Sighing, he pulled the truck alongside her and leaned toward the open passenger-side window. “Lost, little girl?”
Louisa stopped lurching and lowered her hand, the one with the can of pepper spray. Her voice was more lethal. “You!”
Dante might be guilty of a lot of crimes, but no one could blame him for this…whatever it was. “Me. Rivera’s Taxi and Limousine Service.”
She started to move again, but Dante kept pace, with the truck. “Would it help if I apologize for the sins of all mankind, now and in the future?”
She didn’t even look over her shoulder. “No. I do not want to hear anything you have to say.”
Then her snit really was personal? Dante dredged his mind without coming up with a plausible explanation for how he could have stolen her shoe and left her in the dark, while he was watching Harry Potter. The woman had the mind of an addled octopus, going eight places at once and getting nowhere. “Couldn’t we discuss the situation on the way home?”
She kept going. “I am on my way home, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“But it will take an hour at this rate of speed.”
“An hour?”
He heard the dismay in her voice and couldn’t resist adding, “Or two.”
She stumbled, but recovered and limped along faster. Dante was beginning to enjoy himself. She didn’t seem drunk and she didn’t appear damaged, only temporarily deranged. He smiled at her retreating figure, then pulled alongside her again. “You know, there might be snakes sleeping in the grass where you’re walking. There are definitely ticks. And spiders. Maybe fleas.”
She leaped onto the pavement inches from his front fender, then winced when she stepped on a pebble. “Go away.”
Dante had no intention of leaving, but he said, “Not until you tell me why.”
She turned and faced him, glowering into the glare from his headlights. “You’re rich.”
He must have missed an exit ramp to the conversation. “Yeah, and you have one shoe. So?”
“You own a hundred houses.”
“Not even fifty. I’d have to print out a list to get an accurate—”
“And you’re smart.”
Not smart enough to figure out what the deuce she was nattering on about. “That’s a hanging offense these days? I didn’t realize that being successful was against your principles. It is the American way and all that, you know. Or are you some kind of Marxist? I doubt you made a habit of sharing all your income with the masses, unless they were masses of caterers and florists and five-man bands.”
“This isn’t about that damned wedding. Will you forget about it already? I have.”
He didn’t bother replying to that absurdity. No woman forgot her wedding, even if it never came off. Especially if it never came off. “Okay, so I have money and brains. Does that mean you can’t ride in my truck?”
She pounded on his hood. “You didn’t tell me!”
“Oh, I should have introduced myself with my bank book in one hand and a master’s degree in the other?”
“You have a master’s degree?”
“Two, actually, but one is honorary. That’s not the point. You would have heard all that garbage soon enough if you’d visited Aunt Vinnie more. The only reason she didn’t fill your head with my credentials was she forgot you didn’t hear her boasting at the—you know, the party you forgot. Anyway, why won’t you get in the truck? It’s the same one you rode in last week.”
“I thought you were a handyman then!”
“I fixed your fence, didn’t I?”
“You let me make a fool of myself.”
“Let you? Lady, you didn’t need my help. You were in a rant about the renters, about the dog and the fence. You believed what you wanted to, that all men were pond scum, beneath your notice. So you saw a dumb slob breaking his ass to fix someone else’s house. How was I supposed to know no one handed you my résumé? God knows they don’t talk about anything else around here.”
Louisa threw her remaining sandal at his windshield. She didn’t want its match back, anyway. “You could have driven a nicer car so I had a hint!”
“To carry lumber and tools and iced fish boxes? My car is in the garage. Besides, you don’t have a great track record with fancy automobiles, do you?”
Now both her feet were being jabbed by pebbles, and who knew how many rusty nails, broken beer bottles, or slugs crossing the road. “As you are very well aware, I do not have a good record at anything. I cannot fix my house by myself, cannot find a job, and now I cannot even go out on a real date.”
Dante pretended to look in the shadows. This was the most fun he’d had in years, and he intended to enjoy every minute of it. “I hate to say this, Juliet, but I don’t see Romeo around.”
“Stop making fun of me!”
“I’m not, I swear,” he said, glad she couldn’t see his grin. Spitting-mad and shoeless, Princess Louisa was almost as comical as old man Mullins mooning the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Louisa sat on the front bumper of the truck, resting her feet. “I left him to walk home too,” she said over her shoulder.
“Ah, the revenge of the deserted. Howdy Doody took French leave, so you kiss off the next man to buy you dinner?”
“No, I left the next man who thought he could paw at me in a seedy parking lot.”
Suddenly Dante wasn’t finding her story half as amusing. “Who was it?”
“Why, so you can get together with him and laugh at me, at how the mighty are fallen? That’s what your wife would do.”
Tilt. The woman’s mind worked like a pinball machine. Boing, boing, boing, bells and whistles and lights, and the ball never going in a straight line. “My ex-wife. What the hell does my ex-wife have to do with anything?”
“I met her and I didn’t want to be like her.”
“What, gay? Susan says you don’t get to choose, you just get to accept yourself.”
“Not gay. A snob.”
“Let me get this straight. You did not want to seem snooty, so you went out with some lowlife who mauled you?”
She stood and started walking again. “I went out with a very talented, artistically inclined gentleman.”
“Who didn’t take no for an answer?”
“Who didn’t ask.”
Dante used a word he tried not to, on account of his nephew and his aunt, then he turned the truck off and got out, leaving the headlights on in case another car came down the road. He walked beside her, in the cone of light, trying not to think of her poor feet. If he thought of them, he might just have to pick up the fleawit like he would Teddy and sling her in the truck. Without asking. “Listen, Louie, I am not going to let you walk home by yourself, and we both know it. So how about getting in the truck? You can yell at me the whole way home if you want.”
“Would you let me drive?”
He tried to sniff her breath for alcohol fumes. He smelled shampoo and perfume and the honeysuckle starting to bloom in the scrub brush. A man could get drunk on those, but Dante thought she was sober, unless she drank odorless vodka. “Sure. Can you drive a stick shift?”
“No. I was just checking anyway.”
“But you’ll get in the truck?”
They were almost out of the headlights’ arc. Louisa looked ahead and saw nothing but emptiness. She sighed and turned back.
Dante released the breath he was holding and then held the door for her. By the interior light he could see stains on the silky shirt she was wearing. This time he didn’t worry about Teddy hearing the words he used. “That isn’t blood, is it?”
Louisa looked down and sighed again, a $300 sigh this time. She’d have to throw the blouse away too. “Yeah, but not mine.”
Dante got in and started up the truck but waited a minute. “Want to tell me what happened to your shirt and your shoes?”
“No. The sad story of my sandals will go to the grave with me. I might live down the wedding, if I live to be eighty, but the sandals? Never. And the
blouse merely suffered collateral damage.”
“Want to tell me about your date?”
“Hah!”
“What about my former wife? Trust me, there’s nothing you could tell me about her that would surprise me. Did she arrange a blind date for you?”
“Hardly. She told me I didn’t belong in Paumonok Harbor. In polite terms, of course.”
“Susan is always polite, even when she is twisting the knife in your back.”
“Yes, well, I figured that if she could be accepted in a conservative little town, with all her, um…”
“Quirks? Susan is tolerated because I’m rich. Everyone knows I’ll stop donating to the local charities, pull my money out of the bank, and resign from their committees if she is not shown respect. She might be marching on Gay Pride Day, but she was once my wife, and might be the mother of my, ah, test tube someday.”
“That’s very loyal of you. Very droit du seigneur, but loyal. Anyway, I wanted to show Susan—no, I wanted to show myself—that she was wrong. I can make a life in Paumonok Harbor.”
Hell, Dante thought, for once in her life his ex-wife might have been right. Louisa Waldon couldn’t make it five miles from her house without losing her shoes.
Chapter Sixteen
Dante put the truck in gear then said, “I’ll find out who he is, you know.”
He being her late, lamented date, of course. “How, by following a trail of blood from the Albatross? The better question is why you’d want to make the effort? What is it to you, anyway?”
Dante did not want to examine the answers to those last questions too closely. He had no legal or moral responsibility to this disaster-prone dame. He did not want any, or the woman, for that matter, except in the way any red-blooded male would want the slim, shapely, green-eyed blonde. And yet…there was a niggling feeling in the back of his mind that he had to look after Louisa Waldon. Lord knew, someone had to. He had sworn not to take on any more injured doves, yet here she was, in his truck, rubbing her wounded wings.
Feet. She was massaging her sore feet. Instead of being aggravated the way he should be, Dante was amused, relieved, glad to have her so close, and wishing he could rub her toes. Worse, to his thinking, was the fact that the idea of some prick laying his hands on her almost made him turn the truck around and drive back to the—
“Did you say the Albatross? Damn, Louie, that’s no place for a lady!”
“My name is Louisa, and thanks. I know all about the Albatross. Now.”
“Fish-packers go there, and transient crews from the commercial boats. Everyone who’s been thrown out of the Blue Fin or the Breakaway hangs out in that dive.” His blood turned cold to think of the prickly but delicate rose in that field of poisonous weeds. “You could have been murdered, or worse.”
“I met some very nice people there. A charming woman who knows more about beef than you know about baseball, and a lovely young girl, much too young to be legally drinking, but old enough to escort various male acquaintances—at least I hope she knew them—to the men’s room for ten minutes at a time. I am sure she will make a fine mother someday, perhaps next month. Oh, yes, there was the pleasant barmaid who had lesions on her hands, an interesting gentleman with more ear studs than teeth, and a friendly lady in the corner by herself, most likely left alone because her wig could not hide his Adam’s apple. She thought my blouse was divine.”
“At least there were no knife fights or flying bottles.”
“No, I left before the real entertainment started. Stanley and the Split Eardrums was treat enough.”
“I am sure there are neighborhoods in Manhattan where you wouldn’t walk by yourself in the dark.”
“There are neighborhoods in the city where I wouldn’t walk by myself in broad daylight. I just didn’t know there were any like that in Paumonok Harbor.”
“Hey, I’m the biggest booster the Harbor has, but even I acknowledge it’s not the All-American, apple pie model of a small town. We’ve got our share of rotten apples in the bushel, like everyplace else.”
“I’ll remember that, the next time I decide to go slumming.” She leaned her head back against the seat, letting the motion of the car steady her heart rate. “At least I felt safer on the empty street than I did inside the place.”
He looked over at her. “We don’t have a high crime rate. Mostly kids breaking into houses to raid the liquor cabinets. Drunk driving, bar fights, vandalism and domestic quarrels. That kind of thing.”
“Good, now I can sleep better knowing I won’t be murdered in my bed. I don’t have any liquor.”
“Good. That is, you won’t be attacked at a bar, either, if you pick your dates more carefully.”
“What, doctors and lawyers never slip drugs in their dates’ drinks? Accountants don’t think a free meal entitles them to a free lay? Get real, professor. And save the lecture for some other innocent twit. I have learned my lesson.”
“You? For a sophisticated chick from the big city, you sure are naive at times.”
“And for a young man, you sure are prosy at times.”
Dante was pleased she thought he was young. Prosy? Well, she deserved a lecture for going out with—“Who the hell took you there anyway?”
“You see? Prosy. Pushy. Patriarchal. You’ll make a good father however the baby is conceived, but you sure aren’t mine.”
He was almost ten years older than she was, he figured. Not old enough to be her father, certainly. Too old for anything else? He refused to think about it. There was not going to be anything else, period.
When the silence had gone on for a few more blocks, Louisa said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’ve had a lousy night but you’ve been a lifesaver, again. It’s not your fault that you are overprotective and authoritarian. I guess you had to be for a long time, the head of the family and all that. Or maybe it was just bred into you. You know, blue eyes, pride, and thinking you know what’s best for everyone.”
That stung, so Dante replied, “And I guess you can’t help making bad choices now that you are out on your own. I suppose Hagrid made all the decisions for you.”
“Howard?” Louisa sat up straight again. “He did not! I…”
…did what Howard wanted. Louisa had accepted all Howard’s choices, because that was easier than arguing, and he was better company when he had his way. So they ate when and where he wanted, vacationed where he selected, and saw the movies he chose. He was paying for all of it, she always figured, so he had the right. He never paid for her hair or clothes, though, and she still listened to his opinions, catered to his tastes. She was pleasing her partner. She called it compromise, not caving in. What could be wrong with that?
Nothing, unless she’d given up her own ideas, subjugated her own likes and dislikes, until she was a mere extension of Howard, a reflection, a big nothing of her own.
Had she really been a spineless jellyfish, all for a faithless, feckless mama’s boy? Feh, as Susan would say. Yeah, she had been. Maybe she’d wrecked his car on purpose, exerting her personhood, subconsciously destroying the relationship that was swallowing her alive.
And maybe she was just drained from the events of the evening, introspective and maudlin because she had screwed up again. She shouldn’t be so angst-ridden, not when she was safe and secure. When she was gnashing her teeth together to keep Alvin’s tongue out of her mouth, that was the time she should have been questioning her past and her personality. Now she should just sit back and enjoy her victory. She’d won, by god, expressed her wishes in as forceful a way she knew, barring a gun license. She had made a bully bleed and back down. Good triumphed over evil, or over Alvin, anyway. So what if she needed a ride home? She, Louisa Waldon, had fought her own battle.
And she, Louisa Waldon, was cared about by a handsome, intelligent, desirable someone. He might have stopped for a stray dog on the street, too, but he cared about Louisa, despite himself. She could almost see Dante fighting to deny it, but she knew he did. A
nd she felt better for it.
When the old truck pulled up behind her, Louisa had never been so happy to see anyone in her life, even though Dante was a deceiver and a dastard. She couldn’t tell him of her relief and her joy, of course, and she was mortified that he, man about town—man who practically owned the town—had found her in another ridiculous situation. Still, she almost flew into his truck, into his lap, like her dog when someone set off an early firecracker. Here was light and safety and going home. Here was comfort and time to breathe.
Here was Dante Rivera, whose heart would be as battered as his old truck, if he had a heart.
“It’s okay to like me, you know,” she told him now, a few blocks from her house.
“It is?”
“Yes. You see, I don’t want anything from you. I wouldn’t take it if you offered, so you don’t have to worry about being entangled with me and my rotten roof and misguided life choices. I am on my own and I like it that way, learning my own lessons as I go, like how to caulk the bathtub so it doesn’t leak down into the kitchen. And how not to let anyone else do my thinking for me. I won’t listen to your wife, and not to small-town gossip, either.”
“So I have your permission to like you?”
“Well, you already do it, so you might as well admit it.”
“How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Well, you are grinning, for one thing, showing both dimples at once. You are jealous of my date, and you haven’t drummed your fingers on the steering wheel for the last ten minutes. Oh, and you’ve driven past my block twice.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you like me?”
“Yeah, I can manage that, as long as you don’t start calling twice a day and showing up everywhere and expecting me to care about your relatives and your migraines and your wrinkles.”
“I don’t have wrinkles!”
“You will.”
She wouldn’t mention moisturizers and sunblocks. Or his former wife’s foray to the plastic surgeon, which he must have paid for. “Okay. I will restrain from prostrating myself at your feet. There, now we can be friends.”
Love, Louisa Page 12
