Free Calling All the Shots by Katherine Garbera Page B

knew that all this agreeableness
couldn’t last—it just wasn’t in Willow’s nature—but he was enjoying it for right
now. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you being so nice to me?”
    She stopped for traffic and glanced over at him, raising one
eyebrow. “Am I usually not nice?”
    “Ah, of course you are. Just not to me.”
    She shrugged as the cars started moving again and turned her
attention to driving. “When I didn’t know if you were okay I had an epiphany of
sorts.”
    “And that was?” he asked after he realized she wasn’t going to
say anything else.
    “It was just this feeling in my gut that I might have really
missed out on something special by not getting to know you,” she said.
    He reached over and squeezed her shoulder, but didn’t say
anything. What could he really say? He felt the same way but he had no idea
where this was going. And seeing how quickly fate could change a man’s
life…well, being reminded of how easily the plans he made could be altered by
one event had brought home to him that he might have no more time with Willow
than these remaining weeks on Sexy & Single.
    And he really didn’t want to waste a single one of them. He
still planned to woo her and win her, but now the timetable felt even more
compacted because he had been reminded that life wasn’t guaranteed to be long.
It could all end tomorrow and he didn’t want his last thoughts to be regrets of
what could have been with Willow.
    He didn’t pay much attention to their route, just watched
Willow as she drove in the dappled morning November sun. It was clear today and
seemed even colder when she pulled to a stop in front of a brownstone in
Brooklyn.
    “Where are we?”
    “My place,” she said. “I’m returning the favor and cooking you
a meal.”
    He followed her inside and took her up on the offer of a shower
while she cooked. He looked around her place as he walked through it to the
guest room. He didn’t want to assign too much significance to her bringing him
here but a part of him felt like it meant a lot.
    * * *
    Willow had done a lot of soul searching the past week
while Jack had been away and admitted to herself that revenge was no longer the
only reason she wanted to spend time with Jack. She’d also been forced to
acknowledge that for some reason Jack was important and that was it. Until she
figured out what it was she had to learn from him she’d keep him close.
    She glanced at the picture of her mama on the side of the
fridge. It was her favorite picture of her mother, taken just minutes after
Willow had been born. It was the happiest expression that Willow had ever seen
on her mom’s face.
    She kept that picture where she could see it while she was
cooking to remind herself of her mother’s path. The one she didn’t want to walk
down. Her mother had been morbidly obese, and there were times when Willow had
felt like drowning herself in food the way her mother had. She knew that it was
the loneliness and doubt left behind when her father had abandoned them.
    She heard the water of the shower stop and tried unsuccessfully
not to imagine Jack naked. It wasn’t too difficult to picture the rock-hard
muscles that she’d felt when she’d hugged him, naked with water sliding down
over his skin. She shuddered as a bolt of pure desire shot through her.
    She reached for the eggs to crack them into the bowl so she
could start making a frittata but really she was focused on a naked Jack in her
guest room. She wanted him. That had always been a big part of why she’d liked
him even back in high school.
    She’d seldom met any other man who affected her the way he did.
Even watching him on TV had turned her on. She used to pretend that the feelings
coursing through her body were anger, but the truth was there was nothing wrong
with her that a few hours in the sack couldn’t cure.
    “What’s for breakfast?” Jack asked.
    She turned around and saw he’d put on a pair of faded