An Accidental Gentleman (20 page)

A skinny little boy straddled a Big Wheel. Blue and gray streamers hung from the handlebars he gripped with preschool intensity. His jeans bore an army green patch across one knee. In an oversized denim jacket, he came as close to badass biker as a toddler with blond ringlet curls and a wide grin ever would.

“Oh my God, is this you? Your hair is so curly.” The curls tumbled across his forehead and over his ears. He would’ve been the baby getting his cheeks pinched by a parade of aunts, family friends, and strangers at the grocery store.

“Yeah, that’s me.” He paused and glanced over her shoulder before waltzing past with salad plates. “Right before my big brother Matt dumped my ass off and hogged the trike for the whole afternoon.”

She and Erin hadn’t fought over toys much. The six years between them cushioned the overlap, so by the time she wanted something, Erin had already disdained to play with it anyway. Erin’s girls, though. Jesus. Mom and Dad still sent them to separate corners at least once a week. “Your folks didn’t stop him?”

“Naw.” He headed back to the kitchen empty-handed. “We got shooed out the door and told to play nice. Dad worked long days at the plant, and Mom had my younger brother to mind.”

“Lucas?” That couldn’t be right. Way too young.

“Nope. Lucas was the surprise baby.” He snatched the entrée plates and made another pass to the table. His shorts swung above his bare knees, and his dress socks slid down his calves with every step. “Long before him, it was Matt, me, and Jason. Two years from Matt to me, and another year from me to Jason. We ran Mom ragged.”

“You, obviously, were the adorable one.” She laid the frame down gently and picked up the tiger. A man sharing his baby photos while wearing the ugliest outfit on the planet shouldn’t be so fucking sexy. And yet. Every time he walked by from delivering another piece of dinner, she fought not to grab his tie and drag him against her. The heat throbbing in her breasts had permission to stop anytime. Now would be great.

“Golden wheat good?” Shouting from the fridge, he lifted the bottles over his head. “I’ve got a trendy chocolate stout to go with dessert.”

“Golden wheat, yeah.” Ruffling the tiger’s rust-orange fur, she snorted. “Matches your hair, ringlet boy.”

“Ohhh, direct hit.” He carried the beers over and stopped behind her, dangling one across her shoulder. “Now you know why I don’t grow my hair out. Toss a sailor suit on me, and I’d pass for one of those historical society photos of little lord so-and-so.”

Especially without the beard. He had nine years on her, but he gave off an electrical charge of smooth-cheeked youth. She spared one hand from the soft tiger to take her beer. “So what’s with the trip down memory lane?”

“First date, right?” He shrugged and sipped from his bottle. “My mom’s not here to do the honors, so embarrassing myself is a necessity.”

“I think your socks have that covered.” Nice. She flashed a smile to sell the distraction. Forcing herself to see goofy Brian instead of fuck-me Brian might let her survive this without ruining his desire for a no-pressure, non-sexy night out. Or in. Or in and out. Fuck, no, desire belonged to her, not him.

Leaning back, he studied his legs. “You’re right. I should’ve worn the sock garters. It’s falling-down amateur hour over here.” He eyed her legs and rolled the lip of his bottle against his mouth. “I don’t suppose you have a pair you can loan me. Your stockings hug you the way the water hugs the shore.”

“In lapping waves?” The words flew out faster than her lips closed to stop them. Too much, too soon, too
her
.

He flicked the bottle with his tongue. “If the stockings are that good, I’ll have to up my game to compete.”

Thank God she’d worn the panties. Her body refused to separate silly-shorts Brian from demanding backroom Brian, and both seemed determined to get her wet. Hadn’t he wanted a sex-free date, though? For her to stop looking at him as a single-use sex toy. Memory teased, coy and elusive.

“Anyway, my mom got a notion last year to clean up the house.” His voice lighter, easier, he reached across her and rubbed the tiger’s head. “She boxed all the shit my brothers and me had left behind and shipped us the results, along with copies she had made of the family album for each of us.”

“And this fierce fellow was your best buddy?” Neat orange stitches marked the ragged line where the left ear should have been. The kind of patient work a loving mom would do. “He looks like he tangled with a closet monster or two.”

Brian snorted. “I did manage to lock Matt in a closet once or twice, but no. Stripes lost the ear in a car tussle.” He eased the tiger from her hold. “Matt got his hands on him and bit down. Ripped the ear loose and spat it out the window. We had a bumpy rivalry, a lot of one-upsmanship.” Rubbing the ear scar, he bent and set Stripes on the coffee table. “But I idolized him for a long time.”

He might as well have sighed. The hint of pain floated in his voice. The ache in her chest urged her to find the source and soothe his hurt. Not her usual skill set with guys. “So that’s your big tragedy? A chewed-off tiger ear?”

Smooth. Total fucking classy nurturing-woman move right there.

“My what?” Well, confusion was a start.

She elbowed him in the side. Fuck, he didn’t give an inch with his solid wall of muscle. “C’mon, you mean you don’t have a dark secret you want to confess to make me feel all sorry for you and drop my panties? You know, your ‘getting laid’ tragedy.”

Every guy had one. She tried to cut them off before they opened their mouths, because their scars weren’t hers to fix. And they were bullshit anyway, the calculated move of a guy aiming to score sympathy points from a wishy-washy date who either didn’t want the sex or wouldn’t admit that she did. The upfront, wanna-fuck approach eliminated the need for lying and posturing.

“What, like my mom died or my uncle molested me? Or I was the sole survivor of a post-prom car crash that killed my one true love?” He took a long swig of his beer. “Is that the crap you expect to sit through? No wonder you hate dating.”

“Good start.” She nodded and waved in a firm command, the sort she imagined he’d been trained to follow for years. “Go on.”

She actually wanted him to share. Fuck, now she needed a deep drink.

“Sorry, nothing like that. I’m your average fucked-up human, not deeply tormented.”

She sucked down a third of the bottle. Still didn’t change the curiosity gears clanking into motion, flaking off rust and shaking loose dust in her head. Something about Brian merited more consideration than her typical sexual conquests. He’d tweaked her settings somehow when she wasn’t looking.

“But.” He unwrapped his index finger from the neck of the bottle and pointed at her. “My mom did lose me in a department store once. It was incredibly traumatic.” He nodded with solemn dignity, his eyebrows raised and his lips narrowed. “For her.”

She’d wandered off more than her fair share of times, but she’d been easy to find—playing in the hardware aisles, building piles of junk the clerks would have to sort out later. “For real?”

He burst into laughter. “Not that bad. We made it home in one piece. I’ll tell you over dinner.”

“I’m not done yet.” Leaving her bottle on a coaster for safekeeping, she dragged out the open yearbook. “Class photos?”

A teenage Brian Hendricks stared out at her from beneath a faux-hawk, the sides of his head almost fully shaved and a two-inch-wide strip of springy curls on top. His shirt, a black tee with half a logo showing, sported a finger-sized hole under the seam at the neck. Of course, the hole probably went unnoticed by most people, given the fat bike chain draped around his neck.

“Yeah, that’s me, senior year. Complete stud, aren’t I?” He tugged her arm. “You hungry? We wait too long, the food’ll get cold. I don’t know a lot about cooking, but I know some about eating.”

“Hang on.” She flipped the pages in a fat heap. Pictures were fun, sure, but everyone knew the messages from friends held all the secrets. The kids in her class had fought the move to digital yearbooks and won. The hardbound copy with its cryptic notes still brought back memories. “I wanna see what your friends said about you.”

“The usual. That we’d hang together all summer. That we’d never forget.” Folding his hand around the top edge, he laughed. “Stupid kid stuff from twenty years ago.”

Stupid kid stuff didn’t explain why his laugh sounded nervous. He’d confessed about his bad-boy behavior, his truancy and risk-taking and shoplifting. And his punk phase immortalized forever in the photo didn’t bother him, either, maybe because he’d met Perry, but something in this yearbook bugged him.

She scanned the inside cover. Nothing weird or shocking. The usual, like he’d said. Back cover, then. She flopped the weight, dropping the pages on his hand.

Jackpot. On the inside back cover, a huge black scribble blotted out the center of the page. Like he’d taken a Sharpie to erase the message, but the pen lines dug deep enough to shine through anyhow. Mushy love talk from some girl named Becca.

“Ouch.” She closed the book, gently. As she pulled his hand free, she curled their fingers together. “Bad breakup?”

“You could say that.” He tapped his bottle against the yearbook. “First steady girlfriend. We dated all through senior year, right up until the weekend before graduation.”

She left the book behind and grabbed her beer as he tugged her toward the dinner he’d laid out for them. “She pull the whole going-off-to-college routine? No long-distance strings?”

He set his beer on the table, and hers too, and shook his head. “Nope. She pulled the whole ‘fucking your older brother up against the back of the cabin during your last-hurrah camping trip’ routine. After eight months of, ‘I’m saving myself for marriage.’ Turns out, marriage is named Matt. She thought, anyway.”

“Your girlfriend cheated on you and married your brother?” Jesus. His older brother truly had stolen all of his toys. Maybe changed the shape of his life the way Erin’s marriage had changed hers. Fuck, and he didn’t think that counted as a panty-dropping tragedy?

“Tried, I guess.” He shrugged and pulled out her chair. “He’d ditched her by the time I finished basic training and visited home. It was a long time ago. Have a seat, miss?”

She let him have the victory. He could tell his lost-in-the-department-store story instead and avoid the frayed nerves. Because however much he pretended not to care, he sure as hell hadn’t meant for her to go snooping down the ex-girlfriend path.

Helping her settle in the seat, he smoothed his fingers across the back of her neck and out to her bare shoulders. As he rolled his thumbs in tiny circles, her memory finally wiggled loose.

“What makes you think a date with me won’t be like this, Katherine? A naughty surprise.”

Brian’s tender, teasing tone as he fucked her with his fingers a few feet from her workbench. She’d happily take more than his fingers right now, as he sank into his seat across from her. But the whole dinner-date thing? Knowing Brian-the-person? That wasn’t so bad, either. Having both might be feasible. Desirable.

* * * *

Hell, dating Katherine wouldn’t be nearly so tough as he’d feared. They’d sailed through the first three-quarters of dinner and polished off a pair of beers apiece. She’d settled in fine with his get-to-know-me strategy. Asking questions about his childhood, she must’ve been thinking of him as someone to get to know and not just something to fuck.

She hadn’t run far and fast when he told her about Becca, or dug up old hurts to watch him squirm. The more he made himself vulnerable to her first, the more she’d open up to him. Like when she’d talked about her granddad at softball or how entranced she’d been by her sister’s wedding during their picnic. Those moments had been real. They’d been the Katherine she tucked away inside her Kit-face.

He’d be able to take her out somewhere next time without her getting all self-conscious and riled about romance. In the integrated datasets, friend and lover would overlap to be more than fuck-buddy. He’d take her out next Saturday, or maybe sooner, but he wouldn’t ask her now, not when she had a ways left to go on her plate. End of the night would be soon enough. When he gave her a proper kiss, lips on lips and tongues tangled, and she didn’t turn away from the intimacy.

A stray smear of salad dressing lent her mouth a sheen as bright as sunlight flashing off waves. His cock heartily endorsed a proposal to kiss her now. The cozy dinner table wouldn’t be much of an obstacle.

Pausing in mid-fork-raise, she released a quiet laugh. Her cheeks flushed. “You stopped eating. It’s a nice meal, even if you didn’t make it yourself. Maybe better because you didn’t.” Her smile turned wry, but the pink stayed in her face. “You should enjoy it.”

The food, right. He’d almost cleared his plate without tasting a bite, and then he’d lost himself in her. The best kind of evening. His risk had paid off. “So a date with me’s not as bad as you thought it’d be? It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me I was right about us being perfect for each other. Just nod, and we’ll both know.”

She jerked backward. As her fingers tightened, the cherry tomato perched on her fork tumbled to her plate and rolled over the lip onto the table. She pierced the skin with a vicious thrust of the tines. “Date’s not over yet.”

God fucking dammit. He hadn’t meant to needle her. But if one tease went too far, she’d never let him into her heart. He’d forever be circling her defenses in some exhausting dance. If he found the machine playing the music, he’d yank the plug from the wall and smash the electronics on the ground. They needed the silence to be together. To just be. And they never would until she’d drowned the tune repeating in her head—the one trapping her in one moment. If she wouldn’t stop the music, he had to try.

“Katherine.” He waited for the flicker in her eyes. Being careful with his words, seeking the perfect line, hadn’t worked to get through to her. Christ, don’t let her hate him for this. “Every day, you wake up and your sister’s husband walks out the door.”

“No.” The way she tugged her lip, she might be gnawing off more words with her teeth. “Every day, I eat breakfast with two girls who don’t have a father.”