Cherry Popper Read online

  I pulled the car over, looked at myself in the mirror, and tried to connect with my reflection. I reminded myself that I was her, this woman who had just dumped her fiancé, and cut town without so much as a glance back. I grinned and winked at her. She grinned and winked back at me. I was on a roll. I reached for my phone.

  I took a while drafting the text, wanting to wring as much of my vitriol out on to him as I could. I hovered my fingers over the keys, thinking about all the ways I could tear him a new one. I wanted his stomach to drop out of his ass when he got this text, as it sunk into him just how little he had hurt me, and that required the perfect balance of anger, superiority, and a bye-bitch-titude. I spent a while crafting the perfect message, then I sat back and read it one more time before I hit send.

  Hey Dick Head,

  Since I just walked in on you fucking Bella, I just wanted to let you know the wedding’s off. Hope you had a good time. Apartment’s all yours. Rent is paid until the end of the month so I’ll come around and pick up my stuff before then. Oh, also I planned a surprise birthday party for you tonight. Booze has been ordered from Hall and Greek, but hasn’t been paid for yet. Please pick it up before 5pm and get back to the apartment before 8pm. Tip: might be a good idea to act surprised because your boss will be there too. Good luck with explaining to all our friends why I’m not there.

  I hit send and leaned back. Closing my eyes, I let the air escape from my lungs slowly. Wow, but it felt good to hit him with that. There it was… code red, my whole life blown up over the course of one message. There was no way I could go back now, and I was fine with that.

  Fuck him.

  Fuck Bella.

  Fuck me for ever thinking I should have stuck it out with him.

  A knock on my window jerked me out of my internal world. I opened my eyes and a man was asking me if I was all right. I pulled the biggest grin my face would stretch to and gave him the thumbs up sign.

  He smiled back, nodded and walked away.

  Right. Time to start over. First things first. I blocked Mark’s number. Then I got out of the car and stretched. The bright sun beamed down on me as I walked to the diner. I felt strangely light and free. Inside, I ordered waffles and a milkshake; then got a piece of pie to finish up.

  If Mark had been here, he would have been pulling faces about me gaining weight, about not wanting a fat bride to walk down the aisle, but he could blow me. I was eating all the damn pie I wanted, because I wasn’t going to be a fat bride. I wasn’t going to be any kind of bride.

  I thought back to the dresses, to all the outfits I had tried on in the hopes that I would find something that didn’t feel completely wrong for me. Now, looking back it was so obvious that the problem was the man, not the dress. Nothing felt right because he wasn’t right. But now he was gone, and I had a feeling everything was going to make a lot more sense.

  I still had a few questions, of course. How long had it been going on? How many times had Bella looked me in the eye and laughed uproariously at my jokes as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard in her whole life while she was fucking my fiancé behind my back?

  But right now, I felt happy just letting those niggling issues go unanswered and concentrated on how I would handle the backlash; the questions from my family about what had happened. I was going to be blunt as hell and hope that got the point across. “Sorry that I wasted your time and money, but I’m not going to marry the man I caught in bed with one of our friends.”

  Damn, my mother would go crazy when she found out.

  I finished up my food and got back in the car. It was such a beautiful day, I put the convertible top down and turned on the radio. Bruce Springsteen’s raspy voice filled the air. Born in the USA was one of my old favorites so I turned the volume up to the maximum. It’d been a long time since I’d done this. I bounced in my seat while singing along with Springsteen as I hit the highway. Life was for living and that was exactly what I intended to do.

  Some people might have been nervous, heading to one of their most competitive friend’s wedding straight after they called off their own, but I felt no such worries. It felt like something had been set on fire within me. A cleansing flame, one that burned out everything which had been bringing me down all this time. I focused on the wind blowing through my hair and let the rays of the sun filter through the trees either side of me and warm my skin, as a smile spread across my face once more. Yes, this was good. Great. Perfect, just—

  And that’s when the car spluttered, started to cough and slow down.

  Chapter 4

  Mia

  “Oh shit,” I muttered and quickly pulled to the side of the road. I climbed out to see what was wrong. I walked all around it. No smoke or anything serious. No burning smell. The tires were all okay. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t see anything immediate, but when I got back in and tried to kick it into gear, it let out a wet flub of a noise and died again.

  Fuck.

  I got out once more and peered both ways down the road. The road was empty and I hadn’t seen any cars for at least half-an-hour. I was still a couple of miles out of town. I’d hoped to make my triumphant re-entrance under my own steam, but it became obvious it was going to be one of those days. Disasters come in threes. I caught my husband-to-be cheating on me and now I would have to call my parents to help me. I wonder what the third one would be? Still, being stranded like this sucked.

  I’d been hoping for a dignified conversation at my family’s home of why Mark wasn’t with me, but I supposed dropping the news on my mother in the back of the car on the way back home with a cheerful look on my face would have just as much impact as pulling up in my own car alone.

  I dialed their number, leaned against the car, and enjoyed the quiet before the tone started to buzz in my ear. Once, twice, three times, and then it went to messages.

  “We’re out at a luncheon right now, but please feel free to leave a message and we’ll call back later,” my mother’s cultured voice cooed down the line.

  Damn! How many times had I told her she didn’t need to change their message every single time they left the house? She just wanted everyone to know what high-society bullshit they were up to at all times. So, they were out and if they were at lunch, that meant they were going to be a while. So where did that leave me?

  I sighed and dumped my phone back in the car. The buzz from everything that had happened today was beginning to fade, and I found myself getting seriously annoyed. Would I just have to walk the rest of the way into town? I peered down at my shoes. They were three inches high and definitely not meant for walking. I was a good couple of miles out right now, and I had zero intention of turning my feet into blistering red sores.

  I frowned. I supposed I could call one of my old friends. I tried Shana. While she sounded excited to hear from me, she couldn’t come because she was at the hairdressers. She suggested calling her cousin, but I had never kept in touch with her and I didn’t want to ask her for help. I stood there wondering if I should call the bride, when it clicked.

  I remembered that there was a garage not far from where I was. Sure, it would still be a good half-hour walk, but maybe it would do me good to work off some of the excess energy pulsing around my system since I’d left the city. I was pretty sure the place was still open. At least, it was when Mark and I passed it a month ago. Even if it wasn’t, I might be able to flag someone down from there, or get the number of a reliable tow truck company.

  I started on the walk down to the garage, loading up some music on my phone to listen to as I strolled. The air felt dry and hot, but clean. I liked the sensation of having flat countryside on either side of me. This was my home. The place I couldn’t wait to get out of at one time in my life. Yet, now since I was older and wiser, I could appreciate it for what it was. It was real.

  I thought of my crummy job in the city. I’d given my blood, sweat and tears for it and yet, I could be replaced as easily as a lightbulb. Maybe I should move back out here, s
tart a rescue service for women who had their cars break down in the middle of nowhere. This place clearly needed it.

  Finally, I rounded a bend and spotted the garage I’d seen before. I plucked my earbuds out of my ears and stared at the building. It looked so beat-up that for a moment I thought it was closed, but then I heard some male voices coming from the main building and realized there were people inside. I hurried toward it, switching off my music, and patting my hair into place. I wasn’t sure why, but I felt a strange little flutter in my chest.

  Maybe nerves. Maybe something else entirely.

  A man passed me as I got close. I opened my mouth to greet him and ask for help, but he dropped his head and made his way straight to his car, pulling down onto the road and leaving me standing there like an idiot. I raised my eyebrows and shook my head. It might be easy to idealize this place when I’d been away as long as I had. But I did forget it was still the same slightly suspicious small town I had grown up in. I made my way toward the main building, where I could hear the sound of metalwork and a fuzzy old radio.

  “Hello?” I called as I stepped inside and glanced around. It took me a moment to spot him, but I felt a wave of relief when I saw that I wasn’t babbling to myself.

  “Hi, hello.” I ran my fingers through my hair and strode toward the pair of legs clad in oil-stained jeans sticking out from under an old, rusted car.

  “Give me a second,” a deep gravelly voice floated out from under the car, but made no move to show himself. I thought I recognized the voice but I couldn’t place it straight off; I likely knew everyone in this town, anyway, so it wasn’t a surprise that I would.

  I stood there, arms crossed, tapping my foot impatiently as I counted to ten. Rude country hick! As if I hadn’t been insulted enough by the male species for one damn day.

  Finally, when I was just about to kick him hard, he pushed himself out from beneath the car, and—Jesus Christ.

  Chapter 5

  Mia

  Jesse Cooper!

  I closed my mouth with a snap and tried not to stare too hard as he got to his feet. Oh, my…He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so the muscles beneath his smudged-black skin rippled, flexed, and popped all over the place. I felt my own muscles start to tense.

  Ignoring me, he headed over to switch the radio off.

  Fuck. When did he get this…adult?

  “How can I help you?” He turned back to me as he grabbed his shirt from where he had dumped it over the edge of a chair and quickly pulled it back on. Somehow, the pale fabric of the tee seemed to outline his muscles even more profoundly than before.

  I found my eyes drawn to the fullness of his arms in the sleeves. “Um,” I swallowed heavily. “Hi, Jesse.”

  He furrowed his brow at me for a moment and for a split-second, it looked like he didn’t remember me.

  I wanted to crawl out of there in humiliation. We went to high school together. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised he didn’t know who I was because it suddenly felt like a hell of a long time ago. Even so, I recognized him like I’d seen him yesterday, the memory of him burned into my brain like a brand.

  He still looked the same in some ways; the dark, slightly messy hair, that inscrutably strong jaw, those strikingly blue eyes, but now he had a man’s body, full of hard muscles, and his features were sharper and more defined. His jaw was also smattered with a light stubble.

  I never in a million years would have imagined that he could get any hotter, but here we were.

  “Mia Foxton,” he finally drawled, a grin curling up onto his face, as his eyes slowly worked its way down my body. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Uh, I guess not,” I offered in return. Jesus, why did I feel as though the ground had been swept out from underneath me? Like I was about to topple over on the spot? Nothing had ever even happened between us.

  Jesse had ridden up on his big, black motorbike to my high school in my final year. No one really knew much about him other than he had an older brother who sometimes came to school to pick him up, but it was clear he was special. He was one of the cool, mysterious kids who instantly become the heartthrob of whatever school they went to. Every girl found herself swooning over him.

  And yeah, sure, maybe I did a little swooning too. I would never have admitted it to anyone then, as I was too busy carefully cultivating an above-it-all teenager attitude. Then I caught him looking at me with those smoldering flame-blue eyes few times in the math class we shared and it put ideas into my head that for sure, shouldn’t have been there.

  Not that he spent too long hung up on me.

  No, he had other fish to fry. Since most of the girls were busy fluttering their teenage eyelashes at him, he took advantage of their offers and ended up sleeping with as many as he could. Well, pretty much all the girls in my graduating year. Actually, he popped the cherries of so many girls he quickly earned the title of Cherry Popper. And that had been enough to keep me away from him.

  I didn’t want to be just another conquest he made, a box ticked in his mind. He asked me out once. I turned him down even though every fiber of my being was screaming for me to say yes, please.

  Now here he was… working at the old garage that had been on the edge of town for years. Looking even better than he had before, his eyes filled with the same highly sexual gaze of many years ago, reminding me of the past and how much I’d wanted him while I pretended to be aloof and uninterested.

  Problem was…I was now having a hard time remembering exactly what had kept me away from him all these years.

  Chapter 6

  Jesse

  “So, Princess, what are you doing in this part of town?” I asked, leaning back and eyeing her. She looked good. Real good. I would have recognized those big brown eyes anywhere. Yeah, maybe that was a testament to how much her rejection had stung back in the day. Last I heard, she had moved down to the city and didn’t come around here too much. But then if I’d been her, I wouldn’t have bothered with this damn place either.

  “Princess?” She frowned. “Where did that come from?”

  “You know where.” I grinned widely when she crossed her arms defensively over her chest and glared at me. She was hands down the cutest girl at school, but she was also from the right part of town while I, the pariah, came from the wrong end. Her parents were uptight as hell, but I had figured even a girl like her needed to have a little fun once in a while. You figured wrong, Jesse. She had shot me down.

  “Nope,” she retorted, clearly pissed. “I’m just here because I need help with my car. It broke down about a mile away, and I need to get it fixed.”

  “Surprised you come by here anymore,” I remarked. I knew I was acting like a bit of an ass, but what were the chances of the one girl in this place who had sent me up in flames, turning up at my garage and needing my help? I was going to milk it, just a little bit. Anyone would have done the same thing.

  “I’m not in town for long,” she snapped. “And I’m not in the mood to have you playing all high and mighty.”

  “Me, high and mighty?” I held my hands up. “Pretty rich coming from you, but I bet you know a lot about rich, huh?”

  She tapped her foot on the floor impatiently.

  I could tell she was fighting the urge to chew me out. Okay, so this was a little fun.

  “You know, I could just go back and call roadside assistance,” she replied coolly. “I don’t need you, or this shitty little place—”

  “Yeah, good luck with that.” I shrugged, glancing back to the car I’d been working on, playing it as cool as I could.

  “Oh, aren’t you going to stop me?” She arched one perfectly-shaped eyebrow. “I don’t need to give you my business, you know.”

  “No, you don’t,” I agreed. “But if you call roadside assistance, they’re just going to send you back to me. The nearest tow truck is a hundred miles away and they’re not going to drag it all the way out to the ass-end of nowhere when I’m just nearby.”

  S
he sighed heavily again, clearly annoyed.

  I could feel the tension crackling in the air between us, just like it had back in high school.

  Her shoulders slumped. “Fine,” she replied, shaking her head. “I’m not in the mood to fight about this. Are you going to help me or not?”

  I paused for a long moment, letting her think for a split-second that I might turn her down. Obviously, there was no way I intended to pass up on the chance to help Mia Foxton out. I wasn’t exactly averse to spending a little more time with her. “Sure.” I shrugged, as though I could take it or leave it.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled with sheer relief. She was wearing a tank top and it made her boobs rise and fall enticingly.

  “Where were you headed? I’ll give you a lift into town and then come back and work on your car.”

  “I was headed down to my parents’ place.” She chewed her bottom lip. “But my stuff is in my car and I need to pick it up. Can you run me down there first?”

  “Sure thing, Princess,” I replied with an unholy grin. I still couldn’t get my head around Mia Foxton in my little garage.

  She opened her mouth to challenge me, thought better of it, and let her jaw snap closed. Clearly, it was a bad day for her. She was obviously pissed about more than just the car.

  I brushed by her, and was sure I felt a little spark of static move from her body to mine. Yep, nothing had changed. Amazing how things could just stay the same like that.

  We got into my old truck and made our way back down to her car. I noticed her hands fisted on her lap. Jesus, what had gotten her in such a state? Anyone would think the world had ended and I was the one to blame.

  I helped her move her bags from her car to mine. “You planning on moving back, or something?” I asked.

  She shot me a look that told me it would be a good idea for my paycheck if I were to keep my damn mouth closed. Well, that sucked for her, because I had never much been good at that. Apart from when it came to one thing, but I shoved that reminder from the past to the back of my mind. I was having fun. No need to dredge up those memories now. They are almost like dreams that never happened. An unhappy little boy’s nightmares.