Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  He could guess why she was here: the bagman book. He’d assumed that Lara would be assigned its decryption. But it was highly unusual for Nick to bring her here to work—Trey didn’t know of a time it had happened before—and he couldn’t imagine Nick working her into the late hours. He was particularly gentle with Lara.

  So had they left? Had Nick taken her home? If they’d left and forgotten him, that would seriously suck. He didn’t know what to do—but he’d call and ask before he spent the night in his office like an idiot.

  First, though, he went to the front of the building and checked the lot. Ray wasn’t in the reception area, his usual post, but Nick’s Navigator was parked on the lot—and there Ray was, doing one of his perimeter tours. Okay, they were still here, and he hadn’t been forgotten.

  He waved at Ray and headed back to his office to wait.

  Before he could sit down at his desk, his phone rang. Nick. “Hi, Uncle.”

  “I need you. My office.”

  “On my way.” He put his jacket back on, closed his laptop and did a very quick tidy of his desk, and turned out the lights.

  One of the double doors to Nick’s office was ajar, which meant ‘knock and come in,’ so Trey did. Nick sat at his desk. Lara was still here, standing beside him, holding a black notebook to her chest. She looked up at Trey, and her eyes opened wide behind her glasses. Her mouth dropped open, and she stared.

  Nick stood up. “Trey. I want you to take Lara home.”

  Lara’s head spun, and she laid that surprised face on Nick. But Trey had considered the possibility that this might be the errand he’d be sent on. Considered it and set it aside as too emotionally complicated to keep hold of. Like a handful of lava. Seeing her again, feeling something in his gut and chest like a punch, he’d had confirmation that what Ashley had said to him at her front door was right: his attention had been focused on one person. Lara had been crawling around in his head since April.

  However, the truth remained true: he did not belong in her life, and she did not belong in his.

  She was a woman he really liked, really cared about, really wanted to see again, but should stay away from. He hadn’t known whether to hope Nick would have him drive her home or to pray he would not.

  So yeah. Lava.

  “Of course,” he said to Nick, then shifted his attention to Lara again. “I’m ready when you are.”

  “Okay,” she replied, moving her expression into neutral territory. “I’m”—she glanced at Nick—“I’m ready.”

  Nick hooked his arm around her shoulders in a paternal embrace. “Thank you for your work today, Lara.”

  “You’re welcome, of course. It was … fun. I enjoyed it.”

  “Good.” He kissed her head and let her go. When she went to the sofa and packed up her laptop and a half-full backpack, Nick turned to Trey. “I’m going home, too, and tomorrow is light. Since I kept you around all evening, you can take the day tomorrow.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  Lara came to him at the door. He’d forgotten how little she was—if she was more than five feet tall, it wasn’t by much, and she hadn’t gone on any eating binges in the three months since he’d seen her.

  Before she could hang her laptop bag on her shoulder, Trey caught it on his hand and took it from her. He took the backpack as well. “I got these. You ready?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Her tone was prim and reserved. She turned back to Nick. “Good night.”

  “Buonasera, you two,” Nick said and picked up his phone.

  ~oOo~

  After a few awkward attempts at small talk, which Lara absolutely sucked at, the front seat of Trey’s Audi went quiet by the time they were out of the Cove. For the next forty-five minutes, they rode together in silence, much like those first three hours of the drive from West Virginia. Trey focused on the road, and Lara leaned on the door and looked out the window.

  For Trey, the car seemed full of some kind of electromagnetic force. All he could do was think of Lara. He could barely keep his eyes on the road. He wanted to talk to her, touch her, just fucking be with her, but she leaned against the passenger door, as far from him as she could be and still be in the front seat, and looked out the window, turned away. The only other thing she could do without audibly saying to keep away would maybe be wrap herself in garlic and hold out a cross.

  He put the radio on eventually, and that drew her attention for a second. The satellite station he’d had it on played hip hop, and she probably hated that.

  “Do you mind?” he asked “I can change the station.”

  “No, it’s okay.” She turned back to the window, and he decreased the volume a bit. At least then the car wasn’t silent while they rode in awkwardness. Trey’s muscles buzzed with the need to bring her close.

  As they neared Providence, he turned Kendrick Lamar down to almost a whisper. “I don’t know the address of your apartment, I’m sorry.”

  Lara’s head turned slowly, and she simply gazed at him. The lights along the road flashed over her face.

  “Lara?”

  “You can take me to my dad’s.”

  “Yeah? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  He drove to her father’s house and parked at the curb before it. Windows in the living room and upstairs glowed with light. The porch light was on, as if her father were expecting her. Was she still living here? Hadn’t she gone home yet?

  “Thank you for the ride. It was nice to see you again.” Lara reached for the door handle.

  Without thinking, succumbing finally to that magnetic pull, Trey reached out and dropped his hand on her thigh, pressing down. “Lara, wait.”

  She settled back and turned to him. And waited.

  He needed a second to figure out what he was doing here. Alone with him again, she’d been aloof and unresponsive—because the last time they’d been together, he’d been a complete asshole. He should help her out of the car, get her stuff from the back, see her to the door, and leave her to her life.

  But shit. No. At least, he could apologize.

  “I just … I want to say I’m sorry. For the way I was the last day at the cabin, and the way I brought you home. God, I was an asshole.”

  She looked down at her lap, and his hand on her thigh. A lock of her hair had slipped from the clip holding it up in a twist on the back of her head, and that one silky tress just dangled there, along her cheek. The need was so strong to reach out and twist it around his finger that he went hard and barely kept his hand on her knee.

  “It just … confused me. I didn’t understand.”

  “I know.” He couldn’t tell her why he’d been that way. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She faced him with a small, almost reluctant smile. “I liked being at the cabin.”

  There was something he could tell her, and she’d possibly just given him an opening. Maybe he shouldn’t, but right now, he didn’t think he could lift his hand from her leg and let her go unless he did.

  “I liked it, too, Lara. I liked being there with you.”

  She was quiet, and her eyes held with his. Trey waited for her to do something or say something, to accept or reject or acknowledge what he’d said. Nikki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’ was not the right soundtrack at all for this moment, so without taking his eyes from hers, he fumbled on the steering wheel and turned the radio off.

  “What do you mean?” Lara asked at once in the new silence.

  Here was the real opening, and the real risk. He had no thought that she was trying to manipulate him into making the first move—he knew Lara enough now to know that she was honestly asking him what he’d meant, why he’d liked being with her.

  Trey felt a little bit sick. He’d never before felt this insecure with a woman, this anxious about how she’d respond to him. But this was his shot. He had no business taking it, but if he was going to, it was now or never.

  “I mean I think about you every day,
and I think about those days together, and I miss it. I miss you.” His heart was pounding. Jesus.

  “Trey.” Nothing but a whisper.

  Suddenly deciding that he didn’t actually want to hear the rejection, he got in before she could say more. “I know. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

  He lifted his hand from her leg, but she set hers over his and pushed it back down. “Two blocks down, turn left.”

  “What?” The rhetorical shift was a left turn itself, and he couldn’t follow it.

  “My apartment. Turn left at the stop sign, two blocks down, then right at the next stop sign.”

  “You want me to take you there?”

  She nodded. “We can talk.”

  He started the car and pulled back onto the street.

  ~oOo~

  She had him pull behind a building in the middle of a block about a mile from her dad’s house. They were just about on top of the Brown campus, and the houses had the look of student use—stately old buildings that weren’t kept up so well by absent landlords, and tenants who didn’t hang around long enough to care very much about their home. His apartment in Princeton had been in a similar area.

  He parked and trotted around to let her out, then grabbed her bags from the back. She led him to the front of the building and up a steep set of stairs to a softening wood porch. It was dark, nearing ten o’clock at night, but there was enough light around that he could see the peeling paint and the gaps between the boards.

  His seemingly genetic inclination toward building things kicked in. “This porch only has maybe a year or two left before it rots through.”

  She slid a key into the door. “I don’t own the building, just my apartment. The condo association takes care of the porch.”

  “They need to do a better job.”

  She laughed.

  He hadn’t forgotten that soft, sweet, lovely—and rare—sound. “I love your laugh.”

  In the white beam of the porch lights, he saw her cheeks turn rosy. The corners of her mouth turned up, and she opened the door and led him in.

  The front door of this converted condo building led to what had once been a grand foyer of a fine house. She led him across the chipped harlequin tiles to a sweeping, wide staircase, covered with brown industrial-grade carpet, and up to the second floor, where she unlocked another door, this with a black plastic numeral ‘4’ tacked to it, and then he was in her own home.

  She flipped on an overhead light—a ceiling fan—and Trey grinned. His imagination had conjured something very similar. Perfectly tidy, aggressively organized and coordinated, uncluttered.

  He tried to see it the way Lara would.

  The wood floor gleamed. A plain, woven cotton area rug in slate blue was positioned directly before a sofa covered in beige cotton fabric, which faced the wall where a television hung. On the blue rug was an oval coffee table, painted white. A ceramic bowl full of those puffy, colorful plants Misby liked, planted in rocks, was centered on the table. Two pale green armchairs, an old-fashioned set, faced each other across the length of the coffee table.

  From the front door, near the front of the building, he could see almost the whole apartment, except any bedrooms. The living room ran along the inside wall of the apartment, front to back, and turned at the front to a dining area, which led to a small kitchen. The dining area had a tidy square table, wood painted white, situated directly under a white ball of a paper lantern. Four slat-back chairs, painted slate blue, were tucked around the table.

  A row of windows across the front of the house probably brought tons of light in during the day. They were covered by plain white curtains, with white Roman shades beneath. The shades were drawn, the curtains pulled back. Four large, unframed canvases were the only wall hangings besides the television he could see. All four were pieces of busy abstract art. He could imagine Lara staring for hours, finding hidden patterns and Golden Ratios in the splatters and smears.

  The back wall of the living room, which seemed to lead to a hallway and possibly a bedroom or two, was floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall shelving, painted white and packed solid with books.

  He stood at the edge of Lara’s home and could see her mind at work.

  “You can put those down anywhere.”

  He was still holding her bags. Not wanting to just dump them and disturb the order of the space, he carried them to the back of the living room and set them on the floor, against the wall near what was not a hallway, but a small mudroom leading to a back door.

  “I don’t have anything to drink, or eat, or anything. But I can offer water. Ice water. I have ice.”

  His throat was dry. “Ice water is perfect. Thank you.”

  She nodded toward her perfectly arranged, carefully coordinated seating area. “Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

  He sat at one end of her sofa, and she was right back with two clear glasses of ice water. She handed him one and sat on the sofa, not quite at his side.

  Nervous and parched, and still feeling a little unsettled around the stomach area, Trey drank his down all in a go. He did not like this feeling, like a schoolboy, except he’d never felt like this when he was a schoolboy. ‘Girls’ had always been one of his best subjects.

  Lara sipped at her water and set the mostly-full glass down beside his glass of ice.

  “Why did you say that?” she asked at once.

  “Please?”

  “That you miss me.”

  “Because I do.”

  “I’m not being thick, or naïve, when I ask this, but I really don’t understand. What does that mean, that you miss me?”

  He was so far out on a limb he thought he might start shaking. This really sucked. Needing to catch hold and know she was with him, he asked, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

  Her reaction was somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, with a gasp of surprised mixed in. “I’m thirty-three years old. Do you think I’m a virgin?”

  He admired the way she said that, with such straightforward equanimity. She set the rape outside her sexual experience, and that was healthy. But he had no idea what her actual sexual experience was. “I think I don’t know if you’ve ever had a boyfriend. Which is why I asked.”

  “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

  “Yes. Several.”

  A wry cramp of a smile. “At once?”

  “Sometimes. Now you answer.”

  “Yes, I’ve had boyfriends.” That claim came out haughty, but broke almost at once, and she added, “Two.”

  “Tell me.”

  Her head cocked sharply, like a twitch. “You sound like Nick.”

  That made him laugh. For a second there, he had indeed channeled the don.

  “You first,” she said, smiling.

  It was the smile that settled his weirdly stuttering nerves. She was relaxed, and enjoying herself, so he relaxed as well. He sucked an ice cube from his glass, then sat back in the sofa. Sucking and chewing the cube, he answered. “Lost my virginity when I was sixteen. Had a girlfriend for a year or so in high school, had another three in college. Since then, I’ve dated a few girls, but nobody serious.”

  Honestly, he’d never been serious with any girl, even the steady ones—which was precisely why the steady relationships had ended. For the same reason Ashley had bowed out: they didn’t have enough of his attention. He’d liked them, enjoyed them, but he hadn’t been that interested in the relationships.

  His family was bursting with smart, strong, vibrant women. They had their problems and weaknesses, their oddities, but not one of them fell apart at petty bullshit. They had all dealt with real shit, the kind that broke most people, and survived it—maybe not unscathed, but on their feet. His family history was in fact full of real tragedy, real trauma, real pain, nearly as much of that as of love, joy, and hope. His patience for the petty dramas that circled the women he’d dated was … well, it was nonexistent.
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  But Lara was not a woman brought down by petty dramas. She had survived real shit. The kind that broke most people. She wasn’t unscathed, but she was still standing.

  “Now you,” he prompted with a smile.

  She sipped her water, slowly, and returned the glass to the table. “I had my first boyfriend in college. He was a TA in the math department.”

  Trey sat up at once. “Wait. Didn’t you start college when you were still a kid? Like thirteen or fourteen?” She nodded. “Jesus, babe, that wasn’t a boyfriend. That was a pedophile.”

  “I was sixteen when I was with him. You lost your virginity at sixteen, too.”

  “With another sixteen-year-old virgin. It’s not the same. At all.”

  She was clearly offended, and all of a sudden, this conversation was not going at all the way he’d been hoping it would, but he was chock full of protective outrage.

  “He was nice to me. He didn’t think I was weird. And he was only twenty-three at the time.”

  It would have been wrong for anyone, but this was exponentially worse, because Lara was who she was, with the start in life she’d had, and the consequent issues she struggled with. “Jesus! That is not okay.”

  “I’m older than you by more than Todd was older than me.” The sentence came out softly, a murmur while she stared at her glass on the table.

  Trey caught her chin and turned her to face him. “I’m not a teenager, and I’m not inexperienced. We’re both adults. It’s not the same. At all.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does to me.”

  She considered that for a second. “So what did you mean, that you miss me?”

  Just like that, they were back to the question she’d asked. She needed to understand. What the hell, it was time to go all in. He scooted closer and slid his hand from her chin, along her jaw, so he could cup her cheek in his palm.

  “I mean that I like you. I like being with you, and I don’t like being away from you. I mean that I’d like to apply for the position of your boyfriend. I mean I want to kiss you.”