Read Dirty Sexy Knitting Online
Authors: Christie Ridgway
Dirty Sexy Knitting (29 page)
There’d been two condom wrappers tossed on the table on his side of the bed when she’d fallen asleep. And after that he must have snuck out on her.
“Where is he?” she asked, glancing around the small place. A woman was huddled on a stool at the dim end of the bar, but there didn’t seem to be anyone else drowning their sorrows.
“He took off,” the bartender said. “Was drinking with her when I came in”—he indicated the lone figure with a cocked thumb—“but when I reached for the phone, he stumbled out.”
Yet he wasn’t in his car or loitering in the parking lot either. Squaring her shoulders, she forced herself toward the woman nursing the last of a beer. “Hey,” she said, then had to clear her throat and start over. “I’m a friend of Gabe’s. Might you know where he went?”
Bleary eyes swung her way. Platinum, teased hair was pinned in a messy updo and her bangs tangled with black-as-black eyelashes. “I do his hair,” the woman said. “He called me and asked to come in for a trim.”
Cassandra pressed a fist beneath her breasts and tried to focus on the matter at hand. But it hurt bad, it hurt right there below her heart, to think that he’d left her bed for another woman. His barber, Sammy. For a “trim.” Yeah, right.
“I have a styling chair on one side of my duplex.” She blinked and then seemed to really see Cassandra. “You could come in. I could cut your hair in a bob.”
“No, thanks. I’ve seen what you do to Gabe.”
“Don’t blame me for that,” the other woman said. “When he gets a hankering for a haircut, he lets me go at it with scissors, and then he takes the clippers and finishes the job himself. Always looks like hell.”
“So I’m looking for a refugee from the underworld.” Cassandra sighed. “Do you know if he called himself a cab?”
The woman shrugged. “He called himself a selfish son of a bitch and then he walked out.”
What could she do but start for home? If Gabe had any sense, he would have climbed into a taxi and headed back to their canyon. He’d probably beat her there.
Rain started to fall as she pulled out of the bar’s parking lot. The back end of the car fishtailed, a side effect of Southern California’s almost perpetual sunshine. During the long dry spells, oil built up on the roads, only to rise as it rained, turning asphalt into dangerous slicks.
People who said Californians didn’t know how to drive in the rain had never tried driving on a greased surface. She kept her speed slow, but the cars sharing the four-lane Pacific Coast Highway weren’t always as cautious. As one rushed by her, throwing up a rooster tail of wet that landed on her windshield, she was blinded for the instant it took for her to edge up the action of her wipers.
When they cleared the deluge, she saw him. Gabe. Walking in the middle of the highway. Where there were no wide turn lanes and no concrete dividers.
Terror clamped like a skeletal hand around her throat. Her mind raced as she checked her rearview mirror. Clear.
Up ahead, though, coming from the opposite direction, another car approached him. He kept walking, head down, and it laid on the horn as it passed. He didn’t flinch.
She swallowed a shriek, but kept moving, slowing as she came abreast of him. Clammy sweat broke over her skin as she flipped on her hazard lights. Her finger punched the window opener.
Cold raindrops fell on her cheeks. “Gabe!” she shouted. “Gabe, get in the car.”
He kept walking.
She checked her rearview mirror again, and edged her car forward. “Gabe!”
His head came around. In the glare of headlights off the wet asphalt, his face glowed like a ghost’s. He blinked, as if he didn’t recognize her.
This wasn’t the time to make introductions. Gritting her teeth, she pulled the car closer to him, put it in PARK and set the brake, then jumped out. Fueled by a potent mix of fear and anger, she dragged him to the passenger side and stuffed him inside. Then she ran around and got behind the wheel.
“I’m going to kill you,” she said, as she accelerated, taking them back up to a safe and sane speed. “I’m going to . . . going to . . .” And then she humiliated herself by breaking into choking sobs that sounded loud and pitiful and desperately worried because that killing is what she was afraid of most. That Gabe was once again contemplating killing himself.
“Cassandra.” His hand awkwardly patted her thigh.
“Don’t touch me.” She hunched away and tried wiping her face on her wet shoulder. Then she glanced over at him, taking in the drenched state of his clothes. “God damn it, Gabe,” she said. “What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about Maddie,” he said. If he was drunk, it was only the slightest of slurs in his voice. “I’ve been thinking about Maddie all day.”
“Oh, Gabe.”
“I loved her, Froot Loop. I was a good father, I think. Not great. Too busy. But I tried to let her know how special she was to me.” He closed his eyes. “I miss her so much.”
Fresh tears fell, warm over Cassandra’s cold face. At Oomfaa’s that morning, she’d noted his tension around the children, but he’d seemed to pull himself together. He certainly hadn’t mentioned any mental anguish to her. But all day, as they ate together, played together, made love, running through his head like a cold, secret spring, had been thoughts of his daughter.
His wife, too, she guessed.
Gabe’s ghosts.
Indefatigable. Undefeatable. At least it seemed that way to her right now. Maybe in the morning she could imagine some way to rescue Gabe from the clutches of his memories and his pain.
She pulled into their driveway and then parked in front of her house. Weary and frozen to the bone, she headed for her door. Gabe didn’t follow. He trudged up the drive toward his place, head bent, his posture the same as it had been as he’d walked the line on the highway.
Lost in thought.
Or just plain lost—at least to her.
Eighteen
Friends are God’s apologies for relatives.
—HUGH KINGSMILL
Under dreary skies and dripping rain, Cassandra opened Malibu & Ewe. In the quiet time before the shop’s business hours, she went over her checklist for her birthday party the next day. Celebration was the last thing she had in mind, but the invitations had been sent, the food and beverages bought. She had no clue if Dr. Frank Tucker would show up.
She’d still not confessed to Nikki and Juliet about contacting him. She’d not confessed to them she wasn’t certain they were her sisters, either.
All her important secrets were still safe from the relevant parties. After finding Gabe in the rain last night, she was only gladder that he didn’t know her feelings for him. A safe heart equaled a whole heart.
The bells on the door rang out and she walked into the main section of the store to find Juliet. “I didn’t expect you back at work so soon, did I?” she asked, surprised.
“I’m home from my honeymoon and all unpacked. Noah’s returned to his office. So I thought you might need a backup today.” Her blue and green eyes took a slow, considering pass over Cassandra.
“You heard something,” she said flatly. “People are talking.”
Juliet lifted her hands. “It’s Malibu. Someone called Jay and then Nikki called me.”
Cassandra turned away from the other woman’s probing gaze. “Well, I’ll be glad to have the help today. There’s a group coming through on a yarn crawl and we’re one of their first stops.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
Eyebrows raised, she turned back. “Uh . . . can I make you some tea?”
“Yuck, no,” Juliet replied, sounding just like Nikki. “I mean, aren’t you going to tell me about last night?”
She shook her head. Not this time. “Let it go, Juliet.”
Whatever she might have responded was lost in a flurry of activity as the first couple of customers of the day arrived. Umbrellas had to be propped open to dry, rain exclaimed over, worry expressed about what Mother Nature had next in store for beautiful but unpredictable Malibu.
“We tarped our entire backyard,” a woman said. “We don’t want it to start sliding. The moment I heard them predicting a slow-moving storm, we got out all the plastic sheets we’ve been storing since last year.”
Juliet looked over at Cassandra with a little alarm and she remembered the other woman had only moved to this particular eco-system just a few months before.
“It’s the slow movers that scare those built on bluffs,” she explained. “Enough rain over a long period of time saturates the ground and causes it to shift. But even a small amount of precipitation can make burnt-out areas precarious.”
“And if it turns out to be a hard rain, we worry about flash floods and debris flows,” the woman who tarped added.
“It’s not just about sunscreen anymore, Toto,” Juliet murmured.
Cassandra patted her on the shoulder as she passed. “You’re good, up where you are. Nikki and Jay will be fine at the beach house.”
“How about you?” Juliet asked. “You and Gabe are in that canyon.”
“Hay bales and sandbags for us,” she said. “To channel potential water and debris. If it’s an issue, Gabe will take care of it.”
If his hangover would let him, she added to herself. But that thought didn’t worry her. If he was lying in bed and nursing a headache, she at least knew where he was.
The group on their yarn crawl arrived next. Despite the crummy weather, they were cheerful and enthusiastic and Cassandra helped who she could, though most of them were content to nose around the shop on their own or plop down on the couches and work on their project du jour.
“Let’s forget the rest of the LYSs on our list,” one woman suggested. “The traffic will be a bear.”
They entered into a debate about the idea of abandoning their little yarn shop tour when the bells on the door rang out again. Digging through a bin at the rear of the store, Cassandra knew something was up when their discussion pe tered into silence.
“Gabe.” Juliet’s voice, full of . . . shock?
Her heart pounding, Cassandra turned. Oh. Oh, God.
In the drama and the deluge of the night before, his new cut hadn’t registered. There was a quarter-inch of black hair left, so short that the bones of his skull and the lean angles of his face were highlighted. Along with the greenish, morning-after pallor of his face, and the whiskers he hadn’t bothered to shave, he looked like a walking corpse.
Nikki breezed in the door behind him, took a look, then did a double take. “Eek,” she said. “Casting call for the new zombie movie?”
Gabe didn’t flicker an eyelash. “Cassandra, can we talk a minute?”
No, her instincts answered for her. But she didn’t get a chance to express them before Gabe had her by the elbow and was hustling her into the shop’s back room.
There, she pulled free from his grasp and backed up against the now-less-cluttered countertop. “What’s going on?”
He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck. “First, uh, thanks for the ride home last night.”
“Do you need help collecting your car at the Beach Shack?”
“No.” Annoyance crossed his face. “I don’t just come to see you when I need something.” When he rubbed his neck again, she felt his weariness.
I was thinking about Maddie,
she heard him say in her head, his voice raw
. I’ve been thinking about Maddie all day.
she heard him say in her head, his voice raw
. I’ve been thinking about Maddie all day.
No. She’d fall to pieces if she let her mind go in that direction. For once, she had to hold her emotions close and tight. Stiffening her spine, she steeled her voice, too. “So what’s the second reason you’re here?”
“I’m going away today.”
She stared at him. Going away? She’d expected the apology. She’d anticipated moodiness, a grim attitude, a return to his prickly distance. For God’s sake, she’d seen him walking down the highway last night as if it didn’t matter whether he lived or died!
But going away?
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he continued. “I didn’t want you to wonder.”
“Wonder . . . what?” She was still waiting for the words to sink in.
He shrugged, then looked away. “I don’t know. Where to send the rent checks.”
An inappropriate laugh bubbled up from her belly. “The rent checks?”
He glanced up, glanced down. “Yeah.”
“We’ve been friends for two years and you think I’d be wondering about
the rent checks
?”
the rent checks
?”
More than friends. She thought of his mouth on her throat, her breasts, of his hard palm stroking over her hips and down her thighs. She thought of how he slept curled around her at night, the fingers of one hand twisted in her hair and the other nestled between her thighs as if they were each the power charge the other needed. “For God’s sake, Gabe.”
His hands came out in a placating gesture. “No need to get emotional.”
“I can see that.” Another laugh bubbled from some deep, bitter place. “It would be so inconvenient.”
Then she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Her footsteps sounded loud against the hardwood as she hurried from the back room.
“Hey . . .” he said, but she ignored him, rushing into the main area to take her place behind the cash register. Now there was something solid between herself and the man who strode in her wake, frustration wafting off him like brimstone.
“Say good-bye to Gabe,” she told Juliet and Nikki, ignoring the other customers in the shop. “He’s going away indefinitely.”
“Before your birthday party tomorrow?” Juliet asked, looking between the two of them.
She threw up a hand. “Before the rent checks are due. Imagine that.”
Gabe’s frown was fierce. “Jesus, Froot Loop . . .”
“Sorry.” She made a face and threw a look at her sisters. “I’m not supposed to get emotional.”
Bristling, Nikki glared at Gabe then marched over to Cassandra’s side. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Don’t bother,” she muttered. “I bet he’s got that covered.”
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