Dare You To Love Me (A NOLA Heart Novel Book 3) Read online

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now. What do I pay you for?”

  “You don’t pay me,” Luke felt compelled to point out.

  Moira brushed right over his answer as if it hadn’t even been voiced at all. “Why are you here then, if not to help the customers?”

  “Security. Family Obligation. Take your pick.”

  His mother’s blatant glance at his bum hip spoke volumes. “Go,” she urged him again, pushing at his shoulders. “Remember the training manual!”

  Luke stayed silent.

  He felt the full weight of his mother’s disappointment like a shovel to the face. “You didn’t read it, did you?”

  “Bedside reading, Ma. I’m working through it.”

  Moira didn’t take too kindly to that because all she did was lift her hand and point to the back corner of the shop. No words were said.

  Like any good soldier, Luke knew his place.

  Once more he gathered his cane, gripping the handle tight in his right hand as he braced himself for the onslaught of inevitable pain.

  “Have fun,” his mother whispered to his back.

  Luke didn’t know at what point he’d become an old scrooge, but fact of the matter was ... at this exact moment? Human interaction was the very last thing he wanted.

  Chapter Two

  Desperate times called for insanely desperate measures.

  Anna Bryce stared up at the cute chalkboard sign with the word “open” done in curly-cue script. This was her moment. She’d been building courage—okay, so she’d been pretending that her personal life hadn’t sunk as low as it had—all week since she’d overheard customers in her lingerie boutique whispering about this place.

  Somehow, despite the fact that her boutique, La Parisienne, sat only two blocks away from Herbal Heaven in the French Quarter, Anna had never found herself on its front stoop.

  Then again, her life was a blessing of football games with her fourteen-year-old son Julian, late nights spent working, and endless weekends of sweatpants. She wouldn’t trade it for anything, but Anna did want something for herself.

  She wanted a date.

  A date with a nice man who didn’t mind that she had an admittedly rambunctious teenage son, as well as a successful business that had recently landed Anna on the Top 40 Business Women Under 40 List in New Orleans.

  Most men turned tail the moment they learned that Anna had a kid and that the kid was bordering six feet tall.

  Those who didn’t tended to take off when they discovered that Anna was no small shop owner. La Parisienne had shot to even grander heights thanks to her cousin Shaelyn’s natural talent for designing original lingerie.

  Anna never apologized for her ambition. And she certainly never apologized for Julian, who was single-handedly the most important person in her life.

  But what she wouldn’t do to come home to a glass of wine, a hot man, and an even hotter night spent mussing up her pristine white sheets.

  So, it had come to this.

  Herbal Heaven.

  With the palm of her hand, Anna pushed open the rickety nineteenth-century door and stepped over the threshold. Overhead an old-fashioned bell chimed her arrival, and she couldn’t help but imagine cartoon-like arrows bursting around her head like exclamation points.

  Thankfully the people at the checkout counter seemed too engrossed in conversation to pay her much attention.

  Even so, Anna had dressed for inconspicuousness today. Black trendy pants, off-the-shoulder silk top, and thick-soled boots to minimize the loud staccato of her regular stilettos. Brady Taylor, Shaelyn’s boyfriend and their resident police sergeant, would be proud.

  Anna paused to scan the shop. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls; three freestanding shelves created the appearance of sections; and, along the front bay window was a cute display of homemade lotions, soaps, and perfumes.

  It was every adult woman’s version of heaven.

  Back right corner, next to the tea blends.

  Her brain had tucked that snippet of information away as soon as she’d overheard it the other day.

  Like most shops in the historic French Quarter, Herbal Heaven wasn’t overly large and Anna quickly discovered the correct section.

  Multiple rows of small glass bottles lined the dark-wooden shelves, and her eyes skimmed the names of the essential oils. Sandalwood. Sage. St. John’s Wort. Mullein.

  What had the woman in the shop suggested to her friend? Rose and . . . ginger? No, not ginger. Definitely not ginger.

  Why hadn’t she written it all down?

  Think, she instructed herself, tracing the pretty labels with her manicured nail as she silently mouthed the names. Bergamot. Fennel seed. Lemon. Muggle. Muggle? Anna’s gaze shot back to the last bottle, only to realize it read, “Mugwort.”

  Anna’s shoulders slumped.

  She was a fish out of water trying to read Greek.

  Some days, especially after pulling a long shift at work, Anna could barely string together English, so that was certainly saying something.

  She inched up her silk sleeve, exposing the cream leather watch nestled among the silver bangles. Four-fifteen. She had exactly ten minutes to find the oil she needed. Julian would never let her live it down if she was late to pick him up from football practice.

  And then it was back to sweatpants, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, and whatever reality TV show she could find while Jules burrowed in his bedroom with his Xbox. Are you really down for another night of Housewives of Atlanta?

  With renewed determination steeling her spine, Anna got down to business.

  Myrtle. No.

  Oregano. While smelling like dinner might make the men come calling, she doubted it’d make them stick around. Not once they realized her talents didn’t extend to the kitchen.

  Parsley. Maybe this was a sign, a sign that she was destined for singlehood because she had the local pizza joint on speed dial on both her cell phone and home phone.

  Ylang ylang—

  “You looking for something?”

  Anna whirled around at the smoky voice, nearly toppling into a wide chest. A warm, masculine hand closed like a band around her upper arm. A tan hand, she noticed as her gaze swiveled down. Her silk shirt billowed out between long, tapered fingers, and for the first time in a long time, she felt her knees weaken with interest.

  Then she glanced up past the wide expanse of his chest encased in one of those manly ribbed sweaters and her knees threatened to give out right where she stood.

  Crisp green eyes stared down at her from a face as rugged as the Ozarks in Arkansas. She’d visited the mountains only once as a child, but the craggy rocks and steep slopes had impressed vividly on her memory. Wild. Harshly beautiful. The man in front of her was just the same. Brown brows slashed over eerily light green eyes and a crook in the bridge of his nose was the storyboard for an active lifestyle.

  In a single glance, she gathered that this man, however light his grasp was on her arm, was not a soft man. Not a gentle man.

  Not the sort of man Anna should ever consider dating.

  Tell that to your knees, darling.

  His cool gaze found her mouth, hovered, before lifting again. “You good?”

  No. No, she was not good.

  She felt . . . Well, she didn’t know what she felt exactly. Lust, maybe. It’d been so long that she’d felt anything of the sort that the sensation was as foreign to her as the large hand cupping her upper arm.

  “Ma’am?” he asked, that smoky baritone of his peppered with blatant annoyance. “I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t answer—”

  “I’m good!” Anna exclaimed, desperately hoping that her center of calm and overall badassery returned sometime in the next half-century. She stepped back, out of his grip, only to find that her back slammed up against the shelves and jostled the jars.

  Crash!

  “Jesus,” he grunted, wrapping a hand around her arm again.

&nb
sp; He tugged her to the left, away from the shattered glass, but Anna (in addition to being a horrible cook) wasn’t the best dance partner in the world and she moved to the right. Her shoulder powered into his chest, the abrupt contact sending him back on his heels and into a display of wicker baskets filled with tea bags.

  Crash! Crash!

  Anna watched in horror as he went down like a felled log. The display buckled under his weight.

  And the string of expletives he let loose should have been outlawed in all of the Lower 48, amended, and then outlawed all over again.

  “Oh, my God.” Her purse landed on the ground with an audible thump as she bent to help him. “I am so sorry.”

  The toe of her boot connected with his thigh, and she stood corrected. His fluidity with vulgarity should have been outlawed in Alaska and Hawaii, too.

  “How can I help?” Her hands fluttered around his shoulders, finding purchase on the hard balls of muscle before just as quickly letting go. Anna had raised a son all on her own. She’d dealt with the wriggly digging for worm stages and the weekly visits to the doctor for sprained ankles, but she had never toppled over a grown man.

  To be fair, you haven’t really had a man. Not except for him, and he who-shall-not-be-named didn’t count.

  Well, there was that.

  Between gritted teeth, Mr. Green Eyes muttered, “Cane.”

  Anna didn’t ask questions. Her gaze landed on the cane in question and she picked it up by the rubber grip. Acute embarrassment slid through her the minute she caught a glimpse of his face.

  He looked ready to murder her.

  She didn’t blame him.

  “I really am sorry,” she said, passing over the cane and stepping back. “I didn’t mean to”—she waved her hand at the broken wicker baskets—“wreck everything in sight.”

  All she’d wanted was the secret essential oil that her customer had claimed men found irresistible on a woman. Despite her tendencies to talk business at all the inappropriate times, Anna was a romantic at heart.

  She’d wanted to believe that love could be as easy as a blend of specific oils.

  Instead she’d crippled a hot guy and made an utter fool of herself.

  Reason number 3,578 that single is a good look on you.

  Anna swallowed past the lump in her throat. He still hadn’t straightened from his makeshift nest of tea bags, crumpled wicker baskets, and the growing scent of patchouli.

  “Can I help?”

  The hard look he gave her spoke volumes. Anna hid her red face by bending to grab her purse off the ground. Looking like a tomato was the curse of being a natural blonde. She’d only had thirty-two years to acquaint herself with that irrefutable truth.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, “money.” She dug into her purse to rifle around for her wallet. “How much are you thinking? One hundred? Two?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he told her, planting the end of the cane on the ground. Anna almost offered to help, but she recognized the same stubbornness in him that ran through her blood. He didn’t want her help. And he definitely didn’t want her pity.

  Curiosity, always the cat killer, spiked as she clutched her wallet in both hands to resist from reaching out to touch him.

  “I really am sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you sure that I can’t—”

  “Ma’am,” he barked sharply like a drill sergeant, “you’re hovering.”

  Julian only accused her of that, oh, every other day. “I want to help.”

  “You’ve said.” Twisting his big body onto all fours, he dragged the cane beneath him for leverage. Sweat beaded his brow and a grimace flattened the lines of his full mouth as he came to his feet. He drew in a heavy, shuttered breath. “You find everything you were looking for?”

  Before Anna had the chance to respond, her cell phone began to vibrate in her purse. “Oh, crap,” she whispered as she stared at Julian’s name flashing across the screen. She was late. Again. Her gaze flicked up to the man’s stoic features, and she blurted, “I have to go.”

  He didn’t even bother to hide his relief.

  He pointedly swung his gaze toward the front door, then turned back to her. “Come visit us again soon,” he murmured, not at all sounding like he meant it.

  Anna couldn’t help herself. She folded her arms over her chest and said, “How much did it pain you to say that?”

  “Honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m about two minutes away from throwing you out of here.”

  Anna paused to digest the insult. It was a good one. It really, really was. But she could do better.

  Still holding her wallet in her hand, she unzipped it and pulled out a couple of twenties she kept in there for emergency situations.

  In her book, “emergency situations” constituted everything from Ben & Jerry runs to buying new socks for Julian when his toes began playing hide-and-seek.

  “I already told you the money isn’t necessary,” Mr. Green Eyes said with a stern set to his mouth.

  Anna folded the bills in half, and then folded them in half again. She looked up, their gazes clashing as she boldly stuffed the money into the front pocket of his jeans. “Consider it a thank-you for allowing me to let myself out. I’m more than capable of doing so without you going all caveman on me.”

  And then she did just that.

  And, somehow, she found the strength to not look back at the hottest guy she could remember meeting in years.

  Chapter Three

  By the time Anna pulled her car into the school parking lot across town, she’d come to a single conclusion:

  Like many women out there, she suffered from Mr. Darcy Syndrome. Thanks to Hollywood and Matthew MacFayden (Anna was a lone wolf and preferred 2005 Pride & Prejudice), it was the strong, silent, and sexy types that revved her engine.

  Not that her engine had been revved in a while.

  But considering that her first dabbling into dating a modern-day Mr. Darcy had resulted in Julian and no father to share her baby boy’s first steps or the first diaper change, Anna figured she’d learned her lesson.

  The fact that her knees were still wobbly from the encounter at Herbal Heaven proved her wrong.

  Anna groaned. She needed to put Mr. Green Eyes behind her for good and focus on meeting a nice guy who wanted to be a part of her son’s life. A nice guy who maybe wore glasses and didn’t spend all day with his butt on the sofa watching ESPN.

  Number one priority: her ideal match was a guy without a hidden past.

  Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt for a lifelong reminder of her bad decisions.

  Really, she didn’t feel as though she were asking for too much.

  She caught sight of Julian’s lanky form standing by the school’s chain-link fence, and Anna pulled the car up alongside him. The passenger side door cranked open, and his body collapsed on the leather seat, his knees bending like chicken wings up against his chest.

  Jules fumbled for the seat adjuster and sent the seat cranking back. With a scowl, he muttered, “Shaelyn does this on purpose, doesn’t she?”

  Anna directed the car out of the lot. “Only out of love, Jules.”

  When Shaelyn had moved back to New Orleans a year ago, she and Anna might as well have been strangers. Anna was a year older, which felt like no time at all today. But, while growing up, that year had been an impenetrable gap. Anna was partly to blame. Back then, she’d been too focused on friends, cheerleading, and new boyfriends to give too much thought to her short, bubbly cousin trailing behind her. It hadn’t helped that Anna and Shaelyn had gone to different schools all their lives.

  And now—well, now Shaelyn was part owner of Anna’s prized boutique and the two cousins had never been closer. The same went for Jules, who adored Shaelyn and her boyfriend, Brady, to pieces.

  Sometimes, Anna couldn’t help but wonder if he preferred them to her, his own mother. On those rare days when she let herself be sucked
down by regret and guilt, it was a struggle to remember that she and Julian were a team.

  She glanced over at Jules, giving in to the sort of motherly affection he evaded, and ruffled his short, blond hair. “How do you feel about pizza?” she asked, reaching for her cell phone as she kept her other hand on the steering wheel. “We can pick it up on the way home and watch Survivor tonight.”

  “Mom, you do realize that there are other food groups besides pizza, right?”

  Anna feigned ignorance. “Seriously? I had no idea.”

  Ben & Jerry’s Rocky Road was her other favorite food group.

  “Greens are a thing,” Julian pointed out.

  She slid her son a look of horror. “Who are you and what have you done with Julian?”

  An unexpected blush burned the crests of his cheekbones. “I’m still Julian.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Anna said, wagging her finger at him as they slid to a stop at a red light. “You’re not getting out of this one. The last time Shaelyn tried to feed you broccoli you told me you were tortured at dinner and to never send you over to her house unfed again.”

  Clearly uncomfortable with the spotlight, Jules slid a hand through his hair.

  “Is this because of a girl?” Anna prodded, as they continued along and she pulled onto their street. “What’s her name?”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t ruin this for me, Jules. I’ve been waiting for this conversation my entire life.”

  Jules leveled her with a disbelieving glance. “You’ve been waiting your entire life to talk about sex with me?”

  Anna’s stomach dropped all the way to her feet. “What? No!” She parallel-parked the car in between two others, and then pointed at the teenager slumped in the passenger’s seat. “No sex,” she said loudly, “You’re too young.”

  “I’m not, actually.”

  “Well, then, I’m too young for you to be having sex. No sex for you until I’m fifty. And we’re not even going to mention the word ‘sex’ again after this conversation until I hit forty-five.”

  A sly grin worked its way onto his face. “Guess I don’t have to wait too long, then. Aren’t you forty-two or something?”