Home > Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4)(8)

Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4)(8)
Author: Stacey Lynn

Not at all me.

I don’t get hung up on men. Or at least I haven’t since Evan and I divorced, and even then I’m not all that sure I was hung up on him.

We dated in college for a few years and when our friends started getting engaged and married even before graduation, I think we both felt like it was the next step. The problem is Evan’s an accountant and back then I was an art major. I’m art and colors and constantly reinventing things, even if it’s only living spaces. He’s straight lines and black and white and neatly pressed button-down shirts and slacks with the perfect seam ironed into them. Seams. He’s the only guy I know under fifty who still insists on them.

I’m different colored hair and tattoos and Evan has always been, and always will be, short, conservatively styled haircuts, perfect posture, and content to drive a simple Ford Escort the rest of his life because it’s practical. Yet somehow, for years we worked together. We partied and had great sex and he helped keep me focused on my studies and I forced him away from Excel spreadsheets. We worked… until we didn’t.

I’m still pretty sure that day came when he came home from work and I’d painted a wall in our small living room in our first townhome a dark, very dark, purple.

He’d dropped his briefcase, ran a hand through his hair that didn’t even move it was so gelled into perfection and sighed. “That’s going to kill our resale value, Georgia.”

I remember turning to him, head tilting to the side. There was still paint on my cheek and my T-shirt, and he’d cringed when he saw the splatters on my white shirt.

It was the cringe, the startling revelation of how vastly opposite we were with what we wanted out of life that made me ask, “Do you really think we should be married?”

It took him approximately two days and I’m still certain a half-dozen spreadsheets before he came home, with flowers—because he’s such a nice guy—and a sad smile and agreed. “It’s possible we made a mistake.”

Months later we were divorced. I’d been the office assistant at an interior design firm at the time, a job I absolutely didn’t want but made decent money.

Once the divorce was final, I was over all of it. I quit my job, looked at my dad and said, “I need to see the world.”

He’d hugged me, cried, and replied, “Then spread your wings, butterfly.”

That was my dad. It’d always been my mom, too. They were full of encouragement and love and laughter and dances in their kitchen and kisses when they knew it skeeved me out.

I’d been back for a year and my apartment still didn’t feel like mine. This life didn’t feel like mine and I had nothing… absolutely nothing I loved inside of it except for the prints I’d started to tell Sebastian about the other day. They were the only important thing in my life outside my dad. He’d cut me off, jumped like I’d electrocuted him while I told my stories and he’d hightailed it out of there so fast that me still enjoying the freaking scent of him on my pillowcases is borderline crazy.

It’s time to clean. And armed with a fresh supply of heaving duty cleaning supplies, I get to work.

I hopped on a plane three years ago to see the world and figure out who I was.

I might not have figured it out in my travels, but the one thing I do know is that I am not the kind of girl who gets hung up on a married guy, gets a crush on him, and then refuses to remove the scent of him from a pillow.

The sheets get tossed off the bed first, thrown on a pile of my clothes and then I head to my kitchen where I fill four garbage bags with all my dirty clothes.

Once those are filled and my floors are relatively clean, the job seems much less daunting.

I spend the next three hours cleaning my room, scrubbing every inch of my floor. I get on Amazon and spend way too much money on bathroom and bedroom organizing shelves and bins and drawers. Any second-guessing myself is thrown to the curb along with the rest of junk I don’t need.

No way am I stopping to consider I’m doing all of this on the off-chance Sebastian Hendrix ever steps foot into my apartment again.

By the time I’m done cleaning, sweat clings to parts of my body where no sweat belongs. My hair is a ratted mess. Cleaning chemicals are my new perfume and my muscles shake so much I can barely start my Jeep Wrangler. The garbage bags filled with my clothes I’ve tossed into the back will take me a day and a half to finish at the laundromat, so I pick up the phone and call my dad while I’m on my way to his place a few miles away.

“Hey Dad… any chance I can swing by and cook you a good meal before you head into the bar?”

He laughs into the phone. “Let the laundry get away from you again?”

He knows me well.

“Something like that.” I can’t even see out my rearview window the bags are piled so high.

“Anytime baby. You know that. Besides, I already have a roast in the oven.”

“Even better.” My dad’s cooking is kick-ass.

 

 

My dad is one of the best men I’ve ever met. He’s always seemed to understand what I need in my life before I realized I needed it. When Evan and I told him we were separating and divorcing, that we realized we’d made a mistake, I can still see the way his shoulders slumped with relief. When I decided to pack a large traveling backpack and go see Eastern Europe, those shoulders had tightened, with that fear and worry I assume all awesome fathers have for their little girls. Then he nodded, smiled that scared, small smile of his, and said, “Go then. If that’s what you need to fuel your soul.”

That’s my dad. Always encouraging. Always understanding. When my mom died in a car accident during a brutal rainstorm on her way home from her work at a nearby hospital, my dad never once faltered in his love and support for me. I would hear him crying at night, missing the greatest woman I’ve ever known. His love for her was a palpable thing, as was his grief. Yet during the day, his red, sad eyes would crinkle when he smiled at me. He made the worst period of our lives only slightly bearable because of his strength and love.

He took what they always wanted for me—for me to be happy, to find my passion and my drive and live it to the fullest—and he never once tried to hold me back. He’s always the guy I can go to. I can talk to him about anything and everything. Even boys. Somehow, he made that okay and safe for me. He never once balked at anything girly, like buying me tampons or asking if I needed to go on birth control.

He did all the things moms do and as a guy, a man’s man with a slight beer gut and running a rundown bar that was his pride and joy, I always came first.

George Barnes likes the simple things in life, and he wants me to have everything I want and need.

It’s what makes me feel like dirt for hiding the fact Sebastian spent the night in my apartment when he asks if Sebastian got in a cab all right that night.

“I should have known Steve would call you.”

“You know he doesn’t like you being alone at the bar with customers.”

“Yeah. I know.” I slide my fork through my dad’s pot roast. Somehow, he makes a simple meal so tender and juicy, the meat melts in your mouth. “But Steve should also know I’m comfortable with it, and I’m a pretty good shot with the gun. He is the one who taught me how to use it.”

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