ALL IN (7-Stud Club Book 1)

by Christie Ridgway

  It would take some time, but he’d move on.

  But standing beside Hart, with the waves tossing themselves at their feet and the horizon barely a discernible line between the ocean and the sky, Boone didn’t feel at all certain of it. And he couldn’t imagine why his friend had wanted to come to this place, with the millions upon millions of tiny grains at their feet and the unending stretch of water ahead of them.

  Both made him feel fucking lost and alone, like he had when he was a little kid, like he hadn’t when he was with Gemma, like he felt now, times two, times three, knowing she had severed her ties with him.

  As he thought was best, he reminded himself, trying to be fair when he only wanted to hold his breath until his face turned blue, stomp his size fifteens against the shifting sand, and throw shit around like a four-year-old.

  “What’s going on with you and Gemma?” Hart suddenly asked.

  Boone’s head whipped toward his friend. Was he now reading minds? “What?”

  “You’ve been seen together all over town.”

  “Who told you that?” Boone asked.

  “Everyone who texted or called me. They told me about the fire at the cigar bar, the goat that got loose in the library on Bring Your Pet day, and about your romance with the pretty shopkeeper in town.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” Boone growled. “People shouldn’t be spreading it.”

  “They had to find something to say.”

  Guilt added to Boone’s foul mood. When he himself had talked and texted with his friend while the other man was away, he’d been as inept as anyone at initiating the right kind of reassuring conversation.

  “So…” Hart prompted. “You and Gemma?”

  “There’s no me and Gemma. She’s…” Again, words failed Boone and the ocean air clogged his lungs, making his chest heavy and too tight, like a vice was compressing his ribs. “I didn’t know what to do with her.” Or those smiles, that trust, the essential, delicate femininity of hers that had somehow withstood all his rough edges. She made him want to be a gentleman, but even better, he knew she hadn’t wanted that of him. Not in the least.

  His mood plunged lower and he set his jaw. Where the hell was that acceptance he’d been waiting for? A few hours had passed, and thinking of their breakup still made him want to snap steel beams with his bare hands. He had a terrible hunch this might be his new normal.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know what to do with her?”

  Couldn’t they just stand here in stoic, male solidarity, both silently miserable? Boone thought, crossing his arms over his chest. What the hell was he supposed to say to explain himself? The wind tossed his hair in his face and he shoved it back. “The problem is monogamy—I think it must be learned. In childhood.” He’d never been taught how to treat a woman he loved. “I never saw it, not really. My dad failed once and didn’t try again…not even dating. So I can’t have it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Hart demanded.

  Boone sighed. He was being forced to articulate this? His friend had known him for over twenty years. “I don’t know how to cherish her.” An image came to life in his head, his hand tracing over her hair, the long strands catching on his calluses. “She deserves that.”

  Now Hart finally shut up, granting Boone a long pause of quiet filled only with the sound of the waves crashing and the cries of sea gulls, so desolate a noise it seemed to rake at Boone’s heart.

  “Bullshit,” his friend suddenly said.

  Boone jumped at his harsh tone. “What—”

  “You don’t need to know how to cherish her, you dolt.”

  He stared at the other man. “What?”

  “You just need to want to.” Hart shook his head, then the fire went out of his voice. “That’s the easy part.” He sounded beyond weary now as he continued. “Because when she’s the right woman, nothing else but cherishing will do.”

  At that, his friend gave Boone his back and strode stiffly up the beach.

  Without knowing what else to do, Boone watched his buddy move away from him, seeing a man clearly burdened by the weight of the sorrow he carried. The sorrow Boone would give an arm to help bear, but that he knew at this moment could only be taken on alone.

  As Hart receded in the distance, Boone cast his mind to his own consuming problem. Gemma. The breakup with her was still the wisest move, he decided, despite how hard it was going to be to live without her in his life. It wouldn’t be rational to even consider trying to be the kind of man who could keep her and provide her with the forever-and-always future she should have.

  It was a task too important to fail.

  With another glance at Hart, he sighed, rubbing a spot in the middle of his aching chest. And anyway, thanks to his best friend, he now had an ant’s-eye view of the potential—and terrible—risk of love.

  It would be foolish to court such disaster.

  Chapter 15

  At Gifts for Girlfriends, February 14th proved as busy as Gemma hoped. She’d decided against extending their hours, keeping the usual Sunday 4 p.m. closing time. Because, as May so aptly put it, customers shopping for Valentine’s Day at the last minute deserved to be trolling the aisles of the drugstore scanning for gold among the cheap coffee mugs, molting teddy bears, and shrink-wrapped boxes of waxy chocolates wrapped in fraying ribbon.

  By half-past two, foot traffic was already winding down. They decided to let Molly King go thirty minutes early so she could get home to help with the last minute celebration of life preparations. The teenager left with a grateful smile and May then busied herself with straightening stock. Gemma took a minute to perch on the arm of a sofa in the main showroom, where her mother and Auntie Rita were lounging on armchairs.

  The older women had dropped by to see how their product was selling. Gemma had convinced them to whip up a dozen of those lingerie envelopes, each one a pretty confection in pastel-striped satin, padded with an inch of batting between the layers of material and decorated with a hand-embroidered floral design at one front corner.

  Displayed in the boudoir alongside filmy pieces of lingerie and lightly scented beeswax candles, they’d completely sold out of them during the last few days, the final one snatched up before noon.

  “I can’t believe it,” Auntie Rita said. “I could do that embroidery in my sleep and the material was from your mother’s scrap drawers.”

  “I’ll take all that you can produce,” Gemma said, “though we should think of some other hand-sewn products to feature.”

  “We’re not looking for careers,” her mother cautioned, glancing at her sister. “Rita’s busy. There’s a new man in her life.”

  And there’ll be a new man in yours any minute now, Gemma thought on a sigh.

  “Speaking of dating,” her mother continued, with a second look at Rita. “We’ve been wondering how you’re getting along with that big and handsome Boone. We really enjoyed meeting him.”

  “Yes.” Rita leaned close and fanned her face with both hands. “Such a hunk.”

  Her mother nodded, all O Wise Woman of Romance. “My advice, don’t let that one get away.”

  Suddenly glum—or, face it, just glummer than she’d been feeling since the day began, or actually, since her neighbor had left her in his bed the day before—Gemma slid off the arm of the sofa to land on the seat cushion with a soft bounce. Four nights ago, she and Boone had been quietly talking in bed after they’d nearly destroyed the mattress with a round of wild sex that involved making use of every inch of the king-sized sheets. His four pillows with their respective cases had played outstanding supporting roles.

  Her head on his shoulder, her fingers toying with the hair on his chest, his drawing designs on her bare shoulder, they’d traded stories about their only-child growing-up years. At age nine, Boone had been adopted by Hart and a pack of barely tamed boys who for the next half decade were mostly dedicated to skateboarding and seemed to live in a loose family group, trooping from house
to house for communal meals and crowded sleepovers.

  But before then, as a six-year-old, he’d run away on a summer Tuesday morning only to realize upon slinking back that afternoon there’d been no one home to register his absence.

  She’d stretched up to place her lips on the edge of his jaw, pressing a tender kiss against hard bone. “Your dad left you at home all day when he went to work?”

  “Boone males are very self-sufficient,” he’d answered.

  In a return confidence, she’d synopsized her mother’s many marriages and then wondered aloud why the woman continuously chose the same kind of man, the result of which was the same as well—divorce.

  “Can you give her points for optimism?” he’d asked. “Obviously she’s still out there trying because she values committed relationships.”

  “Well, she’s not very good at them,” Gemma had muttered.

  “Maybe she deserves your sympathy for that instead of your censure,” he’d said mildly, then kissed her with such filthy intent that she’d forgotten her name let alone that brief conversation until right now, when she looked at her mother, coifed and cosmeticized to the nines, fondly hoping her darling daughter had found the man of dreams.

  “I love you, Mom,” she said impulsively, then also hoped it might soften the next blow. “But Boone and I…I wanted just a ‘no strings’ kind of thing and now it’s over.”

  Saying it aloud made it only seem more real…more sad.

  Her mother frowned. “Gemma—”

  “From the start, no real skin in the game,” she said with an airy wave of her hand, thinking that’s how Boone might characterize it. The sentiment either sounded sophisticated coming from her or stupid. “So nobody’s hurt, nothing like that.”

  But it ached a little, she acknowledged, more than a little, to have lost the man’s presence in her life. He could reach high spaces without a stepstool. He’d found the muscle in her back that needed massaging after a long day on her feet. His confident hands, his quiet remarks that could provide sudden insight, or simply the look of him with a pair of kittens crawling up his beefy arms would be…missed.

  Maybe her face betrayed something of the feeling, because her mom said, “Gemma,” in a tone that usually went along with a cool hand on a fevered brow.

  It made her rally. “Look. We all don’t need to be hip-joined to some man—”

  The shop’s bells rang out. She instinctively rose to greet the newcomer and saw that it was…

  “Boone,” she said, taking him in. Devastating, she thought, in dress boots, charcoal slacks, white shirt, and navy sports coat. Despite the more formal dress, there was an air of restless agitation about him that couldn’t be camouflaged. She met him halfway across the room. “What are you doing here?”

  His hands strangled a length of gray silk with blue stripes. “Tie,” he said from between his teeth, as if suffering lockjaw.

  “I…see that,” she replied.

  “I fucking can’t manage it,” he said, working it between his hands as if he wanted to strangle her with the fabric.

  Gemma stepped back. “Uh…”

  “And I have to be at the thing on time because I’m fucking speaking at it, giving the fucking opening remarks, and I can’t fucking tie the fucking tie.” He glared at her like it was her fault and then his gaze dropped from her face to take in the simple wrap dress she wore with a pair of high heels that would make painkillers and wine a necessity at the end of the day.

  “You look nice,” he spit out, like an accusation. “Beautiful.”

  She refused to store the compliment away for later replay. “I usually dress up on Valentine’s Day.”

  May came skipping into the room then, a welcoming grin on her impish face. “A man in the throes of panic by the look of him,” she crowed. “You’re my fifth today. What kind of gift are you looking for?”

  He glanced at her. “I can’t get this around my neck,” he said, the tie dangling from one big hand.

  Her assistant looked to Gemma, mischief in her eyes. “Maybe you’d like to do the honors? You could knot it real tight. Extra tight.”

  She shook her head, because she had no reason to want to punish him. That he’d not told her about today’s event, that he’d not shared with her that he was speaking at today’s event, wasn’t something to be angry over.

  Except she was angry, damn angry, almost angry enough to take that strip of silk and make a noose out of it. But she couldn’t.

  Because she didn’t know how, any more than she knew how to make a four-in-hand or a half-Windsor or whatever the heck the current style called for.

  “No?” May asked.

  Gemma shook her head again.

  “Okay,” her assistant said. “But I only know how to make a bow tie. Will that work?”

  “Goodness,” said Aunt Rita, bustling forward with Gemma’s mother at her side. “You young women need to learn something useful besides changing oil and flat tires. Handling a man’s necktie should be chapter one of Sex Ed.”

  Only in the world of the Marquette women, Gemma thought, bemused, as her mother elbowed her sister aside and handily took care of Boone’s dilemma, while he stooped to accommodate her shorter stature.

  “There,” she said when done, running her palm down the length of silk. “You’ll be just fine.”

  “Right. Thank you.” He nodded, then transferred his gaze to Gemma, and hesitated a moment. “How are you?” he finally said.

  Her anger rose again, making her skin feel tight over the burning blood coursing through her veins. What gave him the idea it was okay to traipse into her place of business like this, when they were done, their friendship already fizzled, to remind her of his handsome face and smokin’ hot body and…

  And all the things unsaid between them.

  And not just about what his afternoon entailed, but about…about…

  Her feelings for him.

  That she’d left “I love you,” unspoken.

  Her body trembled and her heart constricted, making it painful to breathe and even more painful to fake a small smile. “Great,” she told him, even as misery washed over her like a wave.

  “Great,” he echoed, and left in such a hurry his coat flew out behind him.

  As the door shut with a clang of the bells, May shook her head. “That man has a great ass,” she said in admiring tones.

  All three Marquette women looked at her.

  “What?” The younger woman’s hands rose. “He has a great ass, whether or not I want to take it to bed.”

  Gemma made it back to the sofa where she flopped onto the cushions and tried to tell herself she was wrong, that this inconvenient and unwelcome sentiment was due to Valentine’s Day or a virus or something else that would pass. That she hadn’t fallen in love with her neighbor experiment. That her notion of no-strings sex hadn’t turned a one-eighty and now she wanted very much to have Boone all wrapped up for her and with her.

  Damn, was Aunt Rita right and Gemma should she have taken a course in tying knots after all?

  “I’m worried about him,” her mother suddenly said.

  “What?” Gemma’s turned her head to look at Vivien Marquette, who might have a lousy track record when it came to marriage, but who had an instinctive understanding of the male of the species. Not just anyone could find four men—and counting—to make promises at the altar.

  “He looks exhausted,” her mother said. “Like a stiff wind might take him over.”

  Nonsense, Gemma tried telling herself. One, he was the size of a redwood tree. Two, he’d said himself that Boone males were very self-sufficient. Three, his poker crew was probably rallying around him right this very minute.

  “And it seems strange he came here for help with his tie,” her mom continued. “Couldn’t he have found someone at his buddy’s house to help? It was as if before that big event he really needed to see a…a friendly face.”

  Gemma glanced down at her fingers, laced together and white-knuck
led. Friendly? Her friendly face? She’d been less than that.

  Closing her eyes, she forced a mental reprise. Boones were self-sufficient. The poker guys. And…

  And neither could take the place of a woman who cared for him, one who’d seen a softer side of him, especially that endearing look of baffled surprise on his face as a kitten batted his nose. A simple thing that had left her knowing in no uncertain terms that in that big chest of his was an equally big heart. Which meant right now he was struggling to show not a crack in his composure as he faced his closest friends and addressed the tragedy that had taken low people he wanted to comfort.

  “Maybe I should go to him,” she said aloud, testing the sound of it, even as her pulse took up a panicky throb. Maybe she should go to him and declare her true feelings and see if their former friendship could become something else…something that lasted.

  “Are you sure you want to take that step?” Auntie Rita asked, the take that risk implicit.

  No. Yes. No. Yes.

  Her pulse beat redoubled and she ignored it.

  Yes.

  True, it wasn’t like her. After her father had never contacted her again, after the first two stepdads left without forwarding addresses, she’d always held back, protecting herself from truly giving her heart.

  But then Boone had walked into her life and it had slipped so easily away, like it belonged with him. Was she willing to let it go without a rigorous pursuit? Without an immediate, rigorous pursuit?

  Yes. No. Yes. No.

  No.

  Time wasn’t for wasting, she thought, thinking of Hart and Kim.

  Gemma looked at her mom and swallowed past her dry throat. “I think I have to get to him. Be…with him now.” Because maybe, if she reached out instead of pulling back, she’d find that he wanted her still too, maybe even loved her too.

  With an encouraging nod, her mother smiled.

  Yes, Gemma could take a different lesson from the older woman’s life, she decided. Not one about fearing mistakes, but one about leading with optimism.

  Leading with optimism no matter the consequences—because there was no guarantee that Boone would welcome what she felt for him.