Intimate Persuasions (10 page)

“That’s horrible,” Ann told them.

“Yeah,”
Frances
said. “We actually panicked the first couple of times thinking that he really meant it, but we soon learned it’s his way of standing his ground. He must have inherited his mother’s non-confrontational behavior, because he’s nothing like your Quinn.”

Her Quinn. She liked the sound of that. “Well, I think it’s mean and you guys should apologize for laughing at him.”

Leo shook his head. “He would never let us. We’ve tried a few times. It just hurts his pride. It has more to do with Sandi than it does with anything else. Ouch, what’d you hit me for?” He asked
Frances
.

“That’s not our business to tell.” She told him.

“Who’s Sandi?”

“No one.”
Frances
answered. “Come on let’s get finished so we can get out of here.”

A little over an hour later Ann watched everyone walk out the back door of the restaurant. She usually walked out with Derek so she saw no reason to make tonight any different. Hesitantly, she walked back to Derek’s office. After his little outburst in the kitchen, he went in there and shut the door, not opening it once, which wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if he didn’t make a habit of helping the staff clean up each and every night. She knocked on the door and waited for him to answer.

“Come in.” Derek’s voice was quiet and barely recognizable.

Ann was ready to greet him with a friendly smile, but then she saw the condition he was in. “Derek? Are you…okay?”

Derek looked up at her and laughed. “I’m great, baby. You?”

Baby? Oh Lord.
“How much have you had to drink?” Although it was a stupid question. She knew that bottle of Jack Daniels had been completely full only hours ago.

“Oh, not much, just a teensy weensy bit.” He motioned for her to sit down and join him. “Here. Take a load off.” Without even asking her if she wanted any, he put a shot glass in her hand.

“Derek, I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Now Ann, you already embarrassed me in front of everyone. At least do me the honor of having a drink with a pretty lady.” He winked at her and slammed another shot.

Pretty lady? He was obviously drunker than she thought, because he was downright flirting with her and that was something that he never ever did.

“Derek, I think that maybe you should let me drive you home. You know, so you can sleep it off.”

Derek cocked a brow up and looked at her. “Are you trying to take advantage of me? Because I have to say, you don’t need to take advantage, I’d be a willing participant.”

Now that pissed her off.
They had become good friends, and now he was going to say something stupid like that and try to ruin things? Well, she wasn’t going to let him.

“Derek, that’s enough.” She slammed her shot glass on his desk causing it to spill over the rim.

“Oh, now what’d you go and do that for? You just wasted some perfectly good whiskey.” Proving his seriousness he picked up her glass and licked the side of it before swallowing its contents.

“Damn it, Derek! Why are you acting this way? What has gotten into you?”

Derek just grinned at her and waggled his brows. “What about you, huh? What’s gotten into you? How about me? You want me to get into you?”

Whap
! Ann couldn’t help it, she was angry with him for his blatant remarks. He knew how she felt about Quinn and this wasn’t him. Derek didn’t act like this. He didn’t hit on her. He had too much love and respect for his brother. She knew it was the alcohol talking, but it didn’t stop her from being mad enough to strike him.

“Shit! What the hell did you do that for?” Derek was rubbing his jaw and wincing.

“I did that,” she reached over and grabbed the bottle from him. “Because you’re being an asshole.”

Derek looked at her for a moment before he responded to her accusation. “I’m sorry.” He sank in his chair and rested his head in his hands.

Derek shook his head from side to side. “Derek, what’s wrong? What happened in the kitchen earlier. You know they were just teasing you, right? They didn’t mean to upset you.”

His head was still hanging down. “I know. I do, it’s just that whenever I get accused of being too nice it pisses me off.” He jerked his head up and looked at her. “I mean, what the hell is wrong with being a nice guy? I can think of worse damn things to be. And so what if I’m nice. It’s not like I treat people like shit. That should be a good quality, instead it’s like a freaking cross I have to bear.”

Ann listened to him vent. She wondered if his pain had anything to do with the girl, Sandi, that Frances and Leo had mentioned. She weighed her options on whether or not she should bring her up. But Derek had been so good to her. He had become a true friend to her. Maybe she could be the same for him.

“Derek, is this about Sandi?”

A tornado couldn’t whip around as fast as his head did at her question. “Who told you about Sandi?”

“No one, really. I just sort of overheard Frances and Leo saying that, well, maybe whatever happened with her has to do with why you get so sensitive about the whole being nice thing.” She shouldn’t have ratted out Frances and Leo, but the only thing she was worried about right now was Derek.

“They talk about me? About that? Oh great. I’m not pathetic enough right. Jesus!” Derek flung himself in his chair for the second time.

“It’s not what you think. They like you and care about you. I think they’re actually worried about you.”

Derek didn’t look at her or say anything. He just motioned with his hands for her to sit in the chair across from him.

Ann sat down and waited for him to break the silence. She had a feeling he just needed time before he said whatever was consuming his thoughts at that moment.

“We were engaged.”

That was all he said, just three little words. But the pain that she heard in his voice spoke volumes of what those words meant. Clearly he had been hurt.

“What happened?”

“I still don’t know. I swear it’s so freaking confusing. It’s been a year and I still can’t forget it.” He didn’t say what he really wanted to, and that was that after one year he still wasn’t over it, or over her. He still loved her.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He laughed, an agonized sound. “What’s there to talk about? I can’t make heads or tails of what went wrong. All I know is one night changed our lives forever. And the Sandi that I knew and loved was gone.”

Okay, so that made absolutely no sense. “Derek, I’m not saying you have to talk about it. But if you feel like it, I’m here, and I’m a good listener.”

He looked at her as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Apparently he was deciding whether or not to talk about it because she could see him pondering what to do. He rocked back in his chair a couple of times before he finally said something.

“I met her about five years ago. She was the Gallagher’s niece. Remember, they were here last…Tuesday. The guy with the funny-looking toupee. Anyway, she had come out to visit one summer with her family. She just turned twenty, still so young and sweet, naïve I guess you could say. Anyway, I met her at the Roadhouse. I was helping Quinn out. His door guy called in sick, so I was working for him. It was Friday night and busy as all hell. I was so busy checking ID’s that I barely noticed her. I glanced at her ID and was all set to let her go inside, but when I handed it back to her our fingers touched and,” he rolled his eyes, “this is gonna sound really corny, but there was like a spark between us. At that one moment when our fingers touched, I felt like I had been electrocuted, but in a good way. You know?”

Boy did she. Being with Quinn was like constant overload to her senses. She knew exactly what it meant to feel your skin heat and sizzle with desire and urgent need for someone. But instead of telling him all of that, she just nodded in agreement.

“Anyway, that’s when I really looked at her.” He started to laugh. “The little sneak had stolen her sister’s ID, which granted they did look a lot alike, but I could tell they weren’t the same person. Of course I told her she couldn’t go in, and I took her sister’s ID, told her that her sister would have to come pick it up.”

Derek shrugged, “It’s policy. We can’t very well give her back the ID she’s trying to use to get into bars. So, I guess I sort of embarrassed her, what with me doing it in front of all the people that were crowded around outside. She decided to wait around until I left that night. She was that pissed. She waited for over six hours until I came stumbling out to my truck, dead tired from a long day.”

He expelled a huge breath before continuing, “I get out there, start to unlock my door and I feel someone slapping me in the back, not just a little slap either. More like the kind when two girls are really going at it, you know like in a cat fight. I mean she wasn’t using her fists, but they sure felt like punches. I turned around to see what in the hell was happening, because that’s what I thought, I was like what the hell? Anyway, I see this pretty little blonde-haired blue-eyed princess glaring at me, but behind that glare I could tell that she had been crying. I gotta tell you, it about broke my heart to see tears in those pretty little eyes.”

Ann was on the edge of her seat with his story, waiting anxiously to hear what happened next. She had to ask him to continue because for a moment he got lost in the memories.

“Sorry. I should have cursed, yelled or something, because damn, her slaps really hurt. Instead I grabbed her and held her close. And before you even ask, I have no freaking idea why I did it. It was the strangest thing. She was beating the crap out of me. For all I knew, she was a little delinquent, because, you know, she was trying to sneak in bars and all. But her tears, oh God, her tears were like a knife cutting through my heart. I just had an overwhelming feeling to hold her and comfort her. And the funny thing is, she didn’t push me away. She just held onto me and cried.”

“So why was she so upset? I mean you embarrassed her, but to be that upset? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, apparently there were a group of local kids that she had met earlier that day at the Stop-N-Go. She didn’t have any friends in town, and she was going to be here for three months, so she tried to become their friend. Only these kids just wanted to mess with her. They knew she was underage, and they also knew there was no way that she’d get into the Roadhouse. So, they told her that if she wanted to hang out with them, she had to find a way to get in. But, rather than me let her in, I took her ID, made some sort of comment about her being a little girl, and sent her on her way. I guess they razzed her pretty bad. So yeah, it might seem extreme to get that upset. But at the time I understood. I mean she was still so young, she had no friends and absolutely no one to talk to. By the way, I neglected to mention that her parents had the personality of a wet mop and pretty much treated her like she was a nuisance. So, she needed a friend and I took away her only hope of making any.”

Ann listened to Derek and tried to put herself in the girl’s shoes. Maybe it might have been a little humiliating, she thought. “So, then what happened?

“It took some doing, but I calmed her down a little bit and we talked. We both sat on the tailgate of my truck, and we talked until the sun came up. It was actually kind of nice. I’d never stayed out with a girl all night before and just talked. Somehow in the hours that passed, I ended up holding her hand. I’m not really sure who had initiated it, but it was nice. I followed her home, expecting to have to deal with her father. You know, your twenty year old daughter is out all night and she comes home in the morning with an older guy following her. I guess I figured there’d be hell to pay. But nothing even remotely close to that happened. Her parents were just coming out of the house when we pulled up. They just looked at her and told her that they hadn’t realized she wasn’t home. Then they said that she would have to find herself something to eat because they were going out to get something. Then they just left. No worries or concern over where she was, or the strange man that was with her. It was kind of sad.”

“And embarrassing. Seeing as how you were there to witness it,” Ann added.

“Yeah, it was. I could see it on her face, too. Only being with her a few hours and I could tell just by looking at her what she was feeling. So, I considered my options. One, I could say goodbye and leave. Or two, I could get out of my truck and give her a hug and ask her to breakfast.”

“Well, what’d you decide?”

Quinn just gave her a ‘oh please’ look. “What do you think that I did?”

She grinned. In the short time that she knew, Derek he was gallant if nothing else. He didn’t like it when women were upset about anything. “You took her to breakfast.”

He nodded. “I did. I took her to breakfast and afterwards, when I brought her home, I kissed her. It wasn’t sexual or passionate. It was just a simple little kiss. But I got to tell you, that little kiss packed one hell of a punch. Because at that very moment I was hooked. She was just so damn sweet. So pretty, she was every fantasy a man has when he pictures his future wife.”

Ann raised her eyebrows at that. “You knew that day that you wanted to marry her?”

“Hell yeah I did. She was amazing. I’m not saying that I actually fell in love with her then. But I was pretty damn close. Sort of like teetering on the edge, so to speak. Anyway, we spent the next several weeks dating. You know, getting to know each other. It was different with her. Every other woman I had dated I was sleeping with by the second date. But Sandi was different. And it was more than a little obvious that she was a virgin. I didn’t want to rush her. Lord knows we had plenty of opportunities. She stayed at my house all the time. Her parents never cared where she was. But, I usually just ended up holding her and cuddling with her.”