So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel) Read online

  So Good

  An Alpha Dogs Novel

  Nicola Rendell

  © 2017 by Nicola Rendell

  All rights reserved.

  Editing: Síofra Ní Thuairisg/Aquila Editing; Lisa Hollett/Silently Correcting Your Grammar

  Cover Design: Najla Qamber Designs

  Cover Photographer: Sara Eirew Photographer

  Cover Model: Justin Edwards

  Cover Model: Bella/Nikki Sebben

  Interior Paperback Formatting: E.M. Tippetts Designs

  Publicity: Ardent Prose

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written consent of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, brands, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  For Sam

  “Love is friendship set on fire.”

  Jeremy Taylor

  1

  Max

  I wasn’t planning to see her naked—I swear to God, I wasn’t. The day was a scorcher, one of those godforsaken New England summer days that makes a guy wonder how he ever said fuck you to winter. I stood on the roof of her house, three stories above the Maine woods, with a far-off view of the ocean. It was pretty, yeah, like the kind of shit real estate companies put on complimentary calendars. But in that heat, it was like standing on top of a goddamned toaster, turned all the way to burned. I could feel that shit in my socks, straight through my work boots. At my feet was a stack of shake shingles, old-school, to replace the ones that were missing. Her house had a few slow leaks, and one over her bathroom that made the ceiling look like a huge Rorschach test. She said it definitely looked like a rose in bloom; I said it definitely looked like Batman. But I told her hidden meanings wouldn’t make shit for difference when the ceiling collapsed into the tub, so there I was. Fucking miserable work, but I was glad to do it. Glad to do anything for her—anything she needed at all.

  In the forest on every side around the cottage, the cicadas screeched. It sounded like a needle squeaking off a record player. I knelt down by the stack of shingles, using my utility knife to score a line through one to fit a nearby gap. I snapped it with my hands and tossed the scrap end off the edge of the roof. A trickle of sweat ran down my forehead, and I wiped my face with my forearm. One droplet got away, sparkling in the sun. It caught my eye, and I watched it fall as it landed on the skylight window with a splat.

  And that was when it happened. Boom.

  There she was, right under me. She couldn’t have been more than six feet away, but she felt even closer. I had a direct line of sight down into her gorgeous, soft cleavage, bright and pure in the sunshine. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the surprise of seeing her, but at first, I didn’t really process that it was Rosie at all. My dude brain said, I want that woman.

  Then my regular brain said, Don’t be an asshole, man. It’s Rosie. Have some respect.

  Respect I definitely had, but of course I’d thought about seeing her naked before. She was so fucking beautiful that any man would have thought about it. Sometimes, like right then looking down into her dress, I couldn’t fucking help it. Sometimes we’d be out doing something ordinary, like eating dinner or I’d be changing her oil, or she’d be teaching me to do shit I should have learned at some point in the last thirty-four years, like iron a dress shirt without screwing up the collar, and I’d catch myself watching her cleavage rise and fall as she breathed or admiring how nice her legs were, and I’d think, Holy hell.

  Now she was directly underneath the skylight. The angle of the sun cast my shadow down the roofline, away from the skylight, so I didn’t give myself away. Like that, I watched her. I gave in to my dude brain and just took her in. Her light brown hair glinted, and a beam of light caught the curve of her shoulder.

  That was when the goddamned striptease started, beginning with the left strap of her sundress.

  Her movements were graceful, sexy, sassy—the sway of her hips, the shake of her shoulders. I realized I might be in real fucking trouble, because I loved that sexy sass. It wasn’t normal Rosie-cute. It was naughty, like nothing I’d ever seen her do before. I liked it so much, I couldn’t look away. She shimmied out of her sundress, and it fell to the floor in a pool at her feet. No big deal, I tried to tell myself. I’d seen her in her bikini a thousand times. This was no different from that.

  Except it was, because then she reached around to undo her bra. Before I could tell myself, Don’t look, dude. It’s Rosie, don’t look, it was too fucking late. The straps slid down off her shoulders, and for one perfect second got caught on her nipples, swinging in the air before falling to the floor.

  Holy…

  I pressed my clenched fist to my mouth and groaned into my hand. All my blood was leaving my head. The roofline was getting wobbly.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t know her curves; we’d spent whole summers on the beach—I knew her shape and her softness, I knew her lines and her freckles. Every curve of Rosie Madden was sacred in my book. Fucking douchebags on the beach giving her eyes had to answer to me and my eyes, right behind her. She did that to me—I was one punch away from defending her honor, always. But this? This was different. Seeing your best friend in a bikini at a clambake is one thing. Protecting your best friend from assholes with wandering eyes is part of the guy-girl best friend creed. But seeing your best friend, absolutely naked in her bedroom, without her knowing? That was a different deal.

  …Shit.

  Part of me knew I should keep my eyes off of her. She thought she was in private, and I had no business spying. Anyway, I didn’t want to be that guy. I hated that guy. But the other part of me, fuck. The other part of me was nothing but want.

  Then she bent at the hips, and time slowed down, like some kind of stop-motion Jackie Chan kung fu sequence. All the cicadas went silent, at least in my head, they did. The wind stopped blowing through the trees. It was just her, and her perfection, in the sunshine underneath me. I felt like I was on one of those glass-bottomed boats, looking at a world I never knew existed.

  She tossed her bra aside, and it landed on her neatly made bed. She shimmied out of her panties, shaking her ass as she did. I growled into my fist, and that’s when I went down into a crouch.

  Because as she shimmied, I saw it in a V above her ass. My kryptonite. A skimpy thong.

  All these years, all these decades, I’d had her pegged for cute cotton panties—pastel polka dots, thin stripes, shit that was sweet and sensible. But I was so fucking wrong. Black. Strappy. Tiny. Not sensible at all. Now it was in a rolled-up ball at her ankles. Using her toes, she plucked her panties from the floor and caught them on one finger.

  Fucking A.

  She was completely naked, not a thread on her. Every thought I’d ever had got sucked out of my brain, like dishwater down the sink drain. What was left was only one true thing, and it wasn’t about her ass or her skin or her breasts. It was the one thing I think I’d always known but never let myself feel. Until that moment.

  She is the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Part of the reason I thought that was, yeah, obviously,
she was fucking stunning, every inch of her straight out of a dream. Not just my dream, either. Guys would slow down on Main Street to give her the elevator stare, and I’d quietly crack my knuckles and give them don’t-you-fucking-dare stares. But the other part, the part that wasn’t in my gut but was in my heart, was that I fucking adored her. Adored her so hard it hurt.

  She crouched down to pick up her dress, lifting the delicate straps with her small, sweet fingers. She pivoted, so I had a view of the other side of her body for the first time. There it was.

  The tattoo.

  I groaned again. I wasn’t prepared for this shit. Three stories up, that body was dangerous. It was a rose tattoo, snaking around her hip, on the milk-white skin that was always under her bikini bottoms. The part of her I’d never seen. It was serious ink, real art, not some namby-pamby temporary tattoo or some amateur shit she might’ve gotten in an hour at a tattoo parlor on a dare on a cruise to Puerto Rico. It was complicated, detailed, and artful. Multiple visits to some tattoo artist, touching that creamy skin—goddamn.

  It took every fucking ounce of strength I had, but I did manage to look away. I felt as disoriented as if I’d been sucker-punched. Not cotton—lace. Not cute—hot. Not my friend—my fucking fantasy.

  She was so important to me, such an integral part of my world, that I’d never let myself think of her as more than what she was. She was like running water or electricity or the sunshine itself. She was one of those things that was perfect exactly as it was, and one of those things only an idiot would want to change. I never looked at her and thought, I wish I could have more of her than I do already. That would be like thinking, I wish I could turn that cold glass of water into a swimming pool. Or, I wish electricity came through the air. Fuck that noise. Perfect things are perfect things, and Rosie Madden was a perfect goddamned thing, from the tips of her toes to the freckles on her nose. And that rose, holy fuck, that rose.

  I was strong, but not that strong, and I let my eyes move down again. She’d disappeared from view, mostly—except for the edge of her ass. I watched her rifle through her closet, and a few dresses fluttered onto her bed. On her bedside table, I caught a glimpse of the picture she always kept there, of the two of us together. The memories flew back at me like a runaway train. The first time I’d ever seen her was the day my parents and I moved to Truelove, at the start of middle school. The first time I ever saw her, she was volunteering at the community gardens. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and I thought she’d looked super badass. I’d helped her dig up carrots and had been too fucking tongue-tied to say a goddamned word.

  That’s how I felt, all over again times a thousand.

  I’d never made a move. She’d cried on my shoulder through a line of guys who were never good enough for her. Jocks and pricks and a brief and seriously unfortunate stint with a guy who was a drummer for a reggae band that I hated so much it made me grind my teeth. But I never said shit about it. She was perfect even when she made mistakes. Tips of her toes. Freckles on her nose.

  Never mind that rose. Like Banksy took on a temple.

  One more time, I glanced down. Now she was sitting on her bed, and I saw that dark V shadow between her thighs. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. I watched her put on a pair of red panties. Equally skimpy, equally not-sensible, equally ballbusting. They were only tragic because they hid the parts of her I’d never seen before.

  Christ. Almighty.

  As the world started to spin, I realized fixing the shingles could wait. I’d been working on old houses long enough to know that if you found yourself on a dangerously sloping roof and felt like you might be less than 100% on the ball, you needed to reconsider your game plan. I needed to get my shit together—that body had me totally fucking derailed. So I made my way down the roof, basically bouldering down backward. I focused on my grip and my steps, like a climber coming down from Everest without enough oxygen. When I got to the gutter, I worked my way around the corner, standing on the eave, and hooked my leg over my ladder, making sure to put one foot after another and keep a tight grip on every rung.

  When I stepped off the ladder, I grabbed a bottle of water that she’d left for me, filled up my palm and then splashed my face. My sweat stung my eyes through the droplets of water, and I rubbed away the tears. I heard the hinges on the screen door creak. “All done?” she asked.

  I opened my eyes. They stung like hell, but I didn’t give a fuck. There she was, in a dress I’d seen before. Striped and sweet. But now I knew the secret. There were red panties under there. Red. Cherry red. My eyes fell on the part of her hip that I knew was inked.

  “Max?”

  I somehow managed to snap out of it. “Sorry. Getting there. Spotted something weird with the skylight.”

  Rosie cocked her head. “Were you up there? Above my room?”

  Awesome, dude. Smooth. “Just noticed it out of the corner of my eye.”

  “I don’t like you being on the roof.” She pursed her lips. “Too steep. Promise you’ll get some ropes up there or something? Promise?” She reached out and put her hand to my arm, her fingers with their short pink nails pressing into my tanned skin. I had a quick but totally unavoidable image of her gripping my forearm in a very different situation. I want that. So fucking…

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  When I didn’t answer—I knew if I opened my mouth, the first words out would be, You. Me. Right Now.—she looked up at the roof and squinted into the sun. She peered suspiciously up at me and shifted her nose, kind of like a bunny. Adorable. She wasn’t very tall, so whenever she looked at me, she had to lift her chin, which used to be cute. But now looked…like everything I’d ever wanted. “Have you had too much sun?”

  I was vaguely aware that she’d said some words, but I wasn’t hearing them because I realized I couldn’t see her bra straps, so that had to mean she was she was wearing a strapless…

  Knock. That. Shit. Off. “I’m good.”

  “Mmm.” She nodded and furrowed her delicate eyebrows, which had never looked as pretty as they did at that moment. I didn’t even know eyebrows could be pretty. They’re eyebrows, for fuck’s sake. But suddenly I felt like for the last ten years, I’d been looking at her through a standard definition television, with a shitty cable connection. Now someone had handed me an HDMI cable, and she was in 1080 dots per inch. Christ.

  “Lemme make you a sandwich. You’re acting strange.”

  Rather than answer her, I dumped the remaining half a bottle of water over my head, like Andre Agassi used to do between break points at the French Open.

  “Ham? Or turkey? I’ve got both. Or chicken salad!” She clapped her hands together, compressing her cleavage. “Do you want a pickle?”

  She means an actual pickle, you fuckwit. “Surprise me,” I told her and dragged my eyes off the curve of her cleavage. I grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and pressed it to my eyes. I had to get out of there. I needed a cold shower or a call from my tax guy or an unexpectedly urgent trip to the DMV—anything to stop myself seeing her stark naked every goddamned time I looked at her. Anything to get my mind off that ink.

  As I wiped my face, she cleared her throat, and I dropped my shirt. “What?”

  She pressed her lips together and rocked back on her sandals. “Nothing!”

  I followed her eyes and glanced down at my fly, but the stallion was still in the barn. “Come on,” I said, finding myself smiling right along with her. “What are you looking at?”

  “Just…” She swallowed hard. “Looking good there, champ.” She glanced at my stomach, where I’d shown her my bare abs. She made a fist and gave me a mock punch, soft and sweet. “That P90X is working great for you.”

  Here we go again with the fitness videos. For everything else she was—beautiful, smart, funny—she was also a fucking ballbuster sometimes. She’d worked up this whole narrative that I spent my nights with Tony Horton on my houseboat, getting cut and doing reps while I drank protein shakes with a straw, straight from th
e blender. It was her only explanation for why I didn’t have a girlfriend. P90X it had to be, she’d said. Or maybe, she’d whispered like a coconspirator, “Jazzercise.” Now, though, I had a better idea than ever about why I was so picky: not a single woman held a candle to her. I’d been fucking blind to it, but now the mist had burned right off. “I’ve never even seen the opening sequence. Never have. Never will.”

  “They’re streaming now!”

  “Christ.”

  Rosie snorted and made a long wheeeeee. “Sure. Surrrrrrre,” she said, stifling her giggle. “One ham-and-turkey, coming right up.” She spun on her sandals and disappeared into the house. Hips swinging. Red panties invisible, but not to me.

  Not anymore.

  2

  Rosie

  Max had been looking at me really strangely, so I stopped on my way back into the kitchen to look at myself in the little mirror over the key rack. I checked to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a dusting of eyeshadow on my cheeks and then accidentally smudged it with my fingers, making myself look like an exhausted NFL linebacker in overtime. I hadn’t. Just to be extra sure, I wet my fingertips and swiped them underneath my eyes. Everything looked normal. I looked a bit flushed, but still like me. I checked my teeth. Nothing green. I looked down at my girls. Everybody in place. So, I figured that whatever was going on with Max had to be the heat. He’d been out there all day, and it was a hot one—out here, surrounded by the trees, it was like being in a huge greenhouse. I turned up the AC on the thermometer pad and made my way into the kitchen.

  Which was a disaster. The whole place was, really. Not dirty, just chaotic. Not so very long ago, but long enough not to hurt me too much to think of it, the house belonged to my grandma. The plan was to get it turned around to sell, but it wasn’t going to be easy. It needed new windows, new doors, and electrical wires that weren’t wrapped in…wait for it…tar-soaked cotton, which had apparently been all the rage in 1891. Charming. The house was like a Pandora’s box of trips to Home Depot, because the more work I did, the more work I realized I needed to do.