Not Over You

Four years ago, Officer Jordan Lassiter swept Rayma Young off her feet, making the twenty-year-old finally feel safe and loved. His quiet, calm, take-charge attitude made it easy for her to trust him with all of her secrets—even the dark ones.

Eager to prove himself as a rookie cop, Jordan accepted a transfer too far away for their relationship to work. Heartbroken, they broke up but remained friends. Or at least that’s what she thought …

Three years later, Jordan’s back and thinks they can just pick up right where they left off.

Not happening.

Hurt and angry for ghosting her, Rayma has slammed her walls back up and not even Jordan and his patient control will convince her to give him back her heart.

But when they wind up at the same Thanksgiving dinner, it’s all Rayma can do to remain strong as happy memories begin to crack the protective shell she’s forged around her heart, while Jordan does everything he can to win her back.
Except give her the one thing she needs.
His trust.

“I’m not so drunk I can’t do the alphabet backward, but I really shouldn’t be driving,” Rayma said, throwing on a lazy smile as she held her sleeping infant niece against her chest and closed her eyes. “Plus, I’m also fine just staying right like this for the rest of my life.”

“Eve might have some say in that,” Heath, Eve’s father, and Rayma’s brother-in-law said with a chuckle deep and raspy enough it had Rayma opening her eyes and suppressing the groan in her chest. Her sister’s husband had a seriously sexy voice to go along with his seriously sexy body and even though Heath was obviously off-limits, Rayma couldn’t control what his voice did to her lady parts. “Gets mighty hungry every forty minutes or so.” He draped his arm around his wife’s shoulder, Rayma’s oldest sister.

Pasha sighed and nodded, appearing sleepy herself. “That she does.”

“Well, just pump them titties and hand me a bottle. Miss Eve and I are perfectly happy right here.” She kissed the top of Eve’s head. “Until she shits of course, then you can have her back.”

“Of course,” Pasha said dryly.

“Where abouts in town do you live?”

Rayma glanced toward the voice. Officer Jordan Lassiter. A newbie cop with the WestShore RCMP. He worked with Krista—Pasha’s sister-in-law—who was a staff sergeant. Since he was new to Victoria and had no family around Krista took pity on him and invited him to Christmas dinner with their loud, wild, heavily laden with testosterone and alpha males family.

Joy, of course, Rayma’s surrogate grandmother or mother, but basically her fairy godmother and guardian angel, kept bobbing her eyebrows at Rayma, then angling them toward Jordan.

Rayma knew the moment she sat down at the Christmas dinner table tonight and her seat was next to Jordan’s that this was a setup.

Nana Joy had good taste. Jordan was fine. But he’d also been pretty damn quiet all night, and when he did speak, he was crazy-polite and gave off serious goody-goody vibes.

Not her type. Though maybe it should be.

She kept picking duds.

“You gonna answer the man?” Joy asked from where she sat next to her boyfriend, Grant—another very handsome man, even if he was sixty years old.

“Sorry,” Rayma said with a yawn. “Didn’t mean to be rude. I live near the University of Victoria. Gordon Head area. Close to that sexy silver fox over there.” She pointed to Grant.

Grant took her teasing in stride, smirked, and shook his head. “Not heading home tonight, I’m afraid.”

Rayma pinned her gaze on Joy. “Yeah, Nana. Get yours.”

Brock, the oldest of Joy’s four sons and the one with the hardest head grunted.

Rayma rolled her eyes.

“I live in Cadboro Bay so I don’t mind driving you home,” Jordan said. “It’s on my way.”

Joy’s dark blue eyes glimmered.

Rayma rolled her eyes at her fairy godmother then smiled before turning back to Jordan. “That’d be great, thank you.”

“We can bring your car to you tomorrow, honey,” Joy said. “Just leave us your keys.”

“Love you, Nana,” Rayma said sleepily.

Eve started to grunt and aggressively bob her head on Rayma’s chest.

“I know what that means,” Pasha said, getting up from her spot on the couch and coming to retrieve her offspring. “She starts rooting before she even fully wakes up.”

“I love that stage,” Joy crooned. “They’re such primitive little beasts when they’re babies.” She cast her gaze around the room at her sons. “Some of them never really lose that primitive side, however. They just learn to speak—though still mostly in grunts—and wipe their own asses.”

“I think we’re supposed to be offended by this,” Heath said, bouncing his seventeen-month-old son Raze, Eve’s older brother, on his knee.

“Should be,” Brock said.

“But when the shoe fits,” Rex, brother number three, said with a yawn.

“You wear it proudly,” Chase, brother number two, finished.

Everyone chuckled.

Rayma’s eyes found Jordan’s bright green ones. “I’m ready when you are.”

He nodded and got up from where he’d been helping the oldest two of the kids—Zoe and Connor—do a puzzle. “I can go.”

They stood up, said their goodbyes and thank-yous to Joy, Grant, and everyone else, then with fuzzy feet, a full belly, and an even fuller heart Rayma slid into the passenger seat of Jordan’s white Dodge Ram.

“You can fiddle with the seat warmers here if you want,” he said, turning over the ignition, then pulling out onto the quiet road covered in a thin layer of dusty snow.

Nodding, she turned up the seat warmers until her butt was just shy of being on fire.

“Are you at UVic?” Jordan asked, after a couple of minutes of them awkwardly driving in silence.

“Yeah, business and marketing major, second year.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah.”

More silence.

Ugh.

She hated awkward quiet which was probably why she’d been called a chatterbox more than once in her life. A filterless chatterbox no less. Which was why she found herself grasping for a topic of conversation.

“So how long have you been a cop?”

“A little under a year,” he said. “Finished at the academy in Regina, then did a posting up in Fort St. John for a year, and was transferred here at the end of January, to the WestShore precinct.”

“And how do you like Victoria?”

“Expensive,” he said with an uncomfortable chuckle. “But it’s beautiful.”

“Indeed, it is.”

“Are you from here?”

Rayma shook her head. “Baltimore, actually. Moved here to be closer to my sister.” That was at least what she told people when they asked why she moved clear across the continent, particularly since she’d finished her last year of high school in Victoria while living with Joy. She stayed because Pasha moved here, but she originally moved in with Joy because she was getting into too much trouble back home, and then when she went to visit Pasha in Seattle, got into the ultimate kind of trouble that nearly killed her.

Joy intervened because that was just the kind of woman she was, and helped Rayma get through some of her PTSD and set herself back on a better path.

Now, Victoria felt more like home than Baltimore ever did, and despite how fucking expensive it was, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

“Where are you originally from?”

“Charlet Heights. It’s on the border of Quebec and Ontario. On the Quebec side though. A couple of hours outside of Montreal. Big ski hill, touristy, but otherwise small as fuck.”

Rayma snorted. That was the first bit of humor he’d used. First curse word, too. She didn’t detect any French accent, but he was probably just good at hiding it. She did that with her East Coast accent. Once in a while—particularly when she was drunk—it slipped out a bit but usually people had no idea she wasn’t as West Coast as they come.

“Did you like growing up in a small town?” Based on the way he said small as fuck, she was going to guess that his answer was going to be a big, fat no. But sometimes people surprised you.

For a moment, just a moment his expression turned dark. Scary dark. Had she not been looking at him, she would have missed it. A thrill raced through her at the idea of getting to peel back a layer on this mystery goody-goody cop.

Jordan shook his head. “Not particularly. Too easy for everyone to know everyone’s business.”

“Ah, it was that kind of town.”

“Sure was.”

“And did you have business for everyone to know and talk about?”

A muscle ticked in his strong, angular jaw and his throat moved in a swallow. Rayma couldn’t help but notice that the man had a very nice profile. Long-ish nose, but not too long. Sharp features, masculine, and for a guy who could not be a day over twenty-five, she could see he didn’t have any trouble growing a beard based on the shadow that was starting to form in on his jaw and chin.

Her pussy clenched.

He cleared his throat. “Hard not to be talked about in a town that size, whether your business is interesting or not.”

Well, that was a vague, beat-around-the-bush kind of answer if she ever heard one.

Which only meant one thing: he did have business that had been talked about, so as soon as he could, he got the fuck out of there and moved to a city where nobody would recognize him if he went and bought condoms at the drugstore.

“Address?” he asked, his voice coming out grittier than it had a moment ago.

“I’m on Torquay in a basement suite a couple of doors up from the elementary school.”

He nodded and turned off McKenzie onto Shelbourne.

Since it was nighttime on Christmas day, the streets were uncharacteristically quiet. The orange glow of the streetlights reflecting off the snow cast an ominous, almost purple hue to the low gray clouds. As much as some people grumbled about the snow, Rayma loved it.

She loved getting bundled up in gloves, warm socks, a scarf, knit cap and big puffy jacket and going for a walk through the fat, falling flakes at night. It was a magical time and some of the few fond memories she had about her parents and her family involved the icy flakes.

Her parents had been ridiculously strict, but one thing they allowed was no matter what time of night, when it started to snow, whoever noticed it first had to alert the rest of the house, then they all got bundled up, Rayma, her four older sisters and their parents, and they went out for a walk.

“Left side or right side of the road?” Jordan asked, breaking through her memories.

He’d turned onto Torquay and had slowed his roll to a crawl.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Three doors up on the left. The house with the purple and blue Christmas lights.”

“Got it.” He sped up just a little, still keeping his speed to that of a snail, and pulled up to the curb in front of her place.

“Thanks,” she said, opening her door. He didn’t shut off the ignition, but he did climb out of the truck, too, meeting her around the front near the grill. “What are you doing?”

“Walking you to your door?” He phrased it more like a question. Like she was the crazy person, and it was brutally obvious what he was doing. “You’ve been drinking and this driveway is on a downslope. Krista would fire me, or one of those giants would kill me if you slipped and broke something when I could have prevented it.”

Her lip twitched, but she took his offered arm. “Well, thank you. How … gentlemanly of you.”

He snorted. “Sure, we can go with that.”

“Just self-preservation?” she grinned up at him.

His smile made her belly grow warm. “No … not completely. I genuinely do not want you to fall. But those five guys back at the house are an intimidating bunch. Not to mention their women.”

They navigated their way down the driveway until it was flat again. Rayma removed her arm from his and they walked single-file along the side of the house to the door for her basement suite. “Oh, I’d say their women are scarier than the men. Hands down. I’d take on Brock before I’d take on Krista.”

She reached for her door, but then turned to face him.

He was adorably scratching the back of his neck. “Yeah, I think I might agree with you on that.”

Nibbling on her lip, she let her eyes roam his face for a moment. “So uh …”

He scratched the back of his neck again and tipped back onto his heels.

“Did you want to come in?” she asked, her body ablaze from having put herself out there, opened herself up to rejection, and exposed her soft underbelly.

His throat moved. His lips twisted. His bright green eyes turned … apologetic.

Shit.

Before he could even say anything, she started to backpedal. “Sorry. Never mind. I’m sure you have a girlfriend. I thought … never mind. Thank you for the ride, Jordan. I appreciate it. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Drive safe. I’ll see you around.” She shoved the key into the lock and turned it, but didn’t have a chance to open the door before she was flipped back around and her back was pressed to the door.

“Shut up, Rayma,” he said, his growl dark and dangerous and sending flames licking up the inside of her abdomen. The goody-goody cop was nowhere in sight.

She swallowed and blinked up at him.

“I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m also not going to come in. I like you. But if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”