Can't Hurry Love

by Christie Ridgway

  “Jules,” Stevie said. “Look at me.”

  She obeyed her sister, even as she remembered. Jules, her mother had said. I’m dying.

  Her sister smiled. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Giuliana’s cold skin flooded with heat. Her head spun. Black dots swam into her vision.

  She saw Stevie start forward. “Are you okay?”

  That question! “Of course . . .” She wasn’t, she realized, as arms closed around her and the room went dark.

  4

  Frustration rose within Kohl Friday, enough that he would have thrown a punch if there was a convenient target. But he was standing in the Tanti Baci tasting room, with its bottles of wine, rows of glassware, and decanters of olive oil. As much as he wanted to vent, he wouldn’t take pleasure in the mess he’d make.

  And then there was Grace Hatch. He wouldn’t take pleasure in scaring her, either.

  He strode over to pick up the sponge that Giuliana had been using to clean the refrigerator before she’d gone into a near-faint and been carried off by her family. And Liam.

  Yeah. Liam. Warm water dribbled down Kohl’s wrist as he squeezed the sodden material in his hand—his action a pitiful substitute for the strangling his temper called for. He glared at the fridge’s white interior walls as if they were the cause of his piss-poor mood.

  “I can finish that up,” Grace said.

  He switched his stare to her. She was gazing at him out of big, wary eyes. Their blue was almost startling, a bright contrast to the soft reddish blond of her short wavy hair that matched the color of the freckles sprinkled over her creamy skin. When she’d first started working at Tanti Baci, there’d been bruises on her—fresh purple ones, fading green ones, the sick yellow that spoke volumes. The five distinct finger marks ringing her upper arm had been nearly black.

  The color of the rage that too often bubbled inside Kohl.

  Fuck.

  Ignoring the little rabbit in the room, he started scrubbing. He hadn’t intended to finish the task, but what the hell. It was too early to hit a bar and start drinking.

  Grace began dusting the shelves again. “She’s going to be all right,” she ventured after a silent moment. “It’s just that she hasn’t been sleeping well. Or eating.”

  Kohl grunted. As if he didn’t know! He should have dragged Giuliana away for a meal before her sister had a chance to tell her about the baby. Instead of celebrating with Stevie, she’d slumped right into the arms of that rich, overprivileged asshole, Liam Bennett.

  “Do you have any cigarettes?” Kohl barked out.

  Grace’s eyes widened. “I don’t smoke.”

  He hadn’t, either, not for a long time, but he thought he might have taken it up again. The morning after the fire, he’d woken to find matches in his pocket, though he didn’t actually remember lighting up. He didn’t actually remember hours of that night—the time between his first few drinks at one bar until the news of the apartment burning had roused him from a stupor on his stool at another. He’d slapped himself two-thirds sober, then called for cab, downing Dentyne to alleviate the stink of booze clinging to him.

  When he’d first left the army and returned to Edenville, he’d spent a lot of lost evenings with his best bud, José Cuervo. It didn’t happen nearly as often now, but he still couldn’t claim saint status.

  He’d been trying, though, for Jules.

  Fuck.

  Angry all over again, he heaved the sponge. It landed on the fridge’s back wall with a loud splat.

  A bleat reminded him of the little rabbit. Guilt pinched and he swung toward her, ready to apologize for scaring the bejeezus out of her. But she was focused on her work, deftly arranging the items displayed for sale. His gaze narrowed on her hands. They weren’t trembling, he was glad to note, but still he didn’t look away. How pretty they were, he thought, covered with those same freckles that stood out like cinnamon-sugar snowflakes on her face.

  He wondered if they tasted sweet.

  She bleated again and he started, embarrassed he might have said that thought aloud. But she was staring down at her forefinger. A drop of blood welled there.

  His feet rushed forward. He halted as he reached her, aware that his mere size spooked some women—not to mention his temperament. “Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing.” She darted him a nervous glance. “I caught it on the edge of this tin of tea.”

  He eased back a step. “Are you up to date on your tetanus shots?”

  Her face flushed. “Yes.”

  They would have made sure of that at the hospital. He’d known she’d gone there after her ex’s last beating. Another spurt of wrath shot through him, and it felt as if a strap was tightening around his chest. It only cinched harder as she brought that slim, cinnamon-dusted hand up to insert the injured digit in her mouth. Sucked.

  Lust shot through him, heat arrowing toward his cock. It immediately thickened. “You shouldn’t do that,” he told the girl, fascinated by the sight. His voice was gruff. Christ! This poor little thing was likely terrified of men and he was stuck on Jules, yet still he reacted just like an animal. Only a beast would let his temper and his hungers get the best of him like this . . .

  In those hours he couldn’t account for, he only hoped they hadn’t.

  Grace wound a paper towel around her injured finger. “Your sister is very nice,” she said, making him suppose she couldn’t hear his heavy breathing. “I appreciate her letting me stay.”

  “Her place is small, but I don’t think she’s ever there.”

  “She dates a lot?”

  A short laugh escaped him. “A lot doesn’t cover—” A thought shut him up. “She wouldn’t bring anyone home when you’re there,” he assured her.

  “Anyone?”

  “A man,” he clarified.

  Her face colored again. “I don’t think all males are villains.”

  No, only the ones who should have taken care of her, starting with her father. “No one could—”

  “You saved Chester,” she suddenly said.

  He blinked. “Chester?”

  “Our dog. My dad had him tied up to a tree in the yard. He would get himself all tangled, no matter how many times I tried to unknot the rope. Then he’d be stuck in the dirt, unable to reach his bowl of water.”

  “Jerry,” Kohl said, the memory rushing to him. He’d been a loner by choice, but it had killed him to see that scruffy, dirty animal on its own, day after day. “We called him Jerry Garcia—you know, after the guitarist in the Grateful Dead.”

  At her puzzled expression, he laughed. “You’ll have to meet my father and mother someday.”

  Pink rushed over her face again.

  Heat burned on his, too. That had probably sounded like some kind of come-on, and despite her protestations, a woman like Grace Hatch had to feel extra wary. He swallowed and backed up a little more. “It’s just that my dad loved that dog from the day I stole him from your house and brought him to our place.”

  She smiled a little. “My father thought I’d allowed him to run off. I was so happy when I spotted him with your parents a couple weeks later. I asked Mari at school and she told me what you’d done.”

  A chill cruised along Kohl’s spine. “Your father—”

  “It didn’t matter.” She spun back toward the shelves and restarted her cleaning and rearranging. “It doesn’t.”

  Oh, God. It mattered. “He hit you.”

  She shrugged.

  Cold and heat collided inside of Kohl as rage mingled with something tender, a volatile cocktail. His hands fisted and it took everything he had to force his voice to gentleness. “He hit you for what I’d done.”

  “Sometimes he hit me for making him dinner,” she said. “At least that time there was a reason for it.”

  Kohl found himself facing the refrigerator again. Maybe those white walls would wipe clean his now cluttered conscience. That SOB, Peter Hatch, had hit his little girl for something Kohl had do
ne—a prank on his part, really, though getting that dog into a bath hadn’t been a bit of fun. But while he’d been struggling with sixty pounds of stinky fur and shampoo, a man had laid a hand on Grace’s sugared skin.

  He remembered her as a kid now, too, as scruffy and unkempt as the canine he’d rescued. But he’d left her behind . . . “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  A promise of more violence wasn’t something she needed in her life. “Nothing. Not a thing.” Asserting his will over his straining muscles—now he knew what the Hulk felt like—he reached for the sponge and started working once more on the refrigerator.

  He cleared his throat, deciding he could take a stab at being civilized. Like that damn Liam Bennett, he thought. “Do you like working at Tanti Baci?”

  “I do. I like the people that come into the tasting room. The time passes so quickly! And the Baci sisters . . .”

  He glanced at her, catching the smile on her gold-dusted face. “You think they’re nice?”

  “Stevie and Alessandra want to save the winery so very badly.”

  He nodded. “Jules, too.”

  Her blue eyes cut to him. They shook him again, their startling blue, the way they seemed to see him . . . differently than most women did. The females he’d been hanging with in bars the past couple of years looked at him and saw burly muscles and his barely restrained belligerence. Both attracted them, he knew. Then there was Giuliana . . .

  “You’ve been such a good friend to her,” Grace said.

  “She’s needed one.” As he’d gained more control of his moods, she’d given over to him more responsibility at Tanti Baci. He’d appreciated that and then come to see that through her trust she was bringing out the better man in him. His time in combat had been hell, and he’d been still partly there upon his return. Jules had seemed the beacon that beckoned the rest of him toward home. “And I owe her a lot.”

  It made him think of her in Liam’s arms again, and he battled the urge to knock something over. But damn it—

  “I owe you a lot, too,” Grace said quietly.

  He glanced over his shoulder, his mind still on that smug son of a bitch who had been making him nuts for months. “What? Why? Because I took your dog and you took a hit for it?”

  At the harsh tone of his voice, she twitched.

  Shit. There he went, scaring her again. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m a lousy kind of man for you to be around . . .”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Her big blue eyes were making him want to twitch again. “Honey—”

  “You called me that,” she said, her gaze glued to his face. She put down her dust cloth and came closer.

  For some reason, Kohl backed up, a man who hadn’t retreated from anything or anyone in all his life. One shoulder blade caught the edge of the refrigerator. There was nowhere to run.

  “A group of boys was chasing me,” she said. “Down by the auto upholstery place.”

  He frowned. The auto upholstery place was in a Quonset-styled, corrugated metal building on the edge of downtown. Just a few blocks from Edenville’s center square, but there wasn’t always a lot of traffic in that area. “What were you doing there?”

  “Just wandering.” She shrugged. “Staying away from home. Staying out of the way.”

  “And the boys?” He had a sick feeling. How come he didn’t remember?

  “It’s not like that. I was seven,” she said. “They weren’t much older. But I fell and skinned my knee on the asphalt. You picked me up.”

  He must have been, what? Fourteen? “I had two younger sisters.”

  “ ‘Honey,’ you said. And you wiped my wet face with the hem of your shirt.”

  He had no memory of it at all. Still, he pressed tighter to the uncomfortable edge of the refrigerator because the look on her face was unmistakable. She wasn’t afraid of him. She probably never would be afraid of him, he thought, feeling sort of awed by the realization.

  He’d dried her tears.

  He’d saved her dog.

  But the light in her eyes scared the hell out of him. There was a kind of worship there, and everybody in Edenville knew Kohl Friday was no freakin’ hero.

  Liam prodded one of Giuliana’s listless hands with a bread-stick he plucked from the pile in the basket on the table between them. “Start with this.”

  She ignored the poke to gaze around the room. “Are the murals new? I don’t remember them.”

  He looked over. The walls of Vincenzo’s were painted in the umber, blues, and greens of Italy. Vine-covered hills, brilliant sapphire skies, a golden-skinned girl with waist-length black hair covered by a white kerchief walked barefooted on a narrow path.

  Tuscany. He smelled it in the herb and rose aroma of the Chianti in their glasses and from the basil and garlic in the pasta dish steaming on a neighboring table. His eyes cut to Giuliana and he saw her as she’d been that summer. Wavy hair to her hips, tip-tilted dark eyes bright with happiness, full lips turned up in a smile that could light all but those darkest corners of his heart.

  They’d signed up to intern at a vineyard from June until September and had left two days after she graduated from high school. Flying in a seat beside her, he’d thought it was the happiest he’d been in his life. Finally away from the tension in his house and finally free to be with the girl he loved—they’d kept the knowledge that she was his partner in the Italian adventure as much a secret from his parents as their two-year relationship.

  There had been so many secrets that summer.

  On the flight overseas, she’d slept with her head on his shoulder. He’d pressed his mouth to her shining hair and committed himself to a lifetime of keeping her safe and happy. He’d succeeded for a few weeks. The air-conditioned restaurant wasn’t the shaded streets of the tiny town where they’d lived, but he could feel the rough cobblestones under his feet anyway. He remembered a particular day, turning a corner only to spy Giuliana walking in his direction. She’d spotted him too and approached him on a run, flinging herself against his chest in loving abandon. Her body warm, her smile brilliant. Liam!

  “Liam!”

  He blinked, coming back to the present. The woman he remembered was a tabletop away. And scowling. There were shadows under her deep brown eyes, not brightness in their depths.

  “You didn’t hear me,” she said.

  “No.” But he had. Ten years before he’d heard every word, felt every break in her voice like a lash to his skin, and every sob like a punch to his gut. Yet guilt and remorse and self-disgust had clogged his throat and iced his heart so that he couldn’t respond in the way she’d needed.

  “I asked you to take me home.”

  He blinked again, now fully back to the present. “We’ve already ordered food,” he said. “For God’s sake, Jules, you fainted in the tasting room. Scared the hell out of everybody.”

  Her sisters. Her brothers-in-law. Him. As she’d slumped, he’d caught her in his arms, only to discover how very fragile she was, no bigger than a bird much too young to leave the nest. It had stabbed at him. “You’ve lost weight—”

  “I want to go home.”

  He glared at her. “And apparently you’ve lost your mind, too. It was either a doctor or food and I’m holding you to your promise to eat a full meal.”

  “I’ll get something back at Tanti Baci,” she said, waving a slender hand. “I don’t have the time for this.”

  “I should have known you’d break this vow, too.”

  Her mouth snapped shut and the look she shot him was black. Bitter. But he ignored it. After a year with Giuliana back in Edenville but without a resolution to their situation, he was prepared to play hardball. That’s what this interlude was really about. His Plan B after the friendship fail. Yeah, he wanted to feed her, but he was also planning on using this time to get her agreement that they go forward, immediately, with what needed to be done.

  Dropping her gaze, she fiddled wi
th her utensils, lining them up like good soldiers. “I want to see Stevie,” she finally said, her voice a little hoarse. “I don’t even remember what I said. I want her to know how happy I am for her and Jack.”

  The blade that had been stuck in his belly twisted. “Once you stopped seeing stars, you expressed yourself just fine.”

  Liam had been the one without the right words, as usual. His friend and father-to-be, Jack, who could be surprisingly emotional at times, hadn’t been content with a congratulatory handshake. He’d yanked Liam into a Super Bowl–win of a man-hug, thumping him on the back. Stevie’s embrace had been the one to slay him, though. She’d bussed him on the cheek, coming close enough for him to imagine he could see the swell of new life beneath her navel.

  So many memories.

  So many secrets.

  “Giuliana . . .” He’d survived her once before, but he’d been younger then. “Listen to me. We’ve got to—”

  “It’s just like old times!” a new voice commented.

  Swallowing his groan, Liam glanced up. Charles Conrad was beaming down on them, his brush cut just turning silver. Beside him was his wiry wife—her tan testament to her passion for golf. They’d lived in Edenville since Charles had been one of the first to sell his Silicon Valley software firm and retire to the Napa Valley, about two decades before. The couple had been part of his parents’ wider social set.

  Politeness necessitated he stand to greet the older pair. He shook hands with Charles and brushed his lips against Mary’s cheek. Though the town was a mere six thousand, he thought he might need to introduce Jules anyway. “Do you two know Giuliana—”

  “Of course.” Charles patted the young woman’s shoulder. “Why, we’ve been watching over the Baci girls for years.”

  Giuliana gave a good-natured grimace. “We’ve discovered that to be a civic hobby of sorts. Of course, when Allie lost Tommy . . .”

  “Tragic,” Mary agreed, “but it was you who first caught our eye, Giuliana.”

  “Me?”

  “And you,” the older woman answered, nodding at Liam. “The whole town held their breath as the two of you fell in love.”