Wild Thing (The Magic Jukebox Book 3) Read online

  Her arm hurt. He was bruising her. He was too close. Too threatening. She blurted out, “What are you, crazy? Let go of me!”

  She hadn’t even thought about the word. She’d just said it. Crazy. He gave her a fierce shake and her head jerked. “Listen to me. You’ll be perfect. You won’t get caught.”

  “No.”

  He snatched the bag of heroin from her hand. “Bitch. I’m doing you a favor, meeting you like this. I ought to kill Danny just for sending you my way. Pain-in-the-ass—” And then he fell back, wide-eyed, as glaring blue lights flashed across his face. Monica sprang free from him and turned in time to see the dark van and two police cars tear across the parking lot, screeching to a halt just a few feet from Monica and MacArthur.

  “You bitch!” he screamed, reaching for her again.

  She sprinted away, colliding with Detective Nolan as he and several uniformed cops swarmed around MacArthur. She tripped over his foot and went down, sprawling on the asphalt. Loose pebbles tore at her palms.

  Detective Nolan halted and bent over to help her.

  “I’m fine,” she said, pushing off the ground and swiveling to sit. Detective Nolan looked so worried—but he shouldn’t be. She was fine. She’d nailed the bastard. She’d engaged in an undercover drug deal, she’d said the word crazy, she’d done things she had never, in her wildest dreams, imagined doing.

  She’d slept with a stranger. She’d fallen in love with him. She’d saved him.

  The air blinked bright blue and dark, bright blue and dark with flashing lights. MacArthur raged and ranted. Uniformed officers shouted at him and wrestled him into handcuffs. And all Monica heard were the bold, wailing opening chords of a song: Wild Thing.

  She’d made everything groovy, as the song said. She knew for sure. She was a wild thing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ty couldn’t stay. The reasons multiplied and blurred in his mind, but the bottom line was, he had to leave.

  All his stuff was in Florida. He had an apartment there. His Honda Rebel. Clients. Contacts. A flourishing career.

  Brogan’s Point had become a holding cell in a police station. It had been a place where he’d been suspected of crimes. A place he didn’t belong.

  Mostly, he couldn’t stay because of Monica. Because she’d risked her life for him, and scraped her hands, and he felt guilty. He’d caused her pain.

  She didn’t seem to mind that she’d gotten injured that night in the marina parking lot. When he’d seen the scabs on her palms, she’d laughed and told him they didn’t hurt. She’d laughed when he was released from the holding cell, too. She’d laughed and flung her arms around him and said, “Wow! It was so exciting, Ty! You should have seen me. I was amazing!”

  He had no doubt about that. As far as he could tell, she was always amazing. She was smart and gorgeous and successful, and in her spare time she could extricate a guy from a tricky legal situation more effectively than his high-priced lawyer could—a lawyer she’d found for him.

  He owed her too much, and she didn’t seem interested in collecting on that debt. She was too thrilled about her excellent adventure.

  He didn’t want to be an adventure for her. He wasn’t sure what he did want, but it wasn’t this—to hang around her quiet little town, doing odd jobs for her at her family’s resort and being beholden to her.

  Besides, he never stayed anywhere for long. Now seemed as good a time as any to leave.

  Caleb had told Ty he would mail a bill, and Ty could do whatever he had to do with his trust fund for the payment. Ty turned in his rental bike, and through some convoluted wrangling, Monica found a ride for him to Logan: the fiancée of her best friend’s boss at the community center shuttled back and forth to Boston on a regular basis because her family and the antiques dealership she worked for were located there. Diana was an amiable, bubbly young woman who insisted that driving Ty to Logan Airport was no hardship. “This is what I love about small towns,” she said. “Everyone helps everyone else out.”

  Maybe that was why Monica had done what she’d done—small-town helpfulness.

  It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. He wasn’t sure he even knew how to stay.

  ***

  Florida was unbearably hot. Even with the air conditioner blasting in his apartment, he felt as if he might melt. The building’s open staircase and pastel stucco walls seemed alien to him. The palm trees dotting his street seemed as if they’d been dropped into place from another planet. Even the Atlantic Ocean smelled different here. It smelled warm and soupy.

  It took him three days to decide he couldn’t stay here, either. This wasn’t home. He hadn’t really had a home since the day his parents died. He’d had places where he’d lived for a while, but no home. He wasn’t even sure what home was, but when he spoke the word, shaped his mouth around it, his mind conjured images of a quiet, private beach, a cool breeze, a cool rain. Clam chowder in a rough-hewn dockside restaurant. Parents who wanted to meet their daughter’s friend and make sure he measured up, even when the friend knew damned well he didn’t.

  He thought of Monica. Her dark, silky hair. Her sleek, slender body. The heat of her surrounding him, holding him deep inside her. Her courage. Her sensibility. Her knowledge of who she was and where she was headed. And those blinding sparks of wildness that flashed through her, captivating him. Making him ache with wanting her.

  Fortunately, he rented his furnished apartment month-to-month, so he didn’t have to break a lease. He packed up the belongings he considered worth saving, borrowed a neighbor’s pickup and drove the boxes down to the marina where he repaired boats and where, for better or worse, he’d met Wayne MacArthur. For worse, because he’d gotten pathetically snagged in a web of legal problems. For better, because he’d met Monica.

  At the marina, he asked the manager to store the boxes for him until he called with an address to ship them. Ty insisted on giving Jeff money to cover the shipping costs and compensate him for his trouble. Then he strapped what he could—some clothing, his lap-top, a couple of good books—to the back of his Rebel and hit the road, heading north.

  ***

  Sun streamed through the window in Monica’s tiny office down the hall from the inn’s lobby. She was glad the room was small, just as she was glad her apartment was minuscule. Too much space made her keenly aware of how alone she felt.

  The hotel was packed. Rose Cottage looked beautiful—a few guys on the maintenance staff had finished what Ty had begun, repainting the parlor and touching up the second-floor bathroom—and the cottage was now filled with the Kolenko wedding party. Every room in the main building was filled, too, although now that the Monday of the three-day Memorial Day weekend had arrived, people were starting to check out. During the week, the place wouldn’t be packed, but next weekend promised to be as busy and profitable as this past weekend. Weddings were booked for every weekend through the end of August. Romance floated through the air like a sweet perfume.

  She ought to be thrilled. Her parents were. The accountants were. The guests were, too.

  But she was wistful. Melancholy. Feeling like an idiot.

  She had known Ty would leave. He’d told her he would. She’d accepted that. Loving him despite the knowledge that he wasn’t the sort of man who stuck around and committed to a place, a life, a woman… It had been risky, but Ty—and the moment they’d found each other while the magic jukebox cast its spell over them—had compelled her to take that risk.

  She didn’t regret it. She just wished that the end of the song didn’t make her want to weep.

  Her phone rang—a direct call, not through the front desk. She answered. “Hello?”

  “Hey, baby!”

  Jimmy. She wasn’t in the mood to speak to anyone right now, but on the list of people she wasn’t in the mood to speak to, Jimmy surely ranked in the top three. “Hello,” she said grimly, hoping her tone would deter him.

  “Listen, I got a great deal for you. A brand-new Focus, no money down.
Great mileage. Automatic everything.”

  “I’m happy with the car I have, thank you.”

  His voice lost its salesman edge. “I heard that guy you were fooling around with has left town. No hard feelings, babe. Let’s move on.”

  She wondered how he’d heard she was fooling around with a guy—which hardly described what she’d been doing with Ty, but the point wasn’t worth debating. In a small town, no one had secrets, she supposed. He could have picked up gossip about her from anyone.

  “I’ve moved on,” she assured him.

  “I’m sorry about the anniversary thing, okay? Let me make it up to you. How about dinner tonight? I hear the Ocean Bluff Inn serves great food.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, honey. We’re past that bump in the road, right? I let you take your walk on the wild side.”

  “Wrong song,” she told him.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You said no hard feelings, and I agree. You said let’s move on, and I agree with that, too. Let’s move on, Jimmy.”

  “How about, let’s move in,” he improvised.

  “No.” No song connected her to Jimmy. No magic. She wasn’t the person she’d been when they were a couple. That all seemed like another lifetime, another world. A world so safe it had nearly smothered her.

  She was a different person now. The scabs on her palms had healed, and her heart… It would heal, too. Like any muscle, it would wind up stronger because of what it had endured. Scar tissue was tough.

  “All right, well, just think about it,” Jimmy said. He was a car salesman, after all. Car salesmen never took no for an answer. Even after you walked out of the showroom and drove away, they still believed they could sell you that shiny new Ford Focus.

  “There’s nothing to think about,” she insisted. “I’m going to say good-bye now. Take care.” She lowered the receiver gently into the cradle, not wanting the last thing he heard from her to be the bang of a phone slamming. She and Jimmy had a history, and they would always have that history. Some good times. Some not-so-good times. But it was history. Not the present. Not the future.

  She didn’t want to think about her future, because Ty wasn’t going to be a part of it. Right now, the present was making enough demands on her, anyway. She swiveled in her chair, turning her back to the window and studying the schedule on her computer screen. Had she hired enough college kids for the summer? Their school calendars meshed well with the inn’s, at least at the beginning of the summer. The hotel had hired a dozen girls to supplement the regular housekeeping staff, and half a dozen boys to supplement the grounds crew. That struck her as terribly sexist; why couldn’t boys vacuum floors and scrub toilets? Why couldn’t girls push lawn mowers and clean the pool? They could, of course, but the girls always applied for housekeeping jobs and the boys always applied for grounds-crew jobs. Gender politics notwithstanding, Monica couldn’t force people to apply for jobs they didn’t want.

  Her phone rang again. Sighing, she lifted the receiver and said, “No. I’m not going to think about it.”

  “Monica?” The voice belonged to Kim Seaver, the front desk clerk.

  “Oh—sorry,” Monica said. “I thought it was someone else calling me. What’s up?”

  “There’s somebody here who wants to see you.”

  “An irate guest?” Please, no. I’m not in the mood.

  “He’s not a guest. He says he wants a job.”

  “It’s not Jimmy, is it?”

  Kim laughed. “No. Can I send him back?”

  Monica glanced again at the staff schedule on her monitor. Maybe it was a liberated young man who wanted to clean rooms this summer. She should encourage him. “Sure.”

  Less than five seconds after she hung up the phone, he swung into her office. Windblown. Sunburned. Covered in road dust.

  Sexier than any man had a right to be.

  “Ty?”

  He was wearing faded jeans, thick-soled boots, and a dark blue T-shirt that had seen better days. A leather jacket was hooked around his index finger and slung over one shoulder. He filled her doorway, looking relieved and worried and… She sighed again. Unbearably sexy.

  He gazed at her, silent. She saw a motion in his neck as he swallowed.

  “You want a job?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Maintenance. Repairs. You know I can do that. I won’t leave any jobs unfinished, either.”

  “I thought you went back to Florida.”

  “I couldn’t stay there anymore. It’s not my home.”

  “It’s not?”

  He swallowed again. His eyes took her in, so blue, so intense. “No, it’s not. You’re not there.”

  Now it was her turn to fall silent. He ventured into her cramped office, one step at a time until he was an inch from her desk. She’d never thought of her desk as particularly large, but now that expanse of furniture between them seemed enormous. She wanted it gone. She wanted nothing between them, nothing but love.

  She rose and circled the desk to him. He opened his arms and she stepped into them. For a long moment, they just held each other. Then he leaned back. “I’m serious. Hire me. I’ll be the best maintenance guy you’ve ever had.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said, “but I can’t hire you. I don’t have an opening for someone with your expertise. I could use you on a contract basis for special projects—”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “You could advertise your services as a freelance contractor. You’d make a lot more money than I could pay you, and I’m sure people around here would be happy to hire you.” She paused, then added, “We’ve got a lot of boats in Brogan’s Point.”

  “Right.”

  He still hadn’t smiled. He looked so wired, so focused. “When did you get into town?” she asked.

  “Five minutes ago.”

  She could smell the road and the wind on him. “Did you—ride your motorcycle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All the way from Florida?”

  “I wanted it here with me. This…” He took a deep breath. “This is where I want to be. This is home, Monica. This town. This place. This part of the ocean.” He bowed his head and touched his forehead to hers. “This woman. You. My wild thing.”

  “If you stay here, you might get tamed.”

  Finally, he allowed himself a small, hesitant laugh. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. “Good.”

  “So. I’m here. To stay,” he emphasized. “To have a home.”

  She tightened her arms around him, tilted her face to his, and kissed him. A long, deep, wild kiss. A kiss that would have lasted forever if she didn’t have to breathe.

  But she did. She pulled back, inhaled, and smiled. “You make my heart sing,” she said.

  He returned her smile and quoted the song’s best line: “I love you.”

  ###

  About the Author

  Judith Arnold is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than ninety published novels. A New York native, she currently lives in New England, where she indulges in her passions for jogging, dark chocolate, good music, good wine and good books. She is married and the mother of two sons.

  For more information about Judith, or to contact her, please visit her website. Feel free to check out her other books and sign up for her newsletter.

  If you enjoyed Wild Thing, I hope you will consider posting a review of it online. Thank you!

  Don’t miss the other books in the Magic Jukebox series:

  Changes

  Antiques dealer Diana Simms is engaged to her longtime boyfriend when she finds herself inside the Faulk Street Tavern. The song “Changes” emerges from the jukebox and casts its spell on her. It also captivates Nick Fiore, a local boy who’s arrived at adulthood the hard way, after a tour through the juvenile justice system. Now he’s dedicated his life to helping other troubled kids. He has no business even looking at a beautiful, well-bred woman wearing a di
amond engagement ring. But once they’re bewitched by the jukebox, he and Diana must change their lives, their goals, their dreams and their hearts.

  True Colors

  When she finds herself homeless, artist Emma Glendon accepts the invitation of her best friend to share a rental house in Brogan’s Point. But their absentee landlord, Nick Tarloff, has come to town from his home in San Francisco to sell the house, which will mean evicting his tenants. Nick is a high-tech brainiac and a self-made millionnaire. Emma is a painter and a free spirit. They have nothing in common—except the jukebox, which plays “True Colors” and forces them to recognize their own true colors, colors that can match and blend magnificently, if the magic of the jukebox has its way.