All a Man Can Be

by Virginia Kantra

  He scowled. “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars to walk away right now.”

  Damn. Twenty thousand. Hell, he could have bought the bar with another twenty thousand.

  “Is that legal?” Mark asked Jane.

  She pursed her lips. “Private adoptions often include costs and fees. Although typically the children in those cases are younger.”

  Private adoption? This was a sale, pure and simple. Anger kindled in him as he glanced from Wainscott’s stubborn face to Gilbert’s impassive one. How could they do this, reduce a kid to a commodity? Any kid? His son or not, it was obscene.

  “No dice,” he said. “No sale.”

  And he turned on his heel and walked away. Blind with anger, he barely noticed the crowd that parted for him like waves before a prow.

  “Mark?”

  Dear God, it was Nicole, tottering toward him on her stupid blue shoes, her curvy body in that flowing blue dress like something out of a sailor’s fantasy. She looked like every woman he’d ever wanted and most of all like the two he couldn’t keep: polished, privileged, perfect, blond.

  Exactly his type.

  Not his kind.

  She reached him and put her hand on his arm. His mind was messed up, his gut was on fire, but his body still took notice of the feel of her fingers through his jacket sleeve.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, concern shining in her beautiful eyes.

  “Everything’s swell,” he said roughly. “Look, I’ve got to go.”

  “But…it’s still early.”

  “It’s nine o’clock. I’ve got to close.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I could come with you.”

  Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t that be a trip? Him out of his skin with temper and lust and her sitting beside him like the ultimate do-over all the way to Eden.

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “But I do.” He stepped away from her. Away from temptation. “Excuse me, princess. My pumpkin is waiting, and I have work to do.”

  Chapter 7

  It was a good night for getting drunk and howling at the moon. But a curtain of rain hid the moon. Mark’s howling days were over. And the memory of Paul DeLucca, with his hands like hams and his breath rank and cutting as a broken bottle, took a lot of the appeal out of getting drunk.

  It was Nicole’s fault for making him remember.

  It was the lawyer’s fault for making him think he had a son.

  Mark locked the Blue Moon’s front door and dimmed the lights. He’d never wanted to end up like his old man, a broken-down, abusive drunk. But tonight he wouldn’t have minded taking a swing at something. He’d half hoped Jimmy Greene would give him an argument at closing time, just so he could throw a punch or two and let off steam. But Jimmy went off mild as a lamb, leaving Mark alone with the stuffed pike over the bar, the flickering shadows of a ball game on ESPN and his own thoughts.

  None of them was particularly good company.

  He punched open the cash drawer and started counting.

  The drops on the window blazed. Headlights, Mark thought. From the parking lot. He twisted a rubber band around a stack of twenties. Somebody was going to be disappointed; he wasn’t opening up for one late customer.

  Outside, an engine cut off. The twin lights died.

  He didn’t bother glancing up from the piles of bills. He’d turned off the neon Open sign fifteen minutes ago. If this guy was moron enough to run through the rain and yank on a locked door, that was his problem.

  The lock clicked. The door opened.

  Nicole Reed stood in the entryway, her damp dress clinging to all her curves and the rain in her hair like diamonds. She was wet. She was gorgeous. Lust punched him in the stomach. And the hair rose on the back of his neck like the scruff on a dog scenting disaster.

  Nicole’s heart thumped. Mark wasn’t very happy to see her.

  He was…wary, she decided, studying his closed expression, the tension in his lean arms and broad shoulders. Wary and maybe a little pissed off.

  “Are you looking for trouble?” he demanded.

  She shivered, damp and apprehensive. “I’m looking for you.”

  “Same thing. Go away, Nicole.”

  She stood her ground, shaking in her uncomfortable shoes. “I came to see how you were doing.”

  He leaned against the bar and crossed his arms against his chest. “To check up on me.”

  She resisted the urge to apologize. “Yes.”

  “It’s after hours, boss. I don’t have to report to you.”

  Frustration made her bold. “Well, you’re still on the clock, bozo. So talk to me.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What do you want me to say?”

  She wanted his anger. She wanted his laughter. Anything would be preferable to this brick wall of silence. “Tell me why you ran out tonight.”

  He didn’t even hesitate, the liar. “I had to close.”

  “Something else,” she insisted. “You looked upset.”

  “If I did, it’s none of your business. In fact, it’s not business at all.”

  She drew a painful breath. What was she doing? What good could she hope to accomplish by forcing a conversation on a man whose idea of intimacy was “Take it off and I’ll watch”? Better for him, safer for her, if she admitted defeat and fled.

  But she didn’t. He drew her.

  It wasn’t because he could pose on a billboard and thousands of women would drive to their deaths craning to get a look at that face. That body. Okay, that was part of it. Once a sucker for drop-dead sexy, always a sucker for drop-dead sexy.

  But that wasn’t why she was standing here in her wet dress courting rejection. Something in her recognized and responded to something in him. It was there in the defensive set of his shoulders, the twist of his mouth, the confusion darkening his eyes.

  Earlier that evening, when he brushed by her in the ballroom, she had seen—she had felt—the same tremors that shook her the afternoon she’d come home to find Zack and his latest wannabe starlet making it on her grandmother’s quilt. The same shock. The same hurt and anger.

  She hadn’t had the wit or the tools, then, to stand up for herself.

  But she was learning.

  “I’m not talking about the business. I’m not here as your employer, Mark. I’m here as your friend.”

  “I don’t have friends. I don’t need friends.”

  “What do you need?” she said softly.

  His eyes were hot, his tone insulting. “You’re so smart, you figure it out.”

  “I think you do need a friend.”

  And she needed to have her head examined. Was she really offering to be pals with tall, dark, disturbed Mark DeLucca?

  He gave her a slow once-over. “And you’re volunteering.”

  His open skepticism scorched her pride—and touched her heart. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah.” He seemed surprised by that. Maybe almost as surprised as she was. “I guess you are. So tell me, friend, exactly what does this kind of relationship involve?”

  She took a cautious step forward. “Well…friends talk to each other.”

  He shrugged. “We’re talking.”

  She sighed. Men were from Mars, women were from Venus, and Mark existed in his own solitary orbit. “And they do things together.”

  He lifted one dark eyebrow. “What kinds of things? Hot tubbing? Naked back rubs?”

  She blushed. Smiled. “Not usually. When things go right, friends celebrate together. And when things go wrong, they comfort each other.”

  “Comfort.” His voice was without expression.

  She nodded, her heart beating wildly.

  “Okay.” He uncrossed his arms and straightened away from the bar. “Let’s go with that. This is the only comfort I want.”

  His hands closed on her shoulders, and his mouth crashed down on hers.

  This was no hello-getting-to-know-you kiss, no thanks-for-caring embra
ce.

  This was a we’re-all-grown-ups-here, full-body contact with tongues. His hands were hard and urgent. His mouth was hot and avid. And she welcomed it, welcomed him, glorying in the raw need she felt in his kiss.

  If this was all the solace he could understand, all the comfort he could accept, then she gave it gladly.

  He kissed her to shut her up.

  He kissed her to scare her off.

  He kissed her because she was breathing and available and he couldn’t bear not to kiss her any longer.

  So, it wasn’t smart. He’d done a lot of dumb things in his life, and most of them hadn’t felt this good.

  And Nicole felt really, really good, soft and smooth and firm against him. She smelled like very expensive sin and kissed like an angel. A very hot angel. Her curves mashed nicely against his planes. Her recesses fit his angles. Her damp silk warmed and wrinkled under his hands.

  He reached for her breast, figuring what the hell, any second now she was going to haul off and slap him, so it wasn’t like there was going to be any permanent harm done. Except instead of clobbering him, she made this accepting noise deep in her throat—very sexy—and pushed her nipple more firmly against his palm.

  A definite turn-on. A guy would have to be dead or a saint not to respond to that invitation. Mark was no saint, and he felt more alive at this moment than he had since he’d hunkered down under fire on an airstrip in Kabul.

  He kissed her, tasted her, licked her, devoured her.

  And she met him, matched him, her tongue dueling with his, her hands clutching his shoulders and grabbing his hair. Good. He wanted her grasping. He needed her greedy. Never mind if all she was after was hot kicks or a quick fix. Never mind if she was slumming, screwing the help to get back at her awful mother. Because as long as she was using him, he could use her, too.

  Only it didn’t—God help him—it didn’t feel like she was using him.

  When he broke their kiss to reverse their positions, to shove her back against the bar and grind into her, he saw that her eyes were open. She looked honest and trusting and maybe a little scared.

  She wasn’t pretending to be anything else.

  She wasn’t pretending to be with anyone else.

  And her hand, when she raised it between them to stroke his cheek, trembled slightly.

  Hell.

  He leveraged his weight off her. “We—” He had to clear his throat. “You better go now.”

  She blinked once, slowly. “Why?”

  He fumbled for words. For reasons. Because I like you? Because you’re a nice girl? Because you deserve better than to get nailed against a bar by a guy with a grudge looking to let off some steam?

  “Because friends don’t let friends do this drunk.”

  “I thought that was driving.”

  “Any dangerous activity,” he said firmly.

  She smiled, but her eyes were serious. Her mouth was soft and red-lipped and wet from kissing. God, he wanted to kiss her again.

  “Then…we’re friends?” she said.

  Friends. A week ago he would have said he didn’t even like her. Not to mention the major reminder pushing at his fly that insisted he had feelings for her that didn’t exactly fall into the “friendly” category.

  She waited for his answer, her smile slowly fading.

  Ah, jeez. She was killing him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Friends. Why not?”

  She relaxed just a little bit. “We could probably come up with a list. If we tried.”

  Hell, he didn’t even have to try. He could already think of a million reasons why any kind of relationship between them would never work. But he said, “Let’s not go there. It’s been a long night.”

  “Yes.” She pushed her slippery blond hair behind her ear and sneaked a look at him sideways. “I’m not really drunk,” she offered.

  He couldn’t afford to think of that. Couldn’t think about what else she might be offering. Drunk or sober, he’d be taking advantage.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

  She touched his arm with her warm, light fingers. “Are you still upset?”

  “No,” he said, surprised to discover it was true. Turned on, yes. Frustrated, absolutely. But he was no longer in the grip of the blind, black anger that had seized him when Wainscott offered to buy him off. Thanks to Nicole. “No, I’m okay.”

  At least, he was okay until the following afternoon, when he came on shift to discover that in her zeal to transform the bar into an upper-class watering hole, Nicole had taken down the deer trophy that hung—that had always hung—above the pool table.

  Mark looked from the empty space on the wall to the bar, where Joe, Louis and Deanna were waiting to see how he would take this latest change. Hoping for a show.

  Well, he wouldn’t give it to them. He was a master, after all, at disappointing people.

  He set his jaw. And maybe it was no big deal. Probably Nicole didn’t realize the significance of what she had done.

  A faint, unfamiliar hope nudged him. She had said they were friends. Friends talked to each other, she said. So he would talk to her, would point out to her, in a perfectly friendly way, that she was out of line and out to lunch on this one, and everything would go back to the way it was.

  Yeah, right.

  He relieved Joe at the bar, sent Louis back to the kitchens and asked Deanna to bus table nine.

  And when Nicole buzzed by with a fresh supply of fancy little cocktail napkins, he cleared his throat. “I’d like to talk to you a minute.”

  She turned, and her face brightened and warmed at the sight of him, so that for a moment it was like staring at the sun sparkling on lake waters.

  “I’m kind of busy.”

  He squinted to clear the brightness from his vision. “What are you doing?”

  She raised her eyebrows at his gruff tone. “Well, I’m dropping off these napkins here, and then I’m going to change the specials board.”

  No big deal, he told himself. But irritation flicked him. “You can’t change things around here every time you feel like it.”

  She frowned. “It has nothing to do with how I feel. We’re out of artichoke hearts, and the sign—”

  “I’m not talking about the sign.”

  “Then what are you—oh.” Blue eyes widened in understanding. “You’re talking about the deer head. You’re upset.”

  He inhaled. “I am talking about the trophy, and I am not upset.”

  “Good. Because I took it down.”

  “Then you can put it back up again.”

  “I don’t want to. I don’t like dead animals hanging up in my dining room.”

  “This is not your dining room. This is a bar.” He saw Deanna glance their way and lowered his voice. “A bar that caters to hunters and fishermen.”

  Nicole looked taken aback for a moment. But she said, stubbornly, “Then we’ll put up something else. An old wicker tackle box or—”

  “We don’t need something else. That stag was up there for twenty years.”

  He remembered—God, how old had he been? Four? Five?—sitting scrunched in the corner by the pool table, listening to his mother laugh at the bar. Waiting for his sister to find them and bring him home. And the deer watching out calmly over the noisy room, with its sharp horns and wise glass eyes.

  “And it looked it,” Nicole was saying. “It was filthy.”

  Yeah, it was. So what?

  “It belonged,” he insisted. “You make too many changes, you’re going to kill the character of this place. Turn it into some chi-chi yuppie meat market and lose the regulars who keep us in business.”

  He watched her struggle to hold on to her temper. “I don’t think taking down one dusty dead deer is going to cost us a lot of customers.”

  “You don’t know that. You can’t say.”

  “Maybe I don’t know, but I can say. I am the owner.”

  There it was. She was the owner. She was the boss. He was…nothing. />
  Frustrated, he turned from her to wipe down the bar. “Fine. Do what you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  She followed him. “Mark, please. Don’t be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  She bit her lip. But she wouldn’t let it go. “It’s possible you’re being hostile because you perceive change as a threat.”

  “Where do you get this crap? Out of some book?”

  He watched the blood sweep up her face, but it brought him little satisfaction.

  “Try this one,” he said. “It’s possible I’m hostile because this change is a mistake.”

  She raised her chin in challenge. “Name one change you wouldn’t consider a mistake.”

  He had to say something. He wasn’t feeling threatened, damn it.

  “New TV.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You want to make a change around here, make it one the patrons can get behind. The TV over the bar is twelve years old. We could use a new one.”

  “That’s not change,” she said dismissively. “That’s…maintenance.”

  Sometimes maintaining was good. Sometimes holding the line was the best a man could ask of himself.

  “What it is is a good idea,” Mark said. “Which, if you weren’t trying to turn this place into something it was never meant to be, you would see.”

  Nicole stared at him with those big blue eyes. She saw things, all right. She looked right inside him and saw…more than he wanted her to see. More than was there.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, like she already hated the idea. Well, he figured she would.

  “You do that,” he said.

  “But the deer has to go.”

  He didn’t say another word about it, then or for the rest of the evening.

  “I think maybe he’s over it,” Nicole said hopefully to her roommate on Monday morning.

  Kathy stopped outlining her lips long enough to ask, “What’s to get over? You’re redecorating the bar. It’s not his problem.”

  Nicole, inexplicably, was moved to Mark’s defense. “It is a problem if I alienate my regulars. Mark thinks—”

  “You don’t pay him to think.” Kathy dropped her lip liner in her purse. “You pay him to mix drinks, break up fights and count your money.”