Crush on You

by Christie Ridgway

  Yesterday, Liam and Seth had been a breath away from detailing at least some of that. For a second she’d wanted Penn Bennett to hear the story and see him squirm like the lowly worm he was. Then he’d be sorry, she’d thought. Then he’d be sorry for her. But . . .

  She didn’t want his sympathy. And why should she care what he thought about her anyway?

  She didn’t.

  She wouldn’t.

  Back in front of Ed and Jed, she purchased the items they’d collected. Besides the paint and the gloves, Penn had picked up a new broom and a stack of disposable face masks. He tossed wooden stir sticks onto the counter and plopped a tissue-thin painter’s cap on top of her hair. “If you’re going to do some painting, you’ll need this, too.”

  “Uh . . . thanks.” She glanced at him, but he shifted his gaze away and busied himself stuffing change into a collection for the San Francisco Ronald McDonald House.

  Jed was putting the loose items into a bag while Ed watched. Then his head snapped up. “I have something I want to tell you. I said to Jed—”

  “ ‘I have something to tell Allie,’ ” his brother parroted.

  “Right.” Ed looked at her expectantly. “So what was it?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know, Ed. What was it?”

  He frowned. “It’s so damned irritating this getting old—oh, I know now!” His smile beamed on. “Thinking about getting old led me straight to thinking about dying young.”

  Alessandra’s own smile faded. She sent Penn a sidelong glance, but he was still plunking nickels and quarters into the plastic canister. “So, um, what do you have to tell me, Ed?”

  “I went to visit Carlene on Friday.”

  “Oh.” Carlene was his late wife.

  “Passed by your dad. Everything looks great there.”

  “Good.”

  “But Tommy . . .”

  Tommy. She saw him then, still too thin, but grinning like a fool, like someone who’d won the lottery, like someone who was marrying his love the very next day. “We’re going to have such a great life,” he’d whispered to her at the rehearsal dinner. Happiness had swelled like bubbles inside of her, filling with the sweet juice of expectation, just like grapes growing in a summer vineyard. How young they’d been. How big her heart.

  Pressing her lips together, she forced herself back to the present. “Is there a problem at Tommy’s grave?” she asked, then regretted the phrasing immediately as beside her, Penn froze. A final coin landed with a lonely plink.

  “A vase was knocked over, filled with some purple spiky things.”

  Lavender. She’d brought them on her last visit.

  “I re-righted it,” Ed continued. “Tried to prop it up against the headstone. But it may fall over again.”

  “Okay.”

  “I thought about calling Sally, but with her so involved with Clare’s wedding and all . . . well, I decided to wait until I saw Tommy’s girl instead.”

  “Thanks, Ed,” said Tommy’s girl. Tommy’s almost-bride. “Thanks.”

  With the purchased items stowed in the truck, there was nothing left to do but get into the cab. It was quiet inside as they drove toward Tanti Baci and a different kind of tension now thrummed between her and Penn.

  Alessandra pulled in a breath and then glanced over at him. “So . . .”

  He continued staring out the window as he steered. “I’m going to feel like an asshole, aren’t I?”

  Despite everything, she felt a smile try to take over. “Maybe.”

  “Then don’t tell me,” he said. “Don’t tell me another word.”

  She let the smile go ahead and bloom then. It eased the sadness inside her and wrapped a little cushion around the tight kernel of her heart so that it didn’t rattle quite so much in the cavern of her chest. For the first time since meeting Penn she felt relaxed. Her normal self. Alessandra Baci, the Nun of Napa.

  Penn seemed comfortable, too. Or he was quiet anyway, as they parked the truck beside the cottage and unloaded their purchases. At his instruction, she tidied the cottage’s floor with the new broom. He stripped off his shirt and began to move panels of Sheetrock from the porch to inside. They kept clear of each other, until her sweeping took her into the main room. She had to sidestep to give him a clear path to the bridal boudoir. Her foot found one of the white plastic bags they’d brought in from the hardware store, and it slid on the film of grit she’d yet to clean.

  She slid, too, letting out a little yelp as the broom left her hand and her balance wobbled. Penn grabbed her upper arms, swinging her toward his bare chest to keep her on her feet. It was a reflex on his part, and a reflex on hers to clutch his biceps as her gaze jumped to his face.

  His handsome face. His strong body so close. His bulging biceps against her palms.

  Heat flushed across her skin, that prickling, sunburn-heat that set fire to her nerve endings. She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, and it didn’t matter, because it was all she could do to handle her own feelings—the spiking desire, that encompassing heat, the sexual rush that flooded her mind with images of skin and lips and tongues and male parts mating with female parts . . .

  “Penn,” she whispered. Just like that, just that quick, she wanted something from him, she needed anything—everything—he could offer with his strong body and his clever mouth. It had been so long. She pressed her body to his. “Penn.”

  He stared down at her.

  “Please, Penn . . .” Her tongue brushed her dry lips. “Please.”

  With an inarticulate sound, he jerked away. Quick strides took him outside.

  Her gaze followed his escape as mortification proved to be the backwash of that brief but intense sensual tide. She put her palms against her hot cheeks, but they were just as overheated as the rest of her. They’d been touching him. And she’d been coming on to him, no doubt about that. In the look in her eyes, the sway of her body, the desire in her voice. She knew he couldn’t have mistaken what she was feeling. There was no way of pretending it hadn’t happened, either.

  And they had almost a month of togetherness to go.

  Maybe she could wiggle her way out of working with him now, she thought. But that was the kind of thing he probably expected from her. There was Clare’s upcoming wedding to consider, too. Alessandra would do what she had to, face fiery mortification and even mocking men, to get the job done for Tommy’s sister.

  That wedding was the important first step toward saving the winery, too.

  Inhaling a breath, Alessandra followed Penn into the sunshine. He stood, facing away from her, his hands laced behind his head, elbows out, back muscles tense.

  “Penn.”

  He didn’t turn. “What?”

  “Sorry about . . . about that.” She gestured toward the cottage, even though he couldn’t see it. “I . . .”

  “You don’t have to say any more.”

  “I do. I have to explain—”

  “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “I have to. I don’t want you to think I was coming on to you because it’s, well, you. It’s just that it’s been five years since . . .” Alessandra swallowed. “Look. You touched me, and for a second, just a second, I . . . wanted to touch back. That’s all.”

  Penn spun to face her. There was a flush on his cheeks and a glitter in his eyes. “So that incident wasn’t about me personally.”

  “No. It was only about the five years and about me and . . .” The words trailed off as her face heated up again.

  He moved toward her.

  Though her pulse went crazy once more, she forced herself to hold her ground even as she continued to babble. “It was momentary. And nothing. Less than nothing.”

  “Less than nothing?” He halted a foot away, his tanned chest rising and falling in counterpoint to the thick beat of her pulse. “Is that right?”

  She swallowed again. “Yes.”

  “So, baby, you’re telling me . . .” he began, his hazel eyes mesmerizing her.
/>   She trembled, a poor little bunny hypnotized by the hungry fox. “Telling you what?” she whispered.

  “That you’re not interested in changing the terms of our bargain.”

  And she could see it: A new bargain, a different deal. Not Boss and Laborer, but Man and Woman. Lover and Lover. Limbs and tongues. Skin and sweat. Sex . . . and sin. Because as the Nun of Napa, wouldn’t it be that, too?

  Penn took another step closer and she flung up her hand.

  Then flung out the truth.

  “Five years ago I was supposed to be married,” she said. “My fiancé—Tommy—he’d had cancer. He was in remission, though—we thought he’d beaten it. But then . . . then he died on our wedding day. He died fifteen minutes before we were supposed to say our vows.”

  4

  Stretched out on the king-sized, unmade bed, Clare Knowles watched her best friend step from the bathroom into the bedroom, wrapped only in a towel.

  “Pretty,” Clare commented, appreciating the view.

  Gil jolted, then his hands grabbed for the terrycloth sliding down his hips. Since he was six foot five and two hundred twenty-five pounds of olive skin and etched muscles, the bath sheet looked closer to a washcloth. “God, Clare, scare the hell out of me, why don’t you?”

  She sent the key ring he’d once given her spinning around her index finger. “Maybe you should be more careful with this.”

  In three long strides he was close enough to snatch the key from her. “Good advice.”

  “Hey.” Clare sat up, hurt. “Are you really taking that away?”

  “You won’t be watering my plants anymore.” He turned his back on her to rummage through a dresser drawer. Then he disappeared into the bathroom again, reemerging moments later wearing a pair of buttery Levi’s.

  “First off,” she said, watching him cover up his impressively chiseled chest with a ratty T-shirt, “you’ve never had any plants. But if you did, why wouldn’t I be watering them anymore?”

  “Clare. You’re getting married in less than a month.” He said it as if she was the kind of stupid girl who got her tent zipper stuck and then cried until she could be rescued by him.

  Of course, she was that girl.

  “I have no idea what my wedding has to do with me and you.” That was a lie, of course, since the whole reason she’d ambushed him tonight had everything to do with her marriage and Gil.

  He looked at her through inscrutable eyes. Dark-lashed, dark brown eyes that had made females swoon since he was five years old. Girls used to chase him around the kindergarten recess yard begging for kisses. Clare had pushed more than one of them down before Gil confessed he sort of liked it, proving that they’d always been there for each other—and that they’d always told each other the truth, too.

  “Why have you been avoiding me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But see, now Gil had started lying to her, too. Clare ignored the way her stomach curled inward at the thought of that. Pasting on a little smile, she patted the mattress beside her. “Then come over here.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Now it was her turn to stare at him. They’d been two peas in a pod during childhood. Remained close friends in high school. Had been sharing their lives throughout their twenties. Last summer, they’d even spooned on a couch three nights straight, when they’d taken a road trip to visit one of her college friends. “I won’t bite.”

  He let out a mirthless laugh, and then with a shrug of his broad shoulders threw himself down onto the mattress beside her. Shoving a pillow beneath his head, he crossed his legs at the ankles and his arms over his chest. “What is it you want, Clare?”

  She frowned at him. He was going to be difficult about this, she’d known that from the start, but even before she’d voiced her request he was acting uncooperative. “Why are you so crabby?”

  He glanced at her, glanced away, then released a sigh. “It was a long day, okay? The lousy economy means everybody wants to keep the scruffiest of vehicles in working order and they don’t want to go more than a day without their wheels.” When he pushed his black hair off his forehead, she noticed the knuckles on his right hand were split open.

  She grabbed his palm to inspect the wounds, holding tight when he tried to tug it away. “What happened?”

  “Banged ’em on an engine block. Occupational hazard.”

  Her gaze lifted to his face. “It looks like you punched a wall.”

  He went all inscrutable again. “Banged ’em on an engine block. Occupational hazard,” he repeated.

  Her huff of impatience didn’t move him, so she tried a different tack. Rolling closer to his tall form, she cupped her hands over his shoulder and propped her chin on her fingers. He stiffened, tensing beneath her touch.

  He’d been so darn tense around her lately.

  “Gil,” she said, keeping her voice soft. He smelled like the generic shampoo she knew he bought at the local big box store along with the matching brand of shaving cream and mega-packs of Hungry Man dinners. They often shopped there together, and last month, when she’d tossed a jumbo box of condoms into his cart as a joke, she’d thought he’d developed a sudden allergy. His face had turned that red.

  Which looked really funny on a man who was six foot five, twice her weight, and who’d been nicknamed the Italian Stallion at twelve years old due to his daily need of a shave. From what she’d observed in the years following, when it came to women he actually lived up to the nickname.

  He was looking a little red-faced now, too, strangely enough. “Gil . . .” she started again, feeling more uncertain than before. The red face, the distance, the desire to have his house key back! What was that all about . . . ?

  “It’s a woman!” she blurt out, the light dawning. “You found someone with an expiration date longer than your gallon of low-fat.” She tweaked him about that all the time—that he lost interest in a woman faster than it took for his milk to turn into cottage cheese.

  One minute she was looking into his tanned, almost-too-handsome face and the next he was presenting her with his back. He’d swung his legs over the side of the bed and now sat on its edge, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

  Clare gaped, unsure how to take the abrupt move. “Gil?” She scooted closer so that she could stroke her hand down the back of his shirt. When her palm ran over the bare skin revealed by a rent in the cotton fabric, he twitched like she’d burned him.

  “Maybe you should go now, Clare.”

  And leave her best friend feeling . . . what? “Doesn’t she . . . is it that the woman you’re interested in isn’t interested back?” Though that didn’t make any sense. No one could deny that Gil was flat-out gorgeous and by any standard other than her mother’s, a business success as well. That he hadn’t gone to college and yet made a good living for himself and his employees by working with his hands shouldn’t put off any female worthy enough to catch Gil’s eye.

  “Who is she?” Clare demanded, and the little green around the edges she was starting to feel was surely due to the fact that this woman was causing Gil—Clare’s best friend—heartache.

  He groaned. “Clare, just leave it alone.”

  “I won’t.” She kneed across the mattress in order to sit beside him. “If she doesn’t appreciate you, I’m going to slap her silly.”

  Shaking his head, he let out another of those mirthless laughs. “Not a good idea. She doesn’t deserve it, not at all.”

  “Huh. So she does like you back?”

  “Yeah. She likes me fine.”

  Funny, how that didn’t really make her feel a whole lot better. “I think I better meet this person.”

  “Clare—”

  “Jordan will be in town on Friday night. We’ll double date.”

  “Clare—”

  “You know how stubborn I can be.”

  He sighed, then turned his head to send her a look. “That’s how I ended
up with a broken arm, if I recall.”

  “So not my fault! I wanted to retrieve those abandoned birds’ eggs. No one made you climb the tree to get them instead of me.”

  “You couldn’t climb a tree worth a damn.”

  “How can we know?” she scoffed. “You never gave me a chance, always playing white knight like you do.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. The good guy.”

  There was a glimmer of a smile on his face for the first time and she grabbed the moment. “I have the perfect opportunity for you to be the good guy yet again,” she said, hearing the wheedling note in her own voice.

  Gil’s smile died and a wary light entered his eyes. “No.”

  “I haven’t even told you what it is,” she protested.

  “When you’re trying to wrap me around your little finger, I know I’m in trouble.”

  She bumped his shoulder with hers. “C’mon. It’s a pretty finger,” she said, holding it up to him.

  He clasped her single digit in his fist. His skin was so warm. A little tremor of . . . something wiggled its way up her arm and she took her hand back, shoving it under her thigh. “You’re trying to distract me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Is it working?”

  She shook off the strange sensation still jittering across her skin. “No. I need a favor.”

  “I already said I’d throw the bachelor party. Please don’t ask me to jump out of the cake at your bachelorette shindig.”

  “What? Jump out of the cake . . .” It was the farthest thing from her mind, yet now it was in her mind. Gil, with his olive skin and tight muscles. His white smile and snapping dark eyes. He’d jump out of her cake and then . . . and then she’d jump him. Gil could be her final fling as a single woman.

  She shook herself again. Gil. Fling. Did not compute. Gil. Friend. That worked. That’s what he was. The friend she wanted beside her when she stood in front of the world and pledged herself to Jordan.