Red-Hot & Reckless Page 17

  “Nicole, I…”

  She lifted her hand to stop him. “Please. Don’t. Just let me say what I have to, okay?”

  She held her breath, choosing her words carefully.

  “I can’t trust you,” she said finally. She heard him shift next to her and forced herself to directly meet his gaze. “That’s right. I said that I can’t trust you.” She pulled her knees to her chest and squeezed. “How can I be sure that next week when something comes up missing, you won’t accuse me of taking it? How do I know that you won’t question my every move, wondering what I’m up to, or if I’m breaking the law?” Her voice caught and she took a deep breath, trying to ease the pain swirling inside her. Then she whispered, “And I can’t trust you with my heart because, even though you won’t mean to, you’ll break it every day we’re together.”

  On top of everything else that had happened that night, the entire day, the effort it took to say the words seemed to forge a crack right down the middle of her chest.

  It seemed to take Herculean effort to push herself from the back of the P.I.’s van. She stepped a couple feet away, then turned, pausing to look at Alex one last time.

  What a beautiful man. Not just externally, with his wide chest and infectious grin, but internally. Despite what he must have thought about her, how different their belief systems, he’d opened up to her in a way no one else had before.

  But he had kept the one thing she wanted most, his heart, safely hidden away.

  She tried for a bright smile and ended up with a sad one. “Go find a nice girl, Alex. One your parents will like. One who would never dream of breaking a law. A nice girl that deserves you. Because I don’t.”

  13

  TIME WAS SUPPOSED to heal all….

  Wasn’t it?

  What a crock of bull that was.

  A month had passed and Alex was no closer to figuring out why Nicole had told him goodbye than he had been thirty days ago. And rather than his need to do so dissipating, it seemed to increase with every tick of the second hand on his watch.

  He pushed from his chair and moved to stand in front of the dry-erase board against his wall. Oh, for all intents and purposes he continued to function the same way he had before Nicole came into his life. Monday through Friday he went into work, put in a full day, then returned home to his loft to eat dinner and watch whatever sports programs were on TV that night. Every Sunday he went to his parents’ house.

  Dark Man had been stopped. The board was now dedicated to three separate thefts. He pulled the board from the wall then tapped it so it turned to the corkboard side. Images of Nicole filled his vision. Nicole walking down the street looking back over her shoulder, her hair curving against her cheek. Nicole sitting at a coffee shop in a blond wig reading the Wall Street Journal, wearing a small saucy smile. Nicole standing on the subway, her hand stretched to the bar above her, the look in her eyes faraway and almost sad.

  He reached out to touch that picture. The one of her looking…lost somehow. It was the one image that most closely resembled the look she’d worn when she’d told him goodbye. The expression that haunted both his dreams and his waking hours…when he wasn’t thinking about the soft moans and whimpers and exclamations she’d made when they’d made love.

  “You’re pathetic, Cassavetes. A grade-A moron.”

  He tugged the photo from its tack and slipped it into his pocket, then began taking the rest of the pictures down. It was time—long past time if you wanted the truth. She wasn’t coming back. He knew that now. It might have taken him a while to figure it out, but he wasn’t completely thick. A month without contact would be enough to convince anyone.

  Ten minutes later he finished then stood staring at the stretch of empty corkboard. He stepped across his office where he’d bought a poster of Manhattan but had never hung it and pinned that up instead, then tapped the board so that it faced the wall again.

  The pictures he put into the Dark Man file that still sat on the corner of his desk, then put the file itself into the out-box for his secretary to file in the closed cases section.

  A knock sounded at the door. “Alex?”

  “What is it, Dorothy?”

  She held up an eight-by-ten envelope. “This just came to you from the P.I.’s office.”

  He frowned. He didn’t have anything pending with Kylie. He’d concluded his latest piece of business with her last week over a drink at a bar down on Broadway. He accepted the envelope, cringing as he remembered that she’d talked him into a shot of J.D. and a beer chaser. But it had been more than one shot, hadn’t it? And he was afraid he’d said far more than he’d intended about Nicole and the fantastic week they’d had together.

  “Thanks, Dorothy,” he said when he realized she still stood at the door.

  “Don’t mention it.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait,” he said. “Has anyone ever called you anything but Dorothy?”

  She stared at him as if he had a wart the size of the Bronx on his chin.

  “You know, like Dot or something?”

  She slowly shook her head. “No. Everyone calls me Dorothy. Just Dorothy.”

  “Oh.”

  She quietly closed the door after herself and Alex tossed the envelope marked Personal onto his desk. He collapsed into his chair and swiveled it to look out the window. Someone in the building across the street seemed to be doing the same thing, their feet on their desk where it faced the window. Maybe he should move his desk to face the glass, despite the impracticality of it. When the sun hit, he could always pull the blinds.

  He rubbed his face with his hands then sighed. He must have been in really bad shape recently if even his mother felt compelled to ask what had happened to that strangely beautiful woman he’d brought home last month, and said it would be nice to see her again.

  He cocked a half smile. His mother wanted to see Nicole again. Unbelievable. Almost as unbelievable as her parents’ gradual acceptance of Athena’s recent revelation to them.

  Of course, guilt could be partially to blame for his mother’s attitude toward Nicole. Given that she had thought Nicole had taken her dowry jewelry right along with him. Athena had been forced to spill the beans about her anniversary party plans and she never passed up an opportunity to tell him and their mother how judgmental they both were. Like mother, like son, she was fond of saying as of late. His father remained silent on the entire matter, except when they were alone and he would make the odd comment about what great legs Nicole had.

  The anniversary party was in two weeks and they had even more reason to celebrate because his father had told Alex the idea of moving to Greece had been put on the back burner. His mother had even suggested it might be a good reason to give “that Nikki girl” a call and invite her to the party. Or if he didn’t want to, his mother could do it if he gave her Nicole’s phone number.

  He wouldn’t have given it to her even if he knew how to contact Nicole.

  He swiveled to face his desk again. The envelope from Kylie sat smack-dab in the middle of it. Taking his opener from the lap drawer, he carefully slit the end then dumped the neat one-page letter attached to something onto his desk.

  “The picture is for your collection,” read a hot pink sticky note stuck to the letter. “And the rest because you’re too dumb to do it yourself.”

  Alex turned the cover letter over and found himself staring at an eight-by-ten glossy of Nicole standing outside a small cottage near water. She had her hair pulled back into a French braid and wore a white tank top and capris and stood on the sand. He squinted at the photo. Was she painting? Cat was curled up on top of a blanket at the foot of the easel.

  Alex’s heart beat loudly in his ears. He knew the photograph had been taken recently or else Kylie would never have sent it. He pressed his fingers against his temples, pondering that Kylie had been the one to snap the majority of the pictures he’d just taken down from the corkboard. But this one…this picture was completely unlike the others. Where was
the black leather? The urban posture? The reckless energy? This Nicole…well, looked almost at peace—if not for the sad, faraway look in her eyes as she stared out at the water.

  He quickly detached the letter paperclipped to the photo and read it. Only there was no Dear Alex or date or any other identifying marks except for Kylie’s business letterhead.

  Name of subject: Nicole Bennett, aka Holly Golightly Harvak.

  Alex blinked then read the line again.

  No way. There was no effin’ way her parents had named her after the Audrey Hepburn character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He looked at the picture, then back at the letter again. No wonder she had a Tiffany complex and had a cat she’d named…well, Cat.

  He absently scratched his head as he read through the rest of the background information. What date she was born in Brooklyn. Where’d she gone to school. Sketchy data on her brother, his wife and infant daughter. She’d even named which prison her father was doing time in and noted how often Nicole had visited. He noticed with a sinking sensation that she’d gone for the first time since his incarceration the same day he’d accused her of stealing his mother’s jewelry.

  Damn.

  Then she listed the address of the cottage in the picture.

  Westhampton—bought three years ago with money kept in trust for her until age twenty-five. Mother’s life insurance policy. Her brother had used his half to open up his own plumbing company.

  Alex sat for a long time staring at the documents in his hands. So much he hadn’t known about her. So much she’d kept from him. So much he suspected she kept from everyone.

  And he cursed Kylie for forcing his eyes open to see it.

  HOLLY PARKED her old convertible Volkswagen Bug in her narrow gravel driveway and reached back to gather the bags of groceries she’d picked up. She glanced out at the white, three-room cottage thinking it looked small and lonely and isolated sitting near the edge of the beach all by itself. She glanced at the larger house a couple hundred yards to her left. The cottage had once been a guest house of the owners, but then they’d expanded the house and had no more need for separate guest quarters and had put the cottage on the market three years ago. Nicole had immediately snatched it up, spending almost every penny of the money she’d inherited from her mother to buy the lovely cottage.

  She unlocked then shouldered open the door. Cat immediately began twisting around her ankles where he’d been waiting just inside.

  “Such a good, good boy,” she said, bending down to scratch his ears before walking across the living area that opened into a kitchen/dining room. Everything was done in whites and off-whites. White walls, white ceiling fan, white furniture with white overstuffed pillows. She put the bags down on the butcher-block island and took out a small plant she had bought. She put it in the middle of the dining room table, stood back and looked at the splash of color in the otherwise pristine cottage, then moved it to the coffee table between the sofa and two chairs. She crossed her arms. There. It looked better there.

  Given her erratic travel schedule, she hadn’t dared buy a plant before now. But since she didn’t plan on traveling anytime in the near future, a plant had seemed just the thing to buy.

  Cat nipped at her ankle then meowed.

  Holly looked at him. “Impatient tonight, aren’t you, buddy? Hold onto your knickers, I’ll get your food in a minute.”

  She put the rest of the groceries away, which didn’t take much time considering she and Cat were the only ones she was buying for. She stared at a package of pasta in her hands, remembered the last time she’d planned to make pasta, then quickly put the package away in the cupboard.

  She would not think about Alex. She refused to.

  She jerked open a can of cat food, nudging Cat away from where he tried to put his face directly into the tin.

  Until Alex, she’d bought the cheap stuff for Cat. The four-for-a-dollar variety pack that was easy on the pocketbook and that the stray that had come with the house didn’t seem to mind. Then Alex had brought the expensive stuff home and Cat refused to eat anything else.

  Home…

  She paused as she used a fork to put half the can’s contents onto a plate. For some reason she had a hard time convincing herself that Alex’s loft had never been home. The cave had merely been his apartment. There was no way she could have seen it as a home given the brief time she’d spent there. Yet whenever she thought of him or his loft, the word home always came to mind. More often than her cottage did.

  She pushed the plate toward Cat then turned to lean against the counter and take in the cottage.

  Maybe it would feel more like home if someone other than her neighbors actually knew she lived there. She grimaced, thinking it a little late for a housewarming party. She absently curved a hand around the side of her neck. Of course, she hadn’t given her brother or father the address.

  This was her safe haven. Where she’d escaped to whenever she’d needed to reconnect with herself. When the world got to be too much, her line of work too dark, this was where she could just be herself without worrying what others might think. The funny thing was that right after she’d moved in, she’d found herself turning into an opposite version of the Holly she was in the city.

  But no matter the clothes she wore, or the color of her couch, she was still essentially the same woman. The person Alex could never love. Not fully. Not unconditionally.

  She caught herself rubbing the area over her chest that still hurt so much whenever she thought of the broad-shouldered Greek-American and forced her hand back to her side.

  Would there ever come a time when thinking of him wouldn’t make her ache to hold him? Long to straddle his hips and welcome him into her body? Want to drive into town and go at him across his desk where the occupants in the building across the street could watch?

  Cat finished his meal and rammed his head into her shoulder by way of thank you. She smiled at his loud purr.

  “You’re welcome, baby.”

  He leapt down off the counter and she washed his dish and put it in the drainer.

  Music. She needed music. Music and a nice, long bubble bath.

  Picking up the remote that activated her stereo, she pressed play and her Alanis Morrisette CD switched on. She put the remote back down then headed for her bedroom. In the doorway, she stopped dead in her tracks.

  While Alanis sung about a guy who had entered her life uninvited she stared at a small robin’s-egg-blue box tied with a white satin ribbon sitting in the middle of her all-white bed.

  Someone had been in her house.

  The knowledge should have caused some alarm. Should have, but didn’t. Because there was only one person who would do this. Only one man who had breezed into her life and turned it upside down and apparently wasn’t done with the job.

  She slowly approached the bed and sat down on the edge, staring at the box for a long time without moving. She saw Tiffany & Co. written across the top and her heart hiccupped. Slowly, her fingers trembling, she reached out and tugged on the white ribbon. It easily sprung loose and she gently removed the top. A bright, multicolored gem-laden brooch she recognized from the Paloma Picasso collection sat nestled inside.

  A soft choking sound escaped from her throat as she stared at the vivid, vibrant piece. She picked up the box and held it in her lap, admiring the way the jewels caught the setting sun and reflected it around the room.

  “Read the card.”

  The softly spoken words came from behind her, from the direction of the bathroom. She didn’t have to look to know it was Alex. She heard his voice in her dreams every night.

  She looked under the brooch inside the box, then glanced to the bed where a small scrap of paper had been sitting underneath the box.

  “You can’t hide from me anymore,” she read at the same time Alex said the words.

  Holly couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. She was so overwhelmed by emotion that she could do little more than concentrate on breathing in and out. />
  “You don’t like it,” Alex said quietly, not having moved.

  Holly slowly blinked. “What?”

  “The brooch. You don’t like it.” From the corner of her eyes she saw him run his hand through his hair in the telltale sign of agitation. “I don’t know what I was thinking, buying you jewelry. I mean—”

  “I love it,” she whispered, interrupting him.

  And she did.

  In that one moment, she understood why her mother had been so enamored with the simple broach her father had bought her. Why she only took it out on special occasions and got that dreamy-eyed look on her face. She realized what she had been looking for all these years, lifting other people’s Tiffany jewelry, trying to find for herself that feeling she’d seen shine from her mother’s eyes.

  But none of it made sense until now, until this very moment, as she sat with the Tiffany box in her shaking hands, knowing that Alex had not only bought it for her, but that he had bought it out of love.

  She tried to blink back her tears, but it wasn’t going to work.

  She felt Alex’s weight on the bed next to her before she realized he had moved to her side.

  “Come here,” he murmured.

  And Holly went.

  She burrowed into the wide, comforting arms of the man she loved so much she hurt with it. Let him hold her to that broad chest that had first captured her attention. Allowed him to murmur soft words into her ear.

  But most important she finally freed herself to love him. Without fear or reservations. Without wondering what would come tomorrow or the day after or a year from now.

  “Marry me, Nicole…Holly. Marry me now. Today. Tonight.” He kissed her neck just under her ear. “Marry me so I don’t have to wake up without you sleeping next to me. Marry me so I won’t go back to the stale, colorless life I led before. Marry me so I can show you how much I love you every day for the rest of our lives.”