Dirty Sexy Knitting (7 page)

And then?
A voice inside her screamed.
What do you remember after that?
But she couldn’t bring herself to ask the questions, not when he was unsettling her with that intense regard. Was he recalling that flare of attraction they’d had at their first meeting?

The air had crackled with sparks from the instant their eyes had met. And when he’d touched her palm the sensation had seared her to her elbow. “Wow,” he’d said, and something had told her to run. She had, but then she’d found herself coming back to him. Too bad she hadn’t listened to that sensible inner voice.

Marlys wiped her right palm against her jeans as if she could rub away the memory of that burning touch, aware that Dean continued to stare at her. She stole a glance at him through her lashes.

His expression remained unreadable. She supposed he was reliving their last moments together. That night, at her front door, her ex, Phil, had spilled the beans about how she’d been leaking gossip to his tabloid-stringer little brother. Dean had appeared pretty disgusted by that.

But what he’d learned moments before had been oh-so-much worse. She wiped both palms on her thighs now, because it made her feel dirty just thinking about it. Suppressing a shudder, she glanced over at silent Dean again. Her gaze caught on his left hand. She stared, watching him worry a worn-looking business card. He turned it over and over between his long fingers.

He must have noticed her intense regard. His hand stilled and he cleared his throat. “My good luck charm. Strange, huh? Lots of the guys have them, though. On each and every mission they bring their granddad’s old dog tags or their baby’s ultrasound image or their local library card. I know a soldier whose talisman is a receipt from Gordo’s Taco Stop in Texarkana, Texas, showing he consumed sixteen bean burritos in one sitting.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to share his barracks that night.”

Dean laughed. “Now this,” he said, waving the business card that advertised the Ms. M boutique in Santa Monica, “is mine. My buddies tell me I carried it with me all the time in Afghanistan. It was beside me in the hospital, too. Every day. Every hour. Call me superstitious—or maybe it’s my Cherokee forefathers telling me something—but I’m still carrying it.”

Now she understood. “Though you don’t recall how it came into your possession, do you?” Because he couldn’t possibly remember her and their time together. If he did know that it was a card from her boutique, if he did know that
she
was Ms. M, then he wouldn’t still be calling it a good luck charm. The likely reason he’d been carting it all over Afghanistan was to find some godforsaken place to burn the thing. She looked up to meet his eyes. “And you don’t know me.”

“Uh.” He hesitated. “No.”

At the confirmation, Marlys went light-headed. She actually swayed on her feet and he stepped forward, catching her elbow to steady her.

This time, the electric burn zipped down to her fingertips and then up again, crackling from the top of her head to the filed edges of her French pedicure. It was heat and sweet and so damn scary that tears pricked the corners of her eyes.

“How could I have forgotten this?” he murmured, staring down at her.

How indeed. But it had happened. Dean Long had lost months of his life, meaning he didn’t remember that ugly, dirty, desperate night when she’d ruthlessly arranged for him to find her post-coital with some other man.

 

 

For a person who’d spent more than his fair share of time playing kissy-face with beer-stained and grime-gummed barroom floors, Gabe figured going through garbage wouldn’t cause him a quiver. And he was right; it was nothing to delve through the little bag of trash that Cassandra left in a can inside the single-sized carport attached to her house. Fact was, because Cassandra put her vegetable parings and fruit scraps in a compost heap and separated for recycling her plastic, glass, paper, and aluminum, what she actually threw away was little more than a flattened tube of toothpaste.

There wasn’t any sign of a condom. Not the thing itself. Not the foil wrapper either. Could you recycle those? Shit.

Headlights appeared at the end of the lane, bobbing a little as the old Mercedes hit the ruts in the blacktop. They caught him in their yellow-white gaze, but he didn’t flinch or fade away into the shadows. Instead, he twisted the end of the bag to tie it off and waited while Cassandra stopped her car.

She didn’t seem surprised to see him either. Part of their deal was that he took care of trash disposal. They didn’t get garbage service out here in the secluded canyon and so he drove their bags into town once a week and deposited them in the big commercial bins behind his fish market.

No, he didn’t have a real reason to feel bad about being caught with her garbage, not at all. As a matter of fact, he’d planned to be found right here, right now, just in case he didn’t discover the reassuring evidence of a rubber among Cassandra’s detritus.

“Good evening,” he called to her, smiling as she stepped out of the car.

In the glow from the security lights he’d installed along the eaves of the narrow carport he saw her send him a startled look. “Hi,” she answered, and ducked into the car to pull out a couple of her reusable grocery sacks, both filled with foodstuff.

Perfect. He dropped the bag he held and hurried over. “Let me take those for you.”

Gripping them tighter against her body, she drew back a little as if surprised. “I’ve got them.”

Gabe tried to figure out the cause of her odd reactions. Did he never smile at her? When he found her with groceries, did he never offer to ease her load?

Apparently he didn’t.

A moment from his past reared up. Lynn, that funny, triangular smile of hers tugging up the corners of her mouth. He’d been playing tea party with Maddie, bowing over her hand and kissing her fingers before settling cross-legged on the floor behind the dainty teacups and pretend petit fours she’d set out. “You’re such a gentleman, Gabe,” his wife had said. “Be careful, you’ll spoil our daughter and make her unprepared for the men who’ll come along and break her heart.”

It turned out that Maddie had never lived to have her heart broken.

It turned out that Gabe was a piss-poor gentleman.

He stomped toward Cassandra and slid his arms under the grocery bags. “Give me those, damn it,” he said, his voice brusque. “What kind of asshole do you think I am?”

She resisted for a moment, allowing him time to breathe in that incredible Cassandra scent and for the back of his hands to register the warmth of her skin radiating through the soft knit of her sweater. Then he wrenched the groceries from her grasp and marched up her porch steps to her front door.

This had been the second part of his plan, after all—that if he didn’t find evidence in the garbage, then he’d get into her house and do a little sleuthing around. If he discovered an opened box of condoms or packet of birth control pills, he could breathe easy again.

Okay, fine, now he truly felt like a slimy Dumpster diver. Because, of course, “sleuthing” was just a euphemism for “snooping.” Still, he just couldn’t see himself confessing to his neighborly nun/sister/friend that he didn’t recall boink ing her and oh, since it was so unmemorable, could she please assure him they’d actually taken steps to prevent a pregnancy? Which meant looking around on the sly was necessary, damn it.

He shuffled aside to let her unlock her front door. She slipped inside the house first, then barred the way, holding out her arms for the bags. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Astonished, he stared at her. She seemed to be guarding her gate. Cassandra never guarded her gate. Cassandra was open and generous and she was always trying to coax him inside so she could cook a meal for him. Except not tonight.

“I’m . . . hungry,” he said, frowning at her.

“It’s that time of day,” she responded. “Let me have the groceries.”

It was his turn to tighten his grip. “Do you . . . Do you have a date or something?” What was the name of that asshat for whom she’d donned the slinky dress and new perfume? “Are you seeing, uh . . . Darryl again?”

“Dante.”

“Dante.” Yeah, there was a name. He was either a wan nabe soap actor or some androgynous dude who did hair up in Hollywood. “Are you entirely certain he likes women?”

Her reusable bags had woven handles. Cassandra grabbed them up and then yanked the groceries away from him. “He likes me,” she said. “Why do you care anyway, Gabe?”

Well, he didn’t care. Not about Dante. He didn’t give a hoot whether someone liked acting or styling or sexing it up with a member of the same gender. It’s just that when it came to Cassandra . . . she was like a nun/sister/friend and he was required to look out for her. Particularly because there might be unintended consequences from the other night.

So when she spun and kicked the door with her foot, trying to shut it in Gabe’s face, he cared enough to kick back. The thick wood reversed direction and he followed her flouncing hair across the threshold and into the living room.

Over her shoulder, she sent him another look. He tried out a second smile and wondered just how he might weasel into her medicine cabinets. Cassandra’s cats ran toward him, giving him the unrestrained welcome that he’d expected from her. He bent to stroke a hand over each—nothing else would get them to back off—then followed their owner even as the cats continued their meowing demands for his attention.

The kitchen was barely big enough for her and half his larger frame as she bustled about putting the groceries away. Another of her wary glances slid his way. Smiling hadn’t been doing much for him, so he just looked back.

Coming to a sudden halt, she closed her eyes, as if in pain.

His chest constricted and he took a step forward. “Froot Loop—”

She halted him with a hand. “Please. Could you get me some ibuprofen?”

“What? You need me to go to Rite Aid?” He tried to think if he had any pain reliever at his place.

Cassandra’s hand rubbed a spot between her arched brows. “No. I have what I need. It’s in . . . I’m not sure. The guest bathroom? My bathroom? Check the medicine cabinets. There’s a new bottle somewhere.”

No. It couldn’t be that damn easy. He had permission to do exactly what he wanted? Her request meant he could run down her hallway and use the excuse to check out all the likely spots.

Cassandra winced, her fingers pressing harder to her forehead. Without thinking, Gabe stepped closer to his nun/ sister/friend and closed his hands over her shoulders so he could massage the muscles that led to her neck. “Headache, honey?”

At the endearment, she stiffened. Her gaze shot up. Gabe pretended that damn wide blue of her eyes wasn’t dragging him down like a weighted anchor and slid his fingers upward so his thumbs could find that sweet spot where neck met shoulder. In a weird flash—memory?—he saw himself biting her there.

But the flesh was unmarked. Half-relieved, half-disappointed, he kneaded her tense muscles, aware that before today, he’d never intentionally touched her—in his memory, that is.

“Ah.” Her head dropped back and she emitted a husky sound of relieved pleasure.

He went hard.

Gabe’s arms dropped and he spun away. He cleared his throat. “Let me, uh, check those cabinets for you.” That was what he needed to do, right? He needed to figure out whether there was a chance he’d made Cassandra pregnant.

Shit. Didn’t that just freeze his feet. Cassandra pregnant. He could picture it. Her rippling hair reaching to her pregnant belly. She’d breast-feed the infant, of course, and every day, damn, so many times a day, she’d expose those incredible, full, beautiful breasts—

“Stop!” he said.

“Gabe?”

Gentleman Gabe. Jerk Gabe. Got-to-get-a-grip Gabe. “I’ll be just a minute grabbing that ibuprofen,” he said, and ordered his shoes to move.

It took more than a minute but less than five to find what she wanted and to find out the info he’d been after. Plastic bottle in hand, he returned to the kitchen with the certainty that Cassandra didn’t stock condoms and with the likelihood that she wasn’t on the pill. He’d discovered no evidence of either.

Which meant he was going to have to tell Cassandra he didn’t remember bedding her. He had to know for sure that they hadn’t risked a baby.

Her back was to him as she sautéed some cubes of tofu in a pan. His gaze trailed over that incredible fall of her rich brown hair, slowly taking in each ripple to where the ends brushed her hipline, right above her heart-shaped butt. He thought about those bruises he must have made upon her skin and damned himself again for not remembering what the cheeks of her ass felt like against his palms, what the globes of her breasts felt like in his mouth, what her wet heat felt like wrapped around his cock.

He groaned and Cassandra looked over. “What?” she said, eyes wide again. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

If the tails of his oxford shirt weren’t untucked, she wouldn’t have needed to ask the question. He shifted on his feet and pretended to peer at what she was cooking. A man couldn’t just launch into the subject of forgotten sex when the scent of soybean curd was in the air, could he? “I’m just wondering how the hell you can eat that stuff.”

And why the hell she hadn’t invited him to share it with her. Yeah, this morning she’d asked for some “distance” from him, but distance just wasn’t Cassandra’s way. He hated thinking that being together in bed with him last night had somehow changed her.

Her head whipped back around as if she could read what he was thinking and she focused on the cubes she was stirring. “I’ve told you. I was brought up eating vegetarian on the organic farm.”

That’s right. “The place your mother worked and where both of you lived when you were a kid. From four until you were, what, eleven? Your mom did the books for the farm owned by the old MacDonalds.”