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  Once Wild

  A Wild Irish Novella

  By

  Cara North

  Prologue

  Parker sat restlessly in the booth at Pat’s Pub. It was Dixie’s twenty-first birthday. He had ordered a plate of fries, two shots of tequila, and a beer. He was nursing the beer and looking at the shots when the fries arrived.

  “Think she’s coming?” He was one of the Collins Clan, the family that owned the pub. He wasn’t sure which one he was, just that he seemed familiar enough that he knew him.

  Which made him consider the fact that they may have been noticed more than either of them expected to be. The thing about the Pub was the location, away from both of their lives. “I didn’t think we were that memorable.”

  “Two teenagers ordering fries and soda every Tuesday for three years until you graduated then left.” He folded his arms and gave him a pretty stern expression.

  “I left for college.” Parker shouldn’t feel like he needed to justify himself to a nosy pub owner, yet he did and he was doing just that.

  “I know. I know everything.” He nodded in a convincing manner.

  “I don’t really remember you.” Parker was trying to place the guy.

  “Oh, she didn’t talk to me, my sister…”

  Parker smiled. “I remember her.”

  The expression was really unpleasant then. Parker chuckled and admitted, “She was really nice to us. We were kids, remember?”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve got a bet going with a few of the staff. For what it’s worth, I’m hoping she does show up. I don’t want to lose twenty bucks.”

  Parker wanted to be angry as the guy walked away, but it was quickly replaced with joy and anticipation as Dixie walked into the pub. He smiled uncontrollably. She had pulled her long brown hair up into a ponytail that swung as she walked. The soft pink dress accentuated everything wild and womanly about her. He couldn’t stand up without revealing just how much he was glad to see her.

  She slid into the booth and picked up a fry. She ate it before even saying hello. He liked that about her. Dixie had the kind of confidence her entire life he had to find at college and she was still better at it. With a wink and a playful smile she said, “Hey.”

  “I ordered shots like we planned.” He turned twenty-one last year and while he celebrated with his college buds, he was thinking about her and today the whole time.

  “You ready?” She slid a well-manicured fingernail along the rim of the shot glass.

  “Are you?” He mimicked her movement, but it was far less graceful and nowhere near seductive, but it definitely made her laugh. With a nod, they picked up the shots and tipped them back. He followed with the lime and watched her face scrunch up with her bite. “They made a bet on us, by the way.”

  “Who did?” She was focused on the fries.

  “One of the owners and the staff, apparently.” He sipped the beer. “I wasn’t sure what drink to…”

  One of the female wait staff approached with an iced tea and sat it on the table. “I’m sorry about the bet, Sugar. You know some of the regulars were hoping this one wouldn’t show up.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll see you next week, right?”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Parker waited until she was gone before asking, “What’s happening next week?”

  “Facial.” Her smile was somewhere between real and fake. He felt his lips pull down in a frown. “I got my esthetician license last year. I’m working on my massage therapy certification now.”

  “How many licenses do you need?” Parker knew they came from different worlds. It was what he liked most about her. She wasn’t pretentious.

  “Two more.” She was serious and excited about it.

  He wanted to ask her to come back with him, but knew better. Dixie was not the kind of girl anyone could force into a settled situation. She made that perfectly clear the first time they met. The first time they entered this pub and split a plate of fries until the rain passed. Over the years and plates of fries he had moments where he thought he could ask her to only see him, but then she would say something about some wild or crazy thing and he would keep the idea to himself.

  He knew what was coming next. He knew they would leave the pub and find some place private, yet probably still public, to make-out or have sex.

  “Come on, Parker. I got us a room.”

  One Plate of Fries

  Dixie entered the only place in this town she missed, Pat’s Pub. She took a seat in her favorite booth and ordered a plate of fries and an iced tea. She stopped ordering cola after high school when she started taking an interest in her future. If she wanted out of this town, she was going to have to work for it. Parker taught her that much. It didn’t matter how much money a person made, if they were trapped, they were trapped, and she had been stuck for too long.

  The ten year reunion was the only reason she was back. She graduated from a different school and a year later, but her uncle Bob worked for the prestigious academy Parker attended. Bob was one of the few men she grew up around that could hold a job and support his family. She envied her cousins for that. Bob was also a really generous guy, so Dixie was always welcome. When she called last month to check in on him, he told her about the preparations at the school to host the reunion.

  It was a chance she was willing to take. If she could only see Parker one more time, she would… tell him to get on social media, something. She honestly didn’t know what she was going to tell him; just that knowing he could be at that reunion had made it worth the trip to get a chance to say…anything. It would be worth enduring all of the other potential people she could run into.

  Her anxiety about this whole plan was at an all-time high. She had barely bitten into the first warm fry when he slid into the booth across from her.

  “I can’t believe you’re here.” He was genuinely happy to see her and his smile set off a powder keg of sparks throughout her body. Before she could say hi, he was already talking again. “I just got into town. I was hoping I would run into you, but I didn’t know…then I was passing the pub and thought…Dixie, I…I’m just so glad to see you.”

  Instead of being cool and casual about it, she was flustered and wound up. “Get a social media account for crying out loud.”

  He leaned back against the booth, a bit stunned. “No.”

  “What? Why?” She never understood why he was so damn secretive about his life. All of it.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of a bunch of people I had to tolerate when I was growing up having a front row seat to my life. I don’t want online friends. I don’t want to see holiday pictures of people I don’t know or worse, don’t like. If I’m not on the list to get a card, then we aren’t friends.” He reached for a fry and she pulled the plate away from him. “What?”

  “I don’t get a card. In fact, after your junior year of college, I didn’t even get a number.” She was really mad at him for that.

  He leaned in and pulled the plate to the center of the table before picking up a fry and popping it in his mouth. Parker from high school, hell Parker from her twenty-first birthday, would have cowered, blushed, and apologized. It was both startling and a major turn on. Of course, Parker had always turned her on.
/>   The waitress stopped by and he ordered an iced tea. Dixie tilted her head and assessed the man before her. He had more hair on his head. It was no longer cut to the standards of the private school and probably the habit of that haircut his first years away. He was in a hoodie and jeans unlike the khakis and button downs she was more familiar with. Even the last time she saw him, he was still a little more like the boy she knew than the man sitting in front of her. Impatient she asked, “Well?”

  “You moved and you didn’t send me a forwarding address. Mine isn’t the only number that changed, but I did send you a letter, and my number, and I got it back with return to sender on the envelope and a note on the back stating I should and I quote, fuck off.” He grabbed several more fries and stuffed them in his mouth.

  That was all news to her. She would have to ask… “Oh my God.”

  “What?” He winked as if he was responding to the call for a higher power’s intervention.

  She glared at him, but let a grin slip. “I was so mad at you for so long and I have been stalking you via the internet for the last five years only to learn today that one of my idiot relatives returned the letter. Probably my mother.”

  He nodded. “makes sense. You said she hated me.”

  “She did because she had no idea all that time I was with a Chadwick and I couldn’t seal the deal.” She groaned.

  “She didn’t know you very well, did she?” He chuckled, but something darker lurked just below the kidding. He was really different and still the same. She wondered if that is what he was thinking about her.

  “I moved out, I moved on, and I stopped paying for rent, utilities, and everything else I had been chipping in for or covering since I got my first job at thirteen.”

  He nodded. “I figured. I just didn’t know where to find you. I’m not saying I never plugged your letters into a search engine, I’m just saying I wasn’t brave enough to hit enter. So go ahead, Dixie, tell me all the things I don’t want to hear right now. Make this the place that has been the most memorable and enjoyable of my life become the place that haunts me with would have’s and should have’s.”

  “You’re eating way too many fries.” She started there.

  He chewed that over and nodded. “And?”

  “And I’m not sure what you are expecting me to say, Parker.” She tried to study him a little closer, what was he looking at, and what was he looking for? His eyes kept searching her and then she realized it was a constant attempt to look at her hands, her left hand. “You want me to say I’m married? I have two kids and a dog?”

  His eyes closed and he gulped. “I knew it.”

  He was serious, really serious and a bit emotional. She laughed out loud. “Parker! I’m not married. I don’t have children or a dog. What is wrong with you?”

  When his eyes opened she saw something she usually only saw on that particular face when it came to their bedroom escapades, determination, drive, need. It lit something inside of her that had long been snuffed out. Heat flushed through her. “Parker?”

  “Dixie.” He always called her by her name, not by the nickname, Sugar. She liked that. “I really messed up as a kid, as a young adult, but not this time. I’m not messing up this time. It was a sign that you were in here, right here, waiting for me.”

  “I wasn’t waiting for you.” She sure was not going to let him think that she found her way to Pat’s Pub just for him.

  “It’s fate and you know it. I need you tonight, Dixie. I need you now more than ever. Tell me you didn’t come here and wish I would walk in that door. I came here just so I could sit and wish you would walk in, but you were already here.”

  Parker had always been guarded with his emotions. She knew he cared for her, they loved one another as friends and that much they had admitted over the years on holidays and special occasions. Nevertheless, it had been seven years since she had last seen him and six since she had last spoken to him. She had a burner phone back then and one of her brothers had stolen it. When she was planning to leave they had trashed a lot of her stuff, including his letters. They essentially cut her off from him on purpose because she didn’t find a way to marry him and use his money to save them.

  All of these emotions were rolling up and it was getting confusing again to focus and find her purpose for coming here. “Okay, I will admit that this place has a lot of great memories and those are linked to you, but whenever I come to town, I stop in here and I usually get this spot, and I order my fries, and…”

  “You think about two kids from different parts of this town meeting one day by chance, rushing into the pub to get out of the rain and finding something deeper, meaningful in that friendship…Dixie I can’t believe I ever left here without you.”

  She could, she actually needed him to go. That was why she told him on her birthday rendezvous, after some intense and extremely satisfying sex, that she was getting engaged. He believed her. He told her they would always be friends and he would still write. He had upheld his end of the bargain, she just didn’t know it.

  “I was never engaged. I told you that so you would go and not look back. I was actually just trying to prove to myself that I didn’t need you and I didn’t really want you.” She wanted to say he would know all that if he had even one social media account.

  “It worked.” He shrugged. “I went back to Florida determined to make a new life and to find someone I could marry. I found someone.”

  He could have punched her and it would have felt better than those words. She was suddenly worried he would now turn this place into her nightmare instead of safe haven. “We dated. We actually lived together for about six months. I was thinking maybe I should marry her.”

  She gulped and picked up the tea for a fortifying drink. Her throat was suddenly dry. “And?”

  “I’m here. My father died, my mother only wants to make sure she has enough to keep herself and the pool boy comfortable for the rest of her life, and I am here. In Pat’s Pub, because it’s not just a place I could get a drink, it’s a place I could come for comfort, for fries, for iced tea without judgment that I was in a bar and not ordering a whisky. It’s the only place in this whole town that really feels like home to me because it’s the place that reminds me of you.” He looked at her then and vulnerability flashed in his expression. “I know, right. I’m being melodramatic and I have only had half a glass of iced tea and half a plate of fries.”

  He signaled for the waitress and ordered something stronger. He looked at Dixie and her heart tripped. “I’m going to get drunk now. Be a friend will ya? Take me home.”

  “I don’t live here.” She spoke softly, gently because her old friend was really dealing with something. She was also dealing with something, a storm of emotions she could no longer stuff down, set aside, or rationalize.

  “I have a place.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He then produced a document and pushed them both across the table at her as the drinks were sat in front of him.

  Distracted by the items, she read the document and looked up to find him through three shots of tequila and chasing it with a beer. He wasn’t leaving her a lot of choice in the matter. The sad thing is how much of a turn their lives had taken. He was here in her role, and she was here in his. She was together, life on track, everything in order, and he was blustering through it all and barely hanging on.

  “I bet we can order a pizza to be delivered to this fancy building the same as to any hotel room, so let’s proceed to the next stop, shall we?” She was still going to tell this man all the things she had ever wanted to say to him if she got to see him, just not tonight.

  ***

  Parker entered his childhood home for the second time that day. He didn’t seem to mind as much as he had earlier. Probably because he was a bit tipsy and Dixie was with him. “You make this whole place a hundred percent better than the last time I was in it.”

  She looked around and nudged the bag he had left at the door with the toe of her
pink high heel. His eyes traveled the length of her leg, noted the fit of her black wrap dress, and settled on her boobs in an obvious manner he couldn’t stop if he tried. She cleared her throat and his gaze lifted quickly to her eyes. Those soft golden brown eyes of hers hinted at humor and something else. “I dropped my bags off earlier.”

  “Come sit down. You look a bit wobbly. You’re still not much of a drinker, huh?” She offered him her hand and he took it. The moment their fingers met, his world settled into place. He had been running from his life, his inheritance, his family name for so long because he was ashamed of the way his family lived. They hadn’t always been scrupulous scoundrels. His grandparents were upstanding citizens, fair business owners, and if they had been scandalous, he never knew. When his Pops passed, his Nana went to Sweden, to be with her siblings. She had been disgraced by her son’s actions and dealings.

  He followed her to the plush couch and they sat down. He was an open book tonight and she hadn’t asked for this chapter of his life, but she was about to hear it. “I’m pretty sure they only had me so I could inherit the business and the wealth. So they didn’t have to give it away to someone else. I think they wanted me to be like them, Dixie, but I can’t stand either of them. The way they lived…did you know that both of my parents had affairs? Both of them. I didn’t realize it when I was younger, what was going on, but then I got older and when I really knew…I started hating them.”

  He felt the roll of emotions surge through him and he got up and found the decanter of whisky. He poured himself a drink and offered her some. She shook her head no, so he tipped his glass up and swallowed the liquid down. He poured another and wandered back to the couch to sit near her. She was watching him intently, curiously, cautiously.

  “I would never do that…” He needed her to hear those words and to believe him. “Everyone says you grow up and become your parents, but I am not going to do that.”

  Her serious expression lifted as her lips tilted in a smile. “If anyone understands that becoming your parents is a myth, it’s me. I mean, I’m not on my fifth kid by as many fathers, right? I’m not working the system to avoid working a legit job because any day now one of these schemes is going to pay off. Parker, if anyone understands that we make our own choices in life, it’s me.”