“No, not so much. I mean, I ski a little. I like to walk, but not places that require a backpack weighing me down. San Francisco has some great places for walking. The Presidio and the Coastal Trail. Across the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“And yet you always seem to have so much energy, just like Lee does.”
“Different to Lee. I’m not as athletic. I’m just not. But I get bored if I’m not doing something, and if my creative side isn’t engaged. I guess that’s it. Lee’s energy is athletic, mine’s creative. Making something with my hands. Or appreciating what someone else has made. I’m loving the sight of the changes unfolding at the resort.”
“You sit in the office, mostly.”
“I have a ton of work to do on the new website, choosing the right photos and putting together some specials and packages that we’ve never offered before. In spirit I’m out there with the guys, jackhammering old concrete, because I can’t wait to see how it’s going to look.”
“Your sister must be due home soon.”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Will your parents come back up from South Carolina?”
“They’re already on the road. They’ll stay somewhere overnight and get here around lunchtime, if they stick to their usual plan. I wish I could have held them off for longer, but they want to see Mary Jane. Or that’s the excuse, anyhow. I think what they really want is to micromanage my paving choices.”
He laughed and leaned back, and she wanted to follow him with her body, lean toward him across the table until he changed direction and bent to her and smiled into her eyes and touched her mouth with his, right there at the table.
Need for his body drenched her like rain, so powerful that she had to close her eyes while she suffered through it. She could not let this show. She must not.
When she opened them again, he was staring down at his fingers, clicking his nails together, while his whole face had tightened and narrowed.
“We should go,” he said. “It’s getting late. I’ll drop you back at your car.” He threw some notes on the table to cover the check, and when she tried to pay her share he just growled at her. “This one’s mine, Daisy. You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for Kyle’s accident, which was my responsibility, not yours.” He sounded so firm about it, or even angry, that she didn’t object, just nodded in silence and picked up her purse.
* * *
Letting out a string of curse words inside your head was really not an effective strategy for getting unwanted physical responses under control, Tucker decided. Just get her back to her car, he coached himself. Say good-night, polite and short and clean, let her drive away.
It should have been easy. The visitor parking lot at the hospital was nearly emptied out, allowing him to pull up right beside her vehicle. She was supposed to hop out of the passenger seat, say a quick thanks and open her car door...
But this was Daisy, and she wasn’t keeping to the script.
“I want to ask if there’s any news on Kyle,” she said as she slid her neat, pretty butt from his passenger seat. He could tell she was tired, but she was fighting it off, determined to do the right thing. “I’ll see if anyone will tell me anything at the E.R. desk, or maybe Rebecca will still be around.”
Hell, I hadn’t spared a thought for Kyle.
Tucker had had other things on his mind, and once again he cursed himself internally for the way his attraction to Daisy was messing with his priorities.
“Let me do that,” he answered her. “I’ll text you if there’s any news.”
“Maybe we should both go in.”
“I don’t know how much they’ll tell us.”
But they didn’t need to go inside, as it turned out. There was a smokers’ area near the corner of the building, and as they approached the main entrance they realized that the female figure standing there with hunched shoulders and a glowing cigarette tip was Rebecca. She recognized them at the same moment, stubbed out her cigarette and stepped toward them as they approached, her face brightening into a smile as she told them, “He’s out of the coma!”
“That’s great news,” Tucker said.
“He’s not talking yet, but he opened his eyes and squeezed my hand to say that he knew who I was.” Her voice broke on the word and she dabbed at her eyes. “The doctors are saying everything looks good for a full recovery.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“He’s such an idiot.”
“It wasn’t his fault, Rebecca.”
“It was, in part. Or it was his mom’s. He didn’t tell you he has epilepsy because he thought he wouldn’t get the job if you knew. That was on Annette’s advice. Of course. Never tell the truth when you can tell a stupid lie instead.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “And then his medication ran out a day or two ago, and he didn’t manage to get to the drugstore. He always leaves it till the last dose. I’ve told him not to do that. He asked Annette to pick it up for him, and she promised she would, but she didn’t. Of course,” Bec repeated. Then she shook her head. “I could kill her. Why did he ask her and not me? Hasn’t he learned by now? I’d have been at the drugstore in five minutes.” She gave another wry smile. “Sorry. Issues. Not your problem. The two of you, interrupting your date for this, I’m so sorry.”
It wasn’t a date.
Tucker could practically feel Daisy wanting to make the correction, just as he did, but neither of them said it. He didn’t know if it was worse to let it go.
“I’m so glad it’s good news,” Daisy said instead, reaching out to give Bec’s hands a quick squeeze. Bec squeezed back, and it was all so natural, the contact and then the letting go, and he felt almost crazy with envy and need.
Touch me. Squeeze me. My hands, not hers.
“I’d better get back to him,” Bec was saying. “Annette didn’t stay. Thank the Lord.” She shook her head again and pressed her lips together as if fighting not to give vent to her complicated feelings.
Tucker understood. He’d felt that way in his teens over his father, and he felt that way now, about Daisy, everything inside him pushing and pulling in multiple directions at once. “Give us a report anytime there’s any news,” he told Kyle’s girlfriend. “Text or call, whatever you need. We won’t expect Kyle back at work until his doctors say he’s ready.”
“You mean you still want him back?” She seemed astonished, and tears filled her eyes once more. “I assumed you’d... That’s so good. Not that I thought you’d fire him because of the epilepsy. But because he hadn’t told you about it. Because he’s such an idiot sometimes, when he listens to Annette instead of me. I just thought this would be your moment for letting him go. Thank you so much!”
“No problem, Bec.”
“Please enjoy the rest of your date now!” She hurried back into the building without waiting for a reply, leaving the two of them with that awkward, mistaken word date hanging in the air, like the lingering echo of a musical note.
If it was a date, I’d kiss her right here, right now.
There was no one else in sight, no other smokers, no one making their way to or from the parking lot. Rebecca had disappeared. The automatic doors at the front of the building sighed shut behind her. Daisy was standing there, looking beautiful and uncertain and not warm enough in her thin embroidered sweater, her cold-stiffened shoulders almost begging for the warmth of his arms.
Why wasn’t she heading for the car? Why was she just standing there? Waiting, as if...
I could do it.
And suddenly, it seemed achingly wrong not to turn possibility into actuality. Tucker just didn’t have the strength or the will, and if there were powerful reasons to hold back, they had faded to nothing compared with the hammering insistence of his body. He could barely remember what his reasons were.
He hated that she thought he wa
s rejecting her a week ago. He hated that he’d shared so much of his past with her tonight, while withholding so much more. He hated that he hadn’t let her know how much he loved her company, her laugh, the mess and pleasure of sharing pizza when they were both tired and ragged at the edges but could still manage a few laughs.
And now she was waiting, looking at him with lips slightly parted and so soft and expectant, as if...
“I have to do this.” The muttered words escaped him before he could hold them back, and hard on their tail came the action of his body. He bent toward her, reached for her, claimed her with a rough demand that reflected the fight and need inside him.
Before she could speak or react, he’d covered her mouth with lips that felt clumsy and half-numbed with the force of his desire.
It was a shattering kiss. Blind and hungry and with no room in it for questions. He held her face between his hands, scooped up the fragrant waves of her silky hair, gloried in the sweetness of her, felt the press of her breasts against his chest. He dropped his arms to tighten them around her body and just held her while his mouth discovered her.
None of it was enough. Not even her wild response was enough. She didn’t hesitate, not for a fraction of an instant. A moan vibrated up through her body and her lips parted wider beneath his. He felt the questing sweep of her tongue and the movement of her hands. She laid them first on his back—softly, slowly running them up, then down. They reached his backside and rested there, cradling the bunched muscles of his butt with a sense of freedom and ownership and boldness that tore strips from his self-control.
She arched her back as if asking for his hands on her breasts and he obliged, cupping the neat, sweet shapes, feeling the hardened nipples that jutted against the thin fabric of her sweater and bra, before dragging himself away from the contact and wrapping her in a shuddering embrace once more.
They didn’t even come up for air. He felt her begin to gasp in a lungful and then moan and press her mouth to his halfway through. The only way he could draw breath himself was to drag it in from her very skin, letting his mouth slip down to her upturned throat.
He wanted to keep going, down and down. Into the soft valley between her breasts. Down to the smooth stretch of her flat stomach. Lower still. He wanted to pull her clothes off and feel and taste and explore every inch of her. Where could they go? How soon could they get there? If this gritty wall behind his shoulders had been a bed, he just would have stayed and not stopped for anything. Hell, if it had been a kitchen floor or the staircase up to his apartment he would have stayed.
But it wasn’t any of those places. It was a designated smoking zone outside a hospital on a chilly night, and this kiss was already hotter than a lighter flame.
Kiss too hot, location too wrong. There would be security cameras trained on this spot. Someone in a gray uniform would be out here any minute, demanding that they move on, get a room. Tucker couldn’t stand the idea of bruising these precious moments with Daisy in such a way. He had to find a way to end this without losing it for good.
She sighed against him and took her mouth away, leaving her fingers laced together at the small of his back. He looked down at her and saw the darkness of desire in her eyes and the swollen satisfaction of her lips. “So why did I think I had it wrong?” she whispered. “Last week, out by the lake, I was so sure you were telling me—”
Hell!
His answering sigh grated painfully in his throat. “I was,” he admitted, because it was time to start trying to make sense of this to her.
“You were?” She frowned up at him. Rightly so, because he wasn’t making any sense at all, yet, and he knew it. The signals were all wrong. His ridged groin was still pressing against the front of her jeans, and he’d given her that ambiguous “I was.”
He was what?
“I was turning you away,” he growled, so it was fully clear. “You weren’t wrong about that.”
“So what’s changed?”
She had him there. How did he do this? How did he pick his way through the tangle?
“Nothing has...”
“And yet we’re standing here. In the smoking zone. Except we’re not smoking. Or at least, not in the traditional sense.” She was smiling. Or trying to. She still wasn’t sure what was happening here and he couldn’t blame her.
He tried to frame the right words, groping for them and second-guessing every one. “Listen, Daisy, I find you...incredibly attractive. That has to be obvious. But there are...a few things in the way.” Mindful of the reality of those security cameras, he knew they had to let each other go, but he couldn’t do it. Not yet.
“Things in the way? Like what?”
Ah, shoot, where did he start? After the way he’d dumped all that stuff on her earlier about his dad and Andrea and Jonah and his mom, could he really launch into another encyclopedia’s worth of personal history?
He wasn’t a big talker so much of the time. He didn’t always trust words. They were too easy to fake and manipulate. On the receiving end of excuses from contractors, staff or clients when payments were late or things didn’t turn up on time, the longer and more verbal those excuses were, the less he believed them. Would Daisy react the same way if he just went on and on?
“I’m married,” he said.
“What?” She snapped back so fast that the movement of her body almost stung his skin, like getting pinged by an elastic band.
He added quickly, “At the moment.”
“You’re married at the moment,” she parroted, shocked and sarcastic at the same time. She wasn’t a fool.
He was, though. “Wait, it’s complicated, it’s not what you think.”
Shoot! Damn! In this situation, could there be a worse or more clichéd line?
“Oh, I bet it’s not!” She laughed, turning on her heel at the same moment and breaking into a stride that was almost a run before he could reach out and stop her. “It never is!”
Would he have stopped her?
He was so tense, his hand landing on her shoulder would have hurt like a vise, which would hardly have helped. He’d blown this, big-time, no matter what he said next. Maybe it was for the best that she was practically sprinting into the parking lot toward her car, right next to his. The two vehicles looked lonely, standing there side by side, staring at the hospital with their blind windshields like a married couple who haven’t spoken for a month.
“I can’t leave it like this,” he muttered to himself. As she ran, she had her arms folded protectively across her chest against the cold night breeze and it threw her off balance in her rush to reach the safe escape of her car. She looked angry and vulnerable and unhappy, and it made him ache with self-accusation and regret.
He went after her. Saw the uniformed security guards he’d been expecting. They exited the main entrance and looked at the scene unfolding in the parking lot. One of them approached close enough to say to him, “Everything okay here, buddy?”
“We’re fine,” Tucker answered. “Just emotional.” Those guys would have seen way worse than this, he knew. They went back into the building, but he knew they’d keep an eye on their monitors in case it was a marital tiff escalating out of control. He forgot them and went back to beating himself up over his poor choice of words. Her reaction was hardly a surprise.
He caught up to her as she opened the car door and swung herself inside, and began his desperate attempt to pull them both back from the brink. “It’s not what you think,” he said, planting himself in the space between the car and the door she hadn’t yet managed to shut. “It really isn’t. You have to let me explain.”
She twisted her head in his direction, her anger giving off a blast of electric energy that pulled on him as powerfully as their shared desire had done just moments ago. Her eyes blazed, bright blue now, when they’d been dark pools of heat as they kissed. “
What, your wife doesn’t understand you?” Her voice dripped sugar and acid at the same time.
“No—” He tried to lean down toward her, but the glare in her gaze made him pause and give her some space.
“You’ve been planning to tell her you want a separation but you’re waiting for the right moment? Till the kids leave for college?”
“No, Daisy, c’mon!” He straightened in frustration and found himself looking helplessly around the deserted parking lot as if help might come—Mattie or Carla, maybe, to give him a character reference, tell Daisy what a wonderful brother he was and how it really was not what she thought.
“Okay, so you’ve just grown apart and agreed to live separate lives in an open marriage?” she drawled next, the sarcasm as thick as frosting on a cheap cake.
“Not that either. Can you please stop with the clichés?”
“You started them.”
“I did. I didn’t know what else to say.” He leaned down again, ready to beg if he needed to. “If I’d started at the beginning, it would have taken too long.”
“So start at the end,” she retorted.
“Okay. The end is that we’re getting a divorce.”
“Isn’t that another cliché? Does your wife know about the divorce, or will it come as news to her?”
“Of course Emma knows. It was in the plan from the beginning. Listen, I shouldn’t have kissed you. I should have explained first. But we had an agreement not to get involved with anyone else—”
“We?”
“Emma and I. For Max’s sake.”
“Max, now.”
“Her son. Sorry, it’s complicated.”
“That’s another cliché, Tucker. It’s always complicated, isn’t it, for men like you?”
“There’s no men like me. This isn’t like that.”
“And yet, you and Emma had an agreement not to get involved with anyone else. Which, I would have thought, is one of the traditional cornerstones of a marriage. Making it sound as if the whole thing is exactly like that. Which kind of brings us back to where we were before.” She stuck the key in the ignition and he clapped his hand over hers so that she couldn’t start the engine. She shook him off and tried to shut the car door, but his body was in the way. Painfully in the way, when she yanked the door toward her and it hit his shoulder, but he didn’t care.
The One Who Changed Everything (The Cherry Sisters) Page 11
