“About what?”
“About your feelings.”
“I reckoned I’d do what I usually do,” Jane said, deadpan. “Ignore them until they go away.”
Lauren laughed. “Or you could ask yourself, what do I want? What’s the behavior that will get me what I want?”
“You sound like a therapist.”
“I am that.” Lauren held her gaze. “I’m also your friend.”
A rush of affection tightened Jane’s throat. “I know. And I’m grateful.”
“Hey, I get something out of this relationship, too.”
“Yeah. Cookies.”
“Your friendship.” Lauren grinned. “Not that the cookies aren’t a nice bonus. But you’re an amazing friend. And one of the kindest people I know.”
“Stop. I’m not so amazing.”
“I know it’s hard to feel amazing. Especially when someone who should have loved you unconditionally, all the time, makes you feel unlovable.”
Jane had read the books. She knew that one of the effects of living with abuse was lowered self-esteem. She swallowed the tightness in her throat. “I’m better off without him.”
“Without Travis? Absolutely. I was talking about your mom.”
Jane stared at her in shock.
“You know, my dad died when I was a teen,” Lauren said quietly. “After that, I was so afraid that somebody else would leave me that I put up with a lot of shit. From guys, especially. It took a lot of work—and Jack—to teach me that I deserved more.”
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Jane said.
“Thanks. But my point is, you don’t have to settle. Gabe Murphy could be a really nice guy. But maybe he’s not the right guy for you right now.”
Jane’s chest hollowed. As if she’d lost her breath or something equally precious. Vital. Which was stupid. How could she lose something she’d never had?
Only a kiss.
Only a moment when she’d felt charged, shiny, electric from the inside out. She’d felt hot.
Jane bit her lip. “You’re probably right.”
Of course she was right. Lauren was her friend. She only wanted Jane to be happy.
Sex would make you happy, whispered the devil inside her.
Jane hushed it. Making a play for Gabe now, especially when he’d told her he wasn’t interested in a relationship, would be every bit of the mistake he’d called it. She felt sad—You’re angry, the devil said—about that, but she couldn’t ignore the reality of her life.
She was Hank’s daughter. Aidan’s mom. She couldn’t go throwing herself at a man just because he had muscled arms and a glint in his eyes, because he was a good kisser and kind to dogs, because he made her feel reckless and rebellious and alive again.
She boxed the lemon ricotta tarts for Lauren to take with her. Slowed work to look out the window.
Gabe was braced on the ladder outside, his long body extended, saying something that made Tomás grin.
Jane’s pulse kicked up.
What do you want? Lauren had asked.
She wanted to be a good mother, Jane reckoned.
She wanted to be a good baker, for her bread to feed her neighbors, for her cookies to comfort them, for her cakes to be a part of every island celebration.
She wanted . . .
Gabe reached overhead, his T-shirt pulling loose from his jeans, revealing the hard, furred ridges of his abdomen.
Her mouth went dry. Oh, she wanted.
Eleven
THE RAIN FELL, flattening the grass and flooding the ruts in the parking lot, turning the blues to gray and the grays to black.
The gloomy weather suited Hank’s mood.
“You won’t make the rain go away by glaring at it,” Marta said.
He turned from the window to scowl at her. With her bright lips and nails and honey-toned skin, she looked like a tropical sunset, warm and vivid. Her blouse was pink. Her bold gold earrings glinted against the reddish tint in her dark hair.
Something stirred inside him. Annoyance, maybe, or relief at having a target for his frustration.
“Shouldn’t you be typing something? Or filing?”
She raised her elegant brows. “It’s Monday. Nothing happens on a Monday.”
“Where’s Jack?”
“At the high school, showing his drunk-driving-accident slides to all the seniors before prom. And before you ask, Luke ran over to the mainland with his friend Gabe. Something about an animal license,” she added with a pointed look.
Hank grunted. At least the son of a bitch wasn’t at Jane’s.
Jane was a good girl. Never a moment’s trouble until she took up with that no-account ex, Tillett. She’d proved herself to be a fine mother, a hard worker. But there was something in her—a bit of her own mother, maybe—that made Hank uneasy. A restlessness, a recklessness, that made her a target for the wrong kind of man. Assholes like Travis Tillett. Troublemakers like Gabe Murphy. She deserved better. More.
But had she listened to him? No.
Maybe she would have listened to her mom.
He prowled to his desk and back again. Shoved his hands in his pockets. It chafed a man when he couldn’t do better by his daughter.
“If you can’t sit down, go home,” Marta said.
“I’m on call.”
“So, if something happens, I will call you. You don’t have to stay here.”
His jaw set mulishly. “Maybe I like being here.”
“I can tell. If you like it so much, why didn’t you take the chief’s job when the town council offered it to you?”
He used to be surprised by her knowledge of the island and everybody on it. Not anymore. Made her a damn fine dispatcher, to tell the truth.
“I’m too old,” he said. Too tired.
“What are you, sixty-four? Sixty-five?”
“Fifty-nine,” he snapped, and then realized he’d been had when her eyes laughed at him.
“Not so old, then. You could live another forty years.”
Coming home every night to the same damn recliner, the same damn sportscasts with the announcers getting younger every year. Or fighting off age with hair dye and capped teeth. “I’d rather be dead.”
“Be careful what you wish for. My husband died when he was only forty-one.”
That shocked him into contrition. “I’m sorry.” He really was. “I didn’t know.”
“You never asked.”
“I always figured . . .” He saw boggy ground ahead and stopped.
She swiveled in her chair, crossing her legs. Nice legs. “That my husband left me?”
He scowled. His wife had left him. Though a man would have to be useless or stupid or both to leave a woman like Marta. “It happens.”
Her face softened. “Yes, it does.”
Hank didn’t want her pity. “I guess I figured you must have kicked his sorry ass out.”
She smiled, but sadly. “No.”
“How old were your boys?” She had four sons. He knew that much.
“Alex and Mateo were in high school. Tomás and Miguel were little boys—eight and two.”
He didn’t know the older ones. But he’d seen the younger two around. “Good boys. You’ve done a good job with them.”
She shrugged round shoulders. Maybe she didn’t want pity, either. “We got by. They are good sons. Hard workers, like their father. The older two got scholarships to college. My point is, you are hardly too old to start something new. I was fifty-two when I accepted this job.”
Because she wanted a challenge, Hank remembered Jack saying. Before that, she’d worked at Grady Real Estate. Started as a cleaning woman, ended up as office manager. She’d been Jack’s first hire as chief of police.
“See, that’s why Rossi should be Chief,” Hank said. “I wouldn’t have hired you.”
Her eyebrows raised. “Because I am a woman? Or because I am Mexican American?”
Heat crawled in Hank’s face. He guessed he deserved that. “Because I’m an old dog. Too
set in my ways. I would have gone on the way things were before, using the county dispatcher. Jack was the one who went to the town council and got the funding for the job. I couldn’t have done that.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit. People listen to you.”
“My daughter doesn’t,” he was surprised to hear himself say.
Outside the windows, the rain continued to fall, wrapping them in a gray curtain of sound.
“You are worried about her.”
He opened his mouth to deny it. Nodded instead.
“Tomás says they are working at the new coffee shop today. Is Jane concerned it will take away from her business?”
It was so far from what Hank had been thinking that he goggled. “What are you talking about?”
“Ashley Ingram’s place. Down on the harbor. It could be competition for Jane.”
He rejected the idea instantly. “Jane doesn’t have anything to worry about. She’s a great little baker.”
“She is. But I assumed that was why she was expanding her dining space.”
Hank frowned. “She didn’t say anything to me about that.”
“Do you two talk at all?”
“We don’t need to talk,” Hank said defensively. “Jane knows if she needs anything, she can come to me. The problem is, she’s too damn proud. Stubborn.”
“Your daughter, proud and stubborn?” Marta widened her eyes. “Imagine.”
A grin tugged at his mouth. He turned it hastily into a scowl. “Like this drywall thing today,” he said. He didn’t know shit about installing drywall, but he could’ve done something. “I offered to go over there to help, but she told me no. She’d rather have that Murphy fellow hanging around.”
“Maybe because he knows what he is doing,” Marta said.
“He better not be doing it with my daughter.”
“Isn’t that up to her to decide? She is an adult woman, yes?”
Hank couldn’t argue about that. Didn’t like to think about it. So he grumbled, “She wants him to work around her place, I can’t stop her. But she’s not coming home for dinner.”
“Poor Hank.” There was a gleam in Marta’s eyes he wasn’t entirely sure he liked. “You will have to feed yourself tonight.”
“I can feed myself. I feed me and the boy all the time.” Best not to mention that on the nights Jane wasn’t home in time to start dinner, she’d usually prepared something ready for him to heat in the oven.
“Do you mind watching your grandson?”
“No, Aidan’s a good boy. Good company.” At least one good thing had come out of his daughter’s lousy marriage. “Besides, I’m not watching him tonight. He’s going over to a friend’s house.”
Those big, dark eyes regarded him thoughtfully. “You are lonely.”
Hell, yeah. “No.”
“It’s all right. I get lonely, too.” She smiled. “Mostly for the company of someone my own age.”
His heart thundered. “You get that here,” he pointed out. “Company, I mean. People coming in and . . . People.” Me.
“Maybe you should come over tonight,” she said. “Since you don’t have anything better to do.”
“To your house,” he said, just to be sure. His blood rushed in his head. She was widowed. She was lonely. He liked her, despite the sparks that flew between them in the office. Or maybe because of them. He wondered if she brought all that attitude to bed.
“For dinner.” Another curve of those bright lips, warm and amused. “And for the companionship.”
* * *
“DON’T LOOK AT me like that,” Gabe said.
Lucky sighed and dropped his head on his paws. The mutt had spent the morning being poked, prodded, and vaccinated like a Marine facing deployment, enduring the vet visit with abused dignity. The treats and attention afterward had helped. So had the ride home in Luke’s truck. But as soon as the dog grasped that Gabe was abandoning him alone in the motel room, the sulks started.
“Sorry, pal. You’ll just be in the way.”
Usually Gabe took Lucky with him to the job site, but he was working inside today. Not that Jane would throw the beast out into the rain, but Gabe wasn’t taking advantage of her soft heart. In any way.
Lucky’s gaze, dark and mournful, tracked Gabe to the door.
“I’m leaving you for your own good.”
The dog turned its head away.
Fine. Try to do the right thing and everybody hates you.
He locked the door behind him.
“Any mail for me today?” he asked at the front desk.
Bob didn’t look up from his magazine. “Nope.”
Not today, not yesterday. Not ever. Gabe didn’t know why he bothered. His mom never replied to his postcards. Never made that call, the one that said I’m sorry or I forgive you or I’m leaving that bastard or Come home.
He went out into the rain. Luke’s truck was still parked in front of the building.
Gabe stopped. “Hey.”
“Thought I’d give you a lift to work.”
They’d marched through worse than rain. But Gabe didn’t see any point in getting soaked and tromping muddy work boots all over Jane’s clean floors.
“Thanks.” He got in.
Luke slid him a look. “You’re spending a lot of time at the bakery these days.”
“I’m finishing up a job.”
“Heard the rest of the crew moved on. Taking your own sweet time because you like the scenery?”
Gabe’s jaw tightened.
Another quick, assessing glance. “Whatever you’re up to, you’ve got Hank’s shorts in a bunch.”
“Nothing happened,” Gabe said. One kiss. One kiss that rocked his world and lit up his system like tracer fire in the desert sky at night. “And you can tell Daddy nothing’s going to happen.”
“She turned you down,” Luke said, his voice almost sympathetic.
“No.”
It would be easier if she had.
Gabe had lost his head over a woman twice before. Rushed into a situation thinking he could make a difference, believing he could save them.
It hadn’t gone well for him. Either time.
Kissing Jane had been a bonehead move. A mistake.
Though she hadn’t felt like a mistake in his arms, he remembered reluctantly. She felt soft and firm, smooth and silky. He touched her and he instantly went hard. Hell, he didn’t even have to touch her. All he had to do was catch her scent, sweet and hot as something from the oven, and he wanted to lick her, suck her, eat her up. The generous way she kissed him back, that little noise she made—so help me, God—tore at his control.
He almost hadn’t stopped, and that scared him. His response to her was too intense. Too much. She was too much for him.
Being around her this past week made him feel like a kid at the grocery store, peering in the bakery case, leaving dirty handprints smudged on the glass. Or like a horny adolescent staring out the detention room window at the pretty cheerleader, who had smiled at him the day before, flirting with the quarterback at the edge of the practice field.
He was sick of looking and not buying, tired of needing and not having.
Luke’s fingers drummed the steering wheel. “Let your Sergeant break this down for you. You’re attracted. She’s attracted. Her father hates your guts. So you’ve got a choice to make, Marine: Do you try to satisfy Jane? Or do you satisfy Hank? Because you can’t make both of them happy.”
“No choice,” Gabe said. “They’re both ticked at me now.”
“You still have to pick your battles,” Luke said. “I can already tell you you’re not going to win any ground with Hank. So I wouldn’t waste my ammunition there.”
“I’m not taking a shot at Jane, either.”
“I won’t argue with that, but . . . why not?”
“I got my first paycheck Friday. Put down a week’s deposit at the motel.”
Luke frowned. “Yeah, so?”
He didn’t get it,
Gabe realized. Their shared service made them brothers. But even the bonds of blood and battle couldn’t change their lives before the Corps.
He didn’t expect Luke—with his solid family and their century-old inn and his reputation as Hometown Hero—to understand. But he tried to explain anyway. “If you don’t count jail, that motel room is the closest I’ve had to a fixed address in years. I’m trying to turn my life around here. This thing with Jane . . . I’m not looking for that kind of complication. I’m not ready.”
“You mean, you don’t want it bad enough.”
Gabe flushed. He wanted Jane. Imagined having her in just about every way a man could have a woman.
But she wasn’t a fucking hill to be taken. He respected her, the way she raised her son, ran her business, fed strays and the elderly. She had made something of herself, something solid and fine and permanent.
“I need more to offer her than a motel room.” More than good intentions and great sex.
“Is she asking for more?”
No. And maybe that stung, a little. “She deserves more.”
Luke grunted. In agreement? “Two years ago, I would have told you there was no way I was ready for a daughter. When I got home, I’d never had a relationship with a woman that outlasted a deployment. I sure as hell didn’t have a clue how to be a daddy. But good things come on their own schedule, not some timetable you set up in your head. I had to accept that.” His grin flashed. “And then I had to talk Kate into accepting me. It took time to earn her trust. Taylor’s, too.”
Easy for Luke to say. No clue? His mother was strong, his father was decent, and his family was frickin’ perfect. He’d grown up with their example.
Gabe looked down at his father’s big hands at the ends of his thick, scarred wrists and slowly uncurled his fists.
He’d grown up with an example, too. Luke had no idea what Gabe carried inside him. What he was capable of.
“Jane’s got no reason to trust me. Hell, I don’t trust myself.”
“You always did step on your own dick,” Luke said with rough affection. “You want to walk away, that’s your business. Just make sure you understand what you’re walking away from. And where you’re going.”
Gabe nodded without speaking.
He was done with running away. He had a chance to build something here if for once in his life he was careful and smart, if he considered the consequences before jumping into action.
Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel Page 13
