Gia’s mouth fell open. The weird-ass flower just kept on blooming. “Like ever? How is that even possible? Do you have a crystal ball?”
“No, but I have self-discipline.”
“So numbers twenty-one through twenty-five left you.”
“They did. Or I could tell that they wanted to and would be better off without me, so I did it preemptively.”
“You dumped them to save them from you.”
“You’re twisting what I’m saying.”
“You’re atoning.”
That was it. That interpretation made everything about him, from pay-what-you-can night to the community refrigerator to his rejection of her despite his obvious arousal, make sense. He felt responsible both for the woman who’d almost died in the accident and for the girlfriend he’d never loved who’d gotten tangled up in the tragedy. Because he used her and she got hurt. He was trying to make sure nothing like it ever happened again. Gia smiled, satisfied to have cracked the mystery that was Bennett Buchanan.
“What?” His voice had taken on the annoyed tone he used with his kitchen staff.
“You’re atoning for your past. You feel guilty, and now you’re overcorrecting.”
He shook his head. “I’m not atoning. I’m just careful. I’m done using people. I’m done taking them for granted. I’m done putting my fleeting desires above the well-being of others.”
“That’s all fine, admirable even, but don’t you think it’s possible to have casual sex with someone without using them? Or maybe using them the same way and to the same degree they’re using you? An equal exchange.” She was going to say more, about how people used each other all the time, and not just for sex—that it was the way of the world, and that the mature thing to do was to be up-front about it. But she realized that it might sound like she was trying to argue her way back into his bed. And though of course she would freely admit that she wouldn’t mind finding herself there—one more time—it wasn’t going to be after she’d had to convince him.
“Anyway,” he said, “the point here is that I have better data than you do. I’ve had it both ways, and I can report with absolute confidence that sex is better with a long-term partner.”
“So you’re saying that sex is better when it’s overlaid with all the insecurities and indignities that come with a long-term relationship?”
She was kidding, sort of.
“No. It’s better when you know someone. When you’re invested in making them feel good. When you know what works.”
She wanted to point out that he hadn’t seemed to have any trouble figuring out what worked last night, but again, the point here was to avoid sounding desperate, so instead she just rolled her eyes. It was a good-natured roll, though, which was kind of remarkable given that she’d expected this day to be humiliating and painful. It was turning out to be neither of those.
Strangely, knowing that Bennett was doing some big, pointless atonement thing lifted her spirits considerably. He was torturing himself and trying to twist his behavior into some kind of pattern he thought was essential. Which meant his weirdness truly had not been about her. He had been telling the truth when he said the rejection wasn’t personal. And he had wanted her—she’d seen and felt the evidence.
He just wouldn’t let himself have her.
Which, now that it was put in the correct context, was…interesting.
It almost felt like a challenge.
* * *
As the morning wore on, the sky lightened, and so did Bennett’s mood. Part of it was the catharsis of confession. But part of it, he suspected, was his confessor. Gia. She’d done another of her presto-change-os, going from cranky and borderline intolerable to kind and compassionate to funny and downright friendly.
It was disarming, but also contagious.
“What the heck is this ‘South of the Border’ thing I keep seeing signs for?” Gia asked several hours later, after they’d traversed most of North Carolina.
“It’s a run-down amusement park,” he said, “and I say we pull off and see what they serve for lunch at run-down amusement parks.”
“Sure. You must be tired of driving. Why don’t you let me take a shift? I’ve got one more day of legal driving.”
“Yeah, but you’re not on the rental agreement.”
“Wow, you really are a goody two-shoes.”
“Anyway, it’s no problem,” he said, and he meant it. Driving wasn’t something he did much anymore, not since he’d moved to New York, but he enjoyed it—when he wasn’t in conditions that made him fear crashing. It was meditative. It let him get out of his own head. Normally. Maybe not at this exact moment. Because that shit Gia had said about him atoning? That was definitely lodged in his head.
He pulled off. “So there’s this creepy Pedroland thing I remember visiting as a kid. It’s definitely seen better days. So probably this is the part where a deranged clown murders us.”
“Hey, I went to circus school. I can totally take down a deranged clown.”
“You went to circus school?” Had he heard that right?
She laughed. “Yeah. I can juggle and everything.”
Damn. Juggling was not, inherently, an attractive activity. And yet…
“Yeah, I hated it, but it was part of my mom’s pageant domination plan.”
“Are you close with your mom today?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking. The answer had absolutely no bearing on his life. It was just that he was getting a picture of Gia’s mom, and it was making him…cranky.
She tilted her head, seeming to give the question serious consideration. “We get along fine, but we’re not close. I think she takes credit for my modeling career—which is fair. But it’s like now that she has no project, nothing to groom me for, there’s…nothing left to base our relationship on.”
He opened his mouth to say more, to ask about her dad, because he found himself desperately hoping that her dad somehow made up for her mother’s remoteness. But then he shut it. He didn’t know these people. After the wedding, he’d never see Gia again.
They strolled in silence for a few moments until she pointed at a mini-golf course and said, “Hey! Let’s play!”
“Shouldn’t we just eat and get on the road?” Her mood had done a one-eighty since early this morning, but they did still need to get that dress to Florida.
“Nah, it’s okay. Wendy moved the tailoring appointment, so the pressure’s off. We don’t need to arrive today.”
It was hard to deny Gia anything when she was like this. And he didn’t want to, really. After witnessing that orgasm last night, he was afraid he would pretty much do anything she asked him to do. Well, almost anything. And mini-golf was easy, relatively speaking. There were no moral gray areas in mini-golf.
She turned out to be really bad at it.
“Have you never done this?” he asked incredulously as she finally sank the ball in the first hole, seventeen strokes to his four.
“Only once, and I think I was about seven. Also, I’m not known for my athletic ability. Muscles are frowned upon in my line of work.”
“It’s mini-golf. No athletic ability or muscles required.”
She responded by sticking her tongue out at him.
By the third hole, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Let me help you.”
He tried to correct her form verbally, and by modeling the correct stance, but it wasn’t doing much. So, God help him, he did that thing where he stood behind her so they could both hold her club.
Because that was such a good idea.
Gia was tall—they were pretty much the same height—but slim, with narrow hips and shoulders, so their bodies fit together perfectly for this task. Everything lined up—her legs against his, her back against his chest, but his broader build left room for him to wrap his arms around her.
When he finished aligning them by placing his hands over hers on the club, she let loose a little breathy sigh of contentment, and her shoulders fell as her body relaxed.
<
br /> It was contagious. It felt strangely good to be holding her like this. Also strangely intimate, which was ridiculous because last night they’d made out like feral teenagers and then he’d made her come. So getting all weirded out over standing with his arms around her made no sense.
He was starting to understand, though, that logic didn’t really apply where Gia Gallo was concerned.
There was no way to back out now, so he spoke in her ear. “Keep your elbows straight but not locked, swing, and…” They hit the ball together and watched as it took off down the green and landed respectably close to the hole. “There you go.”
It was way more difficult than it should have been to let go of her.
But once he did, he took his turn, and then they moved toward the hole for the putt.
“Help me again.” She set up her putt but looked entreatingly at him over her shoulder.
Well, shit. He’d created this monster.
So he did as she asked, lining up their bodies, then setting up her shot. He tried not to be too obvious about burying his nose in her hair. It smelled like mint and rosemary.
The ball went in, and she wiggled with happiness.
He’d been trying to keep the contact between their lower bodies to a minimum during the shot, but so much for that. She bounced around and her ass dragged back and forth over his cock, which had definitely taken note.
Strangely, he wasn’t as embarrassed as he would have expected to be. She knew his deal—that he was attracted to her but wasn’t prepared to act on it. She might think his deal was insane, but she knew it. There was something freeing about having all his hang-ups out in the open.
So to speak.
“Oops.” She pulled away from him and let her gaze rake down his body. “Sorry. I think that counted as ‘casual.’”
And she was going to harass him about it, the little minx.
He didn’t hate it.
Chapter Seven
After lunch, Bennett started yawning like crazy, and Gia wrested the keys from him on their way back to the car. She’d slept like a baby last night after that spectacular orgasm, but she wondered if Bennett had had a sleepless night, all wound up and filled with lust and guilt. “One last day of legal driving,” she insisted, promising that she’d do this one shift with the utmost caution, staying under the speed limit and not straying from the highway.
They passed a tourist information stand filled with brochures, and she noticed one for Charleston. She snagged it. “Hey, we’re pretty close. It’s not that far off I-95. You want to stop?”
He didn’t say anything right away, which made her doubt the sincerity of his eventual “No.”
“You sure?”
“We don’t have time.”
Which wasn’t exactly a heartfelt refusal.
“We don’t have to stay long. We can just pop in and see your friend Marc.”
“No, no. Stopping in Charleston is…not a good idea.”
That pause, though, had suggested he didn’t mean what he said. That he might, in fact, mean the opposite of what he said.
Anyway, it was a moot point, because he conked out almost immediately—she’d been right about his exhaustion.
She took a certain kind of pleasure in driving as he slept. It felt like she was doing something useful. Directly contributing to solving a concrete problem: getting their asses to the wedding. She’d felt the same way when he’d reported that he’d implemented her community refrigerator idea. It wasn’t that Gia didn’t think fashion had any value. It absolutely did. It brought people joy—and jobs. It made the world beautiful and was an avenue of self-expression that was available to all, whether you were shopping the ateliers of Paris or Goodwill. But lately she was starting to wonder, as she strutted or posed, what the point of it all was, or at least her involvement in it.
But again, she always came back to the same question: What the hell else could she do?
Enough with the brooding. She glanced at her passenger. He was awfully cute as he slept. He looked both older and younger, which should have been impossible. Free to observe his face at rest, she noticed the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and the sun glancing off his stubble revealed a few silver hairs. But at the same time, slumber lent him a vulnerability such that she fancied she could see the younger, troubled Bennett inside the modern-day, capable man.
She drove for more than an hour while he slept. Then she started seeing signs for Charleston.
She thought about that hesitation, when he’d said he didn’t want to stop. She thought about him saying, on the train, that he didn’t miss his hometown. He’d been lying, she was pretty sure. There had been something in his eyes, something wistful and yearning, when he’d talked about Chef Lalande.
And honestly, as much as she’d been the one cracking the whip to get them to Florida, she suddenly wanted to put the brakes on. To slow them down. Just a little. Wendy had put off the tailoring appointment, so what could a little detour hurt?
Without letting herself analyze her impulsive decision too much, she exited the highway for I-26, which would take them to Charleston. She took advantage of a slowdown in a construction zone to search her map app for the restaurant, keeping one eye on the road so she wouldn’t get her “not on the rental agreement” ass into trouble.
When she cut the engine in front of the restaurant, he woke up. Keeping up the adorable thing, he shook his head and was all sleep addled and confused at first.
“Oh, man, sorry, I really passed out there. Let me stretch my legs for a minute, then we can swap and…”
He inhaled sharply and leaned forward in his seat, closer to the windshield, as if that extra few inches would clarify what he was seeing.
“What did you do?” he whispered, and Gia had a moment of panic.
“I’m sorry. Was this a bad idea?” She had only wanted to please him. To give him what she thought he secretly wanted.
Well, that, and, stupid girl that she was, she had wanted to prolong their road trip.
But she suddenly grasped what a breathtakingly presumptuous overreach this had been. Yes, he’d told her some shit about his past, but that didn’t mean she knew him. He had told her he didn’t want to stop, and she’d ignored his wishes and brought him here anyway—while he slept. “We can just leave,” she said quickly. She started to insert the key into the ignition, but he grabbed her hand to prevent her.
He didn’t let go of her hand, but squeezed it—hard. “Thank you.” His voice was raspy, and Gia’s throat tightened, even as relief flooded her.
“Come on.” He let go of her hand, but, oddly, grabbed it again when they got out of the car.
“Welcome to Marc’s.” A woman smiled them from the hostess stand. “Do you have a— Bennett? Bennett Buchanan?”
“Fanny.” Bennett dropped Gia’s hand and wrapped the older woman in his arms.
When they separated, Fanny had tears in her eyes. Then she started swatting Bennett and peppering him with questions. What was he doing here? Why hadn’t he called? When was he coming home from that god-awful Yankee city?
Bennett didn’t appear to be crying like Fanny did, but he did noticeably swallow a few times while she interrogated him. “I was in the neighborhood.” He winked at Gia. Then he turned to take in the room. He was trying to hide it, but he was clearly overcome with emotion. “Looks exactly the same,” he proclaimed, his voice thick.
The restaurant was a classic French bistro with exposed brick walls, ornate chandeliers, white-clothed café tables, and specials written on a chalkboard.
Bennett was craning his neck now, like he was looking for something in particular.
“Go on.” Fanny hitched her head to the back of the space. “He’ll be so happy to see you. Might get him out of his mood—the mushroom supplier’s delivery today did not meet his expectations, and he’s right pissed about it.”
Bennett cleared his throat. “Don’t mess with the cream of mushroom soup.”
“I can get your fr
iend something to drink. Maybe you’d like to introduce us? Or do you not do manners in New York?”
Bennett chuckled and performed introductions.
Gia made to follow Fanny, intending to leave Bennett to his reunion with his mentor, but he grabbed her hand again—what was the deal with all this hand-holding?
“Nope,” he said to Fanny. “She’s coming with me.”
* * *
As he approached the door to the kitchen, Bennett’s heart pounded like he was about to step out on stage in front of a million people.
Gia’s hand was the only thing keeping him from totally losing his shit.
Gia. He clutched her hand like it was a lifeline, but he couldn’t look at her, or he would lose his shit.
The way she had just known that he needed to come here. That passing by so close to Charleston without stopping was killing him. But also that he was afraid. Not that he was afraid of Marc, or the restaurant, but that being back in Charleston at all was such an emotional minefield that it just needed to happen to him.
And she had made it happen.
She had a way of doing that. Of wresting control over a situation and making the world bend to her will. He admired the hell out of it. He might not agree with her will all the time—her stance on relationships, for example—but she was so very effective.
Which was maybe not the right, or the only, word a man should use to describe Gia Gallo, but his brain wasn’t working well enough right now to come up with anything other than that. He was just so…overcome to have woken up and found himself outside Marc’s. The place where he got his life back. His home—way more than the actual house he grew up in had ever been. But also the place that was full of so much unresolved shit.
He had invited his parents here once. It had been about a year into his tenure at the restaurant. He’d been promoted from dishwasher to line cook, but Marc had been taking him aside, giving him special lessons. Making him dice one thousand onions until he got it right. But also asking for his input on menu planning. The cravings were becoming more manageable, and he was starting to imagine a future in which this was his career and in which drugs didn’t occupy his every waking thought.
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