"You're cut off," Jess said. "And here's the check, whenever you're ready."
"Jack?" Colleen said. "Our cake is here, punkin." She took a bite.
Unfortunately, lava cake tended to be, well...lava-hot. As her tongue shriveled in agony, Colleen reacted. Spit that cake right out.
"Pretty," Jack murmured as she scraped her tongue free of the molten dessert.
"Thut up," she said.
She gulped some ice water, some dribbling down her chin in her haste. Lovely. No napkin, where the hell was the napkin? She looked like a drooling freak. Fine. She used the tablecloth to dab her chin. And neck. And bosom, for the love of St. Patrick.
Lucas was watching the show, his eyes holding an irresistible hint of smile.
"Okay, fine. Lucas? Is there something I can help you with?"
"No," he said. "Just getting something to eat."
"Good. Because Jack and I want to get back to our romantic dinner, right Pooh Bear?"
Jack looked confused. "Are you talking to me?"
"You're Faith's brother, right?" Lucas asked.
"Afraid so. And Prudence's, and Honor's. Have we met?"
"I used to date him," Colleen said. She took another forkful of cake, careful to blow on this one.
"Right," Jack said. "You were talking about him in the bar the other--"
"No, I wasn't," she said. "Shut up, Jack."
Jack sighed. "Babe? Sweetie-pie? Cuddlebuns? Can I leave now?"
Okay, so this wasn't working. Time to surrender. "Just get out of here, Jack, and thanks for nothing."
Her un-husband grinned, shook Lucas's hand far too cheerfully and stopped to chat with Jess. "You better pay for dinner!" Colleen added.
He did. He might not want to marry her and sire three gorgeous children (possibly four, if one pregnancy was a set of twins, as Colleen would prefer), but he did pick up the tab.
"Can I join you?" Lucas asked.
"Sure," she muttered. He slid into Jack's vacated chair, and the air seemed to shimmer with the sheer force of...of them.
"I thought we should talk."
"Are you stalking me?"
He gave her a slight smile. "Would you like me to?"
Yes, please. "Such an ego. Good to see that hasn't changed."
"There are two restaurants in this town, Colleen. You own one. I showed up here as a courtesy to you. Not to stalk you."
"You can come to O'Rourke's. I have no problem with that. I'm totally over you."
Another almost-smile. The special places began to purr.
Jessica came over and cleared the table, her movements precise and efficient. Lucas ordered a glass of 2010 Fisher Cabernet Sauvignon that Robert Parker had anointed with a 96. It went well with Lucas's whole fallen angel thing. He might as well have been drinking a soul.
Colleen looked around the restaurant, automatically smiling at the familiar faces scattered among the tourists. Hugo's was the fancier restaurant in Manningsport, white tablecloths and flowers and a view of the lake. The sun was setting, the sky purple and slate, the lake darkening. A few boats glided toward the marina, white sails sharp in the dimming light. Hugo's was busy tonight, and if Hugo's was busy, it meant O'Rourke's would be mobbed. She should go help out after this, even if it was her night off.
She didn't move. Her skin felt too tight. "So you're here," she said, "and I'm here, and obviously we'll run into each other now and again."
"Yes."
"You look good, Spaniard," she said. "The years have been kind."
His eyes smiled. His face didn't move; it was like a magic trick or something, the way he could smile like that. Those dark, dark Latin eyes. Lucas never said too much, but his eyes did. Always had.
Never once had he ever said he loved her. Never. But she would have sworn it was true anyway, hell's to the yes, she thought she'd seen it in his eyes a thousand times.
She wondered if his wife had thought the same thing.
Her throat was abruptly tight.
"I need to walk my dog," she said. He could just stay here and eat and brood and be by himself.
"Can I come?" he asked.
"What about your dinner?"
"It can wait."
Dang it. "Sure."
He left a few bills on the table, and they went out. Better. The cool May air was welcome against her hot face.
They crossed the town green. O'Rourke's looked safe and cheery; she could see the mob through the windows, the soft, golden light and gentle tide of voices and music from inside. The pub's slogan was simple and heartfelt, and one Colleen had come up with the first day she and Con bought the place: O'Rourke's: You're very welcome here.
And now, Lucas one step behind her, she wanted very much to go into the bar, see her brother, flirt with Tom Barlow and Gerard Chartier, chat up Cathy and Louise, give a hug to Mel Stoakes, whose wife had just died. She wanted to be the person behind the bar, because she knew what she was doing there.
They went down the block, away from the green and into the Village until they were in front of her house. "I'll be right back," she told him, and ran up the stairs, past the landing where she'd just planted her porch garden, and up to her cheery blue door.
Rufus, her faithful pup, was waiting. "Come on, big guy," she said, and he bounded down the stairs in two strides.
Lucas took a step back, she was happy to see, and Rufus did what most dogs did--rammed his snout right into Lucas's crotch.
"Easy there, boy," he said.
"He likes you. Then again, he tried to hump a tree the other day, so don't take it personally."
Lucas's teeth flashed in the darkness. "You need a leash?"
"Nope." Rufus stuck to her side like a guardian angel as they walked to the park down by the lake. "Go ahead, boy," she said, and he loped off to sniff and investigate.
The air smelled coppery and sweet--lilacs and lake water--and the hum from O'Rourke's was audible on the breeze. Small waves slapped the shore and dock. There were a few people out, but it was fully dark now, and most were on their way home.
The tingling feeling was back, and her whole body thrummed with that invisible connection to Lucas, as if they were circled by electricity.
She wondered if he felt it, too.
This is pathetic, she told herself. He was your first love. Big deal. Get over it. He'll be gone again soon, anyway.
She sat down on one of the benches that overlooked Crooked Lake. Lucas sat next to her, not touching, but close enough.
He smelled the same. That clean, sharp smell, like the outdoors. She used to tell him it was ironic, he smelled like the mountains, her city boy--
Well. He wasn't a boy anymore. And he wasn't hers.
Funny that she'd felt buzzed earlier. She was stone-cold sober now.
"Well? You wanted to talk," she said, her voice sounding terse to her own ears.
"Yes." There was a long silence, the wind gusting. It was getting chilly. She should've brought a sweater. Or he could put his arm around her, and she'd feel perfect.
Stop it.
Rufus came up, and she rubbed his rough head, then tugged on his ears. He smiled happily and flopped at her feet, and she slid her foot over his stomach for the obligatory belly rub.
"How have you been?" Lucas asked.
"Good. Fine. Great, actually." She cleared her throat. Think of him as an old friend. "You know. Connor and I bought the pub, and he's the chef, and I run the place. We love it. Things are good."
"And your family?
"Just fine. Sort of. Dad and Gail got married, and they have a daughter. Savannah. She's nine now." Weird, to be telling him about this. Maybe he knew. Maybe he internet stalked her the way she occasionally looked him up on Google. Well. She hadn't in a long time. But she used to.
"Is your grandfather still alive?" he asked.
"Yes."
"How's he doing?"
"He's horrifyingly healthy." Gramp no longer spoke and hadn't in years, and he cried most afternoons, but his
body was doing just great. One of God's little jokes.
"How old is he now?"
"Eighty-seven."
Lucas nodded. Didn't say anything else, and she didn't, either. He was the one who wanted to talk, after all.
"Colleen," he began, and his voice, damn it, so deep and rumbly and scraped her in all those special places, and it just wasn't fair.
She'd talk. It was safer that way. "Lucas, here's the deal. You're back for a while, and of course we'll see each other, and no hard feelings, okay? I mean, we were young and foolish and all that fun stuff. I'm glad you're doing well, and it's nice for Joe that you're around."
He turned to look at her, and she forced herself to return his gaze, even if her knees were trembling.
"Anything else?" he said.
Why? Why her and not me?
"Nope. Anything else for you?"
"No. Except I'd really like you to leave Bryce alone. Now isn't the time for him to be involved with anyone."
"Whatever you say, God. I mean, Lucas. Sorry. I get you two confused sometimes."
He lifted an eyebrow. "I take that as a 'piss off.'"
"Perceptive of you."
He sighed. "All right, Colleen. Do what you want. You always have."
"And what is that supposed to mean?" she asked. "After all, you haven't been around for roughly a third of my life. Not one letter, not one email, not one phone call. You have no clue about what I always do."
"Did you want me to call you?"
"No. I'm just saying maybe you don't know everything, Lucas."
"I think I know what's best for my cousin. He needs to grow up. He needs to stand on his own two feet and be a man."
"Oh, I love when you talk all Latin machismo."
He leaned forward so she had to look at him now. "His father is dying, Colleen. His mother still hasn't cut the cord, and Bryce hasn't ever had a job for more than two consecutive months. I'm here to honor Joe's dying wish that his son grows up a little, and the last thing he needs is another meddling woman trying to run his life."
"Are you talking about me or Paulie?"
"Definitely you."
"How nice. Well, I spend a lot of time with Bryce, unlike yourself. I might know him better than you think. Paulie is a very nice person. She'd be good for him."
"I'm not debating that. I'm sure she's nice. But distracting Bryce and trying to force some kind of romance--"
"Okay, Lucas. I understand your opinion. I just don't happen to share it." She twisted the silver ring on her right hand. "Is this what you wanted to talk about? Bryce?"
"Yes. Why? Did you want to talk about something else?"
Men. "Nope."
"I get the impression that you want very much to talk about something else. So do it."
"I'm fine." Rufus licked her ankle.
"Colleen."
"I'm good, Lucas. Is there something on your mind?"
"I just told you what's on my mind. Can you not be so female and please just address what you want to talk about?"
"I can't not be female, Lucas. I mean, not without the big operation, which I really don't want to have and can't afford anyway."
He threw up his hands. "I don't know whether to strangle you or kiss you."
"Don't you dare kiss me."
He kissed her.
God.
God. It was a prayer, as in God help me, because Colleen's whole body lit up with flares of light and heat and tiny pinpricks of shock. Lucas was hot and hard and strong, and she wrapped her arms around him and held him just as hard, her mouth opening under his, and yes, yes, this was what they were meant to do, this elemental, hard, thought-stealing kiss.
How dare he.
She yanked back. "Hell's to the no, Lucas," she hissed. "You're not here for me. You're back to help your uncle, and then it's bye-bye, Manningsport, back to Chicago and your swanky life there. So don't you dare kiss me. Don't you dare, Lucas. I'm not about to become some little fling you have in between the important chapters of your real life. Been there, done that."
He ran a hand through his ridiculously gorgeous hair. "You're right."
Damn.
Strike that. Good, she meant. "Yeah. So just...you know. Remember that. Whatever." She stood up. "Come on, Rufus, let's go."
Her dog, who was lying splayed on the grass like a giant dog-slut, leaped to his feet and trotted up the street.
Colleen followed, furious with herself, furious with him, her whole body throbbing with need and lust and heat and...and...
Don't go there again, Connor's voice said. We know how this ends. We've been through this before.
You'd be stupid to do it again.
CHAPTER NINE
BY THE TIME his senior year of high school rolled around, Lucas Campbell was well aware that girls found him very appealing. He didn't mind. Had the typical fun with the occasional girl, making out in a car or stairwell at school, getting fifteen texts a day from some infatuated sophomore. His school had almost two thousand kids in it, and he was out from the shadow of being Bryce's impoverished orphaned cousin, since Bryce went to a private college prep school (days, of course; Didi would never let him board).
But then they moved from Illinois to the tiny town of Manningsport, New York, a postcard type of place with vineyards and a lake that was a far cry from the mighty Michigan. Bryce had gotten into Hobart (thanks to Lucas dragging his GPA into a respectable range), and Didi took a transfer to her company's branch in Corning so she could be closer to her son.
Lucas, on the other hand, got a full scholarship to University of Chicago. When Didi announced the move to Manningsport, he figured he'd stay in Chicago; Stephanie would let him crash on her couch for a couple of months until he graduated. But Bryce wanted him to come along, already distressed that they wouldn't be at the same college, and Bryce generally got what he wanted.
It was fine. Lucas had no ill will toward his cousin, who was easy to get along with and endlessly cheerful. Come August, they'd be parting ways, and he'd even miss the big doofus, so what was another few months? No big deal.
Until he saw Colleen O'Rourke, that quick instant when their eyes met, and something he'd never felt before slammed into his chest at seventy-five miles per hour.
Under normal circumstances, he would've classified (and dismissed) her as another too-popular pretty girl, same as any other.
But something happened when their eyes locked.
She saw him.
Not just his general bad-boy looks, which he had nothing to do with but which had an undeniable effect. Not just a slide of her eyes up and down his torso.
She saw him. Her eyes--her big, wide beautiful eyes changed from smug and amused to...more open somehow. Like something clicked, and she could see his whole life story in one look.
He didn't like it one freaking bit.
By the end of that day, he knew her voice, could tell when she was nearby, because it was the same feeling as when the barometer dropped in front of a storm, that strange, buzzing sensation he'd get before the mighty Midwestern clouds rolled in, churning with electricity and heat. The same feeling as the night he'd put his foot on the rail and felt the train coming, that hum of power.
She felt it, too. He could tell, because she avoided him for weeks.
Couldn't even look him in the eye, the girl who seemed to have a smile and a quip for everyone, universally looked up to by the other girls, universally wanted by the boys.
If she was walking down the hall and he happened to be close by, she'd veer off or stop to talk to someone--the janitor, a teacher, a friend. If he was sitting in the bleachers, watching Bryce play soccer, she made sure to sit far away. She didn't come into Raxton's Hardware, where he'd gotten an after-school job. Only if she absolutely couldn't avoid it would she give him the briefest and most generic smile he'd ever seen.
Ever since his father had gone to jail, Lucas felt as though he was half invisible and half a front. His fellow students in Manningsport were a little
awed by his newness, his half-Puerto Rican looks, as most of them were as white as snow. A mixed-race kid from Chicago? Wow! Cool! Bryce saw him almost as a superhero, where the ordinary act of doing his own laundry was regarded with wide-eyed wonder. To Joe, he was a remembrance of the old neighborhood, an obligation to his late brother.
Sometimes he'd watch Bryce and Joe horse around on the perfect lawn of the perfect house, scuffling over the soccer ball, and a sense of longing would almost drop Lucas to his knees--to go back in time so just once more, he could sit on that old blue plastic crate, handing his father tools as he worked on a car.
The memory of that almost moment on the train tracks, when he'd almost made it to see his father one last time, almost had been able to tell his father he'd been a good dad, almost had that last time to see his father who had worked so hard, who'd done a very wrong thing for very right reasons...just one more time to see those careworn eyes smile at the sight of his son. He'd almost had that.
Joe tried. But he had a son, and Didi made sure he remembered the difference between son and unwanted relation.
As for Didi, he'd learned early on to stay out of the way. If he joined them for Family Movie Night (Fridays) or Family Game Night (Mondays) or Family Hike (Sunday afternoons), she'd get that corpse-sniffing look on her face, her lips tight, her eyes on him for too long, willing him to disappear. Lucas claimed that he'd rather stay in his room and read, which wasn't untrue. But when he heard them laugh, or even just the sound of Didi's voice, relaxed and easy with him not around...he'd just turn up Bryce's cast-off iPod and try to remember his mother's face.
His sister would call once in a while, mostly to vent about Rich. Things weren't working out, and Steph was up to her ears in babies: Mercedes was one of those high-maintenance types who'd learn to talk back before she could walk, and the twins, Tiffany and Cara, were toddlers bent on taking over the world one broken lamp at a time.
So Lucas's plan was simple. Make good grades, get a scholarship to a school in Chicago, go into a field where he'd make a lot of money, take care of Steph and the girls. Head down, nose clean.
It irked Didi that Lucas was smarter than her own son, but then again, this way, she had a built-in tutor. She made sure Lucas checked Bryce's homework and taught him algebraic theorems and quizzed him in history dates. Between that and his own heavy load of homework, running interference when his cousin hung out with the wrong kids or drank too much, the job at the hardware store and cutting lawns on Sundays so he could save as much as he could, Lucas definitely did not have time for a girlfriend.
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