by Nika Rhone
Chapter Thirteen
This was such a bad, bad idea.
The thought rolled through Thea’s head for the hundredth time, as though if she told herself that obvious fact enough times, she might somehow gain the strength of will to jump up off her lounger and make a life-saving run for the house. Well, okay, maybe life-saving was overstating it a bit. But definitely pride-saving. Dignity-saving.
Heart-saving.
With a suppressed groan, she shifted restlessly and tried to have faith in Lillian’s assurances that dragging herself out of hiding and into a confrontation—er, conversation—with Doyle was the best move. Easy enough for her to say. It wasn’t Lillian’s feelings being forked over for another skewering.
Still, Thea couldn’t keep hiding out at Amelia’s. If nothing else, the constant proximity to one or both of the dragons, depending on whether the Davenports were in town or on another leg of their cross-country fact-finding tour for the senator’s economic committee, was almost as unpleasant as dwelling on why she wanted to avoid Doyle in the first place.
So, here she was, stretched out by the pool like a sacrificial offering—for some reason the staked goat in Jurassic Park kept leaping to mind—waiting to see if Doyle would come to her or if she was going to have to go beard him in his den. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.
No, that wasn’t true. Going to him would be a thousand times worse.
At least if he came to her first, she wouldn’t feel…what? Like she was sixteen years old again, following him around with what she’d thought at the time was great nonchalance, making farfetched excuses to pop into his office, or following him on his rounds, or just “coincidently” showing up at the various places around town he liked to frequent during his off hours?
God, she’d been such a dork. The question was, had anything changed? Was she still chasing after someone that just didn’t want to be caught?
“Stud alert at nine o’clock,” Lillian murmured from beside her. Thea fought to keep from jerking her head around to see. She needed to stay calm. Cool. Unaffected.
She needed to throw up.
“Come on, Mellie.” With catlike grace Lillian sprang up from her lounger and dragged on her wrap. “Let’s see if we can get Rosa to scare us up some of those cookies that your mother’s kitchen Nazi hates so much.” Then, as if sensing Thea’s muscle’s twitch in anticipation of getting up to go with them, she jabbed a finger in her direction and said, “Stay.”
“Woof,” Thea muttered as her friends performed their strategic retreat. She had a better chance of Doyle speaking freely without an audience, but she still felt a shiver of nerves dance up her spine. She’d avoided this confrontation—no, conversation, she reminded herself again—for days. It was time to clear the air. But oh, how the craven part of her wanted to run and hide in the kitchen with milk and cookies instead.
“I hope I didn’t chase them off.”
Thea had to swallow to loosen her tongue from the roof of her suddenly spitless mouth before she could answer.
“Ah, no, they’re on a junk food mission. Mellie’s mother has laid down the law at her house about what can and can’t be eaten. No starch, no sugar, no chocolate.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “With the engagement party coming up, she can’t chance getting a zit that would be seen by all the Washington movers and shakers that are going to be there. Lord knows something as horrible as a pimple might ruin poor Chuckie’s entire political career.”
Doyle made a noise that might have been a suppressed snort. “So she abides by her mother’s rules at home to keep the peace and comes here to get her Twinkie fix.”
“Something like that.”
“Very diplomatic.”
“That’s our Mellie. Always eager to please.” It was impossible to keep the hint of dismay she felt for her friend from coloring her words. She hadn’t missed the way Amelia was still pressing her stomach all the time when she thought no one was looking or how she was now popping antacids like they were breath mints. The wedding plans and the tag-teaming of the dragons were taking their toll on her, and something was eventually going to have to give. Thea was just afraid that something would be Amelia.
“Speaking of food,” Doyle said into the growing silence, “I, ah…had a good time the other night. At dinner.”
Thea wasn’t sure how to take that. “The food was good,” she answered, careful to stay noncommittal.
“It always is.” Doyle shifted. “I meant, I enjoyed being with you for dinner.”
Again, not exactly clear, but she started to get a little hopeful. “It was too bad you couldn’t stay to enjoy the rest of dessert,” she said, watching him from behind her dark-tinted Bvlgaris, but his eyes were as well protected by his shades as hers were.
“Yeah, I, ah, well…” He blew out a frustrated breath. “I’m sorry Margo was so…”
Catty? Bitchy? “Rude?”
“She’s normally a very pleasant person,” Doyle said, ignoring Thea’s suggestion. “I don’t know why she acted that way.”
Ah, but Thea did. Margo had found out that “little Cynthia” wasn’t so very little after all, and if she’d caught any of the cake-sharing byplay—which Thea definitely thought she had, given the venom she’d been spitting from word one—she’d probably guessed that Thea’s interest in Doyle wasn’t at all platonic.
Taking a deep breath, Thea threw her pride to the wind and said, “She probably just didn’t like seeing you on a date with another woman.”
She might not have been able to see his eyes, but she could very much see the way his body went still and wary. Her heart pounded painfully in her chest as she waited for the words that would either save her or flay her.
“Well, it ah…” Doyle cleared his throat. “It wasn’t, ah…”
Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.
“It wasn’t really a date.” Doyle stumbled over his words, unaware of the havoc they were wreaking on Thea’s heart. “I mean, it was a date, but it wasn’t really a date date. It was a…a friends date.”
“A friends date.” Thea repeated the words through numb lips.
“Yes.” Doyle nodded jerkily. “Like the time you took me to Q’s for my birthday.”
She hadn’t tried to suck his finger into her mouth at Q’s, but she couldn’t bring herself to point that out. But maybe he’d only looked at her like he wanted to devour her on the spot because she’d made a sexual advance with her tongue and he was a guy and he couldn’t help but respond. For a second, anyway. That seemed to be as long as she could hold his interest as anything other than a—God, she wanted to choke on the word friend.
“You do consider me your friend, don’t you?” Doyle sounded hesitant, almost as though he was waiting for her to pitch some kind of fit.
Somewhere deep inside, she was weeping, but she wouldn’t let it show. Not for a second would she ever let Doyle know how much his words were killing her, a piece at a time. Later. Later she’d bleed. But for now, she pulled the tattered remnants of her pride around her, inadequate protection though it might be, and smiled up at him. “Of course, I do.”
Relief blossomed across his face. “Good. That’s good. Because that’s really important to me. Your friendship. I…I really value that. A lot.”
“Sure. That’s great.” Trying hard to collect her thoughts from their downward spiral, she drew on the only thing she could think of to salvage what little pride she had left. “Oh, did I tell you? I heard back from one of the firms I sent my résumé to. They’re very interested.”
“That’s great!” He sounded pleased for her. And why not, she thought morosely. Isn’t that what a friend would feel? “Which firm is it?”
“Matrix Design.” Her heart double-thumped as she waited for his reaction.
Doyle’s brow wrinkled for a second before recognition hit. “Isn’t that the firm you interned with last year?”
“Yes.” The one in California. A thousand miles away. One of the dozen résumé
s she’d sent out almost two weeks ago after the fiasco with Janice Timberlake and had regretted ever since. “They sent an email yesterday saying they’d love to have me back. Full-time.” And she’d been feeling so miserable that she’d almost sent back an immediate acceptance. Only a last-minute bout of panic had kept her from hitting Send.
“Wow.” Doyle rocked back on his heels for a second before smiling. “That’s great, Thea. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Did his smile look uncertain or relieved? She just couldn’t tell.
“Are you going to take it?”
“I…I haven’t decided yet. I have to think about it. Consider my options and…everything else.”
She didn’t really know what she’d expected. Maybe that he would say he didn’t want her taking the job, didn’t want her moving so far away. But Doyle simply nodded and didn’t say anything at all.
Thea got to her feet, feeling much too naked and far too vulnerable and unable to bear hearing him spout another word about friendship. She grabbed up her wrap and clutched it in a tight ball in front of her, part to cover herself and part to keep her hands from shaking.
“I think I’ll see what Lil and Mellie were able to beg out of Rosa. I’ll…” She swallowed and cut a quick glance at Doyle and then had to look away, afraid he’d see the torment in her eyes despite the dark lenses. “I’ll see you around, Doyle.”
Then she walked as fast as she could without running toward the house and the comfort of junk food and her friends.
****
“You told her what?”
Doyle winced at his brother’s shout as he jerked the phone from his ear. Rubbing the offended organ, he sighed and said again, “I told her I valued her friendship. A lot. Well, I do,” he said when Austin groaned. It was a sound of disgust he had heard quite often from his oldest brother, although it had been years since he’d experienced it. Funny how neither years nor a few thousand miles of wireless connection made it any less humiliating.
“Well, what was I supposed to say?” It annoyed the hell out of him that Austin could still make him feel ten years old again to his brother’s worldly sixteen. “I love your bikini and want to rip it off your body with my teeth?” Now he wanted to groan. That damned bitty bikini had stripped him of his ability to form a coherent sentence. Again. Hell, it had almost put him into full caveman mode. He was lucky he hadn’t drooled all over her dainty little feet.
“Yes!” Austin shouted it, eliciting another wince. Then, in a more conspiratorial tone he asked, “Was she really that hot?”
God yes. “That’s not the point.” He’d be damned if he’d discuss Thea’s body with him. He needed to burn that bikini. Or build an altar to it.
“Uh, yeah, I think it is.” Austin had adopted his wiser older brother tone. “You want this girl, and from what you’ve told me, it’s pretty obvious she wants you, too. What isn’t obvious is why you two can’t seem to get your acts together and do something about it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yeah, yeah, boss’s daughter, trust, duty, blah, blah. She’s legal, isn’t she?”
“She’s twenty-two.”
“So I don’t see what your problem is.”
“I never said her age was an issue.” Austin’s silence called him on that lie. “Okay, so maybe she is a little young. For me, anyway.”
His brother snorted. “Yeah, I forgot, you’re the old man of the sea.”
“Twelve years—”
“Is nothing.” There was a faint sound of crinkling paper, and Doyle knew his brother had opened one of his ever-present rolls of Life Savers. He smiled at the familiar habit, one begun when his brother had first started dating his wife, Rebecca, ten years earlier and she’d broken him of his smoking habit, something even their mother, with all of her well-honed Irish-Catholic guilt, had never been able to do. When Austin had traded his Luckys for Pep-O-Mints that was when they’d all known it was true love.
That was what he wanted, Doyle realized. He wanted that clarity, that light bulb that proclaimed “this is the one.” He hated all this fumbling and guessing and knots in both his gut and his chest every time he thought about either having Thea in his life or not having her there.
“How did you know?”
As always, his brother seemed to follow his train of thought with little effort. “First time I saw Becca, it felt like I’d stepped on a live wire in the middle of the street.” Austin chuckled. “Damn near got myself run down by a bus when I stepped off the curb to cross the street to get to her before she disappeared in the crowd. Once I caught up to her, of course, it took more than a little convincing to get her to even give me her name and some downright pleading to get her phone number. She didn’t feel the same immediate zing that I did, but I got her to come around in the end.”
Doyle had felt a zing all right, but he didn’t think that was what his brother was talking about. “So, what you’re saying is that you knew right away she was the one, but she didn’t?” Well, hell, that didn’t help at all.
“What I’m saying, little brother, is that you’ll never know if she’s the one unless you give yourself—and her—the chance to do more than dance around each other like you have been. Date her. Kiss her. Hell, take her to bed. She’s a big girl,” he said, cutting off Doyle’s automatic protest, “and if she doesn’t have a problem seeing you as someone she’d like to bump uglies with, then there’s no reason you should, either.”
That image blurred Doyle’s vision and sent his pulse up a notch. “And what if it doesn’t work out? What if I…”
“Screw her silly?” Austin said, clearly amused at his brother’s reticence.
“Make love to her.” Doyle forced the words out between clenched teeth. “What if I do, and things don’t work out? What happens then?”
“What, do you think she’d go all rich bitch on you and have Daddy dearest fire your ass?”
He didn’t even have to think about it. “No. She’s not like that.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, what do I do if things do work out?”
There was a long pause on his brother’s end. “Uh, what?”
“What if things do work out between us? What if we fall in love, get married, the whole nine yards. What then?”
“Then you pop out a few kids and live happily ever after?” Austin sounded as though he was feeling his way through a minefield with his answer. Doyle knew exactly how he felt. He’d been negotiating that same minefield for the past few days himself.
“And where exactly do we live this fairy tale life? Do I move her into my bungalow here on the estate? Expect her to cook and clean and do the laundry like a good little middle-class housewife?”
“Okay, you know Becca would rip you a new one if she ever heard you say that, right?”
Doyle ignored the comment, although he knew it was the truth. “What I’m saying is how can I expect someone like Thea to give up the life she’s accustomed to and live at the level I can afford to provide, which doesn’t even come close?”
“So she’s a prima donna, is she?”
“Well, no.”
“Cares about status, bank accounts, flashy cars, how much bling you can cover her with?”
“Of course not.”
“Needs to have servants to do everything for her? Couldn’t find her way around a kitchen or a laundry room with a map? Wouldn’t dare chip a nail opening the car door for herself?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Thea was none of those things.
“Then, brother-mine, I think the one with the problem here isn’t Thea. It’s you.”
Doyle wanted to protest, tell his brother he was dead wrong, that he didn’t give a flying fuck about Thea’s money or his lack thereof, but he knew it would be a lie. As always, Austin had called it true.
He did care.
It bothered him more than he wanted to admit that should he take the chance and pursue this…this whatever it w
as with Thea, the end result would be either him using Thea’s fortune to let them live in the manner she was used to or Thea living on his salary and learning to deal with his more modest lifestyle. Either way, someone wasn’t going to be happy, and he’d already seen firsthand how arguments over money could destroy a marriage before it even got started.
Once again, Austin seemed to read his mind.
“Don’t go comparing you and Thea to what happened with Donny and the bitch-whose-name-won’t-be-spoken,” Austin said. No one mentioned their ex-sister-in-law’s name, even out of their brother’s hearing. She’d caused so much grief and pain in the seven years they’d been together that Donny still refused to trust another woman in his life even thirteen years after she’d finally walked out, taking their daughter with her. Every member of the Doyle clan would rather chew glass and drink vinegar before uttering her name.
“She was a money-grubbing lazy bitch who thought she caught a free ride when she got pregnant, who spent every cent Donny made a week before he made it and then complained that there wasn’t more,” Austin continued. “I don’t see a single similarity, and if you say that there is, I just might have to get on a plane and come out there to knock some of the stupid out of you.”
Doyle didn’t doubt that his brother meant his threat. “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just…” He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “What if we get together and I can’t make her happy?”
“And what if you get together and you do?” Austin made an exasperated sound. “Look, didn’t you tell me that she was looking for a job? Decorating houses or something, wasn’t it?”
“Interior design.” The hard knot in his chest tightened at the reminder of Thea’s earlier announcement about the job offer. The fact that the firm she’d interned with wanted her back wasn’t a surprise; he’d seen the pictures of the jobs she’d done for them. What had surprised him was that she was considering the offer. And the casual way she’d dropped that bombshell on him just now…it had nearly rocked him off his size twelve feet. It had also unnerved him enough that he’d finally broken down and called his brother for advice.
