Closing her eyes, she felt his fingers brushing her face. “You okay, Froot Loop?”
She pressed a palm against her stomach. Too many different emotions in too short a time. “I feel a little queasy,” she admitted.
His hand dropped. A different kind of tension filled the air.
Her eyes popped open. She turned her head, looking at him in the light of the dashboard. “Gabe?”
“Right beside you.”
For now. But from the tight expression he was wearing, she was reminded once again that she couldn’t count on that forever.
Eight
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
—FRANCIS BACON
It was after five P.M. when Marlys locked the door to her boutique, then turned into the wall of a man’s chest. Leaping back, her shoulder blades rattled the door’s glass and her heart rattled, too. “Dean,” she said. “You scared me.”
The streetlights glinted off his black hair. His teeth glowed white in the gathering dusk. “I know.”
The smile he wore made her regret her choice of words. “I’m not afraid of anyone or anything,” she muttered with a scowl as she pushed past him. His pectorals were solid slabs of muscle and if she took a quick breath of his clean scent he wasn’t the wiser.
“I brought you a gift,” he said from behind her back.
Her footsteps halted. She didn’t want to turn to face him, yet still she did. “I don’t want presents—” she started, then her gaze fell on what he had in his hand.
Flowers.
Marlys had been given flowers before, of course. Exotic orchids. Spiky birds of paradise. Once, a man who wanted her in his bed sent her two dozen, long-stemmed, bloodred roses. She’d pricked herself on a thorn when she’d thrown them in the trash.
Dean was bearing roses as well, maybe again two dozen of them, but each was a delicate baby rose, the petals a fragile, kittenish pink. They were encircled in a matching wrap of tulle and bound by organza ribbons of gold and silver.
It was all Marlys was not—girlish and sugary and everything nice.
She despised the flowers because he thought they would appeal to her. So she snatched them out of his hand, determined to dump them in the nearest garbage can like she’d done with that homicide-red bouquet.
What was in his other hand stopped her. A rawhide bone the size of a tyrannosaurus femur.
He noticed her staring at it. “Not for you. You just get the roses.”
Her fingers tightened on the stems. No thorns. “Why?”
“As a thank-you for the kiss. I haven’t had one quite like that in . . . well, I don’t remember when.”
“And the bone’s for Blackie? Gratitude for how he’s slobbered over you?”
He grinned. “Nope. It’s a bribe. Something to keep him occupied tonight while I visit with his beautiful owner.”
She narrowed her eyes. They’d shared that kiss in her boutique, but a burst of business that day had managed to get rid of him. She needed a way to make that happen again. “Maybe I have plans.”
“Date with Phil?”
“No!” The vehement note in her voice embarrassed her, so she cleared her throat to cover the moment. With her free hand she found herself rubbing her arm and then her thigh, as if washing them clean. A memory flashed in her mind: She was facing Dean just like this, wearing her bath-robe and nothing else, while Phil jogged down the stairs from her bedroom, whistling.
“So what are they then?”
She’d lost the thread of the conversation. “What are what?”
“Your plans. Because I’m trying to nudge my memory by revisiting every place in Malibu I went to before.”
“How do you know you were ever at my house?”
With his free hand he tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. Her skin burned, heat zigzagging down her neck like a lightning bolt. “We kiss like I’ve been at your house before.”
“You’ve never been in my bed,” she retorted. But then a guilty flush made a liar out of her. “Well, once you stayed the night, but nothing happened.”
His eyebrows rose. “Nothing?”
She wouldn’t confess that the note he’d left her the next morning after sleeping beside her that night—just a brief couple of lines saying he’d be back in a few days—was folded origami-style into a size that fit in the second tray of her jewelry box. “Nothing.”
He shrugged. “I’m not limited to a mattress and sheets, Marlys. So tell me, where did we, uh . . . kiss? In a bathtub? Under a tree? On the stairs?”
The stairs. The recollection swamped her again. The surprise in Dean’s eyes when she’d answered the door with mussed makeup and bed head. Just a few hours before she’d agreed to get intimate with him for the first time. They were supposed to go to dinner and then they both knew that the sexual chemistry that had been bubbling between them would finally have its chance to explode.
Instead, he’d come over to the house to find out that he’d just missed dessert—and that she’d shared it with some other man.
Her stomach roiled remembering how the expectant good humor in Dean’s eyes had died as Phil’s jaunty whistle drifted down the stairs. The nonexpression on his face had made it clear he’d added two and two together. She’d counted on him being good at math.
“Hey,” he said now. “What’s wrong? I’m teasing, you know. If you really have plans, or if you don’t want me to come over, then—”
“No!” she said again, again vehemently. “I do want you to come over.” Because clearly he wasn’t going to give up on her so easily. If a visit to her place could assuage his curiosity about her . . . then fine. Perhaps after that he’d go away for good.
Twenty minutes later she pulled into her driveway in Pacific Palisades, Dean behind her on his motorcycle. Be strong, she told herself, even as the thrum of the engine seemed to echo in her very foundation. But she wouldn’t be shaken from her goal: Do what was necessary to satisfy his interest in her. No secrets need be divulged, she assured herself. Just enough detail to send him on his way.
It should work out. No male had ever stuck by her before.
“Except Blackie,” she said aloud, as she opened the front door, the bouquet of roses in the crook of her arm. Her dog bounded out, hopping knee-high in greeting. But then he looked past her, and with an ecstatic bark, left her in the dust.
Marlys sighed, and walked into the house without a backward glance. “Abandoned again.” But she liked her solitary lifestyle, she told herself. She’d been virtually on her own since she was twelve.
Apparently Blackie was bought off with the faux dinosaur bone because Dean was alone when he found her in the kitchen. She poured beer into a glass for him, then debated on what could quiet her jangling nerves.
When she turned to him with the frosted glass, he was looking at the scattering of family souvenirs spread on the kitchen table. She hadn’t put them all away after displaying them at a launch party for her father’s book months ago. “I remember,” Dean said.
She started. “What?”
“I remember who this is,” he said, pointing to the framed photo of her father. “General Wayne Weston. I’ve read about him and I recall that Noah worked for him until he died.”
“And Noah just married Juliet, the general’s widow.”
“And Marlys Weston, the general was your father,” Dean added.
There was no reason to deny that fact. Her hand pressed the silver tear she wore on a chain under her thin sweater. “Daddy dearest,” she confirmed, while her gaze focused on her handsome father’s face. He’d died of cancer over a year ago now, and it had left her feeling . . . feeling . . . but that was one of her secrets. That she didn’t like feeling anything and that she did her best to smother inconvenient emotions when necessary.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dean said, and he looked at her, his eyes like mirrors.
She refused to peer at her reflection. “Thank you,” she said, “though we
weren’t close. My parents divorced when I was twelve. That military life you told me you rebelled against until you were eighteen or so—” He’d confessed last fall that he’d grown up with an army father as well. “I swam in it like a fish until my mother turned us civilian.”
“And unhappy,” Dean said, as if he read her thoughts.
She shrugged. “Waah, waah, waah. Now I’m done whining about my past.”
Dean tucked that hair behind her ear again. More lightning. More heat. She swayed toward him and quickly considered the consequences of having sex with him. Right now. Tonight. Surely he wouldn’t turn her down and she could hate him so much easier if he took her to bed knowing nothing more than the few facts she’d doled out. The act would mean less than nothing, and she’d get this yearning for him out of her system.
Yeah, right. But still, if it made him move on, it would be worth the risk.
“So how did it end with us before?” he asked. “Did we, what, just fade away?”
She couldn’t stifle her smirk. “I get that. It’s from that General MacArthur quote: ‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ ”
He smiled.
She melted. Marlys Marie Weston never melted, which was why he was absolutely wrong for her. Absolutely dangerous.
“How did it end?” he asked again.
Her throat felt tight and she turned away from him. The bouquet was on the counter and she busied herself finding a vase and filling it with water. “You were going to Afghanistan. We decided that, well, you know.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t.” The easy humor was gone from his voice. He sounded serious. “I don’t understand what happened between us.”
“With the future so uncertain . . . It seemed best . . .” He’d told her that before meeting her he’d had a reputation for being impetuous. Reckless and rash. And then he’d told her he was going to carry her picture in his head as he went into battle.
It had been like a punch in the chest. She couldn’t imagine being that woman, the one in his head, waiting for him to return from war. As a child she’d waited for her father to rescue her from her bitter mother and her lonely civilian childhood. That had never happened, and she knew waiting for a lover who might never return would be so much worse. But because she couldn’t trust herself to break it off with him, she’d arranged the Phil episode so Dean would do the job.
“That uncertain future,” he prompted now. “It seemed best . . .”
She cleared her throat. “You were leaving.”
“I’m back now.”
What she’d done with Phil would make anything between them impossible, however. But that was one of the secrets she didn’t need to share. She found her kitchen shears and cut the ends off the roses’ stems, wishing she could cut out as easily that ugly piece of her past. Blinking against the sudden sting in her eyes, she settled the flowers into the water.
Dean’s heat was at her back and she wanted nothing more than to take the half-step that would press him to her, that would allow her to lean against his strength. He reached around her to touch one of the delicate rosebuds. “I saw these in the flower shop and they said, ‘Take me to Marlys.’ They’re like you.”
“Girlish and sugary and everything nice,” she scoffed, trying for her old sarcasm.
“Small and fragrant and probably a pain in the ass to keep happy.”
She laughed, when she should have been crying, because maybe he did know her.
“I’m still scaring you,” he said.
She was too tired to deny it.
“Pull out a few pints of Ben & Jerry’s,” he suggested. “Then gather some girlfriends and spend a whole night talking about me. Bet they say we should give this another try.”
“I don’t need girlfriends,” she was quick to say. “I don’t need anyone.”
His big hand swiped the hair off the nape of her neck. He laid a gentle kiss on that vulnerable skin. “When you realize you do,” he said, and he was already halfway across the kitchen and heading for the exit, “look me up.”
And the scariest thing anyone could find out about Marlys Marie Weston was just how tempting that offer sounded.
Gabe’s worst days started like this: He’d wake in the morning with shards of dark dreams rattling inside his skull. Lynn’s smile. The arc of her bouquet on their wedding day. That same arc mirrored in the curve of her belly when she was eight months’ pregnant and they were calling the baby WhatsIt because they couldn’t agree on a name. The sound of Maddie’s first cry. The sound of her last one, the one that he could only imagine. “Daddy! Daddy! Save me!”
On his worst days, he drank oily coffee with his daughter’s pleas in his head. He thought about the photograph in his wallet and his wife’s smiling eyes turning to a glare of accusation.
That’s when he knew he couldn’t save anyone. That’s when he knew that he could save himself least of all, and he’d pick up a beer or a bottle of something stronger and start that slide into the abyss always yawning at his feet. “Come to me.” The tempting words drifted from that inky void, in a whisper made hoarse by the smoke of hell. “Come to me and you’ll forget the pain.”
For three years, whether it had been a month since the last episode or merely a few days, he’d always fallen for the seductive promise. This morning, it was whispering to Gabe again as he stared at the obsidian surface of his first cup of coffee and saw instead the ruined car his wife and daughter had been riding in when a drunk driver hit them at four in the afternoon on the way home from Maddie’s dance class.
The irony that he drank to forget the actions of a drunk was not lost on him . . . it just didn’t stop him from hearing that voice, from sensing that hole at his feet, from succumbing to the longing to slide into the welcome amnesia of too much alcohol.
Setting the coffee aside, he walked from the house to his second, smaller garage. There it was, the 1963 Thunderbird, the same make and model that Lynn had been driving on the day she and Maddie had died. He’d bought it a few months back, with some notion that he could restore it and somehow restore—what? Not his past, he’d known that was lost to him forever.
His sanity. He’d thought, in his tequila-influenced state, that it might save him from crazy.
But today, when he looked at the gleaming new paint job and then noted the garden hose hanging from the exhaust pipe, he saw crazy.
Yet he didn’t immediately make tracks for the nearest bottle of booze and that first, easy step into oblivion. There was something else stirring in his head, another bad dream, but this one kept his feet on the floor and kept him moving through his ordinary-day schedule. By mid-morning, he was at his business across the parking lot from Malibu & Ewe.
He made the motions. Checked in with the manager, bullshitted with the cook, pretending he gave a crap that the order of cabbage they used in making their most popular menu item—Baja tacos—was short. Earlier that morning, he’d also played the I-give-a-rat’s-ass game with the assistant who helped him manage the other various properties he owned about Malibu.
The residences rented for exorbitant prices, and he found an odd pleasure in going on maintenance calls himself—the owner of the multimillion-dollar property showing up to unplug a toilet. Today, there was no shit to deal with. Too bad, because he was in just that kind of mood.
He didn’t take a morning latté to Cassandra. He was self-aware enough to know that witnessing her accident had stirred up all the black ash inside his chest. He’d nearly choked on it as he’d seen the boulder tumble, heard the crash, felt her bones rattling in her skin as he pulled her from the damaged car. The recollection hammered at him.
And honed his need to see her—even as he knew he shouldn’t.
Until three P.M. he managed to stay away. Then, arguing with himself the whole while, he strolled across the asphalt to Malibu & Ewe. He carried the coffee that she would just happen to drink if he just happened to set it on the countertop by the cash register.
Inside,
he found her sitting on one of the couches beside a customer. Her long hair rippled down her back and her attention was riveted on the piece of knitting in her hands. She didn’t notice he was in her shop.
“Oh, how sweet,” she said, her voice soft. She held up a tiny garment. Peachy-pink.
A baby’s sweater.
The blackness ever present at Gabe’s feet shot up, rising as dots in his vision. He would have admitted it to no one, but he had the distinct concern he was going to drop to his knees. Cassandra with an infant’s clothing in her hands. Fear couldn’t come close to describing how he felt at the sight. Petrified was better. Claustrophobia was in the equation.
This was the other nightmare he’d been living with since waking up in her bed. Cassandra pregnant. She’d been queasy after her accident with the boulder. He’d tried telling himself that was normal, not natal, but now, like then, a wave of heat washed over him, followed by a dousing of icy cold.
Cassandra. Pregnant. If it was true, he couldn’t allow himself the indulgence of alcoholic amnesia. If it was true, he’d have to resist with all he had because it wouldn’t be right to check out on her like that.
Why couldn’t that night after the Beach Shack be clear in his head? Why couldn’t he recall that they’d had great sex without the fear of the consequences? But he couldn’t remember and she’d never brought up the issue.
Her friend Carver claimed Cassandra was set on “Spill All.” If that was so, why couldn’t she have said something simple about that night? Something like, “Hey, we had a phenomenal time in the sack, and there’s no worry that I’m knocked up.”
But of course it had already been made clear that he hadn’t provided her with a phenomenal experience that night. Though that still didn’t solve the mystery of whether or not he was less than nine months from disaster.
He could ask . . . but no, he couldn’t. He was just that terrified of the truth.
Dirty Sexy Knitting Page 11