That’s when Gunnar seemed to regret that small confidence. “Eh, I don’t remember. What’s your favorite food, anyway?”
He was really nice to my nephew. But when Ginny took Aaron downstairs to get him ready for bed, I was relieved.
She came back, though, and now she’s sitting on my bed, interrogating me. “How long is he going to sleep on our couch?” she asks. “I hope it lasts a week.”
“A week?” I whisper sharply. “Why?”
“Eye candy,” she whispers back. “Why won’t you tell me all the details from last night?” She’d tried all morning to get a story out of me, but the pie kitchen isn’t very private. I don’t want to talk about it, anyway. I’m confused. That man lied to me, and I had wild monkey sex with him anyway.
“Maybe he has supersonic hearing,” I say under my breath. “Besides, I don’t kiss and tell.”
“You should,” she argues. “This is big. No more dry spell.”
“Shhh!” I hiss. “I can’t believe you’re focused on my sexual exploits instead of the reason that man is on our couch. You seem barely interested that we may be in danger.”
Ginny gives me a maddening shrug. “Those hacker murders don’t have a thing to do with us. And half the neighborhood uses our WiFi, because I made you spring for the fastest service.”
“Sure, sure,” I sniff. “A murderer walks among us, and you just want to know if Gunnar has a nice penis.”
“Does he?” She presses her hands together in a prayer position.
“God, woman. Go back downstairs and read a dirty book. I don’t want it to seem like we’re in here gossiping about him.”
“But we are in here gossiping about him,” she points out.
“No. You’re digging for dirt, and I’m refusing to provide any.”
“You owe me,” Ginny says, rising from my bed. “I will get this story. Was it amazing?”
I shrug, but my face heats, giving me away.
“I knew it!” she squeaks. “Spalding can go eat a bag of dicks. Who needs him, anyway?”
“Not me. I don’t need you right this second, either.” I make a shooing motion. “Go on. I need my sleep.”
“Ten bucks says you don’t get any sleep.” She points at the door and wiggles her eyebrows.
“You’re the only one keeping me awake,” I point out.
“You’re no fun. Hey—what’s that?” She points to a small device on my bedside table.
“Oh, it’s a panic button. It’s something Gunnar’s company lent me, just in case. If you press it, a herd of badass security guys will come running.”
“Do they all look like Gunnar?” Ginny asks. “Maybe I should just—” She reaches for the button.
“Ginny! Don’t!”
She cackles, withdrawing her hand. “Why should you have all the fun? Goodnight, Posy.”
“’Night.”
She finally leaves.
Alone at last, I tuck myself into bed. But Ginny was right, damn it. I don’t sleep. What’s more, the floors in this old building squeak, and I keep hearing Gunnar walking slowly around my living room. Maybe there’s been a development.
I’d better check, right?
Taking care to tie a light robe around my nightgown, I tiptoe into the darkened living room, where Gunnar is seated on my sofa, head bowed.
He looks up the moment I open my door. “Hi, honey,” he says. “Am I keeping you awake?”
“A little,” I admit. “But not because you’re loud.”
“You want me to go? I could take a chair out in the hall.”
I shake my head. “No way. It’s fine. I just wondered if there was a reason you weren’t sleeping.”
His smile is no less potent in the dark. “Nothing worrisome. Just thinking too much.”
“What about?”
He cocks his head and considers me for a second. “Can I ask you a question? The other night, before everything got complicated, why did you ask me out?”
“Oh.” Well, crap. I don’t really want to admit how attractive he is to me. “Do I need a good reason? We have some chemistry. And I was tired of being that boring person sitting home at night while my ex walks the path of joy with a woman ten years younger than I am.”
“Makes sense.” He reaches over and strokes my cheek, and I lean into his hand without even realizing it.
“The better question is why you turned me down,” I point out.
“Only because my investigation got more complicated than I expected. See, before your break-in—when I thought I was just looking for a stranger in your cafe—I was perfectly happy to bang the hot boss.”
I roll my eyes, even though I like the sound of that, and I’m incredibly flattered.
“But after that night, I found myself digging into the details about your divorce and trying to figure out if someone was targeting you specifically. And that's when it got weird. I didn't want to read up on your private life and then pretend to ask you a bunch of questions I already knew the answers to.”
This answer isn’t what I expected. “So you do have some scruples under there somewhere.”
“Oh, I have lots of them,” he says quietly. “My job might seem strange to you—lying to strangers and sticking my nose in other people’s business. But the world is run by people who just take as much as they can, from whomever they want, as often as possible. I try not to be that guy. And I try to protect my clients from those guys.”
My heart rate seems to slow down as I listen to these words. But I’m still not sure about him. “You confuse me. I want so badly to believe that you're one of the good guys, or that good guys even exist.”
“They exist. But being a good guy isn't always a simple thing to be. Not in my line of work. There are lots of moments when I’m not sure what to do, even though I work for the best guys in the world.”
“I’m glad to hear that. But one of the reasons I hired you was that you said you needed the money for your sick dad.”
He flinches. “Point taken.”
“You didn't need the money at all,” I point out. “But a sick dad? That’s very manipulative.”
Gunnar leans back against my couch and tucks his hands behind his head. “Yeah, and the funny thing is I use that lie all the time. It’s my favorite one.”
“Your dad isn't sick?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. “I honestly wouldn't know. I haven't spoken to him in about twenty-five years.”
“Oh. Why not?”
Gunnar’s eyes cut over to mine. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m sure it is,” I say quietly. “But why is information such a one-way street with you? You asked me to trust you, and to invite you into my home. You’ve read everything legally available about the state of my failed marriage and my struggling business.”
“Some of it isn’t legally available,” he murmurs. “And I read it anyway.”
“Nice,” I say. “I’m so happy to be an open book for you.”
Gunnar sighs. “But it’s embarrassing to me. You’re not the only one on this couch with daddy issues. When I was a kid, I thought it was normal that my dad didn’t live with us in our Queens apartment.”
“Where did he live?” I ask, not bothering to hide my curiosity.
“I don’t actually know. I never went there. He was my dad, and I accepted the whole situation as normal. Some mornings—maybe once a week—I’d wake up, and he was there, drinking coffee at the kitchen table with my mother. It was sporadic, though. There’d be months when we saw a lot of him, and then he’d disappear for a while. My mother said he traveled for work.”
“Oh.” I swallow hard, picturing a small Gunnar waiting for his daddy to show up again.
“He wasn’t very interested in me,” Gunnar says quietly. “The only thing we bonded over was baseball. He started showing up in the evenings sometimes, especially during the summer. I didn’t care much for baseball before that, but I’d sit beside him on the sofa, and he’d tell me all the players�
� stats. He’d bring me those cheap packs of baseball cards, and they became my favorite thing in the world.”
I sat very still, listening to this story. It’s the only personal thing Gunnar had ever shared about his past.
“He even said: ‘we’ll go to a game sometime when you’re older.’ And I think he regretted it immediately, because I started asking him when. Other boys in my neighborhood had been to Shea Stadium with their dads. The bleacher seats were cheap, right? And I was starting to notice that my dad had really nice clothes, and that he brought expensive-looking bottles of wine to our house to drink with my mother. So when my thirteenth birthday was coming—it’s in July—I just asked him if he could get tickets. There was a home game that day, too. Against the Colorado Rockies.”
I hold my breath, because I don’t know where this story is going, but I’m betting it’s no place good.
“He said we’ll see, like parents everywhere.” Gunnar chuckles. “But then, three days before my birthday, he turned up with a wrapped gift, telling me to open it on my birthday. So I asked him about the baseball game. And he said—sorry, kid, I’m traveling. I was crushed, because I’d spent the week picturing us in the stadium together, eating hot dogs and popcorn.”
I wait, knowing the story isn’t over.
“On my birthday I opened the present, it was a new glove with a ball. That seemed like a nice consolation prize to me, because at least it was baseball. And then I sat down to watch the game on TV, even though he wasn’t there.” Gunnar chuckles bitterly. “Maybe three minutes later I saw his face on the screen. He was sitting in the second row—the power seats—with a hot dog in his hand, and his arm around another boy who looked something like me.”
My gasp is full of rage. “What?”
“Yeah.” He smiles, but it’s sad. “My mother never expected that to happen, I guess. She sort of stuttered through an explanation. She told me he was married to someone else, and he had two other children, and a penthouse somewhere on Park Avenue.”
“Oh my God. And I thought my father was a dick. You have siblings that you’d never met?”
“Still haven’t. They’re better off not knowing their father is a tool.”
My heart aches to hear it. “What happened the next time he came back?”
“He didn’t. I told my mother I hated him, and I didn’t want to see him again. It was just something you say in anger, you know? But she must have told him to stay away. And he did—at least as far as I can tell. She struggled after that, and I felt kinda bad. But she never complained. She died the year before I met you, so I never heard the whole story—the version you’d tell your adult kid when he was ready.”
I lean back against the sofa, stunned. “I’m sorry, Gunnar. And you haven’t seen him since?”
“Nope.” He shakes his head. “And I never did make it to a game at Shea Stadium before they tore it down. That’s my strange little tale, Posy Paxton. Now you know. Our fathers have a few tricks in common.”
“You figured it out well before I did, though. I spent two decades of my life trying to please mine.”
“We both tried to please him, if memory serves.” Gunnar reaches over and gives my elbow a squeeze.
Sitting here on the sofa in the dark apparently makes both of us feel confessional. “You know, right after I got the bar manager’s job, I walked in on my father making out with one of the waitresses.”
“Really. I wish I could say I was surprised.”
“Well I was. But there they were. She was that blond—a few years older than I was. A Parson’s student, I think?”
“Greta?” Gunnar guesses. “Was that her name? Or Gretchen? I think I saw them together once, too. There was a lot of giggling, and then she came out of his office. I wondered.”
“You never said anything,” I grumble. It was a terrible shock seeing my father lip-locked to a college girl. He and my mother never seemed to have a very happy marriage. And they divorced a few years later. But the flagrance of my father’s actions had stunned me.
“What was I supposed to say? I was a college kid, too, paying his way through school on tips. You don’t critique the company the boss keeps. I didn’t even have proof.”
He’s right, of course. “You understood him before I did. And I lived with the man for two decades. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between you and me—wits and cynicism. Your job acknowledges the underbelly of humanity. Mine assumes that everything is fixable with a slice of very expensive pie. I guess it’s no shock that you’re more successful.” I kick the edge of the coffee table in frustration, and all I get is a pain in my toe.
“Hey now, don’t do that.” He reaches down and grabs my feet, pulling both of them into his lap. “In the first place, you run the most successful pie shop in SoHo.”
“The only pie shop in SoHo.”
He smiles. “That’s not the point. Your optimism is the thing I like best about you. There’s a bar with your family’s name on it—you decide to figure out how to run the place, with no help from the man who’s supposed to pass it down to you.”
“I had help from you, though,” I point out.
“So what?” He shrugs. “You got in there and rolled up your sleeves. You measured gin by the half ounce, and invented a song to help you remember all the ingredients in a Harvey Wallbanger. Even when you were irritating, you were really pretty cute. And that’s because of your upbeat attitude. We can’t all be cynical grouches.”
“Vodka, Galliano and orange juice. Plus a dash of self-righteousness and incompetence. I was an irritating rookie, wasn’t I?”
“Occasionally.”
“You told me I should wear V-necks, and my tips would improve. Instead of thanking you for the advice, I gave you a lecture about feminism.”
“I deserved it. That was just gratuitous on my part,” he says with a grin. His strong hands begin to massage the arch of my foot, his thumb lovingly stroking my skin.
“Omigod,” I moan, and then slap a hand in front of my mouth. There’s a chance my sister is still awake, reading one of her favorite dirty books and listening for signs of mischief upstairs.
Gunnar snickers, and then switches feet. I basically melt back onto my sofa and try not to moan like a porn star. I spend a lot of time on my feet, and they’re often achy at the end of the day. Nobody has given me a foot rub since …
Ever. I have literally never had a foot rub like this. Gunnar works his hand up my ankle and then back down again, stroking the muscles, smoothing the skin. And how did I not know how sensitive the bottoms of my feet were? The longer the massage goes on, the looser I feel.
And, fine. I’m turned on. All it takes is a foot rub and I’m ready to strip off my clothes and let him do me on the sofa. The sooner the better.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly. I refuse to admit that Gunnar has turned on my libido as easily as I can turn on the oven broiler.
“Uh huh,” he says, as a knowing smirk appears on his face. “Me too. Why don’t you come closer and we can do nothing together?”
I don’t move, though, because I don’t want to seem as eager as I feel. I still have Spalding’s critique ringing in my ears.
“You don’t trust me,” Gunnar says, his thumbs making sweet love to the arch of my foot.
“I’m confused about you,” I admit. “But it’s not just that. I have an uneasy relationship with—” I drop my voice down so low it’s a miracle he can hear me. “—Sex.”
“Hmm,” he says, switching my right foot for my left. My feet are basically sexual organs now. Are footgasms real? “How did—” he drops his voice the same way I did “—sex do you wrong?”
“It was Spalding who did me wrong,” I admit.
“How ’bout I do you right?” Gunnar asks with a grin. “I didn’t hear any complaints last night.”
“Oh, there weren’t any complaints,” I whisper. “But last night was a lightning strike. I don’t believe it ca
n happen like that again. I’m not—” How to phrase it?
“You’re not what? My lightning bolt is ready, baby.”
I let out a snort. “I’m not as confident as you. I’ve been told that I’m not any fun.”
His hands go still right in the middle of a glorious instep rubdown. “Come again?”
We’d like to! my hormones shout.
“I’m not fun. I don’t have moves. You didn’t notice last night, because we were both liquored up on adrenaline. But before last night I’d only slept with one man in my life, and apparently he was just putting up with me all those years. He says I’m …” I swallow hard.
“What?” Gunnar whispers, and his eyes have gone scary.
“A starfish,” I whisper.
Gunnar’s head jerks back like he’s been slapped. “Baby, that’s just bogus. I have scratch marks on my back that prove he’s a liar. Do you know what kind of man calls his wife a starfish?”
I shake my head slowly.
“A cheating man. A guy who needs his wife to divorce him so he can bang a younger woman. Which he only wants in the first place because he’s afraid to get old and die.”
Everything goes quiet inside me. I’ve been needing to hear that for a long time. I mean—Ginny said basically the same thing. But she’s my sister. She’s always on my side. Gunnar must think I’m okay in bed, or he wouldn’t be staring at me right now, his expression full of heat and intensity. “Thank you for saying that.”
“It’s just the truth.” He eases my feet off his lap. Without a word, he crooks his finger at me.
Oooh! My hormones squeal. Gunnar wants us.
I’m on all fours without even realizing it. And then I’m crawling toward him.
“Damn,” he whispers. “Your ex is the dumbest man on the planet.”
If I wasn’t already humming with desire, that would have done it.
“Come here, honey. Kiss me.” He beckons again. Then he kicks one leg up onto the couch, orienting his body in my direction, waiting with a wicked gleam in his eye.
I have courage running through my veins. So I reach for his fly, pop the button on his pants, and lower the zipper. Without waiting for an invitation, I reach inside his briefs and curl my hand around his erection.
Loverboy Page 19
