“Well, I can promise you, it’s better than cardboard. Hang on.”
She’d just returned from the back room with Dennis’s plate when the front door shrieked open again. Damn, she really did need to get on those hinges.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Hi, Kendra. Come on in. I’m serving dinner.”
Gemma’s cousin Kendra strolled across the bar with a loose-limbed, sexy confidence that would have turned every head in the room, had there been any heads to turn.
“Gem.” Kendra dropped her enormous leather hobo bag on the bar with a clatter. “You know you’re not a restaurant. We’ve been over this.”
“I’m not selling food. I’m sharing personal food with friends. You’re a friend, right, Dennis?”
“Been a friend of the Romanos for thirty-five years.”
“There you go. Here, eat your dinner.”
Dennis happily tucked into the plate of food she slid in front of him.
“It’s okay if I don’t charge,” Gemma told Kendra.
“It was okay when you were cooking for your family and you had to,” Kendra pointed out. “There’s no family here tonight. Who are you cooking all this food for?”
Wow, that stung. There was no family here. Livie and Jess both gone, her father off with Teresa as often as he was here. In all of Gemma’s life, that had never been the case. She kept cooking meals out of habit, for a bunch of people who were never going to come eat them.
“There’s always someone who needs to eat. Since you’re here, why don’t you make yourself useful and take a plate of this food upstairs to Mr. Mosco?” Mr. Mosco had lived in the rental apartment above Romano’s for so many years it was hard to even think of him as their tenant. He was just there...a fixture, like the old Michelob sign in the window, or the mirror behind the bar.
“You’re feeding your tenant now?”
“He’s old,” Gemma protested. “And he doesn’t have any family.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to sign up as his caretaker, Gemma. You’ve spent your whole life taking care of people. The last thing you need is one more to worry about.”
“I’m not his caretaker. He still gets around okay. But what’s wrong with bringing him a home-cooked meal now and then? It’s just a nice thing to do.”
“You were always a nicer person than me.” Kendra sighed. “Too nice.”
“Did you come here just to bust my chops, Kendra?”
Kendra shook back her long blond hair. She spent a fortune on that color and it was worth every penny. “I’ve heard a very juicy piece of gossip and I came straight to the source for confirmation.” Her voice dropped another register. Kendra’s dark cat’s eyes, golden mane of hair, and wicked curves were what initially drew men’s attention, but it was her voice that brought them to their knees—throaty and low, like whiskey on the rocks.
Gemma bit back a groan. She should have known this interrogation was coming. “Yes, he’s back.”
Kendra scrambled up on the bar stool usually occupied by Frank and propped her chin in her hands. “Tell me everything.”
Although she had two sisters, they were younger than her—Livie by four years and Jess by five. And since Gemma had been more or less left in charge after their mother’s death, confiding about her personal life with Livie and Jess had always felt a little weird. Kendra, on the other hand, was her cousin, and only a few months younger. She’d grown up a few neighborhoods away and they’d gone to the same high school. As a result, Kendra knew more of Gemma’s secrets than pretty much anyone else.
“Nothing to tell,” she lied nonchalantly. “He showed up last night, chatted with some of the guys, and then I tossed him out.”
“You threw him out?”
“Well, it was closing time. I threw everybody out.” Gemma kept her eyes on the bar as she scrubbed at a particularly stubborn sticky spot, muttering under her breath, “All three of them.”
“That’s it?” Kendra looked crestfallen. She’d clearly been hoping for a much more explosive reunion than Gemma was fessing up to. Gemma was wishing she had more fireworks to report, too, but only the kind where she set his ass on fire and sent him packing. Instead, she hadn’t even managed to light the damned match.
“Dennis, need a refill?” Gemma swept Dennis’s glass away without waiting for an answer.
“Ha!” Kendra crowed, pointing a finger at her. “I knew it!”
“Knew what?” Gemma scowled as she tilted the glass under the tap.
“Something happened.”
“No, it didn’t,” she insisted, setting Dennis’s refilled glass in front of him. His attention was entirely on his food. No hope for a change of subject there. Reluctantly, she turned back to Kendra. “Okay, fine. He hung around after closing.”
Kendra abruptly hopped off her bar stool, reached across the bar to grasp Gemma’s elbow, and bodily hauled her down to the end of the bar, far out of Dennis’s earshot. “Tell. Me. Everything.”
Gemma huffed, looking away out the window at the well-dressed people flowing past on Court Street, headed to all the chic new restaurants and bars a few blocks away. “When I closed up, he was waiting outside. He walked me home.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Will you stop saying that? We walked. We talked. End of story.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Um...” What had they talked about? Not the past. That had been off limits. The present? Sort of. “We just caught up.”
When she didn’t say anything more, Kendra’s eyes widened. “And? What’s he up to? Is he married? Kids?”
“Well...” Actually, she hadn’t asked him any of those things, which, in retrospect, seemed like a bit of a lapse, really. “I don’t think so. To either one.”
Kendra leaned back and blew out a breath. “Well. This is an interesting development. Brendan Flaherty is back in town and single.”
“No! You get that look off your face right this second, Kendra Giordano. It’s not gonna happen.” Even though it nearly had last night. Whatever. He was just teasing her. He’d never intended to kiss her. He’d just been winding her up.
“But he’s single, you’re single...”
“Nope. I may be hard up for a date, but I would date literally anybody else in Brooklyn before I considered Brendan Flaherty again.”
Kendra raised a perfectly penciled brow and tucked her tongue into her cheek. “You’re hard up because you’re too picky.”
“I’m hard up because I spend all my days in this bar for geriatrics.”
“I find guys for you all the time.”
“Kendra...”
“Look, I have a great guy for you right now.”
“Oh, no,” she groaned as Kendra produced her phone from the back pocket of her skin-tight jeggings. “He’s a cop in Chris’s precinct.”
“Of course he is.” Kendra’s brother, Chris, was a cop, along with about half of the family.
“Look. He’s cute, right?” She presented her phone with a flourish.
Gemma squinted at the photo of two uniformed cops in front of a squad car. “Kendra, he’s old enough to be my father.”
“No, not him! The other guy.”
“And that one’s young enough to be my kid!”
Kendra tsked. “He’s twenty-two. Totally old enough.”
“Old enough for what?”
The grin on Kendra’s face was purely X-rated. “All the good stuff.”
Ending up with a cop wasn’t so hard to imagine. In her family, you either became a cop or a firefighter or you married one. When she was younger, that had been her plan, too. Hers and Brendan’s—the plan they’d made together. After his graduation, he’d take the classes he needed at community college and study for the firefighters’ exam. He’d wanted to be settled in his first firehouse by the time Ge
mma graduated from high school, hopefully with a little money saved up. Then they could afford to get a place of their own nearby and get married—
Well.
None of that had happened. By the time Gemma had graduated, Brendan was long gone, working with his uncle, a thousand miles away in Chicago.
Still, even after Brendan, Gemma had figured eventually she’d end up marrying a cop or a firefighter. And she’d certainly dated plenty of both.
But one by one, sparks never materialized, guys flaked, relationships fizzled. One day she looked around to find herself thirty and everyone else in her generation had paired up, gotten married, and settled down. It was like a game of musical chairs she hadn’t realized she’d been playing until the music stopped, leaving all the chairs filled and her still standing there alone. There were a few guys back on the market after their first marriages crashed and burned, but she’d figured out pretty quickly why those marriages flamed out. Usually it was because the guy was too dysfunctional to manage a relationship more complicated than his Netflix membership.
It was different for Kendra. She wasn’t interested in any relationship that lasted longer than her roots touch-up, and she wasn’t the least bit bothered that all the single guys kept getting younger. She dated them just the same, partying with them like she had when she was eighteen. Gemma was just too old for all that. Not old in years, old in experience. She’d been all but raising a family since she was fifteen, tending her sisters, her father, the bar. All that stuff young guys were into—clubbing, weekends on the Jersey Shore, all-day boozy music festivals—Gemma had worked right through that phase of her life, and she had no interest in going back to try it now.
“Kendra, I’d have absolutely nothing to say to some twenty-two-year-old kid.”
“Who said you have to say anything at all?”
“There’s more to dating than sex.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Kendra picked at one of her long, perfectly polished nails. “Seriously, Gem, when was the last time you got laid?”
Ugh. It didn’t bear thinking about. And that last time had been nothing to shout about. “It’s been a while,” she conceded.
“So? Maybe all you need is some mindless physical fun. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Maybe, but I just can’t see sleeping with that kid. He’s younger than my baby sister. It would be weird.”
Kendra’s glossy pink lips curled up in a grin. “There’s another age-appropriate option that’s suddenly become available.”
“I told you, I’m not going there. He messed me up enough already. I’m not that much of a masochist.”
“He can only mess you up again if you care.”
“Are you suggesting I hook up with Brendan?”
“Didn’t you say he was fantastic in bed?”
Better than fantastic. Mind-blowing. Still the best she’d ever had. “Yeah, but that was high school.”
“And now he’s all grown up. That’s a skill that tends to get better with practice.”
Well, there was a thought. Yeah, she’d been thinking about him ever since last night, remembering what it had been like in high school. But it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d be even better at it now. Ugh. Another thing to plague her every waking moment. It was bad enough she hadn’t managed to tell him off last night, now she was going to start having sexual fantasies about him. For a tough, no-nonsense woman who took no shit, she was having a very hard time banishing Brendan Flaherty to the mental oblivion he belonged in.
“Well, it doesn’t even matter because I’m not at all his type.”
“What are you talking about? The boy was obsessed with you back in the day.”
“That was then. He’s changed, and I’m still exactly who I always was. I’ve got nothing he’d be looking for.”
“Quit selling yourself short, Gem. Unless he’s had a brain transplant, I’m sure he’d still do you in a hot minute. He was crazy about you when he was eighteen.”
“Yeah, he was,” Gemma said. “But now he’s all rich and fancy, and I’m still a bartender from Brooklyn. High school is over and so are we. It’s ancient history.”
“Except he came looking for you. Maybe he’s interested in repeating a little history.”
“Yeah, well we can’t always get what we want,” she snapped. But inside, she didn’t feel quite so sure of herself. The idea that Brendan might still want her, after all these years... She wasn’t as immune to it as she’d thought she’d be. As she’d hoped she was. Damn him for still being so goddamned hot. And damn her for noticing.
Chapter Eight
“Gemma, you here?”
Gemma smiled to herself as Spudge hoisted himself to his feet and shambled out to the front door to greet Teresa, Dad’s girlfriend.
“In the kitchen, Teresa,” she called back.
Teresa had her own key to the house now, a sign of just how serious Dad was about her. She’d reconnected with Dad years after they’d gone to high school together, after her first marriage ended in divorce and she’d moved back home to take care of her mother, who had cancer. Teresa’s mother had died just after Thanksgiving last year, and since then, Teresa had been spending more and more time at the Romano house. She’d even spent Christmas with them this year.
It was a little strange, adapting to having a new member of the Romano family after it had just been the four of them for so long. But Teresa was so nice, and she was trying so hard to get to know them all, making such an effort not to overstep or erase their mother.
“What are you cooking?” Teresa asked as she came into the kitchen. “It smells fantastic.”
“This short ribs thing with polenta. Grab a plate. You’re just in time.”
“You want a glass of wine?” Teresa asked, retrieving a glass for herself from the cabinet.
“I’d love one, thanks.”
Teresa poured her a glass of Montepulciano from the bottle that lived on the sideboard and set it next to the stove where Gemma was finishing up dinner. It was nice, having someone do little things like that for her. Not that her sisters and father weren’t nice to her, but she was the oldest, usually taking care of people rather than being taken care of. Teresa didn’t have the same dynamic with her, and she fussed over her a little like a mother might have. Gemma found she didn’t mind so much.
After plating two servings of short ribs, she joined Teresa at the kitchen table. “How was City Island?”
Dad and Teresa had spent a long weekend out there with Dad’s brother, Uncle Richie. Dad had gone straight to the bar to relieve Clyde, their one part-time employee, for the night shift.
Teresa sighed happily. “Just great. I love it out there. When you’re out on Richie’s boat, it’s like you’re not even in the city anymore. He and Sheila are getting pretty serious, you know.”
“Seemed like it when she came to Thanksgiving last year. I like her.”
“Me too. She’s so good for Richie. You should see how well the business is doing. They’re thinking of buying another boat.”
“Another one? They just bought the second one a few months ago.”
“And it’s already booked for most of the summer. They could expand to a third boat, easy.”
Uncle Richie had been kind of a mess for years. He hadn’t handled it well when Uncle Vincent had died in 9/11. He drank too much, lost his job, and then lost his wife when she took their two boys and moved to Maryland. Danny and Tommy eventually moved back to the city—Danny was a cop (of course), and Tommy was an E.M.T.
When he realized he’d lost his family, Richie pulled it together and quit drinking. Still, it had seemed like a gamble when he’d asked Dad to buy him out of his share of the bar and the house so he could buy a boat and open a charter fishing boat business on City Island. That was after Mom had died, and they’d just gotten the legal settlement from the h
ealth insurance company, so Dad did it, because Richie was his brother and he was trying to turn things around, but nobody really thought Richie would make a go of it. He’d surprised them all, though, and made good. The business was expanding and doing so well Sheila had quit her nursing job to help him run it.
“That’s great. I’m really glad he’s doing so well.”
“Gemma, this is amazing,” Teresa said after taking her first bite. “Where’d you get the recipe?”
“No recipe. Well, I read a few but then I tried it my own way.”
Teresa shook her head with a smile. “What a gift.”
“It’s just cooking.”
“This is not just cooking. Boiling pasta and sauce out of a jar, which is all I can manage...that is just cooking. This, Gemma...this is a whole lot more than ‘just cooking.’ Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Come on, Teresa.”
“I’m serious. You should think about pursuing this.”
“What, like being a cook?”
“Like being a chef.”
“Nah, I have the bar,” she demurred. Teresa’s lips tightened into a line, but she didn’t say anything else.
It wasn’t as if Gemma hadn’t thought about it. She loved cooking. It had started out of necessity when their mother had died. Someone had to feed the girls while their dad was trying to keep the bar afloat single-handedly. Over the years, it had become, well, calling it a passion sounded silly. It was just food. But it was her favorite thing to do, and she spent pretty much all her time outside the bar in the kitchen.
But doing it for a living? How would that even work? Which of her two sisters were going to give up their brilliant careers to come take her place in the bar? Besides, she loved the bar. It was more than just some job. It was home. It was her history—her legacy. Cooking for friends and family was enough for her.
At her feet, Spudge lifted his head and wuffed softly. A second later, she heard Jess’s key in the lock. Funny, she could always tell which of her two sisters it was just from the sound the lock made, although she couldn’t pinpoint why. Of course, it had to be Jess. Livie was all the way out in Colorado. Jess had moved out, too, but she often came by after work if Alex was going to be working late. Home was still home.
Love Around the Corner Page 5