Sunday (Timeless Series #7) (17 page)

Dinner

Rose

Francesca spent most of her time looking down at Suzie beside her chair. She was in the car seat and tucked under a blanket, plastic keys in her hand. Hawke would do the same, leaning over to check on their daughter.

I thought it was cute.

Kyle moved his hand to my thigh and rested it there while he looked at the menu. “I think I’m going to get the spaghetti. You know, stick with a classic.”

Hawke eyed the selections. “I think I’m going to have a spring salad.”

Francesca didn’t bother hiding her annoyance. She rolled her eyes dramatically than sipped her water.

Without looking at her once, Hawke knew what she just did. “I saw that.”

“Who orders salad at dinner?” Francesca asked. “If anyone should be ordering a salad it’s me. I have baby weight to lose.”

Now Hawke rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Muffin.”

“You have, like, seven perfent body fat,” she argued. “Order the lasagna.”

“I’ll order the lasagna if you order the salad—and we switch,” Hawke said.

I’d never witnessed any of their conversations like this, and it was interesting to see how they behaved with each other. They were argumentative but romantic at the same time.

“Hell no,” Francesca said. “I’m ordering the cheesiest and greasiest piece of lasagna—and you are too.”

Hawke made eye contact with Kyle and shook his head slightly. “You dodged a bullet, man.”

“I can see that,” he said with a laugh.

“I’m getting the tour de France,” I said. “It comes with a little bit of everything.”

Kyle gave me a genuine smile, clearly happy I wasn’t doing the salad dance. “Excellent choice, sweetheart.” He squeezed my thigh gently under the table.

Francesca kept her eyes on Suzie, holding up a toy so she could play with it.

Hawke eyed her and cleared his throat. “If she’s okay, let’s get back to dinner.”

Francesca turned to him with fire in her eyes. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to ignore our daughter?”

“I just think you should leave her alone for five minutes.” He said it calmly but knew something bad was coming.

Kyle looked at me and lowered his voice. “I’m glad we don’t argue like that.”

I pressed my lips tightly together and tried not to laugh.

Francesca had fire in her eyes but she kept the flames back. “Fine.”

“Great.” He poured himself another glass of wine. “This is a great wine, Rose. Thanks for choosing it.”

“Sure,” I said.

Kyle changed the subject before things could get too heated. “I hired three more attorneys for my office.”

“Really?” Francesca asked in interest. “That’s a lot of people.”

“Business has really picked up recently,” Kyle explained. “I’m not sure why. I don’t want to take on any cases unless I want to, so I had to do it.”

“Because it would interfere with your golfing time?” Francesca teased.

“And my girlfriend time.” He squeezed my thigh again.

“That’s a smart way to go about it,” Hawke said. “I hope I have that kind of privilege someday.”

“You don’t control your own hours now?” I asked.

“I do but I’m not done growing,” Hawke said. “I want the business to be in a strong place so I can step aside if I wish. Right now, there’s too much going on. I don’t trust anyone to run the company besides myself.”

“I feel the same way,” Francesca said.

“I just realized something,” I said. “We’re all business owners.”

Kyle slowly raised an eyebrow. “Wow. You’re right. Never noticed that before.” He held up his glass of wine to make a toast. “To running the show.” He clanked his glass against everyone else’s, including Francesca’s glass of water.

The waiter arrived shortly afterward and took our order. Like I expected, Hawke ended up ordering the lasagna. Even when he stood up to her he always let her win. That was something I noticed from the beginning.

“How are things going with you two?” Francesca asked.

“Great,” I said. “We just went to Coney Island the other day.”

“Awe,” Francesca said. “That must have been fun.”

“It was.” Kyle took me around to do all sorts of fun things. He never made any physical moves toward me besides kissing and other things. But he never tried to make love to me. He said he would know when I was ready, but I wasn’t sure how he would know that exactly. But his confidence stopped me from asking further questions.

“I miss going on dates and stuff,” Francesca said. “Now that Suzie is here it’s all work and married life.”

“We still have a pretty romantic life together.” A slight tone of defense was in Hawke’s voice.

“Of course we do,” Francesca said. “But we don’t stay locked up in our bedroom all day anymore. Now we have another person to concentrate on.”

“When I came home yesterday I brought flowers,” Hawke reminded her.

“I know,” Francesca said. “I remember.”

“Well, make sure you tell people I’m the most romantic husband in the world—because I am.” He grabbed a piece of bread from the basket and took a few bites.

Francesca looked at Kyle then rolled her eyes. “Even soul mates can be annoying…”

“Soul mates?” I blurted. The words came out without thinking. I should have held my tongue as well as my incredulity.

“Hawke and I are soul mates.” Francesca said it with complete seriousness. “We knew the moment we met, and we still know to this day. So, it’s okay if he gives me a hard time about things. Because, at the end of the day it doesn’t change anything. I’ll tell him to order lasagna every time we go out and he may or may not do it. But when everything is said and done that truth is still there.”

I’d never heard anyone say something like that, except in TV and movies. I considered myself to be a skeptic of that sort of thing. I didn’t believe in destiny or in soul mates. After what happened to me I hardly believed in humanity.

But I believed her.

I’d seen them together, their interactions as well as the love that burned in their eyes constantly. When she took a step, he immediately reacted in an equal and opposite way. Hawke treasured both Francesca and Suzie like they were the most precious things in the world, and only the belief in destiny would stop Hawke from being threatened by Kyle—who dated Francesca. If I didn’t see this first hand I would write her off as a hopeless romantic.

But I could see it in them.

“That’s sweet,” I said. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before.”

“It’s extremely rare. Honestly, if I hadn’t experienced it myself I’d consider it to be crap. But when Hawke came into my life…I knew.” She looked down at her daughter for a moment before she turned back to me. “When you meet him, you just know. There’s not a specific reason or explanation. It is what it is.”

Somehow, in a strange way, I knew exactly what she was talking about. I was suddenly more aware of the way Kyle gripped my thigh. His fingers were placed on me firmly, and anytime I moved he moved with me. I remembered all the times when Kyle knew what I was thinking when I hadn’t said a word. I remembered everything he did for me when he found out the truth of my past. And I remembered the way he took on the case just to make sure my attacker was put behind bars forever. Our paths crossed in many different ways. I didn’t realize how strange that was until now.

***

“They are cute together.”

Kyle held my hand as we walked back to his apartment.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Do you think of her as your ex-girlfriend?”

“Not really,” he said. “I’m not sure how to explain it. I guess I see her as a really good friend. When we were together we had a good friendship as well as a romantic relationship. When we broke up I missed the friendship more than anything else. It’s nice to have that again.”

“They both seem like really good people.”

“They are—even Hawke.”

“He seems like someone who’s had a difficult life.”

“He has,” Kyle said. “I don’t know what that entails because Francesca never told me, but I know there’s more to it.”

“At least he seems happy now.”

“When you find the right person all the pain seems to slip away.” He brushed his thumb over mine as he focused on our path straight ahead. His other hand was in his pocket. “So, have you worked on my dream house?”

“Yeah, I made all the changes.”

“Great. Now it’s time to build it.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for that?” He took a lot of my suggestions when he didn’t have the very same ideas to begin with. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if it was what he really wanted—or what I wanted.

“Why wouldn’t I be? We’ve been working on that house for a long time.”

“It’s just…do you really want the walk-in closet and the sitting room?” They were classic things that I would want. But would he want them? A feeling deep inside me told me those suggestions weren’t in his self-interest. But why would he lie?

“Absolutely.”

“But you don’t have a ton of clothes. And you don’t sit around much unless you’re playing a game—which would require a TV.”

“Well, I’m not going to live in that house alone forever.” He pulled me down the block toward his apartment. I wasn’t paying attention to where we were going, but he knew his way around.

“But how can you know someone else will like it?”’

He looked down at me, a faraway look in his eyes. “Because you told me you liked all of those things.”

My heart skipped a beat, and then skipped another beat. For a second I thought I was dead because my body suddenly shut down. His words sunk into my skin for several seconds. The meaning wasn’t clear at first, but as time passed the truth rang like a loud bell.

“My wife has to love the place too. She needs some kind of compensation for putting up with my bullshit all the time.” He gave me a playful smirk, clearly loving the floored reaction I just gave.

“So, when you spoke of your future wife you were—”

“Referring to you. I’m surprised it took you so long to figure that out on your own.” He squeezed my hand and kept walking like this conversation wasn’t as serious as it actually was.

“I’m so lucky I found you.” The words left my lips quicker than I could stop them. Lately, I blurted things out without thinking, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

He looked down at me again. “I’m lucky I found you too.”

“But you’ve put me back together. You’ve brought me back to life.”

“And you think you haven’t done the same for me?” He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The night was quiet and there wasn’t much traffic around. It suddenly fell silent.

“It just seems like I’m the one we’re always concentrating on…”

“You don’t understand how much satisfaction I got for putting that piece-of-shit in jail. Knowing he’ll never do this to another woman gives me some form of happiness. I wish someone put my sister’s attacker in jail before he got to her. It doesn’t bring her back, but I know she’d be proud of me for saving as many women as I can. You do put me back together, Rose. This is just as therapeutic for me as it is for you.”

Unsure what to say, I just stared at him. A million feelings hit me at once, and now I didn’t know how to process everything I was feeling. “Don’t you think it’s strange that we’ve been through the same thing, and then we just run into each other on a blind date?”

He tilted his head slightly. “No. I don’t think it’s strange at all.”

“It almost seems like our paths were meant to cross.” I knew I sounded crazy but that didn’t stop me from saying it.

“Perhaps they were.” He gave me the hardest look I’d ever received. He bore so hard into my face that he could see everything inside me. He could see my soul, my heart, and everything else.

The stare was too much, too powerful, so I looked away. Even with my gaze averted I could feel his hot stare. He looked at me like he expected more, expected me to say something else.

***

We lay together in the shade of a beech tree in the park. The sun filtered through the leaves and filled the area around us with distinct warmth. Our depleted lunch sat in a plastic bag off to the side.

Kyle stared up at the sky, watching the leaves sway in the slight breeze. His hand was in mine and his ankles were crossed. “I wish it was spring all year round. In the wintertime, the snow is annoying. And in the summer, it’s way too humid.”

“I like spring too.”

“Plus, the tourists aren’t here yet.”

“They do love to visit.”

He moved one hand underneath his head, this thumb still rubbing against mine on the grass.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good. She’s still getting used to the change.”

“Of being married?”

“Yes. And living at his place.”

“Does that mean the mansion is empty?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she going to sell it? Rent it out?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “She’s too close to that place. I suspect she’ll just leave it there.”