Tempting Love - Haley & Eddie (6 page)

Husband. Family. Kids. Haley wanted all of that.

In her life, when she set goals for herself, she would map out a plan and then make the necessary adjustments to said plan when life inevitably threw her curve balls. So in theory, going out with her sister tonight would be the right move in her goals for her personal life. Staying here with Eddie would be a step back.

Haley’s phone buzzed again. Looking down, she saw that it was once again from her sister.

Just showed him your pic. Now he really wants to meet you.

Haley quickly typed back:

Have to work early tomorrow. Can’t come out tonight.

Sent.

Did she have to work tomorrow? Yes. Was it early? Well, that depended on whose definition she was using. To Haley, nine a.m. was early. Was that the reason that she wasn’t going out? No.

As she stared down at her phone, another message came through.

Seriously?! Early shift my ass. Have fun playing house at Eddie’s while he’s out on a date!

Krista’s words should have made Haley second-guess her decision to not go out and meet Mr. Sexylicious, but they didn’t. Maybe one day, very possibly in the near future, she would have to start to move past her feelings for Eddie. To accept the fact that they were never going to be more than just friends. Neighbors.

But today was not that day.

Standing, she began picking up Barbies, coloring crayons, and books. Emily knew how to play and play hard, but Haley made a mental note that she really needed to work on her cleaning up skills.

As the oldest of four girls, Haley was used to cleaning up. It was like second nature to her. She actually enjoyed it. She remembered that, when she was younger, after her sisters would go to bed, she and her mom would stay up and clean. In the summer, they would drink iced tea after, and in the winter, they would have hot tea or sometimes hot chocolate. Those nights held some of her best childhood memories.

One-on-one time with their mom Sandra, had been hard to come by. Not only had she had her hands full with her four little girls, she’d also stepped in and helped out as much as she could with Haley’s cousins Seth, Riley, Jason, Alex, and Bobby in their mom’s absence. Aunt Cheryl had left when the boys were young. She’d been diagnosed as bipolar and spent years in and out of hospitals before finally overdosing and passing away.

Haley remembered being at her aunt’s funeral when she was the same age as Emily was now and feeling terribly guilty over the fact that she had been so grateful it wasn’t her mom lying in the casket. The memory of sitting in the wooden pew beside her mom, directly behind all five of her cousins and Uncle Bob, would forever be etched in her mind’s eye along with the feeling of the wood digging into the backs of her knees as she held her mom’s hand and imagined what it would be like if she weren’t there. With her.

Losing her mom was unfathomable to Haley, and she had no idea how her cousins had dealt with it. But they had.

She shook off the melancholy that overwhelmed her as she pulled the vacuum out of the closet. Luckily, it was a fairly quiet machine and Emily slept like a rock so she didn’t have to worry about waking her up.

Eddie hated it when Haley cleaned on the nights that she was here with Em. He always told her to just relax after Emily was asleep. But Haley liked keeping busy and it made her feel good to help out.

So she pulled out her earbuds, plugged them into her phone, and started her cleaning playlist. Yes, she had a cleaning playlist. She also had several exercise playlists, a getting-ready-to-go-out playlist, and a bow-chicka-bow-wow-getting-busy playlist.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t heard that one in years.

* * *

Just as Eddie passed the city limits of Harper’s Crossing, his phone rang loudly. Glancing down, he saw that it was Riley calling. Eddie hadn’t been happy about Riley and Chelle getting together at first. Not. At. All.

He and Riley had been wild. Really wild. Notoriously wild in their teens.

Eddie could have never imagined his best friend settling down, being a good husband and a good father. But he was.

Then again, most people in this town hadn’t thought that Eddie would be a good father. In fact, when Lacey had taken off, he’d heard rumors that there was a pool going around where people were betting on how long it would be before Eddie’s parents would have had to step in and take care of Emily. No one guessed that Eddie would step up like he had.

He’d proven everyone wrong, just like Riley had proven him wrong. Now, he had to admit that there was honestly no one Eddie would rather his little sister be with.

Hitting the speaker button, he heard his niece Mya crying in the background.

“Everything okay?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine. Chelle’s out with Katie and I’m having a tough time getting Mya down. She wants her momma.”

Those words caused a tightening in Eddie’s chest. He wondered how many nights Emily had cried herself to sleep because she’d wanted her mom. They didn’t talk about Lacey much, but Eddie knew that his daughter thought about her a lot. He’d overheard her talking to Haley about it, and sometimes she would draw pictures of her.

Not that she’d ever seen her because Lacey had left when Emily was still an infant. But Eddie had shown her pictures of her mom.

“Man, I don’t know how you do the single dad thing. The Marines were nothing compared to this. I’m exhausted.” Riley’s voice sounded worn out.

Eddie had to smile. His friend was a badass Marine. Riley had served ten years in the military and been Special Ops. But Eddie could definitely relate to the fact that one crying baby could make that seem like a walk in the park.

He could remember countless nights walking the floor with Emily, not having a clue if what he’d been doing was right or wrong. He wasn’t close to his parents so he hadn’t reached out to them, but he’d already been working for Bob, Riley’s dad, at Sloan Construction. And Bob had raised five boys practically alone, so he’d helped a lot.

“I remember something your dad told me that helped. You can’t always fix what’s wrong. Sometimes they just need to cry.”

“Damn, I forget sometimes that my dad did this
five
times.” Riley’s voice quieted as the sounds of the crying faded. “She’s asleep. Finally.”

“You’ll be fine, man. And luckily for you, Chelle doesn’t go out much.”

Eddie’s little sister had always been a homebody. Even before she’d gotten married and had a baby, she’d always preferred a quiet night in to going out and partying. But if there was one person who could entice his sister to leave the house, it would be Katie. Those two had been inseparable from the moment Eddie and Chelle had moved to town when Chelle was in the second grade. They’d always been as close as sisters, and now, because Katie was married to Jason, Riley’s brother, they actually were family.

“Hold on a sec. Just let me put her down.” Eddie heard rustling over the line and then Riley’s voice came back on. “You got plans tomorrow?”

“Nope.” Eddie tried to spend every Sunday doing whatever Emily wanted. It was ‘their’ day. So chances were there would be roller skating and Barbies in his near future.

“I’m grilling around noon. You and Em want to come over around nine?” Riley asked.

Eddie was suspicious. “If you’re not grilling ’til noon, why do we have to be there at nine?”

“So you don’t miss the swing set assembly.”

There it was.

“Don’t you have four brothers who can help you with that?” Eddie was just busting his balls. He didn’t care about helping out.

“Yeah, so you should feel honored that I asked you,” Riley said.

“They’re busy,” Eddie guessed.

“Yep.”

“All right. See you tomorrow.” Eddie smiled as he hung up.

As he palmed the steering wheel while turning onto his street, his heart started pounding harder in his chest. Flexing his fingers open and closed around the plastic wheel, Eddie tried to calm down his body’s reaction to the fact that in about sixty seconds he would be seeing Haley. In that dress. In his house.

He’d made up his mind on the drive home, that he would not be engaging in their normal pattern of heading out to the patio or sitting in front of the fireplace on the couch and talking for hours.

Boundaries. Rules. Discipline.

Those were the things that he needed to enforce when it came to the all-too-tempting Haley Sloan. Otherwise, he didn’t have a chance in hell of keeping his hormones, his hands, and he feared even his heart, to himself.

Turning off the ignition, he got out of his truck and made the short walk to the front door. He wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to avoid their ritual time together. Luckily, he’d never cut a night out short before so he could just say that he was tired. She’d get the hint.

Yep. That was the plan. Tired.

When he walked in through the front door, the first thing he noticed was the fresh smell of lemon that wafted through the air. As he took off his shoes, he noticed that he was standing on newly vacuumed carpets.
Haley
.

He’d tried to tell her
not
to clean up while she was here. She did him a huge favor by staying with Em and she wouldn’t ever take a dime from him, always maintaining that she looked forward to the time she got to spend with Emily. At first he’d felt like he had been taking advantage of her. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have other people to leave his daughter with. He did. But he always just felt better when Emily was with Haley. Not that he wanted to delve into the reasons behind that fact.

The light was on in the kitchen and he heard the sink water running, as well as, if he wasn’t mistaken, singing. He couldn’t make out if it was bad or good singing. But for some reason, it was music to his ears.

As he moved into the doorway that led into the kitchen, he saw Haley standing at the sink, her back to him, suds up to her elbows, barefoot, and singing softly but with enthusiasm. His pants grew tight as he watched her hips swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the music that was playing through the headphones she wore.

Damn, she looked like a pinup girl from the ’50s. His blood was not just heated; it was also quickly headed down south. Arousal, like he’d never felt before, crashed through him.

He needed to get her out of here. Now. While he could still think fairly straight and exercise some self-control.

“Hales.” He had heard the need in his voice as he spoke her name.

She, on the other hand, hadn’t. It seemed she hadn’t heard him at all. Singing into a large spoon, she whipped her head back and forth as she sang along with Prince…

I want to be your fantasy, maybe you could be mine.

You just leave it all up to me. We could have a good time.

You don’t have to be rich to be my girl.

Don’t have to be cool to rule my world.

Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with

I just want your extra time and your…

Kiss

And with the word kiss, she rolled her body more seductively than any stripper he’d ever seen and Eddie thought he might explode in his pants. He was having trouble breathing. His thoughts were clouded with lust.

She had to go. Now.

Stepping forward, he hesitated. He was only a foot behind her, but he didn’t trust himself to touch her. He didn’t want to raise his voice to alert her to his presence because he might wake up Em and he didn’t want to scare Haley.

Before he had a chance to figure out a plan, Haley glanced up and caught his reflection in the window that sat above the sink. He saw the split second of panic in her eyes. Okay, so much for not scaring her.

“Haley, it’s me,” he said as she jumped about a foot off the ground and spun around, sucking in a terrified breath.

On instinct, his arms wrapped around her and he pulled her close to him. For a moment she was tense and poised to fight, but then her eyes softened with recognition as her body molded against his. She was clutching her hands to her chest, but he could still feel her full breasts pressed against his chest as he held her.

His hands spread out on the small of her back and his fingers rested against the delicate dip of her spine. For just a moment, Eddie closed his eyes and let himself
feel
.

Never before had they been this close. Body to body. Pressed up against each other. He’d made it a point never to touch her. Whenever she would hug him, he’d made sure that full-body contact had not occurred and he’d always done the one-arm pat move.

Now he knew for a fact that had been the right thing to do because the feel of her in his arms was…amazing. Right. Perfect.

“You scared me.” Her quiet voice drifted into his consciousness.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped as he opened his heavy-lidded eyes. Looking down, he was temporarily speechless at what he saw. Her huge baby blues were staring up at him through long, inky lashes. Her full, pink lips parted as she took in short pants of breath. The seductive line of her cleavage was heaving against him through labored breathing.