More, Please (2 page)

“Oh, God.” I say it out loud, though I hadn’t
meant to.

He turns to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

“I—”

I’ve had one sex partner in my life. The
only sex I’ve had in a hotel room was at a sex toy conference and I was very
much alone at the time.

And I’m a spineless scaredy-cat.

But rather than saying any of these
truths I do what any spineless scaredy-cat like me would do. I lie. “I left my phone
downstairs.”

“Want me to go get it? You can make
yourself at home in the room.”

“No. It’ll just take a minute. I’ll be
right back.”

“Okay,” he says, a smile in his eyes. “While
I wait, I’ll order dessert.” He presses his lips to mine again and I almost have
to swallow the cry that is singeing my throat. I memorize the feel of his brief
kiss, the way his hard body melds so nicely with mine, the feel of his muscles
as they bunch when he moves his hand to my face in a light caress.

I memorize it, because I know I’ll never
have it again. Guys that look like this only come along once in a lifetime.

And here I am, too chicken-shit to take
advantage.

As I step into the elevator, I lean my
head against the mirrored wall, noticing the smudge marks from when I had
plastered my hands at either side of his head, kissing him.

On a whim, I snap a picture of the smudge
with my phone. I know it’s weird. But it’s the only proof I’ll have that for five
precious minutes out of my life, I had thrown caution to the wind.

~ ALLIE ~

If a stray cat walks by, I’ll be dragged
into the street.

I have three dogs attached to me, one in
each hand, and a third whose leash has somehow wrapped itself around my ankle. It
is the best I can do under the circumstances. Two of my volunteers have yet to
show up, and two more texted me saying they’re sick.

Sick. Yeah, right. The sky is the color
of the blue topaz pendants that sparkle in the window of the jewelry store just
five doors down from where I sit, and a warm breeze is blowing in from the
South. It is a perfect day in May in America’s heartland, and I swear I can
smell the moist soil being tilled on Len Kroger’s farm a mile south of town.

My deadbeat volunteers are probably
lounging on their hammocks, sipping a Starbucks right now, or writing up a
grocery list for a spontaneous neighborhood barbeque because it’s just that kind
of day in Newton’s Creek. That’s what I’d be doing if I didn’t feel the weight
of adorable furry lives bearing down on me every day.

Sinking my back into the uncomfortable
folding chair outside Sally Sweet’s Pet Boutique, I watch the slow but steady
trickle of traffic on Anders Road, which is pretty much our town’s Main Street.

I like this street because it seems
frozen in time. My dad used to tell me that half the stores he had shopped at
as a kid were still open here, even if they are struggling now in today’s
economy. There’s a five-and-dime across from me where Dad used to buy me balls
of cherry blast gum or a pretzel rod for a nickel anytime we visited. It is the
kind of street where people always greet me as I sit with my rescued dogs
trying to find them homes.

Even after spending half my night
wallowing in my humiliation after bailing on the hottest man alive, I’m feeling
pretty content sitting out here just like I do every Saturday morning for two
hours with my canine friends.

Life is like that. You fall in a pile of
mud. You get up. You move on.

I spot Cass hauling ass across the street
toward me, dragged by a 75-pound husky mix on a leash. I sigh with relief and
longing when I see the cardboard tray she holds sporting three large coffees,
mine heavily spiked with cream and sugar if she got my text fifteen minutes ago.

Slow down, Snowball. Don’t make her spill
my coffee.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she sets
the coffee down on the concrete beside me and takes one of the leashes from my
hands.

“Don’t worry about it,” I respond,
greedily taking the cup and sucking in a hot mouthful of caffeinated decadence.
“Thanks.”

“Am I the only one here so far?”

“No. Maddie and Lila are inside with the
little ones,” I say as I give a toss of my head in the direction of the pet
store entrance. The little ones are a Chihuahua and a Maltese, both likely to
have homes by the end of the week from the number of applications I have in
hand for each of them. It is so much easier to rehome the little guys.

I unwind Crocco’s leash from my leg and put
it in my hand, getting licked by Snowball in the process.

Cass’s eyes meet mine briefly as she gives
Crocco a pat in greeting. “You look tired.”

I know she’s talking to me, not Crocco, despite
his permanently weary bloodhound eyes. He is a mutt in the extreme, and I
struggled to choose a breed in his listing on our website. Even my dad, who was
a vet for twenty-five years, would have had a hard time nailing it down. But Crocco’s
eyes are all bloodhound.

I grunt my reply, not exactly ready to
explore my indiscretions of last night. Or my lack of indiscretions, as the
case may be. Cass is my friend, and a pretty good one, even though I’ve only
known her a matter of weeks. But really, as the founder of this shoestring rescue
organization I need to keep some measure of dignity.

“You sick or something?” Her big, blue
eyes—the exact shade of the sky this May day—are prying open my
bounty of secrets from last night. But I clamp my mouth shut.

Cass is gorgeous. Freaking gorgeous. She
moved here from New York City for a summer job at an amusement park called Buckeye
Land, Ohio’s second rate Disneyworld knock-off. I’ve never been there since it
opened up after I had outgrown the I-wanna-be-a-fairy-princess stage of my life.

Cass doesn’t even need a costume to look
like the princess she was hired to portray. She has platinum blonde hair and a
pearly white smile that could make a man’s head do a 180 as he plows his Lexus
into a telephone pole. If I had her looks there would be no way I’d hang out in
front of a pet store with a bunch of dogs when I could be sitting in front of a
mirror somewhere just admiring myself.

But that’s just me. And I guess the
thrill of being gorgeous would wear thin after a while.

“Not sick. Just was out late last night,”
I finally confess.

“Oh, that’s unusual for you, isn’t it?”

I raise an eyebrow. I know she didn’t
mean it in an insulting way. I work two jobs and foster dogs in my little
one-bedroom condo. My free time is usually spent walking down Anders Street with
three dogs and a fistful of poop bags. So unless it’s for business, I tend to
go out about once or twice a Presidential administration.

“What’d you do?” she asks.

“I was supposed to meet Mary. She said
she had a great idea for booking more parties this summer. You know how things
slow down. But she never showed.”

“Didn’t she cancel on you last week?” She
shakes her head. “I don’t know why you put up with her.”

I shrug. Mary books about twelve sex toy parties
a year, and since I was the one who signed her up as a rep, I get a piece of
the pie every time she makes a sale. So I’ll put up with her.

Granted, selling sex toys wasn’t what I
wanted to do when I was growing up. And it sure wasn’t why I slogged through
college.

But my
real
job working as an executive
assistant for a nonprofit based in Cincinnati barely pays enough to cover my
mortgage, let alone dog food for three and vet bills.

I moved to Newton’s Creek just two days
after I graduated from college, not the best place for new grads to go looking
for a job unless you majored in agricultural sciences. My mom had gotten
remarried—too quickly after my dad’s death, in my humble opinion—and
something inside me wanted to move to my dad’s hometown.

I don’t know why. I was probably chasing
ghosts. Or just wanting to keep him with me in any way I could.

When I was a junior in college my dad
died of an aneurism. He had seemed healthy as a horse only two months prior when
I kissed him on the cheek and promised I’d come home to Cleveland for
Thanksgiving.

Sometimes, like right now when I’m
thinking of him, I can still feel the warmth of his cheek against my lips and
see the sheen of tears in his eyes as he said good-bye to me. I was Daddy’s
little girl—Daddy’s only child, actually—and he had hated to see me
go. He spoiled me every day of my life. Not with things, because we didn’t have
the money for that. But with love.

And with pets. Dad was a vet with a very
special place in his heart for abandoned and neglected animals, so much so that
people started dumping their unwanted pets at our house rather than at the
local pound.

So when I settled here in his hometown,
the first stop I made was the county shelter. I had thought I’d adopt a dog,
but instead of just walking out with one dog for myself, I walked out with
three… and a mission.

My “day job” boss, Nancy, who started a
nonprofit of her own about ten years ago, helped me establish my fledgling
rescue organization as a 501(c)(3) charity. Then I put a sign in Sally Sweet’s
Pet Boutique asking for volunteer foster homes. It was really a lot simpler
than I had dreamed it would be.

I smile now at the memory of when I
placed my first rescue dog in his new home. That was 53 dogs ago. Yet still not
enough.

“Where’d you go?”

“Hmm?” Cass’s voice snaps me back to the
present. “Bergin’s. The hotel bar.”

Barely registering as a blip on the GPS,
the town of Newton’s Creek doesn’t have many places to meet up for happy hour. So
if you’re over 21 and single in Newton’s Creek (I think there are about twelve
of us), you are definitely familiar with Bergin’s.

“Hmm.” She stretches her lavishly long
legs in front of her. Cass actually modeled in New York, and I think it’s
really odd that she seems content for the moment in Newton’s Creek. “So what
was his name?” she asks me.

“Who?”

“The guy you don’t want to talk about.”

I slump in my chair, signaling my spaniel
mix up onto my lap, while Rocco tugs mercilessly on his leash, attracted to the
smell of the donut shop two doors down.

“Logan,” I mumble. To hell with keeping
my dignity. I have three layers of dog spit on my shirt. Who am I kidding?

“Logan,” she repeats, glancing over at
another one of my volunteers walking toward us on Anders Street. “Sounds like a
made-up name.”

“Well, whoever he was, he bought me a
nice dinner when Mary didn’t show up.”

Cass’s eyes widened. “Wow. A man who
actually buys dinner. Last time I got invited to dinner here in town, we went
for fast food, and he still asked me to split the bill.”

This is hard to believe coming from Cass.
With her looks, she could seduce a prince or a sheik or a billionaire oil
mogul. Or any combination of the above. But I guess there aren’t many of those
in Newton’s Creek.

“What’s he do?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what is he? Pilot? Lawyer?
Doctor? Sports agent? They’re never just carpet salesmen or accountants at a
hotel bar. They always come up with something good.”

I hate that she is right. “SEAL,” I
mumble, giving a wave to my friend Kim about a hundred feet away as our eyes
meet.

“A seal?” Cass’s face is scrunched up.

I can tell by her expression she’s
picturing a marine mammal at the Cincinnati Zoo, balancing a ball on its nose
and going, “Ar! Ar!”

“SEAL. Like, as in Navy SEAL,” I clarify.

She bursts out laughing just as Kim
approaches, reaching out for Rocco’s leash.

“What’s so funny?” Kim asks.

“Allie met a guy at Bergin’s last night
who told her he was a Navy SEAL.”

Shaking her head, Kim’s eyes narrow into
tiny slits. “That bastard. I’ve heard about guys like that. They lie and
pretend they’re heroes to get free drinks and stuff.”

“Or to get laid,” Cass adds with enough
authority that I suspect she’s met a fake SEAL or something similar in her
past.

My face droops, Basset-hound-style. I
hadn’t considered that. “Well, he actually might be one. He told me a lot of
stuff about their training and the places he’s lived.”

 “Probably read some stuff in a book
or something.” Kim shakes her head. “Haven’t you seen all those stories
recently? Total losers pretending to be in the military? It’s all over the news
these days. It
so
pisses me off.”

I actually have seen those stories. I
surf the web as much as the next girl. But I hadn’t suspected he was a fake
last night. Nothing seemed fake about that guy, especially not those
magnificent pecs that I had ogled while we ate. Even now, remembering the way
the smooth fabric on his shirt seemed to showcase his sculpted torso makes my
body hum. “I don’t know. He was pretty convincing. I mean, you guys didn’t see
him. The guy had six-pack abs.”

Cass raises a single eyebrow at me. “Allie,
we’re in Ohio. The only Navy SEALs you’ll find around here are the ones in my
fantasies. The guy was a fake.”

Kim reaches down and lets Rocco slather wet
kisses on her arm. I’ve known Kim since I started this organization. She’s
never been able to foster a dog because she lives with her parents right now. But
I can’t remember a single Saturday when I couldn’t rely on her to help handle
the dogs. “Wait a minute. How would you know he had a six-pack?” she ponders. “What’d
he do? Strip down in the bar?”

My gut tightens. I’m caught. I hadn’t
intended to tell anyone how I had followed him up to his hotel room, only to
race back to the elevator in a fit of blind terror. “I could just tell. His
arms were ripped. You know.”
Arms, yeah. Focus on those arms and don’t get
tempted into telling your friends that you had dared to touch a set of abs so
fine they should be cast in bronze.

“Oh. My. God. You slept with him, didn’t
you?”

“No,” I deny. I didn’t sleep with him. If
I had, I might be sporting a wide Cheshire cat grin right now, and have a brain
filled with dirty memories to last a lifetime.

Kim’s eyes widen. “You did. That’s
totally out of character for you. He didn’t slip something in your drink, did
he?”

“No, no,” I say.
Not unless it was a
pint of estrogen.
“And I didn’t sleep with him. I swear it. We had dinner
and that was it.”