“But it came in handy,” she pointed out.
“The people who buy this house next likely won’t think so. It’s all going to have to go.” He sighed, then tipped his head back for a long swallow of the icy beverage.
She averted her eyes from his throat, tanned and strong-looking. It’s possible she wanted to bite it. “I’m not sure I thanked you for your help with Paige yesterday. I could have handled it by myself…but it was good of you.”
Eli shrugged. “Everybody needs help now and again.”
“You raised four sisters alone.”
“It wasn’t easy, especially at first.”
“I suppose not.” She imagined him, a teenager, dealing with his own grief and then trying to keep a household running for four grieving little girls. More welling of emotion had her turning away again to pour herself a glass. “How did you manage?”
A long silence followed. She thought he’d ignore her question until he began speaking again, his voice low.
“I used to climb up on the roof,” he said. “Stupid, now that I think about it. Dangerous. But I’d go up there at night when the girls were asleep and talk to my parents.”
Just talk? she wondered, glancing at him over her shoulder.
He was inspecting the surface of his lemonade as if he found it fascinating. “To tell the truth, I silent-screamed at the stars on many, many nights.”
Had he read her mind? “But of course you did,” she said, facing him, though she wanted to hold him more than anything—because as he stepped into his parents’ shoes who had provided him comfort? “Anyone would be filled with…”
“Sadness and doubt and a heap of anger thrown in,” Eli said. He drained his lemonade. “Then I felt guilty about being mad.”
“For a long time I was mad at JJ too,” Sloane confessed, “even though by the time of his death I knew our marriage wasn’t going to survive. I was furious that Paige wasn’t going to know her father—however that may have turned out.”
Eli set his glass on the workbench and crossed to one of the other boxes littering the floor of the garage. He’d pulled out his truck to make room for random piles and short stacks.
He took the top off one carton and peered inside. “These are old pairs of soccer shoes. What was I thinking?”
She watched him move about as he expressed varying degrees of dismay at the household items that had been gathering dust. “Okay, this is on my dad,” he said, gesturing to indicate a jumble of bungee cords, coiled and twisted together like snakes in a nest. “He’d find these in a parking lot, on the street, wherever, and bring them home.”
“They’re useful.”
He gestured to an entire stack of boxes, four-high. “All bungee cords.”
“Oh.” She sipped her drink, smiling a little while trying to picture the man who’d collected them.
Eli sighed. “Maybe I can hand them out next Halloween along with the candy. Probably some of them can prove useful at the nursery.”
Mention of the nursery made her wonder. “Would you have done anything different if your parents had lived?” Sloane asked, then cringed at the sound of her own curiosity. “Sorry.”
With two broken lampshades in hand, he glanced over. “It’s okay.” He tossed the items onto a pile clearly designated as rubbish. “I was headed for college to study business.”
“With the intention of coming back to work at the nursery after graduation?”
“Definitely.” He grinned. “But not before some skipping of class, foolish carousing, and taking exams through raging hangovers. I suppose I’m better without that experience.”
Experience was what he was after now, though. “Do you ever wonder if some coed you missed meeting in the cafeteria line might have been the love of your life?”
His face turned serious. “My friend Hart Sawyer dated a girl in college. They re-met at a college reunion last year and became engaged. She died of an aneurism not long ago, right before their wedding.”
“I’m so sorry.” Sloane hand crept to cover her mouth.
He looked away. “So maybe it’s good I didn’t meet that coed either.”
“Right.”
As he bent to rummage through yet another box, her attention caught on something trailing from the broken zipper of a garment bag. Suede. Embroidery. With careful hands, she extricated a garment from the plastic covering. A long coat, made of square and rectangular patches of velvety leather, all of it embroidered with flowers in colorful wool strands.
Sloane couldn’t help herself. She slipped her hands through the sleeves and the hem of it nearly swept her ankles. Spinning this way and that, she admired how it flared around her calves.
“That was my mother’s.”
Freezing midturn, her gaze flew to Eli’s. Her fingers clutched at the lapels to push off the coat. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Leave it on. I like the way it looks on you.”
“No.” She shrugged out of the heavy suede and took care to reinsert it in the garment bag. “You should see if one of your sisters wants the coat. Don’t throw it out or give it away to just anyone. It’s special.”
Still without looking at him, she folded the plastic in half and set it on one corner of the workbench. “What were they like together…your parents?”
Glancing over, she saw him move an old television set, boxy and heavy-looking to the discard pile. “Not a matched pair,” he said.
“Oh?”
“For example, Dad loved to watch game shows on TV. Mom put her fingers in her ears when she walked through a room when one was playing.”
“What was her preference?”
“Mysteries, family dramas. She denied it, but she had a soft spot for those teenage soap operas.”
“So they didn’t watch TV together.”
“Not usually. But she worked part-time at the nursery so still they spent a lot of time with each other.”
She sighed. “They were a happy couple.”
He glanced over, his look sharp, his voice sharper. “They were just people. A normal couple.”
Her eyes rounded. “Not happy then?”
Silence stretched. Then Eli shook his head. “No. They were happy. I only…it wasn’t…well, you know how it ended.”
“But all that came before…” Sloane glanced around at the evidence of a full life—the suede coat, the old TV, the dusty artificial Christmas tree in the corner, boxes of bungee cords.
“You’re going to want what they had,” she said, even if he put it all in the rubbish pile, she was certain of that. “And you’ll find it.”
His silence lingered longer this time.
The garage turned airless and Sloane’s chest tightened. She’d managed to set aside Rona’s warning from yesterday. But this…right now she tasted a panic impossible to ignore. “Somebody gets to have that,” she said, her voice plaintive.
Before he came up with any kind of reply, Paige rushed in and the moment was lost.
The opportunity to hear the answer Sloane had wanted was lost too.
Chapter 10
Sundays at the nursery usually wore Eli ragged, and this one was no exception. At six, he climbed into his truck and pointed it toward home, with a brief stop to pick up a pizza that he’d ordered while still at his desk. Without knowing what Sloane and Paige might like as toppings, he’d requested half pepperoni and half cheese, the old King family standby.
Of course, he could have called or texted to ask what the two preferred, but that smacked of…something he was avoiding. He accepted that he was regarding Sloane as more than a mere housemate. In his mind he’d settled on the term “intimate stranger,” and knowing her pizza order landed too much on the side of intimacy.
Not enough on the unfamiliar.
Not enough on the here-but-would-be-gone-from-his-life-very-soon.
Pulling up to the house, he noted her missing car. He felt a pang of disquiet…or was it disappointment? Ignoring the sensation, he spied Baby Sally upended and
abandoned on the porch steps and felt sure that was evidence his guests were only temporarily away.
Bowing to impulse, he braked his truck in the driveway and strode for the doll, then scooped her up. Her staring eyes sent a shiver creeping down his spine. Steeling himself, he met her gaze. “I could have left you on your head, you know,” he said, straightening her sailor suit with a no-nonsense tug. Once again, one of his dress socks perched atop her messy mane of hair. He yanked it free to untangle her locks with his fingers and the scent of Sloane floated into the air.
He froze, breathing in the light and flowery notes. Her shampoo, he decided. Paige must have washed the doll’s hair with her mother’s brand.
In his mind’s eye, he saw his fingers buried in her blonde curls, holding her head steady for a deep, ravishing kiss. He nearly groaned, recalling how she’d slid her small tongue against his as their naked bodies lay entwined, their legs tangled so that his hard cock surged against her thigh and the melting heat and wet of her pussy pressed against his.
Hell.
Pushing away the sensual memories the scent had invoked, he sat Baby Sally by the front door then backed slowly away. Two gulps of fresh air cleared his head and he jogged to the driver’s side of his truck, deciding a little more distance was required.
He wasn’t supposed to be dwelling on their night together.
One and done.
Without much forethought, he drove closer to town and to the Sawyer Shores development, the small enclave of houses built by the company now headed by his friend Hart Sawyer. Then he pulled up to the modern Craftsman that his buddy had moved into a few months before. Striding up the walkway, pizza in hand, he realized he’d not dropped in on the other man since he’d lost Kim, his fiancée.
Shit.
But he didn’t let that deter him. Because belatedly being a better friend beat rambling around the old house which would be both too empty and also too full of memories—of Sloane, her scent, her kiss—that he was eager to escape.
And then, of course, he had a pizza to share.
Which was the first word out of Hart’s mouth when he opened the door to Eli’s ring. “Pizza,” he said, his gaze dropping to the box.
Eli’s gaze didn’t sway from his buddy. “You look like shit,” he announced.
Hart grasped the edge of the cardboard and hauled both it and Eli over the threshold. “I feel like shit.”
It took a moment for Eli to put it together. While he’d been at work all day, weekends were Hart’s time off. The man looked disheveled and half-asleep, wearing cutoff sweatpants, a ragged T-shirt, and a couple of days’ growth of beard.
As he was led toward the open living space, he noted the pyramid of beer cans on the table between the sofa and the big-screen TV.
“This doesn’t look good,” he murmured.
But Hart heard it. “I’ve been trying to get out of my head,” he said, bleary-eyed. “All weekend long.”
Eli abandoned the pizza to his friend and marched into the kitchen. “Coffee for you, pal, no more beer. And eat some of that pizza, stat.” From what he could see, the man had been consuming his calories via the hops in his favorite IPA and not much else.
Once the carafe was full of a strong brew, he carried a large mug of the black stuff to his friend, who was sitting on the couch and looked to be onto his third slice. “Good,” Eli said, putting the coffee into the other man’s free hand. “Keep eating and drink that.”
With the third piece of pizza demolished and halfway through his second mug, Hart appeared slightly more human. He glanced down at the steaming beverage. “Damn it,” he said. “I’m going to be up all night.”
“Half-caf,” Eli said. “Maybe even quarter-caf.” He’d found both kinds of grounds in the freezer and mixed the two in the filter basket.
Still, Hart set the mug aside and then eyed the pizza with a cautious eye. “I think I better slow down on that, too.”
Eli dropped into an adjacent armchair. “What’s this about getting out of your head?”
“I said that?” Hart grimaced. “You woke me from a beer-nap. They make a guy stupid.”
Maybe so. Because Eli had been thinking, thinking hard, and staying in his head was quickly becoming an imperative. His head was where common sense, logic, and experience prevailed. It was elsewhere—his dick—that was too happy to recall and too willing to be sidetracked by memories of Sloane’s hands on his skin, her mouth on his chest, his belly, then sucking in the throbbing, aching length of him.
Yeah, his dick was more than willing to give all the thinking over to the little head, which was eager for a repeat performance with his house guest.
Yanking his mind back to the present, he leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. “Do you want to talk?” Looking into his friend’s face, the lines of it stark with weariness, compassion leaked into Eli’s chest, stirring a familiar ache. “I’ve said it before—that I can understand, at least a little. Grieving…well, you know my history.”
But he’d never revealed his own intense anguish to anyone until yesterday, when he’d told Sloane about his midnight excursions to the rooftop. He’d surprised the hell out of himself by telling her, but it had come out and he couldn’t regret it.
“I…” Hart shrugged, then lapsed into silence.
Eli allowed that, sitting with his friend in the heavy quiet, unspoken emotion as much in the room as the two of them. It sat with you, Eli recalled now, or on you, weighing down your shoulders or pushing on your chest. Maybe it was enough, for now, for him to be here. For him not to let his friend be alone with it.
In the distance, a bong sounded. A grandfather clock, Hart’s actual grandfather’s clock, that had belonged to the man who’d been a namesake of the Sawyer Beach founder and who’d also established the construction company his grandson now led.
The noise roused Hart. He stirred, and took up the mug again, the liquid inside likely cooled, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Talk to me about something else, Eli.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Hart took a swallow of the coffee. “Where are you with those dating apps? Did you finish your profiles?”
Their phone call—the night Sloane had showed up on his doorstep in the storm—seemed like a million years ago. “I think I’ve abandoned that direction for now.”
“Does that mean you found what you were looking for when you left Thursday’s poker game?”
Eli gave his friend this, too. It was good, actually, that Hart was emerging from that dark yet numbing lake of grief to express an interest outside of its murky depths.
“More than what I was looking for,” he admitted. “I…did I tell you about my neighbor and her little girl?”
As Hart listened, Eli explained the circumstances of the two coming to live at his house and even sketched, in broad terms, Sloane’s difficult upbringing and marriage. Then he, without being explicit, told the other man about the one-night stand with Sloane, confident he wouldn’t broadcast the information.
“Okay,” Hart said, sitting back in the cushions. “So why do you seem conflicted instead of satisfied?”
Eli hesitated.
“Something’s bothering you. Spit it out.”
He opened his mouth to reveal that their single night had merely served to sharpen his appetite. And damn, if that wasn’t true. But…
“Despite everything she’s experienced, she wants to believe in happy endings,” Eli heard himself confess instead. “‘Somebody gets to have that,’ she said to me yesterday…and I…I didn’t jump right up and agree.”
Hart’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t believe it yourself?”
“For sure I know I don’t like being the one to put a cynical cast over her world view.” He ran both hands through his hair. “And…yeah, I probably don’t believe it for me. That happy ending business, if by happy ending we mean me and a wife and kids.”
Hart didn’t say anything.
“Look, I’ve alr
eady been through enough emotions in my lifetime to stuff a grizzly.”
“Interesting way of putting it.”
“Damn it.” Eli shoved his hands through his hair again, feeling defensive and irritated. “I merely want my simple and straightforward bachelor life. Unencumbered. And if it’s not too much to ask, uninhibited.”
“Okay,” Hart said, his tone reasonable. “I got it. You want a lifetime of condoms.”
Eli blinked. “What?”
“Uninhibited and unencumbered. You’re looking at rolling on rubbers until the end of your days. Men can father babies into their eighties, you know.”
“Now I need a beer,” Eli muttered.
Hart suddenly grinned, his face transforming from a carved mask into something that looked like the man he’d been before. “I think I’m having fun.”
“So glad to be the source of your amusement,” Eli grumbled. “And how you’re looking at me is wigging me out, by the way. You and Baby Sally should start a club. You could choose a cause and scare people into supporting it.”
Hart even laughed now, though it sounded somewhat rusty. “I’m going to let that Baby Sally comment slide for the moment. Let’s take it to the core, Eli. If you could have anything right this minute, what would it be?”
“More Sloane,” he said without thinking twice about it. “More Sloane, but in a conscious, intentional way, with no niggling worrying that passion is oversaturating the colors and without the risk of anyone—okay, her—getting swept into believing there is more to it than the…the pure bodily function that it is.”
He looked off into the distance, moody now, grouchy as that grizzly he’d mentioned because with his sisters out of the house his life was supposed to be less complicated. Less stressful.
“Bodily function,” Hart echoed. “Hmm. You’ve never been in love, right?”
Eli glanced over. “I suppose not, unless an excellent turf builder counts.”
Hart started laughing again. “Keep fighting the good fight, buddy. I’m on your side, no matter what happens.”
Nothing was going to happen, Eli thought, scowling on his ride back to his house. The whole point of this trial bachelor period was the absence of things happening. No emergency school projects, no frenemies wreaking havoc, no freak-outs about grades, boys, or making the athletic team.
NO LIMIT (7-Stud Club Book 2) Page 14
