What a Man's Gotta Do (14 page)

“We did great tonight,” the sprayed-to-stay blonde said in her gravelled voice. “Things keep up like this, maybe Galen should think about expanding.”

Eddie slid bonelessly into the nearest booth, thinking long and hard about the merits of intravenous Vitamin E. “Maybe.”

“She couldn't do it herself, though. Even after she has the baby.
Especially
after she has the baby. She'd need someone else, full-time.”

Eddie yawned, scrubbing one hand over his face. “Uh-huh.” Maybe a ten-minute nap, right here…

“You got a lot of compliments tonight, especially on the vegetarian linguine.”

“Uh-huh.”

He heard Ellen's cackly laugh. “Hey. You alive down there?”

“'Pends on your definition of alive,” he mumbled, cheek in palm, eyes closed, realizing he had just about enough energy to feel real sorry for himself. He was going to do well to get himself up out of this booth, let alone get anything else up. All that lush softness, just waiting for him, and not a damn thing he could do about it.

He heard the door swing open. Ellen going back to the office, presumably. A few seconds later, it opened again.

“Now who do you suppose that is at the door?” she muttered, then slalomed around the mismatched tables and chairs to the front door. “We're closed,” she yelled through the glass. “Come back tomorrow.” Eddie heard a man's voice, asking something, but he couldn't stir up enough interest to listen carefully. “Tomorrow,” Ellen repeated. “He's gone home. Which is where I'm going,” she now said to Eddie, who hauled open one eyelid to peer at her as she shrugged into her coat. “You planning on spending the night in that booth?”

With a supreme effort, Eddie shook his head, pushing himself into something vaguely resembling an upright position. “Uh-uh,” he said on another enormous yawn as he stretched hard enough to make his spine pop. “Got me a date, as a matter of fact,” he said, and Ellen hooted with laughter.

“What you got,” she said, “is a problem. Or your date does, is any case. Well, hon, I'm off. Here's hoping tomorrow night's not quite so crazy, huh?”

A minute later, she was gone, as was everybody else. Eddie locked up, grateful to realize there was still some feeling left in his limbs after all, shut the lights, then slipped out into the frosty night. The sharp air slapped him in the face, waking him up some; by the time he walked the four blocks home, maybe he'd actually be more than one notch above comatose.

He saw the man immediately, standing under the streetlight on the corner. Middle-aged, stubby, wearing a dark parka and
knit cap, the end of a cigarette clutched between a gloved thumb and forefinger. Not that Eddie knew everyone in Spruce Lake by any means, but he sensed this guy wasn't a regular, especially as the regulars had no reason to hang out on Main Street in twenty-degree weather this late at night.

“Hey,” the man said, pitching the stub into the gutter.

Awake now, and on alert, Eddie stopped, nodded. “Can I help you with something?”

“You Eddie King?”

His stomach jumped. But, since he knew he wasn't in trouble with the law, and he seriously doubted he'd done anything to warrant the attention of a hit man, he answered. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

Craggy features shifted into a grin. “Heh, heh…one of the waitresses, she told me what you looked like, and I knew I hadn't seen anybody come out who'd fit that description, no matter what that lady said.” The man extended his hand. “I've been looking for you for a long time, Mr. King. Name's Tony Scalia. I'm a private investigator. And your father's gonna be one happy sonuvabitch when I tell him I finally hooked up with you.”

 

“He owns a construction company in Albuquerque,” Eddie said, clearly too tired and too distracted to notice Mala wasn't wearing a bra underneath her velour lounging pajamas. “Did I tell you that?”

“Mmm-hmm.”
At least three times,
Mala thought but did not say, as she moved to a plate the last batch of cookies which, she'd remembered right before Eddie's arrival, she'd promised to send to Lucas's class tomorrow. For the past half-hour, she'd measured and stirred and baked and listened to the stunned ramblings of a man who would have been her lover by now, had it not been for one P.I.'s lousy sense of timing. Although, to tell the truth, she wasn't all that surprised that things hadn't worked out. The whole time she was wrapping presents, taking a bubble bath, shaving her legs, she couldn't shake the feeling that it would all be for naught. And that was before she remembered the cookies.

But it was okay, she told herself, far less disappointed than she'd thought she'd be. All thoughts—well, most of them, anyway—of hanky-panky flew out the window the instant she'd opened her door to Eddie's nearly incoherent apology/explanation. She'd taken him by the hand to tug him inside, only he'd given her this bemused little smile and shaken his head.

“Not tonight,” he'd said, and she said, “I know. Come in anyway,” and after a brief inner struggle, he had. She'd quietly fussed over him, given him hot chocolate, like she might have one of the kids, made him sit, made him talk. The drink had gone pretty much untouched, but he'd sat, occasionally scratching the pup's tummy with the toe of his boot, and he'd talked.

Well, as much as Eddie King was going to talk. There were a lot of “and then he saids” and virtually no “and you know what I feels?” to balance out the narrative with a little man-on-the-street reaction. Not that she was surprised. Irked, yes, but not surprised. Of course, it wasn't as if she could say a whole lot, considering she was the same way. But she hoped it was at least doing him some good, having a sounding board, having someone to tell what he'd just learned about his father. That Rudy Ortiz had been looking for his son off and on for years, but limited funds and Eddie's constant moving had made the search difficult, until an unexpected windfall apparently gave Eddie's father the freedom to tell the P.I. not to stop looking until he found his son.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked gently, figuring it was time for him to move past shock phase into action.

Something stirred in those clear blue eyes, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. Then he shrugged. “Dunno. Nothing, probably.” Then he frowned. “And how come you're baking at this time of night?”

“Because I didn't remember until about a half hour before you walked in the door that I'd promised to bring cookies for Lucas's class tomorrow.”

The frown deepened. “Y'all never heard of Oreos up here?”

“Bite your tongue. My mother
never
did store-bought.”

He settled his jaw in one palm, doing that puzzled look men
were so good at. “You're not your mother, Mala. And I guarantee you the kids'd be just as happy with Oreos.”

She skimmed the last cookie off the sheet with her spatula, set it on a plate with about a thousand of its friends, and frowned pretty hard herself.

Oreos, huh?

“It's a woman thing,” she said, and he snorted.

“No, it's a
you
thing.”

She decided to ignore that, pushing the plate in Eddie's direction. “They're best when they're still warm.” She waited until Eddie's face had assumed a sufficiently rapturous expression—
yeah, right: Oreos, my fanny
—then said, “You're not even remotely curious? About your father?”

He swallowed, then shot her a mildly ticked look. “Why should I be?” Okay, so maybe not quite that mild. “The man walked out on the woman he got pregnant. He never tried to find us when it might have done some good. So why now, after nearly forty years?”

She plopped herself in the chair at right angles to his, snitched one of her own cookies. “Maybe that's what you need to find out.”

“I don't need to know anything I don't already.”

“But you don't
know
anything, except the bits and pieces the P.I. told you tonight. You don't know why he left, for one thing.”

“And what earthly difference would it make to me now? Just because he maybe wants to appease his own conscience doesn't mean I should make it easy for him.”

“I didn't say you should. I'm only saying—”

“Mala, honey—didn't I tell you once there's no use arguing with a man who's not going to give in?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Oh, Lord,” he muttered, then swiped another cookie from the plate. But he didn't eat it. “He didn't say he wanted to see me,” he said softly, and her heart bled at the fresh, raw pain in his voice he was trying so hard to hide. “Just said he wanted to know where I was, that I was okay.”

“So the ball's in your court.”

After a beat, he said, “If he'd wanted to make contact, wouldn't he have said so?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe, after all this time, he's just as afraid as you are of being rejected.”

Bitterness flared in his eyes. “I'm not
afraid
to see him. I don't want to. There's a difference.”

Liar,
she wanted to say. “Not as much as you might think.”

He almost laughed. “You are one insufferable woman, you know that?”

“Yes, I do. But so did you before you walked in here tonight.”

One eyebrow hitched. “As I recall, I didn't. You dragged me in here.”

“And you stayed.” His brows dipped a tad at that. “So now you have to pay the price, which is listening to my advice.”

“Which is, I suppose, that you think I should haul my butt to Albuquerque to see a man who didn't even care enough to go after the woman who was carrying his child?”

She opened her mouth to say something like,
Well, duh, and how else do you think you're ever going to work through all this crap if you don't confront your father and find out what the hell happened?
Except an angel of the Lord, or somebody, smacked those words right out of her mouth, replacing them with, “I'm just saying you should keep an open mind. That's all.”

Then she stood and held out a hand to help him up, since he looked perilously close to becoming fused to her kitchen chair. “And that you should go upstairs before you pass out and go to bed. Alone,” she added before he had a chance to object.

On a groan, he stood, trying to stifle a yawn. Then he hooked his hands on his hips in that way he had that drove her crazy, giving her one of those half smiles of his that drove her crazier, which was definitely not fair. Especially as he swayed a little when he said, “You're not gonna have sex with me because I said I won't go see my father?”

“No. I'm not gonna have sex with you because I'm not into necrophilia.” She turned him around, aimed him toward the
hallway. “Go to bed, Eddie. My libido's waited three years. It can wait a little longer.”

She prodded him the rest of the way toward the door, Grateful trotting happily beside them. But when they got there, he somehow twisted around to bracket her between his arms against the wall. Well, her heart rate kicked up quite nicely at that, boy. Especially when he grinned down at her, all tousled and grizzled and sleepy-sexy.

“Um…what are you doing?”

“At the moment?” He shrugged. “Thinkin' about how pretty you are. And how you're one of the nicest gals I've ever known. And that, come to think of it, maybe I'm not all that tired.” His gaze drifted south, then he got this cute little puzzled look on his face. “When did you take off your bra?”

“About an hour before you got here. And it's taken you this long to notice, bud, I think this has lost cause written all over—”

It
got lost in the kiss that swooped down out of nowhere and opened up a world of possibilities she wouldn't have considered even two minutes before. Even half asleep, the man kissed better than most other men fully awake, and just like that—bam!—anticipation blossomed into a hot, sweet,
mm-mm-good
knot between her legs. So she wriggled and shimmied and looped her arms around his neck, letting him have at it, at
her,
whereupon he began a leisurely and thorough investigation of her neck.

“I sure do like the way you smell, Miss Mala,” Eddie murmured from somewhere around her clavicle, and she smiled and murmured, “Same here,” except then he said, “Hell. I probably smell like sauteed garlic.”

She laughed, thinking,
Gee, whiz, I'm having fun,
then said, “Hey. Some of us get off on sauteed garlic.”

“Speaking of getting off…” Somebody's finger—and hey, it wasn't hers—casually sauntered into her cleavage, joining with a thumb—which wasn't hers either—to toy with her top button. Except then the person attached to the fingers yawned.

Now she sighed. “Eddie, old boy—I hate to dent your male ego, but you are
too
tired to do this.”

He stopped nuzzling and sauntering and otherwise wreaking havoc with her…everything to give her a look that was at once dead serious and seriously thrilling. “To be an active participant, maybe. But I seem to recall promising you something tonight. And damned if I don't intend to deliver, one way or the other. Right here. Right now.”

Her breath left her lungs in a sort of choked wheeze.

“Here?”

“I think asking me to move might be pushing it.”

He was, however, doing a very efficient, one-handed job of undoing the little satin buttons on her jammies with those long, slender fingers of his. The only light came from a lamp in the living room, so it wasn't as if he'd be able to see much, but despite her best intentions, one or two panicked thoughts shot through. Except then he got the last button undone and slowly, reverently, brushed back the opening to reveal her 40 D's in all their glory.

She could have sworn tears pooled in his eyes. Then he let out a long, rapturous, and—she thought—blissful sigh.