Calling His Bluff. Amy Jo Cousins

      An uneven thumping noise, muffled but audible, came through the door.

      “At last,” she muttered, and then banged on the door again for good measure. “Get a move on, poky!” She smoothed nervous hands over her long, straight dark hair and felt her stomach twist again.

      Fifteen years. That’s how long she’d gone without seeing the man she’d adored with the white-hot passion only a teenager can sustain. Fifteen years of dating the wrong men and wishing secretly, in the dark corners of her heart, that J.D. Damico would come back home and sweep her off her feet.

      Hence the satisfaction of being in Armani.

      The threat of imminent death was putting a crimp in her enthusiasm, however.

      “What’s the holdup in there?” she called out.

      An enormous clatter and crash of metal followed hard upon her words, sounding like a thousand steel toothpicks being dropped on the floor of the devil’s workshop. When the curses that followed threatened to rattle the door on its hinges, she was glad she couldn’t quite make out the words.

      “Whoops.”

      She smiled brightly and nodded as another SUV drifted over to the curb, pulling her stalker’s attention away from her. A reprieve from dismemberment. Lovely.

      “I am going—” thump “—as fast—” thump, thump “—as I can.” The words rumbled through the door, halfway between a growl and a shout. On the last word, the door was yanked inward to fly on an arc that only stopped when it crashed into a brick wall. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

      Her apology died on her lips as she opened her mouth. The snotty comment had her snapping her jaws shut with an audible click. She took a deep breath and tried to remember that she’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. Waiting, too, for J.D. to see her at last as someone other than the gawky kid who tagged along after her brother all the time. In her fantasies, J.D. had been waiting for this moment, too.

      Backlit as he was by a flickering yellow-gold glow, she couldn’t see J.D. clearly, but she could tell that he was on crutches and that a fiberglass cast covered one leg from the base of his toes to halfway up his thigh. He seemed to be wearing black sweatpants, the ragged edge of one chopped-off leg brushing against the top of the cast. A gray Chicago Cubs T-shirt covered heavily muscled shoulders and bunched up under his armpits where it caught on the cushioned pads of the crutches.

      So much for him wanting to impress me. At least I know why he’s being obnoxious—he’s clumsy and in pain, not to mention freezing to death. Who wears a T-shirt in March in Chicago?

      She’d have known him in an instant, even if he was dressed like someone she could’ve bumped into in her brother’s pub. She couldn’t stop smiling. She hoped she wasn’t going to throw up.

      He stood in the doorway, staring at her blankly, eyes flickering from her face to her feet to her medical bag and back again.

      She resisted the urge to run a hand over her hair or check to see if her fly was open. She’d been heading to a speed-dating event, for Christ’s sake. This was damn near as good as it got for her, appearance-wise. Maybe J.D. was stunned into silence by how much she’d changed.

      She could break out a Sharpie and scribble e.e. cummings poetry and Edna St. Vincent Millay quotes on her pants, if that would help him remember who she was. Although it would be a crime to do that to this cashmere-wool blend.

      As the moment stretched out, J.D. still staring at her wordlessly, teenage memories of overwhelming awkwardness thickening her tongue and tripping her feet came flooding back in a wave of heat and self-consciousness that she felt as a flush she knew was visible on her face. Fuck. This was exactly how it had happened in high school, too. One minute she was cool and easy with J.D., always happy when he would seek her out in a quiet moment and sit with her. The next minute she was excruciatingly aware of the thick curve of muscle wrapping his shoulder, and unable to speak in his presence.

      If he didn’t say something, soon, it was possible she would dissolve into an actual puddle of goo and embarrassment on the sidewalk and never speak to him again.

      His grin rescued her.

      The white flash of teeth in that cocky smile beneath high, tanned cheekbones and dark shining eyes sparked memories of a skinny teenager who’d claimed there was Cherokee mixed with the Italian blood in his family.

      “Hot damn,” he said, the slow grin spreading over his face. He grappled with his crutches, swinging over to rock her back in a fierce hug. “Sarah Tyler!” He pounded her back with one hand. She hung on and tried to keep him upright.

      After a moment, he pushed her back and held her at arm’s length. “Holy shit, girl. You’re all growed up, aren’t you?”

      She rolled her eyes. Yup, nothing like feeling twelve again. So much for J.D. seeing her as a competent and hopefully foxy adult woman.

      “Get your ass in here, girl, and tell me why I haven’t seen you around Tyler’s place since I got back.”

      So. The big reunion moment was over, she guessed. That was it? Tendrils of irritation crept into her attitude.

      J.D. left her standing in the doorway and thumped off across the cavern of a room to the back corner. His dark hair was tied back in a stubby ponytail at the back of his neck. Oh, no. She shot off a quick prayer that he hadn’t turned into an artistic type. Sarah had always thought of J.D. as the rough-edged boy of her youth, a bruiser more than a finicky, flighty artiste, even as she’d read about his growing celebrity as a photographer. After spending a bit too much time at her brother’s North Side Chicago pub, she’d gotten over her romantic notions about dating artists or musicians easily enough. She’d learned to spot the type that would lecture her for three hours about Scorsese or the history of jazz. But based on the crowds of young women that inevitably gathered around the guys who painted or played or took pictures, she was atypical.

      Artists, bah. Nothing but trouble, and you always had to foot the bill for their foolishness, too. Of course, she hadn’t fared any better with her most recent disastrous relationship choices, even if she’d very consciously tried to choose an ordinary, kind of boring, stable guy. One who never would’ve been caught dead in the chaos inexorably taking over this space. “Shut the door, will ya?” The words were more command than request.

      “Yes, sir.” She flipped what she considered a properly respectful one-fingered salute at his retreating back.

      She tried to slam the door; a nice loud bang would express her frustration at the anticlimactic nature of this fucking long-awaited reunion, thank you, but was surprised to find that she needed to throw her whole body weight into it to swing the door shut. It finally closed with an annoyingly soft click.

      Heat blasted her like she’d stepped into a sauna. Sweat sprang out on the back of her neck and along her hairline almost instantly. She was not sweating through her Armani. No way.

      She looked for somewhere to hang her coat. Someone had clearly begun converting a warehouse here. She saw more unidentifiable mechanical equipment lying around than she did furniture. But having started this project, it looked like the money had run out before getting a tenth of the way through. The pile of aluminum tubes against one wall explained the clattering crash from before, but it didn’t look promising as a coat rack. She draped her coat over her arm instead and headed into the cavern of a room, sweating in her pewter-gray suit.

      She had always thought J.D. had done well with his photography. That he had more sense than the flighty artists she knew. Apparently not. Or maybe it was just his congenital inability to stop in one place for longer than six months. She could see it now. He’d have decided that moving back to his hometown sounded great, but now that he was here, the urge to hit the road again, just like he’d done fifteen years ago, would leave this long-term project abandoned for someone else to clean up.

      The left half of the open room was obviously where civilization