by Julia London
“Marnie, honey. Invite your friend in!” Mrs. Farrino shouted.
Eli looked over Marnie’s head, smiled and nodded, but said through his smile, “Just get in.”
“What? I have to go in—”
“No you don’t. You look fantastic. Just turn around, wave, say hi, and get in,” he said, and opened the door of his truck.
Marnie twirled around. “Hi, Mrs. Farrino. Tell Mom I’ll be back later, will you?” she called, and did not wait for an answer but dove into Eli’s truck. He shut the door behind her, jogged around to his side, gave Mrs. Farrino a wave, and was in with the motor started before Mrs. Farrino could beat a path down the walk. They backed out into the street and sped off, laughing at Mrs. Farrino’s look of defeat.
Eli drove to Redondo Beach and a place he knew there, he told Marnie, that specialized in margaritas and martinis. On the way, she filled him in on the details of the wedding—a little proudly, too, as she had accomplished a great deal in his absence. Eli looked suitably impressed.
At the restaurant they sat outside, side by side on Adirondack chairs, enjoying a cool ocean breeze, sipping apple martinis, and nibbling on shrimp. It was a little cool for the tank top Marnie was wearing, so Eli got a jacket from his truck. She really liked that about Eli—he was such a cowboy gentleman. And she liked his jacket. It was suede and smelled like him.
“So tell me about kite surfing,” she suggested as they dipped their shrimp into cocktail sauce. “I’ve only seen pictures of it. It must be totally cool.”
“It’s a rush like you never had,” he said, holding up two fingers to the waiter to signal two more drinks. “Imagine flying through space,” he began, and sat back to tell Marnie about his trip. She was amazed how the adventure lit him up—he was so enthused by it that she couldn’t help but be excited by just the prospect of it.
“It sounds fantastic,” she agreed when he had finished.
“It is. You should try it sometime.”
She snorted into her martini. “You won’t even let me go canyoning. You’re going to let me kite surf?”
For some reason, Eli’s smile faded a little, and he looked toward the water. “We’ve got a couple French dudes who want to try it,” he said, as if he hadn’t quite heard her. “The trick is getting them over here when there is a hurricane offshore. Those things can turn and go in a different direction in the space of twenty-four hours.”
He talked a little more about it, but Marnie wasn’t listening very closely. She was beginning to feel very mellow sitting outside at dusk, wearing his jacket, listening to faint tropical tunes drift out from the restaurant.
She liked hanging out with Eli. On an evening as beautiful as this with a cool ocean breeze, it seemed natural and right. She could imagine them doing this for years to come. Maybe they’d make it their own little tradition. They’d come down here on their anniversaries and big occasions, and they’d sit in these exact same chairs, and they’d say things like, “Remember the time we came here? You’d just come back from kite surfing Hurricane Jane…”
“Marnie?”
She jerked her attention to Eli. She hadn’t realized how far down in her chair she’d slid and quickly sat up. Eli was smiling. “Where’d you go?”
“Ha ha,” she said with a sheepish smile. “I was just thinking that it’s really nice down here. You know, it’s funny—I’ve lived in LA all my life, and I hardly ever come to the beach. I take nights like this for granted.”
“We all do, don’t we?” he asked, and shifted his gaze to the ocean.
Marnie perused his fabulous profile, his strong chin, the depth of his arm and shoulder, and impulsively put her hand over his. “I don’t want to take any more nights like this for granted, Eli. Do you?”
But the moment the words were out of her mouth, she felt the stiffening in his hand and a lot of really bad vibes. And then he did the thing that signaled a huge, giant blunder. He sighed. A really soft, really sorry sigh. “Marnie,” he said low, and turned to look at her.
She was about to get a jumbo brush-off. “Oh shit,” she muttered and, yanking her hand free of his, sat up. She could be such an idiot sometimes.
“Listen, Marnie—”
“Hey, I think you misunderstood me, Eli,” she said, laughing a little loudly, her mind frantically racing around her plan to save face. Except that she had no plan and came to her feet.
“Oh,” he said kindly. “Okay.” And he stood up, reached for his wallet, and threw some money on the table.
“No, not okay,” she said, already walking to the door. “You so have the wrong idea—”
“It’s okay, Marnie.”
It’s okay? There was something about the way he said that, like he didn’t think he had the wrong idea at all but was getting off the hook. And for some reason, that made her mad. Actually, come to think of it, it made her furious. There had been two people on that red leather couch, both enjoying it, thank you, and as she sailed out of the restaurant, marching to the parking lot, she got even madder.
“Marnie,” Eli called from behind her. “Wait up!”
“It’s freezing,” she said, and kept her legs moving at a furious pace, her face flaming with the humiliation of getting a brush-off and him knowing that she knew that he knew that she knew she was getting the brush-off.
Eli caught her arm when they reached the truck and spun her around. “Marnie, please don’t be upset.”
She laughed at that absurd suggestion. “Jesus, Eli, who’s upset?” She laughed again. “What…you think I’m upset? I’m not upset, Eli,” she said, and smiled brightly into his blue eyes.
But he wasn’t laughing. He was frowning a little, as if he didn’t know what to make of her.
“Look, I’ll be honest here,” she said, in spite of having no intention of being honest, “what I was trying to say…” She paused with a slight wince, put her hand to her nape, and rubbed it a moment. “Is that I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” HA! Turn the tables. Brilliant!
Eli blinked. He even moved back a little and squinted at her like he couldn’t make out what she was saying. “Beg your pardon?”
Too bad she didn’t have a piece of paper so she could spell it out for him. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Eli,” she said, smiling sweetly, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea if we…this…” she said, motioning vaguely to the both of them, “goes anywhere. I mean, what happened was fantastic, it really was. But…it was really just a…a thing.”
Damn him if he didn’t look confused. He shook his head, squinted again, then braced one arm against the truck, beside her head, so that she couldn’t really escape him if she wanted to. “So let me get this straight,” he said, his blue eyes piercing hers. “You’re saying that our little deal the other night was just a thing?”
Marnie puffed out her cheeks for a moment, then nodded.
He reared back, put his hands on his hips, and stared at her. “That’s not very nice.”
She shrugged. “I like you, Eli, but I don’t like you like you, if you know what I mean—”
“Oh yeah, I know what you mean,” he said, his brows dipping into a frown. “I, too, was in the seventh grade once.”
“Come on,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea if we, you know…get into anything here. This is a working relationship, and I think we need to keep it that way. I hope you can understand that.”
His frown went deeper. “Oh, I can understand it. I understand it all too well. In fact, I was going to suggest the same to you.”
Ha! He was going to dump her. Even though she had scored with a preemptive dump, the idea that he was going to dump her turned her fury up a notch. “You were going to dump me?” she demanded, folding her arms across her middle. “So you make a habit of sleeping with women and then dumping them?”
Now he really looked confused. “I…what happened to ‘It was just a thing’?”
“That doesn’t give you license to just dip your wick wherev
er you want.”
“But it apparently gives you license to invite all the wick dipping you want,” he shot back.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not trying to tell you—”
“I am a grown woman, and if I want to have a thing, that is my prerogative, and okay, I don’t do it very often, and really, Eli, it was pretty spectacular in my book, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but upon further reflection, it occurs to me that maybe it’s not the best thing I could be doing because you know how you are, all moody and weird and—”
“Marnie,” he said, and abruptly put his big rough hand to her face and cupped her cheek.
She gulped. “What?” she asked weakly, already lost in his blue eyes, already picturing them above her, already regretting that it really wasn’t going any further.
“Shut up,” he murmured, and his gaze had gone soft and dipped to her lips.
“Okay.”
She had no idea what she was thinking, or even how it happened, but he seemed to reach for her at the same time she impulsively flung her arms around his neck and held tight, kissing him with all her might, meeting his lips and tongue and pressing tightly against him.
Eli gathered her up in his arms, actually lifted her off the ground. He pushed up against the truck and she could feel him hard against her belly, could feel the power in his arms as he held her. She took his head in her hands, curled her fingers into his hair, and kissed him with a desire that billowed up in her and spread out to her limbs.
Eli groaned into her mouth and proceeded to kiss the breath right out of her, then slowly lifted his head, let loose his grip of her so that she slid down his body until her feet hit the ground. He said nothing, just gazed at her, smoothing her hair back from her face and kissing her forehead, then the bridge of her nose. And then he stepped away from her and opened the passenger door.
They rode home in companionable silence, Marnie smiling quietly, her hand in his. When they arrived at her house, he met her at the front of his truck. His blue gaze roamed her face and a strange little smile lifted one corner of his lips. He gave her a light, tender kiss, a squeeze of her hip, then stood back and watched her walk up to her front door and disappear inside.
It wasn’t until much later after she’d bathed and tied her hair in a knot and had settled at the kitchen table with a bowl of ice cream and the wedding budget before her that she stopped to wonder if she’d actually been dumped or not.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eli kicked himself all the way home. That kiss was definitely not supposed to have happened, but dammit, she’d looked so mad and cute and oddly vulnerable during her speech that he’d slipped.
Okay, all right. He was having a little more trouble than he’d bargained for in keeping his distance from her. Well, sure—she was a very appealing woman. But she wasn’t the first appealing woman he’d ever known, and he usually had a little more self-control. Tonight, he’d proven his deepest fears—that he was a complete putz of a man who could be easily sucked in by cute.
Jesus.
Trish never did cute, he had to admit. She used tears to get her way, and it always felt like a sucker punch, because Eli was not the sort of man who dealt very well with a woman’s tears. They always made him feel frantic to do something to stop them.
He usually didn’t have any trouble when a woman was arguing with him, either, but Marnie, hell—there she was, talking a mile a minute, the fire in her eyes getting brighter and brighter as she tried to cover her disappointment, and he had felt that panic to make her stop. Frantic enough to kiss her. For a really long time.
Long enough to make him ache to be with her again.
Goddammit!
He drove recklessly, screeched to a halt in his drive, walked into his house, and threw his keys at the Mayan bowl where he usually kept them, missing the bowl and hitting the wall instead. He stalked into the kitchen, flung open the fridge, grabbed a beer, and kicked the fridge shut. And then he went out onto the terrace to sit under his trellis and stare glumly at the lights of the valley.
The best thing to do was lay low. He had a little less than two weeks before he and Vince and Olivia and Cooper took off to do the canyoning in the San Juan Mountains. After that, the wedding, and directly after that, thank God, the Amazon trip with the Japanese. He needed the Amazon trip to clear his head and get it on straight.
So three weeks max, and then it was over. Just like that, she’d be history. He could go on with his life, she could go on with hers, and they’d both be a whole lot happier doing it.
Three weeks. He could do three weeks standing on his head. Well…unless she argued. Or cried. Or smiled that big moon smile at him. No, no, he could handle it, he could do this. He was not ready for a relationship, and he really wasn’t ready for Marnie, no matter how appealing she was.
Seriously. He wasn’t.
He took a swig of beer and absolutely refused to listen to the little voice inside his head telling him he was a big fat coward and a really bad liar.
Marnie didn’t hear from Eli the next day, but she was far too busy to think much about it, because Olivia had a dress crisis. As in, she absolutely despised the dress she’d commissioned from the new hot designer Ming Xioong. Ming had made the dress based on Olivia’s exact specifications, and Ming had delivered. Marnie thought the gown was gorgeous.
“It looks like a potato sack!” Olivia wailed over the phone.
“But Olivia,” Marnie tried, “she hand-sewed it. And she embroidered it.”
“I don’t care if she picked the silk and spun it. It’s horrible and I am not paying twenty thousand dollars for that rag.”
For starters, Marnie didn’t think that you picked silk, but she set up an emergency meeting with Ming for the very next day, which she managed to squeeze in between her emergency meeting about the reception pavilion and the emergency phone conference about the antique altar Olivia now wanted.
Together, Ming and Marnie convinced Olivia to at least try on the dress. Olivia tried it on, stood up on the little platform before three floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and cried.
“You can’t see it?” Olivia demanded tearfully when Marnie asked her what was wrong with it.
“I swear to God, I don’t see anything,” Marnie said. “You look absolutely gorgeous.”
“No, I don’t! Just look at this,” she wailed, gesturing lamely at her chest.
Ming and Marnie looked at her boobs, then at one another. Suddenly, everything was clear. “So…you don’t like the bodice?” Marnie asked carefully.
“Would you?” Olivia snapped.
The problem was that Olivia was less than well-endowed in the chest area, and Marnie wondered, with all her freakin’ money, why Olivia hadn’t gotten on the breast-enhancement bandwagon like the rest of LA But she hadn’t, and the result was a bodice that didn’t hang exactly right. It had nothing to hang from.
“I see this all the time,” Ming said knowingly. She disappeared into another room, and then reappeared with a padded push-up bra. “Put this on,” she said to Olivia.
“I am not going to wear artificial enhancements,” Olivia said stiffly.
“You can have one or the other,” Ming said matter-of-factly. “If you wear the push-up, I can make some adjustments and you will look beautiful. If you don’t want enhancements, then this is the best I can do, and you still owe me twenty thousand dollars.”
Olivia looked at Marnie. Marnie mouthed, Wear the push-up.
“Fine,” Olivia huffed, and stepped off the podium, snatched the bra from Ming’s hand, and went into the dressing room.
She reappeared a few minutes later and looked as if she was seeing the gown for the first time. She beamed at her reflection in the three-way mirror. “This is so much better,” she said, as if she had thought of the bra herself, and caught Marnie frowning at her. “You just don’t understand how stressful this all is, Marnie.”
Actually, Marnie thought she had a prett
y good idea of how stressful it was.
Olivia turned one way, then the other, admiring herself. “Wow. I look fantastic. I love wedding gowns. They’re so beautiful. Do you ever think about getting married, Marnie?”
That question certainly caught Marnie off guard.
“Every woman thinks of getting married,” Ming scoffed when Marnie didn’t answer right away.
“Sure, I’ve thought about it. Sort of,” Marnie said.
“Omigod,” Olivia said, her eyes going wide. “I don’t even know if you have a boyfriend. I can’t believe I never asked you that,” she cried. “I mean, I know about the guy who slept with you and never called you again, but I never thought to ask about a boyfriend. How terrible of me—do you have a boyfriend?”
Marnie could feel herself coloring and looked sheepishly at Ming’s invoice (which Ming had shoved at Marnie the moment they entered her studio).
“Uh-oh,” Olivia said as Ming began to pin her gown. “This is awkward. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, no,” Marnie said with a laugh and a wave of her hand. “There’s a guy,” she said with a sheepish laugh.
“Oh?” the Olivia and Ming chorus asked at the very same time, and both of them stopped what they were doing to look at her.
“Sort of,” she said. “I mean, we’ve been…close. But then, not so close.”
“Ah,” Olivia said, nodding sagely. “That’s the guy.”
“Did you sleep with him?” Ming demanded.
Oh man, this was awful. “Maybe.”
“No maybe to it. Either you did or you didn’t.”
“She slept with him. But he never called her, can you believe it?” Olivia volunteered.
“Bastard!” Ming spat.
Clearly, she was going to have to discuss this, and Marnie put the invoice aside so she’d have her hands free to talk. “Okay, he did call. Eventually. But here’s the thing—neither of us meant for it to happen, but it did. And it was fabulous. Fantastic!” It was indeed the highlight of her sexual life thus far. “We’d been sort of building this friendship, and it happened, and honestly, he seemed really into it. But the next time I saw him, he told me he didn’t think we really ought to go there for a lot of reasons, which, okay, I could understand. But then he kissed me. And it wasn’t a good-bye kiss, either. It was a kiss.”
