“Wow . . . I . . . you . . .” I’m speechless. “You look gorgeous.”
She hooks a hand on her hip. “You going to tell me where you’re taking me now?”
I approach her with small steps, taking my time and enjoying the view. She still wants to be mad at me, but it won’t last long. She licks her lips, her body tense and her demeanor guarded, but by the time this night ends, she’s going to be mine all over again.
Sliding my fingertips down the side of her silken arm, I take her hand in mine and pull her toward the front door. By the time we reach my SUV, the light scent of her perfume envelops us in a cloud of sweetness.
I open her door, treating her like the lady she is, and I neglect to tell her that I’m not sure I’ve ever opened a door for anyone before.
A minute later, we’re leaving Laguna Palms and heading toward the Gulf Coast. Another hour or so and we’ll be at my favorite private beach. One of my buddies owns this little section of shoreline, and tonight, it’s just going to be us, a blanket, the crashing waves, and the starry sky.
I’m not a romantic guy, but I want to make Delilah feel special tonight. Because fuck, she is special.
Chapter 23
Delilah
Zane pulls into a small, tree-covered parking lot. Up ahead a sign marked “Private” hangs from a wrought-iron gate.
“Hop out,” he says, reaching behind him and retrieving a blanket and a small cooler.
“What is this? A picnic?”
“Something like that.”
The sky is pitch black save for a smattering of twinkling stars and a bright full moon. Why Zane would shroud this evening in romance is beyond me, but I’m willing to hear him out one last time for some completely insane reason.
I follow him to the gate, where he punches in a code that lets us through. A sandy path surrounded by greenery leads us toward the sound of crashing waves, and within seconds we’ve reached a private beach covered in sugar-soft white sand and moon-lit turquoise waters.
Zane spreads the blanket out, and I kick off my strappy sandals, and then he lowers himself to his knees, opens the cooler, and pulls out a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a corkscrew.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “I don’t understand.”
“My abuela always told me that actions spoke louder than words,” he says, driving the screw into the cork of the wine bottle.
“Okay, so what are you trying to say with all of this, because I’m really confused. Flowers? A beach picnic? Wine?”
“The other day,” he says, pouring me a glass and handing it off. “I know I hurt your feelings.”
“What gave it away?” My tone is drier than this white wine I’m sipping.
Zane takes his glass, chugs half, and stares over my shoulder toward the rolling waters. For the first time ever, he looks lost in thought.
“I don’t even know where to begin.” He laughs, but it’s not a joyful laugh. It’s nervous. Another first. I’ve never seen Zane de la Cruz nervous. Ever.
My pulse races, and I take another drink. I know from grad school that when someone’s about to reveal something, we let them do it on their terms. We don’t coax or ply the information from them.
“If I tell you some things tonight,” he says. “Promise me something.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t try to analyze me. Don’t try to figure me out.”
That’s going to be really hard, but I’ll try my best. “Okay.”
“I mean it, Delilah,” he says. “If I tell you these things, I don’t want you to look at me differently. For better or for worse. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me, and I don’t want you to walk away from me without giving me a second thought.”
His preface is beginning to scare me, but I keep a calm gaze and draw in slow, deep breaths. In school, we learned to be prepared to hear anything. You never know what secrets someone is shouldering until they decide to share their story.
“I won’t judge you or analyze you, Zane.” I lift my hand to my heart, feeling my stare turn sympathetic. “I promise.”
He smiles a nervous smile, taking another mouthful of wine and swallowing so quickly I doubt he tastes it.
“Okay.” He pulls in a hard breath and lets it go. “Jesus. I don’t even know where to start. And some of this stuff, I haven’t talked about in years. Decades even.”
I reach across the blanket, scooting closer and placing my hand on his. “I’m honored that you want to share this with me.”
I’ve never seen Zane so vulnerable, and it almost makes me forget all the reasons he’s on my shit list. Part of me wants to crawl into his arms, wrap myself around him, and kiss his trembling lips. It’s nice to see the man behind the ego. It’s a breath of fresh air.
“When I was nine,” he says, “CPS took me away from my mother. She was using drugs. Selling herself to pay the rent. I had never been to school. I was malnourished, small for my age. I looked like a five-year-old.”
“My god,” I whisper, looking at this giant muscled man and trying to imagine an emaciated little boy.
“I was given to my grandmother, Magdalena,” he continues. “I’d never met her before. She was my father’s mother, and she and my mother hated each other. My mother never let Magdalena around, and even when my grandmother sent us money, my mother would send it back. She chose to prostitute herself out rather than accept money from Magda.”
I nod, squeezing his hand to let him know I’m listening.
“Anyway, my grandmother taught me how to read, enrolled me in school,” he says. “She’s the one who signed me up for football camp one summer. I was the smallest kid on the team. Nobody wanted me there. But I loved the hell out of the game, so I never cared. Magda taught me the worst thing anyone can do in their life is care about what other people think.”
He smiles with a nostalgic distance in his eyes, as if he’s recalling a memory of her.
“She also taught me never to let the past define who we are. To live in the present.” His shoulders rise and fall. “To never settle for less than what we want.”
“Your grandmother sounds like a wise woman.”
Zane turns to me, his maple brown eyes glistening. “Yeah, she was. And she’s probably rolling in her grave at the man I’ve become.”
“I doubt that.”
He takes another sip, finishing his glass, and pours another. His lips slowly curl up in the corners.
“I’m not even supposed to be drinking,” he says.
I place my hand on his, controlling the wine glass. “Then stop.”
I take it from him and rest it carefully in the sand beside the blanket.
“She passed away my senior year in college. Just before I was recruited by Gainesville,” he says. “Never lived long enough to see me play in the pros, but that woman didn’t miss a single college home game.”
He drags in a ragged breath.
“Everything changed after I got that first signing bonus,” he says, shaking his head. “I was just some twenty-three-year-old instant millionaire. No direction. No one guiding me. No one telling me not to be a giant fucking asshole.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think it’d be hard for anyone to be responsible at that age when someone dumps all that money into their lap.”
He snorts through his nose. “I went above and beyond irresponsible. I hurt a lot of people. People I cared about. I did some bad things. Unforgivable things.”
“Nothing is unforgivable.”
Zane sits up, adjusting his position and staring blankly ahead at the rolling waves. “A few years ago, I was engaged to a girl named Mirabelle.”
He stops, his body rigid, and I’m not sure he wants to continue with his story, but I don’t say a word.
Several seconds later, he clears his throat and releases a deep breath. “She was the love of my life. I’d never been so happy. We did everything together. I’d never felt this level of inseparability w
ith anyone before. I didn’t even know it was possible to feel that way about anyone before.”
“She was your first love.”
“Right.” He shakes his head. “We were young. And dumb. And fucking like rabbits. I convinced her to make a sex tape with me. She didn’t want to. I told her no one would see it but us. Told her I wanted to take it with me to away games so I could watch it when I missed her, you know, shit you say when you’re stupid in love. She finally agreed, and we made the filthiest fucking sex tape you could imagine.”
My lips purse together, my heart aching for this sweet girl, the pit of my stomach twisting in melancholic anticipation because I know this story isn’t going to end well.
“Anyway, it was on this little handheld video recorder,” he continues. “I took it with me to a game against the Ironfield Rivets. That Saturday night at the hotel, the night before the game, a bunch of us were hanging out in my room. I left with a couple guys to get dinner, and when I came back, half the team was gathered around my TV. One of those assholes found the camera and hooked it up. They were watching Mirabelle, ogling every square inch of her like she was some dirty porn star, hollering and cheering like a bunch of wild apes.”
“Jesus.” My eyes burn. I can’t imagine.
“I had to tell her,” he says. “Mirabelle was a very private person. You could even say shy. Just getting her to make that tape . . . it was something she did for me. She trusted me with it.”
I squeeze his hand.
“Needless to say, she was humiliated. Beyond humiliated actually.” Zane drags his palm down his face, inhaling the warm sea air that swirls around us. This night is too beautiful for a story this tragic. “She . . . got hurt. Physically.”
“Oh, my god.”
“She’d gone home, to California, the weekend after I told her. She needed to get away. Didn’t want to run into any of the guys from the team. Understandably. That Sunday, I got a call from her uncle who told me Mirabelle had been upset about something all weekend. He said she was frantic. Crying a lot. She went on a drive late Saturday night and somehow crashed her car. We don’t know if it was intentional or due to her state of mind. She was still breathing when they found her. Still alive, thank God.”
I move closer to him, taking his other hand in mine.
“Long story short, I flew out there. I confessed everything to her parents,” he says. “They deserved to know why their sweet, beautiful, intelligent, happy daughter was an emotional wreck.”
“And how did they take it?”
“Not well.” He shakes his head. “They asked me to leave immediately. Forbade me from coming anywhere near their daughter again.”
“Is she okay now?”
“No.” He tucks his chin. “Because of the accident, she suffered oxygen deprivation and was permanently brain damaged. She can’t speak. Can’t walk. All I know is she’s living in some private assisted-care facility in Northern California. I’ve hired private investigators to try and locate her, but they’ve all come up empty handed. This place, wherever it is, is tighter than Fort Knox. I’ll never see her again. I’ll never get to apologize. There’ll never be closure for either of us.”
I climb onto his lap, unable to look into his painful gaze a second longer, and I wrap my arms around his neck, kissing the side of his face.
“I’m so sorry, Zane,” I whisper into his ear.
“You remind me of her so much.” His voice has a slight shake in it. “But I swear, Delilah, that’s not why . . .”
“I know.”
He breathes me in and then exhales, saying nothing.
And I get it now.
The partying. The living in the moment. The rebellion. It was all a giant “fuck you” to the tragically beautiful cards he’d been dealt. On one hand, he had it all. And on the other, he had nothing.
I slide to the spot beside him, keeping his hand in mine.
“The reason I’m telling you all of this,” he says, “is because these last few years, I’ve been a bit of a shithead to the team, to Coach, to anyone who tried to rein me in. And this year, I was told that the owner was thinking of cutting me from the team unless I straightened up. So I was told no booze, no women, no parties – at least none of that in public. The team was already spending a fortune in PR costs to clean up my reputation. And the Cougars are such a new team, they couldn’t afford any more negative publicity, so they gave me an ultimatum.”
“They can just cut you? Don’t you have a contract?”
“That’s how it is unless you’re Tony fucking Romo or something,” he huffs. “Most contracts don’t come with provisions to prevent you from being cut.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, gorgeous.”
Ain’t that the truth.
Zane reclines, lying back on the blanket, and I curl up into his arm where I’m nice and warm.
“So the reason I couldn’t take you golfing on Sunday,” he says, “is because I’m trying to walk a straight line here. Publicly. At least for the rest of the season. And then I’m done with the Cougars. My contract is up after this year, and I’ll be a free agent. I’m ready for a change of scenery.”
“I understand.”
“As much as I’d love to take you out in public because I think you’re pretty cool to hang with,” he says. “I just can’t. Not yet. We’re so close to football camp starting, and I’ve been told they’re still trying to decide whether to cut me or not. I can’t slip up. Not when I’m this close.”
“So why the flowers and the wine and the private beach?”
Zane shrugs. “It was a respect thing. I wanted you to know that you’re special. You’re not just some fuck buddy. You may not be my girlfriend, but you mean something to me. And I appreciate that you put up with my shit because I know I’m not the easiest son of a bitch to like.”
I sigh, breathing in the faded scent of the aftershave that clings to his skin. I’m going to miss this smell after this summer. If I could bottle it up and take it with me, I would.
“What kind of cologne do you wear?” I ask, as if the intention behind my question isn’t glaringly obvious.
“What?” he chuffs.
“You smell really good. I was just curious. Never mind.” I nuzzle my cheek against his cotton shirt.
His fingers tangle in my hair, and my question goes unanswered. And maybe that’s life’s way of reminding me to live in the moment. I’ll never know the name of his cologne, and I’ll probably never come back to this private beach in this obscure town in the middle of nowhere.
For now, all we have is this moment.
And maybe, for right now, that’s all we need.
Chapter 24
Zane
“Rue’s house sold, by the way.” The moon washes over Delilah’s face from the passenger window as we drive back to Laguna Palms Tuesday night with sand in our shoes and leftover remnants of beach-sex orgasms coursing in our veins.
We made love on the beach.
It wasn’t fucking.
It was so much more.
Gone was any hint of dirty talk. She didn’t beg for it, and I didn’t manhandle her like some kind of sex-starved animal. It was slow and sensual, the kind of sex that means something.
The kind of sex I haven’t had since Mirabelle . . .
“We’ll be gone by the end of July,” she adds.
My stomach clenches. “Well, that kind of blows.”
“Kind of?” she elbows me playfully.
“Guess we’ll just have to make the most of the time we have left,” I say. “I say we make a pact.”
“What kind of pact?”
“No fighting. Just sex. And fun.” I turn to her, feeling her stare. Her lips curl at one side. “Let’s make this the kind of summer neither one of us will ever be able to forget.”
“All right. Deal.”
We shake hands, our holds lingering a second too long.
When we pull onto my street, I veer into my dr
iveway out of habit. My body warm and relaxed and my mind drained after spilling my life history earlier, I reach for Delilah’s hand and take a deep breath.
“You want to sleep over tonight?” I ask.
Her knees clench together. “Oh, um. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to have sex with you, but . . .”
“No,” I say. “I’m not asking for that. I want you to stay with me tonight.”
She turns to me, slowly, brows lifted. “Really?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I want you to.”
I shift into park and she grabs her bag, her gaze moving from my house to Rue’s. We climb out, walking around and meeting by the hood.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
She bites her lip. “A lot of things.”
Lifting my brows, I will her to elaborate. “Such as?”
Delilah opens her mouth to speak, and then silences herself. “Nothing that needs to be said right now. It’s late. I’m exhausted. You are too.”
I take her hand in mine, pulling her near. “You coming inside or am I going to have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you?”
Her lips inch into a grin before she yawns. “Do what you want with me, de la Cruz. You’ve earned some bonus points tonight.”
“Not sympathy points, I hope.”
“Nope. Just nice guy points.”
My eyes squeeze shut and I stick my tongue out. “Lame.”
“Not lame. Not lame at all.”
Without hesitating, I hoist her over my shoulder, running my hands up the backs of her thighs and slapping her ass. She pounds on my back with clenched fists.
“I thought you were joking about throwing me over your shoulder.” She laughs.
“Nah. I’ve always wanted to do that to someone.” I take her inside, plunking her down on my bed at the end of the hall. Grabbing a t-shirt from my dresser, I toss it to her. “You can sleep naked or in one of my shirts. Whatever makes you comfortable.”
“Host’s choice.” She unzips the back of her dress, letting it fall to the floor as she wears nothing but her bra and panties and a smile.
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