Rules of the Game

by Lori Wilde

  A fortyish waitress, with rainbow-colored hair pulled back in long fishtail braid, sidled up to their table. She wore half-inch ear gauges and a mother’s ring with three rubies on her right hand as if all her kids had July birthdays. Who knew? Maybe she’d given birth to triplets. Her name tag said Fiona.

  “What’ll ya have?” Fiona asked.

  “Two cups of coffee,” Jake ordered. “And a big slice of your German chocolate cake with a couple of forks.”

  “We’re fresh out of German chocolate.”

  “Dang,” Jake said. “We were looking forward to it.”

  “Honestly”—Fiona leaned forward and lowered her voice as if sharing a state secret—“our pecan pie is even better than the German chocolate. No kiddin’.”

  Jake met Jodi’s eye. “Pie?”

  Jodi shivered. They were seated near the window and she told herself that’s why she was shivering. That it had nothing to do with the hungry look in Jake’s eyes. Nor did the fact that her heart seemed determined to knock a hole in the middle of her chest.

  Jake smiled at her as if he knew exactly what trouble her heart was giving her and he was proud of himself for it.

  “Sure,” she said. “Pie’s fine.”

  Fiona tapped her chin with an index finger, and her cuff bracelet slid down, revealing a tattoo on the back of her wrist of a heart entwined with a rose, one thorn stabbing through the heart and a drop of blood leaking out.

  The tattoo stirred memories of her biological mother. Vivian had had a black rose tattooed on her wrist. When Jodi was a child, Vivian would get stoned, and if she were in a nice mood, she’d call Jodi “Freckles” and tell her stories about how she got her tattoos. Jodi liked those times when Vivian would cuddle with her on the couch and there were none of those men around. But if Vivian was in a mean mood, she’d poke fun at Jodi. You look like a carrot and a beet went at it in the backseat of a 1976 Impala. You’ve got a mouth like a bass. No man is ever gonna wanna marry a neat freak like you. Lighten up. Loosen up. Get that stick out of your butt.

  After Vivian would come down off whatever drug she was on, she would be sweet and apologetic and put strawberry Pop Tarts in the toaster and give Jodi a big hug and say, “There’s nothing wrong with being who you are. I’m glad you stack your clothes in neat piles and line your toys up on the windowsill just so. You make me feel normal.”

  “Are you disappointed about the cake?” Jake asked. “You look disappointed.”

  “No, not disappointed,” she said, and shook off the mood. Why was Vivian haunting her now?

  “We could go somewhere else.”

  The thought of getting into a car with this gorgeous stranger and driving off to parts unknown had her fighting off another shiver of ominous pleasure. Walking across the street to a diner with him was one thing, but leaving with him was another.

  “The pie is fine,” she said. “I don’t normally eat sweets, but tonight I’m feeling—”

  “Sinful?” he finished, his eyelids drooping to sexy half-mast.

  That wasn’t what she was going to say at all, but it was the truth. Taken aback Jodi stared at him. Over the Formica tabletop, the man’s disquieting chestnut eyes held hers and the sultry look pushed heat up underneath her skin.

  “Why would you think that?” she asked.

  “You’re a rule breaker.”

  She laughed at that. If he only knew how far off the mark he was.

  “So crashing a wedding is out of character?”

  “First time.” She toyed with a sugar packet, turning it around and around in her hands to keep from looking at him, felt the sugar shift from one side of the packet to the other.

  “Do you intend on making a habit of it?”

  “Only if I keep meeting men like you,” she teased.

  “You’re making me jealous,” he said, too smooth for her own good. “I don’t want you to crash weddings with anyone else but me.”

  She combed her gaze over him, got an electric thrill. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. My career as a wedding crasher is over. Besides, why be jealous, you could have any woman you wanted.”

  “Except for the one sitting in front of me?”

  “You don’t want me. Not really.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’re attracted to the rule breaker you fancy me to be, but I’m the furthest thing in the world from that.”

  “Not tonight you’re not.”

  “Tonight was an exception.”

  “What’s got you testing boundaries? Tired of being the good girl?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  “Don’t let the jerk who treated you badly cause you to do something you don’t really want to do,” Jake said.

  Sideswiped by his insight, Jodi swallowed, and smiled as if she was unruffled. Was she that transparent? Or was he that perceptive?

  “Tonight was for me.” She notched up her chin. “Not him.”

  “Good for you.”

  Fiona appeared at their table with two cups of steaming coffee and a thick slice of pecan pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and oozing sweet goo onto a blue china plate.

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t claimed you as my plus one?” he asked once Fiona left.

  “I don’t give away my secrets.” She coyly lowered her eyelids. Truth was, she hadn’t had a backup plan.

  “There’s nothing I can do to convince you to tell me your real name?” He sank his fork into the pie, spearing it through the layers of packed pecans to the flaky homemade crust.

  “No.” She concentrated on doctoring her coffee with a packet of Stevia and a dollop of creamer and avoiding his dark-eyed gaze.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  “We really can’t get to know each other if I don’t know your name.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So this is …” He looked hopeful.

  “Coffee and pie.”

  “Pie and coffee.” He waited, for what she didn’t know, his fork poised over the plate centered on the table between them, a sensual expression smoothing out his handsome features.

  Truthfully, she could go gaga over a good-looking man just as easily as the next girl. But she’d learned the hard way that sexy was only skin-deep. What really mattered were honor, loyalty, and kindness. She’d take those qualities over good looks and charm any day of the week. Kindness touched her the most because the trait arose from suffering and the ability to learn from that pain. Kindness developed from getting knocked down and dragging yourself back up again. It sprang from rejection and loss and disappointment. Kindness created a universal bond with others. It was kindness that understood and forgave human frailties. When she saw kindness in a man it triggered something inside her—an ache to be a better person, a longing to learn from the hard lessons of her mistakes, a desire to bask in the glow of a man who cast such a bright light.

  She saw it in Jake—in the depth of his dark brown eyes fringed with thick black lashes. Looking into those magnetic eyes she wanted to tell him everything, confess her sins, and find absolution in his embrace. But she’d lost the ability to trust her own judgment, much less a gorgeous man.

  Who was she kidding? She didn’t know a thing.

  Disturbed by her thoughts, Jodi dug into the dessert, using a spoon, making sure she got a bite of ice cream along with every bite of pie.

  He sat watching her.

  “What?”

  “It’s fun watching you eat. I noticed how you divvied things up when we were eating at the reception.”

  She felt the need to explain. “I like things to come out even.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Even?”

  “Whenever I eat I want a bite of everything on the plate in one mouthful.”

  “Amuse-bouche?”

  “Yes.” She smiled because he knew the term. “The perfect bite.”

  “A lot of people are quirky about food.”

  �
��I have a sister who eats everything separately. She’ll eat all her meat, and then she’ll move on to the potatoes, then the beans. Drives me crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Too one-dimensional.”

  “You like symmetry.”

  “I suppose.” She wrinkled her nose, considering that. “I like things I can count on.”

  “What do you do when a meal comes in courses and you can’t even out the bites?”

  “I hold on to the first course until the second course arrives.”

  “What happens if one helping of food is smaller than another and you run out of one helping first?”

  “I never run out because I plan ahead, and I divide the smaller serving item into smaller pieces.”

  “What if there’s a big gap in proportions and you can’t stretch the serving of one food to match the others?”

  “I stop eating.”

  He leaned back in the seat. “Fascinating. I never analyzed how I ate.”

  “You’re haphazard,” she said.

  “That sounds bad.”

  “Actually, it’s good. Means you’re not OCD about food.”

  “You’re OCD?”

  “No. Maybe. Not bad. A little. About food.” She lifted one shoulder, to show she wasn’t loony, but simultaneously fiddled with the necklace at her throat. “Also about locks. I recheck locks a lot.”

  “With that skill you could be a prison guard.” He took a sip of coffee, and a scalawag grin claimed his face. “Are you a prison guard, Gwendolyn?”

  “It’s a career path I never considered, but now that you bring it up …” she teased.

  “What do you do for a living?” he asked.

  “Shh. I’ll never tell.”

  “I’m—”

  She cupped her palms over her ears. “Please, I don’t want to know.”

  “How can I get to know more about you if we don’t swap stories?”

  “I just told you my weird fixation about making food come out even and that I rechecked locks. What more do you want?”

  “It’s not enough,” he said, staunch-eyed.

  “I could just get up and walk out. Leave you with half a pie to eat,” she threatened, but didn’t mean it.

  He reached out a hand to cover hers. “Don’t go.”

  His touch shoveled heat through her bloodstream like coal into a furnace and he held her gaze a few seconds too long, a clear sexual signal. She could hang on to it, or bounce her gaze away, deflecting the invitation in his eyes.

  She hung on. Uh-oh.

  The snow and the wind, the cold whispering against the windowpane, the wink of Christmas lights on their last hurrah of the season, the pecan pie, Blue Bell ice cream, hot coffee, his handsome face cast the diner in a Hallmark-moment-greeting-card-snow-globe-Hummel-figurine perfection.

  “Give me one good reason to stay.”

  “You can’t resist my magnetic charm?” he asked, lifting hopeful eyebrows, his smile turning over easy.

  Too true, but she wasn’t about to admit it. No doubt that grin got him laid left and right, and she refused to add another layer to his ego.

  He ran a thumb over her knuckles. Jodi felt the now familiar heart surge again and sank her teeth into her bottom lip, but she didn’t move her hand.

  Someone put a song on the Wurlitzer. Alycia Miles sang in a smoky bedroom voice.

  “This song is too sexy,” she said, her hand growing so warm she could have used it as a cookstove. “A diner should play songs like ‘Rock Around the Clock.’”

  “I like this song.”

  She did too. Just not in this context when she was already feeling susceptible. “You like R&B?”

  “Love it. I go to the Sweet Note a couple of times a month,” Jake said, referring to a downtown rooftop nightclub that was one of Dallas’s best-kept secrets. Jodi had only heard of it because her youngest sister, Suki, frequented Dallas hotspots. “I go with friends and we sit in the back listening to up and coming artists, taking in the night skyline and drinking aged scotch—”

  “And going home with some pretty young thing on your arm.”

  His eyes darkened and his smile vanished. “Not anymore. New rule. These days, I always go home alone.”

  “Always?” Jodi couldn’t believe she’d asked.

  “Lately. But for you, Gwendolyn …” He swept a stare over her that singed her from the inside out. “I’d break the rules.”

  Quickly, she glanced out the window toward the Grand Texan, and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. The man sure knew how to charge a woman up.

  From the side entrance of the hotel, she saw the bride and groom dash out, guests lined up on either side of the walkway throwing rice or birdseed, it was hard to tell in the dark. The groom had a tight hold on the bride’s hand and she was smiling like all her dreams had come true.

  Jodi shut her eyes. Emotions coursed through her body, pounding against her temple, broadcasting along her nerve endings. Somewhere, a coffee cup rattled and settled. She opened her eyes.

  Jake was watching her, measured and assessing.

  He’d completely undone his bow tie. He’d raked a hand through his hair, mussing it. His eyes were more complicated than straight brown, she realized, a dark yellow tint hidden in the depths that she hadn’t noticed before. Murky amber.

  She should go.

  “What do you do for fun when you’re not crashing weddings?” he said as if he was planning a future date.

  “I don’t have much free time,” she said quite honestly.

  “Ah,” he said. “A workaholic.”

  “You’re fishing,” she said. “I’m not telling you what I do for a living.”

  “Guilty.” He chuckled and held up both hands. “The truth is, Gwendolyn, I like you and I want to see you again.”

  She was flattered, but she wasn’t at a place in her life to encourage him. It was time for her to find out who she was alone. “Another time, another place …”

  He looked confused. She imagined women did not often turn him down. “That’s it? No chance?”

  “I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said kindly, ignoring the thrust of her heartbeat as it sped up.

  He changed the subject and they talked for a while about safe things, movies, books, hobbies, favorite vacation spots, and favorite cuisines. She was surprised to discover they had a lot in common. Neither one of them cared for New Orleans, fried pickles, August, politics, sand in their shoes, garden gnomes, sun-dried tomatoes, or aluminum siding. They both loved caramel popcorn, waterskiing, October, farmers’ markets, Tex-Mex, scary movies, Craftsman-style homes, and John Steinbeck.

  The conversation lagged, but Jodi didn’t try to stir it. Strangely enough, the silence between them didn’t feel awkward. It felt nice. Natural.

  Fiona came back, a carafe of coffee cocked in her hand. “Refills?”

  Jodi placed her hand over her cup. “None for me, thanks.” To Jake, she said, “I’ve got to go.”

  He nodded at Fiona. “Check please.”

  The waitress pulled the check from her pocket and presented it to him with a flourish. He opened his wallet, peeled out a twenty and a ten for a healthy thirty percent tip. Did Jake always tip so lavishly or was he just trying to impress her?

  “This is too much,” Fiona said.

  “Keep it,” Jake said. “My mom worked as a waitress when we were growing up. I know how tough the job is.”

  “Thank you,” Fiona said. “I appreciate it. You two make a cute couple by the way.”

  “We’re not a couple,” Jodi said.

  “Oh, you were so easy together I just assumed.” She looked embarrassed, and scurried away.

  “That was nice of you,” Jodi told him. “Leaving such a big tip.”

  He shrugged. “She looked like she’d been on her feet all day.”

  There it was, his kindness for others. She felt something twist loose inside her chest. “Thank you for the coffee and pie.”

  �
�You’re welcome.”

  Simultaneously, they got up. Jodi clutched her purse in front of her, a paltry shield against the strength of her feelings.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well,” she echoed.

  An awkward end-of-the-evening moment hung in the air, weird and quivering. They weren’t dating. They’d never see each other again. What was there to say?

  Jake insisted on helping her on with her coat. She started to protest, but didn’t want to be rude, and then wondered why she cared. She’d never see him again. His fingertips brushed the back of her neck and she felt his touch to the marrow of her bones.

  She tried to shake off the yearning that his touch stirred insider her, but it lingered stubbornly, tingling her nerve endings provocatively. When he opened the door for her, she got another whiff of his scent. She liked the way he smelled—appealing, male, distinctly him.

  They stepped out into the cold. The snow was falling faster now, liberally salting the ground. Across the street at the Grand Texan, the last cab at the taxi stand pulled away, red taillights disappearing into the glassy murk of snowy night. The elaborately gabled roof of the Grand Texan glistened in the light from the neon sign above the diner, silvery gothic slants cracked by diagonal black angles. It was both romantic and slightly spooky, like a fairy-tale castle.

  He took her arm to help her cross the street through the mirrory darkness, and she did not resist. But neither was she falling for his gentlemanly gestures. Ryan had opened doors and helped her on with her coat and took her arm when the footing was treacherous. The gestures were showy, but ultimately meant nothing. Although Ryan never left big tips, in fact, Jodi always had to slip back to put extra money onto the table when he wasn’t looking. It should have been a clue to his real character. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  “Let me give you a ride home,” Jake said when they reached the door of the hotel.

  She canted her head, eyed him, felt the charge of blue-hot electricity jump between them. “How do you know I’m not staying here?”

  “I saw you arrive in the limo.”

  “Maybe my limo is coming back.”

  “Is it?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I planned on catching a cab back to—” She stopped before she said, “Motel 6.”

  “It’s no trouble to give you a ride.”