So Irresistible

by Lisa Plumley

  “Nothing.” Mouth fixed in a hard line, Shane gripped the steering wheel. He kept driving. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “It was definitely fine this morning.” Wearing what she knew was a lusty smile, Gabriella put her hand on Shane’s thigh. His quadriceps muscles felt hard, tight, and perfect—just like the rest of him. “I didn’t know we could both bend that way.”

  Her reminder of their A.M. frolics earned her a wan smile.

  That’s how she knew something was wrong. Ordinarily, Shane was up for any and all instant replays of their lovemaking. He liked being reminded of everything they’d shared. Gabriella liked reminding him. She liked remembering those things herself.

  Everything about the past few days had been perfect. Aside from a little preoccupation on Shane’s part—which she chalked up to the rigors of helping her get Campania up on its feet, now that they were working as partners—things had been running smoothly. After the debacle with the pizza dough, Gabriella had focused more intensely than ever on leading her crew toward success. Victory was so close she could taste it.

  All it had taken was an almost disastrous brush with complete closure to make her realize exactly how strong she was.

  “I think there’s going to be chafing this time,” Gabriella joked, still trying to get Shane’s attention with ribald talk. “I keep thinking we should slow down—you know, sexually”—she punctuated that with a provocative eyebrow waggle—“but then you touch me or kiss me or just walk by shirtless, and it starts seeming like a really good idea to go for another round.”

  Shane gave a noncommittal grunt. He turned the corner.

  Hmm. Gabriella considered that response. It wasn’t satisfying. Outside the car, the tree-dotted neighborhoods of Portland flashed by, full of repurposed buildings, kitschy paint colors, bicycling residents, and unique character. Everything about her hometown made her happy. She liked its weirdness, its idiosyncrasies, its openness to being yourself and being real.

  In the Rose City, alternative lifestyles weren’t just welcome, they were practically de rigueur. Starting over was encouraged. So was following your own (possibly uncool) path.

  Portland seemed honest to her. That’s what she liked most.

  She valued honesty. But she loved Shane.

  Regrouping, Gabriella eyed him again. “You have this very persuasive way about you,” she told him flatteringly, still giddily going on about their sexual chemistry. “It’s so—”

  “If you’re saying I’ve made you do things you don’t want to do,” Shane interrupted grimly, “you’re wrong. You wanted them.”

  Huh? What was up with him? He was never this forbidding.

  “Of course I wanted them!” She stroked his thigh a little higher. “That’s what I meant by saying you’re persuasive.”

  Shane put his hand atop hers. “Cut it out. I’m driving.”

  Surprised, Gabriella squinted at him. Then, “Oh. I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “You’re nervous.”

  He scoffed. “I’m not nervous. I have a lot on my mind.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Like being nervous. Gabriella knew why, too. “Don’t worry. My parents will love you. I know they will.”

  Shane’s mouth tightened. “What kind of person has Sunday gravy on a Monday?” he groused. “I wasn’t ready for this.”

  “You’re really cute when you’re nervous,” Gabriella told him. She loved his profile. Even when he was upset. “Your nose gets all … nosey, and a little muscle in your jaw clenches.”

  Shane sighed. He tossed her a smile. “You’re crazy.”

  “Crazy about you? Guilty as charged.” Gabriella smiled back, happy she’d been able to lighten his mood. Shane had certainly done enough to help her lately. She was glad she’d trusted him. With her pizzeria. With her parents. With her heart. “When we get there, just be sure to eat a lot. To my mom, food is love. To my dad, Italian food is heaven. Don’t be shy.”

  “I,” Shane assured her, “am never shy.”

  Gabriella believed that. “We have to have Sunday gravy on Monday night,” she explained belatedly, “because that’s the only night the pizzeria is closed. It’s always been that way.”

  “Then why is it called Sunday gravy?”

  She knew she didn’t really have to tell him.

  “Tradition!” they both chorused in unison. They laughed.

  This time, it was Shane’s turn to put his hand on her thigh. He caressed her, his thumb nervously beating a tattoo.

  Gabriella examined him. “What else is wrong?”

  Shane steered down her parents’ street, squinting at the houses. “You tell me. You’ve been talking so much, I know you’ve got something on your mind that you’re avoiding.”

  Unwilling to acknowledge his insight—no matter how stupidly accurate it was—Gabriella pointed. “It’s that house.”

  Shane parked in front of it. He turned off the ignition. He slung his forearms on the steering wheel, then watched her.

  Intently.

  When he watched her that way, she wanted to tell all.

  Mostly because she knew Shane would listen. Really listen.

  “Okay, fine!” she blurted, surrendering before he brought out the big guns. Like compassion. Smiles. Heavy-duty caring and a lot more patience than any man ought to be endowed with. “I’m nervous, too. About tonight. About dinner. About everything.”

  Shane frowned. “About me?”

  “No!” She laughed. “Never about you. It’s just that I haven’t spent much time with my mom and dad since I came back to town. This will be our first real face-to-face, in fact.”

  Especially since they dodged me at the farmers market.

  Still flummoxed by that incident, Gabriella shook her head.

  Shane took her hand. “It’ll be fine. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise that,” she protested. “You don’t even know them. You don’t know how mad they were when I left.”

  “I don’t have to know them. I know you.” Shane touched her cheek. He pulled her closer, then pressed a soft kiss to her mouth. His gaze, full of affection and reassurance, locked with hers. “You’re a good person, remember? Your parents will understand. You’ll explain, and they’ll understand.”

  But will they forgive me? Gabriella wondered. After all, she had yet to redeem herself by saving the pizzerias.

  “They’ll forgive you,” Shane said. “Anyone would.”

  Struck by Shane’s perspicacity—and his seemingly rock-solid faith in that supposition—Gabriella nodded. She could do this.

  She could be brave. For herself. For Shane. For them both.

  Because Shane had never had a real family, and Gabriella wanted to share hers with him. She wanted Shane to see that genuine love and forgiveness were deeper than anything else.

  Even deeper than misguided showdowns and subsequent escapes from PDX to Astoria … where they didn’t even have good pizza.

  Bravely, she drew in a breath. She smiled. “After tonight, you are so going to be addicted to my mom’s Sunday gravy. You’re going to be jonesing for some meatballs, trying to score some spaghetti—you’ll want to date me just to get a taste of it.”

  Shane appeared dubious. “Nothing is that powerful.” Before she could protest, he added, “I already want to date you.”

  “My mom’s cooking is super powerful.” Gabriella gestured outside. Her parents’ modest two-story house stood in a yard that looked a lot like hers would have—if she’d been more successful nurturing her grandmother’s roses. “Shall we go in?”

  “Do we have another choice?”

  Gabriella laughed. “Anyone would think you’ve never met the parents of any of the dozens of women you’ve dated.” She rolled her eyes with flagrant disbelief. “Come on, lothario. It’s time you atoned for all your sins.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  In Donna and Robert Grimani’s home, atonement came with a side of garlic ciabatta and a glass of red wi
ne, Shane learned.

  So, thus fortified, he went on serving his overdue penance, with Gabby’s teasing last words still ringing in his ears.

  Come on, lothario. It’s time you atoned for all your sins.

  “All of them?” Shane had joked back. “That’s a tall order.”

  Gabby had only laughed and tugged him inside, but Shane had meant what he’d said. For the past fifteen years, he hadn’t made a single legitimate attempt at being good. He hadn’t seen the point. But that night, with Gabby’s parents, he did try.

  Not that he’d never tried behaving himself. As a kid, he’d tried. He’d hoped to make things easier on his parents. After that had bombed, he’d tried turning over a new leaf when he’d been adopted by the Walthams. He’d gotten lucky—everyone had told him so, even Casey. So Shane had tried to settle down, to behave, to let the fact that he was wanted and cared for—for the first time he could remember—sink into his bones and turn real.

  The trouble was, the wanting and caring never quite came. The censure and rebuke and cold words came instead. So did the money and cars and privileges, of course. But Shane hadn’t cared about those. Beyond a brief, hedonistic spurt of misbehaving in even more self-destructive ways, Shane hadn’t ever cared about all the things the Walthams could give him.

  He’d cared about all the things they’d refused—or been unable—to give him. Like love. Hope. Real, lasting security.

  Freedom from fearing he’d be abandoned all over again.

  Eventually, Shane had realized there was no use trying to earn what would always, eternally and hopelessly, remain out of reach. He’d reverted to his bad, old troublemaking ways, knowing that at least when he got busted for something, he was seen. He was misunderstood and punished, but he wasn’t invisible and overlooked. That had always been preferable to him.

  Those qualities had made Shane a star in the gang of thugs he’d run with, a regular in the principal’s office, and an occasional juvenile scofflaw. They had not, however, turned him into ideal boyfriend material. They hadn’t made him good. Shane had never regretted that fact more than he did while standing that evening in the Grimanis’ cluttered home kitchen, making small talk and watching the senior Grimanis bustle around making dinner.

  Theirs was a well-orchestrated routine, honed by years of evident experience. Robert handled the ciabatta, with its heady smear of garlic-herb paste. Donna handled the wine, pouring with abandon. Gabby pitched in readily, taking her place as though it had been designed for her—as though it had been hers for years.

  Obviously, it had been. Gabby was an only child, Shane remembered. She’d always had her parents’ love all to herself. She hadn’t had to share it or yearn for it. It was just … there. It was there in the same way her parents’ expertise with a skillet and a meat mallet and a stockpot of boiling water was there. In the Grimani household, love was a tangible thing.

  No wonder Gabby had been so shaken to have risked it. No wonder she’d been so desperate to get it back. She hadn’t been trying to save Campania all this time, Shane understood as he watched her with her family. She’d been trying to regain her parents’ approval and their forgiveness—to get back the things she’d inadvertently thrown away in one heated disagreement.

  That realization only made Shane more aware of Gabby’s strong feelings about Campania, about the other pizzerias, about her new ideas for their menus and décor and expansion possibilities. To have endangered all this, Shane understood as he watched her laugh at something her mother said, then jostle her father to make him laugh too, Gabby must have felt very impassioned. Because there was more to her than stubbornness.

  There was heart, too. Much more heart than he deserved.

  Not wanting to think about that, Shane turned his gaze to the family photos scattered around the Grimanis’ home. They peppered the whole place, propped on tabletops and haphazardly hung in disordered clumps on the walls. The Grimanis’ photos looked as if they’d popped up spontaneously and had stayed there forever after, like freckles marking a summer’s day full of memories. They were too messy and real to be subjected to levels and rulers and perfect, orderly grids. He liked them.

  “So … Maresca.” Glancing up from her pot, Donna Grimani assessed Shane cheerfully. “That must be an Italian name.”

  Caught flat-footed, Shane drank his wine. He felt Gabby’s gaze on him and urgently wanted to do the right thing.

  The trouble was, his first impulse belonged to his fixer past. His first impulse was to spin a story that would please Donna—something poetic about his fake Italian forebearers, the charm of the old country, the difficulty of getting good cheese in a place where everything was pasteurized and inauthentic.

  He could have pulled it off, Shane knew. He had the knowledge, the charisma, and the dynamism to convince Donna and Robert that lingua italiana was his mother tongue, that he had olive oil running through his veins, that he’d been swaddled in the green, white, and red colors of the bandiera italiana since his days as a bambino. Shane had a knack for embellishment.

  He also had a gift for making friends, a talent for being persuasive (just as Gabby had accused), and an unyielding aptitude for telling lies as though they were the truth.

  Right now, Shane also had a yen to live the truth.

  “I don’t know if Maresca is Italian,” he admitted. “I lost touch with my parents a long time ago. They never talked about our heritage. As far as I know, mine’s a mystery.”

  “It’s Italian,” Donna pronounced with certainty. She smiled at him, a fiftyish woman with dyed dark hair, an ample figure, and an overall aura of generosity. “That’s an Italian answer.” She shifted a vivacious glance toward her daughter. “You hooked yourself a spicy Italian mystery man, Gabriella.”

  “Hmmph. A little too mysterious, if you ask me.” Robert Grimani looked up from his cutting board full of bread crumbs and slivered garlic. “Exactly how did you two meet?”

  Caught red-handed, Shane and Gabby traded guilty glances.

  It was a hot and sexy one-night stand, sir, Shane imagined himself saying. Your daughter ordered me to ravish her on a rug.

  “Ah. I see. Never mind.” Gruffly, Robert cleared his throat. “Cara, are you ready for the rest of this garlic?”

  Donna laughed, pointing her wooden spoon at her husband. “You! You just can’t stand talking about anything emotional!”

  She turned to Gabby. “What your father means to say,” she told her daughter cheerfully, “is he’s very happy for you both.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth! We talked about that.”

  “We talked about you not being such a stubborn old fogey,” Donna reminded Robert. Meaningfully, she added, “Speaking of which … don’t you have something you want to say to Gabriella?”

  Robert glanced up. “Meatballs or braciola?”

  Looking exasperated, Donna rounded on him. “Not that!”

  Shane almost laughed. Apparently, Gabby came by her stubborn streak naturally. No wonder her estrangement from her father had gone on so long. Shane wanted to end the impasse between them.

  “I’m sorry about … our fight, Gabriella,” Robert admitted. Roughly, he went back to plucking thyme leaves from their stems. “I’m the parent. I shouldn’t have let it drag on. If not for your mother, I’m not sure how long you would have stayed away.”

  Donna smiled at him, appearing duly satisfied.

  She turned to Gabby next. “Now your turn,” she nudged.

  “My turn?” Gabby protested. “Why is it my turn?”

  “Because despite what you may think,” her mother explained patiently, “your just being here tonight isn’t an apology.”

  That was almost the same point Shane had made at the brewpub before Gabby had reconciled with her crew. But Gabby grumbled now, just under her breath, obviously disagreeing.

  “Don’t make me put you both on dishwashing duty to get this done!” Donna threatened. “You know I’ll do it.” Self-assuredly, she went back to s
tirring her Sunday gravy—which, Shane had learned, wasn’t traditional “gravy” as he knew it at all. Donna’s sauce was more akin to a ragu than anything else. It sent up delicious tomatoey smells all over the kitchen. “There’s a reason I never got myself an automatic dishwasher, you know.”

  Gabby and her father exchanged reluctant glances. They’d obviously been treated to Donna’s nontraditional methods of reconciling problems before. Gabby lowered her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry too, Dad. I shouldn’t have stormed off the way I did. I thought you didn’t respect my ideas, and it hurt.”

  “There was nothing wrong with your ideas,” Robert told her, his weathered face softening. “They were good ideas. I just—”

  “Not everyone moves as fast as you do, Gabriella,” her mother put in from the stove. “Some people need more time.”

  “I was getting to that!” He shot his wife an irked look. Then he put down his knife, wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, and faced Gabby. “The thing is, I know how hard it is to run the pizzerias. I know how much responsibility it is. How much work. I knew what you were volunteering to take on.”

  “I thought I did, too,” Gabby admitted. “I was wrong.”

  Robert’s gaze sharpened. “Has it been too hard on you?” Dramatically, he flung his hands to the sides of his head. “I knew it! I should have shut down Campania! I shouldn’t have let you get involved again. I never wanted you to struggle.”

  “It hasn’t been that bad, Dad.” Gabby aimed a guilty glance at Shane. “Shane’s helping. We’ve been getting by okay.”

  “Humph.” Robert frowned. “Pinkie tells us otherwise.”

  Gabby’s face turned a little guiltier. “Well, you know Pinkie.” She gave an offhanded wave. “She’s exaggerating.”

  Her parents didn’t appear placated. Now Donna had turned to face Gabby, too. Her formerly smooth brow was furrowed.

  “Is there something you’re not telling us?” she asked.

  “You should have seen Campania the other night!” Gabby blurted in an obvious case of redirection. “People were lined up around the block, waiting to get in. There were signs, and cars driving by honking in support, and about a gazillion Tweets—”