The town of Quiet Cove was having a big celebration, with the boardwalk as the centerpiece. The boardwalk and public beach were full to bursting with holiday revelers, but Luca’s older sister, Carmen, owned a little house and a slice of beach just past the public area, and the Paganos were gathering there. This was nothing like the Memorial Day bash that their father threw every year. This was just the family gathering, playing and eating and then heading off to the town’s celebration in different groups, whenever they saw fit.
She took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
He went to the back of his truck and pulled out the necessary beach shit, and they went around Carmen’s house to meet his family.
They were the last in. Where family obligations were concerned, Luca was usually last in. As they came around the house and saw the sheer number of people Manny was about to meet, and watched their expressions shift as they saw him and comprehended that he had, for the first time ever, brought a date, he realized that he’d made a tactical error. He should have prepared them. He had not said a single word to any of his family about her.
Not for any reason other than he hadn’t seen any family outside of work since Sunday. Training Anthony had sucked a big chunk of his free time, and he’d been spending what was left with the little slip of a woman at his side. He wouldn’t say it hadn’t occurred to him to mention her, but there had never been a time to do so.
They were going to be shocked, and Manny was going to feel that. Fuck.
Well, too late now.
Carlo broke the collective family gaping trance and came up to them, a bemused smirk on his face. “Hey, man. You brought a friend.” They gripped hands.
“Yeah. Carlo, this is Manny.” He went for it. What the hell. “My girlfriend.”
Carlo was smooth, so his shock was manifested merely as a lift of his eyebrow and then was gone. Luca knew that Manny would miss it completely. Then he turned his suave, city boy smile on her and held out his hand. “Manny. This is going to sound like a line, but have we met?”
Manny shook his hand and then yanked back. Carlo noticed but didn’t say anything. “Yeah. I manage the band that played at your wedding.”
“Right! You called Luc’s truck a giant phallus. And told him he had a tiny dick.”
Luca was happy to see her smile a little. “Um, yeah. I did. I was right about the first one, but wrong about the second. He’s not compensating. He’s showing off.”
Good girl! Luca was proud. That was the Manny he’d hoped had come with him today. That Manny would get through this fine. She might even have a good time.
Surprised and evidently charmed, Carlo grinned. “Figures Luca would get snagged by a girl who called him out. Okay, well come meet the rest of the wolves.”
Carlo held out his hand to her, but she just stared at it and then at Luca. The panic at the edge of her eyes gained some ground, and he stepped up between his brother and her.
“Let’s get the meet and greet over with. With any luck, the only grilling happening today will be the kind with sauce.”
Carlo gave him a look, and he shook his head, one quick, hopefully subtle move.
He should have said something to somebody. At least to Carlo—but Carlo was the one he was most concerned about. He had a bad history with a woman with a mental illness.
The rest of the introductions went okay. Everybody gaped like drooling morons at first, but nobody made any rude remarks. The one who once might have, Joey, didn’t talk so much anymore. Sitting on an Adirondack chair, a cannula in his nose and his oxygen tank at his side, Luca’s youngest brother only shook her hand and gave her a halfhearted smile, saying “Good…to meet…you.”
There were a lot of Paganos. And Carlo had invited his business partner. As he greeted Pete Cabot and his date with a handshake, he turned a quick, apologetic glance toward Manny. It was clear that she’d done a count and was preparing for more meetings than she’d expected, but she was holding it together.
Nobody tried to hug her except, as expected, Mrs. D., but Luca was able to step between them and give the old broad a hug himself. Otherwise, everybody was chill, and Manny seemed on edge but basically all right. She had her sassy pants on, and Luca found himself grinning like an idiot, feeling prouder and prouder every time she opened her mouth.
He could tell that he had some explaining to do eventually, but for now, he thought the day was going about as well as he could have hoped. She even let herself be drawn off from him, talking to Carmen and Sabina about her mother’s garden.
While she talked chick talk, he ended up sitting with John, who had not brought his girl, Carlo, and Joey, drinking beer. They had questions, but they were offered as gibes and shit-giving, and he brushed them off. This was not the time or place. Every now and then, he’d scan the area, but she looked content with his sisters.
Luca looked around and tried to see what Manny was seeing. Carmen’s shake-shingle cottage, small but well-kept and cozy. The fire pit ringed with white Adirondacks. Trey and his dog, Elsa, bounding around in the surf with the youngest Pagano sister, Rosa. The Pagano men, all big and dark, shirtless and sunglassed, sitting around laughing and drinking beer. Luca’s father already poking around the grill, getting it ready, their next-door neighbor, now potential stepmother-to-be, standing with him. Carmen and Sabina off with Manny, in deep conversation.
The town crowd pushed at the edges of Carmen’s property line, but on days like today, she didn’t get uptight about it. Still, town people kept a respectful boundary, and so there was an almost physical line of demarcation, where the chaos of the town party stopped and the Pagano family gathering started. Maybe that buffer was helping Manny be okay.
Then, John nodded at a point behind his shoulder, and he turned around to see her coming quickly, right to him. As she got a few feet away, he could hear her muttering, “Turbulence, turbulence, turbulence, turbulence…”
He stood, and she stopped right in front of him. “Turbulence.”
“Excuse me, fellas. Come on, bit. I got ya.” With his arm outstretched, he gestured toward Carmen’s cottage, and she followed him up the beach.
He led her into Carmen’s little house. “Here. See? Quiet.”
“Whoa. This is awesome.”
Carmen’s house was full of color and texture. It made him a little twitchy, but he knew Manny would like it. There seemed to him to be more obvious rhyme and reason to Carmen’s décor than to the bargain-basement riot that was Manny’s place, but there were some similarities. “Yeah. Her taste’s not much different from yours. Hey—I thought you were doin’ okay.”
“I was. And then I wasn’t. Everybody talks at the same time and so fast. I just got tired.” She dropped into a chair at Carmen’s table. “And sad.”
He sat at the table with her. “Why sad?”
“I don’t know if I can say it. But…everybody is so easy with each other. And Trey is playing and laughing with everybody, and just…I don’t know. I never had that, and I never will. I did nothing but make my family’s life harder. I still make things harder. That’s who I am. The girl who makes everything hard. Nobody can relax around me. I can’t even relax around me.”
Listening to her, his chest felt tight and weird, and his eyes itched. Her hand was on the table, looking small and vulnerable, and he just couldn’t fucking resist. He wrapped his own around hers and squeezed.
She hissed and jumped back so hard that the chair she was sitting in went over, and she barely kept her feet.
“Dammit, Manny! Chill the fuck out!”
And now she was looking at him like he’d grown horns or something.
Fuck! Fuck! He just wanted to fucking touch her. He’d only tried to hold her hand. He wanted to give her some goddamn comfort.
But his touch wasn’t comfort, not to her. And now he’d scared her.
“I need to go home.”
He sighed. They hadn’t even made it to dinner. And he’d been hoping to get in t
he water with her, too. “Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry, bit. I didn’t mean—”
She waved him off. “It’s fine. I just…I need to go.”
oOo
“Where are we?”
He killed the engine and sat back. “My place.”
“What?” She’d sat with her arms wrapped tightly around her body, making herself as small and stiff as she could, the whole short drive. Now she turned her head toward him but didn’t try to meet his eyes.
He’d thought the day had been going well, but he’d been wrong. There were just too many Paganos, and it had never occurred to him that the simple fact that his family was mostly happy and functional would itself upset her.
“My apartment. We’re at my apartment. I live up there, on the corner. View of the water.”
“I saw water all day. I want to go home. My home.”
“Manny. I never brought anybody to my place before. Not once.”
She said nothing, but she almost lifted her eyes to his.
“Do you see me trying, bit? Do you see?”
She spoke slowly, like she was tired of finding words. “It’s not like it’s going to get better. My folks have been trying since I was six. I’m always going to be hard. I’m built wrong. My brain is just…deformed.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a fucking moron, then. It doesn’t matter what you believe. It’s a fact. True whether you believe it or not.” She smacked herself hard in the forehead, surprising him. “I’m broken.”
“Hey, don’t do that. Maybe I am a moron. Maybe not. But I’m wicked stubborn, little bit. And I’m not giving up.”
Now she did turn those blues on him. “Why? Why not just go back ten days and pretend I don’t exist?”
“You’re not so easy to forget. I like being with you. I think about you when I’m not. I fuckin’ dream about you, and that’s a first. So I’m with you. Unless you want me gone.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
It was like she hadn’t heard what he’d just told her. He had no trouble being honest and straight up with her, but he was saying things to her that he’d never said before, and she didn’t seem to understand that he was taking big risks, making himself vulnerable. It was not something he did. Being vulnerable was something he spent most of his life avoiding. It hurt that his risk, his need, just seemed to bounce off her.
It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t developed the capacity for empathy. But it sucked to be on the other side of that chasm.
He couldn’t stop trying, though. He wanted her to want him, to feel him, like he did her. “I thought I’d show you a quieter part of my life. It’s not all like today. Fact is, all that ruckus drives me up a damn wall.” He smiled. “I want to make it up to you.”
“How far from my place are we here?”
“About two miles, a little less. Why?”
“I need to be able to walk if you won’t take me home.”
“I’ll take you home when you want.”
“That’s where I said I wanted to go in the first place.”
Luca resisted the urge to hit the steering wheel in frustration. Instead, he calmly replied, “Do you want me to take you home now?”
She stared at him for a long time, and he didn’t look away, but he couldn’t read her. It was like her face had turned off. She was just slack. Then she looked at her lap. “No. I’ll go up. Just…don’t touch me.”
“I know. Come on.”
Why was he trying so hard? He didn’t know, but he couldn’t stop.
oOo
She stood in his living room and looked around, literally turning in a circle. He wondered what she thought of the plain, Danish-style furniture, the neutral colors, the near-total lack of knicks or knacks. Even his walls were mostly bare. He’d had them painted a dusky kind of brown, and the only thing hanging on the walls was a large rack holding his surfboards, which dominated one side of the room.
His kitchen was separated from the living/dining room by a wide island with a stainless steel countertop. It was completely bare.
“Follow me, Manny.” He crossed the room and went down a short hall. Opening a louvered door at the end, he swept his arm, ushering her through the doorway. She froze.
“This is your bedroom.”
“It is.”
“I don’t…I…” She didn’t like to fuck in bed any more than he did. But this was different.
“There’s a reason. Give me a minute of trust. Can you do that?”
When she finally nodded, he went into his closet. He’d designed and built a big organizer in there, and he pulled a set of metal and black leather handcuffs out of a drawer.
He had no idea if they would fit him; he’d bought them on whim years ago and had only used them once—on Lynne, in fact—and he never in a thousand lifetimes would have thought he would ever offer to do what he was about to offer to do. Passivity was not his thing. Being actually at a woman’s mercy had no appeal for him whatsoever.
But Manny appealed to him.
He felt like he owed her some kind of penance. Not for touching her, even though he knew better. But for yelling at her when she reacted the way she had. When she’d reacted as he should have known—as he had known—she would.
He was about to offer her a truckload of concessions. Handcuffed. Sex in bed. In his bed. In his home. But when he came back into the room, dangling the cuffs on his finger, Manny backed up so fast she slammed into the open door.
“Easy, bit. They’re for me, not you.”
She relaxed a little. “Please?”
“I’m gonna let you cuff me and have your way. Right there on my bed.” The bed had a slatted steel headboard with a vertical beam down the center. The cuffs would hook around that, he was sure.
“I don’t…why?”
“No way I can touch you if I’m chained up. You can relax and do what you want. Are you up for that?”
“Even after…even now, you want to fuck?”
“Sure. Why not? Don’t you?”
She slumped a little and got quiet. Then she stood straight again and said, “Okay, yeah,” and started to strip.
There was something…something different in the way she looked at him as she undressed. It unsettled him, but he didn’t know why. But then he saw that she’d been wearing a one-piece bathing suit under her shorts and t-shirt. With a Union Jack pattern. On Independence Day. It was so fucked up, and so Manny, that he laughed and forgot about that weird look.
He got himself naked, grabbed a condom, and, with some misgivings that were stronger than he wanted to examine, got on his bed and hooked the cuffs through the center of his headboard.
Manny knelt on his bed and watched him, looking like she had some misgivings, too. He got one hand cuffed on his own—they were adjustable and fit well enough—and then he shook the other gently and cocked his head at her.
“Gonna need you to do this one. And then I’m all yours.”
There was that odd light in her eyes again, and he almost changed his mind. “You okay, bit?”
She smiled and nodded and took the cuff from him, catching his wrist in it snugly. And that was it. He was chained to his bed. Fuck.
Manny was kneeling naked at his side, staring at his cock, which was not what one might call enthusiastic about this plan. She lifted it off his leg and looked up at him.
“You don’t want this?”
“I want you. But this isn’t something I’m into, no. But you did something for me today. I figure I was due for some payback.” He smiled, hoping he looked both convincing and reassuring. “I bet you can get things going.”
He must have sold it, because she gave him a mysterious little ghost of a smile and then sucked his soft length into her mouth, making her tongue undulate so that the stud moved rhythmically over him. Damn, she gave great head. In seconds, he was hard as ever.
Then she released him and straddled him, taking her time touching his body, kissing him everywher
e, massaging him with almost therapeutic pressure. Whenever he groaned or made any kind of a sound, she came up and kissed him, plunging her tongue deeply into his mouth.
He was beginning to be a fan of the cuffs. He usually had to concentrate to keep his hands to himself with her. Now, with no choice, he could just give in totally to the way her body felt on his. Her tongue, her mouth and hands, the way her tits, with those little rings, brushed his chest—Jesus God, it was good.
Her hand wrapped around the base of his cock. The condom packet was on an upper corner of the bed, but she didn’t reach for it. Instead, she straddled him and sat down, taking his bare rod into her tight, silkyhot sheath.
Touch (The Pagano Family Book 2) Page 13