I dare you to find me the perfect match, she said.
Luke O’Connor has never turned down a dare. Ever. But that was before his last deployment left the charming playboy a shell of his former self. Now he just wants to be left alone - no hookups, no relationships.
Single mother and the CEO of New Orleans’ hottest lingerie boutique, Anna Bryce has it all - except that a business can’t keep her warm at night. She’s determined to find Mr. Right, but can’t fight her attraction to Mr. All Wrong, the wounded veteran who says he's not into her.
I dare you to kiss me, she said.
I dare you to love me.
All Luke has to do is resist her dare - but for the first time in his life, he’s betting on losing.
PROLOGUE
THE SANDBOX, I.E. THE MIDDLE EAST
Three months earlier
Luke O’Connor had three passions in life.
Women.
The Army.
Football.
So it seemed like a slice of poetic justice that his exit from the second came as a result of the first and the third.
Poetic justice was putting it lightly. Really, it was bullshit with a sprinkle of what-fuckery-of-the-gods-is-this.
Luke lifted his gaze from his heavily bundled left leg, past the chrome footboard, and up to the doctor who’d just delivered the bad news.
“You’re telling me that Trinket, the smallest fucking guy in the platoon, shattered my hip?”
The doctor, an elderly man who still looked strong enough to run up against the heaviest defenseman, didn’t bat an eye. “Sergeant O’Connor, I’ve already explained to you what happened.”
“What happened isn’t physically plausible,” Luke said, trying for the love of all things holy to rein in his temper. “Trinket weighs in at a buck-twenty soaking wet. On a good day.”
Dr. Manson tucked his clipboard under his armpit. “Yes,” he murmured, “but the laws of physics don’t include football cleats into the equation, do they?”
Luke mulled over that. He’d never done well in school, and fact was, he was a soldier, not a mathematician. But the pain emanating from his left hip signaled that, yeah, maybe the good doctor was onto something here.
Ignoring the burning heat from the pain, he fixed his attention on the doctor. “What’s the prognosis?”
“Your hip is fractured in three different places, Sergeant. That is your prognosis.”
Hearing it for a third time wasn’t making it sound any better.
“I’m talking recovery time. How long does a broken hip take to be patched up? We looking at a month, two months—”
“You’re looking at a hip pinning.”
“Come again?”
“Surgery, Sergeant. The extent of your injury requires surgery. Recovery from that will more than likely take three to five days, depending on your disposition”—the doctor slid him a disapproving glance—“and your ability to adjust. From there, I’d suggest spending a week or two here, so that we can oversee your initial stages of healing.”
This wasn’t the sort of conversation he wanted to have while lying down like an invalid. He wrapped a hand around the metal pole by his hospital bed and tried to leverage himself into a sitting position.
Pain flooded his side, turning his vision a fun shade of purplish-red at the perimeters.
Jesus H. Mary, he was going to kill Trinket. So what that he’d been talking shit about dating Luke’s sister? They’d been half a world away from New Orleans, Louisiana, Luke’s hometown. But Luke had let his competitive nature get the best of him, as it usually did, and the idea of his platoon “fighting” over Amy had turned a casual game of football and trash talk into the next Super Bowl.
And now Luke was immobile on a hospital bed with a shattered hip and the sneaking suspicion that he’d just pissed himself.
Trinket was going to die, and Luke was going to make it the best moment of his life.
“Sergeant?”
Luke tore his gaze from the white sheets. “Overall recovery time, Doc. Just give it to me. When can I expect to be back in the field?”
For the first time since the gray-haired Dr. Manson had strolled into Luke’s hospital room he looked remorseful. Luke girded himself for what he knew had been coming since he’d heard the words “shattered hip.”
The clipboard went on the rolling metal desk, and the doctor faced Luke with a somber expression and folded arms.
Luke had never been the sort to cower in the face of anything, and he didn’t now, either. “Just say it, Doc.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant O’Connor, but you won’t be returning to the field anytime soon. Following your surgery later today, you’ll be honorably discharged from the army.” The doctor’s speech tapered into a deliberate pause, as though waiting for Luke to adjust to the information. “I thank you for your service to this country.”
Thank you for your service.
Luke had heard that same sentiment for over a decade now, sometimes from TSA agents in the airport when he flashed his military ID, sometimes from kids as they saw him in his ACUs, sometimes from the women he took to bed. Always, he took the words and digested them with a surge of pride.
But this time, the last time he’d hear them as an active duty soldier, left him feeling cold.
After thirteen years in the US Army, he’d been fallen by a rogue cleat and a football game.
Hooah.
CHAPTER ONE
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Present Day (Unfortunately)
“Ma’am, that shit is not meant to be sniffed,” Luke barked from behind the register, his walking cane propped up against his good leg.
The customer in question was pulling a balancing act as she groped a jar filled with god-knows-what-herbs and shoved her nose in it. She didn’t appear to have heard him, or maybe she just didn’t care about store policy.
Either way, this was the most action his mother’s store, Herbal Heaven, had seen all day. And Luke would be lying through his teeth if he said he wasn’t already feeling the thread of anticipation.
“Ma’am,” he said again, using the tip of his cane against the original wood floors for a good, satisfying thump. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to put the jar down before you fall and crack your head open and I’m obligated to resuscitate you.”
The woman lowered the jar and cast him a disbelieving glance. “Don’t you have a cane?” she asked, pure snark dripping from her voice.
His day had just inched up a notch from Boringly Dull to Boringly Acceptable. A worthy adversary of trash talk—a rarity these days.
Luke retrieved his cane and brandished it like a fine weapon, before popping it on the countertop. “That I do,” he said, because it wasn’t like he could hide the cane when it was metal and glinted under the florescent light. “It’s also equipped with a secret blade.”
Not true at all, but it was totally worth it when the woman’s brows drew together. “Is this your plan to prove you have the ability to revive me?”
He pointed the cane at her. “Follow the store rules and you won’t have to find out.”
The chiming of the front door coincided with Luke’s mother bustling into the main area of the shop. Hugging an armful of small jars to her chest, Moira O’Connor drew to a sudden stop as she caught sight of the customer’s fleeing back.
Exasperated blue eyes turned to her only son. “Another one, Luke?”
“She was sniffing the herbs like she was looking to get high,” he said, bristling at the censure in his mother’s voice. Moira was the sweetest woman to ever grace the earth, but man did she know how to effectively pile on the guilt.
He figured it was the Irish blood in her.
Still, she didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure she wasn’t checking out the tea blends?” she asked, carefully unloading the jars onto the counter.
Luke wouldn’t know the difference between tea and honeysuckle and weed if he were held up at gunpoint and told to take a guess. Feeling more like a reprimanded eleven-year-old than his actual thirty-one years, he admitted, “Guess it could have been tea. I didn’t get a close look.”
Not the right thing to say.
Moira gripped one of the empty jars and mimed hauling it at his head. She’d catch him, too—his hip surgery had axed most of his mobility, and three months of physical therapy hadn’t done much in the way of boosting overall flexibility and strength.
“Luke,” reprimanded his mother, “we’ve talked about this.”
There was the guilt again. Luke shoved his free hand through his brown hair and sighed. “Sorry, Ma,” he said, the duly chagrined only son, “I’ll do better.”
“It’s not a matter of doing better,” she said softly, reaching out to put a warm hand to his cheek, “you’re desperate for human interaction.”
Luke tugged back from her motherly caress, making sure to briefly touch her hand so she didn’t take his aversion personally. He’d been that way since his first deployment and she didn’t seem to take his withdrawal to her heart.
Shifting on the chair to relieve the pressure from his aching left hip, he said, “Ma, I’m good. Promise.”
Disbelief was written all over her face. “When I asked you to help me look over the shop, I was hoping it might give you something to do. Something to occupy your time.”
Luke ground his teeth. His mom meant well—she always did—but he hated the way she made it sound like he was just biding his time until something momentous happened. Thanks to Trinket the Asshole, Luke was now sidelined and out of commission for the foreseeable future.
His physical therapy sessions weren’t progressing as they should.
His left hip was a cacophony of excruciating pain, numbness, and nuts and bolts.
And Luke had apparently left whatever social graces he’d once owned back on the base in Iraq.
Working at Herbal Heaven was his sole excursion from the small shotgun house he’d rented a month ago after the doc had given him the thumbs up.
Maybe his mom was right. He needed social interaction with people other than his mother, Amy, and the rare visit with his childhood best friend, Brady Taylor.
Luke leaned forward, lifting his butt off the chair, and wished that he’d brought some of his pain relievers to work. He’d always been an active person, playing football, baseball, and rugby throughout the years. He’d broken his nose, twice, and solidly fractured his arm during his senior year of high school.
But a splintered hip was on a different level.
“Are you okay, honey?” Moira asked, concern lining her brow.
“I’m good.” Luke was anything but good, but he’d developed the fake it till you make it mindset over a decade ago. He was too old to change his habits now. “You mind if I take off, Ma? Head home?”
The thought of sinking onto his couch with a beer, Dr. Phil on TV, and a hot towel on his hip was his current version of heaven.
Life had become a monotonous decision between Dr. Phil and Judge Judy reruns, or at least it had been since he’d returned to New Orleans to find that not a single bit of it felt like home.
Home was his platoon and his soldiers.
New Orleans was . . . the place he’d grown up, as much a stranger to him as his life post-the US Army.
Gathering his cane, Luke carefully straightened from the chair. He bussed a kiss over the top of his mom’s blonde head. “I’ll be in tomorrow morning at 0700.”
“No.”
Luke froze. “Don’t tell me I’m getting fired.”
“You won’t be so lucky as that,” Moira quipped, her blonde ringlets bouncing on either side of her face. “I need you to stay.”
“Today?”
“Yes, today. At least for one more customer.”
Luke knew better than to fight the O’Connor matriarch. As a single parent who’d raised two children on her own, Moira ruled with an iron thumb. A green thumb, if you considered her profession, but iron nonetheless.
Fact was: he didn’t need another broken hip.
And he didn’t trust his mother with those empty jars on the counter.
Leveraging his weight on the cane, Luke had nearly sat back down on the stool when Moira stilled him with a hand to his bicep.
“No more sitting,” she told him, a bright smile blooming on her face. “I want you to mingle.”
Luke mutely scanned the shop’s wooden bookcases filled with everything from tea blends to weed-impersonators to something his mom called “frankincense” but looked like a root on steroids.
Reading his doubtful expression, Moira rolled her eyes to the heavens. “Honey, don’t be a man.”
“I am a man.”
Thank God. Living with two women until the age of eighteen had shown Luke that there was no part of being a woman that enticed him.
Now being with a woman, preferably in bed—he could get down with that.
Only recently, the whole human interaction thing was proving to be Luke’s downfall. Maybe it was some form of self-pity seeping through, or maybe he’d turned a new, non-man-whore leaf, but whatever the case was . . . his interactions with women were few and far between.
Actually, they were nonexistent.
Luke grimaced.
“What I’m saying,” Moira stressed with motherly patience, “is that you need to stop being stubborn.” She waved a hand toward the narrow aisles of the shop. “Go, wander. Stop moping.”
“I’m not moping.”
“You haven’t smiled once today.”
Luke cranked a smile on his face. It felt painful, like his throbbing hip. Again, he was faced with the reality that maybe he needed to get out more.
He hated it when Moira O’Connor was right.
The door announced a new customer with a squeak of the hinges and the chime of the overhead bell.
Moira turned to him, excitement brimming in her blue eyes. “Go,” she whispered.
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now. What do I pay you for?”
“You don’t pay me,” Luke felt compelled to point out.
Moira brushed right over his answer as if it hadn’t even been voiced at all. “Why are you here then, if not to help the customers?”
“Security. Family Obligation. Take your pick.”
His mother’s blatant glance at his bum hip spoke volumes. “Go,” she urged him again, pushing at his shoulders. “Remember the training manual!”
Luke stayed silent.
He felt the full weight of his mother’s disappointment like a shovel to the face. “You didn’t read it, did you?”
“Bedside reading, Ma. I’m working through it.”
Moira didn’t take too kindly to that because all she did was lift her hand and point to the back corner of the shop. No words were said.
Like any good soldier, Luke knew his place.
Once more he gathered his cane, gripping the handle tight in his right hand as he braced himself for the onslaught of inevitable pain.
“Have fun,” his mother whispered to his back.
Luke didn’t know at what point he’d become an old scrooge, but fact of the matter was ... at this exact moment? Human interaction was the very last thing he wanted.
CHAPTER TWO
Desperate times called for insanely desperate measures.
Anna Bryce stared up at the cute chalkboard sign with the word “open” done in curly-cue script. This was her moment. She’d been building courage—okay, so she’d been pretending that her personal life hadn’t sunk as low as it had—all week since she’d overheard customers in her lingerie boutique whispering about this place.
Somehow, despite the fact that her boutique, La Parisienne, sat only two blocks away from Herbal Heaven in the French Quarter, Anna had never found herself on its front stoop.
Then again, her life was a blessing of football games with her fourteen-year-old son Julian, late nights spent working, and endless weekends of sweatpants. She wouldn’t trade it for anything, but Anna did want something for herself.
She wanted a date.
A date with a nice man who didn’t mind that she had an admittedly rambunctious teenage son, as well as a successful business that had recently landed Anna on the Top 40 Business Women Under 40 List in New Orleans.
Most men turned tail the moment they learned that Anna had a kid and that the kid was bordering six feet tall.
Those who didn’t tended to take off when they discovered that Anna was no small shop owner. La Parisienne had shot to even grander heights thanks to her cousin Shaelyn’s natural talent for designing original lingerie.
Anna never apologized for her ambition. And she certainly never apologized for Julian, who was single-handedly the most important person in her life.
But what she wouldn’t do to come home to a glass of wine, a hot man, and an even hotter night spent mussing up her pristine white sheets.
So, it had come to this.
Herbal Heaven.
With the palm of her hand, Anna pushed open the rickety nineteenth-century door and stepped over the threshold. Overhead an old-fashioned bell chimed her arrival, and she couldn’t help but imagine cartoon-like arrows bursting around her head like exclamation points.
Thankfully the people at the checkout counter seemed too engrossed in conversation to pay her much attention.
Even so, Anna had dressed for inconspicuousness today. Black trendy pants, off-the-shoulder silk top, and thick-soled boots to minimize the loud staccato of her regular stilettos. Brady Taylor, Shaelyn’s boyfriend and their resident police sergeant, would be proud.
Anna paused to scan the shop. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls; three freestanding shelves created the appearance of sections; and, along the front bay window was a cute display of homemade lotions, soaps, and perfumes.
It was every adult woman’s version of heaven.
Back right corner, next to the tea blends.
Her brain had tucked that snippet of information away as soon as she’d overheard it the other day.
Like most shops in the historic French Quarter, Herbal Heaven wasn’t overly large and Anna quickly discovered the correct section.
Multiple rows of small glass bottles lined the dark-wooden shelves, and her eyes skimmed the names of the essential oils. Sandalwood. Sage. St. John’s Wort. Mullein.
What had the woman in the shop suggested to her friend? Rose and . . . ginger? No, not ginger. Definitely not ginger.
Why hadn’t she written it all down?
Think, she instructed herself, tracing the pretty labels with her manicured nail as she silently mouthed the names. Bergamot. Fennel seed. Lemon. Muggle. Muggle? Anna’s gaze shot back to the last bottle, only to realize it read, “Mugwort.”
Anna’s shoulders slumped.
She was a fish out of water trying to read Greek.
Some days, especially after pulling a long shift at work, Anna could barely string together English, so that was certainly saying something.
She inched up her silk sleeve, exposing the cream leather watch nestled among the silver bangles. Four-fifteen. She had exactly ten minutes to find the oil she needed. Julian would never let her live it down if she was late to pick him up from football practice.
And then it was back to sweatpants, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, and whatever reality TV show she could find while Jules burrowed in his bedroom with his Xbox. Are you really down for another night of Housewives of Atlanta?
With renewed determination steeling her spine, Anna got down to business.
Myrtle. No.
Oregano. While smelling like dinner might make the men come calling, she doubted it’d make them stick around. Not once they realized her talents didn’t extend to the kitchen.
Parsley. Maybe this was a sign, a sign that she was destined for singlehood because she had the local pizza joint on speed dial on both her cell phone and home phone.
Ylang ylang—
“You looking for something?”
Anna whirled around at the smoky voice, nearly toppling into a wide chest. A warm, masculine hand closed like a band around her upper arm. A tan hand, she noticed as her gaze swiveled down. Her silk shirt billowed out between long, tapered fingers, and for the first time in a long time, she felt her knees weaken with interest.
Then she glanced up past the wide expanse of his chest encased in one of those manly ribbed sweaters and her knees threatened to give out right where she stood.
Crisp green eyes stared down at her from a face as rugged as the Ozarks in Arkansas. She’d visited the mountains only once as a child, but the craggy rocks and steep slopes had impressed vividly on her memory. Wild. Harshly beautiful. The man in front of her was just the same. Brown brows slashed over eerily light green eyes and a crook in the bridge of his nose was the storyboard for an active lifestyle.
In a single glance, she gathered that this man, however light his grasp was on her arm, was not a soft man. Not a gentle man.
Not the sort of man Anna should ever consider dating.
Tell that to your knees, darling.
His cool gaze found her mouth, hovered, before lifting again. “You good?”
No. No, she was not good.
She felt . . . Well, she didn’t know what she felt exactly. Lust, maybe. It’d been so long that she’d felt anything of the sort that the sensation was as foreign to her as the large hand cupping her upper arm.
“Ma’am?” he asked, that smoky baritone of his peppered with blatant annoyance. “I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t answer—”
“I’m good!” Anna exclaimed, desperately hoping that her center of calm and overall badassery returned sometime in the next half-century. She stepped back, out of his grip, only to find that her back slammed up against the shelves and jostled the jars.
Crash!
“Jesus,” he grunted, wrapping a hand around her arm again.
He tugged her to the left, away from the shattered glass, but Anna (in addition to being a horrible cook) wasn’t the best dance partner in the world and she moved to the right. Her shoulder powered into his chest, the abrupt contact sending him back on his heels and into a display of wicker baskets filled with tea bags.
Crash! Crash!
Anna watched in horror as he went down like a felled log. The display buckled under his weight.
And the string of expletives he let loose should have been outlawed in all of the Lower 48, amended, and then outlawed all over again.
“Oh, my God.” Her purse landed on the ground with an audible thump as she bent to help him. “I am so sorry.”
The toe of her boot connected with his thigh, and she stood corrected. His fluidity with vulgarity should have been outlawed in Alaska and Hawaii, too.
“How can I help?” Her hands fluttered around his shoulders, finding purchase on the hard balls of muscle before just as quickly letting go. Anna had raised a son all on her own. She’d dealt with the wriggly digging for worm stages and the weekly visits to the doctor for sprained ankles, but she had never toppled over a grown man.
To be fair, you haven’t really had a man. Not except for him, and he who-shall-not-be-named didn’t count.
Well, there was that.
Between gritted teeth, Mr. Green Eyes muttered, “Cane.”
Anna didn’t ask questions. Her gaze landed on the cane in question and she picked it up by the rubber grip. Acute embarrassment slid through her the minute she caught a glimpse of his face.
He looked ready to murder her.
She didn’t blame him.
“I really am sorry,” she said, passing over the cane and stepping back. “I didn’t mean to”—she waved her hand at the broken wicker baskets—“wreck everything in sight.”
All she’d wanted was the secret essential oil that her customer had claimed men found irresistible on a woman. Despite her tendencies to talk business at all the inappropriate times, Anna was a romantic at heart.
She’d wanted to believe that love could be as easy as a blend of specific oils.
Instead she’d crippled a hot guy and made an utter fool of herself.
Reason number 3,578 that single is a good look on you.
Anna swallowed past the lump in her throat. He still hadn’t straightened from his makeshift nest of tea bags, crumpled wicker baskets, and the growing scent of patchouli.
“Can I help?”
The hard look he gave her spoke volumes. Anna hid her red face by bending to grab her purse off the ground. Looking like a tomato was the curse of being a natural blonde. She’d only had thirty-two years to acquaint herself with that irrefutable truth.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “money.” She dug into her purse to rifle around for her wallet. “How much are you thinking? One hundred? Two?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her, planting the end of the cane on the ground. Anna almost offered to help, but she recognized the same stubbornness in him that ran through her blood. He didn’t want her help. And he definitely didn’t want her pity.
Curiosity, always the cat killer, spiked as she clutched her wallet in both hands to resist from reaching out to touch him.
“I really am sorry.”
“I know.”
“Are you sure that I can’t—”
“Ma’am,” he barked sharply like a drill sergeant, “you’re hovering.”
Julian only accused her of that, oh, every other day. “I want to help.”
“You’ve said.” Twisting his big body onto all fours, he dragged the cane beneath him for leverage. Sweat beaded his brow and a grimace flattened the lines of his full mouth as he came to his feet. He drew in a heavy, shuttered breath. “You find everything you were looking for?”
Before Anna had the chance to respond, her cell phone began to vibrate in her purse. “Oh, crap,” she whispered as she stared at Julian’s name flashing across the screen. She was late. Again. Her gaze flicked up to the man’s stoic features, and she blurted, “I have to go.”
He didn’t even bother to hide his relief.
He pointedly swung his gaze toward the front door, then turned back to her. “Come visit us again soon,” he murmured, not at all sounding like he meant it.
Anna couldn’t help herself. She folded her arms over her chest and said, “How much did it pain you to say that?”
“Honestly?”
She nodded.
“I’m about two minutes away from throwing you out of here.”
Anna paused to digest the insult. It was a good one. It really, really was. But she could do better.
Still holding her wallet in her hand, she unzipped it and pulled out a couple of twenties she kept in there for emergency situations.
In her book, “emergency situations” constituted everything from Ben & Jerry runs to buying new socks for Julian when his toes began playing hide-and-seek.
“I already told you the money isn’t necessary,” Mr. Green Eyes said with a stern set to his mouth.
Anna folded the bills in half, and then folded them in half again. She looked up, their gazes clashing as she boldly stuffed the money into the front pocket of his jeans. “Consider it a thank-you for allowing me to let myself out. I’m more than capable of doing so without you going all caveman on me.”
And then she did just that.
And, somehow, she found the strength to not look back at the hottest guy she could remember meeting in years.