A Carpino Series Collection, Books 1-3

by Brynne Asher

  He just sighs at the look on my face and shakes his head. “I’ll give it to her when she starts clawing at me so she’ll leave me alone.”

  “You buy her fancy-schmancy treats, she’ll love you even more, Jude. This is not the way to get her to leave you alone.”

  “Whatever,” he mumbles.

  With that, he takes my hand pulling me down the street to the car.

  Chapter Eighteen

  One More Surprise

  The buzzer goes off on the oven. Yes, an actual buzzer since the oven is probably older than me. I pull out the cake, even though we already had sweets today, we bought it and I was going to make it. It’s later in the evening, I know we won’t be able to eat the whole thing but we can have leftovers for breakfast with coffee and toss the rest. Jude is on the sofa again, this time watching Sunday night football. He told me he’s faring pretty well in the Carpino Clan Fantasy Football League, not that I care who wins, but it’s always fun to be a winner, so good for him.

  Setting the cake on the stove top to cool, I grab my beer and take myself back to Jude. He’s laying out flat, taking up the whole sofa, so I sit my beer on the table and lay down on top of him, fitting myself into the back of the sofa but mostly on top of big comfortable Jude. His arm comes around me, I give him a kiss, lay my head down on his chest and his hand comes immediately to the back of my head and starts pulling his fingers through my hair. This feels so good, I snuggle in as deep as I can get and close my eyes.

  “Cake done?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I answer and we lay like this, in comfortable quiet, for what seems like quite a while.

  I start to doze when all of the sudden I feel my big comfortable Jude get tense and he mutters, “What the fuck?”

  I scarcely hear a couple car doors slamming, then before I know it, there’s pounding at the door and male voices yelling, “Jude, man, open up!”

  Jude stands up taking me with him. “I can’t believe this.” Looking down at me he goes on, “Stay here.”

  “Okay,” I answer quietly, wondering why Jude is so unhappy with his late-night visitors, they certainly seem to know him.

  He stalks through the mudroom to the front door and I can hardly see around him. Two pretty big guys are standing there, but not anywhere as big as Jude and his only greeting is, “What the hell?”

  A loud voice bellows inside. “What the hell? Man, I could ask you the same thing. You’re in Colorado and you don’t call us? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Then another resigned voice says, “Sorry. He insisted on coming up. If I didn’t bring him, he was going to drive himself.”

  Jude, still not moving out of the doorway or giving them any indication they’re invited in, says, “I’m busy. I’ll call next time.”

  “What the fuck is up with you?” the loud one yells way louder than necessary. “I haven’t talked to you in months. Mike runs into your dad, he tells him you’re here, we drive all the way up and you’re gonna tell us you’re fucking busy?”

  With that, Jude is bumped out of the way and the blond charges through with a dark headed guy following, shaking his head in apology to Jude. I’m standing at the far end of the sofa now and as soon as his eyes come to me, the blond stops in his tracks. The dark headed guy follows suit, stopping next to him. I hear Jude slam the front door and he strides back though the room, looking none too happy with his guests. I don’t know what to do, the visitors are staring at me like I’m an alien and Jude is staring at his visitors like he wants to murder them. We’re all in a strange triangle around the stagnant room with no one uttering a word.

  Remembering my manners, I start, “Hey. I’m Gabby.”

  The blond’s gaze on me turns even more intense and his eyes coldly scan my body, making me even more uncomfortable. His lips tip up on one side and turning to Jude, he says, “Nice.”

  What in the hell?

  I look to Jude who is glaring at him and bites out what sounds like a warning. “Conner.”

  “I’m Mike. Nice to meet you, Gabby,” the dark-haired guy offers, obviously having more manners than his friend.

  “Mike, a pleasure,” I return quietly and look back to the blond who now has his arms crossed, staring at me. I try again. “Conner, is it?”

  Conner, again, doesn’t speak to me but rather looks back to Jude to deliver his next blow. “What the fuck, man? I know you go through women like dirty socks, but you never bring pussy up here. She must be good if you want her for more than one night.”

  My stomach drops as I hear Jude growl, “Get the fuck out!”

  I look to the side to see Jude advancing on Conner, but since Mike shares Conner’s point of our weird triangle, he was closer and steps in front of Conner to put a hand in Jude’s chest. But Jude is bigger and stronger. He reaches the twosome, stretching around Mike to grab at Conner’s sweater and the shoving and pushing begins. Conner detangles himself from Jude as Mike gets in a good shove separating the two.

  “Jude, settle down. We shouldn’t have come. We were out and he’s been drinking since this afternoon. I mentioned I ran into your dad, he said you were here for the weekend, and Conner wanted to see you. He didn’t mention you had company. I’m really sorry, man. We’ll leave.” Mike turns to me. “I’m sorry, Gabby.”

  I can’t move. My brain is racing and I don’t know what to say or do. But there’s no chance to think further because the man drama in front of me continues to unfold.

  “Fuck you, Mike,” Conner says, feeling brave. “It’s like he’s fucking disappeared. He finally gets out of the Force, gets some government job that moves him everywhere and when he has the chance to be back home, he chooses to live in fucking Nebraska? And he won’t even return my calls. What, can I not come and see my brother-in-law when he’s in town?”

  Jude’s head swings around to find my eyes. I immediately reach my hand out to the back of the sofa to hang on. Brother-in-law? How? The far part of my brain realizes how they could be related, especially with the look Jude is giving me.

  “Brother-in-law?” I murmur, asking to no one in particular, but needing an answer from someone—anyone.

  “I see she doesn’t know about Julia,” Conner says, slurring his words. Turning his head, he speaks directly to me for the first time dropping the final bomb. “My dead sister.”

  Dead sister?

  “Shit, she must be one hot piece for you to keep her here for a whole weekend,” he slurs to Jude.

  I close my eyes—my face is hot and my ears are ringing. I start breathing hard, I’ve got to get out of this room, away from them. Opening my eyes, I look at the three of them and mutter, “I’m just going to, um…” I look around desperately for an escape and see the bedroom door, “go get ready for bed. The altitude, you know, makes you tired. I’ll just … well … let you all catch up. So nice to meet you both.” My last words are barely a breath and I turn to half run to Jude’s bedroom and try not to slam the door but don’t really know if I succeed.

  Locking myself in, the tears burn in my eyes and nose as I lean against the closed door sliding down to the floor on my ass. I hear Jude yelling at them both to get the fuck out of his house. I hear a scuffle, wince at the sound of glass breaking and scattering. Conner is yelling back at Jude, saying more awful things about me and Mike is trying to play mediator.

  I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t take anymore. Climbing to my feet, I move to get away from the voices and go to the bathroom but can still hear them. Turning, I look for somewhere to escape—anywhere—knowing full well there’s nowhere to go. I open the shower to start the water and strip off my clothes. Not being able to rip them off fast enough, I step in and the water hits me like a Mac truck—ice cold, not having a chance to heat up yet. Not caring, I put my head under the water to drown out the noise of fighting from the other room and my body starts to shake from the cold water, but I stay where I am.

  Finally getting relief from the voices, my brain has a chance to catch up with al
l I’ve just learned and the tears start to flow. Jude was married. Jude’s wife is dead. This news is so tragic, but why hasn’t he told me? Who hides that they have a dead wife? He’s asked me to trust him and I did. I trusted him completely. But those comments about all the other women in Jude’s life, comparing me to them, combined with the terrible things Conner was saying about me is too much. The possibility that what we have doesn’t mean to Jude what it means to me rips me apart.

  “Gabby!” Jude shouts from outside the bedroom. I don’t answer and hear him at the door pounding. “Gabby!”

  I want to go home. But I’m over six hundred miles away from home. My only way home is in a plane flown by Jude. I’m trapped. And what felt like a sliver of heaven just thirty minutes ago now seems like my personal hell that I can’t escape.

  “Gabby!” Then I hear the crashing of the bedroom door. Holy shit, he broke the door open. Before I could process Jude busting through the bedroom he’s standing with the shower door open looking at me.

  His voice is low. “Get out, Gabby.”

  “Leave me alone,” I plead, not caring a bit that I’m standing here naked in front of him. “Please, just leave.”

  “Gabby, let me explain. Let me talk to you.”

  I remotely realize he has a cut lip and his t-shirt is ripped at the neck. I can’t concentrate on the result of his scuffle because the tears start flowing again and I bring my hands up to my hair. “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to be by myself. Just go … I don’t know, go somewhere.”

  “Sugar, I’m not going anywhere. Get out of the shower. Now.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do, Jude. Not anymore. Leave me alone!” I shout.

  With that he reaches in and flips the shower off. Grabbing a towel off the rack, he steps into the shower with me and wraps me up and starts drying me off. I struggle against him, push him away but he’s just too big and he wraps me up with my arms pinned inside the towel. And damn it all to hell, my tears won’t stop. Resigned, I realize that there’s nothing I can do to stop him. Mostly dried, he wraps the towel around me and leaves the shower for a nanosecond, coming back with a big flannel plaid shirt. Ripping the towel off me he slips it up my arms and buttons a couple buttons. Putting an arm behind my back and before I realize what’s happening, I am up and he is walking out of the shower carrying me to the bedroom.

  “Jude. Put me down!”

  Using his soft raspy voice through my wet hair, he says, “Stop it, Gabby, you’re gonna get cold.” He puts a knee to the bed, deposits me with my back to the pillows, covering me up tight even though my hair’s dripping. Not foreseeing his next move, I pull my knees to my chest and scoot back as far as I can away from him with the covers tucked tight, but he proceeds to sit close in front of me, straddling me with his legs bent, essentially boxing me in.

  Shit and damn.

  “Why can’t you just leave me alone? You can’t just carry me around putting me where you want me.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone. If I have to tie you down, you’re gonna listen to what I have to say.”

  Starting to feel my ire once again at the thought of him tying me down to listen to him, I say, “Fine. Let me have it, Jude. This can’t get any worse, can it? I mean, I’ve learned a lot tonight. I must be really good, huh? Not only am I one of many in a long line of pussy, but I must be good enough for you to keep around for a while. Well, good for me,” I bite out, breathing hard. I’m so pissed, my tears have even dried up.

  “Gabrielle,” Jude growls with a warning. “You know that’s not that way it is between us. You know.”

  “I thought I knew, Jude. I thought I knew a lot of things. But maybe you should tell me. Tell me all about your past now that someone else has let it out of the bag. But when you’re done, I’d like to know why you’ve kept things from me, important things. Like the most important things, Jude. You know everything there is to know about me. Everything. Why do I not know that you had a wife?”

  “And two children.”

  I again hear my breath being pulled in and I push back into the pillows as far as I can. “What?”

  There’s something working in Jude’s eyes, something between pain and anguish. “I was married, Gabby. It seems like a lifetime ago. We met in high school, Julia was Conner’s younger sister. Conner, Mike and I were tight and Julia and I started dating when I was a senior and she was a sophomore.” He takes a breath. This is obviously hard for him to talk about.

  “Jude, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m sorry,” I whisper, now feeling bad for being a demanding bitch. I, of all people, know how it feels to have to dredge up the past, reliving a nightmare.

  “No, Gabby. You need to know, I shouldn’t have waited so long,” he says, pulling in another breath. “We were young, but we knew what we wanted and had a plan. I went to the Academy, she got in a couple years of college and I married her as soon as I could, the week after I graduated. I was twenty-two and she was just twenty. Her parents weren’t happy about her marrying so young, but back then we felt like we’d waited a lifetime and they knew they couldn’t stop us. I was assigned to the base in San Antonio, continued my flight training, we lived on base and she took classes while working part time. We had nothing but felt like we had everything.”

  The sadness in his eyes seeped into his face. Sitting so close, Jude boxing me in with his hands at my waist, I’ve never seen that look on his face before and it tore through me. I can tell this is hard for him, but he continues. “We were happy, so it didn’t matter what we had. Julia wanted to start having babies right away, but I held her off. I wasn’t blind to the fact that we were young and I wanted her to be able to finish college so she wouldn’t regret it later. I held her off for two years, enough for her to get a degree then we started trying. It took a couple months, her period was always irregular, but she was over the moon and I never saw her as happy as the day she told me she was carrying my baby.”

  The tears are streaming down my face again, knowing that however Jude’s story turns out it is going to be tragic. He brought his hands up to my face, his thumbs swiping my tears, but they just kept coming.

  His fingers tensed in my hair and continued in his quiet raspy voice. “We had about five weeks of happy. I was away on a two-day training mission and by the beginning of the second day, I couldn’t get ahold of her which was unusual. She was teaching at the time, but she never went more than an hour or two without calling me back. I finally had a friend on base go to check on her.” Jude pulled in another gulp of air. Letting it out he finished on a whisper, “They found her in our bathroom, so much blood and she’d been dead for hours. I wasn’t there, Gabby. She was by herself and she couldn’t get help.”

  My chest rises violently with my breathing my heart beats wildly while Jude is still holding my head in his big hands. It is all so overwhelming but I had to ask, “Miscarriage?”

  He shakes his head. “Not a normal miscarriage. The autopsy showed she had an ectopic pregnancy. She was farther along than we thought because her periods were irregular, the embryo had split giving us twins and they were planted in one of her fallopian tubes. It was rare, but with her being farther along than we thought and two babies growing inside of her, they didn’t catch it early like they normally do. It caused her tube to burst. She was by herself and probably in so much pain she couldn’t even get to a phone to call for help. She bled out and died in our fucking bathroom, alone, with my babies inside of her. I lost all three of them in one day. And I don’t care that they were only weeks old—they were mine and always will be. I had a wife, two babies and then I had nothing.”

  It’s at this moment I realize I love him.

  Yes, it hurts that he didn’t tell me about his past—so badly that I can literally feel it in my heart. And if I’m just another woman to him and he doesn’t feel the same about me, it will rip me to shreds. But I can’t help it, I love him. I know the look in his eyes, I’ve experienced that look and I
hate to see it on his beautiful face.

  Jude is blurry now from my tears and I’m shaking my head. Not being able to take it another second, I climb out from under the covers and crawl into his lap, straddling him. He pulls me into his arms, stuffing my face in his neck, one hand at my head and the other at my ass.

  “I’m so sorry,” I mumble into his neck, not being able to stop my tears. “I’m sorry you lost them and I’m sorry I was such a bitch.”

  His fingers tense on me and he says into my hair, “Sugar, you weren’t a bitch. I should have told you sooner. It’s been nine years and I’ve gotten used to keeping it to myself, buried deep. As time went on, I didn’t know how to tell you or when to bring it up. It’s not fun telling people you were a widower at the age of twenty-four. The more time that passed made it harder. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner and I’m really sorry all that happened out there. That shouldn’t have been the way you found out, it should have come from me. Conner is a mean drunk and always has been. I could fucking kill him for what he said to you.”

  Not knowing what to say to all that, I hold on tighter. Yes, he should have told me sooner, but I know as well as anyone there is never a good time to have to explain death and heartache. But as much as I hurt for Jude, for what he lost, the two children he never got to hold in his hands, the wife he clearly loved more than anything, I’m now more conflicted than ever about what I mean to Jude.

  And I’m exhausted.

  Emotionally drained.

  Trying to catch my breath from my latest crying jag, all I can do is hold on to him because I don’t know how to ask him about what all this means for us. Do I even want to know? I don’t know how I feel about being lumped into the large category of women that Jude has clearly had a lot of in the past nine years. I feel the fear and panic starting to take over, to the point that I can’t learn anymore tonight. I don’t even want to know about the last nine years of his life since he lost the family he loved so deeply and completely.