All a Man Can Be

by Virginia Kantra

  Nicole frowned. “He doesn’t serve drinks to minors, does he?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” Kathy paused before adding, “Of course, his sister’s engaged to the chief of police, so I don’t think you’re in danger of losing your license. But I think DeLucca just flirts with them.”

  “Wonderful. Does his future brother-in-law, the police chief, bend the laws about sexual harassment and statutory rape, too?”

  “From what I saw last Saturday night, I’d say your bartender’s on the receiving end of the harassment.” Kathy sounded amused.

  “So you don’t blame him,” Nicole said.

  “I don’t blame him or them. I’ve been tempted to harass the man myself. He can handle it. And he can handle the Monday-night football crowd, which is saying something around here. That’s why we kept him, really, despite his background. He did a good job for the previous owner. She couldn’t run the place, and she needed the income.”

  Nicole might be a dupe where men were concerned, but she wasn’t that naive about business. “Not to mention that an active operation is more attractive to purchasers than a closed one,” she said dryly.

  “That, too,” Kathy admitted. “I showed you the numbers. So, what did DeLucca do to upset your apple cart?”

  Nicole couldn’t say. Didn’t want to say, not when her confession would make it painfully clear how susceptible she was to the wrong kind of guy.

  “Nothing much. He was a little aggressive. And I was late,” she added, trying to keep the accusation from her tone.

  “Oh, I forgot to wake you, didn’t I?”

  “That’s all right,” Nicole said, although it wasn’t, really. “I should buy myself a new alarm clock.”

  “Put your old one in storage?”

  No. Her clock had been missing ever since Kevin had packed his things and a selection of hers and moved out of her apartment—right before he fired her. And in the three months since, Nicole had kept an irregular schedule, reading until all hours of the morning and then sleeping through the day. But she didn’t feel like confiding that to Kathy, either.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Well, another good thing about Mark DeLucca is he shows up when he says he will. He’s reliable.”

  Nicole eased her death grip on the receiver. Reliable was good.

  And then Kathy went and spoiled it all by adding, “It’s remarkable, really, given his background.”

  “What background?” Nicole asked.

  “Well, remember, I’m not a local, so I can’t tell you everything,” the real estate agent said. Though she seemed to be doing a mighty thorough job to Nicole. “But that whole family has issues. I know the mother has a drinking problem.”

  Nicole closed her eyes. No new business owner wanted to hear that her key employee came from a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic gene pool.

  In Nicole’s own personal rogues gallery, that résumé put Mark DeLucca somewhere between Charles the self-absorbed graduate student and Yuri the vodka-prone cellist. Some women fell for tall, dark and handsome. She was a sucker for tall, dark and misunderstood.

  Not anymore, she reminded herself. She opened her eyes to the light streaking through the window.

  Never again.

  She would not allow herself to be used, and she would keep Mark DeLucca around only as long as he was useful to her.

  The memory of his smooth, flat voice mocked her resolution.

  I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll work for you.

  There was a woman waiting upstairs in Mark’s apartment.

  He recognized the signs: the car parked in the marina’s lot below, a light in the window above. But this car, a battered compact, belonged to his sister. And since his sister was also the only woman who currently possessed a key to his apartment, it was a good bet she was the one waiting inside.

  Too bad. Mark pulled his Jeep into a space by the boathouse steps. He wondered what Tess wanted this time.

  Or—since this was Tess, after all, who had bullied and mothered him since they were both old enough to stand—what it was she thought he needed now.

  He smiled as he climbed the stairs. He was sure she would tell him.

  She was already in his kitchen when he opened his door, a pretty dark-haired woman in tight jeans and a red sweater, standing in front of his refrigerator.

  “You’ve got cold pizza and three different kinds of mustard in here,” she said without turning around. “What kind of a diet is that?”

  Mark grinned. “Jarek got you on some kind of health food kick now?”

  Jarek Denko, Eden’s chief of police, was Tess’s fiancé. They were getting married in three weeks.

  Tess snorted. “Hardly. I brought hazelnut crescents.” She pulled a white bakery box from the fridge, dangling it by its string. “From Palermo’s. I thought I’d have to leave them for you.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows. “Palermo’s, huh? That’s some kind of bribe. What do you want, Tess?”

  “Aren’t you home early?”

  Ah, hell. As if being his big sister wasn’t bad enough, Tess was also a reporter. She was both perceptive and damnably hard to shake. “Joe’s opening the bar today,” Mark said. “My shift doesn’t start till four.”

  “Which hasn’t stopped you from being there at eleven every other day this week.”

  He shrugged, not denying it.

  “It didn’t go well, did it?” Tess’s golden gaze was concerned. “Your meeting with the new owner.”

  Not well. Now, there was an understatement.

  Mark cut the string on the bakery box. “She hasn’t fired me yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Of course she didn’t fire you,” Tess said. “She’d be a fool to fire you. You’re all that’s kept that place running.”

  His sister’s quick loyalty was both touching and more than he could bear right now.

  “I don’t know if I want the job.”

  Tess frowned. “What else would you do?”

  That was the problem, Mark acknowledged. Despite his stint in the marines, he didn’t like taking orders. He had enjoyed running the bar. Calling the shots. But Nicole Reed, with her silk blouses and dot-com fortune, had nixed his dream of making the place his own.

  Since he came back to Eden a year ago, he was just drifting through civilian life. So far he’d avoided repeating his old mistakes. He wasn’t drinking, and he hadn’t been arrested. Not yet, anyway. He’d come close a couple of months ago. But he couldn’t blame his sister for looking at him like a loose boat cruising toward an accident.

  He regarded her with affection. “Is that why you’re here? To stand over my shoulder like you did when I had that paper due in Mrs. Williams’s English class?”

  “Of course not,” Tess said. But her cheeks turned dull red. “I came to tell you you’ve got a tux fitting tomorrow at ten-thirty.”

  “You could have called.”

  “And to bring you dessert.”

  “You could have waited.”

  “And to deliver your mail.”

  She must have collected it from his mat when she let herself into his apartment.

  He stuck out his palm. “Fine. Hand it over.”

  She marched around him, scooped a sheaf of envelopes and circulars from the mess on the coffee table, and thrust it at him. “There. Special delivery.”

  “Gee, thanks. But you shouldn’t have.” He started to thumb through the stack. “There’s nothing here that can’t—”

  A heavy cream envelope with an embossed return address snagged his attention. Johnson, Neil and Younger. Since when did high-priced Gold Coast law firms troll for business in tiny Eden?

  “What?” Tess said. “What is it?”

  Mark slit the flap and unfolded the letter inside.

  Dear Mr. Delucca, I am writing to you, blah blah, guardian ad litem— What the hell was that? —for Daniel Wainscott. More blah, inform you of the passing of Elizabeth Jane Wainscott—


  His eye caught. His mind stumbled. Betsy? Betsy was dead?

  —will suggested that you are Daniel’s father and requested that you become his guardian.

  The news slammed his chest like a swinging boom. The air left his lungs. The room tilted.

  “Mark? What’s the matter?”

  He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He could only read while his world capsized around him.

  Phrases leaped off the page. The words were jumbled and his vision blurred, but the meaning seemed horribly clear.

  …no legally binding effect.

  Daniel’s grandparents, Robert and Helen Wainscott, have expressed interest in adopting Daniel and appear ready to pursue all legal avenues to do so.

  …advise you……choose to prove paternity……seek custody of Daniel…

  “Mark!” Tess touched his arm.

  The letter in his grip quivered like the edge of a sail. Mark folded it and tucked it back into the stack. But the words still burned and swirled in his brain.

  …possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father……act quickly to avoid losing your rights…

  “It’s nothing,” he lied. “A mistake. Want a pastry?”

  Chapter 2

  She was pretty when she smiled.

  Mark paused in the dark entryway. Behind the bar, chubby Joe Scholz was trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of the Blue Moon’s cash register to Nicole Reed. Her blond head was bowed. Her pink lips curved in a secret smile. And with the suddenness of a squall, swift, blind, animal lust took Mark by the throat and shook him at the root.

  He sucked in his breath and waited in the dark, his blood roaring, until his eyes adjusted fully to the dim room and his body recovered from the impact of that smile.

  Nicole glanced toward the entrance and saw him. Just for a second, surprise and relief shone in those blue eyes. And then her slim shoulders squared, and her smile disappeared as if it had never been.

  Mark took another breath. Good.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said in her precise, private school voice.

  He forced himself to move forward; summoned a shrug. “Then I guess you didn’t look at the work schedule.”

  Her lips firmed. “I looked.”

  “Then you should have known I was on at four.”

  “I thought you hadn’t decided yet whether you would continue to work here.”

  He liked the way she took the battle to him, instead of dithering around. But he couldn’t afford to like her too much. He couldn’t afford to say too much, either.

  The problem was, he hadn’t decided what to do yet. Nobody in town would believe it—the Delucca men weren’t exactly known for sticking around—but Mark’s pride wouldn’t let him walk away without at least giving notice.

  Not to mention that as long as there was the slightest chance there was a kid out there somewhere with the Wainscott name and Delucca genes, this could be a really bad time for Mark to find himself unemployed.

  Mark’s jaw tightened. No, he wouldn’t mention that.

  He wouldn’t even think about it.

  Much.

  He lifted up a section of the counter and slid behind the bar. “You need a bartender.”

  Nicole slipped out of his way, watching him with her too-cool, too-perceptive blue eyes. In the cigarette-and-beer-tinged air, her scent lingered, expensive and out of place. “Joe is here.”

  Joe was doing his best to fade into the bottles behind the bar. “Joe’s off now.”

  “I would have managed.”

  “They teach you how to mix drinks in business school?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But I pour a mean glass of chardonnay.”

  Mark stopped inventorying the glassware for the evening rush to stare at her. Little Miss Michigan Avenue wasn’t actually poking fun at herself, was she?

  She offered him a small smile. It didn’t transform her face the way the other one did, but it was still very, very nice. “Thank you for coming in,” she said. Like she meant it.

  He lifted one shoulder. “Don’t thank me. That’s what you pay me for.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Uh-oh. Another minute, and he might start liking this chick. And that would be as big a mistake as mixing beer and brandy.

  “Try staying out of my way,” he suggested, not caring if he sounded like a jerk. Hell, hoping he sounded like a jerk, like somebody she wouldn’t in a million years want to get to know better. The last thing he needed was another sweet-smelling, spoiled blonde complicating his life.

  …need to consider the possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father.

  Damn.

  A couple of regulars dragged in—the eight-to-four shift was ending at the nearby paper plant—and Mark greeted them with smiles and relief.

  “Hey, Tom, Ed. How’s it going?” He moved smoothly to pull a beer and pour a whiskey, comfortable with the demands of his job, easy in the world he’d created.

  A world where he knew almost everybody by name and could give them what they wanted without having to think about it too much.

  Okay, he was good, Nicole admitted several hours into Mark’s shift.

  Good to look at, too, she thought as he turned to set a drink at the other end of the bar and she had the chance to admire his hard, lean back and the fit of his Rough Rider jeans.

  Not that his appearance mattered, she reminded herself. She was here to evaluate his job performance, not his butt. She stole another surreptitious glance. Although at the moment she had no complaint with either one.

  He didn’t spin or flip or juggle bottles. Unlike Joe, who had kept up an unthreatening stream of jokes and small talk through the afternoon, he didn’t try to entertain the customers. Surely he could offer them more than, “What can I get you?” and “Be with you in a sec.”

  But he never got an order wrong, Nicole noticed. He never asked a customer to repeat one, either. His memory—and his patience—astounded her.

  It wavered only once, when an older man in a well-cut suit and ill-fitting hairpiece gulped half his drink and then demanded a new one.

  Mark raised an eyebrow. “Can I ask you what’s wrong with what you’ve got?”

  The older man scowled. “I ordered a Manhattan, damn it. I can’t even taste the scotch in this.”

  Mark whisked the offending drink away. “Let me take care of that for you.”

  Nicole shifted on her stool at the other end of the bar. Maybe the University of Chicago didn’t offer courses in mixology, but…

  “What’s in a Manhattan?” she asked as Mark approached her perch.

  “Vermouth, bourbon. Bitters.” He barely glanced at her. His eyes and hands were busy on his bottles. Below his turned-back sleeves, he had long, lean hands and muscled forearms and—heavens, was that a tattoo riding the curve of his biceps, peeking below the cuff? “But our guy doesn’t want that,” he continued. “He wants a Rob Roy.”

  Nicole tore her attention from his arm. Liquor was expensive. She wasn’t giving away free drinks because Mr. Hairpiece didn’t know his ingredients. “I’m sure if you explained to him that he ordered the wrong drink—”

  “—I’d be wasting my breath.” Mark added a twist of lemon peel to the fresh drink. “The customer’s always right, boss. I’m surprised they didn’t teach you that in business school,” he added over his shoulder.

  Cocky, conceited, know-it-all jerk. Nicole twisted her rings in her lap.

  “Well, hel-lo, pretty lady.” A warm, male, lookee-what-we-got-here voice swam up on her other side. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  Nicole squeezed her eyes briefly shut. She was a loser magnet, that’s what she was. She took a quick peek through her lashes at the man crowding her bar stool. Not quite young, not exactly good-looking, and married. She would bet on it. She sighed.

  “That’s because I haven’t been here before.”

  He laughed as if she’d said something funny. “Guess
it’s up to me to make you feel welcome, then.”

  “No, thank you, I—”

  He leaned into her, his stomach nudging the back of her arm, his face earnest and too close. “What’ll you have?”

  “Miss Reed doesn’t need you to buy her a drink, Carl.” Mark DeLucca’s voice was edged with amusement and something else. “She owns the bar.”

  The pressure on her arm eased as the man—Carl—took a step back. “This bar?”

  “This very one. And if you want to come back, I suggest you take your beer and go join your pals.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Carl blustered.

  “You bet,” Mark said.

  Nicole was grateful. Embarrassed. Defensive. The author of Losing the Losers in Your Life was adamant that a successful life plan did not include waiting for rescue.

  As soon as her new admirer was out of earshot, Nicole snapped, “I could have handled him.”

  Mark removed a couple of glasses from the bar and gave the surface a quick wipe down. “Old Carl would have liked that.”

  Her face flamed. “I meant, I can look after myself.”

  Mark paused in the act of emptying an ashtray. He gave her a quick, black, unreadable look that scanned her from the top of her smooth blond head to the glittering rings on her fingers and nodded once. “Yeah, I can see that. My mistake.”

  And after that he pretty much treated her as if she wasn’t there.

  Nicole squirmed on her wooden bar stool. Well, she squirmed on the inside. On the outside, she sat with perfect poise, her spine straight, her knees crossed, typing her observations into the slim-line laptop she’d set up on the bar.

  Men and women on their way home from work were replaced by young people out to have a good time. Couples pressed together in the booths in the back. Singles hooked up at tables or swayed by the jukebox. Nicole sipped her Diet Pepsi and let it all wash over her, the raucous music and the flickering TV, the drifts of cigarette smoke, the bursts of laughter. It was louder, looser, more exciting than she’d imagined.

  Thrilling, because now it was hers.

  She typed a note about the music. The jukebox selection needed updating. She couldn’t imagine her clientele playing “Takin’ Care of Business” that often if they had an adequate choice.