She disconnected and right away, her phone rang. She cocked her head. “Bethany.”
“You gonna answer?” Dillon said.
“Nope.” She turned the ringer to mute. “I have to go and talk to Eric about how he can help me now that I’ve fired the florist two days before the wedding.”
He looked at her closely. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” she said, sounding a bit surprised. “I really am.” She got to her feet. “So… let’s go see Eric. I hope he’ll have a few ideas.”
“Maria?”
She glanced at him.
“You did good, baby.”
“Yeah?”
“Hell, yeah.” He grinned as her phone started to ring again. “Bethany?”
“Yep.” She switched the phone off completely. “My shift ended thirty minutes ago, so I can turn this off now without any guilt.”
“Awesome. So we go see Eric and then what – back home?” He used the word ‘home’ easily, naturally; the truth was that he felt like he was at home when he was with Maria, and he didn’t care if she knew it.
“I want to cook tonight,” she said. “You interested?”
“I’m interested.”
She peered up at him, hearing layers and depths and folds in those two words. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
Maria pulled out every ounce of courage that she had. “So am I.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Dillon swallowed hard. “So let’s go sort out the flowers and then we’ll go home and do something about all this interest. OK?”
“Yes,” she whispered, already afraid and intrigued about what the approaching night would bring. “OK.”
**
“Do you know Gabi well?”
Dillon looked up from chopping the vegetables for the salad. “Gabi? Yeah, well enough, I guess. I mean, I’ve been working at Dangerous Curves for two years and she’s been there for three. I don’t talk to her much when I’m bouncing and she’s cleaning, but we do chat.”
“What’s she like?” Maria said.
Dillon’s brow furrowed. “You really don’t know her, do you?”
“No, not really.” Maria stirred the pasta sauce and averted her eyes. “I mean, we’ve been talking on the phone maybe once every couple of weeks, a bit more now that this has happened, but we’re still not close.”
“I thought you spent Christmas together?”
“Yeah, two days of it. Then she had to go back to work.”
“Yeah, well, she works a lot.”
“So she’s hard working?”
“Oh, man, that’s putting it mildly.” Dillon grinned. “She never stops, never takes a day off. Sometimes she pulls sixteen-hour shifts at two different places, cleaning her ass off the whole time.”
Maria nodded and took a sip of wine. “What else?”
“Uh. She’s smart, for damn sure, but she’s quiet about it. In fact, she’s quiet all the time. Keeps her personal business to herself.” Dillon hesitated. “We didn’t even know she had a half-sister until all this shit with the Fallen Angels happened and she told us she was worried about you being targeted.”
“Yeah, we agreed to not say too much about each other yet.”
“How come?”
“In case we decided we didn’t actually want a relationship in the end. It would be too awkward to have to explain to everyone why two sisters who’d just found each other didn’t want to have anything to do with each other.”
“Why would you decide that?” Dillon tossed the veggies in to a large bowl.
She was silent for a while then she sighed. “To be honest? I was the one holding back.”
Dillon looked over at her, thought about that. Gabi had given him a very rough run-down of Maria before he’d arrived here, and so he knew some basic details. He knew that Gabi’s Dad had had an affair and that Maria had been the very unwelcome result. He’d never acknowledged her; in fact, he’d never even admitted to being the father at all. It was a hugely asshole move, in Dillon’s opinion, and Gabi damn well knew it. She’d been angry when she’d told Dillon about it – she was well aware that her father had behaved badly.
It only got worse, of course. Maria’s Mom had been unable to deal with a baby on her own and had given Maria up as soon as she was born. Maria had been put in to the system and she’d never come out. She’d never been adopted, so she’d just been shuffled from foster home to foster home for years, until she was eighteen and then she was out on her own. That whole time, she’d thought of herself as an orphan.
When Gabi’s Mom and Dad were killed in a car crash the year before, Gabi had found documents about Maria in her Dad’s things. She’d been shocked and horrified at the discovery that she had a half-sister running around out there… and then she’d tracked Maria down. Dillon still wondered just how the hell that first conversation between the women had gone.
Well enough, he supposed, since Gabi had apparently come to Open Skies a few times to visit and the two women talked a couple of times a week on the phone. They seemed to be slowly, cautiously, becoming friends. He supposed that was the best place to start.
“Why were you holding back?” he asked gently. “You resent Gabi?”
She gave him a look, startled. “A bit, yeah. I mean, I know it’s unfair… but I still feel that way.” She paused. “How’d you know that?”
He shrugged. “Because she had a family and you didn’t.”
Maria bit her lip and stared down at the sauce again. Dillon’s curt and call-it-like-I-see-it approach to life was usually refreshing, but in this case, it was a bit uncomfortable. He didn’t sugar-coat much, did he?
He must have seen something on her face, because suddenly he was standing next to her. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she said, still not looking up.
“For being insensitive.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I can be kind of a dickhead sometimes.”
“You aren’t a dickhead,” she said. “You’re just – blunt.”
“Yeah. In a dickheaded way.”
To his relief, she laughed now. “Maybe a bit.”
“You OK?” he said. “You want to stop talking about your childhood?”
She considered that. The truth was that she didn’t talk about that time of her life with anyone. She’d told her last boyfriend that her parents were both dead – and as far as she had known at the time, it was true. In most ways, it was easier to think that they’d died and that was why they’d never come looking for her.
“I – I – maybe not.” She tasted the sauce and turned the element off. “I mean… you know more than most anyone else.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Besides Julie, nobody here has any idea at all. And I only told her because her own childhood was so unbelievably bad.”
“Really?” Dillon thought about the gorgeous, wealthy woman that Julie was, then he thought about the toughness lurking just below that polished skin. “It was like yours?”
“Worse, in some ways, I think. I mean, the truth is that I was moved around a lot, but on the whole, my foster parents were OK. Not really loving, but kind enough. I was fed and clothed and sent to school.”
Privately, Dillon thought that sounded like the equivalent of being a traveling house plant, but he refrained from saying anything more. She hadn’t been physically or sexually abused or hurt, and that was a small miracle in itself in lots of ways. Then again, she’d never been loved and he knew that had to have hurt her in other ways – ways that don’t leave physical scars or marks on a person.
“Were you angry about that growing up?” he said. “About not having a family of your own?”
“Angry?” She thought about that. “Sometimes, I suppose, but like I said, I never saw the point of anger. I guess I was more�
� resigned.”
“Resigned?” That seemed an odd choice of word. “Like – you thought you’d never be adopted and you gave up hope?”
“Exactly.” She drained the pasta now, turning her face away from the steam. “I just wasn’t one of the kids who was going to be chosen and I knew it.”
Her words hit Dillon somewhere he didn’t even know existed, on some deep level inside.
“Chosen?” he said.
“Yeah. Prospective parents came around all the time and looked at the kids. Watched us eat, watched us play, talked to us sometimes. Vetted us as potential kids to take home with them, really.”
Urgh. Like choosing a dog from the pound? Why does this strike me as so gross?
“I was so shy, I couldn’t even look at these people most of the time,” she said. “They always chose the outgoing kids, you know, the cute ones who could talk and chatter and be funny. I didn’t even blame them, to be honest with you… given a choice between a kid who won’t take their eyes off the floor and a kid who dances around and laughs, who’d you choose?”
Oh, it’s not like the pound. It’s like a beauty pageant with a talent component. Goddammit.
“I can’t believe it worked that way, Maria. What – people just wandered in and picked a kid? Took ‘em home?”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t that blatant or that easy. I mean, most people wanted babies and there are agencies that screen potential parents and then put them on waiting lists. But older kids, kids like me? We were way harder to place, so the foster care workers made sure we were introduced to people who couldn’t get on those lists, for whatever reason. Money, mostly. The adoption process for newborns is crazy expensive.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“So they’d meet us and if they clicked with a kid, then the foster care workers arranged time together to talk, or draw, or eat. The kid would get to know them and if everyone felt comfortable, then the process could begin. Took months and in some cases, it was halted for any number of reasons and the kids were devastated.” She looked up at him, her dark eyes vulnerable. “There were so many ways to be hurt back then – even by the very people you trusted to make you theirs.”
“God, baby. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Well, I was never hurt that way,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “I wasn’t cute or charming enough, not outgoing enough. Not memorable enough, I guess, really. I just – I wasn’t enough, for lots of reasons.”
Dillon hurt for her, he physically ached and he longed to hold her until she felt wanted. “You were more than enough, Maria. You still are.”
“Yeah, well… it doesn’t matter now.” She forced a smile. “I learned how to deal with people leaving me and I’m used to it now. I got myself through school and I worked to pay for my hospitality courses and I came here six years ago. I’m doing fine here at Open Skies, you know? I think of these people like my family and I’m happy enough.”
“Happy enough?” he said. “Or happy?”
She paused, regretting her slip. Christ, nothing got past the man, did it?
“Happy,” she said firmly. “I’m happy.”
“You telling me the truth?”
She stopped, remembering their agreement to always be honest with each other.
“Well… I’m happy enough,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Nothing.”
“So why aren’t you totally happy?” Dillon asked softly.
“I – I don’t know. I mean, are you totally happy?”
“Nope.”
She blinked, taken aback yet again at his harsh honesty. “OK. So why aren’t you happy?”
“I’m lonely, I suppose.”
“You are?” She plucked up her courage to ask what she’d been dying to ask him for over a week. “You – you don’t have anyone special in your life?”
He gazed down at her in her simple, loose dress, standing close enough to her to feel her breath on his chest. “No. I don’t.”
“Oh.” She gulped. “But – but you spend time with women, right? At work?”
Dillon furrowed his brow at her. “What do you mean?”
“Gabi told me about Curves… told me it’s a pick-up bar for customers and staff. She said that you guys all use some – some back rooms or something?”
“Oh, Christ.” He shut his eyes. “She told you about the crash rooms?”
“Uh-huh.”
He opened those cool green eyes again. “Yeah, Dangerous Curves is known for the quick-fuck rooms, no doubt about that. But I’ve never gone back there with anyone.”
“No?”
“No. I’m not in to casual.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
“Why not?” She took in his face and body, sure that he must have any number of women chasing him. “I thought it was every guy’s dream to get no-strings-attached sex from hot women.”
“Not mine.”
“Why not?”
“Honestly? I got all that out of my system by the time I was about twenty-two, which is when it stopped being fun and just got deadly dull. I was in the army by then and I just got so fucking sick of the bars and the drunk women throwing themselves at me and the other guys every single weekend. I just opted out of the whole scene and then I was shipped out to the Middle East where casual sex was pretty rare, to put it delicately. I shuffled between here and there for years, kept getting more intensive training. I came back to the States almost five years ago now, and relationships have been challenging to come by.”
“Why?” Maria was fascinated at his openness today. Dillon never talked this much.
Dillon shrugged. “Because I’m hard to get along with, mostly.”
She actually giggled. “Sometimes you are. Not always.”
“Thanks.” He grinned at her. “I’m trying to be nicer for you, darlin’.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you trying to be nice to me?”
It suddenly occurred to him that this was the moment to say something, to make a move. He had a million thoughts running through his head about Maria and they needed to go somewhere – and soon.
“Well,” he said cautiously, worried about freaking her out and trying to reign in his naturally abrupt manner. “I like you.”
She blushed. “I like you too.”
“And I like being with you.”
“Well, you have no real choice, do you?” she teased him. “You’ve been ordered to stay put, right?”
“Don’t do that.” His voice had that familiar rasp to it, the one that appeared when he was bordering on angry. “The one thing has nothing the fuck to do with the other.”
His intensity shocked her a bit. “I – I didn’t mean…”
“You did mean, Maria. You meant that the only reason I spend time with you at all is because I was told to. Right?”
She looked down. “Yes.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve been a bodyguard before and I always, always maintained a strict distance between me and the principal. I never ate with them, never spent time talking to them, never laughed with them.”
“So what did you do?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.
“I hovered in the background and just watched them. Stood well back and damn near disappeared. Half the time they forgot I was even there and they just got on with their lives. Maybe made me a cup of coffee once in a while. That was it.”
“So why do you behave this way with me?”
“Because I can’t just stand back from you.” He moved closer now and was gratified when she didn’t move away. “I like you.”
“I like you too,” she repeated.
“How much?”
“How much do
I like you?” she said, confused.
“Yeah.” Slowly, he raised his large hand and touched her cheek, stroking the silky golden skin. His fingertips trailed over the curve of her face, tender and slow. “You like me enough to let me do that?”
Her breath caught. “Yes.”
Dillon’s eyes sparked at her husky assent. His fingers threaded in her long hair and he tugged her closer, until she was pressed up against his strong chest.
“And that?” he said. “Can I do that?”
“Yes.”
Still gripping her hair, Dillon lowered his head to hers, ghosting small kisses on her forehead, across her cheeks, along her chin, turning her this way and that to accommodate his mouth. He moved slowly, taking his time, listening to her breathing get deeper and harder at his gentle dominance.
“What about that?” he murmured against her throat. “You like me enough for me to do all of that to you, baby?”
Maria couldn’t answer this time; her voice seemed to have completely stopped functioning. She nodded, praying with everything in her heating-up body that he wouldn’t stop touching her.
Dillon lifted his head again, stared in to her eyes. He smiled at her clear desire, knowing now for sure that he wasn’t all alone in what he was feeling. She looked scared, though, and he didn’t want that. It was just about the last thing in the world he wanted.
“You want to know how much I like you?” he said.
“What?” she stuttered.
“Ask me how much I like you.”
She was frozen in place, fighting to get up the courage to do what she really wanted to do – what it looked like Dillon wanted, too. But he wasn’t going to take that next step, she saw suddenly. He was going to make sure she was OK with this and the way he could be the most sure would be for her to take things to the next level.
Oh, my God. I have to kiss him.
He watched and waited, pushing down on his urge to ravish her mouth with his. No, he’d made the first tentative moves but she was going to have to make some of her own. He needed to know that she was a part of this, that it wasn’t all just happening to her. That she was making choices with him, not because of him.
Open Life (Open Skies #5) Page 9
