by Brenda Novak
“They aren’t the type to accept responsibility. They’ve been trying to place the blame elsewhere ever since this happened. So...you should be careful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of...backlash.”
Denny and Powell had already stopped by, but no one seemed to know that. Apparently, they weren’t telling—probably because coming to her house and getting into an altercation would only make them look as combative as their dogs. Also, Callie believed a guy who prided himself on his size wouldn’t want to admit that he’d been so easily taken by a drifter weighing fifty pounds less.
“I’ll be careful.” She tried to sound confident, but in her current condition, she wouldn’t be able to put up much of a defense once Levi left.
* * *
It was close to seven when Levi saw Callie’s SUV turn down the drive. He’d finished working for the day, had just showered in the small, makeshift bathroom in the barn and was playing a game of fetch with Rifle. Fortunately, now that she was back he wouldn’t have to figure out how to occupy himself next. He was hungry, but he hesitated to invade her privacy by going inside her house while she was gone, even though she’d told him he could make himself at home.
He stood to one side as she parked.
“Hey,” she said as she got out. Her smile suggested she was happy to see him. It was so infectious he couldn’t help smiling back.
“Hey yourself. That took all day.”
“I had lots to do.”
“Get it done?”
“I think so.” She leaned in for a small paper sack that was sitting on the console. “Found the nails you wanted, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
After taking the bag, he compared what she’d bought with one of the nails still in his pocket. “You did great.”
She crouched to say hello to her dog, who was so excited to have her home his whole hind end was wagging. “There’s my baby. How are you today?” she cooed, scratching and patting and hugging him. Then she squinted up at Levi. “Looks as if you two have been getting along.”
“Rifle’s a good dog.”
“You hear that? He likes you.” With a final pat, she straightened and collected the bags piled in her backseat. “I don’t want you to get mad at me for this, but I bought you a couple of things at the mall.”
“Me?” he said in surprise.
“I thought you could use them.”
He cocked his head to see around her, at what she was digging out of her SUV. “What’d you get?”
“A pair of jeans and a shirt.” She shoved a Macy’s bag at him. “Go try them on.”
Reluctantly, he accepted her offering, but he scowled to let her know he wasn’t pleased. “Callie—”
“Oh, stop,” she said with an impatient wave. “You’re going to end up doing a lot more work than what I’ve paid you for. I’ll owe you—and Lord knows you could use a change of clothes, so...do we have to make a big deal out of this?”
Her expression seemed almost childlike in its entreaty.
“I guess not.”
“Wonderful!” Her smile returned. “Will you try them on? So I can see if I got the right sizes?”
“Sure.” With a sigh, he helped bring in some takeout that smelled good enough to make his mouth water, as well as several other bags that had come from various shops other than the department store where she’d bought his clothes.
“I think I’m safe with the shirt,” she said. “But the jeans. I had to guess.”
He gave her the food and dropped the other bags on the couch before proceeding to her bedroom, where he changed. When he came out, the food was gone—she’d probably put it in the kitchen—and she was resting on the couch.
“You okay?” The paleness of her face reminded him of the harrowing hours of illness she’d suffered the night before.
She opened her eyes. “Just tired.”
“You need to get in bed early.”
“Nice,” she said as she noticed his clothes. “I did well.”
Everything felt comfortable, fit perfectly. “I like what you bought,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You come across as very conservative. I thought I couldn’t go wrong with a pair of jeans and a dark shirt.” She laughed. “You ready to eat?”
“I’m starving.”
“It’s on the table.”
He paused halfway to the kitchen. “What about you?”
“I’m going to lie here for a bit.”
She’d bought tri-tip, roasted vegetables, corn on the cob and some thick-sliced bread from a place called Just Like Mom’s. Hoping to encourage her to eat, he brought her a plate before dishing up his own, but it was too late.
“Damn,” he said when he saw that she’d drifted off. He set her food on the coffee table so he could carry her to bed.
“How was dinner?” she murmured as he lifted her up.
“I’m sure it’ll be delicious.” He thought she might tell him it was too early to go to bed. But she didn’t. She seemed willing enough to let him carry her, too.
“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” she asked.
“In the barn, where I’m supposed to be sleeping.”
“No, stay inside, okay?”
He was beginning to want things he hadn’t wanted for a long time, so he wasn’t sure that would be a smart move. “It’s probably better if I don’t, Callie.”
She’d closed her eyes and turned her face into his chest. “Better in what way?”
He wasn’t about to explain it to her if she hadn’t already guessed. “Fine. I’ll stay in.”
“Thanks.”
After depositing her on the bed, he covered her and returned to the living room. He was in a hurry to have his dinner before it got cold and he’d have to reheat it, but he noticed something that stopped him before he could go very far. One of her shopping bags had a very distinctive color and logo.
Pink. Victoria’s Secret.
What had she bought there?
Maybe it was just a bra or panties for everyday use, but he couldn’t help checking. Pushing the tissue aside, he pulled out a sheer white number with a lace-up front and a matching pair of barely there panties.
“Holy hell,” he muttered as his body reacted.
A sound from behind him told Levi she’d followed him out. Embarrassed to be caught handling her lingerie, he turned to find her watching him.
At first she didn’t speak. They stared at each other for a moment. Then she cleared her throat and said, “I was just coming to get my stuff.”
That was his cue to shove the sexy scraps of fabric back into the bag and walk away. But he couldn’t pretend that what he’d found didn’t affect him.
“Pretty,” he said.
“I don’t know why I bought that.” She went bright red. “It was just...something I’d want to buy if...”
“If?” he prompted.
“If I had a reason.”
He couldn’t give her that reason. Tossing the bag onto the couch, he pivoted toward the kitchen. Food. He needed to concentrate on something else, because he knew that if he looked into those big blue eyes any longer, he’d carry her into the bedroom and break his promise to Behrukh.
10
Standing with her back to the closed door of the bedroom, Callie covered her mouth. Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! she screamed, but only inside her head. She’d remembered that Victoria’s Secret purchase just as she was about to fall asleep and forced herself to get up so she could retrieve the bag. She’d wanted to hide the contents before Levi could stumble across it, but she’d ended up surprising him instead—and creating a terribly awkward moment for both of them.
He’d had no right to snoop. But she could understand why he might be interested. She shouldn’t have bought such a thing to begin with. Why had she wasted the money?
Actually, she knew the answer to that. No doubt Levi did, too. But there was more to it than merely wanting to be with a man. When she looked at tha
t bustier, she didn’t think about dying, she thought about living. About loving. About passion and beauty. At thirty-two, there were so many things she had yet to do and see and feel. She didn’t want to die without ever experiencing a night of real passion.
She couldn’t forget Gail describing how it had been the first time she’d made love with Simon. Just thinking about her friend’s happiness made Callie smile, especially since Gail and Simon were now married and having a family, and that happiness was lasting.
Rifle had been lying on the rug by the bed. She normally left her door open and let him roam through the house at will, but she didn’t want to leave him alone with Levi for too long too soon. When she didn’t continue into the room, he cocked his head and whined as if asking what was wrong.
“With all the odds stacked against me, I’ll never have the luck Gail had,” she told him. Gail had married a movie star.
But an out-of-this-world encounter with the tall, handsome man who’d walked into her life three days ago didn’t seem like too much to ask.
Even if sleeping with Levi wasn’t everything she imagined, it wouldn’t be too difficult to surpass what she’d known so far. Kyle was by far the best of the few lovers she’d had, but physical fulfillment wasn’t necessarily emotional fulfillment. Before she died, she wanted to see what it was like to drown in desire and thought maybe the attractive, mysterious Levi could provide that experience—if he was still capable of having sex. It was possible that what he’d been through had robbed him of that ability.
She remembered feeling a certain solid object pressing into her backside at various moments last night. That suggested he could perform. And yet he’d made no attempt to act on his arousal. It was only because she’d been sick that he’d gotten in bed with her. So even if the problem wasn’t physiological, there was some avoidance there. Maybe it was a mental or emotional problem.
Either way, she’d been stupid to buy such expensive lingerie.
Planning to take her purchases back to the store after Levi left, she shoved them in a drawer and picked up her cell phone. Lately, she’d been too afraid her friends would notice her failing health to hang out with them as often as she used to; she was always traipsing back and forth to the transplant center, anyway. She hadn’t been diligent about returning their calls.
But now that she’d had a chance to acclimate, as much as one could acclimate to the possibility of dying, she missed them.
Baxter answered on the first ring. Callie wasn’t sure why she hadn’t chosen to contact one of her female friends first. Gail or Eve or Cheyenne would’ve been a more natural choice. Even the married Sophia. But if her suspicions about Baxter were true, he was also unlucky in love. Given that she believed he was as gay as her first boyfriend and in love with Noah, who was also part of their group, she thought he’d be the most likely to understand how conflicted she was feeling.
“Hey, don’t tell me this is Callie—Callie who was too busy to visit me in San Francisco and have lunch last week.”
She couldn’t have gone to the city. She’d had too many doctors’ appointments in Sacramento—appointments she didn’t dare cancel. She was fighting for her life, hoping against hope that the people who ran the national donor list would be able to come up with a liver in time.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I’ll come another day.” Baxter commuted to a brokerage house in San Francisco four days a week. As long as her health held out, she would have other opportunities.
“I can count on that? You haven’t been returning my calls,” he said.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Getting your grandparents’ place ready to sell? Is the job really that all-consuming? I mean, it’s been five years. I hate to sound harsh, but maybe I could understand your complete absorption in this if they’d just died.”
“I miss them.”
“To the point that you can’t take a few hours for your friends? You haven’t joined us at the coffeehouse in a month. For some reason, you’re shutting us all out. Except Kyle.”
She heard the undercurrent in those last two words. He suspected she and Kyle were more involved than they’d been letting on. Some of the others did, too. Eve had once asked, point-blank, if they were sleeping together. But that was before they’d become intimate, so Callie had felt comfortable saying no.
“You know where I live,” she told Baxter. “It’s just that Kyle comes over and you don’t.”
“Because I’ve never been invited.”
The TV went on. Apparently, Levi wasn’t ready to sleep. “Kyle doesn’t sit back and wait for an invitation.”
“Why do you think that is?”
There it was again. What she’d done with Kyle was another reason she’d been pulling away from the group. She was embarrassed by her own behavior.
She considered admitting that she’d slept with Kyle. If nothing else, the revelation would throw Baxter off the trail of what else was going on in her life. But she quickly decided against it. She had no right to divulge anything without Kyle’s consent.
Besides, what had happened between them—it was just a blip on the radar, an anomaly, a...lapse. And it was over. Somehow, since Levi had appeared on her porch, she hadn’t even thought about getting naked with Kyle, except to be mortified that she’d let the situation interfere with her good judgment in the first place.
“Is it because he likes me more than you do?” she asked, putting a teasing lilt in her voice just in case.
“I’d say he likes you in a different way.”
She cleared her throat. “We all have our secrets, right?”
When he immediately let it go and changed the subject, she felt more confident than ever that she’d guessed one of his.
“So what’s up?” he said. “How are things going with your guest?”
Relieved by the shift in the conversation, she drew a deep breath. “Kyle told you about Levi?”
“He’s still returning my calls. We had a drink together last night.”
She ignored the jab. “And?”
“He’s worried.”
But not just about Levi. Kyle had been the only one to spend much time with her in the past three weeks, the only one to see her begin to feel worse and worse as her bilirubin count went up.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “If Levi was going to murder me, he would’ve done it by now.”
“It’s not like you to take in some drifter.”
“This isn’t some drifter.”
“Who is he, then?”
“A man who needs a helping hand. A vet who’s served our country.”
“I admire the patriotism. But from what I’ve heard, he’s also a loner who might be damaged beyond repair. Have you considered that?”
She’d thought of little else. But instead of being frightened or repelled, she wanted to help him. That desire was taking over her life, and she was grateful she’d found such a compelling cause. Before he’d shown up, each day had been harder than the last. He’d made what she was going through easier just by being around.
Last night, for example. What would she have done on her own? Spent hours upon hours on the bathroom floor without the strength to stumble to her bed?
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whatever his situation, I want to do what I can for him.”
“Selfless and admirable. Or...is there more to it?”
“By that you’re suggesting...”
“Is he also someone you find attractive?”
Callie pictured Levi as she’d seen him earlier, on the ladder with his sweat-dampened T-shirt clinging to his muscular torso. “Definitely.”
“Ah...riddle solved.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you have ulterior motives.”
She almost denied it but laughed instead. “Maybe—to a certain extent. Would that be so bad?”
“Yes. Because then he could hurt you in a whole new way.”
She doubted Levi co
uld hear her above the program he was watching, but she lowered her voice just in case. “I’m not
expecting a commitment from him. He’ll be leaving soon.”
“So we’re talking about...sex?”
She supposed they were. For whatever reason, she felt a compulsion to get closer to him, but she’d convinced herself that it stemmed from her desire to “fix” him, since she couldn’t fix herself. “That’s part of it.”
“Oh, jeez,” Baxter said. “Whatever you do, make sure he’s clean.”
“Don’t act like he’ll...contaminate me!” she whispered harshly.
“Someone needs to caution you. You don’t know him, so you’d be taking a huge risk—and you’re not really the risk-taking kind. You still regret that one-night stand you had after Peter broke up with you, despite the fact that you went out looking to get laid!”
“The memory is revolting! I regretted it even while I was doing it.”
He chuckled at her passionate response. “How do you know this would be any different?”
She didn’t think she could adequately explain, but she made the attempt. “He excites me. I close my eyes and...he’s who I dream about. I wasn’t attracted to that other guy. I just wanted someone to reassure me that I was desirable, that it wasn’t my fault Peter preferred men.”
“Sexuality doesn’t work that way.”
“A fact I understand now. I was twenty, remember?”
“I get all that. But...you changed before Levi showed up. So none of this really relates.”
“Of course it does.”
“Callie...what’s going on?”
He wasn’t letting her cajole him. Squeezing her eyes shut, she cradled her head in her hand. “What would you say if I told you I was dying of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease?”
“What?”
The words were out. They’d been trapped inside her for so long she could scarcely believe she’d released them.
“Could you say that again?”
“You heard me.” She couldn’t bring herself to repeat what she’d said.
There was a silence during which Baxter dropped, almost as if it were a physical object, the “you need to get your head on straight” attitude he’d wielded throughout the conversation so far.
