Tease (Cloverleigh Farms #8)(8)

The uncontrollable thoughts. The racing heart. The sweating, the nausea, the inability of my head to find words and my mouth to form them. The blurry vision. The dizziness. The refusal of my lungs to take a full breath. The sheer terror of knowing that I could publicly humiliate myself in a hundred different ways, expose myself as deficient. A failure. A fool. A fraud.

Actually, give me the fucking lions.

I’d take my chances with them.





I walked up the driveway to my sister’s side door and paused before knocking, my fist in the air—were those my parents’ voices I heard through the open kitchen window? My dad’s loud belly laugh confirmed it a second later.

Allie pulled the door open, a gleam in her eye. “What’cha doin’?”

“Deciding whether I want to come in. Are Mom and Dad here?”

She nodded. “They stopped by after their Saturday morning power walk. Matching track suits and all.”

“Any way I can avoid them?”

“Why do you need to avoid them?”

“They’re just a lot. Mom’s all over me about what she calls my emotional avoidance issues, trying to set me up on dates with her kooky clients right and left, and I’m already hanging out with Dad later tonight.”

She grinned. “Poker night?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky you. But you can’t leave. I need to be at the salon in twenty minutes, and Mom and Dad both have to work today. They just popped in to see the kids real quick.” She sighed heavily. “They love popping in.”

“I told you not to buy a house right around the block from them.”

“I know, I know.” She threw a hand up. “But it’s a good location and the price was right. We’re not all billionaires.”

“Fuck off, I told you I’d help you with a house. You refused.”

She smiled triumphantly. “I did, and it gave me great pleasure. So thanks for that. Anyway, you covered my student loans, and that was a lot.” She patted my chest. “You get free therapy from me for life.”

“Just what a guy wants, his big sister bossing him around and calling it good for him.”

“Speaking of which, did you call the woman I told you about, Natalia Lopez? The one who does the acceptance and commitment therapy? She’s always booked super far in advance but as a favor to me, she said she’d get you in.”

“No. I don’t call people.”

“Hutton! You didn’t like cognitive behavioral therapy, and this is another option. A different approach. Why not try it?”

“Because I don’t need it.”

“So testifying in front of Congress won’t be a problem then? How many times are they going to let you get away with pushing it back?”

Rather than tell her about the text from Wade, I pretended to throttle her by the neck as we walked into the kitchen, which smelled like bacon and waffles.

My parents sat at the table in their matching track suits, his royal blue, hers bright purple. They were well into their sixties but didn’t look it. My father still had a full head of thick dark hair, which was only slightly gray above his ears, and a bushy brown mustache that was his pride and joy. My mother’s long blond hair, chatty exuberance, and brightly colored clothing made her look more like a Hollywood sitcom psychic than a grandmother.

If anyone asked what their secret was, they had different answers. My father swore it was his hobbies that kept him young—the man had more hobbies than anyone I’d ever known, from gardening to tai chi to his barbershop quartet—and my mother claimed it was their enduring love that kept them so energetic. I think it was a combination of both, since my father’s hobbies often took him out of the house, which he’d once confided was quite conducive to a good marriage.

My niece, Keely, was on my mom’s lap, tearing apart a waffle and shoving it into her mouth like only a two-year-old can. My nephew Jonas, who was four, was squeezing a steady stream of syrup over everything on his plate—waffles, bacon, sliced strawberries. The oldest, Zosia, was six, and she was concentrating hard on cutting her own waffle under my dad’s watchful eye.

“Hutton!” he boomed, glancing at me. “Still coming tonight?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Nope, I already told the guys you’ll be there.” He grinned. “They’re excited to have a celebrity at the game, but a little worried about your deep pockets.”

“I’m not a celebrity, Dad,” I muttered, taking a coffee cup down from the cupboard.

“They should be worried about him counting cards, not placing high bets,” said my sister, filling up my cup from the pot.

“Hutton has never cheated a day in his life!” My mom was outraged at this attack on my honor. “And he knows that nothing good ever comes from taking a penny you didn’t earn. It brings bad luck.”

My sister and I exchanged a look. Our mother was famously superstitious—which one of my therapists thought explained my belief in magic powers as a kid. He might have been right, but it wasn’t really the breakthrough he thought it was and definitely didn’t merit the price tag of those sessions. Thousands of dollars just to be told our parents can fuck us up? People called cryptocurrency a racket, but therapy was a hundred times worse.