Neither did Asprey.
He stood as unobtrusively as he could on the outskirts, drinking when the bottle came his way, otherwise nothing more than an observer, a man holding a little dog with quiet stoicism.
It seemed wrong to intrude on Poppy’s grief, somehow. He hadn’t been invited to this funeral, but he hadn’t been
not
invited either. It made for an interesting memorial dynamic—a situation not exactly helped along by Poppy’s mourning clothes, which were composed of a short, tight black skirt, gray striped tights and, of course, her teal cowboy boots.
“What are you kids doing out on that lawn?” An overlarge matron in a floral blouse and a navy skirt hiked up to her armpits appeared on the steps of the bingo hall. “You can’t loiter here.”
Poppy held up the box of ashes like it was a trophy. “It’s Grandma Jean. We’re bidding her farewell.”
“Grandma Jean? Jean Donovan?” The matron lumbered down the steps. “You her granddaughter?”
Poppy nodded and offered the woman a drink, which she promptly declined with a whole list of dietary restrictions.
“I heard she went real quiet,” the woman said kindly, flanking Poppy as the last of the ashes fell onto the grass. It wasn’t a very windy day, so most of it clumped in little heaps on the ground. “We miss her.”
“Me too,” Poppy said. Unable to help himself, Asprey put an arm around her waist. She tensed but didn’t push him off, so he stayed there.
“She owes me about two hundred bucks,” the woman added. “She cheated at bingo, you know. We didn’t even know a person
could
cheat at bingo until she joined the club. Made her own score sheets at home.”
Poppy laughed, her smile misty. “Everyone knew that.” She jerked her head toward the south side of the street and added. “I opened a tab at Ludwig’s Hole. You and everyone else she owes money to can feel free to drink every last penny she cheated you out of. Just say a few toasts for her while you’re in there. Please?”
The woman gently pushed Asprey out of the way and engulfed Poppy in a swell of pink chiffon. He couldn’t hear what the woman whispered, but it must have been the right thing because when she pulled away, Poppy had abandoned the misty stage and fallen into a laugh-sob.
“What do you suppose she said?” Asprey asked Bea. Poppy’s roommate and friend was a hard woman to read, but if he had to guess, he’d say he was begrudgingly accepted by her. That seemed pretty par for the course, though. Begrudging acceptance from these women seemed to be the most he could ever hope for.
Bea eyed him warily. “Probably that there isn’t enough booze in the world to cover Grandma Jean’s outstanding tab. Good thing Poppy was able to recover that eighty grand her grandmother invested.”
Asprey nodded, not sure how much he was supposed to divulge of Poppy’s exact recovery methods.
“What’s not going to Ludwig’s Hole is yours,” Poppy said, interrupting their conversation. “I mean it, Bea. It’s for you and Jenny—it always has been.”
Bea’s mouth, already scarily firm, grew even tighter. “Absolutely not. There’s no way you’re giving me money in addition to everything else. I won’t take it.”
“Then it’s a good thing I had a lawyer friend put it in a trust fund in Jenny’s name, huh?” Poppy asked, triumphant. “You can’t get around this one, Bea. I know fancy people now.”
Asprey set Gunner down so he could put his hands defensively up. “It’s not me. The only thing I know about a trust fund is how to spend one.”
Bea snorted. “I can believe that.”
“It’s all I’ve dreamed of since I walked through those doors out of jail,” Poppy said. She forced her friend to look at her. “It’s the one thing that kept me going after I found out Grandma Jean died—knowing that I might be able to make some good come out of all this. Take the money, Bea, please. Give Jenny a home like we never had. Make it all worthwhile.”
“But what about you?” Bea cast a suspicious glance over Asprey.
He straightened. “I’ll handle Poppy. In fact, I’ve come to make an offer I don’t think she can refuse…”
Poppy scowled, taking him in for the first time since he rode down for the impromptu funeral. He had on a leather jacket over a suit—not his finest look in the world, but he’d been spending a lot more time at the office lately than he cared to dwell on. Graff and Winston hadn’t been lying when they said things were a financial mess.
“If you’re about to offer me a job at Charles Appraisals and Insurance, I’ll have to ask you to meet me at the Pit.”
“Considering what happened the last time we were there,” he said, his voice low, “I accept.”
She didn’t miss the reference, and, with a brief flash in her eyes, she grabbed him by the front of his jacket and dragged him away from the rest of the group. Bea scooped up Gunner before the dog could follow them. It was the first time in days he and Poppy had been alone together, and he couldn’t help but be grateful, even if they stood outside a small-town bingo hall.
Poppy wrapped her arms around her midsection and offered him a pointed look.
Strictly business
, it said. “How are things with the family? Is running a company as much fun as you expected it to be?”
Asprey didn’t let her icy exterior ruffle him, even though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so nervous. Not even being tied to a chair while his brothers threatened to turn her in compared to this. “It’s
exactly
as much fun as I expected it to be,” he admitted. “Which is to say none at all. That’s why I quit.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and Asprey had to restrain himself from reaching out and tracing the path of them. More than anything, he just wanted to
feel
her—but even with her daring rescue the other night, she showed no signs of wanting to resume their intimacy.
He didn’t blame her. Now that the job was done and their roles were complete, she probably thought he’d retreated right back to being a fluffy, useless trust-fund baby.
But he wasn’t going back there.
“How can you just quit? It’s your family’s company—we practically forced Graff to draw up the papers signing everything over to you and Tiffany. All that stuff we did, all those laws you broke, those people you robbed…what was it
for
?”
He shrugged. “I kind of suck at being people’s boss. Yesterday, I gave them all a half day. There was a parade downtown—it seemed as good a reason as any. Today I told them not to bother coming in at all.”
She let out a strangled laugh but cut it short when he let himself fall into a wide grin of his own. “What are you doing here, Asprey? I appreciate you coming for this…thing to say good-bye to my grandma, but I’m not sure this is a good idea. Now that you convinced Graff and Winston to tuck their tails between their legs and disappear, you have your big, fancy, crime-free world to live in. And I’m still me—can’t leave the state, can’t get a job, not sure I care on either count. Leaving your company isn’t going to change things between us.”
He stilled, his heart in his throat. “So your only objection to me is that you’re an ex-con and I’m not?”
She spread her hands helplessly. “It’s not just the ex-con stuff, Asprey. All that time I was breaking laws, breaking the conditions of my parole, so close to losing everything and heading back to jail—the only thing I could think of was how great it felt to be alive again. You hate your job, but that’s all it is for you. A job. You can go home at the end of the day and eat your expensive dinners and fly your plane and still get to be
you
.” She let out a sigh and looked away. “But me? I
am
the job. More than anything, these past few weeks have highlighted that I’m not cut out for anything else. I have to find a way to exist in this world, and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for anything else.”
He pulled her into an embrace then, expecting a battle but not getting one. She sagged against him, her whole body limp. That softness—such a contrast to the exterior she normally presented to the world—almost made him lose his footing.
“It was fun while it lasted, Asprey. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“No.” He spoke into her hair. “I refuse to leave it at that. Flee the country with me.”
She pulled away and looked up, an adorably puzzled look on her face. “What? Are you insane?”
He shook his head. He’d never felt more sane in his whole life. Maybe he wasn’t going to devote his life to art like his dad or build a company with his own two hands like his grandfather. Maybe he’d always have to rely on buckets of family money to get by. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t make his own contribution to the world. That didn’t mean he couldn’t choose between better and worse.
Poppy was better.
“Tiff and I sat down. We think it’s best to close the company down. Neither one of us loves it the way Graff and Winston did, but there’s no way in hell we’re giving them a chance to do any more damage to the family name. It’s time to say good-bye.”
“You can’t do that! What will you do? How will you make a living?”
“Well, we’re not
destitute
.” He laughed softly. “We can sell off the company’s assets. I can rent out my loft. We have Todd’s half of a million, though we should probably try to give that back to the people who lost it. And if that’s not enough, I hear there’s good money in the confidence trade.”
She snorted. “You’re not becoming a criminal, and that’s final.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head with mock sadness. “I was really hoping I could convince you to help me. I’m not sure I can steal all that stuff alone.”
“Steal?” Poppy’s eyes lit, and he realized she hadn’t been lying. This stuff really did bring her to life. And that was okay with him. The way he figured it, getting all the original paintings and pieces of jewelry and heirlooms back from the black-market buyers would take at least two decades. After that…well, they could figure it out later.
“Someone once told me I was a selfish prick, that maybe instead of the insurance money, the people we stole from might rather have Grandma’s cameo back.”
“Asprey Charles, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
His smile threatened to crack his face, and he dropped to one knee. The wet grass soaked through the fabric of his two-thousand-dollar suit, and he would have gladly rolled in the mud if it would make her smile again. “Poppy Donovan, will you do me the very great honor of fleeing the country, thereby breaking your parole, only to embark on a life of crime with me by your side?”
She paused, not breathing, not moving, not doing anything to end Asprey’s agony.
He knew, coming here like this, that he risked breaking something more than society’s stupid laws—his heart was on the line too. But he had to
try
. He’d spent far too many years letting his brothers call the shots, in believing the world when it said he was only good for a fun time.
“Five,” she said, staring at him.
Asprey looked around, wondering what she meant, but the grassy clumps of dirt yielded no clues.
“Four.”
“Are we negotiating something?” he asked. “If that’s the case, I want twenty. No, thirty.”
She smiled, and that tiny action lifted a huge portion of his agony away. He knew that smile. He loved that smile.
“Three. And you’re running out of time. I only promised you a five-second window in which to escape.”
“Poppy.” He didn’t need a warning. There was nothing he wanted more than to be sent hurtling through this world at her hands.
“Two,” she said.
“One,” he finished for her.
She squealed and tackled him, sprawling him flat on his back, knocking the wind out of his lungs and the last of his common sense out of his head. “Do you mean it?” she asked, lips parted, hovering over him like some strange angel-demon creature he had no power to resist. “This isn’t just a game?”
“Of course it’s a game.” Asprey reached up and brushed the hair behind her ear, pausing to gently cup the side of her face. His heart soared. “It’s life. It’s you and me. It’s doing what we should, black and white and right and wrong be damned. We make a good team, you and I.”
He didn’t get a chance to hear her response. There were words, he was sure, and maybe even an insult or two, but all Asprey knew was that the moment her lips met his and they tumbled through the grass, he finally found his higher calling. It was loving Poppy.
And he knew, without a doubt, that he’d be excellent at it.
About the Author
Tamara Morgan is a romance writer and unabashed lover of historical reenactments—the more elaborate and geeky the costume requirements, the better. In her quest for modern-day history and intrigue, she has taken fencing classes, forced her child into Highland dancing, and, of course, journeyed annually to the local Renaissance Fair. These feats are matched by a universal love of men in tights, of both the superhero and codpiece variety.
Visit her online at
www.tamaramorgan.com
or come say hello on Twitter at
@Tamara_Morgan
.
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Now Available:
Love is a Battlefield
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