by Lori Wilde
Nick cocked a grin, ramping up the sexual tension, trying his best to embarrass her. Maybe if he made her uncomfortable enough, she’d quit the job. “Healthy.”
“Mr. Vinetti,” she said, clearly shocked by his retort. “I was speaking about the tools we’ll need to repair your grandmother’s house. Since you apparently pride yourself on being a Neanderthal, I’m assuming that you have the requisite hardware.”
Nick arched an eyebrow and started to make a joke about requisite hardware, but she rushed to finish her thought before he got a chance to gig her.
“Like hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches and such,” she said.
“I can assure you, Rosy, I’m a card-carrying caveman. It’s not an idle boast. I own a fully equipped tool chest, and I know how to use it.”
“I’m so happy for you. Now shall we continue with our shopping?”
“We shall.”
She scowled. “You’re making fun of me.”
He measured off an inch with his thumb and forefinger. “Just a little bit.”
“Are you going to keep giving me a hard time during the entire course of this project?” She primly squared her shoulders.
“Depends on what you mean by a hard time.” He lowered his eyelids and sent her his most charming smile. He was bad. He shouldn’t be toying with her like this, but he just couldn’t seem to help himself. He got a kick out of shaking her cool.
“Will you please stop with the sexual innuendos?”
Nick held up his palms. “Hey, I can’t help it if you’re reading things into what I say.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Be honest. Do most women really find this troglodyte stuff charming?”
“You’d be surprised.”
Delaney tossed her head and skirted around him, wheeling the shopping cart toward the plumbing department.
Didn’t she realize how easy she was making it for him to tease her unmercifully? Clearly, she had not grown up with brothers. She had no clue how to defend herself against verbal sparring.
“Hey, Rosy, wait up.”
“Feel free to gimp along at your own pace,” she called out over her shoulder.
Nick burst out laughing. Feistiness. All right. He knew she had it in her, and he loved provoking it. Chasing her off was going to be a lot more challenging than he’d first thought, but also a lot more fun.
When her left hand shot up over her head with the middle finger extended, he laughed so hard he almost choked. Now that was a sight worth seeing.
Miss-Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt-Between-Her-Thighs-High-Society flipping him the bird.
Delaney Lynn Cartwright, the daughter of a Montgomery blue blood, does not stoop to common vulgarity.
She heard her mother’s chiding voice in her right ear, and the small sense of satisfaction she’d just derived from flipping off the arrogant Mr. Vinetti evaporated instantly.
Don’t feel guilty. It’s about time you showed some spunk, Skylar’s voice countered in her left ear.
Terrific. Her highly developed superego, represented by her mother’s voice, was pulling her in one direction. While her much-ignored id, in the form of Skylar-speak, was yanking her in the opposite.
Apologize to Mr. Vinetti for your rudeness, Honey’s voice demanded. Delaney stopped, turned, and faced Nick.
He was standing at the end of the aisle, eyebrows cocked slyly, and a knowing smile playing across his lips.
To hell with that. Look at him. He’s so damn sure of himself. He deserved the bird, Skylar’s voice argued.
Delaney whirled back around and marched in the direction she’d been heading.
Just like when her sister had been alive, Delaney felt caught in the middle between two warring personalities much larger than her own. As a child, whenever Honey and Skylar went at it, Delaney hid in the closet or under the bed to avoid the fray. Her mother the perfectionist, and her sister the free spirit.
What am I? she wondered.
You’re the people-pleaser, the Skylar voice and the mother voice echoed in stereo.
Feeling overwhelmed, Delaney clamped her hands over her ears to drown out the conflict.
When did she get to please herself? She was twenty-five years old, pampered and protected. How was she ever supposed to know what she really wanted if she kept letting other people tell her what to do?
Plumbing. Concentrate on plumping supplies and the repairs to Lucia’s house.
She stared at the shelf in front of her, not seeing anything because her mind was in turmoil.
“Are you okay?” a deep voice curled through both her ears as a masculine hand touched her shoulder.
Startled from her reverie, Delaney leaped, hand splayed across her heart. “Eek.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Nick dropped his hand, but very slowly, and in the process grazed the length of her arm with his fingertips.
“No, no, I’m sorry.” She wasn’t prepared for the full consequence of being touched by him again. Her breath simply flew from her lungs, and she was left with her mouth hanging open at the razor-sharp jolt of awareness blasting through her body. Quickly she stepped closer to the shelf and farther away from him.
He was staring at her intently. As if he could make her disappear merely by focusing his mind on the task. He left her feeling tongue-tied, weak-kneed, and totally inadequate. “Don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything.”
Her eyes met his. Prickles of primal excitement skidded up her spine. “I flipped you off.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “You did.”
“That was rude of me.”
“Sometimes rude is justified.”
Not according to my mother.
Their gazes were fused to each other, her pulse firing like a piston.
“Which size pipe do you think we’ll need to replace the leaky one in your grandmother’s upstairs bathroom?” Delaney pulled her gaze from his and ran her hand along the smooth hard length of metal plumbing pipe on the shelf in front of her.
“One and three quarters,” he said.
“That doesn’t seem thick enough.”
“I measured it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know if I measured something or not.”
“No, I mean are you sure you measured correctly.”
“Go with this one, Rosy.” Nick leaned around her to reach for the pipe and his chest brushed against her shoulder. The sleeve of his T-shirt rode up, revealing a wicked scar high up on his bicep.
Delaney felt something inside her start to unravel. She gasped. “What happened?”
“Huh?” He turned his head and saw her staring at his bicep. He was so close she could smell the clean linen scent of his soap. “Oh, that. Got shot.”
Her whole body went cold. “You got shot?”
“Long time ago. Rookie mistake.”
She swayed, imagining him hurting and in pain. She couldn’t stand the thought of it and bit down hard on her bottom lip.
“You’re looking pale, Rosy. You gonna faint on me?”
“Your job is very dangerous.”
“Most of the time, no.”
“But you got shot on the job, and your grandmother told me you hurt your knee on the job as well. That seems pretty perilous to me.”
He laughed and gave her a droll stare. Apparently her distress over his risky employment amused him. “Don’t worry. Two injuries in eight years is not that bad. It’s not like I’m an Alaskan king crab fisherman or anything.”
His eyes hooked hers. He was so alive, so raw, so electric. So the opposite of Evan.
If she were a braver woman, she would have met the challenge in his eyes. But she wasn’t brave. His overt masculinity scared the heck out of her.
“Go with this piece of pipe,” he repeated, straightening and placing the pipe in her hand.
She dropped it into the shopping cart. “This is enough for now,” she said, anxious to get outside where she could draw in a breath of fresh ocean air and clear her he
ad. “We’ve got enough to get started. We can always come back for more supplies later.”
Nick paid for the purchases and they left the store.
On the drive back to Lucia’s place, tension permeated the cab of the pickup. Sexual tension. Taut and hot. Delaney stared out the window, focusing on the scenery. Condos and beach cottages and seagulls and tourists in brightly colored clothes.
But no matter how hard she tried to direct her attention outside, every cell in her was attuned to what was happening inside. Both inside the cab and inside her.
Her hands lay fisted against the tops of her thighs. Her throat felt tight, the set of her shoulders even tighter. Restlessly, she wriggled her toes inside her sandals. Even way across the seat, Delaney could feel the heat emanating off Nick’s body. The truck smelled of him—musky, manly, magnificent.
The plastic hula girl, mounted on his dashboard, swayed her hips with the vehicle’s movements. The faster he drove, the faster she danced the hula. Hula, hula, hula.
Her mother would have labeled the hula girl tacky and lowbrow. She supposed it did seem a bit chauvinistic, sort of like the silhouette of naked women on eighteen-wheeler mud flaps. But she liked the whimsy of it. Watching the plastic doll’s undulating hips had a mesmerizing effect.
She reached out to touch it.
“No, no,” Nick growled. “No touching Lalule.”
She drew back her hand quickly as if he’d smacked her.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “Didn’t mean to snap. Reflex. The nieces and nephews are always trying to monkey around with her, and I’m so used to warning them off, I forgot it was you. Lalule means a lot to me.”
“Why is that?”
“My mother gave her to me,” he said gruffly. “Not long before she died.”
“Oh.”
He didn’t say anything else.
Delaney didn’t mean to be nosy, but she wanted so badly to understand him. Because she thought that if she could understand him, maybe she could figure out why she was so attracted to this man. And then she could sublimate that attraction in a healthier way. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Dominique. I’m named after her.”
“How did she die?”
“Brain tumor. When I was seven.” He stared out over the hood of the truck, and Delaney knew his mind was rummaging around in the past.
“That must have been so difficult for you,” she soothed.
“Yeah.”
“You must have felt abandoned.”
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, and she thought that was all she was going to get out of him. She didn’t press. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he didn’t want to talk about it.
But then a few minutes later, he surprised her. “Mom’s dying wish was to go to Hawaii. Dad maxed out the credit card and took us to Maui for three weeks on one last family vacation.”
He paused again and glanced over at her. The raw pain on his face was almost unbearable. Nick was far more complicated than she’d guessed.
In that moment, she saw past his looks, beyond the dark eyes that were often hooded to hide his thoughts. Beyond the high, masculine cheekbones, the thick black eyelashes, the nose that looked as if it had been broken a time or two. She peered beyond the promise of his beautiful mouth, which wasn’t too full or too thin, but very well shaped with a distinctive cut to the borders and a curious firmness in the way he held it. As if if he were to relax his hold, it might give away too many secrets.
Delaney thought that was all he was going to say on the subject of his mother, but then he said, “I was a cowardly kid. I wanted so badly to learn to surf, but I was afraid of the water. I didn’t even know how to swim.”
It touched her that he would confess this vulnerability, that he trusted her not to judge him for his childhood fears. Most macho guys refused to admit any kind of weakness. But in Delaney’s point of view, Nick’s willingness to acknowledge his foibles only made him stronger.
“You?” she said, treading lightly in this swamp of emotion. “Detective Bullet-Riddled a ’fraidy cat? I don’t believe it.”
“Yep. I was. My little brothers could swim, but I was afraid of sharks, of drowning, of getting taken away from my mother.”
“Do you think she knew that?”
“I know she did. She bought Lalule and told me she was my guardian angel. Whenever I got scared, Mom told me to just give Lalule a shake, and she would remind me to shake things up,” he explained.
“Shake things up?”
“Mom said I could sit on the beach, play it safe, and feel sorry for myself, or I could be brave, learn how to shake things up, and make my life happen. With Lalule’s help, in three weeks I’d learned not only how to swim, but also how to surf.”
“Your mother knew she wouldn’t be around to inspire you herself, and she gave you the doll as a reminder of her indomitable spirit,” Delaney said softly.
“Yeah. I suppose she did. My mother was sweet on the outside, but tough on the inside. Sort of like you.”
That sounded dangerously close to a compliment. Except Nick was dead wrong. Delaney wasn’t tough inside at all. She was a total marshmallow through and through.
He took a deep breath. “Mom died just four days after we got back home.”
Delaney’s throat clotted with emotion. “Nick—I—”
“So you see why I don’t like anyone messing with Lalule,” he rushed in to say. She could tell he was struggling to sound casual.
She wanted to touch him, to comfort him for that long-ago pain, but she had no business, no right. Still, she couldn’t just leave him with his shoulders tensed, his jaw clenched, his mind hung up in the past. She skimmed his forearm with her fingertips—briefly, lightly, just enough to let him know she cared.
“I understand the hurt. The confusion a young child goes through when they lose someone close to them. You blame yourself. You think that if you’d been a better kid, the person you loved wouldn’t have died. That if you had done just one thing differently, you could have saved them.”
He looked startled. “You too?”
“My older sister,” she said. “When I was eight.”
Nick made a noise, half empathy, half sorrow. His eyes glistened. “Life’s a bitch sometimes,” he said to be macho, but he reached across the seat and tenderly took her hand.
Every muscle cell in her heart ached. She looked over at him. This shared intimacy forced a deeper understanding, a bonding between them.
“Losing Skylar changed me forever, you know.” She swallowed. “While losing your mother made you braver, losing my sister made me more afraid.”
“You seem brave to me.”
“I’m not.” She ducked her head. “Not at all. You have no idea how scared I am ninety percent of the time.”
“What are you so scared of?”
“Of everything, but mostly of being scared.” She laughed at herself. “Of not really living.”
“If that’s true, where did you find the courage to dress up in that bustier and raincoat and attempt to kidnap your fiancé?”
“I needed to feel something. Needed some magic in my life, I guess. But you saw how well that turned out.”
“I thought it turned out very well. It made me damn jealous of your fiancé.”
Delaney couldn’t handle the swell of emotions flooding through her. She couldn’t keep looking at him. Instead, she directed her attention out the window and told herself to breathe.
They were traveling down Seawall Boulevard. Sunlight streamed through a break in the soft covering of clouds, sparkling off the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The water shimmered, rolling in toward the seawall.
For a split second, Delaney felt the way she’d felt the night she found the wedding veil. Caught up in a special sort of magic that could change everything. And then the feeling vanished, disappearing as quickly as it surfaced.
She saw a carnival-style amusement park situated at the end of the bea
ch. The rides looked old and shaky, the garishly painted skins peeling and rusting in the salt air. Delaney was at once both charmed and repelled by the rinky-dink amusement park.
When she was a kid, she’d always wanted to go to a carnival or an amusement park. Ride those scary rides. Eat sticky candy apples and funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar. Breathe in the air rich with the smell of frying grease. Get taken in by the sideshow barkers. Play games of chance and win a giant teddy bear.
Her mother had hated carnivals and amusement parks with a passion verging on phobia. “Carnies are common street thugs,” she’d tell Delaney. “You’ll get germs from the rides. They’ll cheat you and steal your money. Stay away from carnivals and fairs and small-time amusement parks.”
So she had.
But her mother had made carnivals such a taboo, that whenever Delaney saw one, she experienced the lure of the forbidden deep in the center of her stomach. Calling to her. Urging her to defy her mother. To sin by climbing on the Ferris wheel and floating high above the crowd and then slowly coming down to earth. She had imagined it a thousand times.
She latched on to the amusement park with her gaze, using it to pry her awareness off Nick. Realizing that in spite of having grown up a very rich girl, she had missed out on a lot of the simple things. What she would have given for a Lalule of her own.
Then Delaney saw something totally unbelievable.
Her smartly dressed, perfectly coiffed mother.
No way.
But she could have sworn it was Honey Montgomery Cartwright standing on the seawall beside the entrance to the amusement park, talking to an elderly woman in a babushka and wading boots, wearing a black eye patch over her left eye.
The pickup truck sailed by.
Delaney blinked. No, it couldn’t be. She must have imagined it. She couldn’t conceive of a single reason that would compel her mother to visit a run-down amusement park on Galveston Island.
“Wait, wait,” she exclaimed.
“What is it?”
“Back up, back up,” she yelled at Nick, frantically making counterclockwise motions with her hand.
“Huh?”
“Put it in reverse, go back, go back.”
“I can’t back up in traffic.”