on her every word, Hudson marveled, “She’s really great with them isn’t she?”

“Yep. You wouldn’t guess it from how quiet she is, but Lia definitely has a way with kids, in a way that’s uniquely her own. MaGyver-ing games out of random things around town like she’s doing now is just one of the reasons why they love her. I know my kids and my niece”—he nodded over at a cute little girl with Connor’s blue eyes—“are definitely huge fans. To them, Lia’s one of the town amenities they’re always wanting to visit Cactus Creek to come see.”

Hudson could see why. Lia had a very…unassuming charm the kids seemed drawn to. There wasn’t a single trace of rah-rah kid’s show host in her actions, nor did she carry herself like a singing dinosaur. She was more like a modern day Pied Piper, quietly inspiring fun, effortlessly cultivating life. In fact, just watching her lead the kids over to a tire swing tree at the center of the park, he half expected smiling daisies to slowly bloom to life out of the ground in her wake.

While it had been crazy sexy to see her passion about antique rifles, mind-blowingly erotic to see her this morning in her thin white tank top and cute boyshort panties…this…seeing her directing the now dozen or so kids that had gathered around her as if she were the Pied Piper—it tugged on a part of his heart he hadn’t really thought was accessible anymore.

* * * * *

“OKAY, GANG ARE we ready?” called out Lia. “Are all the logs in place? We’re going for a strike so we need to make sure it’s in a nice, clean triangle.” She walked back over to check on Skylar Sullivan, the designated “bowling ball” in today’s game. It was an honor bestowed on the lanky teen by the town children primarily because she was the only one of the bunch taller than three feet, but also because they all just flat-out adored her. Lia didn’t blame ‘em. Skylar was one very cool soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old. Lia didn’t know many high schoolers who would choose to hang out with her toddler sister and wobbler cousins on the weekends, not to mention a bunch of random grade school kids currently lining up to push her on the tire swing toward their makeshift “bowling pins.”

“Alright, who’s up first?”

Two little preschoolers bounced forward like eager bunnies while Skylar made a theatric show of securing her grip on the rope like a trapeze artist.

“When I say go, you two give her a nice big push now.” All the parents of the gaggle of kids had gathered around as well to watch, indulgent smiles alit. “Okay,
1 – 2 – 3 – GO!
” All the kids squealed as the two “bowlers” gave Skylar a mighty shove on the rope and watched as she swung toward the big plastic logs they’d arranged as the “pins.”

There was a collective, “
Oooh
,” and a raucous symphony of cheering as Skylar put an extra fancy flare on her return swing back and picked up the 7-10 split via the very tip of an outstretched hand, along with the last-second Hail Mary launch of her flip flops.

Judges’ ruling?

Totally allowed.

Arms up in triumph along with the kids, she gave them all hi-fives just as she saw Hudson standing at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head and smiling at her.

“Okay kids, I gotta get going. My friend is here.” At the musical collection of, “Awwws,” she chuckled and waved over a few parents to take over her little ringmaster role before heading over to Hudson.

“You could’ve bowled a few more rounds with the kids,” he told her, smiling ear to ear.

“Nah, that’s okay. I usually just get them all riled up and then send them back to their parents.” She beamed as she watched the kids and parents cheer through a strike. “This was one of my more successful games.” Turning back to check out his empty hands, she frowned. “They didn’t have any cool toys you could get?”

“I actually didn’t make it to the toy store,” he replied with an amused chuckle.

“What happened?”

“The entire town decided to stop me for an interrogation the minute you stepped into the shop.”

What?
Hands on hips, she scanned the streets to see if she could find any usual suspects. She stopped counting at ten. “Hudson, I’m so sorry. They’re a little…nosy.”

“They worry about you. It’s cute. And it’s no big deal. I can swing by the toy shop on my way back home after breakfast.”

At the reminder that he’d be gone in a few hours, Lia fell silent, surprised at her level of disappointment over a man she’d just met leaving town.

When she felt Hudson’s hand grip her elbow gently, she looked down and blinked.

They were about to step off a curb. How’d she miss that? He ensured she’d make that harrowing journey off the four-inch landing with a warm palm that sensitized her back, and she barely concealed the ripple of awareness in her breathing.

Okay, so maybe she wasn’t so surprised over her level of disappointment. He affected her like no other man ever had. Not even her husband.

Automatically, her fingers went up to her throat to spin the rings on her necklace.

Hudson’s eyes followed the movement, but instead of commenting, he asked instead, “Hey, so what’s the deal with all these people walking around town eating bowls of cereal?”

WHEN THAT SMILE he was starting to get addicted to lit up Lia’s face once again, Hudson felt another tug in his chest. Legitimate question aside, he’d hated seeing her eyes dim as she’d toyed with the wedding bands dangling from the thin gold chain she wore around her neck.

From her marriage.

For once, his trademark patience was practically nonexistent. He wanted to learn all there was to know about her.

Well, as much as he could before he left.

Because he
was
leaving, he reminded himself for the third time this morning.

“Want to get that breakfast now?” he asked.