Chapter 8
Hefting a heavy, insulated basket in one hand, Lucas let himself into the house. The smell of coffee immediately greeted him, and he swallowed a curse. He’d wanted to be back from his errand before Emmaline awakened.
But there she was, bustling about the kitchen, a cloth in hand and swaddled by a long expanse of dark-gray fabric tied with a bow at her waist. He frowned.
“I thought we agreed you’d forego the uniform,” he said.
She whirled, then ran a hand over the material covering her front. “It’s only an apron. I have on regular clothes underneath.”
Her nervous gaze traveled around the room, seeming to avoid him at all costs.
Without further comment, he strode to the island and set the basket on the surface, then crossed his arms over his chest. Watching her return from a date with another man the night before had been an unpleasant coming-home gift. The impromptu business trip had been compulsory, but the hassle of it had been doubled by the fact that it postponed Emmaline and his being able to process together what had happened between them on the couch.
In the heat of the delicious moment of satisfying her, completely and gratifyingly, he’d leaped to the conclusion that he’d done something as hasty and dangerous as falling in love. But on the plane flight north later that night, he’d reassessed. Surely he was too smart to be ass over ears, too controlled.
It didn’t make sense that he even believed in something as ephemeral and illogical as love.
For the hours of the flight and whenever he had a quiet moment while he was gone, he’d gone to work on the idea like one of his employees, seeking weaknesses.
They hardly knew each other.
Mutual lust did not a relationship make.
What the fuck was love anyway?
He’d flown home thinking maybe he’d return to find her prosaically folding towels or cutting up vegetables, and it would be as if that time with her naked and riding his hand was some kind of illusive fever-dream. A delayed and deceptive after-effect of the crappy bout of flu.
Driving up to the house, for a tense moment he’d even wondered if she wouldn’t be there at all. If perhaps those weeks of her in his household had been a figment of his imagination—an illness-induced fantasy. But then he’d spied tossed on a countertop the straw hat she wore out in the herb garden and noted the cheery bouquet of sunflowers popping from the mouth of an earthenware pitcher that he was sure he’d never seen before.
He’d smiled to himself and relaxed when he found the cookie jar full of the oatmeal and chocolate chip bars that she promised were ten-percent healthy for him.
All had been right with his world, though he’d worried, a little, about her continued absence. Then he’d heard a car drive up to the house.
His feet had headed straight for the front door.
Where he’d met her would-be swain. Instantly, Lucas’s competitive streak had been triggered. He’d determined he wasn’t happy about handing over a newly sex-awakened Emmaline to some slick guy who looked like he should be starring in a magazine photo shoot at Zuma Beach. Just days past she’d come apart in his own arms, and that meant…something.
He hadn’t known what exactly, and what exactly to do next, but during the course of the night he’d made a plan. Maybe if they spent the day together he could come up with a notion of how this thing between them should go from here.
Now, though, taking in her rigid posture, he thought she might not be amenable…or easily persuadable. Her wariness hadn’t abated with his absence. Lucas considered his options.
“So…” he said. “Big plans for the morning?”
“The usual.” She busied herself at the coffee maker, then came toward him, his favorite mug, filled to the brim, in her hand. “Coffee before you have to leave for the office.”
“I don’t have to go in today,” he said, taking the brew. “I have something else that needs doing.”
“Oh?” A polite enquiry.
“Yes.” He sipped his drink, then set it aside. “And I could use some help.”
Emmaline glanced up. “Of course.” She wiped her palms on her apron as if readying herself for a new task—filling the salt and pepper shakers or coming up with a dinner menu for a weekend party or mending a loose seam on the canvas umbrella on the terrace.
The woman could do anything.
“I’ve got orders.” Mental ones, from his brain to himself. “To relax. Smell the roses, so to speak. I’ve been working too hard, what with the merger and the wedding stuff.”
Her eyes rounded. “Orders,” she repeated, clearly taking it as he’d hoped she would–orders from a medical professional.
Did he feel guilty for manipulating her? No. It was bad of him, “Mr. Curry” bad, “sir” bad, but he figured she could use a break too.
“A day on the beach,” he said. “With you as companion.”
“But—”
“I need someone to keep me in line. Without a minder, I’ll probably be checking in with my assistant four times an hour and bringing up his blood pressure as well.”
She fidgeted with her apron, pleating it with restless fingers. “Isn’t there anyone else?”
“I pay you to manage my household,” he said, resolute. “And part of that household is me.”
Bowing to that bit of logic, Emmaline agreed. He rewarded her by giving her time to finish a few of her morning chores, but soon enough he was shooing her to her rooms to get into a swimsuit.
Before doing as bid, she fussed at him about towels and sunscreen and cold drinks. There was mention of needing to prepare snacks. That’s when he flipped open the top of the basket he’d procured at the little café up the coast. “Everything two beach picnickers might need.”
Then he told her he’d meet her on the sand at the bottom of their steps.
He didn’t tell her about the paddle boards.
She came tripping down the stairs, sunglasses concealing over half her face, a ball cap covering her head, with a ponytail of brunette hair flying out the back opening. She wore a Hawaiian-patterned swimsuit in blue, green, and white, with a matching mesh sarong tied around her hips. Lucas decided merely seeing her like that—bright clothes, lots of bare, golden limbs—could give him that case of hypertension he’d told her he was all about preventing.
A breeze wafted by, cooling his hot skin and sending the scent of coconut wafting past his face. She’d smell like it everywhere, he thought, cataloging the places he could seek out its strongest notes—at the bend of her arm, mixed with the salt of a light summer sweat at the small of her back, in the heaven that was the cleavage between her pillowy breasts.
“Are you all right?” she asked, coming to a stop before him. “Are you in pain?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
She reached up to put her palm against his forehead. “You feel hot.”
He said “yes” to that too, but stopped any of her further fretting by taking her elbow and turning her toward the boards that he’d carried from the garage. The paddles stood up, jaunty, where he’d jammed them into the sand.
Emmaline instantly said, “This is not going to work.”
“I’m supposed to relax,” he reminded her.
“It will not be relaxing to have to chase after me as I float toward Hawaii.”
He smiled at her. “The currents might take you in the direction of Mexico instead. Margaritas and fish tacos sound nice.”
“I’m serious. I will not be able to control that contraption.”
“It’s not a contraption. It’s a recreational tool. And I’ve seen you wield both a food processor and a fancy espresso machine. Surely this can’t be any harder.”
“Two words,” she said, lifting her sunglasses to pin him with her stare. “Horse shoes.”
He laughed.
“Honest, I’m no good with recreational tools,” she said, her expression solemn. “In my hands, a bat becomes a boomerang. I gave myself a concussion once throwing a ball for a dog.”
“All right,” he said, deciding she wasn’t kidding. “Plan B.”
As it turned out, he actually did manage to unwind once he got her seated on his board. It wobbled only a little as he climbed on to stand behind her, and she squealed a little bit more than that—“You may never tell anyone I whined about cold water,” she ordered in a severe tone—and then he was paddling them through the bay’s calm waters. Today the waves seemed too lazy to rise higher than a few inches and then dash themselves desultorily upon the sand.
The sun beat warmly on his shoulders and the top of his head, but the breeze, cooled by the Pacific, kept them comfortable. Emmaline crossed her pretty feet at the ankle and leaned back on her hands.
“I feel like Cleopatra being paddled down the Nile,” she said.
He smiled and let a little more serenity slide over him.
The beach was sparsely populated. Most people preferred the beaches at Santa Monica and Zuma with their parking spaces, public restrooms, and snack bars. But as they approached a large house with dramatic glass walls, Emmaline started waving at a little figure in the surf. “There’s Wells! Hey, kiddo!”
Lucas navigated them closer to shore, and they bobbed in the small surf as the child splashed out beyond his knees. Emmaline’s friend Charlie was right behind the boy, and she kept a watchful eye on him as they chatted.
“I lost another tooth,” Wells told Emmaline and grimaced to display the gap in the bottom set. “I tried to talk Charlie into tying a string around it and yanking, but—”
“Charlie shuddered at the thought,” the woman in question said. “It’s perfectly fine to wait until it comes out on its own.”
“She doesn’t like to see my blood,” Wells confided. “You should have seen how upset she was when I cut my chin, and rivers of it went all over my shirt.”
Emmaline gave a dramatic shudder and then asked him the going rate the Tooth Fairy paid out.
“Five dollars,” Wells said promptly.
“One dollar,” Charlie corrected. “And fifty cents goes into your savings jar for college.”
They bid them farewell shortly after, and Lucas turned back to paddle toward home. “That kid is seriously cute.”
“I agree,” Emmaline said, lifting her face toward the sky so that the end of her ponytail tickled the expanse of skin between her shoulder blades.
“He looks a lot like Charlie.”
“You think so?” Emmaline mused vaguely, then she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Really?”
He shrugged. “They look like mother and son to me. He’s lucky to have found someone to care for him like that after his own mom died.”
“You’d know how that is,” she said. “You became Stella’s parents.”
“I’m sure I screwed up more than once, but I did my best. Luckily she was beyond the Tooth Fairy stage.”
“Wells is still a believer,” Emmaline said, an odd, pensive note in her voice.
“When did you stop?” he asked, curious. “Believing, that is. Did an older friend spill the beans, or…”
“When my mother died. I don’t think anyone had to tell me, I just knew they were all a sham…the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa. Even the Valentine’s Pixie.”
Ah, Emmaline. His chest ached, and it was good he had to paddle or else he’d have her in his arms before he’d decided what came next with them. “I don’t think I know the Valentine’s Pixie.”
“I’d wake up in the morning on February 14th and my room would be decorated all over with hearts and cupids. My mom claimed it was the Valentine’s Pixie who stopped by, spreading love like glitter on that day to glow and grow inside us for a whole year.”
Lucas smiled. “Sweet.”
“She was genius at creating enchantment.”
Over the shliss of his paddle scooping water, he heard Emmaline’s little sigh.
“When she passed, all of it went out of my world.”
“That isn’t true.”
Emmaline looked over her shoulder at him.
“You’re creating magic all the time yourself, Emmaline. Many sorts of magic, from flowers in a pitcher and cookies in a jar to the precise stacks of T-shirts in my drawers.”
“That’s not magic,” she protested.
“It is to me,” he said, aware he was speaking truth, not platitudes. “It’s the kind I believe in.” Certainty settled over him. Not confidence in how this would all play out between them—Emmaline, with all her mysteries, wasn’t a sure thing—but an assurance about the direction he’d decided to take.
“It’s the kind of magic I can’t resist,” he told her.
That day of Lucas’s relaxation, Emmaline became very afraid she was going to fall in love with him. She did her best to turn off that path, even to the extent of trying to pick a fight during the beach picnic by criticizing those T-shirts he’d mentioned.
You’re creating magic all the time.
“About your drawers,” she said, pointing at him with the remains of a cold chicken leg. They were seated on a blanket he’d spread on the sand, with the basket between them. “You’ve got to winnow the contents. There’s a ratty shirt in there commemorating a fifteen-year-old track meet.”
“The San Gabriel Relays?” he asked, rummaging in the basket and coming up with a container of chilled apple slices.
“Most of the writing has rubbed off,” she said. “I can use it as a dust rag. Or I’ve read you can make rugs by tearing the cotton into strips.”
He stared at her. “I won a gold medal in the high jump during that meet my senior year.”
The unexpected fact diverted her. Staring at the body lounging opposite hers, lean and muscled in board shorts and nothing else, she could picture it performing—a bound, an arc, a lift into the air. Masculine grace, a poetry of movement.
As a clumsy athlete herself, feats of sporty prowess only impressed her more.
His muscle wouldn’t have been as thick as it was now that he was a full-grown man, she mused. Her gaze traced his heavy shoulders and down the corrugated muscles of his torso. She’d seen for herself the strength in his legs when they’d been braced on the paddle board and those two times when she’d sat on his lap, his thighs—
“When do you work out?” she asked, hoping her sunglasses gave her wandering eyes cover. Surely he didn’t just sit in his big leather chair all day.
“At the office we have a full gym,” he said. “So the people who work for me can get away from their desks.”
She thought of the eccentric-looking band she’d seen on his floor, all of them with skinny limbs and pale faces, where piercings gathered like constellations. Maybe the more jock-y types had cubicles on the lower levels.
“What will change with the merger?” she asked.
“Not much for anybody but me,” he said. “I’m handing over what I consider to be the headache portion of the job—client recruitment and relations. I hope I’ll only have to drag on a suit a few times a year.”
Emmaline frowned. She loved his suits, and he looked so good in them, wearing the pieces with a careless aplomb. “Does that mean my monograms will never see the light of day again?”
He smiled. “I’ll wear the dress shirts still, but with jeans or khakis. How’s that?”
She wasn’t ready to commit to full approval. “If you’re not spending most of your time recruiting and relating to clients, what will you do?”
A pause ensued, then he cleared his throat. “Actually, I’m going back into the lab. Looking forward to it, actually.”
“Lab?”
“It’s where we develop new testing methodologies. Information systems change all the time, as do ways of hacking into them. We have to stay on the cutting edge.”
Emmaline blinked. In his striped ties and tailored suits, she’d always assumed he was a businessman with a capital B. “Are you, well, does this mean you’re…”
“At heart I’m a geek, Emmaline,” he said. “Yeah, I was on the track team in high school, but my best friend growing up was my computer. I spent more time in adolescence with my hand wrapped around a mouse than wrapped around—well, you get the idea.”
“A nerd,” she said, beaming at him.
“That pleases you?” he asked, sounding amused.
“A nerd is the cowboy of the 21st century.”
Lucas shook his head. “I’m not even going to ask you to explain that.”
“Nerds are the new—” She was going to say “hot,” but then considered that might be wandering into dangerous territory. Clearing her throat, she decided to tack back to her original subject.
“Your drawers. Winnowing. You definitely need to do something about that ancient Velvet Lemons T-shirt.”
“It was my dad’s,” Lucas said. “They were his favorite rock band.”
“Oh.” Abashed, Emmaline ducked her head and felt her cheeks begin to burn. “You should definitely keep it, then.”
In her bedroom at her father’s, she’d had a small trunk Dina had given her that she’d filled with a few of her mother’s things. Colette’s high school diploma, the points of the gold star seal pulling away from the edges, a rose corsage that had dried and darkened until it more resembled the butt of a cigar, some Polaroid photographs―their blurred images leaching color―of her tween mother hamming it up with some unknown girl. Emmaline had kept those particular items because their ephemeral quality was so very like the memories she held.
Yet even now she wished she could sort through the keepsakes, as if touching them could sharpen the images that faded year-by-year.
She looked up, her heart opening wider as she thought of the young man who’d never let go of that memento of his dad’s, but instead kept it close.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever said it out loud to you, Lucas. I’m so sorry for the loss of your parents.”
“Emmaline.” He reached across the short distance separating them and took hold of her free hand. “They died in a drunk-driving accident.”
“Stella mentioned it.”
His fingers lightly toyed with hers. “My father was driving. It was a one-car accident.”
Meaning he’d been the drunk driver. “Oh.” She set down the chicken leg on her paper plate, but her fingertips were too greasy to stroke against his face like she wanted. Plucking a napkin from the stack, she rubbed them clean. “I don’t know what to say.”
His gaze didn’t lift from their tangled hands. “My mother’s blood alcohol level was over the legal limit as well. This wasn’t a case of a celebration gone too far. They…had bad habits.”
Emmaline found her fingers squeezing his, and then the other hand covered their tangled digits as if she could create a barrier to his pain. “I don’t know what else to say but, again, I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “Very few people are aware of the facts. I’ve never explained to Stella the complete circumstances.”
To protect their parents’ privacy and to keep their memory untainted in his little sister’s heart. Emmaline swallowed. “Why did you tell me?”
“It just seemed like the right time.”
But his “right” could only be wrong because the words served to pry her heart open wider. Sharing that piece of his past with her made her want to know more. Know him more.
And that might lead to love.
A true tragedy for her, because while he had revealed a private truth, there were lies that she would be carrying on her soul for the rest of her life. Coming to care for him like that would lead to regrets, and she already had plenty of those.
So. Time to put an end to this dangerous interlude.
Carefully, she pulled away from him and began repacking the basket. “It’s getting late.”
Already, the sun had tipped past the halfway point, and even in summer the slide to the horizon went faster than expected.
“Late for what?” Lucas asked.
“That dinner with your sister at Cucina Verde.”
“Oh, yeah.” Lucas shifted to his knees.
“You know that the bridesmaids are joining you and Stella, right?”
His eyebrows rose. “No.”
“Change of plans. I thought Stella had explained. Her three attendants wanted in, and I was able to change the reservation. Party of five.”
“Party of six,” Lucas said firmly. “If I’m to be subjected to nonstop bridal chatter, then you’re coming too.”
He said it as a given, not a question.
Emmaline decided against making a fuss about that. With the extra company in tow, she should be as safe as could be.
Three hours later, wrapped in the chatter of a knot of younger women, Emmaline moved through the doors of Cucina Verde, Lucas holding up the rear. When she’d met him at the front door of the house at the appointed time, she’d wavered in her safety certitude for a moment. His gaze had lingered on her face then dropped to the modest décolletage revealed by her lace dress. It was a color between tan and mocha, and the day spent on the beach and water, despite sunscreen, had deepened her skin tone until it was hard to tell where the dress stopped and her naked flesh began.
She’d had second thoughts looking in the mirror, but there’d been no time for a wardrobe change if they were going to make the reservation. Stella and her girls were taking a car service to meet them there because they were club-bound after dinner and didn’t want to be bothered with a designated driver. Upon arrival at the restaurant, Emmaline had placed herself in their midst.
Their group paused by the hostess table, and Emmaline took in the dimly-lit restaurant. Rough-hewn paneled walls divided the space into smaller dining areas which held two-tops and four-tops. A longer table here and there could fit twenty or could be used as community seating.
Lighting was created from bent pitchforks or old ladders wired with bare bulbs. In one corner sat a small antique tractor glossily restored, and along another wall narrow planters were filled with thriving succulents.
Gripping drinks in Mason jars, the people at the bar looked happy—a good omen.
With a practiced eye, Emmaline glanced around to note water glasses were full and dirty plates weren’t left to molder on the tables. Ambient sound wasn’t so noisy that patrons couldn’t converse over their meals. More good signs.
As they followed a slim hostess toward their table, from the corner of her eye, Emmaline glimpsed a rotund Italian-looking man in a dark suit moving among the customers and stopping to pause and chat.
One of the owners, she thought, glimpsing another gentleman strolling about dressed in a chef’s jacket and checkered pants doing his own version of tarry-and-talk.
Both of them getting a read on how they were faring with the patrons. Smart. Experienced.
A server came over and took drink orders, but before the cocktails arrived, heavily iced glasses of water with wafer-thin slices of lemon and lime were placed in front of them. A basket of sliced artisan breads slid onto the table next, with shallow bowls sharing a yin-yang of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Though she sat with a woman on either side of her, Emmaline couldn’t help her hyper-awareness of Lucas. She watched him from under her lashes in his seat across the table, staring at his big hand as it curled around the water glass to bring it nearer. His forefinger traced a pattern on the sweating glass, and she wanted to know, intensely, what he shaped there. An innocuous doodle? Initials? A name?
The young woman to her right gasped in surprise, and Emmaline looked over, tuning into their conversation. Apparently one of their wider circle had recently broken her engagement and refused to return the engagement ring.
“Lindsay says she’s owed it for pain and suffering,” one of the others said.
“Pain and suffering from what?” Stella asked.
“Curt’s obsession with sports. He has a pair of season tickets to everything, including hockey and women’s basketball.”
“Women’s basketball?” one of the other young women echoed. “Go, Curt.”
“Those he has solely for business reasons. He’s a lawyer, and he hands them out to his female clients.”
“Boo, Curt.”
Stella frowned. “But wasn’t Lindsay getting married before the end of the summer?”
“Invitations were supposed to be mailed next week,” answered the know-it-all. “Instead she’s going to barbecue them.”
“A bride should never cancel a wedding that close to the date,” Stella said, emphatic. “Never.”
Warning bells went off in Emmaline’s head. She thought of Aaron and his casual cruelties, the bruise she’d seen on the inside of Stella’s arm, staring up at her like a dark, almond-shaped eye.
“A bride can call a halt even at the very last second,” she said firmly. “Even after the last second. You can…you can refuse to sign the marriage certificate.”
Stella’s eyes widened. “What?”
Her friends rushed in to agree with Emmaline.
“Come on, Stel. You can’t say never. What if a bride found out the groom was having an affair?” one asked.
“With another man,” the second added.
“Who was previously married to his first cousin, affectionately known as Turtle.”
The women went silent for a second, absorbing the non-sequitur, then broke into peals of laughter.
Her tension relieved, Emmaline joined in, and glanced toward Lucas to see him smiling and shaking his head. Over his shoulder she spied the server coming their way carrying a tray with their drinks.
She leaned back in her chair as he passed them around. Movement in another section of the restaurant caught her eye. The back of a figure, turning a corner, his black hair curling around his ears, his left hand tracing the wall, the ruby on his pinky ring a dull-blood glow in the low light.
Emmaline’s heat seized and her stomach dropped as sudden panic shot through her. Going cold all over, she jumped to her feet, desperate to get away. It was imperative that she become invisible. Now.
Her hand batted at her chair, trying to make room to escape and then she stumbled over one of the legs. As she tried to right herself, her ankle gave out, and the rude wrench made her gasp. Pain arrowed up her calf and then became other pains, remembered pains.
A sprained wrist, the burn of a slap on her cheek, the heavy cuff of a hand against the back of her head.
Why do you make me do this? You shouldn’t make me so mad. Coco, don’t you ever listen?
She slumped to the ground, whimpers rising in her throat like those made by a kicked dog.