Both older men, red-faced and out of breath, jaws and fists clenched, stopped and turned to him.
“What the hell, Dad?” Tony said. “What is with the two of you lately?”
Demitrio turned to Tony Sr. “Why don’t you tell him, Tony.”
“I’d like to know, too,” Rob said. The last time Uncle Tony had been to their house, Rob showed up to find his mom in tears. He wanted to know why.
“Boys, this is between me and my brother,” Tony Sr. said. “There’s no need to be concerned—”
“Dad!” Tony said. “You were two seconds from beating the crap out of each other.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I beat the crap out of him,” Demitrio said, glaring at his brother.
“When you were kids maybe,” Rob said, “but you’re in your
sixties
. You could have a heart attack.”
“Did I miss the fun?”
Rob turned to see Leo, Nick’s dad, walking toward them.
“They’re fighting,” Tony said, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “
Physically
fighting.”
“It’s nothing to worry about, boys,” Leo said, laughing heartily. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I had to get between these two when we were kids. It’s that middle-child curse, I guess.” He stepped strategically between his brothers and gave each of them a slap on the back. “Come on, gentlemen, let’s go in my office and settle this.” He turned to Rob and his cousins. “You boys can head on out. I’ve got this.”
Reluctantly the three cousins walked to the elevator.
“So what do you think that was about?” Tony asked him.
“I don’t know,” Rob said. “But it’s been building for a while now. Things have been tense for a couple of months.”
“Don’t forget, Tony’s mom was arguing with your dad at Thanksgiving,” Nick told Rob. Sarah, Tony’s mom, used to date Rob’s dad before he joined the army. The fact that Tony Sr. married her shortly after he left had been a minor source of friction among the three of them over the years. Certainly, it was nothing they would come to blows over now, unless the dynamics of those relationships had changed….
“Tony, you don’t think that your mom and my dad…”
“Honestly, Rob, I don’t know what to think anymore. But things have seemed off with my parents, as well. I went to a New Year’s party with them and they seemed…I don’t know, out of sync, if that makes sense. They’re typically very physically affectionate with each other, and I barely saw them touch.”
“Maybe my dad can help them figure it out,” Nick said.
“Is your dad still sleeping with your mom?” Rob asked him.
Nick made a face. “Yeah. It’s bad enough knowing about it, but to actually see them…you know…” He shuddered involuntarily. “Talk about scarring a person for life.”
“That’ll teach you to barge into your mom’s house without knocking,” Tony told him.
“I think it’s pretty cool that after being divorced for so long, they reconnected,” Rob said.
“They do seem happy,” Tony told Nick. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but they were at the New Year’s party, too. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and they disappeared long before the ball dropped.”
“Regardless,” Nick said, “I’ll never get how two people who despised each other, and had a messy and uncivilized divorce that scarred all three of their children, could suddenly change their minds and hop in the sack.”
“I’m sure that if they’d had a choice, they would have preferred to be happy the first time around,” Tony said.
Nick shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. So long as I don’t have to see my dad’s bare ass again, they can be ‘happy’ all they want.”
“So, breakfast?” Tony said.
They said goodbye to Sheila as they passed the reception desk, then rode the elevator down to the lobby. Dennis, the security guard, nodded as they walked past.
“Who are you betting on in the playoffs?” Nick asked him, walking backward to the door.
“Steelers-Lions,” Dennis said. “And the Lions will take it.”
“No way! The Lions haven’t won a championship since what, the fifties?”
“Fifty-seven,” Dennis said. “But this is the year.”
Nick laughed. “Dream on. I say Steelers-Chargers, and the Steelers will take the championship.”
Dennis grinned and shook his head. “Keep dreaming, boss.”
Nick laughed as they walked out the door into the bitter wind. Parking was a bitch downtown, so they pulled up their collars and walked the three blocks to the restaurant. The pavement was slick, so it was slow-going, and by the time they got to the diner it was already filling up with the lunch crowd. Every seat was taken and there was a line of people ahead of them.
“Feel like waiting?” Tony asked.
Rob shrugged. “Could be a while.”
“I say we wait,” Nick said. “It’s too damn cold to go back out there.”
“Hey, Caroselli!” someone called. Rob followed the voice, cursing under his breath when he realized whom it belonged to.
Four
“I
s that Carrie?” Nick asked.
“That’s her,” Rob said. She sat alone in a booth near the back, and she was waving them over. She was still wearing the ugly suit, but she’d lost the shapeless jacket. She’d let her hair down so it fell in soft waves over the shoulder of a rose-colored shirt made of some sort of stretchy nylon that clung to her curves.
Tony’s mouth dropped open. “Holy hell. No wonder you picked her up. Look at her.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Her body is…wow.”
Yes, it was, and as much as he didn’t want to, Rob couldn’t help but look. Just as he couldn’t help it the other night either. In her clothes she was smokin’ hot, but out of them she was a goddess. A work of art.
But that was where the attraction ended.
“Looks like she wants to share her table,” Nick said.
“I’d rather wait for a table,” Rob told him. She had ruined enough of his day.
“Stop being a baby and go,” Tony said, giving him a shove from behind. “You’re going to have to get used to being around her.”
But not outside of a work scenario, Rob thought, grumbling to himself all the way to her booth. And while he could have turned and walked out, he refused to show defeat, to let her win. To drive him from a restaurant he’d eaten in weekly for the past ten years.
She smiled up at them as they approached. “Hello, gentlemen. I saw you walk up and thought rather than wait, you might like to share. I stood in line about twenty minutes myself.”
“We’d love to join you,” Nick said, flashing her his “Charming Nick” smile. He and Tony slid into the empty side of the booth, leaving Rob no choice but to slide in beside Carrie, which earned each of them a malevolent look.
The booths weren’t exactly spacious, and with her briefcase on the seat next to the window, there was no hope of putting any real space between them. She was so close he could feel her body heat, and every time either of them moved, their shoulders or arms bumped.
This day was going from bad to worse.
He refused to acknowledge the scent of her perfume, or shampoo, or whatever it was that had driven him mad the other night, or the lusty urges he was feeling as her leg brushed against his. The desire to run his hand up the inside of her thigh again, until he reached the garter holding up her stockings, had him shifting restlessly in his seat.
“Are we a little antsy?” Carrie asked him, but thankfully, before he had to come up with a viable excuse, the waitress appeared.
“Hey, boys,” she said, stopping at the table with a pot of coffee and four beat-up plastic cups of iced water. What the place lacked in class, it made up for in good food and quality service. “What can I getcha?”
Without even looking at the menu, they all ordered their usual breakfast, and after reviewing the menu, Carrie ordered the special, which was a lot of food for a woman her size.
“I take it you gentlemen come here often,” Carrie said, reaching across the table for a coffee creamer, her shoulder bumping against Rob’s.
“Best greasy spoon in the greater Chicago area,” Tony said. “How did you stumble across it?”
“On my way out I asked Dennis where I could get a decent breakfast.” She added a packet of artificial sweetener to her cup. “He told me to come here.”
If Dennis wasn’t such an exemplary employee, Rob might have considered that grounds for termination.
“So what do you think of Chicago?” Nick asked her.
“It’s very cold. And windy.”
“They call it the Windy City for a reason,” Tony said.
“I’ll bet you can’t wait to get back to the West Coast,” Rob said, and she shot him a sideways glance, as if to say,
Don’t you wish.
“I think I’ll like it here,” she said. “Though probably more when it warms up a little.”
“Do you know where you’ll be staying?” Nick asked.
“Not yet. I’m hoping to find a rental. I don’t suppose you know a good local agent?”
“My brother-in-law David is in real estate law,” Tony said, pulling out his phone. “He could probably give you the name of someone reliable.”
He found the number in his address book, and she entered it into her phone.
“I miss the days when we used to write things on paper,” Nick said.
“Have you got a piece of paper?” Rob asked, and grinning, Nick held up his napkin. “Pen?”
Nick felt his pockets, then frowned and said, “I used to carry one all the time.”
“I would be lost without my phone,” Carrie said. “My whole life is in this thing. Of course I keep it all backed up on my laptop, which I also could not live without.”
“So what kind of place are you looking for?” Nick asked.
“A two-bedroom apartment or condo, preferably furnished, in a building with a fitness room and a pool, or close to a pool. I like to swim every morning.”
“I think I may know just the place,” Nick said. “My wife, Terri, has a condo that she’s been thinking of putting on the market, but it would probably mean taking a loss. She had entertained the idea of renting it out, but she’s heard so many horror stories about bad tenants that she’s been hesitant. It has pretty much everything you would need, and there’s a fitness center with a pool a couple of blocks away. And it’s not too far from work.”
It also wasn’t too far from Rob’s loft, which didn’t exactly thrill him.
“It sounds perfect,” Carrie said. “I can pay her the full three months up front.”
“I’ll talk to her today and give you a call.”
“Sounds great,” she said, exchanging numbers with him, which irritated Rob even more. It was bad enough that she would be around for three months. Did she have to pretend to be so nice to everyone? Which she was clearly only doing to make Rob look like the bad guy.
“So, on the rare occasions that I might have a free day,” Carrie said, “what attractions would you gentlemen recommend? There are so many things to do in the city, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
His cousins tossed around suggestions like the planetarium and the aquarium and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
“How about you?” she asked Rob. “What would you suggest?”
“The Museum of Science and Industry.”
“Really,” she said, looking thoughtful. “For some reason I imagined your preferring someplace a little less…academic. Like a sports museum.”
“And you assumed that because, why? You know me so well?”
She looked amused, as if this was some big joke to her.
The waitress dropped their food off at the table and when Rob looked at Carrie’s plate, he could feel his arteries tighten. The special consisted of three eggs, four sausage links, hash browns, white toast and a stack of pancakes six inches high. A heart attack on a plate, his fitness instructor would call it. Which was why Rob had ordered his usual egg white vegetarian omelet, lean ham, tomato slices and dry whole wheat toast, of which he would allow himself half a slice. Unlike some people at the table, his goal was to live past his fortieth birthday.
“Do the three of you live in the city?” she asked them, and when her leg bumped his, he wrote it off as accidental, until he felt the brush of one shoeless foot slide against his ankle.
Was she coming onto him?
He shot her a sideways glance, but she was looking at Nick, chewing and nodding thoughtfully as she listened to him describe where each of them lived in relation to Caroselli Chocolate.
Okay, maybe it had been an accident. But what about the way she just happened to get syrup on her fingers, and instead of wiping them with a napkin, sucked it slowly from each digit, one at a time. Which of course reminded him of her sucking on something else.
He grabbed his iced water and guzzled half the glass.
“Not hungry?” Carrie asked, looking over at his untouched food. He’d been so busy obsessing over her that he hadn’t even thought about his breakfast.
“Letting it cool,” he told her, forking up a large bite and shoveling it in, burning the hell out of his tongue in the process.
“So I’m under the impression you three aren’t just cousins, but good friends,” Carrie said.
“What makes you think that?” Tony asked.
“I’m very intuitive about things like that.”
“Not so much when we were younger,” Nick said. “Mostly because of the age difference, but our family is very close-knit, so we saw each other constantly. But, yeah, we’re all pretty close now.”
“So, then I guess Robby told you that we had sex on New Year’s Eve.”
Rob dropped his fork halfway to his mouth, Nick choked on his eggs and Tony nearly sprayed the table with a mouthful of coffee.
“What makes you think I would do that?” Rob said, even though that was exactly what he had done.
She smiled serenely. “As I said, I’m intuitive about that sort of thing.”
“He may have mentioned it,” Tony said, shrugging apologetically to Rob.
“I hope he also mentioned that we didn’t know who the other was until this morning.”
“That was fairly obvious,” Nick said. “And you really don’t have to explain.”
“I prefer to get things out in the open. I wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong impression.”
“Of course not,” Tony said.
“Carrie,” Rob started, and she held a hand up to shush him.
“I’m not angry,” she said. “Men like to talk about their conquests, I get that. Hell, I called my friend Alice first thing the next morning. It’s not as if we ever expected to see each other again. I’d just appreciate if it didn’t go any further than this table.”