Dirty Sexy Knitting (28 page)

Or who they thought was a sister.

It swamped Cassandra again, the terrible thought that she’d found them just to lose them. The questions could be easily answered, she supposed. She could confess right now and tomorrow order those kits that required a simple cheek swab to determine DNA.

As if Nikki could read her mind, she lifted her head and scooted away a bit so she had room to pivot and face Cassandra. “Now you, Froot Loop.”

“What?” she said, stalling.

“What’s the truth you’ve been hiding?”

Cassandra jumped up. “Look at the time. People will be here any minute.”

Nikki caught her arm. “Oh, no. You won’t get away that easily. Juliet and I spilled our guts.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“Something’s eating at you,” Nikki said. “Don’t bother to deny it.”

She cast about for something. “Edward’s been leaving me messages again.”

“Oh, stop talking about that twit. You’ve been handling his messages and what all without a flutter for months.”

“It’s something else,” Juliet said quietly.

Looking into their faces, she realized they’d likely engineered this moment. It was what sisters did. They’d finagle a way to get the quiet one to talk. A few months back, she and Nikki had done the very same to Juliet.

Nikki gave her arm a little shake. “You can tell us. What’s at the bottom of your heart, Froot Loop? What’s at the very bottom of your heart?”

At the very bottom of her heart? At the very bottom of her heart was this frightening, terrifying, terrible truth. She opened her mouth and heard it tumble out, just as the bells on the door to the shop rang.

“I’m afraid I’m in love with Gabe.”

The shock on the other women’s faces startled her. Was it that surprising? But then she noticed they were looking not
at
her, but beyond her. Her insides freezing, she snuck a peek over her shoulder.

Gabe was standing inside the shop, wearing his usual inscrutable expression. Meaning it was impossible to tell whether he’d overheard her deepest, scariest, very-bottom-of-her-heart secret.

Family is just accident . . . They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.

—MARSHA NORMAN

 

 

 

 

Sunday morning, Gabe pulled up outside Cassandra’s house, and she slipped into his car even before he’d turned off the ignition. He tried not to react as she leaned across his car’s console to stroke her palm against his just-shaven jaw. “Smooth,” she said. The kiss she pressed to his chin was casual. “And it looks as if you just combed your hair, too. Gabe, I’m flattered.”

Her teasing eased the knot in his gut that had been tightening since Tuesday night. He slanted her a grin. “I’m trying to keep up with Jay.”

She laughed. It was careless as well, and he relaxed further. “I think he gets manicures. Are you prepared to go so far?”

“Depends. What do you charge?” he asked.

“You can’t afford me,” she said, sticking her cute nose in the air. “Accept that.”

He didn’t stop himself from reaching over and tweaking it between his forefinger and thumb. What an idiot he’d been, worrying about whatever it was he’d overheard—obviously wrongly he realized now—at the knitting shop. Cassandra could never be in love with him. She was too smart and too familiar with his demons.

If he had believed she’d fallen, he wouldn’t have risked spending any more time with her, no matter how tempting she was every time he looked at her. Today she was wearing a sweater she had surely made. It hugged her breasts and was the exact color of her blue eyes. Her long legs were encased in jeans and she had on high-heeled, suede boots that looked like butter and appeared almost as soft as her skin. He regretted that he’d lost out on the chance of having those long limbs wrapped around his hips for the last few nights.

She’d given him a reason to keep them in separate beds since Knitters’ Night. Working overtime on stuff for her upcoming birthday party. He hadn’t questioned her closely, uneasy about what he’d hoped he hadn’t heard, but now just looking at her made him keenly regret those hours apart.

He took a breath instead of crassly trying to persuade her back into her house. Only a stupid man suggested sex right off the bat. To cool his libido, he thought of her nosy cats. “How’s the menagerie?” he asked.

“Pining for you.”

He shot a look at her, but decided he’d imagined the note of true emotion in her voice. “We’ll bring them home some salmon from brunch.”

Yeah, he’d actually asked her out. His last date had been a hundred years ago and it probably involved a pitcher of beer and some soggy pretzels. He would have felt like an ass now, dating after a century’s hiatus, except that it was Cassandra sitting beside him and his world was right again.

“Bed’s been too empty,” he heard himself say. “I’ve missed you.”

“You’ve seen me every day.”

Lattés. He had to bring her lattés. And he’d finished the shelving in her back room. But the yarn shop had been full of customers every time he’d arrived and it seemed to him they’d both been relieved by the buffer. But they were alone now, and he threaded his hand through her luxurious hair and pulled her close with it for a kiss.

Yeah. “Maybe I need to say hello to the cats after all,” he murmured against her mouth.

She softened, and he drew his mouth toward her ear. “Baby . . .” he murmured, grateful as hell they were back to their new normal, in each other’s arms. “How about I buy you lunch instead?”

Her lips curved. “Well—”

His cell phone rang. Jerking back from her mouth, he cursed and fished in his pocket. “
Now
it chooses to find some reception.” Glancing at the readout, he groaned. “Property management call.”

But maybe one that wouldn’t ruin their plans for the day. He would have passed it on to a service, but the request for repair was simple and from one of Cassandra’s friends. He started his car. “Let’s go fix Oomfaa’s garbage disposal.”

One of the Most Famous Actresses in America leased a house he owned in the infamous Malibu Colony—the original oceanfront development that Hollywood stars of the 1920s had settled. Oomfaa had been in this house for something like six months without a problem. This one didn’t look serious in the least, Gabe thought, as he played with the switch on the kitchen’s granite backsplash.

Cassandra and Oomfaa were indulging in mimosas. “Carver’s coming over,” the actress told them, her smile luminous. Without all the movie magic, freckles dusted her nose and cheeks. Gabe thought she was prettier with them.

He was crouched on the floor to reach under her kitchen sink when the attack came. The front door opened, and a spatter of feet and high-pitched voices assaulted him. In an instant, he was brought back to Maddie’s fourth birthday. Lynn had read that the guest list at a child’s party should be the number of the child’s age plus one. Tossing that advice to the wind, they’d invited twelve little girls to the house for the afternoon.

These were only three children, he noted, even as instinct urged he climb under the sink altogether. A trio of the female gender: seven, five, and three, he guessed, each of them in pink and glitter and ruffles, all that froufrou stuff that he knew some little girls, like his own, were born to love.

Carver followed the posse in, a baby wrapped in more pink in his arms. On top of the child’s head fountained a feathery, Pebbles ponytail. The other man caught sight of Gabe, frozen on the floor.

“My nieces,” he explained. Fisted in his free hand were white paper bags reeking of fast-food breakfast items. “Four of ’em, can you believe it? I’m giving my sister and brother-in-law a much-deserved morning off.”

Gabe wanted off. Out.

Yeah, he’d seen kids around, of course. You couldn’t avoid them. But you could stay out of their way and you could stay out of places that packed tiny toys with every meal. There’d been a basketful of them in Maddie’s sunny bedroom, because it was their father-daughter weekend ritual, a walk to the park so Mom could sleep in, followed by the short drive to the Golden Arches.

Now the smell of maple syrup made him ache, remembering sticky little girl kisses.

“You okay, man?” Carter asked.

“Yeah.” He couldn’t turn around and look at that baby again.

He hadn’t thought much about the kid issue when he was a young man and even a young married man. Busy building his career and his portfolio, he hadn’t noticed their friends joining the diaper set, but Lynn had. And when she’d brought up having a child—well, even though he thought they were too young or he was too busy or perhaps not ready because the idea didn’t goose a single warm thought out of him—he hadn’t said a word. You went to college, you worked, you married, you had kids. The natural order of things.

Unlike burying your young wife.

Unlike deciding on the epitaph for your daughter’s headstone.

“Can I help?” Carter again.

Gabe risked a glance over his shoulder. The drummer had divested himself of food bags and from the sound of things the little girls were having a breakfast of champions in the nearby alcove, but that baby was still on the man’s hip. He was hunkered down and the child stared at Gabe while she gummed a piece of toasted English muffin.

He couldn’t look away from her. It had been like that when they’d put Maddie in his arms minutes after her birth. Up to that point he’d been neutral on the whole project. Just another agenda item. But then they’d put this living, squirming, warm bundle of person against his chest. She’d stared up at him from unblinking eyes, as if she saw everything about him in that first look.

Had she known then that he would fail her?

This baby studied him in the same way. Then, with a four-toothed grin, she held out her scrap of muffin to him.

Gabe stood so fast he slammed his hip into the countertop. Grunting at the pain, he pivoted for the front door. “I need something from the car,” he said.

Outside, he breathed in air. Salty, crisp Malibu air. He’d never expected it to cure him, when he’d taken up residence here, but sometimes he thought he was better: when he was trading insults with the vegetarian next door, when they put up wallpaper or painted new shelves, when he wrapped himself around her at night.

And then sometimes, like now, he knew he would never be whole.

The ash that was the residue of his heart sickened his soul. Eventually, it would darken everyone he touched. And now, the knowledge of that opened the ever-present hole at his feet. There was a bottle of vodka wrapped in a rag in his trunk. He could take it out, slug down a mouthful or two. More.

Such an easy slide into that dark place.

But not right now, he told himself. Not with Cassandra in the house as well as Oomfaa and Carver. Not with children around. He could keep it together. He
would
keep it together.

He made himself return to the house. The garbage disposal was grinding merrily and Carver wore a warrior’s grin. “Who said I was just another pretty face?” he said, sending a triumphant look at the two women still overseeing breakfast. Gabe followed his gaze.

Cassandra was holding Pebbles.

The sight struck him like an ax to the chest. He couldn’t breathe as he took in the softened lines of her face, the little back-and-forth rock of her body as she murmured to the baby, her cheek against the child’s temple. The baby’s head was snuggled into Cassandra’s neck and one small fist was tangled in her hair that tumbled over her generous breasts.

Gabe knew the wonder of her silky hair and that bountiful softness. He closed his eyes as pain shredded whatever soft parts he had left inside him.

“She’ll make a great mother, eh?” Carver asked.

“What?” He opened his eyes again.

“Cassandra, a great mother,” the other man said, elbowing Gabe with the arm illustrated with that naked lady tattoo.

It usually pissed him off, but now he stared down at the ink instead of looking at the woman who was so like it.

“A wonderful mother,” he agreed, and he knew without a doubt that it was what she wanted for herself.

Of course it was. Family was her thing. Her lonely child, outcast upbringing had pushed her to pursue every biological tie. She loved her sisters and would revel in the role of aunt, if that came about, but she had to want the tighter bonds of her very own children.

Which was the last thing he had to offer her.

So their “new normal” was only postponing the real inevitable. They couldn’t be together. They shouldn’t be together.

Every moment he took from her only took her away from the man she needed to find, the one who would give her babies. Every moment he took from her only took her away from those she’d be with for the rest of her life.

 

 

 

At the shrill peal of the phone, Cassandra jolted awake. She stared into the dark, heart pounding with that familiar where-is-Gabe fear, until she remembered he was beside her. As the ring sounded again, she sat up and glanced over at his side of the bed.

It was empty.

He was gone.

She snatched up the phone. “Yes?”

It was routine, the finding of clothes, keys, the drive to the Beach Shack. She peered into Gabe’s car as she jogged toward the bar’s doorway, noting the empty bottle of vodka on the passenger seat.

Mr. Mueller was waiting for her. “I’m sorry, Cassandra. I only came in a short time ago to close up or else I would have called you sooner.”

“Sooner” Gabe had been beside her in bed. They’d spent the day together—a late brunch, an afternoon with the newspaper and the three cats, a shared dinner. When Edward had called, Gabe had happened to pick up the receiver for her and she thought his intimidating growl might have put the other man off for good. When she’d teased him about his caveman phone manners, he’d chased her into the bedroom and they’d wrestled until lust had been declared the winner.