A man could really screw up his life without hardly trying, he thought. All it took was a little depression and a lot of booze. But things were different now, he reminded himself. He’d turned over a new leaf. Started fresh.
Just like with this house. Not too long ago, he’d been living in a cold, lifeless condo in San Jose. Far from the town where he’d grown up, from the family he loved despite their combined craziness. He’d lived alone and insulated from everything save his own popularity. And what had it gotten him?
Truckloads of trouble.
So he’d moved back to Chandler. Back to his past, in the hopes that it would jump-start his future. And since he was making a fresh start, he’d decided to go all the way. Why buy some new, characterless place that would end up being nothing more than a carbon copy of that god-awful condo? Nope. Not Nick. He’d bought a run-down place at the opposite end of town from his mother’s house.
Hey, he wanted to come back home, but he wasn’t completely nuts.
The house sat at the edge of the woods, not far from the small lake that ran along the border of Chandler. Back here, among the trees, the nearby ocean sounded like nothing more than a hushed heartbeat, drifting through the forest and sighing on the wind. Here he was close enough to his roots to get support—and far enough away to retain his sanity.
At least, whatever sanity was left him after the remodel was finished.
He’d hired the Marconi family to make the renovations, and they’d assured him that in no time at all he’d have the house of his dreams.
They just hadn’t specified that those dreams would be nightmares.
Shaking his head, Nick stepped into the shower, flipped on the water, and sucked in a gulp of air as the frigid water drilled a gaping hole through his chest.
“Jesus!”
His shout drew a peal of laughter that drifted in through the tiny window above the tub.
“Sorry, Nick!” one of Hank’s daughters shouted. “Had to turn off the water heater this morning. Working on the gas line.”
“Great,” he said, through clenched teeth. If this house remodel didn’t kill him, Nick thought, nothing would.
After the world’s fastest shower, Nick got dressed and jammed his feet into a pair of sneakers. Heading downstairs, he stepped over cables and wires and tried to ignore the tarpaulin-covered area that used to be a semihabitable living room.
Muttering under his breath, he turned toward the kitchen, hoping the Marconis had left the electricity on. He needed coffee. Gallons of it.
“Nick … hi.”
“Hi, Mike,” he said, nodding to Hank’s third daughter as she pulled her blond head out from under the sink and stood up. She gave him a soft smile and a pout she’d perfected years ago in high school. He ignored it. Safer that way. “You guys leave me any coffee this time?”
Josefina, “Jo,” Marconi, the oldest daughter, walked into the kitchen just in time to answer that. She flipped a dark brown ponytail over one shoulder and cocked a hip. “You said you wouldn’t be here today. We shut everything off to get at the wiring. And the gas.” She shot a look at her younger sister and smirked. “Cool your jets, Mikey.”
Mike, Michaela, huffed out an impatient breath, but relaxed the femme fatale look, which helped Nick relax a little. He didn’t need Hank Marconi coming after him with a shotgun, demanding he do the right thing by one of his precious girls.
Well, the morning just kept getting better and better. “This is great. And what do I do for coffee?”
“What we do,” Sam said as she stepped into the room and stopped between her sisters. She pulled a white painter’s cap off her head and sent a mass of long reddish brown hair tumbling down to her shoulders. Grinning, she held up a tall paper cup with the Leaf and Bean logo. “Go to Stevie’s place.”
Nick studied first one sister, then the next. The Marconis were so different, you’d never know they were related by looking at them. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, the Marconi girls were full partners in their father’s construction business. Thankfully for their sakes, they’d taken after their mother—tall, slim, and gorgeous—rather than their father in the looks department.
The Candellano kids and the Marconis had gone to school together. Hell, he’d even dated Sam once or twice, before hooking up with Stevie—and right this minute, Nick could cheerfully murder all three Marconi women.
“You’re killing me, you know that, right?”
“Suck it up, football star,” Samantha said, grinning.
Nick grimaced.
“Hey, the place is gonna be great,” Jo told him.
“When?” Nick asked.
Mike, answered, and Nick said the words right along with her. “Three or four weeks.”
She grinned at him and sent him a slow wink.
Samantha jabbed her with an elbow to the stomach.
Nick paid no attention. Three or four weeks. No surprise there. It was the same response he’d been getting from the whole family ever since this remodel had started two weeks ago.
“C’mon, you guys,” he argued. “It’s not that big a house.”
“Hell,” Sam countered with a derisive snort and a glare at her youngest sister, “it’s almost not a house. I’d call it more like one step up from a shack.”
“Now,” Nick argued pointedly.
“Hey,” Mike said, abandoning the flirtatious pose long enough to defend her family’s work, “it’s over fifty years old. The pipes and the wiring alone belong in a museum.”
Nick shot a look at her. “But everything was working until you guys ripped the guts out of it.”
“Working for how long, though?” Jo asked. “Until you woke up floating downstairs one night ’cause the pipes burst? Or until an electrical fire turned the whole place to ash?”
“Fine,” Nick muttered, surrendering to the inevitable. “I give up. I’m going to Stevie’s for coffee.”
“Excellent idea,” Sam said. “Bring us back a few more, huh?”
He stopped dead, hunched his shoulders, then kept on walking. Perfect. He was three for three. Career. Life. House. All screwed. He opened the car door and glanced up, half-expecting to see a plague of frogs descending on him.
* * *
Somebody crashed into Jonas from behind, then ran past him, down the crowded hall. He hardly noticed. Heck, the school hallways were always packed. A guy could get run over and then trampled to death and probably nobody’d notice until the bell rang and you could see the body.
“You hear anything?”
“Huh?”
Jonas spun around and grinned at his best friend. Alex Medina, clutching one strap of his overloaded backpack, grinned back. “I said, did you hear anything yet?”
“No.” Jonas slammed his locker door shut, the loud clang rising up and then disappearing in the roar of sound created by several hundred kids. “Nothing. But the lawyer said that it might take a while.”
Alex shook his head and fell into step beside Jonas as the boy started walking toward his first-period class. “Man. It’s all gonna happen, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got the lawyer and everything. You’re really doing it.”
“Told you I was gonna,” Jonas said, and swallowed back the tight ball of nerves that seemed permanently lodged in the middle of his throat.
For two days now, he’d been waiting. He didn’t know if he could last much longer. For so long, he’d thought about doing this. About setting everything into motion. And now that he finally had, there was only one thing that worried him.
What if his father didn’t want to be found?
CHAPTER 4
“So, talk. What was he like?” Molly Watson, friend and co-operator of Castle’s, tapped her foot. She tipped her head to one side and her perfectly cut midnight black hair stayed in place. Tiny points and wedges of hair flattered her small face and made her look like a mischievous pixie. Impatience had her drumming her blood-red nails against the arm of the chair as she waited for more information on Tasha�
�s mystery man.
At eight-thirty, there was still a half hour before the first customer arrived and things started hopping in the shop. Tasha glanced around. Not much had changed in here since Mimi’s death. And there was familiarity and comfort in that. It was still a three-chair shop, which meant they were busy enough to keep ahead of the bills and small enough to stay cozy.
Shifting her gaze back to Molly, Tasha sighed. They never scheduled customers before nine in the morning, giving themselves that extra half hour to catch up on the bills or to chat or even to do each other’s hair. This morning, though, the conversation was strained and Tasha couldn’t shake the weird sensation of impending doom that kept tugging at her insides.
Ridiculous.
Everything was fine.
Even if Tassel Loafer came back, which she was pretty sure he would, she would handle it. She’d get through it—just as she’d gotten through every other rotten situation in her life. Atta way, Tash, she told herself silently. All she had to do was remember all of the other crap she’d managed to survive.
And now she had more motivation than ever—because it wasn’t only her own life at stake here … it was Jonas’s.
Sitting at her workstation, directly opposite Molly, Tasha wondered if she should have said anything at all about Tassel Loafer. Maybe she should have kept the weird visit from a stranger to herself.
In the old days, she would have. But her life was different, now. She was different, now. She didn’t have to carry all of her burdens alone anymore. She had friends. Like Molly.
“Are you gonna tell me what he was like or not?” Molly prompted.
“How do I know?” Tasha finally said. “I got rid of him as fast as I could.” Though God knew, he hadn’t been easy to get rid of. But then, guys like him—gorgeous and charm personified, rich, too, judging by the clothes—probably weren’t used to hearing the word no very often.
Molly was not appeased. Dangling one foot off the chair, she gave herself a push against one of the pink cabinets and sent the chair into a slow spin. When she came back full circle, she stopped the spin with a slap against the counter and said, “At least you could give me a clue about what he looks like.”
Tasha didn’t even have to dredge up her memory to describe him. Hadn’t his image been dancing across her brain all night? She shifted uncomfortably in the chair as she pictured his eyes, dark and filled with frustration. “He looked,” she said, “like temptation.”
“Mmmm … sounds promising.” Molly waved a hand at her. “More.”
“Tall,” she said. “And gorgeous, in an I-know-I’m-great-try-not-to-faint-at-my-feet sort of way.”
“Intriguing,” Molly murmured, then tipped her head to one side to study Tasha. “Tall?”
Tasha snorted. “Look who you’re talking to. From my vantage point, everybody’s tall.” But as she remembered it, he was really tall. And lean. And muscled. And dangerous, damn it.
“Good point.” Molly nodded. “Okay, how was he dressed?”
“Expensively.” Tasha leaned back in her chair and folded both arms across the T-shirt across which bold letters spelled out: Castle’s Salon. “I already told you about the loafers.”
Her friend nodded. “That’s right. The tassels. And he wanted to talk to Mimi.”
Both women turned to glance at the postcards stuck into the frame of the mirror. A second or two ticked past.
“Okay, bad,” Molly said.
“And Jonas,” Tasha pointed out.
“Okay, really bad,” Molly agreed, and idly ruffled one hand through her hair. Every hair fell perfectly back into place and Tasha felt a quick rush of pleasure. Damn, she did a good haircut.
“But,” Molly added, “he did leave after you told him to.”
“Not the first time,” Tasha argued. “The second time, I didn’t give him much choice. Slammed the door in his face and didn’t open it again.”
“Well, if he’d been a cop,” Molly offered eagerly, “he wouldn’t have left at all.”
She’d already considered that option and rejected it. During a certain time in her life, Tasha had had more reason than most to become intimately acquainted with the police. And though her instincts had faded with time, she was pretty sure she could still spot an undercover man, and Tassel Loafer didn’t set off those warning bells inside her. No, he set off a completely different early alert system. Which she really didn’t want to think about at the moment. Or ever. Tasha shook her head. “Trust me on this. No cop dresses that well.”
“Private detective?” Molly ventured.
“Hired by who?” Tasha countered, sitting up and shoving both hands through her hair in frustration. “And for what reason? No. You’ve been reading too many mystery novels again.”
“Then who do you think he was?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “And that’s what worries me.”
“Maybe he won’t be back.”
Tasha shook her head. He’d be back. The guy had determined written all over his face. A look that said, “I’ve never been denied anything in my life, and I don’t plan to start now. Step aside, or get run over, lady.” Tasha shivered. “He’ll be back, Moll. There’s not a doubt in my mind. He’ll be back.”
She just wished she knew what to do about him when he did show up.
* * *
Nick drove straight to the Leaf and Bean from what was left of his house.
The place was busy.
Polished wood and soft lights made the coffeehouse look warm, welcoming on a cold morning. Sunlight streamed through the front window and danced off the wood walls and tables. From the overhead beams oversize baskets hung on silver chains, trailing enough flowers and ferns to start up a good-sized rain forest. And over it all, the rich, tantalizing aroma of coffee and fresh-baked pastries filled the air.
The Leaf and Bean was a gathering place in town, once the summer tourists were gone. The locals came out of the woodwork, reclaiming their town for the winter months. Well, at least in the early mornings. In cold weather, the tourists really didn’t get moving until afternoon. Then the tiny town of Chandler would get wrapped up in the spirit of the winter carnival and catering to the day-trippers who flocked to town to take part in the festivities.
In the mornings, though, the locals huddled around the small round tables scattered across the gleaming wooden floor at the Leaf and Bean. Conversations rose and fell like waves battering against the shore.
Only a half hour or so away from Monterey, Chandler was a world unto itself. A throwback to a gentler era, the wide Main Street looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. With forests and a lake on one side of town and the ocean on the other, Chandler had the best of everything—an easy commute to a big city but the comfort and irritations of a small town. The local gossips spread news faster than the New York Times, and there wasn’t a kid in town who could get away with anything. But there was a sense of community here you just didn’t find most places.
The Candellanos had been in Chandler for years. Like most of the Italian families in the area, they’d been drawn to Northern California generations ago, by the fishing industry, the canneries, and the vineyards. They’d stayed, raised their families, and become a part of the tapestry that was California.
Familiar faces dotted the crowd in the coffee shop and a few of them turned to smile at Nick as he walked across the room. He nodded in greeting but kept walking, hoping no one would start a conversation until he’d had some coffee.
Following his nose, he stepped up close, rested his forearms on the gleaming wooden counter, and glanced at his twin brother, Paul. Fraternal twins, the two of them were absolutely nothing alike. Either in looks or in personalities. But they shared a closeness that only another set of twins would understand. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
Paul shrugged and winked at his new wife. “I’m going in late today.”
Nick shook his head and watched as Stevie and Paul shared one of those sec
ret, incredibly intimate looks that only couples understood. Electricity arcing between the newlyweds nearly singed Nick’s eyebrows. Amazing.
Before Stevie had entered his life completely, Paul would never have considered missing work. The man’s brain was as fast and complicated as the computer programs he designed. But apparently, he’d found something with Stevie that was bigger—more important to him than the work that had always been his driving ambition.
A small twinge of envy spiked through Nick, then disappeared again almost before he could be surprised at it. After all, he’d never wanted a steady relationship—a marriage. Hell, if he’d been interested in that, he wouldn’t have blown it with Stevie years ago. Even as he thought it, he realized that his time with Stevie felt like another lifetime ago. Now, when he looked at her, he saw … a sister. Paul’s wife.
Weird.
“So what’s up with you?” Paul asked, splintering Nick’s thoughts.
“I’m hiding out from the Marconis.”
“A little loud over there?” Stevie asked, reaching behind her for a pot of coffee sitting on a warmer. From beneath the counter, she pulled out a bright yellow mug, filled it to the brim, and slid it across the counter to Nick.
He bent his head and inhaled, sucking in the rich aroma that cleared his head and opened his eyes. “God bless you, my child.”
Stevie laughed and leaned into Paul’s side before asking, “So what happened to you last night?”
He picked up his mug, took a long sip, and let the hot dark brew slide down his throat, like a blessing from above. “Last night?”
“You were supposed to come over for dinner?” Paul reminded him, nodding his head toward his wife. “Stevie was cooking?”
“Oh, yeah.” Nick scraped one hand across his face. Hell, he’d forgotten all about the dinner in the face of his sudden could-be parenthood. Hardly surprising. Looking up at his twin, Nick thought for a minute about telling Paul what was going on. Asking him what he thought about it.
But then he realized that Paul would probably tell Stevie, who would tell Carla, and then Mama was bound to find out and—good God. No. Best to keep the food chain of the Candellano family in mind.
Loving You Page 4
