Take Me Tender

by Christie Ridgway

  He pulled into the parking lot of Gabe’s café a few minutes later. At this time of day, late morning, it was too early for the mixed-sex lunch crowd. Now, the patrons were most likely to be all-male—day laborers eating almuerzo because they started work at dawn, or starving surf dudes just in from their first go at the waves.

  The coffee he ordered at the counter came quick and its heat burned his palm through the paper cup. He inhaled the bitter scent and the greasier one of the fish and chips the guy in front of him had purchased. Then he turned toward the L-shaped seating area, looking for an empty spot among the crowd of occupied white plastic tables and chairs.

  “Jay!” The voice’s gender was already an unhappy prospect. But when he looked in its direction, he couldn’t avoid Cassandra’s come-hither wave. “Over here.”

  Putting a polite mask on the beast he felt inside, he threaded his way toward her. Maybe she just wanted to say hello.

  Yeah. Because that’s just the way his luck was going. Everything his way, and it wasn’t going to take an act of Congress to get Nikki back into his bed tonight.

  Wait—was that what he wanted? Nikki for more than just one night?

  But that wouldn’t simplify anything, he knew, and he shoved the notion from his mind as Cassandra gestured to the chair beside hers and shut the laptop that had been open on the table. “Keep me company,” she said.

  He shrugged, accepting his fate. Why not? Sure, she was female, but he’d always found her one of the more restful sorts. And that’s what he needed. A few quiet moments to get his head together.

  She smiled as he settled into the plastic chair and moved her own steaming cup away from the table’s edge. “I didn’t get to say much to you earlier this morning.”

  “You looked as if you had places to go and people to see.”

  “People I thought to see, anyway. I’m hoping to catch up with Gabe here this morning. It’s his usual payroll day. But…”

  “But?”

  With both hands, she pushed her long fall of hair over her shoulders. “But Gabe has an annoying habit of going AWOL.”

  Another voice joined the discussion. “AWOL assumes I have someone I’m required to report to.”

  Ah, the person in question. Both Jay and Cassandra glanced up, and Jay couldn’t help but wince. The other man looked like a walking bender: His black hair was uncombed, his dark, five-o’clock shadow would have been edgy two days before, but now, paired with rumpled khakis and a half-buttoned shirt, he looked like Bogey’s better-looking, taller twin, just off The African Queen.

  Gabe flopped into the chair on the other side of Jay and reached a long arm across the table to grab Cassandra’s cup. He threw back his head to take a swallow, then snapped it forward again, his eyes bugging as he slammed the drink to the table. “What is that?” he choked out. “Surely we don’t heat and serve lawn fertilizer.”

  “Herbal tea. I brought my own bag over from the shop. You provided the boiling water.”

  Cassandra’s smile beamed sunshine, but it seemed to hurt Gabe’s eyes. He squinted and half-turned his face away. “Damon,” he yelled in the direction of the counter. “Bring me a quart of coffee, will you? Black and bitter.”

  “Just like your mood,” Cassandra said, her voice as sugary as her smile was warm. “How fitting.”

  “We can’t all be vegan and virtuous, Froot Loop,” he retorted. “Christ, what the hell’s wrong with you? Your cheeks are too rosy and your hair’s too damn shiny. And can’t you give all that smiling happiness a rest?”

  His mood lightening, Jay sat back. Maybe it was perverse of him, but the battle of the sexes didn’t feel so life-and-death when he watched others engaged in it as well. Hell, maybe he could take some tips from Gabe and handle Nikki just as he handled Cassandra—which was not at all, and while wearing a bewhiskered scowl.

  Except Cassandra didn’t appear the least put off by her landlord’s ill-temper. “You promised to meet me at the Chamber of Commerce meeting last night. You weren’t there.”

  “That was last night? No. Last night was Tuesday. Your meeting is Wednesday.”

  “And this is Thursday. Gabe, did you have a blackout or something?”

  “No!” His scowl deepened and he looked around him, as if getting desperate. “Where’s my coffee?”

  Jay curled his own cup close to his chest. “I’m not sharing.”

  Cassandra leaned across the table. “And I’m happy to inform you you’re now the chairperson of the parking committee. As those things inevitably go, in your absence, you were elected.”

  The other man’s head swung back to pin her with his bloodshot gaze. “God damn it, Cassandra. You put my name in, I’ll bet. That’s not fair.”

  “Don’t blame me. I’m the one who sent you a reminder e-mail.” She shrugged. “It’s not my fault you bury yourself.”

  “I’m not six feet under—not yet anyway, and when I go, I’m starting to think of taking you with me.” He yanked her laptop toward him and flipped up the top even as she made a strangled sound of protest. “And you didn’t send me an e-mail. I’ll prove it.”

  Just then, Gabe’s quart of coffee arrived. It distracted him from Cassandra’s computer and as she half-rose to reclaim it, the screen bloomed with a photo of Nikki. Without thinking, Jay grabbed the other woman’s wrist to stop her from shutting it down once again.

  He heard Cassandra’s nervous clearing of her throat. “I, um, took some pictures with my cell phone at the restaurant opening. You know, I thought I might use them to, uh, advertise the shop or my dress designs or, um…”

  Jay barely heard her. His attention remained focused on the screen as a Nikki slide show started. It was that damn dress, he decided, that made it impossible for him to look away. He’d never fully appreciated the back view, and he could see it in this shot, one in which she was standing beside the glass wall and gazing out over the ocean.

  Her hair tumbled to her shoulders, a riot of sun-shot brown, and then there were the delicate wings of her shoulder blades that his gaze bumped over on its way to that intriguing sway at her back. God! How had he missed that last night? He wanted nothing more than to bare it for his touch—to give it a raunchy roll with his cock as he sucked on that innocent spot on her nape so often left naked by her little-girl-gone-grown-up braids.

  She didn’t know how horny that innocuous hairstyle rendered him.

  That photo dissolved too soon and another emerged. It was Nikki and he on the dance floor, their gazes locked together. He could remember that moment, his eyes focused on her mouth and how tempting her just-tongued lips looked. How ready for his kiss. In his mind that instant morphed into one from last night, when he watched her body claiming his wet cock, sliding inside her as she came.

  It was back, that buzz in his blood, that incredible, drug-like high he’d found when her orgasm had triggered his. No lay had ever been better for him, no matter how quick or lazy or downright dirty. No bed partner, no woman had ever fascinated him, touched him, fucked him like Nikki had.

  The dance floor photo faded and he found himself reaching out for it, his fingers slipping back to the tabletop as the next one materialized. It was he and Nikki again, the two of them leaving the party, his arm around her shoulders.

  Her bound to him…where she belonged.

  And then it hit him. The euphoria he found in her body. The panic when he’d woken and she was gone from his bed. The way she had of making him so freakin’ crazy.

  This was it.

  It.

  What he’d never really understood. What he hadn’t truly believed in until this moment. He couldn’t have been more blown away if he’d come downstairs on Christmas morning and found a red-suited fat guy spreading presents under the tree.

  His breath backed up in his lungs as he realized what had happened. Damn it.

  Damn it!

  Those receptors in his brain had finally opened up and he…he was in love with Nikki.

  Prickly, independ
ent, not-even-certain-she-liked-him Nikki Carmichael.

  Could it be true? Could it be as simple as that?

  That his life would never, ever be simple again?

  The photo faded. The next was Nikki alone, a close-up shot that did justice to her unusual blue and green eyes, the cut of her cute nose, the red of her mouth, and the jut of her stubborn chin. Apparently Cassandra had Photoshopped the image, because now the color leached away, turning Nikki’s face to stark black-and-white and giving Jay a new perspective of her looks. With his attention not so riveted on her mouth or her unusual eyes, there was something about her…

  Something…familiar.

  Oh, shit.

  Oh. Shit.

  Scattered snatches of conversation shifted in his journalist’s mind, coming together in a story that he couldn’t ignore or dismiss. Slowly, his gaze lifted from the screen to Cassandra’s anxious face.

  He scanned her chin, the shape of her bottom lip, the arch of her eyebrows. “She’s your sister,” he said. “Nikki’s your sister.”

  “Donor half-sibling,” Cassandra whispered. “And Jay…Jay, you have to promise me…”

  He wasn’t going to like this, that was a given. Just as he didn’t like knowing he’d fallen head over his ass in love for the first time in over thirty years, just as he didn’t like that the woman he’d fallen for was a crazy-making female who couldn’t even have both eyes the same damn color like everyone else. He could never let Nikki know, he decided. He could never let her find out what she’d done to him.

  “Promise me, Jay,” Cassandra said. “Promise me you won’t tell Nikki.”

  Oh, hell. And now he really didn’t like the fact that he had a second secret to keep from her.

  Fifteen

  You must be a Lotus, unfolding its petals when the Sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it!

  —SAI BABA, INDIAN RELIGIOUS FIGURE

  Shanna was drowning. Her heavy limbs took her down through the saltwater that filled the Olympic-sized pool, down toward the tiled coat of arms her father had ginned up from an ancestral legacy as deep as a sheet of Kleenex. The heated water stroked like silk against her skin and she reveled in the calming sensation. Closing her eyes, she spread her arms wide and embraced the fall, sinking into the serene moment.

  A muted, liquid crash made it through her water-deafened ears. Her eyes flew open, but there was only a riot of champagne bubbles in her sight and then the hard grasp of a hand on her ankle. She gasped, inhaling water, as instinct made her fight the strange touch dragging her upward.

  She breached the surface, coughing and sputtering, to face the one who’d manhandled her and still continued to hold her with a firm grip on her upper arm. Jorge.

  “Wha—” She couldn’t get out a whole word before the coughing took over again.

  His Spanish sounded more like Anglo-Saxon curses. In two long-armed strokes, he towed her to the side, then cradled her into his arms to mount the steps.

  She was plopped onto a lounge chair and a beach towel was wrapped around her. When she looked up, the sun was behind him, turning him to a dark, threatening figure.

  “How could you?” he demanded.

  Water was still streaming into her eyes. How could she what? She coughed again. “What are you…” It took her a minute to catch her breath. “…talking about?”

  “What were you trying to do to yourself?”

  Relax? Revel in the warm water and sunny day? But then she thought how she must have appeared to him, spread-eagled and drifting downward. She coughed once more to rid herself of the last of the water. “It’s just something I used to do as a kid. Give myself…give myself over to the water, I guess you’d say.”

  Jorge released an explosive sigh and moved so that the sun was no longer directly behind him. “You frightened me.”

  “I guess.” Shanna took in the sight of him in his drenched work uniform of khakis and a Santos Landscaping shirt. “You need to dry off, too.”

  He tried waving her away, but she rose from the lounge chair and, skirting the heavy work boots he’d managed to unlace before diving in for her, went inside to find fresh towels.

  She scooped up a double-wide beach towel, then scurried to one of the downstairs guest baths for something smaller for his hair. As she started to hurry back, her wet feet lost purchase on the tile and she reached out to stop her slide. Her flailing hand caught the medicine cabinet over the sink and the door popped open, tumbling items from the shelf into the sink below.

  Making a face, she stepped carefully back and began returning the sundries to the cabinet. Two kinds of sun-screen, a bottle of acid controller, and then another, almost full bottle of oxycodone prescribed to her mother. Shanna frowned at the painkiller for a moment, remembering that it had been mislaid on Robin Ryan’s last visit to the Malibu house. So here’s where it had landed. She tucked it beside the Pepcid, then reached for the small box now lying alone in the bottom of the porcelain sink.

  A convenience pack of condoms.

  The back of her neck burned and she hastily shoved it away, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Jorge hadn’t followed her into the house.

  The last thing she wanted was for him to find her fondling prophylactics. They’d shared that one kiss while painting at the Pearson house, and then he’d stopped by this place earlier in the week “to check on how his workers were doing,” but he’d spent more time with her than with the men trimming the hedges.

  He’d kissed her then, too.

  But she was trying hard not to think of where that was leading. Like a few moments before when she was floating in the pool, she was trying to enjoy the moment instead of worrying about what lay ahead.

  For the last few weeks—months? years?—the future had seemed so empty to her. She’d latched on to Jay, hoping he would fill her void, but that relationship had drifted away like dry sand in a stiff breeze.

  Returning to the pool with her stack of towels, Shanna promised herself she wasn’t so desperate that she would think of Jorge in any but the most here-and-now sort of terms.

  And here-and-now he was, looking soggy and more than a little self-conscious as he dripped, still fully dressed, onto the pool deck. Shanna tossed him a couple of the towels and used a third to wring out her wet hair.

  “Do you want me to see if I can find something of Dad’s for you to wear?” she asked. “I’m sure there are sweatpants upstairs.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be all right.” He started to blot his clothes.

  “That’s not going to work very well,” she advised him. “At least take off your shirt so we can spread it out to dry.”

  Though he halted his ineffectual blotting, his hand merely hovered over the buttons at his throat. His hesitation puzzled her.

  “I won’t look,” she said, smiling a little to show she was joking.

  “Promise?” he muttered.

  Unsure if he was kidding now, she half-turned as she fashioned her long towel into a below-the-armpits sarong. He’d already seen her modest black bikini, of course, but his discomfort was making her uneasy. And too aware of her near-nudity.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw him fling the wet fabric toward a woven-backed chair where it landed in a heap. She crossed to it herself, tsking a little, and spread it out across the seat. Then she turned to him. “You’ll never get it—”

  The word “dry” didn’t make it off her tongue. Instead it stuck there like a postage stamp, as she took in the sight of Jorge, half-naked. Oh, wow.

  His chest rippled. Beneath fine-grained, dark golden skin, there was a wealth of working-man muscle. And to keep it all from being too extraordinarily beautiful, the dark tattoos scattered across his flesh gave him an edge no amount of Method acting would lend to even the most leading of Hollywood’s men.

  “They’re gang tattoos,” he said, his voice abrupt. “Most of them, anyway.”

  They certainly weren’t the col
orful illustrations you saw at the mall or the gym. The tribal armbands the big-wave surfers had inked around their biceps and the Disney characters adorning their girlfriends’ ankles looked nothing like the raw black images sprinkled on Jorge’s chest and upper arms.

  A primitive thrill shot up Shanna’s spine as she drew closer to him, intent on getting a better look. It was the same thrill, she realized, that she’d felt years ago when she’d gone with some friends to a Native American powwow at a desert reservation east of L.A. That day, the primitive beat of the drums had created inside her this exact combination of excitement and dread.

  Jorge’s gaze was on her face, she could feel it, though her own couldn’t break away from the canvas of golden skin in front of her.

  A tombstone adorned one heavy bicep. RIP, it read, and then two dates. Whoever it memorialized had died at 17 years old. On the opposite arm was a sombrero leaning on a machete that was dripping blood.

  Other symbols, stylized letters that were an acronym she didn’t recognize, an Aztec Indian head, and an intricately drawn sun decorated the right side of his chest and belly. But over his heart at slight center-left—she blinked, trying to believe her eyes—over his heart was the profile of a woman’s face.

  Her face.

  Could it be? Was that her head and torso in profile, a replica of that old advertising for Decadence candy bars? It certainly looked like it was, with her chin tilted back, her hair flowing down her neck, her eyes closed as if she was savoring…or anticipating…

  Shanna watched her hand reach out. Slowly, slowly, as if it might disappear if she moved with any speed, she placed the pad of her forefinger against the image.

  Jorge’s muscles flinched beneath her touch, but the tattoo remained. Her gaze lifted to his.

  “A decade ago you were like…a…a pinup girl for me and my friends,” he said.

  His friends? His gang? She could feel his heartbeat reverberating through her hand. “You take pinup pretty seriously, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” He tried to catch her hand in his, but she moved it then, drawing her fingertip away from that tattoo, over the brown nub of his nipple, down to his bands of abdominal muscles, toward the wet waistband of his pants. As she watched her hand travel lower, desire rose inside of her like the volume of those powwow drums.