Lucky Catch

by Deborah Coonts

  Stopping in front of me, he grabbed my hands in his bear paws. My cringe didn’t slow him down. “Miss Lucky, it’s been too long. I was so glad when the movers showed up today with your boxes.” Concern dimmed his smile as he leaned in, lowering his voice. “You do know Mr. Teddie is back.”

  “Did you lock up all the sharp knives, just in case?” His eyes widened—I forgot Forrest wasn’t used to my snark. I softened it with a smile.

  “Oh, you were teasing.”

  I gave him a noncommittal tilt of my head. “Sort of.”

  “Broken hearts, they take some time.”

  I wished people would stop saying that—of course, it was better than the avoidance people often gave someone newly diagnosed with a terminal illness, so I took that as a good sign.

  “I had the cleaning crew in this morning. The movers put everything away.” Forrest chuckled. “The folks with that damn bird just left. He took a chunk out of one guy’s fingers. I think he taught our feathered friend some new words. But everything should be just right for you now.”

  Just right. Not everything. But I knew what he meant. If only one could quiet the inner turmoil by setting the outer self straight. “It’s good to be home.” I squeezed his hands, very lightly—mine were still numb, but they’d started to twinge—then let his go as I stepped around him. “Elevators still in the same place?”

  “Yes ma’am. If you need anything, I’m here,” he called after me.

  I waved my thanks as I stepped into the elevator and hit the button. When the doors closed, I sagged against the back wall, assaulted by memories, suddenly unsure about this whole going home thing. Conflicted once more . . . or still. At least I was consistent.

  As I ascended, I remembered the first time Teddie and I had known we would have each other. Driven by the heat of anticipation, we’d practically disrobed each other right here in this elevator. Closing my eyes, I could feel his hands on me, insistent, teasing, his kisses taunting, plundering. Driven by desire, neither of us could catch our breath. For a moment, I’d thought I had everything.

  What had I missed?

  How could I have been so wrong?

  Why hadn’t I hunted him down and shot him? Men!

  The elevator slowed, and I opened my eyes, bracing myself—I hadn’t set foot in the place since right after the night Teddie had left. I had no idea how I would feel. Angry? Hurt? Sad?

  I needn’t have worried. When the doors opened, and I stepped into my great room with its burnished hardwood floors, stark white walls, bright paintings, and comfortable furniture in a variety of styles, I felt happy. This was home, the place where I belonged . . . my space. Moving farther into the room, I was enveloped in the comforting hug of peace. I almost didn’t recognize the feeling—it had been a while. Yes, my fault, but I always did have to take the long road. For some reason, I just wasn’t a shortcut kind of gal.

  Drowning in emotion, I hadn’t immediately noticed the soft music coming from the kitchen. Nor the aroma of marinara sauce, heavy on the oregano and basil. A loud sound startled me—it sounded curiously like the pop of a Champagne cork. Who would be here?

  I narrowed my eyes. Teddie wouldn’t dare. . .

  Stalking toward the kitchen, by the time I burst through the door I had worked up a pretty good bit of red ass. The sight in front of me stopped me in my tracks and diffused my anger like a swift breeze brightening a stale house.

  “Jordan?”

  He graced me with one of his best Hollywood-heartthrob grins. In two strides, he was in front of me. Grabbing me, he swept me around, bending me backward in a dip as he kissed me. Our normal greeting, so I was semi-prepared, but he still left me breathless. Putting me back on my now unsteady feet, he grabbed a flute of sparking bubbly off the counter and presented it to me. “Welcome home, sweetie.”

  I downed the whole thing in one long swallow.

  Jordan raised an eyebrow, but refilled my flute when I thrust it at him. “What did you do to those hands?” He grimaced when his eyes found mine.

  With his short-cropped black hair running now to salt and pepper, angular features, strong jaw, bedroom eyes, perpetual tan, and youthful physique, Jordan Marsh was every woman’s dream, except for that minor sexual-orientation issue. Just another cruel injustice heaped on the female gender. The thin white tee shirt and fitted European jeans pressed home that point. Even the frilly pink apron didn’t dim his masculine appeal.

  After I’d consumed half of my second flute, my progress slowed. “It’s a long story, and I’ll need more to drink to repeat it. What are you doing here? You were on my list of things to do tomorrow.”

  “Honey, you can do me anytime, but don’t put me on a list—my inflated Hollywood ego would be dashed.” He turned back to stir a pot simmering on the stove. “I’m underwhelmed by your delight in seeing me.”

  “Sorry, just momentarily side-tracked by the visual of doing Jordan Marsh.”

  “You can look, but you can’t touch.” Rudy Gillespie, Jordan’s partner, sailed into the kitchen. Tall, thin, with curly, dark hair and a wicked smile, he grabbed my shoulders from behind and leaned around, planting a kiss on my cheek. Then he joined Jordan at the stove. Individually, they turned every head when they walked into a room, but together, they could stop traffic. “Smells divine. There is just something really sexy about a man who knows his way around a kitchen.”

  “Tell me about it.” I joined them at the stove and peered into the pot. “Is that your famous marinara sauce?”

  Jordan dipped a wooden spoon into the thick red slurry, blew on it for a minute, then held it out for me to taste. “Careful, it’s hot.”

  One tiny taste and flavor exploded on my tongue. I groaned in delight. “When’s dinner?”

  “Soon.” He handed me the spoon. “Here, keep stirring for a minute.” Thankful that, for once, someone else was making the decisions, I did as asked. “Where’s the bird?” I directed the question at Jordan’s ass, which was poking out of the open fridge as he gathered ingredients.

  “In the pantry.”

  “You put the bird in the pantry?”

  “He’s in time-out.” Jordan stood, his arms laden with deliciousness, and gave me an accusatory look. He tried to hide his smile, but with little success. “For the record, I am not amused by the recent additions to his vocabulary.”

  Jordan turned his back and carefully offloaded his armful onto the counter, sorting the items by dish. “A good salad caprese—fresh basil. And the tomatoes!” He bunched his fingers, then put them to his lips and made that exaggerated Italian gesture of fabulousness. “Fresh mozzarella to die for.” He held up an elongated bottle. “Twenty-five-year-old balsamic, so thick it pours like molasses. And”—he held up a finger, pausing dramatically—“the pièce de résistance.” He reached for plate on the other side of the stove. With a flourish, he removed the light towel covering the contents, then waved the plate first under Rudy’s nose, then mine.

  My stomach growled. “Yum, prosciutto and figs.”

  “Not prosciutto, Culatello de Zibello, and not just any fig, fresh Southern Blacks from South Africa.”

  Rudy snagged a half a fig and its coat of thinly sliced, meticulously cured exotic ham. If I’d tried that, I would’ve lost a hand. Then he topped Jordan’s flute of Champagne. Proffering the bottle in my direction, he raised his eyebrows in a silent question. When I shook my head, he drained the last of it into a flute for himself.

  “Keep stirring,” Jordan admonished me. “If you let that burn, I will carve out your soul and roast it on a spit.”

  “I have no soul, haven’t you heard?” I risked another taste of the sauce. “Did you bring all this from L.A.?”

  “No. Amazingly, I found it here in this horticulturally challenged wasteland.”

  “Who’d you have to kill?” I cringed at my word choice—somehow, it didn’t seem funny anymore.

  “Nobody.” Jordan took the spoon from me. “You are the worst stirrer.”

 
With Jordan’s attention diverted by my woeful lack of kitchen skills, Rudy snagged another fig, making me laugh. Jordan narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s so funny?”

  I gave him a straight-faced, wide-eyed look of innocence.

  He whirled to face Rudy, who managed a similar look, even with his mouth full. Jordan tried to look angry, but he didn’t pull it off—so much for his acting skills. “As I was saying.” He stopped stirring and focused on another larger pot that was beginning to put off some steam. “I found this little specialty food stall.” Measuring out fresh-made whole-wheat tagliatelle, he salted the boiling water and carefully immersed the pasta, checking his watch.

  “Food stall?” Since I’d been demoted from head stirrer, I needed something to do, so I went in search of the proper beverage for such a feast. If I recalled correctly, I’d left two bottles of Ribolla Gialla in the wine refrigerator under the bar. The bar was in the great room, so I raised my voice to stay in the conversation. “Where is this purveyor of exotic treats?”

  Jordan’s voice followed me out of the kitchen. “In the garage.”

  The wine was where I’d left it.

  Returning to the kitchen, a bottle in each hand, I proffered them for Jordan’s approval. “Will this do?”

  “Impressive.”

  “I bought it from a lady in Sonoma—a small vineyard. She’s cultivating some varietals from her grandfather’s hillside in Friuli. A great story.” I set about grabbing the right stemware and pouring us each a dose. “This food stall was in a garage?”

  Jordan swirled the wine in his glass, then eyed it as he held it to the light. Sniffing deeply, he then took a sip, swishing the liquid around his mouth before swallowing. “Sublime. It should go nicely with the sauce and the subtleties of the appetizer and salad.” He lowered the glass and gave me a quizzical look. “Not a garage. The garage.”

  “The garage? You mean at the Babylon?”

  Jordan turned off the heat under the pots, then lifted the pasta pot and poured the contents through a strainer in the sink. “I’m surprised you didn’t know about it.”

  “News to me. Who put you on to it?”

  Rudy had set the kitchen table—there were four settings.

  I eyed the two men. “Anybody else joining us?”

  Rudy wouldn’t meet my eyes as he filled an ice bucket and nestled the bottles inside.

  Jordan waved airily. “No. Just us three.”

  Personally, I thought the wine was cool enough, but I didn’t feel like trotting out my burgeoning wine snobbishness—a result of spending too much time in the company of a certain French chef who had gone missing. The comfort of good friends dimmed my worry for a moment, but like a bug bite in a place I couldn’t scratch, it still tormented me.

  Jordan ladled the pasta into a bowl, then topped it with the entire contents of the saucepan. The men brought the food to the table, then Jordan helped me with my chair.

  I settled the napkin across my lap. “Why did you set four places if no one else is coming?”

  Rudy shot Jordan a glare. “Your friend there thought it would be a good idea to invite Theodore.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly as I counted to ten . . . then twenty, fingering the knife as I silently tried not to fume.

  “Not to worry. He’s not coming,” Jordan harrumphed as he focused on piling pasta on each plate, reaching for mine, then Rudy’s, saving his own for last. “I went up the back stairs, looking for him, but he wasn’t home.”

  “Saving you from a slow and painful death.” In my half-starved state, I couldn’t resist any longer. The aroma from my plate inciting an irresistible need to feed, I attacked my pasta. “My God, if you ever want to open a restaurant, I’ll back you.”

  “Food is about love. I only cook for people I keep in my heart.”

  I reached over to squeeze his hand. Remembering the state of my own, I gave his a pat. “I really am glad you’re here.” I included Rudy with a look. “Jordan, seriously, I thought you were arriving tomorrow—did I screw up?”

  Jordan finished his bite and wiped a bit of sauce off the corner of his mouth. “Miss P. called me. Neither one of us thought you should have to come home to an empty house.”

  Unbelievably touched, I fought down my emotions for a moment—like a cat left out in the rain, Jordan got twitchy when I cried. Clearing my throat, I changed the subject, returning to an unanswered question. “So, tell me about this food stall in the garage.”

  “It really wasn’t a stall per se, more like the back of a panel truck.” Jordan sampled a fig. “This really is manna from heaven . . . an amazing find.”

  “Let me get this straight, some guy is selling foodstuffs in our garage from the back of his truck?”

  “They do it all the time in L.A.”

  I had no idea. “Who put you on to this guy?”

  “Brett Baker. I knew him in L.A.—his sushi is positively orgasmic. And he specialized in some of the more exotic stuff—the things that make your lips go numb and can stop your heart. Truly, I remain in awe of what that man can do with eel and urchin.”

  I knew there was a scathing reply laden with innuendo somewhere in there, but I just wasn’t up to the task. “Why would he share that kind of information?”

  Jordan gave me his best Hollywood A-Lister smile. “The stuff that people tell me would make you blush.”

  * * *

  I had a rule in my home that whoever did the cooking was exempt from cleaning up. Needing time to think, I’d shooed Rudy out of the kitchen as well. Dinner in the company of good friends was just what the doctor had ordered, and I was feeling a bit more settled, comfortable in my skin and in my space . . . despite Jean-Charles and Teddie and everyone’s meddling.

  As if on cue, Teddie’s voice interrupted my peace and quiet. “Hey, anybody home?”

  I didn’t need to look to know he stood in the opening to the back stairway we had installed between our apartments—before I minded him popping in unannounced.

  With dish towel in hand, drying the last pot, I turned.

  When he caught sight of me, his smile fled. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Jordan didn’t tell me you were back.”

  “I live here.” Of course, that was a recent occurrence.

  Teddie was smart enough not to point that out. “I had a note from Jordan inviting me down—his marinara is hard to resist.”

  “The stuff of legend.” Finished, I pulled out the drawer under the counter and put the pot away. “There’s leftovers.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why not?”

  Teddie looked at me as if weighing the odds his meal might come laced with poison. “As invitations go, that was one of the least encouraging.”

  I didn’t feel the need to excuse or explain as Teddie took his usual place at the counter while I pulled out the food I’d just put away.

  “I wouldn’t have come down the stairs unannounced had I known you’d be here. Back at the hotel, I got your message. You need time and space, I get that.” He tried to sound sincere, I could see it in his face, but he didn’t pull it off.

  “The guys killed the wine. How about some Prosecco?”

  “I’ll get it.” Teddie backed off the stool and headed toward the bar with a galling air of familiarity.

  Still warm, the pasta only needed a slight bit of reheating. I chose the stove rather than the microwave in deference to Jordan’s culinary sensibilities—he’d often complained the microwave toughened pasta. As it warmed, I assembled a small salad—we’d consumed all the figs and culatello—and Teddie popped the cork and poured us each a flute of Italian sparkling wine.

  He raised his glass in a toast. “To friends.”

  Reluctantly, I clinked my glass with his. “In the span of less than twelve hours, I’ve gone from wanting to shoot you on sight to being able to tolerate your presence without going postal.”

  With a little less “jaunty” in his stride, Teddie carried his plates to the t
able. “Not exactly the progress I was hoping for, but I’ll take what I can get.”

  I followed with the bubbly. Awkward would be the word I would’ve chosen had anyone asked how all this felt.

  Teddie attacked the pasta, forking it in without reverence—I was glad Jordan wasn’t witnessing. “Amazing stuff. Do you know his secret?”

  “Many, but not the one you’re looking for. He said it had to do with love.”

  “Doesn’t everything.” Pausing with his fork, dripping with pasta, halfway to his mouth, Teddie held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary.

  Immune to the BS Teddie ladled with ease, I looked past him through the kitchen window—a different angle of the Vegas Strip, but equally as spectacular as the view from the great room. I fought the pull of the warm familiarity of having Teddie in my kitchen, of sharing my home and my life with the man who had been my very best friend. That’s the part I wanted back.

  Teddie ate in silence. Consumed by his food, he seemed unaware as I surreptitiously took stock. The few months since I’d last seen him had deepened the worry lines bracketing his mouth and perhaps added a few wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, but overall he looked as delicious as ever.

  The movement of his hands drew my attention. Artist’s hands, graceful and beautiful, with long fingers to stretch across the keys. I’d loved to sit next to him at the piano while he played. But today, his hands didn’t have the beauty they had once held. Red scrapes marred his knuckles, scratches sliced his fingers, a fingernail . . . no, two fingernails were torn, one badly enough to sport a Band-Aid.

  When my eyes lifted to his, I caught him staring at me, his fork lifted halfway.

  “You were there,” I whispered, I don’t know why. “Were you following me?”

  “I told you I wanted to help. You wouldn’t let me go with you.” He set his fork down, deliberately placing it just so before he answered. “Two people have died already, Lucky.” His eyes had turned a deep, serious blue.