Love Capri Style

by Reynolds, Lynn

  “All right, Zeke,” Eric called to him. “But be quick. I need to kiss my bride.”

  “Go right ahead,” Zeke shot back. “I’m a pretty good action photographer.” His hangdog face broke into a melancholy smile.

  Eric swept Amanda into his arms and Amanda beamed up at him, her heart bursting with joy at how well everything had turned out. Eric loved her. He hadn’t even batted an eye when she’d told him about the baby. He’d swung her into the air and whooped with excitement that day. She’d made a wonderful new friend in Stacey Dakota. And even her relationship with her father was improving. Life didn’t get much better than this.

  “Happy, Mrs. Greyford?”

  “Ecstatic, Mr. Greyford,” Amanda answered.

  Eric captured her lips in a kiss that was full of tenderness and passion. When at last they parted, they discovered the assembled guests crowded into the foyer, cheering and applauding.

  Artemisia Nash appeared in the foyer doorway. “That was beautiful, children. Now let’s go out to the garden for your public debut as man and wife.”

  She extended a hand, chauffeuring them out the door.

  Eric smiled down at Amanda.

  “I’m ready. You?”

  “Oh, yes.” Amanda nodded.

  Eric took her hand and together they walked out of the Villa Battali and into the first morning of the rest of their life.

  The Beginning

  **Thank you for reading Love, Capri Style. Please turn the page for an excerpt from Thirty-Nine Again, Lynn Reynolds’ chick noir suspense novel. RT Book Reviews called it “a first class mystery…and a first-class read.”**

  THIRTY-NINE AGAIN

  a “chick noir” novel

  by

  Lynn Reynolds

  What’s chick noir? It’s like chick lit, but with guns and dead bodies instead of shoes…

  On her first thirty-ninth birthday, Sabrina O’Hara battled cancer. This year, she discovers her fiancé Scott’s leading a treacherous double life. Now she’s on the run—from Scott, from the Mexican Mafia, and from one dangerously sexy Homeland Security Agent. Thirty-nine the first time was horrible. But can Sabrina survive Thirty-Nine Again?

  RT Book Reviews said: 4 Stars

  “[Thirty-Nine Again is] a first-class mystery and…a first-class read.”

  ***

  CHAPTER ONE

  The day of my second thirty-ninth birthday began beautifully, but that just goes to show you appearances can be deceiving. Overnight, the unseasonably mild autumn had blossomed into full-fledged spring, with sunshine and temperatures expected to reach the seventies. All day, childish glee bubbled in me at the realization I’d lived to see another birthday. It bubbled even bigger as the workday drew to a close—I had planned to knock off work early to run with Evan down at Harborplace.

  I blew off the gang at the office, even though they wanted to take me to Pazo to celebrate. ecause I’d had no energy for celebrating my first thirty-ninth birthday—chemotherapy and radiation treatments will do that to a person—they’d wanted to make it up to me this year. I felt a little bad when I broke the news, but they weren’t too put out about it. In fact, a round of cheering went up. Everyone knew Scott and I had been drifting apart, so they were kind of pleased to hear someone else had inched into the picture. I denied that was the case, of course, even to myself.

  “Evan’s just helping me get back into shape after surgery. He’s my new personal trainer, and he figured I’d stick with running more regularly if I had a partner.”

  “I’ll bet he can think of a few other things you’ll do better with a partner, too!” laughed Andy from Information Services.

  “Not true!” My friend Jess winked at him. “Sabrina says he’s gay.”

  “Really?” Andy’s interest wasn’t all that altruistic. He’s gay, and he’d seen Evan once when we ran into him in Starbucks. “Are you sure?”

  As a matter of fact, I wasn’t. I had never said I was sure. I’d only mentioned it in passing, a point of curiosity because of the whole earring thing. He wore earrings in both ears, and I was old enough to remember a time when only gay guys did that. But Jess and Andy reminded me that wasn’t the case anymore.

  How does someone know when a cultural shift like that takes place? How, as a straight guy, would you know it’s now safe to wear earrings in both ears? I mean, even Bono has earrings in both ears now, and he’s got something like sixty-seven kids, doesn’t he? When did he get the memo?

  “No, I’m not sure Evan is gay,” I admitted.

  “Mmm-hmm,” from both of them.

  “Cut it out. If he is straight or bi or whatever, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure I’m too frumpy for the likes of him.”

  “Oh, girl, have you looked in a mirror lately?” Jess sighed.

  Of course I hadn’t, not closely anyway. I avoided mirrors as much as possible. First, I’d been a chubby, freckle-faced teen, then last year I’d been bald. Now I was missing a sizable part of one breast—euphemistically called a lumpectomy. Bottom line, mirrors had never been my friends.

  “I have to go.” I snatched up my gym bag. “I’ll try to come to the restaurant later tonight.”

  “You’ll try?!” Andy shook with laughter. “You’ll try? You mean, if you aren’t too worn out from all that running?”

  “We won’t hold our breath,” Jess added.

  I exited to the sound of clapping and a lot of ribald whistling.

  ***

  Evan and I were supposed to meet at the amphitheatre in front of the harbor, but when I arrived, I saw no sign of him. I wondered if I was late or maybe he changed his mind, and I paced around nervously. Then I decided I shouldn’t look too interested, so I strolled over to the angled steps near the water taxi’s passenger loading area. I sat down and further decided my left shoelace was too tight and my right shoelace was too loose. So I untied them both and began to retie them.

  Evan jogged around a corner and stopped beside me. “Hey, I thought maybe you decided not to come!”

  I looked up, disappointed to discover his dark eyes were hidden by a pair of those Oakley sunglasses that big with military guys.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah, sure!” I felt my face heating up involuntarily and heard the perky little exclamation point in my voice. It made me ill.

  I charged up the steps to cover my own embarrassment, but I’d never finished with the whole shoelace-tying thing, so I got tangled in my own feet and stumbled. Badly. I stumbled in a way only I could stumble. I started to fall face forward right into Evan’s arms. That threw me into such a huge panic that I windmilled my arms wildly and tried to arch away from him. I flailed backwards, somersaulting down the steps and coming within a millimeter of rolling into the dirty, oily water of the harbor. The only thing that saved me was Evan, who dove down the steps with incredible speed and grabbed me by the arms. I wound up with my legs in the water but my clothes unscathed. He pulled me onto the steps, and I buried my face in my hands.

  “Oh, that went way better than the gym,” I muttered.

  Evan snorted, blatantly failing to hide his amusement. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I replied. “I am not. I have a bloody knee that’s probably been exposed to all sorts of mutant flesh-eating bacteria. And my pride is utterly in tatters.”

  “Not to worry.” He left me there and jogged over to the Light Street Pavilion, the one with all the food places. When he returned, he was carrying two cups and a little plastic shopping bag.

  “Water, bandages, and lemonade.” He knelt beside me.

  “What good will all that do?”

  He hooked his sunglasses over the neck of his t-shirt. Then he lifted the lid on the cup of water, put his hand under my knee, and poured the water over the wound. The water was warm, but it stung nonetheless. Still, I was impressed at the effort he’d made to get the water temperature right. I peered at him surreptitiously. His head was down, and the sun’s rays glinted off shoulder-length hair so black i
t almost seemed blue. He wore it tied back in a ponytail, which looked natural, not phony and pretentious. At my firm a couple of investment bankers with receding hairlines had adopted the mini-ponytail look in some lame effort to compensate. On them, the effect was comical. Not on Evan though.

  The hard lines of muscle in his shoulders and back flexed as he leaned forward and blotted at my knee. To my surprise, he used the hem of his olive green t-shirt to clean the wound.

  “Oh, Evan, don’t,” I protested.

  “It needs cleaning.” He glanced up with a reassuring grin. His almond eyes were so black I couldn’t even see the pupils. But his smile was so open and honest, like none of this was the least bit of trouble, and there was no place he’d rather be.

  “This is an old shirt,” he added. “From my Army days. It’s seen worse than this. Anyway, time to let it go.”

  We both laughed, because when he laughed, I couldn’t help but join him. His eyes gleamed, and little crinkly lines formed at their corners. How could a woman not want to laugh with him? No wonder Scott had blown a gasket last night when I’d said I was going running with Evan.

  Scott and I considered ourselves engaged, even though no ring had ever been proffered. He was an immigration lawyer at Homeland Security, and he came from an uptight, politically well-connected Southern family. They didn’t blow gaskets in Scott’s family, so his display of temper had come across to me as almost flattering. Making Scott a little jealous was one thing, and not a very classy thing. But I knew it was about more than making an indifferent lover jealous. Scott wasn’t even here to bait, yet I continued to sit, immensely enjoying the feel of Evan’s hands all over my leg. Guilt fluttered at the base of my skull, like a moth trapped in a light.

  Evan pulled a box of large bandages out of the little bag he’d brought with him.

  “Where did you find those?” I peered over at the pavilion he’d just left. Baltimore’s big tourist Mecca was full of overpriced chain restaurants and gift shops. No drugstores in a place like that.

  “They have a security and first aid station. Any big mall does. People are always getting lost or injured or sick in malls, Sabrina. I went in, told them what happened, and asked if they had some first aid supplies. No big deal.”

  He shrugged in that mellow way he had. Everything about Evan as my personal trainer was like that—laid-back, low-key. He ripped open a packet of antibiotic cream and dabbed it all over my knee as I winced.

  “That’s what this is for.” He handed me the lemonade. “To take your mind off the pain.”

  “I’m sorry I’m being such a girl,” I said.

  “I’m not.” His voice sounded uncharacteristically husky. When his eyes tried to meet mine again, I looked away.

  “I should go.” I half-rose from the step, his hands still wrapped around my leg.

  “Come on. First let me bandage this,” he insisted.

  I sat back down. He laid a piece of non-stick gauze against my knee before fixing the big square bandage on top. His hands were broad with long, thick fingers, and they moved with swift confidence, like he’d done this a million times.

  “Were you ever a medical student or something?”

  “Army medic.”

  That jarred me. How pathetic I must look complaining about my poor knee. But then he was younger than me, so he couldn’t have been in for very long. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything gruesome at all.

  “Can you walk okay?” He rose with a lithe, animal grace and offered me his hand. As I took it, I realized I’d never remotely believed he was gay or bi. Except in a couple of really weird fantasies involving him and me and Matt Damon. I shook my head hard, trying to knock those embarrassing images out of my head.

  “Does your head hurt?” Evan threw his arm around my shoulders, not in a romantic way, but like he was trying to steady me.

  My head did hurt now, mostly because I’d shaken it so hard. I’d almost been able to hear marbles rattling around.

  “It’s fine.” I squirmed out of his unexpected embrace.

  “Where’s your car?”

  Normally I wouldn’t even have my car with me. I can walk to my office from my condo at Harborview and usually do. But I’d driven to a client’s that morning and then left my car in the office parking garage. When I told

  Evan where I’d parked, he said that was a long walk with a sore leg, which it wasn’t. Then he offered to come with me. I don’t know why I said yes. Okay, I do know why I said yes. But at least I had the dignity to hesitate a bit.

  We lumbered down the street side by side. By this time of the year, people usually needed to bundle up in heavy jackets, but the weathermen were calling it the warmest November on record. People in their business suits and designer dresses brushed past us, wrapped up in their cell phone conversations and oblivious to the warmth of the evening or the beauty of the Inner Harbor.

  Yeah, the water was disgusting, but the place was picturesque in the extreme, something I’d only noticed around the time my hair started falling out.

  I used to joke that with less weight on top of my head, I could think more clearly. During chemo I’d dug out my old sketchbooks and pastels, and on my good days, I’d come down and sketch the boats in the harbor or sketch the people strolling hand-in-hand around the promenade. At the time, I’d promised to spend more time on my art and less on adding up columns of numbers. As I walked with Evan, I realized it had been months since I’d taken time to do any sketching.

  Evan interrupted my musings, laying a hand on the middle of my back as he guided me into the garage. We came to a halt in front of a bank of elevators.

  I turned to face him. “I’m on the top level. Thanks for walking with me.”

  And then I kissed him, just like that—a shy little girl kind of kiss, a geeky peck on the cheek. I slapped a hand over my mouth.

  He froze, his golden-brown skin darkening slightly. This would be the moment where he would tell me he had a girlfriend in L.A. or wherever he was from. A girlfriend way prettier than me, who didn’t try to drop barbells on him or trip over her own shoelaces. He stared at me for the longest two seconds of my life.

  “Hey, come on,” I joked. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  He gave a peculiar little smirk and turned away, planting his hands on his hips as if he were angry or thinking hard about something. I was fourteen the last time I’d tried to kiss a guy first, and it had gone about as well as this seemed to be going. I looked down at the grimy concrete floor and opened my mouth to apologize.

  Evan spun around with a fluidity that startled me. He caught me by the elbow and pulled me close. He pressed his other hand against my neck, so that his fingers were tangled up in my hair and his thumb teased at the corner of my lips. Then he ducked his head down and kissed me, long and hard. My hands slipped around his back as if they were used to going there. I staggered a bit as his tongue slipped into my mouth. When we stopped for breath, he pressed his forehead against mine and sighed.

  “That was incredibly unprofessional of me,” he murmured.

  He surprised me. I had suspected personal trainers were like tennis pros—that a fair percentage of them were in the job for the extracurricular benefits. I thought about Scott and how angry he’d been last night. He’d implied I was trying to bait Evan, and I’d denied it heatedly. Now here I was proving him correct. I’ve always hated women who try to make their boyfriends jealous. If a girl is that insecure about a guy, why not dump him? Why, indeed?

  Years of accumulated stuff, inertia, the cowardly fear of an ugly scene, lack of confidence in her own attractiveness—that would be four answers right off the top of my head.

  “I should really go. Now.” The elevator doors opened and I felt a childish tear steal its way down my cheek.

  “Hey,” Evan protested softly.

  He raised a hand again, as if he wanted to touch me. But then he drew it away, balled it into a tight fist, and clamped his other hand on top.

  “I’m sorry,” I babbl
ed. “Scott and I had a fight yesterday, and he left for his business trip in a really bad mood. He was so flustered he even took the wrong damned laptop, which is not like him. He never lets me touch his computer. Barely lets it out of his sight. He’s going to be in such a mess at his meeting in Mexico, and then he’ll be in an even crankier mood when he calls later.”

  Behind me, the elevator doors whooshed closed again. Evan’s face twisted, a deep line creasing his brow.

  “Do you have the laptop with you?”

  Talk about a non sequitur.

  “What, when I go jogging I should bring someone else’s computer? Not even my own?”

  I laughed but he didn’t. His whole demeanor had changed somehow, like a panther sighting a wounded rabbit.

  “It’s not in your car either?” He said it with a weird, disconcerting urgency.

  “What do you care?” I was baffled and even a little alarmed. The kiss had obviously rattled us both way more than it should have.

  “You know, I need to leave.” I thrust out a hand to keep him at bay and backed up a little. What did I know about him, except he looked hot in a muscle shirt and could probably wrestle me into submission with frighteningly little effort? As I stepped away from him, two silver-haired businessmen approached the elevator and pressed the call button. The doors slid open again.

  “Sabrina,” Evan said. “Wait. I need to tell you something.”

  “Please don’t.”

  I positioned myself close to the two, fatherly businessmen, who eyed the earring-wearing Hispanic with condescending sneers. One of them moved to block the center of the elevator doors. He pushed the “close” button before Evan could follow me.

  ***

  I called Jess at the restaurant and told her I wouldn’t be coming. I was tired and embarrassed, disgusted with my lame attempt at flirtation, and in a significant amount of pain. My knee had grown to the size of a grapefruit, and I worried something important might have been torn or damaged. I went home and put an icepack on it, reminding myself where I’d been one year ago. A pity party was better than no birthday party at all. I capped off the celebration with a glass of one of Scott’s most expensive red wines. Scott fancied himself a bit of a gourmet cook and wine connoisseur. I didn’t know enough about wines to know whether he was really an expert or just a poser—but I knew what I liked. So I had another glass. And then I had another. Soon I was feeling pleasantly drowsy.