Can You Love Me Now?: (Oakland Hills Short Story 3)

by Gretchen Galway

  Contents

  Copyright page

  From the Back Cover

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Also by Gretchen Galway

  About the Author

  CAN YOU LOVE ME NOW?

  Copyright © 2015 by Gretchen Galway

  Eton Field, Publisher

  www.gretchengalway.com

  Cover Design: Gretchen Galway

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Sasha Selkirk has been in love with her best friend’s brother, Jake Lapinksi, since she was thirteen. Now twenty-eight, she knows if he was ever going to return her feelings, he certainly would’ve done it by now. So when he shows up at the snowbound mountain cabin where she’s staying—alone, trying again to forget him—she pushes him away, never expecting him to kiss her. Or make any of her other dreams come true…

  CAN YOU LOVE ME NOW? is a contemporary romance short story of about 45 pages. Although it’s set in the world of Gretchen Galway’s bestselling Oakland Hills series, you don’t have to read the other stories to enjoy this one. No cliffhangers! Spice level: Sensual.

  Chapter 1

  JAKE LAPINSKI WATCHED HIS SISTER unwrap the painting he’d made for her new apartment, his stomach tensing. Even after a decade as a professional artist, he got edgy when a crowd gathered to look at his work.

  Not that the two dozen or so people in the small living room in Oakland, California were gathering for that reason; his sister, Jody, had just shacked up with her boyfriend. It was an open secret they were already engaged, and all their friends and family had gathered to wish them well.

  “You didn’t have to get us anything,” Jody said, smiling at him.

  “Of course I did.” Jake hoped she didn’t hate the painting. Her opinion meant a lot to him—although not quite as much as the opinion of the woman standing by the window. If Sasha Selkirk didn’t like the painting, he’d probably take it home, gesso over it, and try again. Sasha was her sister’s oldest and closest friend, almost part of the family. She didn’t talk a lot, but when she did, it was ten times more insightful than what anyone else might say.

  “Be careful,” Jake said, reaching over to help his sister tear away the paper. He’d put the small painting inside an Amazon box. “It’s not actually dry yet.”

  Jody lifted the flaps of the box and peeked inside. “Oh, Jake. Is it rosemary? I love it!”

  He glanced at Sasha, relieved to see her smiling as she peered over Jody’s shoulder. When he wasn’t creating pet portraits for clients, he’d been painting garden herbs all year, usually in miniature. Couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “I told him it seemed small for a housewarming gift,” Marjorie, his girlfriend, said. Jake didn’t mind if Marjorie didn’t appreciate his work. She couldn’t tell the difference between Van Gogh and Vin Diesel. Although a great optometrist, she had no eye.

  Not like Sasha.

  “It’s not too small,” Sasha said. “It suits the subject matter.”

  “Thanks, Sash,” he said, saluting her with his beer bottle.

  She gave him one of her enigmatic smiles and looked down.

  What is she thinking about? he wondered for the millionth time. He ran his hand through his longish hair, emptied his beer, and set the bottle on the table next to the other housewarming gifts.

  His girlfriend picked it up and wiped away the water ring with a scrap of discarded wrapping paper. “I’ll recycle it,” she said, patting him on the head as she walked to the kitchen.

  The gesture annoyed him. They’d been dating for two months, and he was starting to worry that it wasn’t going to last. He was over thirty. He was ready to last. Ready for a relationship to last. But Marjorie didn’t seem to like him enough. He wasn’t picky, but that struck him as important, even key.

  “Jake?”

  Marjorie was calling from the kitchen. Seeing that his sister and Simon, the shack-ee, had moved on to opening the next gift, he stood up and joined his date near the refrigerator, which was in the farthest corner from the living room, just out of eyesight of the party.

  “Want me to pour you another glass of wine?” He reached for the fridge. Marjorie seemed to like him best when he was serving her something. That was another warning sign, but he wasn’t in any hurry to admit it.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. Only then did he notice she was wearing her jacket.

  Apparently she was the one in a hurry.

  “OK,” he said.

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I guess it wasn’t working out,” he said.

  Her brow creased. “I was tired.” Her voice turned sharp and pointy. Kind of like her shoes. “I wanted to go home and crash. That’s all I meant.”

  “Oh.” He felt his face get hot. “Right. Totally. I’ll—well, I can’t drive you home yet because I just had a beer on an empty stomach and I’m kind of buzzed—”

  “You thought I was breaking up with you?”

  He licked his lips and studied the shape of her head, just a few inches away from her eyes. Nice head. He’d drawn her a few times, but knew she wouldn’t appreciate his technique. He tended to make people look like animals. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “And all you were going to say was ‘OK’?”

  He sighed. Might as well go with it. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “I know,” he said, sighing again. “That’s part of the problem.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Save us both some time, I guess.”

  “I am sorry.” After a moment, he realized he really was. He should’ve handled that better. “Look, I only had one drink, I’m cool to drive. Let me get my coat and I can at least see you h—”

  “No.” She turned and opened the front door. “I drove us here, anyway.”

  “I know, but I could—”

  The door slammed between them.

  “Drive you home and get completely stranded,” he finished under his breath. Lame. He’d forgotten that he’d just moved up into his grandmother’s house in the Oakland Hills. Not easy to get to without a car.

  He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing another failed relationship didn’t sting so badly, that he could cover his love life with gesso like a canvas and simply start over.

  When he moved to return to the living room, he found Sasha standing only a few feet away, watching him with her dark, beautiful eyes.

  Chapter 2

  SASHA CLUTCHED THE TORN WRAPPING paper to her chest as if trying to muffle the sound of her pounding heart.

  All these years and Jake still had the power to give her a coronary. He’d taken off his glasses, which made him look just like a teenager again, especially with his sandy-brown hair flopping over his forehead.

  God help her. In the fourteen-and-a-half years since she’d first decided she was in love with her best friend’s brother, she’d had several boyfriends and a fiancé—blissfully now an ex-fiancé. But Jake Lapinski still managed to get her heart going.
/>   And other parts.

  “Your date had to go home?” she asked.

  “Permanently,” he said, putting his glasses back on.

  So, no more Marjorie. The involuntary surge of joy the flowed through her was ridiculous. “She’s becoming a shut-in?”

  Some of the pain easing in his eyes, one corner of his mouth twitched. “If she does, I won’t know about it.” He sighed. “We broke up.”

  “That was fast.”

  “Two months,” he said.

  “I mean, the conversation. You guys were only in here for a minute.”

  “When it’s wrong, you don’t want to drag it out.”

  She walked past him and poured herself a glass of wine at the counter. “I know what you mean.” They always talked like this. Old friends with nothing to hide. “Can I make you a drink?”

  “I’ll just get a beer. But thanks.” He opened the fridge. “One good thing about Jody moving in with Simon. Decent brew.”

  She sipped her wine, knowing she should rejoin the party but also knowing she’d never leave him alone in a room voluntarily. His tractor beam was too powerful. She was a moth to his flame. She could almost smell her wings burning.

  “You do know, don’t you?” he asked. “Didn’t you just end something pretty serious?”

  The fact that he didn’t even remember she’d been engaged said it all. “Yes.” She gulped down the Sauvignon Blanc. “About six months ago.” Two years after her half-hearted acceptance of Lyle’s proposal, she’d finally done the right thing.

  “Here’s to friendship.” He was holding out a beer bottle.

  She tapped her glass against it, her insides shrinking. “To friendship.”

  His gaze slipped past hers to the living room, and his expression softened. “I’ve never seen Jody so happy. Simon seems like a good guy.”

  “You don’t remember him from way back when?” They’d all lived in the same neighborhood growing up in Southern California. Although there had been some falling-out after high school, everyone agreed now that Simon was indeed a good guy.

  “Afraid not. I was so much older.”

  “Only four years,” she said.

  “It’s nothing now, but back then…”

  “I know. We were like little kids to you.” She hid her face in her wine glass, wondering what it would’ve taken to show him otherwise. Even after she was in college and they’d seen each other at the Lapinski house, (she spent most weekends there), he’d treated her like a kid. What if, just once, she’d “accidentally” run into him in a push-up bra and a lace thong?

  Yeah, right. There wasn’t enough wine in the world—not then, not now. She was a software engineer, not a stripper.

  She emptied her glass down her gullet and prepared another.

  He frowned. “How are you getting home? Don’t you live in Silicon Valley?”

  “I’m flattered you remembered.” The alcohol was working so well that she found herself patting his broad shoulder.

  “I saw your Beetle out front. I don’t think you should be driving tonight.”

  Her hand seemed to be glued to his bicep. Lifting that paintbrush made bigger muscles than she’d expected. “Don’t worry. I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  She felt the tension go out of his muscles. “Oh, that’s good. We can make a party out of it,” he said, lifting the beer to his lips again and grinning around the bottle. “Turns out I’ll be sleeping there too.”

  Chapter 3

  JAKE WATCHED A LOOK OF horror dawn on Sasha’s face.

  “No way,” she said. “That couch is mine, Romeo.”

  Surprised, he put the bottle down on the counter. “Excuse me?”

  “I arranged it with Jody last week. You can get a ride from somebody. Call a cab or Uber or something.”

  “You know what a ride up there is going to cost me?”

  “Not my problem,” she said. “Besides, you can’t pull that starving artist thing on me. I know you’re loaded.”

  His freelance business was doing all right, but that wasn’t the point. Her visible disgust at the thought of sleeping next to him—not with him, for God’s sake—was unexpected. He’d been kidding, anyway. But he wasn’t going to tell her that now. “I didn’t mean we’d be on the same couch. There are two of them.”

  “There’s one. It’s a sectional.”

  “Then if you want to get technical”—he marched across the kitchen and to the living room so he could count the individual pieces of the modular sofa—“there are actually five of them.”

  She didn’t follow him, just leaned against the counter and sipped her wine.

  “Come over here and count for yourself,” he said.

  “I’ll ask Melissa if her new boyfriend could drive you home. He lives up in the hills.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Now he was really starting to get curious. “Do you snore? Sleepwalk? Wear one of those apnea machines you’re embarrassed about? If so, don’t worry about it, one of my college roommates did all three and it never bothered me. I can sleep through a hurricane.”

  Without a word, she set her wine glass in the sink and walked past him into the living room, where she sat next to Jody and made a show of admiring a faux-fur pillow she’d just unwrapped.

  She’d always been able to surprise him, whether with a dirty joke or insightful remark, but this was bizarre.

  Reminded of another woman he didn’t understand, he pulled out his phone and confirmed that no suddenly regretful Marjorie had left him a text or a message. No, no message. It was really over.

  He should enjoy the party and stop thinking about anything. He could be happy for his sister settling down before he had, no matter how much older he was, how long he’d been hoping for something similar. Not even as good. Just similar.

  This, of course, would involve another beer. So he got one and rejoined the fun, happy people in the other room.

  Glancing at Sasha every few minutes to wonder what it was about him that she found so repulsive.

  ❄

  Did he have to sit there looking so irresistible?

  It wasn’t the stubble. She liked him clean-shaven even better, although there was no denying the meltingly hot appeal of a five-o’clock shadow dusting his dimpled chin.

  And it wasn’t his plaid flannel lumberjack shirt that screamed climb my tree, baby. It wasn’t. Almost, but she could’ve ignored him if that’s all it was.

  There was something even more deadly. Ever since the avoidable conversation in the kitchen that she hadn’t avoided because she’d been in love with him since her mother died when she was twelve, damn it, he’d been staring at her. Following her every move. Laughing at her little jokes. Holding her gaze if she was dumb enough to let hers drift near his.

  She’d had too much wine. When Jody had announced the party, she’d asked to stay over so she could drink as much as she wanted, knowing Jake would be there with some woman. He was always with some woman. This one had been even prettier than the ones before. Even when he’d been broke and living in a six-hundred-square-foot studio apartment with two other guys in Berkeley, he’d had women throwing themselves at him. And he’d always been a really good catcher. The Giants could put him behind the plate.

  Well, she wasn’t going to join the horde. If anything was going to happen between them, it would’ve happened by now.

  Nothing is going to happen, you idiot.

  She stood up, reminding herself that negative self-talk was bad for you.

  Stop insulting yourself, you idiot.

  Laughing under her breath, she patted Jody on the top of her happy blonde head and weaved around the coffee table and gift boxes to the kitchen. Time to switch to water. Rehydrate before she went to bed.

  With Jake on the sofa.

  Feeling overheated, she went to the kitchen sink and splashed some of the tap water on her throat and forehead. Would they sleep head-to-head or toe-to-toe?

  She closed her eyes and let an erotic daydream w
ash over her. Sure, they’d be at right angles, and if he rolled over to kiss her, he’d get a mouthful of hair and an ear instead of her pink, moist, welcoming lips…

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  She opened her eyes and found Jake standing a couple feet away, serious and concerned.

  “No,” she said with a sigh, then realized she’d spoken aloud. “Yes. I mean, just tired. Drank too much.”

  “Look, I was just kidding about sleeping on the sofa with you.”

  She gripped the stem of her wine glass and thanked the heavens. And then hoped that a just and loving god would forgive her for being insincere. “I know. I was just kidding about minding if you did.” Now she managed a smile. “I don’t have the alcohol tolerance I had when I was younger. Guess I’m getting old.”

  Rubbing his dimpled chin, he grinned. “Not you,” he said. “Never you.”

  Not you. Never you.

  And didn’t that just sum it up perfectly?

  Chapter 4

  JAKE SHOOK SIMON’S HAND NEAR the door. “Good luck living with my sister. If she’s horrible, you can move back into your rooms at my grandmother’s house.” Until that week, both Simon and Jody had been living together in separate rooms at Nana’s big old house in the Oakland Hills. Nana had decided she wasn’t sure she’d ever move back into it, choosing instead to live in New Mexico with a man she’d met on her European tour. Jake and Jody’s parents were scandalized. Jake was happy to live in the now-empty house and had dreams of buying it from her if she’d consider the idea.

  He was getting a ride from his sister’s friend Melissa’s new boyfriend—some Eduardo somebody. He and Melissa had gone off to get the car, which he’d had to park a few blocks away. From the way they were groping each other as they walked out, he thought they might take a few extra minutes before they came back to fetch him.