What a Man's Gotta Do (21 page)

“That's more like it,” Eddie said, pushing himself off the bed to stand at the edge farthest from her, only to dodge the pillow now sailing in his direction.

“God, you are such a man,” she said, but she didn't seem any too upset about that fact. Nor did she seem particularly aware that the sheet had slipped.

It was everything Eddie could do not to rip off his clothes and crawl right back under those warm, sex-and-perfume scented covers and lose himself once again in all that softness and laughter and generosity. They'd even managed to get through this time without scrapping over something. Although, to tell the truth, it kind of got his blood going when they argued, made him feel like…like maybe she really gave a damn.

His heart racing, Eddie grabbed his lined flannel shirt from the chair by the bed and shrugged into it, only to find himself once again bending over Mala, his hands braced on the mattress.

“You're incredible, Miss Mala,” he whispered, his insides cramping all over again at her smile, as pleased and ingenuous as a child's. Then the smile softened, the expression in those yellow-green eyes shooting straight to where he'd packed his soul away in dry ice, a thousand years ago.

“So are you, Eddie,” she said. “And you haven't answered my question.”

“I know I haven't,” he said, straightening.

“It's just a Superbowl party, for heaven's sake….” She threw back the sheet and got out of bed, tucking all those sweet curves into that ugly robe of hers. “And there will be so many people crammed into my parents' little house, nobody'd even know you were there.” She yanked the tie closed on the robe, then giggled.

“What's so funny?”

“Me,” she said with a huge grin, padding over to him and slipping her arms around his waist. “I just made love in broad daylight. Wow. I'm getting downright decadent in my old age.”

Eddie waited for the familiar feeling of suffocation to claw at his lungs, more startled than not when it didn't come. But it would, if not now, then later, when he least expected it.

It always did.

He gave her a nice, slow, we-just-had-incredible-sex-in-the-middle-of-the-day kiss, then an extra one on top of her head for good measure. “So. When's this party?”

Her eyes brightened. “You'll go?”

He kissed her on the nose. “I'll think about it. Don't want your folks to go getting any wrong ideas about us, right?”

Her expression unmistakeably dimmed, even as she crossed her arms underneath her breasts and gave him one of her take-no-bull looks. “They won't. After all, you live upstairs, you're free that day and you're nuts about football. Inviting you is just the logical, not to mention polite, thing to do. There's nothing to be nervous about.”

He dropped into the chair, thought about that as he yanked on his boots. Thought more about the way Mala's robe was gaping open like that. “The only thing making me nervous,” he said as he got up, “is the condition I'm gonna be in if I don't get out of here within the next five seconds.”

Her wicked laughter followed him as he headed out of the room and toward the front door. He'd just reached for the knob when he heard, “Oh, Eddie…?” in a gravelly, singsong voice behind him.

Against his better judgment, he turned. Mala stood in front of the stairs, pure, unadulterated trouble blooming in her great big eyes as she whipped open the front of her robe. “We'll be waiting for you,” she said in what he was sure was meant to be a sultry voice, except she collapsed into helpless laughter before she finished getting the words out.

On a groan, he zipped out the door, slamming it behind him.

But he was grinning like a dadburned fool all the way to work.

 

She stood at the living room window like some lovesick teenager, watching him fold that long, lean body that had so recently been folded around hers into his car. If she had known that sex could really be this much fun, that it really was possible to find a lover who could be both tender and passionate, that this wasn't just
Redbook
hype, she'd've set her sights a damn sight higher to begin with.

Now that her mother knew about…things, she'd bugged Mala half to death about inviting Eddie to the Superbowl party, to encourage him to feel more like one of the family. When Mala finally took the bull by the horns and pointed out that Eddie was leaving in a few months, no matter what, her mother had only shrugged and smiled.

If you had to pin down why the human race had survived as long as it had, Mala mused, it would have to be because women were unshakeably optimistic.

 

The Koleskis' driveway looked like a used car lot, as did several of the houses Eddie had passed on the ten block walk from Mala's house. Folks took Superbowl Sunday seriously around here, looked like. It had already been dark for some time, but an overflow of kids of all shapes, sizes and hair colors had spilled out into the small, chain-link-fenced front yard, whooping and shrieking their heads off as they played a football game of their own in the deeply shadowed light spilling from the porch. Carrie spotted Eddie and made a beeline for him, chattering a mile a minute about heaven-knew-what, but Eddie noticed that Lucas was hanging back in the shadows, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. Eddie could see that the kid was obviously torn in two, wanting to get involved at the same time he was afraid to.

Eddie looked up at Mala's folks' front door as he sidestepped the kids to get there. Yeah, he could relate to that, boy.

And had been, before he was even as old as Lucas, Eddie realized. Maybe he'd handled his own fear of rejection, of being hurt, differently from Lucas, but when it came right down to it,
whenever he looked at Lucas it was like looking at old movies of himself at that age.

He was still watching the little boy and puzzling over this when the front door swung open. Eddie whirled around to run smack into Mala's brother's steady, green-eyed gaze.

Eddie had met him on occasion, when Steve and Sophie had brought their brood into the restaurant, but it always startled him just how damn big the guy was. So when, like a big old rottweiler wagging its tail, a smile branched across Steve's face, that went a long way toward easing Eddie's mind.

“Eddie, hey! Mala told us you might stop by! Come in, come in—” Steve backed away from the door, which led directly into a small, very crowded, very blue living room with an enormous TV at one end. Right on Eddie's heels, all the kids trooped in, flopped wherever they could find a spot on the floor. “Wanna beer?”

“Yeah, sure, that'd be great.”

Steve disappeared toward the sound of female cackling coming from the back of the house, leaving Eddie standing at the back of the packed room with his hands in his jeans pockets, trying not to look so much like a bump on a log.

Except at that precise moment, Mala spotted him. Her mouth dropped in surprise, then she jumped up from where she was wedged on the sofa between her father and a tall, spiky haired teenager Eddie recognized as one of Steve's soon-to-be-adopted wards. Wearing a loose white sweater and jeans, she wriggled her way through the crush of male bodies and over to Eddie, her face lit up brighter than the Christmas lights he'd finally gotten around to taking down a couple days ago. For a moment, he thought she might hug him, only to realize there was no way she'd do a thing like that. Not here, and certainly not with a dozen pairs of eyes riveted to them.

“I really didn't think you'd come.”

“I didn't know I was going to, up until a little bit ago.”

She reached out to briefly squeeze his arm, then said, “Well, I think you pretty much know everyone who's here. Steve and Sophie and my parents, of course. And all the kids. And—oh, wait a minute.” She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled over the din. “Hey, Alek!”

At her call, a man with hair darker than Eddie's looked over, then stood, which is when Eddie realized he was cuddling a baby not a whole lot bigger than little Sam Farentino. Stepping over assorted children sprawled on the small patch of wall-to-wall carpet crammed between the coffee table and the TV, the man approached Eddie and Mala, a broad grin splitting handsome, angular features that looked vaguely familiar.

“Eddie King, Alek Vlastos, my brother's brother-in-law. Sophie's brother.”

“Oh, right, that accounts for why you looked familiar.” With a smile of his own, Eddie stuck out his hand before it occurred to him that this just wasn't any old relative-by-marriage, but a real live prince, standing here with baby spit up on his expensive sweater, surrounded by cans of domestic beer and bowls of chips, salsa and pork rinds. And looking just as happy as a clam about it, too.

The prince adjusted the sleeping baby on his shoulder, took Eddie's hand. “Ah, the chef, yes?” Laugh lines branched out from the corners of pale silver eyes, their gaze direct and honest. After a brief, strong shake, he said in his foreign-sounding accent, “Luanne and I stole an hour to ourselves and had dinner at
Galen's
the other night. It was superb.”

“Thanks. That means a lot, coming from you.”

The grin broadened. “Mala tells me you're from Texas?”

“Yes, sir, I am. Originally, anyway. I haven't been back there for some time.”

“We just came from there. My wife was born in Sandy Springs, have you heard of it?”

“Matter of fact, I spent a summer there once. Long time ago, though—”

Then Steve shoved a can of beer into Eddie's hand, and Alek excused himself to go change the baby, and Mala told Eddie if he didn't go back to the kitchen to say hi to her mother, Bev would have both their hides.

So he did, since he was rather partial to his hide, and Bev swooped him into her arms like he'd just come back from the wars. Then she introduced him to Luanne Vlastos, a very pretty brunette who looked and sounded like she should be up for a country music award, and the whole time he was talking to her,
he was trying to come to terms with her being a princess. Then Sophie came in, followed by Mala, who slyly skimmed her palm across his butt when nobody was looking, nearly making him snort beer out his nose.

By this point, he decided there were far too many female bodies crammed into the tiny kitchen—although he burned for one of those bodies so bad, he was like to self-combust—so he opted to go back to the living room and the game. Except when he stepped out into the hallway, he thought he heard crying coming from one of the rooms down the hall. Kid's crying.

He thought about going back to the kitchen to tell somebody, only to realize that, with all these kids, it probably would make more sense to find out whose kid it was first. Otherwise, there'd likely be a stampede.

The whimpering was coming from behind a partially closed door near the end of the hall. Eddie slowly pushed open the door, saw Lucas sitting with his back to the door on a twin bed with a dark blue bedspread on it. His little shoulders were shaking something fierce, making something snap inside Eddie.

“Hey, buddy,” he said quietly so as not to scare the boy. He walked into the room—a half-second's glance at all the sports trophies and what-all told him this had been Steve's room, once upon a time—and around the bed, lowering himself onto the edge of the mattress. “What's up?”

Lucas skootched away from him, his arms knotted tightly over his middle. “Go 'way,” he said, but not like his heart was really in it.

“You want your mama?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“You hurt or something?”

He shook his head.

“Somebody say somethin' to you, hurt your feelings?”

After a second, the boy sucked in a long, shuddering breath and said, “Dylan called me a baby 'cuz I said I didn't wanna play football.”

“Dylan…that's Steve's youngest boy, right?”

He nodded.

“But isn't he younger than you?”

Lucas swiped his sweatshirted sleeve across his nose. “Yeah. But he's tougher 'n' me, too.”

“Says who?”

“Everybody. Carrie calls me a weenie-baby 'cuz I cry so much.”

“You ever see her cry?”

“Not much.”

That figured.

“Well, buddy…”

Lucas's face jerked up. “An' you think I'm a baby, too, huh?”

“Well…”
Oh, boy.
“You do kinda tend to get real upset about things that aren't really all that important.”

“You mean 'cuz it's not okay for a boy to cry?”

“Didn't say that. Sure it's okay for a boy to cry, if the occasion warrants it.”

“You really mean that?”

“Wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it. Shoot, it's even okay for a grown man to cry from time to time. Just not every time he gets a little scrape or bumps something, y'know?” He leaned over, whispered, “That kinda gets on people's nerves, if you wanna know the truth.”

Lucas seemed to think this one over for a bit, then said, “Bet
you
don't.”

“Well, I suppose it has been a while. But that doesn't mean I can't. Or won't, ever again.” Then he said, before the conversation got any nearer a sore spot Eddie hadn't even know existed until about two minutes ago, “So…how come you don't wanna play football?”

Lucas just sat and stared at his knees.

“You think it's dumb or something?”

“Nuh-uh. I think it's way cool. But…I'm scared of gettin' hurt.”

“That's understandable. Football can get kinda brutal.”

He looked up at Eddie, his eyes all watery behind his glasses. “An' I can't always catch the ball, which makes the other kids get mad at me and yell at me an' stuff. Especially Carrie. An'
my glasses get knocked off sometimes, an' then I can't see when the kids are comin' at me.”

“Yeah, I can see where that could be a problem. But you know, it doesn't make you a baby, avoiding something that could get you hurt.”