Free Nemesis (Southern Comfort) by Lisa Clark O'Neill Page B

didn’t want to start cleaning.  All she wanted was some more aspirin and a bed.  But she didn’t want to waste funds by hiring a service.  So she trudged back down to her car, unloaded her newly purchased cleaning supplies, and went to work , determined if not precisely enthusiastic.
     
    DECLAN kicked back in his leather recliner while he finished the remnants of his lunch.  Alone, just the way he liked it.  He wiggled the toe that was peeping out of the hole in his sock and turned up the big screen’s volume, simply because he could.  No nagging sisters around to tell him to keep it down. No one to complain about his ratty attire. Nobody to remind him that the living room wasn’t meant for dining.  Just him, a remote, and a few beers.  Everything a smart man could want for. 
    He’d just cracked open his second adult beverage when the knock sounded on the front door. 
    He froze in the act of bringing the bottle of Harp to his lips. It had been years since anyone had been stupid enough to disturb him at home on this particular holiday.
    It wouldn’t be his family – if there’d been trouble, they would have called, and they’d long ago stopped attempting to include him in the annual consum ption of pork roast, hop ‘n john and collard greens that was their particular New Year’s tradition.  The year he’d thrown his plate at the wall had pretty much done the trick.
    And he tried to discourage visits from his neighbors as much as was humanly possible.
    He’d put up that damn fence, hadn’t he?
    Maybe he needed to get a Doberman or motion-detecting sirens or something if people around him were going to be so thick-headed that they couldn’t understand he didn’t want to see them.  Hell, the damn mat on the front porch said Go Away .
    How much clearer did he have to get?
    When it sounded again, the noise tinny and persistent in his ear, he realized he’d have to handle it.  So he set aside his plate and collapsed the footrest on the recliner before stalking toward the door.
    The bell rang again when he was in the middle of the entry hall and he snarled “All right already!” before yanking open the door.  The sight that greeted him on the other side of the threshold made him wish he’d just kept his ass planted firmly in the recliner.
    “Declan,” Sadie said, surprise registering on her little elfin face.  She fell back a step, wrung her hands together, and looked at him with dismay. 
    There was a smudge of some kind of dirt on her cheekbone that he wanted to eradicate with his tongue. 
    “I didn’t… I wasn’t expecting…” She glanced at him expectantly, but he wasn’t about to offer any encouragement, so she got that familiar mulish look on her face and managed to stop sputtering.  “Is your dad here?” she finally came out with, looking at him like something that grew under logs.
    He crossed his arms over his chest.  Why the hell did she keep popping up right in his face?  That damn memory zap hadn’t worked, apparently, because he was real clear on her identity. 
    Thong-wearing Sadie Rose Mayhew.  The new bane of his existence.
    He looked her over from head to toe, noting the hair gone awry – one particular platinum strand curling over her head like a halo – the oversized denim shirt that was now all wrinkled and filthy, and the plain canvas tennis shoes covering her pretty little feet.  No sparkles or goo-gaws or improbably high heels this time.  He wondered what the hell she’d been up to.
    And why the hell he cared.
    “No,” he finally answered, tone as far from cordial as he could make it.  “Why would he be?”
    She took on air like a puffer fish.  “Because he lives here?” she suggested sweetly, but her body language gave her away.  She was practically vibrating with animosity. 
    Better than vibrating with misplaced lust, as his own body seemed hell bent on doing.
    “Actually, he lives in town, has a place a couple blocks over from the bar.”