Love Untamed

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Present

Susie pushed through the door at Sally’s. It was raining, so she was meeting friends for an early dinner. Sally’s was a Diamond Creek fixture, an old renovated barn that had long been an established restaurant and bar. She shook her brown curls, raindrops flying when she did. She strode quickly over to the dining area, searching out her friends.

A good hour later, Susie was wondering how much she could take from Hannah and Tess about Luke and Nathan, their respective husbands. Hannah, Susie’s best childhood friend, had married Luke Winters, and Tess had married his younger brother, Nathan, after meeting him on a fishing trip to Alaska last year. Susie loved to see her friends happy, so she just might have interfered a little. But if she’d known how much they were going to drone on about how awesome their husbands were, she would have reconsidered. There was also the inconvenient fact that Jared was the older brother to Luke and Nathan, so it was difficult to avoid him. She thought she’d done a good job of hiding how she felt about Jared, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. Especially since that damn kiss last year. Just thinking about it aggravated her still. She didn’t like letting anything get the best of her, and she’d been an i***t to let that kiss happen.

After Hannah made a sly comment about Susie being the one to set Hannah and Luke up, Susie harrumphed and took a swallow of beer. “Maybe I can see a good thing coming, but that doesn’t mean you have permanent permission to drone on about how great he is.”

“It bothers you because you can’t keep your eyes off Jared and won’t admit it to save your life,” Tess replied with a sly grin.

Susie choked on her beer, grabbing a napkin to wipe her chin. Emma gave Tess an admiring nod. “You may be kinda new around here, but…wow…that took nerve.” Emma was Hannah’s older sister and had moved to Diamond Creek a few years ago. Their parents had given Emma up for adoption, and many years later, Emma had started searching for them. Unfortunately, she never met her biological parents because they had died in a plane crash in rural Alaska. But she’d found Hannah and decided to move here. She was more low-key than Hannah and Tess, but probably sharper than all of them as she was a therapist. Her sly sense of humor tended to sneak up on others.

Hannah bit her lip and shook her head. Susie glared at them and hoped they didn’t notice the blush creeping up her neck. Tess had zeroed in on an uncomfortable truth—Susie barely could keep her eyes off Jared whenever he was around, and it drove her nuts. Even when she wasn’t thinking about it, she’d catch herself looking at him. It didn’t help that he was ridiculously sexy. Matters made worse by the fact that they were not cut out for each other. Maybe that one kiss had been mind-blowing, but Jared had never even hinted it happened. He was cool, calm and collected. Stop thinking about him! He doesn’t matter. Right, you only wish.

“What?” Hannah asked, feigning innocence. “You’re happy to dish it out, you’d better be ready to take it.”

Play it cool, do NOT let them see you sweat this. Susie straightened her shoulders and glanced around the table. “I’ll have you know that while I won’t deny Jared is handsome—that whole damn family is—I can certainly keep my eyes off of him. Plus, can you imagine me with someone that uptight? That man seriously needs to loosen up.”

“And maybe you’re just the girl for the job,” Tess said.

Susie thought she might get skid marks on her tongue because she had to bite it so hard to keep from swearing. If she didn’t want the whole world to know Jared pushed her buttons and then some, she couldn’t go around losing her temper just because her friends teased her about him. She rolled her eyes at Tess. “I’m sure I could be the girl for the job, but it’s not one I want.”

Conveniently, the waitress arrived to deliver their check. Susie took the moment to take a faux bathroom break and gather herself. She was not up for parrying about Jared tonight, not when her friends were uncomfortably close to the truth. By the time she returned to the table, she managed to make her excuses and get the hell out of there.

As she drove home, she wondered how to stop feeling the way she did. Before her fated kiss with Jared, a teensy tiny part of her might have admitted she was more attracted to Jared than anyone before. But then…the kiss. Oh, that kiss. It had been over a year and not a day passed that she didn’t think about it. Jared irritated the hell out of her half the time, and the other half—holy hell, all she did was fantasize about him. Then he just had to go and be an amazing kisser.

When she pulled up in front of her house, she banged her forehead on the steering wheel. “Damn, damn, damn.” She lifted her head, brushing her unruly curls out of her face. All by herself and she was blushing like crazy. She needed to talk to someone, but doing so meant sharing a few details she’d rather not. She was the strong friend, the together friend, the one who played matchmaker and who always had a quick comeback. The only friend who had glimpsed the her underneath all that was Hannah, her best friend since elementary school. But Hannah had missed a few details while she’d been out of state at graduate school and grieving the death of her parents. And Susie hadn’t quite found the time to fill her in.

The main detail being that Susie had somehow never managed to lose her virginity and here she was thirty-one years old. Oh and this might have happened because she narrowly avoided getting date-r***d by some asshole who slipped something into her drink one weekend when she was in Anchorage. Up until then, she’d had been a fun-loving flirt. Perhaps she’d made it a little further than most with regard to her virginity, but it hadn’t been because she was uptight. Just because she was choosy.

But her choosy radar must have been turned off that night. She’d thought Tim was cute and fun. He was of one of the common tourist types that visited Alaska—outdoorsy, and handsome. She’d been up in Anchorage with her mother and decided to stay an extra night to stock up on shopping. Nothing cued her that Tim might not be a decent guy. Until she woke up, woozy, out of it, and with him tugging her jeans off. Though she couldn’t even see straight, she fought like mad. She knew to this day she was lucky he didn’t care to fight too hard to r**e her because she might be feisty but she barely topped five feet. She came out of it with a few bruises while he left her hotel room swearing, bright red scratches on his face.

That had been the last time she’d been anywhere close to being intimate with a man. She hadn’t meant for it to be like that, she just couldn’t seem to let down her guard. She’d convinced herself being single was a choice of freedom and tried to ignore the corner of her psyche that doubted her instincts and shied away from intimacy. She was strong and independent. Though she was more romantic than most, she focused all that energy on her friends, committed to making sure they weren’t dumb enough to let the good guys blow by. Until Jared came along.

Susie swore and climbed out of her car, stomping into her house. She bought this house herself when she moved back home after college. Diamond Creek was home and always would be. Her parents would have been happy to let her stay with them as long as she wanted. But she had needed to make it on her own. Reeling from anger at herself, frustration that she hadn’t the courage to track Tim down and press charges, she’d thrown herself into making an independent life for herself. A few years later and she was known as the best accountant in town and had her own home. It was a small, cedar A-frame with purple trim and a wrap-around deck. As with almost every house in Diamond Creek, it had a lovely view of Kachemak Bay and the mountains across the water.

Diamond Creek was situated on the shores of Kachemak Bay, one of Alaska’s coastal jewels and a massive tourist draw from spring to fall. Kachemak Bay detoured off the Cook Inlet, an inlet that stretched from the Gulf of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean to the bustling port of Anchorage. Anchorage was the hub of Southcentral Alaska. The Kenai Peninsula sat south of Anchorage, and Diamond Creek was located toward the southern end of the peninsula. Susie was an Alaskan girl, through and through. She enjoyed trips to Seattle and just about anywhere, but Diamond Creek was home. She savored the wild edge, the immense beauty, and the independence and quirkiness that Alaska fostered in people.

Susie shook her raincoat and hung it on the small coatrack by the door. She flicked on a few lights and glanced around. It was cold, dark and rainy, and she was glad to be home. Realizing her feelings for Jared might be obvious to her friends made her want to jump out of her skin. How could she explain why it would never work with him? And why, oh why, did he have to be the man who made her think twice about her plan for being permanently single?

There was a soft scratching at the door. She flung it open to find her cat, Jasmine, looking irate and wet. Jasmine raced through the door, promptly jumping on the kitchen counter and shaking. Susie found Jasmine last spring when it was still too cold at night. After a few hours of wondering what was scratching under her porch in the night, Susie shined a flashlight underneath and found Jasmine, then a kitten, shivering. Jasmine was a smoky gray feline with a streak of feistiness tempered by her sheer adoration of human affection.

“Jasmine, you’re soaked! I didn’t know you were out all day.” She went to the small laundry room off the kitchen and grabbed a towel, briskly rubbing Jasmine with it. Jasmine purred like mad, rubbing into the towel, her irritation at being outside instantly gone. Her gray fur tufted up all over once she was dry.

After changing into warm, dry clothes, Susie curled up on the couch and flipped through the channels, Jasmine snugged up against her side, purring audibly. Thoughts of Jared crept into her mind, and Susie sighed.