“I couldn’t let you drive all the way over here just for that,” he answered. “I thought we could have a little dinner out here with your doppelganger and enjoy the fire pit for the last time this season.”
The whole scene was appealing—almost as appealing as Cade in his jeans and the heavy Irish fisherman’s sweater he was wearing. And since Nati had already talked herself into this evening she just went with it.
“I am starving.”
“Then let’s eat,” Cade suggested.
He led her to the food table, taking a piece of paper out of his pocket as they reached it.
“This restaurant had a write-up in the paper this week. Southwest fusion. I had to write this down to tell you what it all is,” he explained.
He read from the paper as he opened each container. “This is slow-roasted pork shoulder with roasted corn puree and pumpkin seed sauce. These are lobster tamales with truffle puree and roasted pepper crème fraiche. These are chicken flautas. These are skewers of beef tenderloin, chorizo, bacon, peppers, grilled cactus, and cheese, in tomatillo salsa. This is guacamole with tortilla chips. This is something called queso fundido—it’s a cheese dip. We use the little flour tortillas to eat it. And for dessert we have warm three-milk bread pudding with frangelico liquor, Tres Leches crème anglaise and blueberry compote.”
Ah, the perks of a man who didn’t live on a budget, Nati thought. But what she said was a simple, “Wow.”
“I’ve never been to this place so I just said give me a couple of appetizers, something with fish, something with chicken, something with beef, and dessert, so I can’t take the credit for having good taste. Or the blame if it’s lousy.”
“It all smells too good to be lousy,” Nati assured him.
They each filled a plate. Cade poured the wine and then urged Nati to have a seat on the glider. They briefly sampled each of the dishes, gave their opinions and then settled in to eat, comfortable in the heat that came from the firepit.
As they were eating, Nati asked, “So what did you have to tell me?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Cade said, putting a long index finger to his mouth to signal that she’d just reminded him but that he needed to finish his bite before he could answer.
When he had, he said, “First of all, the hope chest looks beautiful. GiGi will love it. And I’ll take pictures of it to show Mandy as an example of your work.”
“Mandy?” Nati repeated, hating the familiarity with which he said the name and, for some reason, instantly becoming suspicious. And jealous. Which she had no right or reason to be, she told herself firmly.
“Mandy Thompson. She’s our decorator and you’ll be hearing from her on Monday.”
With her mouth full of succulent lobster tamale, Nati could only raise her eyebrows in question.
“I decided against having you do another wall here because something else occurred to me last night on the drive home. We just bought another office building—our executive financial and accounting department needed more space. It’s in north Denver so it won’t be quite as far to drive for most of our money people—or for you—”
“For me?”
“It’s an old building that we’ve had to refurbish and remodel. Mandy is just starting to do the decorating and it struck me that it would be nice to have you texture one wall in each office.”
“How many offices?” Nati asked.
“There’s forty-two of them but I talked to Mandy this morning. I explained your shop schedule and the arrangements you make with Holly so you can fit in outside work. Mandy said she’ll accommodate you. You two can hash it out together. She’ll probably want something a little less elaborate than what you did on my dining room wall—there probably won’t be plaster or sanding, just those other things you showed me where layers of paint look like marble or granite—so each office can be done in maybe one or two days. But there’s no rush. If you need more time, individual offices can be vacated for a day or two even after we move in.”
“Forty-two offices and you want a wall done in every one of them?”
“I do. I also told Mandy about your other work and she said she can always use someone good at stenciling and murals, too—Mandy is the decorator-in-demand around here and she does a lot of nurseries and kids’ rooms on top of everything else, so she was excited to hear about someone who can do what you do. Plus she wants to look at the stuff in your shop.”
Nati couldn’t think of anything to say but another, “Wow...” because what he was describing—to become affiliated with a decorator—was tantamount to striking gold for her business all the way around.
Then, when it seemed almost too good to be true, she added, “Seriously?”
“You’ll take the job?”
“I’d have to have my head examined if I didn’t. This is a huge opportunity...” Then she heard herself say, “So this Mandy...you’re close to her?”
Cade laughed. “Mandy is about fifty-five, she has a hulking husband, kids not much younger than I am, and if by ‘close’ you mean we’ve worked together before, then yeah, we’re close. She does all the decorating for the Camden Incorporated offices, the lobbies. She did my house. If by ‘close’ you mean anything else, then no, we’re not close.”
“You haven’t ever mentioned anyone else, and you said her name so...fondly...it just made me wonder...”
“If I said her name fondly it’s because I like Mandy. She can be a little outspoken, but you get used to it.” Then he smiled slyly. “But you were thinking she’s what? A girlfriend? An old girlfriend?”
“I’m sure you have them,” Nati insisted.
“Old ones, yeah. But no one more recent than a year and a half ago.”
“How many old ones? Dozens? Hundreds?” she challenged, too curious not to persist now that she seemed to have a foot in the door on this subject that she’d wondered about since the minute they’d met.
“I haven’t kept score of how many girls and women I’ve dated but I can’t imagine that it’s dozens—plural—let alone hundreds.”
“How many stand out from the crowd?”
“Oh, I need dessert to talk about those...” he said, taking their empty plates and setting them aside. Then he went to the wet bar and fetched the single container that they’d left closed. After a moment, he returned to the glider with dessert and two clean plastic spoons.
“Let’s see,” he said. “There have been two affairs that stood out because they turned nightmarish, and two sort-of-serious relationships that seemed like they might go somewhere but then ended. One because I was barely twenty-two and wasn’t ready to get serious about marriage the way she was. I guess your grandfather and I have that in common. The second ended because we both came to the conclusion that while we’d liked each other well enough to keep at it for over a year, we didn’t really feel anything more than ‘like,’” he said as he sat down again, at an angle to face her.
The spike heels might look fantastic but they pinched like vices so Nati kicked them off and shifted sideways to face Cade, tucking her bare feet under her hip.
Cade handed her a spoon and opened the container, setting it on the glider between them so they could share.
“So let’s hear about the nightmares... I assume they were serious, too...” Nati prompted.
“They ended up serious. Ugly-serious,” he said with some contempt.
They each tasted the bread pudding and rated it as delicious as the rest of the meal before Nati questioned him further. “Ugly-serious? What does that mean? Not an illegitimate child out there somewhere, because you said you didn’t have any kids.”
“Right, no kids. But with the most recent relationship that ended a year and a half ago, the woman claimed that I was going to.”
“Uh-oh...”
“Yeah. We’d been seeing each other for about two months when s
he said she was pregnant and that the baby was mine.”
“Was she lying?”
“She was pregnant but it wasn’t mine. Of course by the time I could find that out with testing I was already in court facing her paternity claim. She demanded financial support throughout the pregnancy, child support and maintenance after the baby was born, plus a million-dollar settlement.”
A third wow seemed in order so that was just what Nati said. “And the baby turned out not to even be yours?”
“Right.”
Doug had faced his own false paternity claim during college, when Nati had still been resisting his attentions and had heard about it through the grapevine. So what Cade was describing wasn’t a complete shock to her.
“The Pirfoys used to say that money and position made them targets for people who saw them as their payday. I thought it was cynical of them, but maybe not?”
“It isn’t cynical. It becomes a reality you just have to watch out for. Try to avoid,” he said solemnly. “Since the baby wasn’t mine, nothing came of the lawsuit but the grief.”
“Was your other ugly-serious relationship like that, too?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. Even worse. It was a breach-of-promise suit.” They’d finished dessert, so he put the spoons in the empty container and set it on the table.
“You made promises you didn’t keep?” she said with a hint of sarcasm. Nothing she knew about him caused her to believe that that was something he would do.
“I did not,” he said with authority. “I’d dated this particular woman on and off for about a year—she traveled for her job and we’d see each other when she was in town—no big deal. It was also no big deal when we’d go for weeks without any contact at all, either. Then she changed jobs, didn’t have to travel, and we started seeing each other more often. Which was when I realized that I didn’t really want a steady diet of her—”
“So you broke up with her.”
“It really wasn’t anything serious—when she was traveling we’d probably seen each other nine or ten times. And after a month of her being in town for good I knew it wasn’t going to work out, so even though we’d sort of been together for a little more than a year—fourteen months to be exact—there had still only been a countable number of dates. But when I told her I thought we should go our separate ways, she filed a breach-of-promise suit.”
“Just out of the blue?”
“Her claim was that she’d given me fourteen months of her life—at the height of her childbearing years. That I’d explicitly led her to believe I would marry her, that we’d talked about it—which we hadn’t—and that she’d begun to plan for it by meeting with a wedding planner—”
“You went to a wedding planner with her?”
“No! No way! But she’d seen the wedding planner on her own and named me as her groom, so she thought the fact that the wedding planner was willing to confirm that aided her cause.”
“That would look bad,” Nati agreed.
“Jennifer also claimed that she’d changed jobs solely at my request because I hadn’t wanted her to travel, because I wanted her to spend more time with me. And she’d told that to her previous employer when she’d quit. Since he didn’t have any reason not to believe her—particularly when she was taking a lesser-paying job—he was going to testify to that. Basically, without my having any idea what she was doing behind my back, she was stacking the deck against me.”
“And how much did she want in damages?”
“Four and a half million.”
Yet another wow came out of Nati. “She wasn’t fooling around,” she added.
“No, and that one was actually harder to fight than the paternity suit. Paternity can be proven or disproven. It’s a black-and-white thing—”
“But the breach of promise was he said she said.”
“Her word against mine, yeah. If my lawyers hadn’t had her investigated and discovered that I was the second guy she’d done this to, I could have actually lost that suit.”
“The Pirfoys were very big on keeping to their own kind—there were a lot of reasons for it but one of them was to avoid people who were after their money—maybe you should take that into consideration,” Nati suggested.
Cade smiled. “You’re a cautionary tale from one side of the coin, I’m a cautionary tale from the other side. I guess we’re both examples of how inequalities between two people in a relationship can leave one partner bearing a bigger brunt if the relationship ends. I know it’s made me a little gun-shy...” he admitted somewhat under his breath.
“I understand that—I know I don’t want my history to repeat itself,” Nati agreed.
And with that in mind, she told herself this was the moment to put an end to being with Cade. Once and for all...
Even if she still didn’t want to.
She took a deep breath, exhaled and said, “I should probably get going.”
Cade studied her very intently, as if weighing how to respond to that.
Then he said quietly, “But I don’t want you to...”
Nati pointed her chin in the direction of her scarecrow likeness. “The scarecrow and I are not a package deal,” she joked.
Cade laughed. “Damn, I never even thought about making that a contingency.”
“Too late now.”
His smile turned more contemplative as he reached up to brush her hair slightly away from her face. “Cautionary tales... Why is it so hard to learn a lesson from them?”
“Good question,” Nati said, thinking more about how close he was and the way the fire’s dimming glow made him look dangerously attractive than about what she should be cautious of.
He touched her cheek, and she was so sure that he was going to kiss her that her eyelids dropped to half-mast in anticipation.
But he didn’t. He went on studying her face, shaking his head again at something Nati couldn’t fathom.
“You really are beautiful,” he whispered, just before he did kiss her, but only lightly, chastely, a kiss that was more poignant than anything.
Nati knew she should have left it at that. Simple and sweet.
But without any premeditation, her head tipped to one side, she tilted her chin towards him, and the kiss became much more intense.
As it did, Nati wondered why there had to be such a battle between what the heart and body wanted and what the mind knew. Because her mind knew to just say no. To do what she’d intended to do—end things.
But now that she was with him everything felt so right, so good, so much like where she should be, that all her arguments seemed inconsequential...
His hand curved into her hair, cupping her head. The kiss found a new level of intimacy and still Nati didn’t balk. Still Nati let her lips part even wider so their tongues could play with more abandon.
And suddenly her mind began to be won over to the side of her heart and body. This, tonight, with Cade, wasn’t what she’d gotten into with Doug. It wasn’t a commitment. It wasn’t anything that could alter her entire life, her future. It couldn’t cost her all that the Pirfoys had cost her.
This was just tonight. Right now.
Tomorrow would come and that would bring the natural conclusion to whatever it was she’d entered into with this man. But there wasn’t anything natural about the end coming tonight. Now. Not when what he’d brought to life inside of her last night was reawakening by leaps and bounds.
And truly, what harm was there, she asked herself, in letting nature take its course until tomorrow? So what if she had one night with this incredible guy? Even if she was afraid that he could ultimately be bad for her, he wasn’t bad for her for just this one night. Not as long as she made sure it wasn’t for more than that...
She raised her hands to him—one to his chest, the other to his nape where she mass
aged his neck.
She wanted Cade. Maybe she’d wanted him from the first minute she’d seen him—there was certainly no denying that she hadn’t missed a single detail, a single nuance of his appeal. Regardless, she wanted him now so badly that she knew she’d only been fooling herself to think she could merely say goodbye and never know him to the fullest extent possible.
She had to go to bed with him. She just had to. This once. She suddenly knew that there was no closure without it...
The fire was dying in the fire pit and the coolness of the October air was creeping in, tightening her already taut nipples almost painfully and sending chills along the surface of her skin that competed with the chills the kiss was causing.
So Nati brought the kiss to an end and whispered, “Inside?”
Cade’s smile was tentative. “It was you who shut me down last night, as I recall, and I did not come into tonight with the intention of—”
“Neither did I,” she said. “In fact I had every intention not to.”
“But now you want to go inside?”
“Now I do,” she said, leaving no doubt. “Unless you don’t.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding...” he said with a laugh that released all his pent-up frustration.
He took her hand in his and they stood up. Leaving everything behind—including her shoes—he brought her back into the house and straight upstairs to his bedroom. Once there, he swung her around and into his arms, instantly recapturing her mouth with an all new ferocity that Nati was only too willing to answer.
She raised both of her hands and held his head steady for the kiss. His arms circled her waist and she felt the roughness of his thick sweater on her exposed stomach.
The wool was too rough on her bare skin, the sweater forming a barrier that was too thick between them.
So Nati let her hands course down his broad back until she found the sweater’s hem. She yanked up on it, bringing it nearly over his head, then broke their kiss just long enough to rid him of it entirely.
For a moment she devoured the sight of his naked torso in all its magnificence, wondering only peripherally where a desk jockey got muscles like that.
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