by Stacy Gail
Ooh. This game was getting fun.
“We’re lucky we were able to get a table without a reservation. This place is always filled to the gills.” With her bruised ribs protesting her every move, Sass slid carefully onto the white-washed wrought iron chair in the solarium room, one of the more popular dining areas that The Secret Garden restaurant had. The eatery was an almost sacred bastion of femininity that she, Scout, Tonya and Frankie had discovered when they took Mama Coco out for her birthday last year. The solarium was exactly as advertised—a circular solarium with white floors, white tables and chairs and white-washed filigree metalwork framing the two-story-high windows overlooking Lake Michigan. With the exception of the many thriving plants placed throughout the room, Sass thought it was like being inside a life-sized birdcage. She absolutely adored it.
She was also positive that by the end of their meal, Rude would be covered in hives at being immersed in such pure feminine surroundings.
She couldn’t wait to see it.
“I strongly recommend the Bellinis, though your mother and sister prefer the mimosas.” Humming to herself, she plucked up a menu, flipped it open and glanced at him over the top of it. Her smirking smile slipped when she found him watching her with a bemused, almost indulgent expression. “What?”
“You’re a fucking riot when you think you’re being mean,” he said randomly before also picking up a menu. “Have any recommendations for breakfast?”
He dared to laugh at her? Clearly it was time to lower the boom. “They make the most adorable eggs in a basket, where they cook the egg in a piece of brioche, with the center cut out in the shape of a heart. Isn’t that cute?”
“Cute.”
Ha. “Tonya always gets that, egg over medium, with a side of Greek yogurt and honey. Then there’s my personal favorite, the gluten-free, light cream cheese crepes with the mixed berry and honey reduction. Frankie likes her crepes to be savory, so she orders the chicken and spinach crepes with Hollandaise sauce. Scout’s all about the sun-dried tomato and feta cheese frittata and your mother can personally vouch for just about any quiche they make here, though she does seem to favor the asparagus, bacon and gruyere cheese crustless quiche.”
“The quiche sounds pretty good since it’s mainly protein, but Frankie’s favorite sounds perfect. And I don’t think I’ve ever had a Bellini, so I’m going for it. What kind of coffees do they have here? I’ve got a wicked addiction to genuine Italian-roast espresso, so I’m hoping they’ve got the on the menu.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
“Uh… yeah. They have great espresso here, though we never order it when we have your mother with us. She can’t do caffeine anymore, something that breaks her heart, so we try not to drink anything like coffee in front of her.”
“Yeah?” He looked up at her, and the surprising warmth of his gaze when it connected with hers brought everything inside her to a halt. “The way you look after my mom is pretty damn awesome, Sassy. Thinking about little details, like not drinking coffee in front of her so she won’t suffer… that just kicks so much ass.”
“We all do it.” She had to look away. She had to, while she still remembered they hated each other. “It’s no big deal.”
“It’s also cool that you know what everyone’s preference is right off the top of your head.” Without even looking at it, he closed his menu and set it aside. “You all keep yourselves woven into my mom’s life, just as you do with each other. You support each other the way a family should. I know my parents are grateful for that. I am too.”
She waved a vague hand at that, frustrated he kept being charming while refusing to break out in hives. With all the over-the-top femininity of The Secret Garden, there should have been mass amounts of hive-breakage by now. “We strays are all grateful to your parents. Are you sure you don’t want anything more substantial than crepes? Maybe go somewhere else?”
“You kidding? This place rocks.” He looked around so appreciatively she wanted to choke him with her lace-edged napkin. “Next time you bring Mom around, let me know, yeah? I’d love to join you.”
“Goddamn it,” she hissed, even as their server headed their way. “My bringing your super-bad Marine ass here is the equivalent of you bringing me out to a titty bar. You’re not supposed to fucking enjoy it.”
He burst out laughing, then kept at it until he had to wipe at the corners of his eyes. Sass watched, frozen in her seat like someone had put a spell on her. She’d never heard Rude laugh in all the years she’d known him, and she couldn’t help but stare at the spectacle. He’d always been a handsome bastard, with his thick black hair and lady-killer cognac eyes, but she had never seen the attractive laugh lines at the corners of those eyes, or the shallow dimples that bracketed his mouth.
Dimples. Why the hell did he had to have dimples? That was like finding out Godzilla had dimples. It wasn’t fair.
It took a while for him to calm down long enough for them to put in their orders, and she could still see laughter in his eyes as he looked back to her once their server left. Then he took his phone out, messed with it for a couple of seconds, and took a picture of her before she knew what he was going to do.
“What the hell.” To ensure he didn’t do it again, she put up a hand to block another shot like a poor man’s version of Naomi Campbell. “What are you doing?”
“Recording the poutiest face in Chicago for posterity. And also sharing it with everyone, because it’s too fucking hilarious to keep to myself.”
“Only now do I begin to see where I went wrong in letting you in this morning. Apparently I’m slow on the uptake.” When he didn’t immediately answer, grinning as he worked his phone, she wondered if he’d notice if she simply left the table and hailed a cab. “Please tell me you’re not actually sending that out.”
“Hell yes, I’m sending it out. And I’ll bet you the first round at a titty bar of your choosing that your phone’s about to blow up with all your sisters wanting to know if I’ve kidnapped you.”
“God help me.” Their drinks came, and she grabbed up her Bellini like it was a lifeline. No doubt she’d need something a lot stronger than peach schnapps and champagne to get through the meal, but it would have to do. “That’s a first round that’s never going to happen, since I never plan on going to a titty bar.”
“They’re a lot more fun than you think.”
“For a guy. You probably haven’t noticed, but I don’t have a penis.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed. You’re one of the hottest women who’s ever graced my world or any other, so if you had a penis I’d be pretty damn disappointed.”
In the time it took a heart to beat, a thousand possible answers crashed through her brain, almost all of them flirtatious and therefore not even remotely appropriate. They couldn’t be, because she would never—repeat, never—flirt with her former foster brother.
“I don’t grace your world,” she said flatly. “And you sure as hell don’t grace mine. Unless you count knowing each other’s names as gracing.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Thank you.”
“So we need to do something about that.”
Wait, what? “Do something?”
“Yeah. Let’s get to know more than each other’s names.”
Another heartbeat of time passed, but this time her brain refused to offer up any responses, flirtatious or otherwise. It just sat there, stunned and twitching. “Um…”
“It’s not that impossible to imagine, is it?” Smirking as though her deer-caught-in-the-headlights reaction amused him, he took his espresso by the saucer and held it in one huge mitt and lifted the small cup to his mouth with the other. “You’re close to everyone else in the family, right? Why not me?”
“Because you’re Rude.” Duh.
“You tagged me with that name a thousand lifetimes ago, Sassy.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You avoid family ge
t-togethers whenever you know I’m going to be there, but what you don’t know is that you’re avoiding a kid who’s been gone a long, long time. If you’d stop avoiding me, you’d see that.”
“The thing is, I’m cool with avoiding you. I like avoiding you. I’ll be happy to avoid you for the rest of my days. It’s not even that difficult.”
“She says as she sits right across a dinky table from me.”
Shit.
Point to him.
“And fair warning,” he went on when it became apparent she couldn’t rebut the reality of where her butt was parked. “It’s going to be a lot more difficult for you to avoid me from this point on.”
That didn’t sound good. “Why is that?”
“Because I’m not going to let you get away with it.” And, as he calmly sipped his espresso, the top of his foot slid against her ankle and oh, so gently up her calf.
She almost lap-dropped her Bellini.
“Are you high?” Frantically she scooted her legs back, but he was right. The table was dinky. “Does concentrated caffeine in a cup make you loco?”
“What’s so loco about a man being straight with a woman? I thought that you would appreciate that kind of thing, since you like to be upfront yourself.”
“I appreciate it when it comes from anyone but you. With you it’s obviously just a game where I don’t know the rules, so you know what? I’m not playing.” With a huff, she leaned forward to put her untouched drink down. In a move so fast she didn’t see it coming, he also moved to put his saucer and cup aside, then caught her hand before she could get to her feet.
Skin sizzled against bare skin. Every nerve beneath his touch jangled wildly out of control, shutting down her ability to move, to think, to breathe.
His touch was incredible
It burned.
It electrified.
It branded.
“Whether you decide to play or not, the game’s already begun.” His voice was soft, barely loud enough to reach her ears, yet for some reason it resonated inside her so deeply it replaced the overwhelmed reaction her nervous system had to his hand on hers. “You can’t avoid me unless you drop out of the Panuzzi world, and no one wants that, least of all me.”
“You used to,” she blurted, failing miserably at pulling herself together long enough to put a cap on that long-ago well of resentment.
“Yeah, because I was a sucky little asshole who didn’t want to share bathroom privileges with a couple of girls again.”
That stopped her dead in her tracks. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. “Bathroom privileges?”
“Yeah. Bathroom privileges.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Izzi and Frankie were finally out of the house, which meant I didn’t have to wait forever for the one bathroom we had upstairs. Then you and Scout moved in, and then Tonya after that. Ladies first, you know? Suddenly I was back to being last in line. It would’ve pissed anyone off.”
She blinked, momentarily sidetracked. “So… wait. You were a terror because you were worried we’d make you wait to pee?”
“I was a simple boy with simple needs.”
“Emphasis on simple.”
The fingers that held her hand tightened—not in punishment, but almost like it was his hand’s way of giving hers a hug. “Just because I was stupid back then doesn’t mean you get to be stupid now by avoiding me.”
“So you’re the only one who gets to be stupid? Okay, if you want to own that privilege, have at it. Own it like a boss.”
“I was a kid, and kids are stupid about a lot of things, like resenting parents who are good enough to open their home to helpless kids who’d never had a place of their own, a family of their own, or even a say in what home they got shipped off to next. You are an adult, so obviously standards are higher. You don’t get to be stupid about avoiding me, especially when avoiding me is impossible.”
“Don’t underestimate my level of motivation,” she muttered while his words flowed over her like a healing salve to a wound she didn’t know she had. It had always hurt when the biological children of her fosters had treated her like scum. Like them, she’d had no choice but to be there. It was ridiculous all these years later, but it soothed her to know he now understood that. “There’s only one time a year where I can’t avoid crossing paths with you, and that’s at Mama Coco and Papa Bolo’s anniversary party. But that bash is always so huge, there’s a very real chance I won’t even bump into you.”
His fingers gave hers another squeeze before letting her go. “For the first time, I’m in charge of putting that shindig together. I’ve just decided to set it up someplace more intimate. How about your apartment?”
“Wait.” Alarm zipped through her, but it had nothing to do with coming into close contact with him at some point in March. “Please tell me you’re joking, Rude. Are you joking?”
“About what, your apartment?”
“You do already have a venue booked for the party, right?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Why would you?” It was a strange thing, shrieking at someone while still trying to keep her voice down. “What the hell is wrong with you? That should’ve been done a month ago.”
“Sassy, calm down. It’s over four months away.”
“Exactly! All the good places will have been taken by now. Oh, you’ve never done this before, you don’t know what it’s like,” she groaned, diving into her clutch for her phone. “You’ve always been deployed or stationed God knows where, so you’ve never put one of these things together. Didn’t Scout offer to help you on this? She said she was going to.”
“I couldn’t let her do that while she was putting together her wedding. She’s amazingly organized, but she’s not Superwoman.”
“Don’t tell her that. Okay.” She flicked her thumb at the screen to scroll through her phone book. “I have a few notes from a couple years ago when it was my turn to do the party. I have some contacts for venues, maybe you’ll get lucky there—oh, and don’t forget to ask if valet parking is used at your venue site, or if you have to arrange for that yourself. Party rental equipment—you’ll need that number too. Then you need to look at caterers, and you need to order a cake like, now. And then there’s the humongous headache that is the guest list, which was nearly a hundred last year. But before all that, the one thing you absolutely have to do is decide on a theme because that’ll dictate—”
“Stop.” No longer smiling, he had the appearance of a man pinned down by enemy fire. “It can’t be that complicated.”
“It is.”
“Why? Why can’t it be just like…I don’t know, pasta night around the dinner table?”
“Because it can’t.”
“That’s how it’s going to be if I’m in charge of this, and I am.”
“Not anymore, you’re not,” she muttered to her phone, and when she glanced up at him when he didn’t answer, she caught his sharp smile before he wiped it away.
Damn it. Played again.
Chapter Four
“I can’t believe it. I mean… Rude and The Secret Garden?”
“That’s just such a wacky combo. Did he like the food?”
“How did it even happen?”
“Were you guys on a date?”
“No.” Sassy held up a hand to stop the torrent of questions pouring out of her former foster sister Tonya and Rude’s sister, Francesca “Frankie” Panuzzi-Valente. Frankie had been away at college when the Panuzzis had opened their home to Sass, but over the ensuing holidays and various breaks, she’d become one of Sass’s favorite people. Sass had even been one of the bridesmaids at Frankie’s wedding, a happy day marred only by Rude, whom she’d had to walk up the aisle with once the ceremony was over.
That was a walk she wouldn’t soon forget. It had been done in stone cold silence from both of them, with Sass not even looking Rude’s way, which had been a difficult task for several reasons. Mainly because the wild-eyed wedd
ing coordinator insisted they had to end the ceremony by walking arm-in-arm back up the aisle. But it had also been tough not looking at him because Rude had been in his dress blues. Until that day, she’d never fully understood how some women could never resist a man in uniform. After the ceremony, however, she was a true believer. He’d looked so freaking different. Gone was the obnoxious brat she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with. Instead, with his hair all but shaved off, his eyes solemn under the brim of his cap and his shoulders filling out his uniform in ways that were new and awesome, it had been almost impossible not to look at him.
But she’d done it. Not looked at him, not talked to him. And he’d treated her the same way.
Even now it was hard to admit that his pretending she wasn’t there—behavior that mirrored her own—had hurt her deep down in a place she didn’t want to analyze.
“I want to make it clear that what happened was no big deal,” Sass announced as she curled up in a white wicker chair on Tonya’s back patio. Frankie—four years older than Rude with jet black hair that curled down to her shoulders and those cognac-brown Panuzzi eyes—was seated in a matching chair across from her. Rude’s sister looked like she was on the edge of her seat, hoping to hear a thrilling fairy tale full of dragons, derring-do and earthshaking kissy time. Tonya, meanwhile, lounged on a chaise, wrapped in a fuzzy blue bathrobe and doing an excellent job of looking like someone recovering from the stomach flu. Normally her latte-hued skin looked so flawless it could have been in a skin commercial, and her tight corkscrew blonde-tipped curls usually cascaded in thick profusion around her model-stunning face—a face that could have been Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Polynesian, African American or a mixture of that and more. Today, however, her hair was scraped back into a messy bun and she looked as weak as water.
But she’d obviously been feeling well enough to call this powwow. Sass figured that if Tonya was perky enough to insist that Sass drop her latest cookbook manuscript so that she could drag her butt out into the suburbs to go over how she’d wound up at The Secret Garden with the foster brother from hell, her former foster sister had to be on the mend.