“Dante.” Yeah, there was a name. He was either a wan nabe soap actor or some androgynous dude who did hair up in Hollywood. “Are you entirely certain he likes women?”
Her reusable bags had woven handles. Cassandra grabbed them up and then yanked the groceries away from him. “He likes me,” she said. “Why do you care anyway, Gabe?”
Well, he didn’t care. Not about Dante. He didn’t give a hoot whether someone liked acting or styling or sexing it up with a member of the same gender. It’s just that when it came to Cassandra . . . she was like a nun/sister/friend and he was required to look out for her. Particularly because there might be unintended consequences from the other night.
So when she spun and kicked the door with her foot, trying to shut it in Gabe’s face, he cared enough to kick back. The thick wood reversed direction and he followed her flouncing hair across the threshold and into the living room.
Over her shoulder, she sent him another look. He tried out a second smile and wondered just how he might weasel into her medicine cabinets. Cassandra’s cats ran toward him, giving him the unrestrained welcome that he’d expected from her. He bent to stroke a hand over each—nothing else would get them to back off—then followed their owner even as the cats continued their meowing demands for his attention.
The kitchen was barely big enough for her and half his larger frame as she bustled about putting the groceries away. Another of her wary glances slid his way. Smiling hadn’t been doing much for him, so he just looked back.
Coming to a sudden halt, she closed her eyes, as if in pain.
His chest constricted and he took a step forward. “Froot Loop—”
She halted him with a hand. “Please. Could you get me some ibuprofen?”
“What? You need me to go to Rite Aid?” He tried to think if he had any pain reliever at his place.
Cassandra’s hand rubbed a spot between her arched brows. “No. I have what I need. It’s in . . . I’m not sure. The guest bathroom? My bathroom? Check the medicine cabinets. There’s a new bottle somewhere.”
No. It couldn’t be that damn easy. He had permission to do exactly what he wanted? Her request meant he could run down her hallway and use the excuse to check out all the likely spots.
Cassandra winced, her fingers pressing harder to her forehead. Without thinking, Gabe stepped closer to his nun/ sister/friend and closed his hands over her shoulders so he could massage the muscles that led to her neck. “Headache, honey?”
At the endearment, she stiffened. Her gaze shot up. Gabe pretended that damn wide blue of her eyes wasn’t dragging him down like a weighted anchor and slid his fingers upward so his thumbs could find that sweet spot where neck met shoulder. In a weird flash—memory?—he saw himself biting her there.
But the flesh was unmarked. Half-relieved, half-disappointed, he kneaded her tense muscles, aware that before today, he’d never intentionally touched her—in his memory, that is.
“Ah.” Her head dropped back and she emitted a husky sound of relieved pleasure.
He went hard.
Gabe’s arms dropped and he spun away. He cleared his throat. “Let me, uh, check those cabinets for you.” That was what he needed to do, right? He needed to figure out whether there was a chance he’d made Cassandra pregnant.
Shit. Didn’t that just freeze his feet. Cassandra pregnant. He could picture it. Her rippling hair reaching to her pregnant belly. She’d breast-feed the infant, of course, and every day, damn, so many times a day, she’d expose those incredible, full, beautiful breasts—
“Stop!” he said.
“Gabe?”
Gentleman Gabe. Jerk Gabe. Got-to-get-a-grip Gabe. “I’ll be just a minute grabbing that ibuprofen,” he said, and ordered his shoes to move.
It took more than a minute but less than five to find what she wanted and to find out the info he’d been after. Plastic bottle in hand, he returned to the kitchen with the certainty that Cassandra didn’t stock condoms and with the likelihood that she wasn’t on the pill. He’d discovered no evidence of either.
Which meant he was going to have to tell Cassandra he didn’t remember bedding her. He had to know for sure that they hadn’t risked a baby.
Her back was to him as she sautéed some cubes of tofu in a pan. His gaze trailed over that incredible fall of her rich brown hair, slowly taking in each ripple to where the ends brushed her hipline, right above her heart-shaped butt. He thought about those bruises he must have made upon her skin and damned himself again for not remembering what the cheeks of her ass felt like against his palms, what the globes of her breasts felt like in his mouth, what her wet heat felt like wrapped around his cock.
He groaned and Cassandra looked over. “What?” she said, eyes wide again. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
If the tails of his oxford shirt weren’t untucked, she wouldn’t have needed to ask the question. He shifted on his feet and pretended to peer at what she was cooking. A man couldn’t just launch into the subject of forgotten sex when the scent of soybean curd was in the air, could he? “I’m just wondering how the hell you can eat that stuff.”
And why the hell she hadn’t invited him to share it with her. Yeah, this morning she’d asked for some “distance” from him, but distance just wasn’t Cassandra’s way. He hated thinking that being together in bed with him last night had somehow changed her.
Her head whipped back around as if she could read what he was thinking and she focused on the cubes she was stirring. “I’ve told you. I was brought up eating vegetarian on the organic farm.”
That’s right. “The place your mother worked and where both of you lived when you were a kid. From four until you were, what, eleven? Your mom did the books for the farm owned by the old MacDonalds.”
“MacDougalls,” she corrected. “She did the books and homeschooled the kids. The farm was pretty secluded and we all lived there together. Three generations of MacDougalls, my mom, and me.”
“Three generations, huh? I don’t remember that part.” And he’d been certain he knew thousands of details of Cassandra’s life, as from the beginning she’d filled every moment of quiet between them with any thought or emotion that crossed her mind. Since his black moods equated to many dark silences, Cassandra had given him hours of her bright and cheerful chatter.
For some crazy reason he couldn’t explain, he’d found her impossible to walk away from or to shut off. She’d wrapped him around her finger that way, which meant he knew her favorite color—robin’s egg; the name of her date to the senior prom—Carver Shields, now a drummer in some heavy metal band currently touring Eastern Europe; and the day she’d first picked up a pair of knitting needles—May 15, at her friend Claire’s thirteenth birthday party. But he didn’t recall three generations of MacDougalls living together on a secluded rural property, and something about the way she said it had the hair on the back of his neck rising.
“Froot Loop?” he prompted, cold trailing down his spine. “Did that MacDougall clan include a funny uncle?”
“No. The MacDougalls aren’t a very funny lot.” She added some soy sauce to her pan. “Especially the MacDougall kids.”
Hmm. Gabe stepped closer to her turned back, twining his fingers in her hair. He pulled a swathe away from her face and tilted his head so he could better read her profiled expression. “Bullies?”
She slid him a quick glance, then shrugged a shoulder. “Cousins. Twelve of them, all first cousins, which made me . . . lucky number thirteen.”
“Twelve little bullies,” Gabe confirmed. And Cassandra the unlucky outsider. The only one not family . . . and without a family of her own except her mother who insisted she be called “Judith” instead of “Mom.” A man didn’t need to be named Freud to know what drove this generous, beautiful woman. From the beginning, from when he’d first met her and all the way through her making contact with her donor sibling sisters, she’d been clear about what she was looking for.
The bonds of family.
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And now he thought he understood a little more about why.
“They didn’t like me,” Cassandra added, a new note in her voice. “And they made that very, very clear in very many ways.” She sounded . . . bewildered? Hurt?
Because everybody always liked Cassandra. The woman had more close friends than most people had pairs of socks. But between her mother’s choices and the MacDougalls’ cruelties, she’d come to think they couldn’t substitute for family. That friends couldn’t provide the kind of support and comfort some people required.
She was right, in a sense. Who rubbed away Cassandra’s headaches? Who stroked her hair like he was doing right now when she was blue?
Gabe had experienced that kind of intimacy once. Juliet had it with Noah now. Nikki with Jay. But Cassandra was still searching for that tight emotional and physical bond. He palmed his hand down her hair again and she sent him another glance. He could read those big blues of hers like a book. Sweet Cassandra, who had put up with his sour tempers and nasty disposition so many times, was having herself a bad day.
It unsettled him, more than a little, because Cassandra didn’t have bad days. And shit, was he the one who had delivered hers?
Without thinking, he turned her and pulled her against him. His arms held her close, her soft breasts aligned with his chest, her hip bones pressed to his groin. “Froot Loop . . .”
“You know I hate that name.” Looking up, her lower lip slid out in a pout.
And he kissed it, gently and slowly and nearly asexu ally, because she was so sweet and still his nun/sister/friend. She was still in his arms, too, and her blue eyes looked a little lost and Christ, he didn’t know where to go from here. No condoms. No birth control pills. So damn it, man, no putting tongue into this kiss!
No way could he let this embrace turn passionate. He sighed. Just as there was no way he could ever let her know that if he had fucked her last night he’d forgotten all about it.
Five
A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.
—HELEN KELLER
Marlys remained focused on her current customer when the bells on the door of her boutique, Ms. M, rang out, though satisfaction warmed her belly. A busy morning was the harbinger of a good day. Surely she was owed one of those.
Her gaze ran over the woman who had just stepped from the dressing area. Fortyish, she was just the kind of customer Marlys liked to see in her shop. Good taste, ready with her credit cards, and willing to step out of the Nordstrom/ Neiman/Bloomie rut that her type too often traveled along. Still, Marlys had to shake her head.
“Dark jeans are a good choice, but not those jeans.”
The woman looked down, showing how artfully blond and copper highlights were weaved into her blah-brown hair. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the pants.” Crossing her arms over her chest, Marlys inspected the customer’s midsection. Other boutique owner’s might soften the truth to make a sale, but tact didn’t come easily to her. At twelve, she’d stopped nurturing that let’s-make-nice female gene—which probably partially explained her lack of friends. Not that she missed them.
“Nothing’s wrong with the pants. It’s you,” Marlys said, gesturing toward the small roll of flesh hanging over the waistband of the woman’s jeans. “It’s your muffin top.”
A choked-off cough caused her head to jerk around. Oh, damn. Harbinger shmarbinger. This was going to be a very bad day, after all.
Dean Long was in her shop. All too many feet and too many hard muscles of him were pretending to inspect a tray of costume jewelry sitting on a small table near the narrow rack of shoes. But he wasn’t looking for an accessory; she could guarantee that. He was looking for answers.
The other day, when she’d encountered him at Juliet and Noah’s guesthouse, she hadn’t told him she was Ms. M. Between the shock of seeing him and then learning he didn’t remember any of his time in Malibu, it had been impossible for her to do more than make an excuse and hurry away.
Her customer had turned to look at herself in the full-length mirror and was pinching the skin at her hips. “I substituted Pilates for lattés. I walk up those damn treadmill steps four times a week, forty minutes each time. It must be the wine.”
Marlys returned her attention to the woman and shook her head. “It’s the rise. You need to choose a pair of pants that has a longer distance from the waist to the crotch—that’s the rise.”
“You’re telling me I’m too old for hip-huggers,” the customer said, an expression of dismay on her face.
“Yes.” What was the point of prettying it up? In the mirror, she saw Dean glance over at her. He had questioned her plain-speaking before and didn’t like it now either, apparently. So what? It was part of the secret to her success in the fashion business.
But watching the customer grab her waistline with evident self-loathing gave Marlys a little pinch, too. “Hip-huggers with a two-and-a-half inch zipper, that is,” she clarified. “Leave those to the women who never get to taste ice cream. Let them at least have something.”
The woman paused, then laughed. Her fingers eased on her flesh and she smiled at Marlys in the mirror. “Too-thin women have saggy breasts.”
“And sallow skin,” Marlys added. “Not to mention the bad moods that are brought on by chocolate and fat deprivation. Very scary. Very sad.”
She saw the customer’s shoulders relax as she crossed to a stack of denim on a nearby shelf. “Try these,” she said, handing over the jeans. “There are more inches to the rise and the back pockets will accentuate your, um, natural assets.”
The woman took them with a grin. “The natural assets that my best buds Ben & Jerry get the credit for.”
“All hail Phish Food and Chubby Hubby,” Marlys murmured.
The customer laughed. “I’ve always liked this shop, but now I think I like you, too.”
As the dressing room drapes closed behind the woman, Marlys took a quick breath and steeled herself to face the man browsing through the Ms. M merchandise. Stalling wasn’t an option. Running had only sparked his curiosity about her. What she needed to do now was deal with him head-on and without hesitation.
Then lie through her teeth if it became necessary.
Dean never needed to know what they’d once had . . . and the manner in which she’d thrown it away.
She tacked a smile carefully in place and marched right over to him, where he was standing by a selection of scarves and belts. “We meet again.”
He dropped the gossamer-weight chiffon he was fingering to pull the battered business card from his front pocket. “You didn’t tell me the other day that you worked at Ms. M.”
“I own Ms. M.”
“You didn’t tell me the other day that you own the shop that the card I carry advertises.”
She kept her smile in place. “An oversight.”
“Or an underestimation. You must underestimate me. Didn’t you figure I would venture into Santa Monica?” He wiggled the little piece of cardboard in front of her face. “The address is right here.”
“I . . . I guess I didn’t think about it.” More like, she’d been praying he wouldn’t.
He slid the card back into his pocket and crossed his arms over his chest. It was a wide chest, and she could see the outline of his pectoral muscles under the cotton knit of his shirt. She remembered sitting on his lap. She remembered leaning her head against that strong shoulder.
She remembered how he’d made her weak and womanly, both things she couldn’t afford to feel.
Given that she had those man issues. Especially those man-leaving issues.
“You didn’t think I’d be curious as to why I’d be carrying this business card around Afghanistan?”
“I don’t like to think about you in Afghanistan,” she confessed. Giving herself a mental jab, she hurried to the nearby counter to put a barrier between herself and the man who followed, his expres
sion giving nothing away.
“I’m trying to reconstruct the missing pieces of my life,” he said.
She wouldn’t let him. At least not the pieces that involved her.
“Marlys—”
“You know my name.” Her head jerked up. “I didn’t introduce myself the other day.”
His brows rose. “It’s right there.” His finger pointed to one of the two sets of business cards sitting on the counter. One small stack was the generic advertisement for the business—like the card in Dean’s pocket. The other was new. Last month she’d had different cards printed that included her name, which was convenient for handing out to vendors and special customers.
“Oh. Yeah.” She blew out a breath between her lips. For a moment there, she’d thought his memory might have returned. Having Dean recall what she’d done was too damn close to reliving the event. She rubbed her upper arms with her palms as if she could wipe away the memory.
“Cold?” His fingers reached toward her face.
Marlys scuttled back. No way could she let him touch her again. Her elbow still remembered the grip of his hand from two days ago. Though it was months past, her mouth remembered every searing kiss they’d ever shared.
Dean stared at her face. “There was something between us before,” he said, his voice certain.
She made a face at him. “Why would you think that?”
“Marlys . . .”
The fact was, Marlys Weston was pretty. Maybe even beautiful. She knew that. And she was also short, which meant that she’d had more than her fair share of attention. Once she’d wandered through a Tall Singles Club barbecue at a nearby park and been accosted by an Amazon who demanded she stick with the height-challenged. But she couldn’t control who hit on her, and at twenty-five, she’d been hit on by dozens of men—the five-foot-one guys, the seven-foot-two types, the geeks, the gods, and every kind in between. She had the freeze down pat and she turned it on now, icing her gaze and her words and her attitude.
“If there was something between us before,” Marlys stated, “I certainly don’t recall it.”
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