Tainted Read online

  Tainted: Lance and Mary

  Tess Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution‐Noncommercial‐No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the authorʹs imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Also by Tess Thompson

  For my Bonus Son,

  Jeremy Strom.

  My favorite “nice” guy.

  Like my hero, he’s smart, sweet, loyal, and funny.

  Chapter One

  Lance

  * * *

  TEN SECONDS BEFORE the clock struck midnight and tossed them into a new year, Lance Mullen had only one wish. He wanted to kiss Mary Hansen. Not a friendly peck on her alabaster cheek or a chaste brush of lips. No, his kiss must steal her breath and quicken her pulse and weaken her knees. He must make her swoon.

  This was not a task for the shy or meek. Only a hero could rouse her from her half slumber.

  It would take the kiss of the greatest love story ever written.

  Around him, his friends began to chant the countdown.

  Ten…

  Mary stood next to him in Zane and Honor’s crowded living room. All night she’d stayed near, so close he could smell the subtle scent of her perfume and bask in the heat that radiated from her skin. She tugged the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Lance, you have to count.”

  Nine, eight…

  He looked down at her. His pulse quickened, his knees weakened at the mere sight of her. With an oval face and one of those well-defined jawlines he found so attractive, she reminded him of fine china, meticulously honed into beautiful lines and curves. Tonight, she wore a dark blue velvet dress that clung to her slender waist and hips. Her caramel-hued hair was swept up into a pile on top of her head, exposing her long neck, the tips of her delicate ears, and the birthmark on her neck that reminded him of a question mark. All evening he’d longed to trace the birthmark with his finger as if it might unleash the answer to her heart. Yet, he wondered, too, would she shatter under his touch?

  She played with the gold bangles around her wrist and counted down the seconds with the rest of his friends. Seven, six…

  She smiled up at him with eyes as dull as a child’s crayon. Five, four…

  One day she’d told him that all interesting characters in novels have a secret.

  He had one.

  He was in love with Mary Hansen. No one knew, not even his best friends. She was tainted in their eyes, prickly and cold.

  Unlike a hero in Mary’s favorite novels, his secret did not make him interesting. More like pathetic.

  Three, two, one…

  Confetti floated and danced around him. “Auld Lang Syne” played from the speakers. His best friends and his brother kissed their wives—everyone married now but him. Maggie and Violet were pregnant. He knew his sister-in-law, Kara, wouldn’t be far behind. He was ashamed that their happiness made him sad. More than it should? Maybe. Was he wrong to want a love of his own? A woman to cherish and dogs and babies and the busy, messy lives his friends had made for themselves? If it was wrong, if he should not yearn for more when he had so much, then he was guilty. His new house and all the money in the bank and his expensive cars and clothes meant little when you woke up alone.

  He wanted to wake up with Mary Hansen.

  The passage into her heart was as mysterious as the Agatha Christie novels she lovingly displayed on the Staff Picks table of their bookstore. That said, he knew more than most about the damaged beauty by his side. During their late nights of easy friendship, she’d slowly revealed herself to him as they prepared to open the revamped bookstore. The plot? Six years ago, her baby daughter had died, followed closely by her mother’s death. Then, her husband had admitted to having an affair while she was pregnant. The subtext? Trained as a librarian, she lived only in the pages of the novels she coveted. They were her link to the living world.

  * * *

  Mary turned to him and played with the collar of his shirt. “Sir Lancelot.”

  “Yes?” She labeled everyone by characters in books. He was Sir Lancelot. Every time she called him that, his heart fluttered. However, she was not his Guinevere but his Sleeping Beauty. If only he could waken her.

  “You’re supposed to kiss me or it’s bad luck.” She held up her cheek.

  This was his chance. Do it. Be bold.

  “It has to be on the lips,” he said. “Or it doesn’t count.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, but just in case, you better do it.” She pursed her lips, playful.

  She was about to know he was not playing.

  He pressed his lips to hers, not hard like he wanted but with just the slightest of pressure, and kissed her. To his surprise, she softened against his mouth. She kissed him back! Yes, there was no question. Her lips moved, mimicking the flutter of the confetti that tickled his ear. He lingered at her mouth, lost. My God, she tasted of champagne. Another stanza of music passed. Still, he could not let go. He slipped one arm around her waist. She kept her arms at her sides but allowed him to pull her small-boned frame against his broad chest. Overwhelmed by the scent of her perfume and her hair, he kissed her harder. A spark of light exploded behind his eyes. An engine rumbled through his stomach.

  She pulled away, flushed and breathing hard. “What was that?” she whispered.

  “A kiss.”

  “Why did you do that?” She splayed her fingers against the base of her neck, as if a collar choked her.

  “I’m sorry. I got carried away.”

  She looked down and rearranged the bangles on her arm. “It’s fine. Just a kiss between friends.”

  Suspicions confirmed. He was a sick man. Not with a physical ailment, by the grace of God, but with a mental malady he’d named after himself. The Lance Syndrome. Men who fall for women who are either married, gay, emotionally unavailable, or not interested due to lack of physical attraction.

  “I want to go,” she said.

  His heart no longer fluttered at her words. Once again, he’d blown it.

  A few minutes later, he pulled out of Honor and Zane’s driveway and headed down the hill toward town. Mary sat beside him, stiff and quiet. He’d frightened her with his unwanted kiss. He could kick himself. Here it was the first day of the new year and he had nothing but the same mistakes stretched out in front of him like a road map to his own personal hell. New year. Same mistakes. New woman with which to make same mistakes.

  Nice. Tori Hawthorne, the woman who’d wrecked his life, had once called him vanilla melba toast during a fight. He was the guy you called when you needed a warm smile, genuine encouragement, or to kill a spider. Not the guy who pressed you against
the wall and kissed away all reason.

  Everyone knew nice got you nowhere in life.

  His father had always said a man’s greatest strength was also his greatest weakness. Lance was a good man, a compassionate person. He was sick to death of himself. Sure, it was great to be empathetic and nonjudgmental, but it made life more complicated. Seeing beyond a person’s public face made almost everyone understandable, even lovable. He could see a person’s innate character, the person they’d been before life whittled away at their trust and courage.

  It was as if he stood on a glass floor and could see what lay below when others saw only a shiny reflection of themselves. One couldn’t truly see another if they looked exclusively with their eyes. Only a heart could see through glass.

  He saw Mary with his heart. Behind her reticence and aloofness, those layers of porcelain, was a woman who had suffered great losses yet continued onward, fighting the darkness that wanted to pull her under. To him, this was the true definition of character. She was strong and brave. His friends didn’t understand. They couldn’t see beyond her cracked glass floor.

  Make small talk. Get through the awkwardness. Back to friend zone.

  “What’s the famous medical manual? You know, the one on my mother’s desk?” Mary knew every book ever published. She was a walking database of books.

  “The Merck Manual,” she said.

  Lance snapped his fingers. “Right, that’s it.”

  He imagined The Lance Syndrome listed in the Merck Manual. Along with the description of the syndrome, photographs of the women he’d once loved displayed as exhibits A though F. His last conquest, Exhibit F, Tori Thayne Hawthorne, best described as married. A footnote at the bottom of the page would include details such as, the boss’s daughter who subsequently got him fired from his upwardly mobile job as a hedge fund manager in one of the most prestigious firms in New York City.

  Never one to fail quietly, no, not Lance Mullen. He went out with a splash big enough to empty his famous brother’s swimming pool. Lost the girl and the job and his eye twitch and everything else he’d built over the past eight years of eighty-hour work weeks by falling in love with his boss’s married daughter.

  His brother, Brody, had convinced him to come to Cliffside Bay. Start fresh.

  So, he had. He began again in Cliffside Bay. He’d had a beautiful house built on the corner of Brody’s property. The Dogs and their wives had welcomed him back into the fold, delighted he had finally moved to town. He thought he’d made the right decision for his life. However, one couldn’t shake fundamental flaws just because one moved across the country and constructed a beach house.

  Wherever he went, there he was.

  Exhibit G was his current work in progress. Mary Hansen. She might be his finest disaster to date. Mary fell under two categories. She was emotionally unavailable and put him squarely in the friend zone. Only his most self-destructive work contained women who fell into more than one category.

  She shifted in her seat, smoothing her hands down the front of her dress. Damn that clingy blue dress coupled with the pair of nude sandals that showed off her long legs. Mary Hansen was one sexy librarian.

  He should never have asked her to be his date. Not when he knew his feelings were so far out of the friend zone it was practically another planet.

  Mary looked over at him. Her eyes sparkled in the lights of a passing car. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “You don’t?” If only she meant, I want you to take me home and rip off my clothes.

  “No, it’s just a little after midnight. Now that half your friends are pregnant or have small children, that was a tame New Years’ Eve celebration.”

  “Everything’s changed.” He’d felt it keenly all evening. He was going to be alone the rest of his life, thanks to The Lance Syndrome.

  “Let’s buy a bottle of tequila and make margaritas,” she said.

  “You drink margaritas?”

  “I used to. I used to be fun, believe it or not.”

  “I think you’re fun now,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are,” Lance said. More than you know.

  “I want to be fun again. I want to have fun. Do you know how long it’s been since I cut loose?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  She laughed. “Yes. I don’t want to go home to my empty house. Not tonight. I hate New Year’s Eve. I just want to forget my life for a few hours.”

  “I have tequila at my house.”

  He turned onto the road that took them out of town and up the hillside toward the Mullen property.

  “I feel like drinking too much and dancing in my underwear,” Mary said.

  He coughed. “What?”

  “You are awake,” she said.

  He was awake now. The thought of her dancing in her panties was enough to keep him from sleeping for weeks.

  “You’ve never danced in your underwear,” he said. “No way.”

  “Once. In college. After too many tequila shots.”

  “I can’t picture it.” Maybe you could demonstrate later.

  “Librarians know how to party,” she said.

  He laughed. “That’s a party I’d love to go to.”

  “Seriously, the country song’s true. Tequila does make your clothes fall off. And other things.” The last part was said under her breath.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “Never mind.” She punched his shoulder. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  They turned into the Mullen property. The head of Brody’s security team, Rafael, was off for the night, but Taylor, the night guy waved them through.

  “I’d hate to be as famous as Brody. Well, famous at all,” Mary said.

  “It’s the price he had to pay to play football.” In the past tense. Brody would never play again. A neck injury had forced him into retirement at age thirty-one.

  He drove by Brody’s house, then past the driveway that led to Mary’s dad’s place. Her father had married the Mullens’ longtime housekeeper, Flora, essentially their second mother, and built a cottage where they planned to stay part of the year. Currently, they were in Oregon at their other house and wouldn’t be back until next month. Mary was staying at their place while they were gone.

  “Any luck finding a house?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s for sale or rent. I’ve got to find something before Dad and Flora come back. I cramp their style.”

  “I still think we should make the rooms above the store into an apartment. Like Zane’s apartment above The Oar.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Something about living above a bookstore in that tiny space reiterates the fact that I’m doomed to a life of cats and spinsterhood.”

  You don’t have to be.

  He turned into the third driveway. His house wasn’t far from the cliff, but not so close it would fall into the ocean. He’d made sure of that. Like trading stocks, one had to measure the risks versus the rewards.

  They walked up his stone pathway to the front door. He’d left the yard lights on, but the stones were craggy and uneven. Perfect excuse to take Mary’s arm. How she walked in those heels was as intriguing as the woman herself.

  He kept hold of her as they ambled up the stairs to the front door of his Cape Cod–style home. Once inside, he turned on a few lamps with a command on his phone.

  “Oh, Lance, it’s gorgeous.”

  His designer, Trey Mattson, had put the finishing touches on his house that afternoon. The white couch was now adorned with blue pillows that mimicked the color of the ocean on a summer day. Paintings of the Italian seaside hung on the walls.

  The living room and kitchen were one great room, strategically designed to face the ocean. Tonight, the giant windows acted as mirrors, catching their reflections. During daylight, however, they looked directly out to the ocean. Wide-planed, distressed hardwood floors throughout contrasted with white walls and light furniture with pops of blue in pillow
s, bowls, and vases. At the kitchen island were five stools for five Dogs.

  “Did the table for the dining room come?” she asked.

  “Yes, finally.” He pointed toward the closed door to the dining room, next to the stairs that led up to the second floor. “You can look at it later.” He’d bought an enormous table with enough seating for all of his friends and family. Someday, he would host a holiday meal. A vision of the two of them together with a couple of kids flashed before his eyes. How he wished it could be true.

  “Oh, Lance, the view from this window is unbelievable.” She stepped out of her sandals and placed them neatly by the door to the patio.

  “I’ll never tire of it,” he said. The window was in fact a door, much like a garage. During warm months, the entire door rolled upward and disappeared, making the living room and deck into one space.

  “I love the high beams and light walls. Everything seems so clean and fresh.” She swept her hand over the back of his white couch. “And the bits of blue are lovely. My favorite color.”

  “Mine too. Anyway, we can thank Trey for all of this. I can barely pick out a pair of shoes let alone decorate an entire house.”

  Lance had asked Trey for the ultimate seaside escape—a sanctuary from the world. He hadn’t said it out loud, but he wanted a place where he could feel at peace. A home where he could forget what happened in New York and let all the expectations he’d had for his life drift away in the ocean breeze. This house should grant him peace. Something had to.

  “I love the floors,” she said.

  “Brody said they’re manly but also pretty, like me.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “It’s fine. Just brotherly ribbing.”

  “You’re handsome, not pretty,” she said.