His brother had already picked up on it. “So what’s your problem today?” Nolan asked him as he let another niece, Asher, climb on his back.

“Your face,” he told him lightly, because that’s what you said to your brother. “Where the hell is Eve, by the way? I wanted to ask her if she’s talked to Evan about when we’re getting the car.”

“She’s around here somewhere. Probably in the kitchen. She loves Mom’s cheese balls.”

“I think she’s avoiding me,” Rhett said as he pulled Georgia up to rest on his hip. It made him concerned there was a problem with their plan. Last fall, Eve had quit her job as a PR rep for her brothers, both highly successful stock car drivers, Elec and Evan Monroe, to pursue her own career as a driver. She had chosen to try to tackle the truck series and was already a few weeks into her inaugural season. Rhett had left Evan’s pit crew to join Eve’s, knowing it would afford him more free time to pursue his own passion—dirt track racing.

If all this went south, he was going to be less than thrilled. Not to mention out of a job.

He didn’t really know his new sister-in-law all that well, since they had only fleetingly crossed paths over the past couple of years. It was just since she’d married Nolan a few months earlier that he had started to spend more time with her, but they weren’t particularly close. Maybe he was reading her wrong.

“You sound like a middle school girl,” Nolan said. “No one is avoiding you.”

If he hadn’t been holding Georgia, he would have called his brother a dick, but he was, so he had to settle for punching Nolan on the arm.

“Dinner! Find a chair,” their mother called from the kitchen.

They were easily twenty for dinner that night, which was still only half the family, but in a small ranch house, it made for tight quarters. Rhett tried to maneuver himself near Eve, but she hightailed it to the very end of the long folding table, which came out on Sundays to accommodate their large numbers. With six kids and Nolan between them, there was no way Rhett was going to get a seat anywhere near her.

He was not imagining that her behavior was off.

It did not improve his mood.

Nor did his mother’s decision to ask him about his love life.

“So I was hoping we’d see Lexi here tonight,” his mother said to him across the table, ruining his appetite entirely.

“We broke up,” he reminded her. “It’s been six weeks, Mom. Let it go.”

To change the subject, he turned to his sister Danny. “Give me the mashed potatoes.”

His sister made a face at him, and he realized that sounded way ruder than he had intended.

“So bossy, for crying out loud,” his mother said. “I hope you weren’t bossy like that with Lexi.”

If only his mother knew just how bossy he had been. The thought amused him.

Down the table, Eve started choking on her wine.

His nephew Simon whomped her on the back.

“Good Lord, are you okay?” his father asked her.

“Fine, fine,” she said, holding her hand up.

But then she made eye contact with Rhett and started, glancing away quickly.

What the hell?

“I just think,” his mother said, circling right back around to his failed relationship, “that maybe you’re not nice enough to your girlfriends. Nolan was the opposite, always falling in love in a minute, showering the girls with gifts, but you don’t smile enough. It makes the girls feel so insecure.”

“So I should smile more and I’ll nab an unsuspecting female? Okay, thanks, Mom.” He wanted to roll his eyes, but there was really no point. She meant well.

“You showered the girls with gifts?” Eve asked Nolan, her eyebrows raised, the corner of her mouth turned up in a teasing smile. “I don’t seem to recall that happening with me.”

“Oh, I meant when he was young,” their mother hastened to amend. “You know, cheap things, like teddy bears and chocolates.”

“I bought you leopard-print underwear and that crap wasn’t cheap,” Nolan told Eve.

“Nolan!” That was their mother, horrified.

Rhett grinned. He did enjoy a good Sunday dinner.

“Why are you so eager to marry Rhett off anyway?” Nolan asked their mother. “With me, you were always telling me not to rush into anything.”

“Because you were always impulsive, and you wear your heart on your sleeve. Rhett doesn’t attach very easily. It worries me.”

“Rhett is in the room,” he said, annoyed all over again. It wasn’t that he didn’t attach easily, nor was he opposed to marriage. The truth was, he was often guarded with women because he did attach. He was intense. Once he was in, he was all in, and he’d yet to find a woman capable of handling that facet of his personality and needs. They all eventually became frightened by his passion.

He was starting to conclude that he was just a whole lot of too much for the average twenty-three-year-old woman.

“It’s just because you’re the last one,” his sister Jeannie said. “Nine kids and eight are married. Mom wants to close the folder on her parenting.”

Yet another one of the joys of being the youngest.

Though most of the time, he didn’t mind it. His childhood had been happy, and his sisters had all doted on him, carrying him way past the age when he needed to be carried, and slipping him treats. He’d been their mascot of sorts and had satisfied their desire to role-play as mommies. But there was no question his parents had been a bit worn out by the time he’d been coming up, and he had never quite gotten over his resentment about his name. It had given him countless bloody lips and bruised knuckles on the playground when he’d been forced to defend himself against bullying.

Maybe he could let the whole thing go if just once his mother admitted that perhaps it had been a poor choice, but she didn’t. She still thought his name was the shit.

“She can do that whether or not I’m married. I have my own apartment. I have a job. A social life. It’s all good.” He glanced at Eve again, but she was cramming a dinner roll in her mouth.

“Speaking of social lives, or lack thereof. Eve, do you still have your book club?” Danny asked. “Can I join it? I would love to do something like that and get out of the house a little.”

Nolan laughed. “Eve’s book club is a front for getting together with her friends and drinking wine. She had it last night and they wound up in a bar.”

“I’m in,” Danny stated emphatically. “I need one night to be an adult. Who else is in the group?”

“It’s not a front,” Eve protested. “We read all the books and we do discuss them. It’s just, why not discuss them with wine, right?”

Nolan scoffed. “That still doesn’t account for the bar. And don’t tell me that was Harley’s or Shawn’s idea, because I seriously doubt either one of them would suggest it.”

Shawn? Rhett set his fork down and looked down the table at his sister-in-law. How many women named Shawn could there be in this town? Who had been in a bar the night before? With female friends?

“Are you suggesting it was me?” Eve asked hotly. “Nolan Ford, you are going to pay for making me sound like an alcoholic in front of your mother. It was actually Charity’s idea, because Shawn said that a place like that doesn’t exist.”

Rhett went still. The Shawn in the club had said virtually the same thing.

“Bars don’t exist?” Jeannie asked.

Shawn. Four girlfriends. Skepticism about a fetish bar.

Holy shit, Eve had been in the club the night before with the woman he had danced with.

Eve suddenly seemed to realize what she had revealed. “Oh, sh–, I mean, shoot. I mean, like a specialty bar. Never mind.” When she glanced at him, her cheeks were burning red, confirming that Rhett was one-hundred-percent right.

Whattya know. Rhett grinned at Eve.

While his initial reaction was one of mortification that his sister-in-law had seen him out at a fetish club, it paled in comparison to the rush of excitement and satisfaction he felt knowing that he now had a way to find out who Shawn was and where he might be able to see her again.

Rhett took the platter of sliced pork tenderloin his brother-in-law passed him and served himself a hearty helping. His appetite had suddenly returned, full force.

* * *

EVE couldn’t look at Rhett without picturing him paddling a simpering female. It was pissing her off. She liked her brother-in-law, damn it. They worked together and were just starting to get to know each other. They were essentially starting a new business venture together, and she did not want to know about his sex life. It was like walking in on your parents having sex. Or seeing your husband’s father naked in the shower. She didn’t care what Rhett did in his private life, she just didn’t want images of it popping up in her head every time someone used the word “bossy.” Or “dominate.” Or “whip.”

There had to be some sort of mental trick she could use to disassociate Rhett from sex. Like every time she started to conjure up inappropriate imagery, she could think of dead rabbits or something. That might work.

As long as he never knew that she knew, they would be cool.

Speak of the devil, when she opened the door to the kitchen from the garage, having gone out there to snag a beer from the overflow fridge, he was standing there, smiling at her. He gestured for her to go back into the garage and then he pulled the door firmly shut behind him.

“So Eve, how did you like The Wet Spot?” he asked.

Crap on a cracker, how did he know? Never one to back down from what she’d done or a challenge, Eve just shrugged nonchalantly. “It was alright. A little underwhelming, to be honest. I take it you saw me there?”