by Inara Scott
“Mrs. Parisi?” Zoe froze in shock. “What a surprise.”
“I didn’t know you were in San Francisco,” the older woman said. She wasn’t frowning, exactly, but had that faintly reproving look that all of Zoe’s mother’s friends shared when they looked at her. It was the same look that had followed Zoe in her rearview mirror when she’d left Los Angeles eleven years ago.
God, she hated that look.
“Well, here I am,” Zoe said, shaking herself loose with a deliberately cheery smile. “In San Francisco. What are you doing here?”
“We moved here a few years ago to be with my daughter, Sophie. You remember her, don’t you? She’s Sophie Anderson now.”
Since they’d lived a block away from each other for the first eighteen years of Zoe’s life, this seemed like an unnecessary question, though evidently designed to emphasize the change of name. Or perhaps Zoe’s status as outsider to the place she had once called home.
“Of course. How’s she doing?”
“Just had her second child,” the older woman replied, her chest puffing with pride. She made an obvious attempt to check out Zoe’s ring finger. “Have you settled down yet?”
“Not yet,” Zoe said tightly.
“Who’s this?” Mrs. Parisi angled her head toward Connor, a mix of curiosity and disapproval in her dark eyes.
Zoe imagined it would take about five minutes after she left the restaurant for the phone call to go back to her mother. “Elena Parisi, this is my friend Connor Ashton.”
Connor stood and nodded from the other side of table. “Nice to meet you.”
Mrs. Parisi’s eyes widened as she followed his move to his full height. “Goodness.”
Zoe was pretty sure in this context, “goodness” meant, “how irresponsible of you to grow that tall.”
She swung her gaze back to Zoe, then peered back and forth between the two of them. “How is your mother?” she asked finally.
“I haven’t spoken to her for some time,” Zoe said. This, of course, was unlikely to be news to Mrs. Parisi, or anyone else who knew her mother.
“I see.” The older woman seemed to be waiting for some kind of apology, or explanation. Zoe just kept her pleasant smile pasted on and refused to give her the satisfaction of saying anything else. When the silence that stretched out between them had gotten too long, even for her, Mrs. Parisi pursed her lips. “Well, I suppose I’ll be going.”
“Lovely to see you,” Zoe said.
The older woman only sniffed as she shuffled away.
“She seems nice,” Connor observed.
His dry statement broke the tension, and Zoe gave a short laugh, though it was hard to entirely shake off the bleak feeling left behind by the unexpected encounter. “That’s one way to describe her.”
“You know her from back home, in Los Angeles?”
She nodded. “It’s weird to see her. I hadn’t heard about Sophie moving here.”
That wasn’t surprising. She’d been scratched off all the Christmas card lists years ago. But she and Sophie had been like sisters, and it hurt all over again to realize that even living in the same city, they would probably never speak to each other again.
Connor studied her. “You know, it occurs to me that I’ve never heard you talk about your family. Or where you grew up.”
“That could be true,” Zoe said. “It’s not my favorite subject.” She picked up her wine and stared down at the red liquid. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The truth was, she’d never talked about it. With anyone.
Once she’d left, she’d never looked back. And why dredge up the past when it was so damn painful?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She glanced up. “What for?”
“Whatever they did to hurt you.”
Shit. Zoe had to blink away a quick prickle of tears. “Yeah, well, old news.” She waved off his concern.
“If you say so.”
“It’s possible it’s still a little raw,” she admitted.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Did she? That was a good question. She’d tried to talk about it a few times before. Once with her friends from law school. Once over a few bottles of wine with Luke and Rafe.
But the words had never come. It never seemed the right time.
She looked back at Connor, and somehow, under his quiet gaze, the story just started to fall out.
“I was engaged once,” she said. “It was the worst mistake of my life.”
Chapter Twelve
In his usual quiet way, Connor did not react to her statement. He just studied her, his regard deep and penetrating. “I have to admit, I would never have guessed that about you. How long ago was this?”
“High school. He was a boy I’d grown up with. Someone from my old neighborhood.” She forced herself to take another bite of gnocchi.
Nothing to see here. Just a failed engagement that caused untold pain to someone I loved. Move along, please.
“High school?” He waited for her to continue. His steady gaze was her undoing, and words that had been dammed up for years threatened to spill over in one huge rush.
“Yeah, crazy, I know. But somehow it made sense at the time. We’d grown up together. His family knew my family. We started dating freshman year of high school, and by senior year everyone was asking when the wedding would be. We got engaged over Christmas and planned to marry right after graduation.”
“Didn’t your parents object?”
Zoe snorted. “They thought it was great. My mother was pretty sure that the only job a woman should have is to make babies and cook and take care of her husband. She’d always hated that I played chess and liked math. She thought if I got married early, I’d avoid all that college nonsense I kept talking about. My dad basically went along with whatever my mother said.”
“And the guy—what was he like?”
It was still hard to picture him without choking up, so she focused on speaking. “Daniel just wanted to make everyone proud. His family ran a hardware store, and he was planning to take over the business. He was never much for school, but he always supported me. Went to chess matches. Made me dinner the night before my big exams. He knew I put a lot of pressure on myself, so he tried to make things easier for me where he could. Also”—she gave a sad laugh—“he knew my cooking sucked.”
“You loved him.” It wasn’t a question, more a note of recognition.
She brushed aside the trace of a tear. “I did. It wasn’t exactly a passionate relationship, but we really cared about each other. Everyone said we were meant to be.”
“What changed?”
She fiddled with her napkin, straightening it on her lap. “I got accepted at Berkeley. It was the happiest day of my life and the worst, all at the same time. Because I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go through with the wedding. I wanted to go away to college, travel, have a career. Daniel didn’t want any of those things. Not to mention that I knew things between us weren’t quite right. I felt sort of ridiculous, like I was chasing a stupid fantasy of passion and romance, but in my heart I wanted more than what we had. So I broke it off.”
Her throat kept trying to close, so she stopped and took a few breaths and told herself she could do this and she wasn’t going to break down in a restaurant in the middle of Little Italy. “My parents were furious. Like, you can’t imagine how angry.”
Her mother, yelling across the house, telling her that she was betraying all of them, that she was turning her back on everyone who loved her. That she was selfish and cruel.
Her father, resolute. His face turning red as he quietly told her how disappointed he was in her.
“Because you’d broken it off?” Connor asked. “I don’t understand. They would rather you’d have gone through with it?”
“They thought I was just having cold feet and being immature. My dad was pissed that he’d already put down deposits on the reception hall and with the caterer. My mom kept say
ing how I was hurting everyone. She was really close with his parents, especially his mom, and she couldn’t imagine how she was going to face her.”
She’d known that telling her family about breaking her engagement would be hard. But she hadn’t anticipated how the rest of the neighborhood would react. The way people looked at her at their local grocery store. The way Daniel’s parents had crossed the street to avoid her when they happened to be walking down the block at the same time. The coldness in the eyes of people who had once been her friends.
“They were wrong,” Connor said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. It didn’t really feel that way at the time. I told Daniel first, of course, and he just cried. He said I was it for him, and he’d never try again.”
“What happened to him?”
“He dropped out of school. Spent the next few months in and out of counseling. I left in the fall for college. When I came back at Christmas, one of my old friends told me he’d tried to kill himself.”
“Jesus.” Connor reached out to grab her hand. “Zoe, that’s horrible.”
She gave him a watery smile and squeezed his hand gratefully. “I got a letter from him about a year later that said he was coming to understand that he’d been depressed for a long time, and he didn’t blame me for anything. But I never saw him again.”
Connor was silent. He rubbed the top of her hand with his thumb, and the soothing rhythm allowed her to take a deep breath. “Where is he now?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. No one would tell me, even then, what happened to him. When I asked my mother why she hadn’t told me earlier that he’d tried to hurt himself, she said his parents didn’t want me to know. They didn’t want me to have anything to do with him or their family. They figured it was my fault, and so did everyone we knew.”
She pulled her hand away from his to wipe off another tear. “I like to imagine he got the help he needed and found someone who loved him the way he deserved to be loved, but I honestly don’t know. I spent a few more nights at home, but I was so hurt I couldn’t stay. I bounced around a few places until break was over, then went back to school. Luckily for me, the financial aid office was really helpful—they found enough loans to get me through the rest of the year.”
“What do you mean? Your parents just stopped paying for college?”
“They weren’t paying for much anyway. I had a scholarship and a bunch of financial aid. But the school was expecting them to make a contribution, so I had to take out enough loans to cover that myself. After that I worked my tail off to find whatever scholarships I could. There was some money for women going into STEM fields, and I qualified for a scholarship in engineering, so I went that route. And then someone suggested I think about patent law, and I did some research and saw how much money you could make. I was piling up the loans, even with my scholarships, so I figured I needed to make as much money as possible.”
“Makes sense.”
“Look, I don’t want to make too much out of this. The real victim in this story isn’t me, it’s Daniel.”
The sympathy in his eyes was nearly her undoing. “Are you sure of that?” he asked. “An eighteen-year-old kid, made to feel like she was responsible for another person’s life? Abandoned by her family? Zoe, I can’t imagine.”
She shook her head. “They were upset. I understand. Everyone loved Daniel. I just wish he could have reached out and let more people help him. I would have done anything I could to make it easier for him.”
“I bet you would have. And I bet he knew that.”
“I hope so.”
“Did you and your mother ever reconcile?”
Reconcile. That was a funny thought. “We were never that close to begin with. But no, I haven’t been back home or talked to my parents since.”
He sat back against his chair. She picked up her wineglass and took a sip. When she’d first found out about Daniel, she’d been so angry and hurt she could barely get through the day without crying. She’d removed her home address from Berkeley’s records so her parents wouldn’t get any mail from the college and ignored a scattered phone call or two from her old area code. Of course, that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been waiting, deep down, to see when her parents would come find her. It hadn’t occurred to her that time might be never.
Eventually, she’d figured this was the way things were meant to be.
She sent them a graduation announcement when she finished her undergraduate degree but never heard back. After that, she put them out of her mind completely.
That part of her life was over.
She bit her lip and looked at his hand. “So that’s my secret life story. I can’t believe I dumped it all on you like that. I’ve never actually told anyone before.”
“Never?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t make many friends in college—I guess I was too raw. It’s hard to share your secrets when you aren’t quite sure who you are or whether you’re a decent person. And once you get in the habit of not talking about something, it’s surprisingly hard to break.”
“But you did tonight.”
“I did tonight.”
She didn’t know quite why. She wasn’t drunk. He hadn’t pressed her. It had been weird and awful to run into Mrs. Parisi, but she could have brushed it over. But something about Connor’s quiet strength made her feel safe enough to open up.
The waiter arrived then with their dinners. Another bottle of wine appeared as well.
After dinner, as they headed for the door, Connor stopped at the entrance to the restaurant, a tiny smile playing at the corners of his lips. “Do you have time for a surprise?”
Zoe held her hand over her heart. “Does it involve chocolate?”
“No. Even better.”
“That,” she said, “is unlikely. However, I will remain open-minded.”
Truthfully, she didn’t want the night to end. The intimacy between them just kept growing, until it felt like there was a sort of bubble around them and she could forget all the reasons why this could never be.
She kept wanting to touch his hand. To let him touch hers. To brush her knee against his. To act on the attraction it was becoming impossible to pretend didn’t exist.
They walked around the corner and down the block. When they stopped in front of a motorcycle, Zoe squealed. “Is that a Southcycle?”
Connor patted one of the handlebars with a look of pride. “Just picked it up this morning.”
It was all black, with a streamlined shape that flowed from sleek handlebars to arched back end. She knew from her research that the teardrop-shaped tank at the front contained the battery, while the smooth midsection held no filters, spark plugs, oil, or exhaust. Just the electric motor, which would be all but silent as it raced down the road.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, running her hand along the top of the frame. Indeed, the bike looked powerful, but not intimidating. Sexy as hell, if she were being honest.
“I know.” He grinned. “It’s my first motorcycle. I’m a little like a kid on Christmas morning.”
His enthusiasm was contagious; Zoe couldn’t help but smile in return. “Is it as fast as they say?”
“Oh, absolutely. Dangerous, I’m sure, but you just twist the handlebars and go. No clutch, nothing. I put it in sport mode to get down here and had to watch so I didn’t end up going seventy in a thirty.”
“They say it’s the fastest motorcycle in the world.”
He nodded. “Faster than gasoline versions. Remarkable engineering. Plus almost no maintenance. No oil to change or clutch to adjust. Just a belt, no chain at all. They’re going to give Tesla a run for their money.”
“It can carry two, right?”
He nodded. “I’ll take you out when your arm is doing better. No one-armed passengers, I’m afraid.”
“Can I sit on it?” It was hard to resist. Her good hand kept trailing up and down the smooth seat. Even though she’d never eve
n ridden a motorcycle before, she suddenly had visions of herself in a helmet and leather jacket, weaving back and forth through traffic.
“Sure.”
She started to hoist herself up, but she was too short to swing her leg over without grabbing onto something, and leaning on one hand made her nervous. “Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Can I help?”
She nodded, though it occurred to her a minute too late that helping meant touching, and touching was definitely something she was not supposed to be doing. Connor got on the bike first, on the rear passenger seat that was positioned above the main seat. Then he reached out toward her. “You back up to the bike, I’ll give you a lift onto the seat.”
She maneuvered herself as close as she could, then felt Connor’s large hands close around her waist. As if she weighed nothing, he lifted her onto the seat in front of him, sidesaddle. She flipped around one leg to straddle the bike.
The feeling was electric.
The seat was smooth, perfectly rounded to support and yet give the rider plenty of room to move. The handlebars called out to her to lean forward and take off.
Though honestly, it was hard to say if it was the motorcycle she was reacting to or the feeling of Connor sitting snugly at her back, his hands on her waist, his legs around hers. “What do you think?” he murmured into her ear. “Do you understand the attraction now?”
Did she understand the attraction? Was it possible to spontaneously combust just from sitting on a leather seat?
She tipped her head back toward him. They were so close, for a moment her cheek touched his jaw. “Yeah, I think it’s safe to say I understand the attraction.”
He laughed, and she felt it rumble in his chest. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day.”
She relaxed and let herself fall against him, forgetting for a moment all the reasons why they needed to stay apart. She felt his breath catch, then he loosened his hold on her waist.
He cleared his throat. “I hate to say it, but we should probably call it a night.”
“Oh, of course!” Zoe sat up with a zing of disappointment and embarrassment. She’d gone one step too far and stepped right through the bubble that had protected this evening from the real world.
