The small victory she just achieved seemed hollow at Penni’s realistic observation.
“You could have at least given me five minutes before bringing me down to earth,” she snapped.
Penni’s joyful laughter brought a smile to her lips, despite her irritation with her friend.
“Don’t worry; our husbands prefer to ride their motorcycles.”
Joining in with her laughter, they got in the car.
Grace snapped her seatbelt in place, then started the engine. “You’re right; she would have had a better chance if she had called herself Ducati.” Grace was laughing so hard she had to wipe a tear away.
“Hell no! Ice wouldn’t be seen on a Ducati. She should have passed off as a Harley.” Penni stopped cracking jokes long enough to ask, “Where are we eating lunch?”
Grace pulled into traffic. “You know… you’re right.”
“I am? About what?”
“About our husbands. And I’ve come up with a plan.”
Penni was usually the one with harebrained ideas, but Grace wasn’t going to let some other big boobed witch in the future try to get one over her.
“Do I want to know what it is?”
Penni was her one friend that was game for anything, and she had no intention of embarrassing herself without someone doing it right along with her.
“How do you feel about pole dancing?”
HALO FOR THREE
CHAPTER 1
The whirling sound of an empty soda dispenser had Mika looking at the button on the vending machine. There was no red light on the old machine to show that the brand she wanted was empty.
Aggravated at herself for not stopping at a convenience store before checking in to her motel room, Mika pushed the button for her second choice. The whirling sound came again, but this time it was followed by a loud thump as the bottle dropped.
Bending over, she reached for soda, but it wasn’t in the tray.
“Dammit!”
“Need some help?”
The deep, masculine voice had her jumping and turning around, then wishing she hadn’t. The blue-green eyes staring back at her had her mouth dropping open.
“Ah… no thanks.”
Turning back to the machine, she bent over to open the flap metal door, hoping the bottle would suddenly appear. It didn’t.
Squatting down, she shoved her arm inside, trying to reach farther up the mechanism. She had heard the thump of the stubborn soda, so it should’ve been just within her reach. Extending out her fingers, she came up empty again.
“You sure you don’t want me to try?” The dry amusement in his voice had her wanting to tell him no again, but she knew she was holding him up from getting his own drink.
“I would appreciate it. Maybe you can reach it? Your”—standing to face him again, she made a conscious effort not to swallow her tongue at the rugged man in front of her—“arms are longer.”
Moving aside, she expected him to try the same method she had. However, he used his powerful arms to grab each side of the machine and easily tipping it toward him, causing her eyes to widen as the stubborn bottle easily slid down the dispenser.
“That’ll work, too,” she said drily as he set the machine upright again, then grabbed the soda.
“There you go.”
“Thank you.” Taking the bottle from him, she kept her lashes lowered as she went around him, conscious of his eyes following her.
As she was exhaling a breath of air, she found herself face-planted against a masculine chest that was coming around the corner at the same time she was.
Raising her startled gaze upward, gray eyes met hers.
“Excuse me,” she muttered in embarrassment.
“I’m sorry. It was my fault. I should have been looking where I was going. Are you all right?”
The hard face staring down at her had her giving a brief nod before she stepped around him, her feet hurrying her away from the unsettling encounter.
Jesus, if all men in Kentucky look the way these two did, she should move here.
Once safely locked in her motel room, she turned on the television to break the lonely silence. Then she set the bottle down on the dresser, wanting to wait a few minutes before opening it in case it spewed. She used the time to unpack a change of clothes, taking out a pair of jeans, a white scalloped sleeveless top, and a jean jacket. Laying them out on the bed until after a shower, she went back to the dresser to open her soda.
“Excuse me,” she mocked herself out loud. “Mika, just once, couldn’t you have done something cool? Why didn’t you say, hey, handsome, what’s your name? Why couldn’t you have just said hi to the other one?”
Though she laughed at herself for the wishful thoughts, Mika knew she was incapable of making small talk with men. Especially not two who looked like they were cover models for Hunky Studs Weekly. The fictitious name for a magazine that didn’t exist at least showed that she did have a sense of humor, even if it was bad.
She wondered if the men knew each other or if they were friends. Then another thought occurred to her. Maybe they are a couple.
Not only did she consider herself low on the scale of hotness when compared to other women, but she also ranked herself competitively against men; she received a failing score. Hotness had never been a descriptive word she would use to describe herself, and as luck would have it, neither did men.
Her male friends and coworkers always put her in the “friend” category, despite how hard she tried to get herself out of that group—when friendship wasn’t what she was after.
Slipping out of her flat shoes, she sank her tired feet into the carpet and wiggled them. It had been a four-hour drive from the airport, where she spent the entire flight from California squished. Arriving at Treepoint at precisely 2 p.m., she had searched and found the motel. Now the rest of the night was hers to do with as she wanted, and the plans Mika made caused nervous butterflies to swirl in her empty stomach.
Taking a drink of her soda to relieve her parched throat, she then screwed the lid back on before going to the phone beside the queen-sized bed. Picking the receiver up, she pushed the number for the front desk.
“Front desk,” the irritated male desk clerk answered.
“Yes… I… Could you tell me …?” The butterflies flapped around in tighter circles, making her want to vomit up the small sip she had taken. “Are there any bars close by?”
A small pause, and then Mika heard a faint rustle in the background before he answered with, “Sure are. Take a left out of the parking lot and go straight for about three miles. You can’t miss Rosie’s; it’s sitting on the left side of the road. Tell Mick I sent you, and he’ll give you a free beer.”
“Okay, I will. Thank you.”
Hanging up, Mika stared at the phone as if it would reach out and bite her.
“Don’t do it, Mika. Stay here and get some sleep. You need sleep.” She tried to convince herself not to do the thing she convinced herself she would do just days before.
She tried to bolster her courage. “If you’re going to change your life, you have to start somewhere. We can do this, Mika. Where’s your backbone?”
She grimaced at herself, for not only talking to herself, but at the business suit she was taking off.
Mika wished she had gone to get the soda in the new outfit she bought and planned to wear tonight—at least then she could have had a better chance of attracting the attention of the two men outside.
Her inner demons battl
ed as she showered, which Mika tried to ignore. However, the insecurities she’d dealt with since college wouldn’t be silenced.
Men didn’t like to fuck smart women. It had taken her a while to figure that out. In fact, it had taken a male friend to clue her into why she wasn’t getting asked out. In a new university, she was not only the youngest but no longer having her BFFs around that she could have turned to for their support at how to fit in better.
“Mika, a guy doesn’t want you to call them out on their bullshit.”
She’d been hurt by Cory’s observation, having just overheard him promising to take one of the girls in their class to a concert that weekend.
“The tickets are already sold out,” she’d informed him, thinking she was being helpful by letting him know. Instead, Cory had given her an angry look in addition to the “advise.” The remark stung, but nothing was more truthful than a hormone-ridden boy when he didn’t get what he wanted. Then, when the young woman had switched her attention to another male classmate, he’d taken his failure out on her.
She might have been gifted with a smart mind, but the drawback was that the same intelligence allowed her to see through the crap that men used to get women in bed. And it only grew worse as she got older, and their lies became more skilled and covert.
Like the boy who had asked her to go with him to homecoming their senior year, she had seen through his schemes, that he’d only wanted to make his ex-girlfriend jealous.
Her first job out of college hadn’t gone any better. The men hadn’t given her nerdy appearance a second glance until she moved up the ranks. If they hadn’t loved gossiping loudly in the break room so often, she would have been fooled a couple of times. One day she had gone to work early and had heard her name. Outside of their line of vision, the full effect of what they felt for her was revealed.
“If Mika wasn’t such an ugly cunt,” Carter Long told another coworker, “I’d think she got that award by giving blowjobs.”
The crude comment had her ignoring her embarrassment and humiliation, and walking into the break room with the pretense of getting a cup of coffee. Their startled eyes were unable to meet hers, the deafening silence heightening their unprofessionalism.