“Pearl.”
“Miss Pearl. Let me know if you need anything,” I forced myself to offer, knowing it was the right thing to do. “I work a lot, but I’m usually home Sundays. My phone number is on the container,” I said, holding the Rubbermaid right up against her hands, which were clasped in front of her.
She took the container from me, her expression still a little off.
“Well, it was nice meeting you,” I said, taking a step back.
Were her eyes still narrowed or was I just imagining it? “Nice meeting you, Miss Cruz. I hope these Mexican cookies are good,” she finally replied in a tone that said I shouldn’t hold my breath.
I blinked at the “Miss Cruz.”
With a sigh punching at my throat to get out, I jogged down the steps and headed toward the next house. Unsurprisingly, no one answered. It was the middle of the day on Tuesday. Most people would be at work. I didn’t need to look at the bag to know there was one more container of polvorones to deliver. One more set of cookies for the home where I’d helped break up a fight and seen a man in his undies. I’d be damned if I went back home with them, or worse, tried to hide them because I didn’t want to have to listen to my mom rail me for not doing what she requested.
I blew out another breath as I climbed down the steps of the second to last house, distractedly noticing that the red car that had pulled over while I’d been talking to my next-door neighbors was still there. Huh. In the day since the beat down, I hadn’t seen any cars in the driveway. But a red sedan didn’t exactly seem like the kind of car either man that had been in the house would drive.
For a moment, I hesitated. Then all I had to do was think of my mom waiting for me in the house, and I knew I didn’t have a choice unless I wanted to hear about it all night, or worse, have her threaten to go meet the neighbors herself because I hadn’t. Was I ever not going to be scared of her?
Down and around the sidewalk leading up to the house I had been in once, I jiggled the cookies in my hand. I eyed the Chevy for a second as I walked by it and headed up the neat walkway toward the front door. It was a better-looking cousin to my place… only this one was hiding the horrors within.
At the door, I knocked but there wasn’t a single noise from inside. I rang the doorbell, and when still nothing stirred, I set the container of cookies on the deck on top of the doormat, ripped my business card off the lid, leaving only the Post-it, praising Jesus that I’d gotten out of talking to this neighbor—or his friend or roommate or whoever that man had been—at least for a little while longer. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed. I wasn’t. I hadn’t done anything other than save the man’s ass, but I didn’t want to seem like some stalker showing up to their house just two days afterward.
“Hey!” a feminine voice called out.
Turning around, I frowned at the black-haired woman standing on the side of the sedan furthest away from me.
“Yeah?” I called out, squinting against the sun.
“You know if Dallas lives here?” the woman asked.
“Dallas?” I made a face. What the hell was she talking about? We were in Austin.
“Dal-las,” the woman said slowly like I was an idiot or something.
I was still making a face at her, thinking she was the idiot. “You mean Austin?”
“No, Dallas. D-a-l-l—”
“I know how to spell Dallas,” I told her slowly. “Is that supposed to be a person?” Either that or she really was an idiot.
Pinching her lips that matched the color of her car together, she nodded.
Oh. “I don’t know anyone named Dallas,” I answered back in a tone nearly as snappy as hers as I walked down the steps. What kind of a name or nickname was Dallas anyway?
“About this height, green eyes, brown hair….” She trailed off when I didn’t say anything. That sounded suspiciously like a description of half the men in the world, including both of the men I’d seen at the house. The one who had gotten beaten up had dark blond hair but some people might think it was brown.
More than anything though, how was I supposed to know who she was talking about even if it was one of them? I didn’t know their names. Even if it was the beat-up guy, I didn’t want to get sucked in to some stranger’s life more than I already had. That guy just seemed like a bunch of drama I didn’t need or want in my life. The other one… well, I didn’t want or need that in my life either, even if he did have an incredible body. “Don’t you live around here?” she asked, still using that snarky voice that called to my inner attitude like a siren.
I bit the inside of my cheek as I walked down the path, telling myself I couldn’t pick a fight less than two weeks after moving in. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was going to live here for a long time, I hoped. I couldn’t be starting some kind of beef so soon. But my voice backstabbed me, coming out exactly how I was feeling. “Yeah, I do, but I haven’t lived here long, sorry.”
I think the woman might have stared at me for a moment from the silence between us, but I really couldn’t tell. I heard her sigh. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been calling this asshole all day, and he won’t answer. I heard he was living here.”
I shrugged, my temper starting to ease at her apology. Technically, even if my neighbor was named Dallas, or Wichita or San Francisco, I didn’t know that and therefore didn’t know a Dallas, so I wasn’t lying. Plus, I could barely keep track of my own schedule, much less someone else’s. I tried to think of Beat-up Dumbass’s face, but could only get a clear image of all that horrible bruising while he’d been lying on the recliner. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone.”
With a long and aggravated sigh, the woman dipped her head just as I got within a foot of her car, close enough to really see her face. She might have been older than me, but she was really pretty. Her face was oval, her makeup perfectly done, and she was wearing skintight clothing on a curvy body, even I could appreciate. Once upon a time, I’d put on makeup and curled my hair just to go to the grocery store. Now, unless I had to work or was going someplace where pictures were going to be taken, it wasn’t happening.
“All right, thanks, honey,” the strange woman finally said. With that, she ducked back into her car.
Honey? She couldn’t be that much older than me.
For one brief second, I wondered if the man who had gotten beat up was this Dallas person, then pictured the other man—the bigger one—clearly in my head, and then I shoved the curiosity aside. I had other things to worry about than the neighbor and his might-be friend. Back inside my house, I found my mom in the living room alongside my dad, hanging up picture frames.
Sure enough, the second I closed the door behind me, my mom’s eyes swept over the empty bags I held in my hands. “You gave them all away?”
I gave the plastic in my hands a squeeze so they crinkled. “Yes.”
My mom bobbled her head, mocking me. “Que te dije? No me hagas esa cara.”
I let my smirk fall off my face a little slower than she would have liked.
We worked alongside each other in peace for the next few hours, hanging frames and some of my best friend’s artwork I’d collected over the years. Neither of my parents said anything when we pulled out the framed photographs of Drigo and Mandy. I didn’t want the boys to forget their parents. I didn’t want to stuff their memories into a box so that I wouldn’t feel that pull of sadness every time I remembered what we had all lost. What I did notice was my dad looking at a picture of the entire family at my high school graduation with this intense expression on his face, but he didn’t say a word about it.
Neither one of my parents ever wanted to talk about my brother.
Every once in a while, when I was at the really low point where every cell in my body missed Rodrigo and got mad that I would never see my brother again, I’d wish that I could bring him up, that I could talk to them about it. But if there was one thing I’d learned over the course of the last few years, it was that everyone dealt with grief differently. Hell, we a
ll dealt with life differently.
My mom eventually made dinner with the pitiful ingredients I had in the fridge and pantry, we ate, and they took off. They lived almost an hour away in San Antonio, in the same subdivision as one of my aunts and uncles. After twenty-something years in El Paso, they had sold my childhood home and moved to be closer to my dad’s family. I had been living in Fort Worth at that time; for eight years that had been my home. Their moving and my ex were the reasons why I’d left Fort Worth and moved to San Antonio before I got the boys. It had been my decision to move to Austin with Josh and Louie to have another fresh start.
Once I was alone, I finally finished hanging all my clothes from the boxes where I’d packed them.
In my room, I had barely taken my jeans off when the doorbell rang. “One second!” I yelled, tugging my stretchy shorts up my legs before waddling over to the door, inspecting the living room to see what my parents might have left. It was probably my dad’s cell; he was always leaving that thing lying around. “Papá,” I started to say as I undid the lock and opened the door, my attention still on the living room behind me.
“Not your daddy,” a low, unfamiliar masculine voice replied.
What?
It definitely wasn’t my daddy on the other side of the front door with his hands buried deep in the pockets of stained denim jeans under the porch light.
It was the man. The man I’d seen inside of my neighbor’s house; the man with the big biceps and short, dark brown hair. The guy who’d been in his boxers.
This was a surprise. Up close, without the weight of exhaustion from being woken up in the middle of the night and nerves from dealing with a moody asshole who didn’t want my help after I’d freely given it, I finally got to take in that the man was in his mid-thirties, maybe close to forty. I blinked once and gave him an awkward smile. “You’re right. My dad’s half a foot shorter than you are.” He probably weighed sixty pounds less too.
I’d figured that day in the house he had to be taller than Beat-up Dumbass, but now I got to confirm that. He was easily six foot two. I’d had a boyfriend once who had been about that height. Fucking jackass. But this man in front of me was built a lot more muscular. A lot. There was no doubt about it. If I could get up close and personal with the seams of his black T-shirt, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the stitching had been holding on for dear life. He was all super straight spine, broad chest, and veiny biceps and forearms. And that plain face with its high, sloping cheekbones, proud, straight nose, and square jaw was not hot or handsome, but there was something about the structure of his face that I didn’t mind looking at.
Nope. I sure didn’t mind looking. I could still see that big tattoo across the upper half of his chest if I closed my eyes.
The corner of the man’s mouth—this stranger’s mouth—went flat instantly.
Had he figured out I was checking him out? Movement around his waist had me eyeing the familiar-looking plastic container he was holding in one hand.
Shit. If he’d caught me eyeballing him, it was done; I might as well not be shy about it. Rubbing at my hip, I looked him directly in the eyes and smiled wider. Their color reminded me so much of a forest; somehow brown and gold and green at the same time. Hazel. After Louie’s, it was one of the prettiest shades of color I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t help but stare at another body part of his, even as I wondered what the hell he was doing here. “Can I help you with something?” I asked, not breaking our eye contact.
“I came by to say thanks,” he answered in that voice that was still as deep and raspy as it had been in the middle of the night, somehow perfectly fitting for that angular, henchman-like face of his. A crease formed between his thick, dark eyebrows as his gaze strayed from my eyes to my chest and back, for a moment so quick, I might have imagined it.
One of those big hands I’d seen clenched in aggravation days ago went up to tug at the collar of the plain, black T-shirt he had on. He flicked those greenish brown eyes back in my direction, tugging again at his clothes, showing off a hint of the tattoo at the base of his neck. “I appreciate what you did.”
I had to tell myself twice to keep my gaze on his face. “You don’t have to thank me for your friend—”
“My brother,” the man cut me off.
His brother? The idiot who got beat up was his brother? I guess they were both big…. Huh. His brother. That explained the wanting to “fucking kill” him part perfectly, I guessed. I raised a shoulder. “If he wants to say ‘thank you,’ he can do it himself, but he doesn’t have to. Thank you anyway.” I kept smiling at him, hoping it wasn’t as forced as it had originally been.
“That’ll never happen.” The man’s hazel eyes slid over my face, and I was suddenly extremely aware I hadn’t put on makeup that day and had two nice scabs on my forehead from picking at my face the last time I’d gone to the bathroom to pee. “I appreciate it though.”
His nostrils slightly flared when I didn’t glance away from his eye contact; he stood up taller, his lips pursing. Maybe the staring was too much.
Too bad for him, because checking out his biceps to guess how much he curled would have been even more inappropriate. The man shrugged too roughly to be casual. “He doesn’t need to be bringing his shit over here, is all. I’m sorry about that.”
I blinked. “It would be nice for that not to happen again.”
“You live here with your boys?” the man suddenly asked, those pretty irises still locked on mine. No one ever really stared at me right in the eye for this long before. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Plus, there was something more important for me to deal with: how the hell was I going to answer his question? Should I lie? His question seemed casual, but there was something a little off about it. I didn’t know how he knew about Josh and Lou, but obviously he’d seen us at some point. That was nothing to freak out about. He could have seen us from a distance.
Couldn’t he?
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He narrowed his right back.
My mom had always said you could tell a lot about a person by their eyes. A mouth could be formed into a million different shapes, but eyes were the windows to a person’s soul and shit. I could remember in the month after my last ex and I had split, how I had sat there and wondered where the hell I’d gone wrong. The sad reality was, when I thought about the upper half of his face… I accepted that I had been blind at that point in my life. Blind and dumb.
Stupid, really. God. I’d been so fucking stupid back then. I couldn’t be that stupid ever again. Maybe he didn’t have black holes as a reflection of his soul in his eyes, but I moved the door in closer behind me just an inch, more of a reflex than anything. I’d misjudged others before. I could never forget that, especially when I had other people I needed to watch out for.
I said “yes” before I could think twice. They were my boys. Maybe they hadn’t come straight from my body, but they were as mine as they could get. Plus, what did it matter if he thought I was a single mom? I was a single aunt. A single guardian. That was basically the same thing.
His answering nod was slow, a definite dip of his chin that had me glancing at his pink mouth. “This is usually a quiet neighborhood. You don’t gotta worry about your kids. What happened won’t be happening again.” That hard face, with crow’s feet at his eyes and the brackets at his mouth, told anyone who looked at this man that he wasn’t unused to smiling. But I couldn’t picture it. He hadn’t looked happy the first time I’d seen him and he didn’t look particularly happy to be here in front of me right then either.
Was he nice or not? Here he was taking responsibility for someone else’s actions. He couldn’t be that bad.
Could he?
I just kind of shrugged. “Well, thank you for… caring.” Caring? Really, Diana?
It was impossible to miss one of his large hands forming a fist all over before going loose. “Well, just wanted to thank you,” he started, sounding uncomfortable all over again. He gave
the container a shake, holding it slightly away from his body. “Here’s this before it got lost in my things.”
“You’re welcome.” Jesus Christ. He’d eaten all the polvorones already? I’d just dropped them off. I took the container from him, still wondering how he’d downed that much sugar before something about his words tickled my thoughts.
His mess?
“He lives with you?”
The man’s eyebrows twitched. “Yeah. I’m your neighbor. He’s only staying with me.”
This was my neighbor.
All this was my neighbor?
What the hell?
This tall, muscular, tanned-skin man with tattoos to his elbows and a body that made me want to pray he did the lawn with his shirt off was my neighbor. Not the other guy.
I wasn’t sure why I was so relieved, but I was. Maybe he wasn’t exactly giving me a hug, but he wasn’t being a rude prick either like his brother. And he’d brought my mom’s plastic container back. Even I didn’t do that. People who knew me didn’t let me borrow stuff because they never got it back.
There was no way this guy could be so bad if he was here apologizing for something he hadn’t done. Could he?
I looked into his hazel eyes again and decided probably not.
Blowing out a breath of air, my cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk before I gave him the second awkward smile of the day. “I thought—never mind. In that case, I’m your neighbor Diana. Nice to meet you.”
He blinked and the hesitation, or caution or whatever it was floating around in his brain, flashed across his eyes briefly before his hand extended toward me, and I saw it.
He had a wedding ring on.
“Dallas,” the man introduced himself.
He watched me with that straight face of his, a crease back between his eyebrows, his grip firm. Dallas. Dallas.
Oh shit. This was the man the lady earlier had been asking about. He was a real person, so she wasn’t an idiot.
He was a married real person, and some lady who didn’t know where he lived was asking about him. Hmm. I wondered what she wanted for one second before telling myself it wasn’t any of my business.
Wait for It Page 4