by Gina Ardito
“No.”
That one word answer devastated me, and I dropped my head before he noticed my tears.
But he cupped my chin and tilted my head up to see his smile. “Get your coat, princess. We’ll have to go shopping for a new outfit.”
I screeched my excitement all the way to my room.
Lucinda
I found my mom sipping coffee in the kitchen. Alone. Had Colin decided to leave me home, despite my doctor’s okay? If he had reneged on our deal, after all I’d gone through to agree to his demands, I’d take the bus to the restaurant just so I could kill him and ride the bus home again. “Where’s Colin?”
“He took Ari to the store to buy a new outfit.”
He did what? Why? “What kind of outfit?”
“She needs a white blouse and black pants to work the front of the house tonight.”
My first reaction was, “No.” I needed to keep these two apart, but fate kept working against me. Or was Lady Luck taking payback for that one night of divine intervention?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom retorted. “She’s in the best hands with him. Colin’s return is a real blessing. Not only for you, but for me, too. Since he’ll now be driving you home at night, I don’t have to worry about you being on that horrible bus anymore.”
I stared at this woman—this stranger—at the light in her eyes, the smile playing around her lips, the smooth brow. “Oh, Jeez. He won you over already?!”What happened to the Iron Lady I called “Mom?”
She waved me off. “Honestly, Lucie. The man is handsome, successful, and doing everything he can to get back into your good graces. Why can’t you forgive him for what he did when he was just a stupid boy?”
I couldn’t believe what I heard. “This advice is coming from the woman who hasn’t spoken to her only sister in twenty years?”
Another dismissive wave met my reminder. “That’s different. She’s always been a troublemaker, a liar, and a diva. My life is much better without Ana in it. But you. You’re not me. And Colin’s not Ana.”
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I can trust him any more than you trust Tía Ana.”
“You can’t trust him?” Mom quirked her eyebrows in that cynical way she had. “Or you can’t trust yourself?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how. Every minute I spent with him developed another crack in my hard shell veneer. Too soon, those spidery lines would weaken my foundation, and I’d crumble.
From some deep, dark pocket in my brain, my late husband’s voice echoed. Nobody but me will ever want you, Lucie. You’re not pretty enough or smart enough or rich enough for a guy like Colin Murriere. I told you that. You belong with me. Now and always.
I clamped my hands over my ears, hoping to mute that mocking voice. “No!” I hadn’t realized I’d screamed the denial until my mother pulled me into her loving embrace and ran a comforting hand down my hair.
“Listen to me, mi hija. I was not happy when I first saw that man with Sidney this morning. He knew I wasn’t happy, and he knew why. But he asked me to sit and talk with him, to hear him out. I did. Now you should.”
“Why? What line of bull did he toss at you?”
Eyes glittering like agate marbles, she clucked her tongue. “Do you think I forgot all you’ve gone through? From both him and that monster you married?” She shook her head. “How would you feel if a boy told Ariana she was worthless and beneath him?” This time, she didn’t give me a window to reply. This time, it wasn’t necessary. “A mother never forgets the hurts done to her child. But a mother can also tell when a child has grown up, regretted his decision, and truly seeks forgiveness.”
All my doubts must have reflected in my expression because she nodded to give her words credence. “Talk to him, Lucie. Really talk. And more important, listen. Listen with your ears and your heart.”
Ariana
Alone with Chef Colin in his car, I finally had the chance to ask him my questions. I wasn’t really sure how to come out and start this discussion without hurting his feelings. I mean, what was I supposed to say? How come Mom doesn’t like you?
I decided to begin with simple stuff. “How did you first meet my mom?”
He lowered the volume on the radio with a press of a button on his steering wheel. “What’d you say?”
I repeated my question and waited, counting my breaths until he finally answered.
“We were friends a long time ago. She was working at a hotel where I applied for a job. I took one look at your mama and thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.” He stole a quick glance at me, smiled, then turned his attention back to the road. “Almost as pretty as you.”
“So, what happened?”
“We dated for the summer, that’s all.”
“No, that’s not all,” I told him. This was getting ridiculous. Why wouldn’t anyone tell me the truth? “Something happened. Otherwise, Mom wouldn’t be so—” I stopped before the word “mean” slipped out.
He sighed. “I know I upset her these days and I’m sorry if that makes things hard for you. She has every right to be upset; I want you to know that. She and I dated. That’s the truth. But in the end, I treated her badly, said some really mean things, and generally hurt her feelings.”
My eyes practically bugged out of my skull. I mean... Wow. I couldn’t believe it. He seemed so nice now. “What did you say to her?”
“I...don’t think that’s something we should discuss.” He tapped an index finger on the steering wheel. “You might want to ask your mom. I was wrong and I’m very sorry now.”
“Did you try telling her you’re sorry?”
“Once or twice. But, she’s still angry at me, and I really can’t blame her. I wasn’t a nice guy back then.”
I didn’t say anything more until we pulled into the parking lot behind the clothing store on Main Street. “Maybe I could help you.”
With the car stopped, he turned around all the way in his seat so he could look directly at me. “How?”
I shrugged. “She’s my mom. I know what she likes and what she doesn’t like.”
He shook his head. “I appreciate that, princess, but I think I have to do this on my own.” Then he turned off the engine and stepped out of the car.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed out to stand beside him. Darn. He was going to screw this up. I just knew it.
I was going to have to get sneaky.
Lucinda
I had to admit, having Ari to help me out had taken a lot of pressure off me. Even so, at the end of the night, I had no idea who was more exhausted. At midnight, I’d banished her to her cot in Sidney’s—Colin’s—office. Two hours later, after the rest of the staff had gone home for the night, I peeked in on her and found her out cold. Lucky girl. I wished I could climb into the cot beside her. Every pore in the flesh of my left side sizzled, a painful reminder of last night’s misadventure. I needed another dose of ibuprofen to get me through the rest of my work. Leaving my little girl tucked in dreamland, I headed for the bar outside for a bottled water, followed by the locked area of my station for my purse. I dropped two pills into my palm, tossed them into my mouth, then swallowed with a huge gulp of water.
“All set out here?”
Surprise reversed the water’s direction, and I sputtered, the pills leaving a burning trail down my esophagus. Even through the tears that sprang to my eyes, I caught Colin’s amused grin. “Dammit,” I rasped, “stop sneaking up on me.”
“Maybe we should crush the pills inside a spoonful of jelly for you. That’s what my mom used to do for me.”
I swigged more water until my throat felt normal again.
“How’s our girl doing?”
The question irked. “If you’re referring to my daughter,” I replied, “she’s sleeping. I figured I’d leave her be until the absolute last minute.”
“Actually…” He crept closer to me then reached a hand to skim the slope between my right cheek and chin. “…I was talki
ng about you.”
I rebounded against the wall, out of reach. “Stop it! I’m not your girl!”
“Relax, sweetheart.”
Fisting my hands, I straightened to face him dead-on. “I’m not your sweetheart, either. I knew I shouldn’t let you drive me to work or take me to the doctor. Now you think I’m under some bizarre obligation.”
“Easy, Lucie.” He held out a hand, palm up. “Calm down. No one said anything about obligation. Take it easy, okay?”
He spoke to me the way he would a lunatic—which was only fair because I was acting like one. I inhaled and exhaled several times, giving my heart and my head a chance to return to normal.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured as I turned toward the door to hide my embarrassment. “It’s been a miserable day.”
“There’s more than that going on with you,” he said.
Frustration forced me to face him. “What do you want from me, Colin?”
“Forgiveness, for starters.” He pulled a bistro chair from a nearby table and slid it toward me, but didn’t say any more.
“For what?”
“For ten years ago.”
I sank onto the offered seat, my legs trembling. “You really hurt my feelings that night,” I confessed. “But the rest is all my fault. Nobody made me go running to Rob. Nobody forced me to marry him. That was all my insecurity, not yours.”
Kneeling beside me, he shook his head before taking my hand. His clasp was warm, secure, safe. “We both made mistakes. Dumping you was the biggest mistake of my life. I knew it when I left, and over the years, I missed you more instead of less. I was everything you said I was back then: arrogant, conceited, snobby... But I was also a coward. I didn’t have the courage to stand up to my father. He was paying all my bills, my tuition, my car, my living expenses. I was his puppet, expected to perform the way he wanted, when he wanted. He was buying my entire future. And he had it all planned out for me: a stint at Stanford, then working under the old man’s thumb. Eventually a wife—and not someone named Lucinda Rosado—my wife would be some socialite named Jacqueline or Emily. Lucinda Rosado was the fling, the woman I kept in a love nest somewhere for a couple of months before I moved on to another woman, another nest.”
Pride and anger warred inside me, and I wanted to zing something scathing back at him, but he didn’t give me the chance.
He leaned forward to kiss my cheek—gentle, sweet, and lovely. “But you were never love nest material. You were an all or nothing kind of girl. I knew that from our first date. And God, how that bothered me! All that summer, I’d look at you and see someone who had nothing. Nothing. Except big dreams. You were working days as a maid at the Seabreeze Hotel, waiting tables in that greasy fast food place at night, and earning scholarships to go to some local yokel community college. But you never complained. You never thought you couldn’t do it. You just tried harder. And I resented you for that attitude.”
In retrospect, I could see that about him. How my ambition was stronger than his, even though my goals were a lot more improbable than his. It didn’t excuse his behavior, but it definitely explained his animosity toward me those last days. “So what’s changed now?”
“Me. When I went away to school, I had every intention of forgetting all about you and majoring in business to follow my father. I was going to be somebody special.” His fingers brushed gentle circles across my hand, slow and comforting. “I failed on all fronts.”
With a derisive snort, I pulled away from him. Yeah, right. The winner of “All Star Chef” was a real failure. “Now you’re making fun of me.” Because I still hadn’t achieved my goal, I still lived with my mother, still had no career, still existed paycheck to paycheck.
“No. I’m not. Picture it, Lucie. I was a long way from Long Island and Snug Harbor. In Stanford, the name, Murriere, meant nothing. Compared to some of my classmates, my father was no better than a bean farmer. It was a pretty humbling experience for me.”
My lips twisted. “I’ll bet.”
“I’m serious. I met this girl there.” He looked across the room, staring at some empty table in the dark corner as if he saw some phantom seated there. “Fiona. You don’t need to know her last name.”
I didn’t need to know her at all, as far as I was concerned, but I nodded, prodding him to continue.
“Her family was a big deal. Bigger than mine. Like Vanderbilt big. Kennedy big. In some ways, she reminded me of you. Not in her looks or her pedigree or her background, which were all beluga caviar and imported champagne.” He placed his forehead against mine and bopped my nose with two fingers. “No jalapeño in her at all. But she had your drive, your spark. She never challenged me the way you did, which at the time, I thought I wanted. Then again, no one ever challenged me the way you did. She was a pale, overbred imitation of the one person who made me feel alive and happy. The closest I’d get to ever having you in my life. And then the most amazing thing happened.”
“What happened?”
“I took a cooking class for one of my electives. One class on world cuisine, and I was hooked. I loved the frenetic pace and the heat and the aromas. Cooking excited me more than number-crunching and marketing ever could. I decided I wanted to be a chef. So I changed direction, ditched my business degree, and enrolled in culinary school. My father was less than thrilled. He insisted if I wanted to pursue this “crazy dream” of mine, I should see what I was in for. I took a job in a local restaurant, started as a dishwasher before becoming a busboy, then a waiter, and so on. I even worked as a maître d’ for a while.”
“You did?”
He nodded. “But I wasn’t nearly as good at it as you are. You’ve got a knack for making every customer feel like they’ve been welcomed into a warm and loving home. That’s a gift.”
“Uh-huh.” Did he really think I’d be satisfied with a shallow compliment now? Never mind. “So what happened? With you and Fiona?” I practically choked on the name.
“One night when I was bussing tables, I heard a familiar laugh. I turned and saw her with some guy. Another name from the society pages. They were all cuddled up together, kissing and holding hands so I knew he wasn’t just a friend or a long-lost cousin. I was stunned because I thought she and I had something, you know? I mean, at this point, we’d been dating for almost three years.”
Jealousy pricked me, but compassion soothed the sting. I knew how it felt to love someone who didn’t feel the same way. “What’d you do?”
He shrugged. “I had a job to do. I filled her water glass, along with her date’s, and said hello. When the guy she was with asked how she knew me, she said, ‘He’s my macroeconomics tutor.’”
“Ouch.” I winced in empathy. “That must’ve hurt.”
“Actually, it didn’t. Oh, I admit, my pride was stung. But what it actually did was show me how much I’d hurt you. I realized she never took me seriously because I didn’t come from the same social or financial level as her family.” He took my hand again. “I saw it all so plainly. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I tossed you away because my parents wouldn’t think you were good enough. And I realized I had to prove to you that I wasn’t that...”
He seemed to be searching for the right word. “Jerk,” I supplied.
“Jerk,” he agreed. “I wasn’t that same insecure jerk you’d known. I was going to get out from under my father’s thumb, change the direction of my life, and come back to Snug Harbor. Maybe even find you. After I won ‘All Star Chef,’ I knew exactly where I wanted to open my new restaurant. I got lucky when I found out Sidney was ready to sell. I didn’t blink when he mentioned the maître d’ was his daughter-in-law. Then you waltzed into the kitchen, and I realized you were the girl that got away all those years ago. I knew the minute I saw you, but it seemed to me you didn’t want to acknowledge we were more than acquaintances. I assumed you’d never told your father-in-law about us, and with your little girl right there...” He tilted his head toward one shoulder. “I rolled w
ith it. I think now that was a mistake. I probably should have apologized to you then and there instead of allowing more bricks to build in the wall between us.”
He stood, smoothing his hands down the thighs of those hard-packed black jeans. “I want us to start over, Lucie. I know I made mistakes with you. I was a dumb kid, and I didn’t know what I had in you. I wasn’t ready for an intense, serious relationship. Now I am.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say? ‘Uh-huh?’”
I didn’t trust myself to say anything more. Rising from the chair, I headed for the bar to pick up what was left of my water. I tried to borrow strength from the ancient elm—uprooted during a devastating hurricane and reborn into this gleaming counter. I absorbed the pride of the stately tree, remembered its stubborn refusal to die, and compared my heartache to that hurricane. He might have returned, and he might have assumed I’d hung around here, waiting for him to decide he was “ready” for me, but I had news for him.
“What more do you want me to say, Colin? You say you’ve changed. I believe you. After all, you were twenty-two when I last saw you. Since then, you’ve become a chef, a television star, and now a restaurant owner. But...here’s the thing. When you last saw me, I was nineteen. Since then, I’ve become a wife, a mother, a widow, and now I’m working toward my architectural engineering degree. So what makes you think I’ve stayed the same dumb kid I was when you dumped me?”
“I never said that.”
I swigged more water from the bottle. “You didn’t have to say it. You’ve made your thoughts crystal clear to me. What do you think? I’m Sleeping Beauty? And I’ve just been waiting for you, my Prince Charming, to come back to Snug Harbor, kiss me, and wake me up?”
He stalked toward me, all dark grace and intensity. When he got to the opposite side of the bar, he leaned over until his lips were a breath from mine. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
I scooped up the water bottle and pressed it to my lips, creating an effective barrier. “Let’s not.”
