Hunkering down beside her, Gabe took the fork, though still obviously reluctant. He wasn’t wearing anything warmer than a pair of jeans and a denim workshirt.
“You’re not cold?” she asked.
He shoved the unmarshmallowed end of his fork in the sand and then reached into his back pocket. “I brought a hat,” he said, and pulled the beanie over his hair. She’d made it for him months ago, in the blue-and-gold colors of his alma mater. As far as she’d known, he’d thrown the thing out. There was a matching extra-long woolen scarf, but she’d never seen it again either.
She shot another glance at him. It gave her a silly little thrill to see him wearing something she’d made with her hands. He picked up his fork and shoved the tines into the hottest part of the fire.
“Why am I not surprised you go straight for flame?” she asked, as the white confection lit and started to burn.
He brought it to his mouth and blew on the marshmallow to put out the little fire. It looked more like a lump of coal than a treat.
“Who gets to eat something gooey and sweet first?” he asked, and to prove his point, he created a graham cracker and chocolate sandwich, biting into it just as she was turning her fork yet again.
“You’ll burn your tongue,” she warned, worrying he’d selected the speedy method in order to hurry back to his original plans for the evening.
His next words were somewhat muffled by the sticky treat. “I survived your kiss, didn’t I?”
That shut her up for an uncharacteristic ten minutes. But maybe her silence was as effective as his curiosity, because Gabe stuck by her side on the blanket. Of course, knowing him, it was probably the sugar that kept him from running off. They made s’mores to the sound of the surf, Gabe’s cooking style enabling him to out-eat her three-to-one.
She was licking chocolate from her thumb when he groaned and fell back onto the blanket. “I’m warning you, getting sick is another possibility.”
“But you won’t have a headache later, which makes it so much better than the vice you were heading for tonight.”
He didn’t move. “What makes you think that?” he asked slowly.
“Jay called me. He said he stopped in to get swordfish steaks for his and Nikki’s dinner and that you were . . . in a mood that told him there was trouble brewing.”
“I was in a mood because my manager, Charlie, told me at four this afternoon that he’d forgotten an appointment, which meant I’d have to stay and close.” A long moment passed. “Ah. I smell a second conspiracy.”
“I’m not the only person who sees what’s going on with you, Gabe. Charlie worries, too. And Jay was concerned enough to call me.”
“I’m surprised he did,” Gabe admitted.
“Why?” Though she’d known her almost-brother-in-law was reluctant and had heard Nikki in the background objecting and cautioning throughout the phone call.
Tell her I can keep him off a barstool
, Cassandra had told Jay,
while keeping myself out of trouble
. While keeping her emotions unengaged. “Why would Jay be reluctant to call me?”
“In a few weeks you’ll be related by marriage, Froot Loop. A good man does the right thing for family.”
With a sigh, Cassandra lay back on the blanket, mimicking Gabe’s pose. Overhead, the swathe of the Milky Way lay like a thin film over the twinkling stars, just as she’d heard Jay’s concern for her coating his words during their conversation. He did care. Nikki and Juliet and Noah as well. It was exactly what she’d been seeking after her mother went off on her global adventure. Family ties to take away her loneliness. Her feeling of rootlessness.
What a success! Her sisters were everything she’d dreamed of since childhood . . . and yet she hadn’t updated that dream once coming to understand about husbands and marriage. Both of those changed the relationships she could have with her siblings.
Not that she didn’t want Nikki and Juliet to find their men and matrimonial happiness. And if she wanted the same for herself, well, Edward popped the question on a biweekly, if increasingly peevish, basis. He didn’t take her “no” for an answer, nor did he seem to believe her when she said she liked running her own business and was not interested in closing it or selling it so she could devote herself to becoming his devoted wife.
“Where did you meet Edward anyway?” Gabe asked.
Had she said his name out loud? Cassandra frowned. “It was before you owned the fish market . . . I met him there. He was with his mother and his two sisters. They’d gone for a Sunday drive and stopped in for lunch.”
“Ah,” Gabe said.
“ ‘Ah’?” She glanced over at him. The firelight and the starlight illuminated his chiseled features but didn’t make clear his expression.
“Sisters? A mother who goes on Sunday drives with her children? All you’ve ever wanted, Cassandra. Can’t-Take-No-for-an-Answer Edward was just a bonus. Or, as we know now, just an ass.”
She scowled at Gabe, resenting his flip, beachside analysis. “So, if we’re into swapping facts and then making something more out of them, where did
you
meet your wife?”
“What?”
Yeah, that shoe didn’t feel so comfortable on the other foot, did it? But she refused to back off. Gabe’s daughter and wife—particularly his wife—were taboo subjects she’d been tiptoeing around as long as she’d known him. She wasn’t any good at it, not really, no better at it than she was at keeping her emotions unengaged when it came to Gabe.
Because here she was, despite her promises to Nikki, lying next to him, her body aware of every inch of his body next to hers. And worse, her heart was pounding and her lungs were tight as she brought up the woman whose ghost had always hovered between them.
Her failure to keep her emotions unengaged made her voice sharp. “Where did you meet her? Lynn. We can say her name, right?”
Lynn. We can say her name, right?
Yet it was another of those unspoken words in Gabe’s vocabulary.
Lynn. Maddie. Daughter. Wife.
The s’mores sugar buzz had done something to dilute the day’s earlier grim mood. With the darkness still hovering all around him, he’d been forced to put off his next bender because of staffing problems. But now, lying beside Cassandra and with the taste of chocolate and marshmallow on his tongue, the voice in his head was muffled and those verboten names slid into his consciousness without the usual wrenching pain. God, it felt good. It felt like he could breathe, and maybe even live a little.
He stared up at the sky. The stars overhead looked like the surface of the play table after his little girl had been into her craft box. The mess of sequins and glitter would cling to her small fingertips and be sprinkled like fairy freckles across her short nose.
Look, Daddy, I made you a card. Mommy’s mad that you’re late, but I’m not.
“Lynn was mad the first time I met her, too,” he murmured.
“What?” Cassandra said. She scooted closer to him on the blanket and he could feel the warmth of her shoulder brushing his. The black mood moved even further away.
“Lynn was mad the first time I met her,” he repeated.
“I can sympathize,” the woman beside him said, with a teasing nudge to his side. Now her whole arm was against his. “What did you do to tick her off?”
It startled him to realize that he could smile, thinking about it. “I was riding my bike near campus and mistook her for someone I knew. I came up behind her, and as a joke, when I passed by I swatted her on the butt.”
“But it was the wrong butt.”
Cute all the same, he remembered, but yes, the wrong butt. “When I looked back to laugh at my friend, I was looking into the fuming face of my future wife.”
“So what did you do?” Cassandra asked. “Leap off your bike, drop to one knee, and propose right on the spot?”
“Not even close,” he said, recalling his embarrassment. “I put on the afterburners and pedaled away as fast as my legs would carry me.”
“And?” She nudged him again, and then the back of her hand brushed the back of his. Hers was encased in some sort of half-mitten thing that left her fingers bare. Their pinkies twined. “What happened then?”
Gabe glanced over and saw the moonlight washing Cassandra’s beautiful face with a silver light. Like the sugary s’mores, the sight of it zapped a jolt of energy through his system. But she was his friend, his platonic, assuredly unpregnant friend, and it would be wise to remember that. “She caught up with me at the next stoplight.”
“Then gave you a piece of her mind,” Cassandra finished for him.
“Not to mention her phone number, before all was said and done,” he added, and realized he was smiling again. “Believe it or not, I used to have a surfeit of charm.”
“You’ve proved that a time or two,” she said, her voice light.
Looking back up at the sky, he threaded the rest of his fingers through Cassandra’s. She was such a pretty liar, because he’d never tried to charm her. He’d never tried with Cassandra at all.
It made him feel regretful and protective—the former on his own behalf and the latter on hers. He wished he could give her more at the same time that he wanted more for her. Yet here he was, already hand in hand and unable to move away from her slender fingers and warm body.
“So was it wonderful?” she asked softly. “The marriage? Making a family with Lynn and Maddie?”
He stiffened, the wistful note in Cassandra’s voice piercing that chink in his armor she’d been able to find so easily of late. The stab hurt like shit and only served to piss him off as his lungs tightened again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh, Gabe.” Her fingers squeezed his. “I . . . I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Damn right,” he ground out. Damn right, because that way lay danger.
“But don’t you think—”
“No,” he said. Implacable. Completely certain that he didn’t want to talk about his marriage, that he didn’t want to share a second of it.
She looked over. He could feel her sympathetic gaze, but he kept his own away from hers, determined not to fall victim to the concern he was certain he’d find in her big blues. Next thing you’d know he’d be reassuring her, rewriting history and telling his own lies, anything not to extinguish the stars reflected in her eyes.
Or worse, he’d tell the truth, and shatter her illusions forever.
Since when had it become so important to him that Cassandra keep her confidence in love and forever afters? Or was it her image of him as the perfect husband that he didn’t want to damage?
Her gaze was still resting on him, he knew it, and he couldn’t resist the lure any longer. Turning his head, he found himself nose to nose with her, their mouths inches apart, his cheek resting on a cool length of her rippling, perfumed hair.
He wanted her. Yes, she was his friend, but he still wanted to fist his hands in that hair and roll onto her body. Cassandra would cradle his cock between her thighs and he could rock them both away, far away from the truths and the danger that being this close to each other wrought. Funny, but it suddenly seemed like sex was the weapon that he knew would keep emotions between them at bay.
With his body, he could put off honesty.
“Gabe . . .” she whispered.
And he could almost admit to himself that those words were just his own lie to give himself permission to taste her again, to touch her again, to feel her warmth. Using his free hand, he brushed her hair away from her face. A strand was caught in the corner of her mouth, and he worked it free, seeing how her breath hitched at his gentle touch.
He was such an asshole, he thought to himself, as he gave up the struggle and leaned in to take her mouth.
She turned into his body and pressed closer as her lips opened to his invasion. He slid his tongue in her mouth and stroked it against hers, soft and sure, until he heard her moan. Then he couldn’t leave it soft anymore. Thrusting hard into the heated cavern of her mouth, he slid his hand along the indentation of her waist to her hip and then her rounded ass. She moaned again and he tucked her hips against his, grinding his cock against the cushioned mound of her sex.
At their feet, the fire crackled, and he could smell the smoke, but both were almost drowned by the sound of the blood rushing through his veins and the delicious fragrance of Cassandra, her lemony skin and her flowery hair.
He wanted to wrap himself in her and take them both away. Driven by the image, he inched up her sweater to bare the warm skin of her belly and then her breasts, her bra covering their abundance. His hand cupped one and squeezed with a gentle pressure and Cassandra bowed into his body and his touch, her mouth widening to take the deeper thrust of his tongue.
Then he left her lips to run his along her soft cheek, her slender neck, the pulse point that thrummed with excitement. They were both excited, aroused, and he couldn’t deny that it was only harder to resist her every time they got this close.
But he couldn’t worry about it, not when her skin was so hot and her little whimpers such a turn-on, not when she was chanting his name with such sweet desperation.
“Gabe.” Her breath hitched. “Please, Gabe.”
He caught her earlobe between his teeth and felt the bite of her fingernails in his scalp as he tugged. “Please, Gabe. Aren’t you listening to me?”
Aren’t you listening to me?
The question repeated in his head, jolting his conscience out of its sexual stupor. Lynn had always said those words.
Aren’t you listening to me?
Anger at himself poured through him, overriding the lust that he’d let drive his actions. He released Cassandra’s tender flesh and then yanked her tight against him, pushing her head into his neck. “Easy, baby,” he said, using his other hand to jerk down her sweater. “Easy. We’re taking this too far.”
“Gabe?” He heard the uncertainty and the thread of embarrassment in her voice and cursed himself again.