Me And Mr. I.T. (Kupid's Cove Book 2) (16 page)

I pulled my hand from his and leaned forward, folding them in front of me. “I’ve had a crush on you since I met you, Maltrand. It started out as just a ‘he’s cute and funny’ kind of crush, but the more time we spent together it became an ‘I want to get to know him better’ kind of crush.”

He rubbed my back slowly and I felt his warm touch through my thin shirt. “I would say that mirrors exactly how I’ve been feeling.”

I turned my head to look at him. “Really?” He nodded and I sighed. “I wish I had known that before I threw myself at you.”

His hand paused on the small of my back. “What are you talking about? You’ve never thrown yourself at me.”

I nodded sadly. “Yes, I did. That night you helped me home after I had been drinking. Honey bunches, remember?”

He snickered and his hand started moving again. “I didn’t see that as throwing yourself at me. I saw it as a woman who had way too much to drink trying to find solace with another human being. If you hadn’t been drunk I would have picked you up and carried you right to that bed without a second thought.”

I leaned back and looked at him from under my eyebrows. “Wait, you said you don’t sleep with women you work with.”

He leaned back in his corner and shook his finger at me. “No, what I said was, I don’t sleep with drunken women, especially drunken women I work with. If I thought for a moment you were in your right mind, I would have taken you up on that invitation. I’ve wanted you since the first time I laid eyes on you. Gideon was giving me a tour of the building and we walked in on you beating up the fax machine.”

His words made me laugh and the smile I had been trying to hide won out. “That dumb thing never worked right.”

“So if that’s how you feel, what is the reality part?”

“The reality is we can never be together that way,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “While all of this is sweet torture, I don’t want it to end. Once we find the thief and go back to Maui, I will have to quit my job and move away.”

He sat straight up and grabbed my upper arm. “What are you talking about? Why would you quit working for Gideon?”

“Ever tried to get over somebody while having to see them every day? It never works.”

He massaged my arm where he had held it tightly. “I think we need to back up some here, Ellie,” he said, finishing his brandy. “If we’re both feeling the same way, that we want to get to know each other better, why can’t we do that?”

“Because when you find out the truth about who I really am, as a whole, you’ll decide it’s not worth it. Then we both end up with broken hearts.”

“What makes you think I’ll decide you’re not worth it? Because some other guy did? Did someone break your heart? I didn’t think you were serious about that jerk you were dating a few months ago.”

“I wasn’t serious about him, or any of the other guys I’ve dated.” He motioned at me with his hands to keep going. “As long as I keep things casual I never get a broken heart when they leave, and they always leave.”

“Then they weren’t the right guys. That’s what they say, right?”

“That’s what they say, but even the right guy may find my issues more than they want to deal with. It’s one of those looks can be deceiving kinds of things.”

“This is where Hope comes into the picture, right? The way you knew what to do so she’d stop crying.”

I nodded. “I noticed the port wine stain on her face. I had the same one when I was a baby.”

“What does that have to do with her leg?” he asked, obviously confused.

“She also had one on her leg. Port wine stains have a lot of blood vessels in them and the limb will feel funny to a baby, almost like a pounding that overwhelms their coping mechanism. By wrapping it, the pounding lessens and allows them to be comfortable enough to sleep.”

“Did you have one on your leg, too?” he asked and I nodded. “Do you still have it?” I nodded again, biting my lip to keep it from trembling. “And getting close to me means you’ll have to show me at some point and then I’ll find it grotesque and leave?”

This time I gave him a shoulder shrug. “I suppose if you insist on leaving the light on when we have sex.”

He took my hand in his. “First off, I don’t have sex with a woman I love. I have sex with someone I don’t care about beyond stealing a few moments of companionship with them. Second of all, I’m not that shallow. I don’t fall in love with a pair of legs or a great rack. I fall in love with the whole person because of everything they are, not because one part of their body is considered to be some great attribute by the guys only out for sex.”

I pulled my hand from his and stood, walking to the window where I could see the ocean beyond the window. How I wished I could climb on a boat and just disappear, but that wouldn’t happen. This is my life and I have two choices, live it or waste it. Maybe it was time to stop wasting it and take a chance on living it.

“Everything I am isn’t that great when you put it all together, Maltrand. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s why Katie and I have a unique bond, and look at what she and Gideon are going through right now. Katie’s heartbroken and Gideon takes the blame for it. I don’t want you to feel the way Gideon is feeling.”

“And you don’t want to feel the way Katie is feeling,” he whispered.

“It’s too late. I’m already feeling what Katie’s feeling. I thought I could go through life just stealing a few moments of companionship from men. I thought sex with the lights off would be enough for me, forever.”

He stood and came to me, his hands holding my shoulders and his cheek against mine. “Now you want to fall in love, but you’re scared you’ll be the only one feeling that way.”

“No, now I’m in love and I’m scared I’m the only one feeling that way. The last two months have been hell. Even if I thought we stood a chance of being together, I blew my chance to present my best attributes to you. When I got drunk and moaned over some guy who didn’t even matter to me, I lost the opportunity to show you I’m worthy of being with,” I said, the tension in my voice caused by the tears threatening to fall. “After that night, I tried to avoid you and hoped I could do that long term, but it isn’t working. I can’t keep pretending.” I wrenched out of his arms and hurried toward the bedroom, hoping to get away from him before the tears fell, again. He called my name softly until I closed the door to the bathroom and closed him out of my life. I held a rag to my face, and the coolness soothed my tears. I knew there was nothing that would soothe my heart from the loss it endured when I walked away from him.

Chapter Thirteen

Mr. I.T.

I lay in the quiet room, draped in the silence of the night and the comfort of sleep. Only I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make my brain stop rewinding and playing my entire life back every time I closed my eyes. I would look down at the beautiful woman asleep on my chest and I wondered how she had such a hold on me. I realized that I’ve spent the last few months trying to get the attention of a woman I didn’t know I already had. Hers. Since that night in her apartment I haven’t looked at another woman, not out of any kind of misguided belief that Ellie was perfect, but because she was perfect for me. Regardless of what she thinks, our pasts don’t make us who we are. I’ve learned that one the hard way.

She thinks she’s not good enough to be my wife, real or fake. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I read between the lines. If we want to play that game, then I would say on the merit of the things I’ve done in my past, I’m not worthy of being her husband, real or fake.

“Are you watching me sleep?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

I chuckled a little and her head moved with my chest. “I might be, because I can’t sleep.”

“Probably because I’m squishing you,” she said, trying to lift her head, but I kept my hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not squishing me. I’m just trying to work through my past while staring at my future. It’s not an easy task.”

“Your future?” she asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “Is it really only one a.m.?”

I sat up against the headboard. “You’ve been sleeping for a few hours. Do you remember what happened last night?”

She looked down at her hands. “Of course, why wouldn’t I?”

I took the hands she was twisting and held them still. “You got a concussion a few days ago and sometimes that can make it hard for you to remember events in the short term.”

“And sometimes it can make it hard to keep your emotions in check. That’s what WebMD said.” Her lips pulled up in a half a quirk and I chuckled. Leaning in, I kissed those lips once slowly, to show her I care about how she feels.

“I keep hearing what you said before you ran away earlier.” She nodded and I rubbed her knuckles with one thumb. “It kills me to hear you say you aren’t worthy of being with. Darling, everyone has worth. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, in the past that can ever make me believe you aren’t the perfect woman for me. You’re worthy because God made you perfect for one person, me. I will convince you of that someday.”

“You’re so wonderful,” she whispered, running her hand down my face, “but none of that changes the fact that I’m not, nor ever will be, a normal woman. I’m used to it, and my family is used to it, but I wonder if any man could truly get used to it.”

“I want to know what everyone else knows, please,” I begged, holding her hands in mine.

She shook her head a little. “The only other people who know are Katie and Gideon, so you aren’t alone.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised that she had kept it all under wraps for this long. “Is that why you never go out without looking your best?” I remembered back to when she told me that before our first date, if you could call it a first date.

“I’ve always been self-conscious about how I look because of what I do. I suppose if I wanted to be a wallflower I shouldn’t have picked marketing to go into, but I’m good at it, so…” she shrugged one shoulder and I rubbed it.

“So, it made sense to go into it. You aren’t good at it, you’re great at it,” I said and her shoulder relaxed with my words.

“I only told Gideon one day because we were talking about a friend of his who was struggling. I should have known it was Katie, but I didn’t put two and two together. She told me the other day that he told her what I go through. It seemed to help her, so I guess it was worth it.”

“See, there’s that word again. Worth. It can mean a lot of different things, but you just proved me right.” She smiled a little bit and rubbed her face from sleep. “Help her with what, though?” I asked.

“It helped her understand that she isn’t alone in knowing she could pass a life altering genetic condition to her child.”

I took a deep breath and shook my head a little. “It’s time. I want you to tell me everything.”

“I don’t know how,” she cried, her chin quivering. “I promised myself when I was fifteen I would never tell another boy what was wrong with me ever again. I broke that promise to myself once already.”

I held her chin and looked into her eyes. “I’m not a boy, I’m a man, and you’re not fifteen anymore. Trust me with your story and I promise it will be worth it, because here’s the situation as I see it. I would be more than happy to lay you down right here in this bed and make love to you for the rest of the night without a second thought. That’s the God’s honest truth, but I know you would have more than second thoughts. You’d have four, five and six thoughts because you’d be worrying about what my reaction will be once I find out.”

She blew out a breath and brought her knees up, hugging them to her. “That’s true, especially if you wanted to leave the lights on.”

I laughed, not at her, but because she always had a way to release the tension. “I will be leaving the lights on,” I promised her, making sure to use ‘will’ so she understood it would be happening at some point in our relationship.

She stared at the curtains and began to tell the story. “I didn’t have the best start in life. While it’s true I was born and raised on the island of Oahu, I’m not a native. They think my mother was possibly part Japanese and my father was likely from the US military. My mother abandoned me at the hospital before she even took me home.”

“So your mom and the admiral aren’t your real parents?”

She shook her head. “No, they adopted me when I was four. They moved to Oahu for the Navy and mom worked as a nurse. Apparently, one day, she had to work on the pediatric floor because they were shorthanded. I had been in the hospital for several weeks for tube feeds and chronic ear infections. I lived in a home for disabled children, and they did the best they could, but I wasn’t an easy child. Mom found me in the far corner room, a tiny little thing, barely thirty-five pounds and I was already four. The first memory I have of her is sitting on her lap in a rocking chair while she sang to me in the hospital.”

“And she fell in love with your sweet little heart, right?” I asked, picking up her hand and caressing it softly.

“That’s the way she tells it. She got temporary custody and once they released me from the hospital she took me home. She probably saved my life just on happenstance. If she hadn’t come up to work on a floor she didn’t usually work on, I would eventually have been a proverbial lost child.”

I pulled her to me and hugged her. She leaned into me for a few seconds, as though spending too much time in my arms would derail her resolve to keep me out of her heart. “You’re not a lost child, though, Ellie. You’re a beautiful woman who has so much to share with the world, and so much love to give the right man.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” she said slowly.

“How do you look at it?”

“I remember the surgeries, the therapy, the pain, and the tears of my mother. I don’t want to be the reason for someone else’s tears.”

I held her out by her shoulders. “I don’t like being the reason for your tears. When you ran from me last night, and tried to use the water to cover the sobs I could still hear, it destroyed me. I don’t understand how you think you’re protecting me by not getting involved with me. As far as I’m concerned,” I said, holding up my wedding band, “I’m as involved as it gets.”

She twirled the band on her own finger as she struggled to put into words how she was feeling. “If I thought for a moment we could have the kind of relationship that involved nothing more than casual sex and dinners out, I would do it in a heartbeat, but I know that’s not how we would be together.”

I caressed her cheek, running a thumb over her right brow, a smile on my face. “No, you’re right, that’s not how we would be together. You already know what we would be together. We’re living what we would be together. We would be sassy and smart aleck, we would be Curly and Moe, and we would bang heads, and hold hands. I don’t see how anything that’s happened in the past could change how we feel now.”

“It wouldn’t change how I feel about you,” she whispered, shame filling her voice.

“But it will change how I feel about you?”

“It’s likely. See, when my mom found me in that hospital there was a reason I only weighed thirty-five pounds.”

“You had a cleft lip, right?”

She sat back in shock. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t, I was guessing, but after one look at your lip and where the scar is, I made a shot in the dark.”

“You hit the bulls-eye. I had a cleft lip, and palate. I was in pain a lot, and hungry all the time, because my cleft kept me from eating properly. I couldn’t speak, because the clefts kept me from using my tongue correctly. I needed surgery, but no one on the island performed that procedure, at least not at that time. My mom flew me to California and we stayed at Shriners Hospital for months. They fixed the cleft lip and palate and taught me how to eat again. When we came back to Oahu I stayed in therapy and eventually learned to speak and eat correctly.”

I rubbed my thumb over her eyebrow, something that comforted me more than her in the last twenty-four hours. “Does the eye have something to do with that, too?”

“Yup,” she answered, reaching one hand under her hair on each side and pulling on something. She held her hands out to me. In them laid two hearing aids. “These do, too. I had normal hearing when I was born, but the cleft palate caused middle ear infections to the point I lost most of my hearing in both ears. Without the hearing aids I have to lip read.”

“Those are tiny,” I said, inspecting them closer.

“Eh?” she asked like an old lady, cracking a smile and I laughed, motioning for her to put them back in.

She let her hair fall back over her ears once she put them in. “It’s why I leave my hair down all the time. It covers the aids and no one suspects a thing.”

“Why do you care if they suspect anything? Will what they think change your life?”

“While you think the answer is no, you’re wrong, because I’ve had it happen. People are funny and many have wrongly formed opinions about a person’s intellect if they’re different physically. If I presented myself as who I really am, without the contact, the aids, the spray tan and the camouflage, people might think I’m less than. I don’t want to be less than ever again. I lived that for so many years as a child. I won’t go back to it.”

“I’m starting to understand the connection you and Katie share,” I said and she nodded. I pulled her to me with my arm around her shoulders. “I’m going to tell you this now, and I’ll keep telling you this until you believe it. You can’t be less than anyone as long as you stay true to yourself, because there is only one you, therefore, there is no comparison.”

She looked up and ran a finger down my face. “You’re sweet, Maltrand. Maybe you’re right and I hide behind my camouflage too much.”

“If you feel better wearing the contact and the spray tan, then do it, but don’t use it as a way to shortchange yourself from having the kind of life you want. None of what you just told me changes anything as far as I’m concerned.”

I leaned over and rested my weight on one hand while my other one slid under her hair to the nape of her neck. She didn’t resist when I pulled her to me. When our lips touched, there was nothing but pure white light behind my eyes when she responded to my touch. She tipped her head allowing me to deepen the kiss as her arm came up around my back. I heard a soft sound of pleasure escape from the back of her throat that was uniquely her. I wanted to hear that sound every night when I kissed her goodnight at the end of a long day. I could feel myself losing control of my body’s reaction to her. I pulled myself back from the brink before I scared her, or took things too far.

Our lips fell apart and our foreheads went together as we held each other at the neck. “This is why I know we could never have a casual relationship. We’re too explosive together. It’s all or nothing for us.”

“Then it’s going to have to be nothing,” she whispered, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced.

“Why? Tell me why you can’t love me with everything inside you. Tell me why we can’t be together,” I begged softly.

She made a sound that reminded me of the strangled cry of a newborn. The one sound encompassed so much pain and terror I didn’t know how to comfort her. I kissed her again. My lips tried valiantly to quiet the voices of all the men who have kissed her before me, and left. She didn’t speak until I released my hold on her lips and neck.

“I know if I let myself fall for you, eventually you’ll end up in the same position Gideon is now. I see how he and Katie struggle with having kids, even though they talked about it before they got married. You’ll say you’re okay with it. You’ll say you don’t need anyone but me, but in the end, you don’t know that for sure.”

I leaned back and looked into her eyes. She believed what she was saying, and I couldn’t dispel her fear by telling her it wasn’t real. It was my job to show her the complete opposite is true. I had to follow my heart and trust that I would know the right things to say.