Nikki was quiet a moment, then her eyes narrowed. “What did you do to Gabe last night? Not that I’d blame you or anything, but after you yanked him out of that bar, did you rearrange his face or something? Do you need dear old dad’s help to fix his broken—again, not that I’d blame you—nose?”
“I could never hurt Gabe,” Cassandra scoffed.
“There’s the whole damn problem in a nutshell,” Nikki muttered. “The guy needs a serious wake-up call and I can think of several soft spots of his anatomy that might benefit from a swift blow or two.”
“This has nothing to do with Gabe.” Or everything. No, it had everything to do with her, with Cassandra, who wasn’t involved with Gabe any longer and who wanted to have at least one-half of her parental DNA at her upcoming birthday celebration. Then she wouldn’t feel so . . . so rootless when contemplating the next decades of her life. “I know you’re leery of men—”
“I’m not—” Nikki halted as the bells on the shop’s door rang out. Her head jerked toward the man strolling over the threshold. “Tell her,” she called out to him. “You tell her.”
Jay Buchanan’s golden eyebrows rose as he made his way toward his fiancée. In designer trousers, a silky shirt, and Italian loafers, he looked as über-cool as the über bachelor he’d always been. But now he wore a heavy gold “engagement” band on his left hand that looked completely at home next to the hulking diamond he’d slid on Nikki’s finger three and a half seconds after she’d agreed to marry him.
He took hold of that finger now, and rubbed his thumb over the beautiful ring. To this day he said without shame that he’d chosen all four carats in an effort to weigh her down. That he’d do anything it took to make it hard for her to ever run from him and what they had together.
How hard the mighty fall, Cassandra thought. Jay had never known what love was like, while Nikki had been distrustful of too-close connections. Depending upon others had disappointed her before, and she still had a tendency to claim she could take care of herself under any circumstances.
But Jay was wearing her down, Cassandra realized, if she was looking to her fiancé to explain her position.
“Tell her,” Nikki said again now. “Tell my sister I am not leery of men. I’m just leery of contacting a man who gave some samples thirty-plus years ago and then promptly forgot about them.”
“You don’t know that,” Cassandra refuted. “I told you, it was common at that time, in the early years of artificial insemination, for medical students like our father to be donors. And infertility itself was rarely addressed publicly by anyone. He did nothing wrong.”
Jay ran his fingers through Nikki’s tangle of gold-streaked brown hair. “Cookie, remember that some months ago he registered at that site that connects donors to offspring. He’s expressed curiosity, too.”
“And then nothing,” Nikki pointed out. “Though he knows where to find us, thanks to that queen-of-mean, Marlys the motormouth.”
Jay looked over at Cassandra, his left eyebrow winging up. “Cookie’s right.”
“But—”
“But what’s the big hurry anyway?” Nikki asked. “We agreed to do this Three Musketeer style if we did it at all. You, me, and Juliet. Why not wait until she and Noah get back from their two weeks of nudie-nudie in nookie-nookie town?”
Jay winced. “Nudie-nudie in nookie-nookie town. Always the romantic with you.”
His fiancée turned to him with a tender smile. “Just so you know, I’m saving up rose petals to scatter on the bed-sheets during our honeymoon.”
“You are not,” Jay started, a laugh in his voice, then it died away. “You are?” He yanked her close and kissed her, sweet and long.
Cassandra watched the show out of the corner of her eye. She’d tell them, she thought. She’d tell them when they came up for air that with her sisters occupied otherwise—though she didn’t begrudge them their happiness—she needed to see this family thing through for herself.
With no Gabe to distract her—
The bells on Malibu & Ewe’s doors rang out again. Jay and Nikki broke their kiss and all three of them watched the newcomer enter the shop. A glance at the clock showed it to be the usual time—the exact hour she’d come to expect her landlord’s daily visit. Gabe would drop by with a large latté and then idly shoot the breeze or silently brood sourly, depending upon his mood. She’d pretend she wasn’t drinking the beverage down and he’d pretend he didn’t see her enjoy the caffeinated, non-soy beverage that she’d deny imbibing to her dying breath.
The man striding over the threshold carried the coffee all right, though whether it was indeed her landlord she wasn’t entirely certain. Because this man had shaved. And his hair appeared to be combed and was slicked back in damp waves. The post-bender, green-around-the-gills part was familiar, though, as well as the grim set to his mouth.
It turned even grimmer when Nikki announced in a perky voice, “Check out what the jaws of hell have barfed up.”
Jay winced again. “Bad Cookie,” he murmured, then cleared his throat. “How’s it going, Gabe?”
“Fine,” the other man answered absently, his gaze shifting to Cassandra’s face.
That flutter was stirring back to life in the pit of her belly. She watched him set his cup beside Nikki’s on the counter. Why was he here? Hadn’t she made it clear she wanted him to stay away?
“Did you forget—”
“Yeah,” he answered, skirting the cash register to join her on the other side of the counter. “Yeah, I forgot something this morning.”
He stepped closer, invading her personal space. Gabe never got this close, unless he was reeking of booze and crowing over his elephantine endowments.
She swallowed. “You forgot what?”
“To thank you.” He smelled like sandalwood soap, the bars she’d bought for him herself at the organic festival in Ojai last summer. Cool fingertips, Gabe’s cool fingertips, burrowed beneath her hair to touch her nape.
Startled, her muscles froze. “Oh. You’re, um, welcome.”
His fingertips applied pressure to the back of her neck, and she found herself forced into stepping closer. “Not that kind of thank you,” he murmured, and she could taste the hot-cinnamon toothpaste on his breath. “This kind.”
And then he kissed her.
Cassandra’s mouth. It was soft and warm and Gabe had surprised her into a little “oh” that gave his tongue the perfect opportunity to glide—
Pain poked his lower leg. “Ah!” He jerked from the kiss, his gaze shooting down to catch Nikki rising from a crouch, a knitting needle in her hand.
She’d learned an innocent eyelash flutter from her big sister, and she used it on him now, pretending a quasi-apology. “I dropped my needle, and then . . .” She shrugged. “Did I hurt you?”
“Not really.” But she’d given Cassandra time to back-pedal. The yarn shop owner had retreated a good five feet away and was staring at the wall to the right of his shoulder, her expression dumbstruck.
“Too bad,” Nikki murmured, her eyes narrowed. “Because—”
“Because then she’d have to make it up to you by baking a batch of her vanilla-cherry cookies,” Jay interrupted. “And with all the wedding planning, she really doesn’t have the spare time. As a matter of fact, maybe we should—”
“Stay right here,” Nikki said sweetly, doing her own interrupting. “I need Cassandra’s help on the naughty little number I’m knitting to wear on our wedding night.”
Jay’s eyebrows rose, obviously derailed by the words “naughty little number.” A smile quirked the corner of his mouth, proof that his bride-to-be had given a definite tug to his libido.
Gabe could relate. His own libido had been held fast like a fish on a line from the moment he’d woken in Cassandra’s bed. The damn thing wasn’t going to stop jerking him around until he figured out exactly what had happened between those sheets.
He’d thought a kiss might stir his memory.
That wasn’
t exactly the part of him that felt stirred up right now, though. He slid Cassandra another glance, but she was still staring at a two-by-two section of plaster behind his back. Truth to tell, he was a touch poleaxed himself, which was just damn crazy.
The kiss had been brief. Broken off by a needle jab.
And, as far as he could tell, completely unfamiliar.
He’d swear he’d never before tasted such soft, sweet heat.
Shoving his hands through his hair, he crossed to the back of the shop. There, he stared out the back doors and considered the drop from the balcony to the ocean. He’d thought about it before, but at low tide a leap would land a man on soft sand. At high tide it would be nothing more lethal than a jump from a high dive.
Neither idea was the least bit tempting now, not even if they’d been more daring, not when the mystery of last night wouldn’t let him go. He just could not believe that he’d gone to bed with Cassandra. If he had, how could he have blocked out such a thing? It was hard to imagine, just as it was hard to imagine that he would have let himself go that far. For months he’d worked so hard at being so damn cautious around her, never letting on that he was fascinated with her mouth, her rippling hair, her spectacular breasts and ass.
Not once had he ever let her know he’d sell his black soul—that not even the devil seemed to consider worth buying—for the chance to bury himself between her thighs. He hadn’t done that to Cassandra—who was like a nun, and a little sister, and the closest to a friend he had—because she deserved a whole man, a bright-white love, a passion un-besmirched by the ashes that were the only thing left of Gabe’s heart.
The air stirred around him. He glanced over, seeing Jay beside him and noting the other man’s perfectly layered hair and his impeccable shave. A wave of odd embarrassment moved through Gabe, and he smoothed a self-conscious hand over his scruffy hair. He remembered the cut on his chin from the dull razor he’d scraped over his face before coming to the yarn shop.
“Cookie didn’t injure you, did she?”
“No.” He hesitated. “But I’m picking up on the fact that I might not be her favorite person.”
Jay glanced over his shoulder, and then Gabe did, too. A couple of women had come into the shop and Nikki was chatting them up. Cassandra still wore that spacey expression, but she was moving toward the customers.
“Look,” Jay said, “I’m going to be honest, Gabe.”
He braced himself. Though he’d not gone looking to make friends in Malibu, thanks to Cassandra and her relent lessness, he’d spent time with her sisters and the men in their lives. He respected Juliet’s Noah as well as Nikki’s fiancé, Jay. “Go ahead and get it off your chest.”
“Here’s the deal. We all worry about her going out at night.”
To collect Gabe from bars, the other man meant. “Hey, I never expected—”
“The first couple of times you did some drunk-dialing. After that, the barkeeps have gone ahead and called her themselves when your situation turns south. I don’t know how many seedy joints she’s visited after last call the past year or so.”
“It’s not all that often.” As a matter of fact, his “lost weekends” had tapered off considerably in the last few months.
“It’s enough,” Jay answered flatly. “And not every drunk she meets in those places is harmless.”
Shit. Gabe jerked left to stare at the other man, his stomach suddenly churning. For a second he worried it might be like Zuma, when he’d upchucked three days’ worth of booze and just about all of his dignity. He hauled in a deep breath to calm his gut. “I hadn’t thought . . .”
“Yeah? Well, maybe you should start. Maybe you should start thinking about what you put her through.”
Shit! He pushed his fingers through his hair and another sick sense of shame twisted his gut. He turned again to stare unseeing at the Pacific view.
“Has someone hurt her?” he asked. Though surely everyone from the beach at Zuma to the pier in Santa Monica would have raised holy hell if Malibu’s favorite local girl had run into trouble. Gabe swallowed down another bubble of bile. “Has someone . . . has someone come on to her or something?”
“I know of one man who propositions her every time she goes out on a two A.M. pickup.”
It wasn’t bile, but anger that spiked inside Gabe now. Someone was harassing his Froot Loop? Some dumbass drunk thought he could come on to beautiful, untouchable, celibate Cassandra? He pivoted toward Jay again, his fingers curled into fists. “Who the hell is he? I’ll—”
“It’s you, Gabe.”
His fingers went slack. “No. No, I don’t.”
“Yep, you do.”
He shook his head in confusion. “I can’t believe . . .”
Jay lifted an eyebrow. “Does this ring a bell? Your first order of business is to tell her you’re hung like an elephant.”
Unable to take it in, he stared at the other man. Oh, God. “She called me Dumbo once when she was really mad at me. I didn’t get it.”
“We all wanted to make a habit of that, but she put her foot down and we promised we wouldn’t speak of it. We know why you do what you do, Gabe.”
He dismissed that with a gesture. It wasn’t the important point right now. “So I tell her what I have to . . . to . . . offer and then I . . . and then I . . . what?”
Jay shrugged. “Varies. And I haven’t been there on every occasion, of course. But you make it pretty clear what you want from her. That you want her.”
Gabe groaned. So much for his hard work at keeping his lust for her a secret. “Why hasn’t she just hauled my stupid ass to the road and then run over it to put me out of my misery?”
“Interesting question, that. Maybe because she thinks that’s exactly what you’re looking for, or maybe because . . . ?”
Maybe, maybe, maybe, he thought, staring out the glass doors at the ocean. So many maybes, and then the one certainty that yes, despite all his caution when he was sober, last night he could very well have let her haul his stupid ass home and then ended up seducing her between her lemony-scented sheets.
Turning away from the view, he spun toward the shop’s interior, thinking he had to get out of the place, that he had to get away from what he’d just learned. But his gaze caught on Cassandra—and he was caught up by the sight of her.
A woman he didn’t recognize was sitting on one of the couches and Cassandra was leaning over its back to inspect a piece of knitting. She held her spill of hair behind her shoulders, which gave him an eyeful of her bountiful breasts—the same ones that he’d spied wet this morning. He forced his attention from the soft, sexy sight, only to have his gaze catch hers.
The line that had hooked his libido snapped tight. And then something was reeling him forward. Without a second thought, he walked toward her with single-minded purpose.
Want. Have. Touch. Taste.
The woman on the couch was still talking to Cassandra, her focus on the scrap of pink knitted yarn in her hands. “It was an ‘ooops,’ plain and simple. We have a nine-month-old! Scott said, ‘How could this possibly have happened?’ Only a man would ask such a dumb question.”
Some concern tickled the back of Gabe’s mind, a worry that scented the air almost like smoke, but he ignored it as he drew closer to Cassandra. She straightened, stepping away from the couch that held the oops lady, but held her ground as he came to a stop a foot from her.
Her tongue made a nervous pass across her bottom lip, yanking him another inch closer. “Gabe . . . Gabe, what do you want?”
But she already knew, didn’t she? She’d known for months, and last night he’d finally acted upon the desire.
And if Cassandra hadn’t desired in return, he wouldn’t have ended up among her pillows. She wasn’t that nice.
And not really like a nun either, apparently.
He reached out and touched her hot cheek with the tip of his forefinger. He felt hot, too. They both were burning—no wonder he could smell that smoke again. Stronger.
Bells rang out. More customers for Cassandra, damn it, but he kept her attention on him by running his thumb along her bottom lip.
Then a sharp voice cried out. “People! Parking lot. Flames.”
The mention of fire acted like an overturned bucket of ice water. Cassandra spun, Gabe leaped, they both ran for the front door with Nikki and Jay right behind them. Outside, a few feet from the shop’s solid side door, the one that led directly to the smaller of the building’s storerooms, they found a petite, dark-haired young woman stomping on some charred cardboard.
From behind Gabe, Nikki spoke first. “Marlys? What the hell are you doing?”
“A public service,” the woman spit out. She shot them all an angry look. “I was just . . . just walking around and saw some kids playing Matchbook Bonfire. They ran off when I yelled.”
Gabe pulled Marlys away from the ashes so that he could make sure the fire was extinguished himself. It was out, and the dark, papery remains were already lifting into a cinder tornado stirred up by the ocean breeze.
“Kids?” Nikki questioned, her voice sharp. “I don’t see any kids.”
“Nik . . .” Cassandra warned.
Color shot up Marlys’s face. “They ran off. I told you.”
“But—”
“I’m no arsonist!”
“Yeah?” Nikki sneered. “Maybe not, though we know for certain you’re a bitchy snitch.”
Jay made a sound that could have been a choked-off laugh. “Cookie, let’s go. We’re late to . . . something. Everything okay, Gabe?”
He nodded. “I’ll call the sheriff, though. And keep an eye out. You do the same, Froot Loop.”
Cassandra nodded, too, though her gaze was trained on the brunette. A frown turned down her pretty, full mouth. “Are you all right, Marlys?”
“I’m fine.” Without another word, she stomped off.
Nikki muttered something under her breath, but soon she and Jay were on their way as well.
Gabe trailed Cassandra back into Malibu & Ewe, less concerned about some delinquent kids with matches than he was about why Marlys Weston was hanging around Malibu. The daughter of Juliet’s late husband, she’d stirred up trouble by seeding the tabloids with ugly rumors about Juliet. When she’d found out that the three donor sibling sisters were fathered by the same famous Hollywood plastic surgeon, she hadn’t hesitated to pass that info along as well. Bitchy snitch pretty much summed it up.
Dirty Sexy Knitting Page 4
