Dirty Sexy Knitting Page 5

  Inside the yarn shop, the oops lady hovered by the door. “Was there a problem?” Her hand covered her belly, and he recognized the protective gesture. His wife, Lynn, had caressed Maddie’s growing body just that way when she was in the womb.

  Then it all came together for him. The pink piece of knitting, the mention of the nine-month-old, the “plain and simple” oops. The lady was pregnant. Apparently she and her husband hadn’t used any—

  Gabe froze.

  —protection.

  Protection!

  Had he and Cassandra used any last night? He didn’t carry condoms. She’d claimed to be celibate.

  Oh, hell.

  Hell.

  If Cassandra Riley was pregnant with his child, he was already smack-dab in the middle of the underworld’s flames.

  Four

  Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

  —GEORGE BURNS

  “ ‘Bitchy snitch,’ ” Marlys muttered, glancing over at her dog, Blackie, who was grinning out the passenger window of her Miata. “I don’t know why you think that’s funny. If you ask me, I’m a hero.”

  Her conscience gave her a pinch, but she ignored it and raised her voice. “I’m serious, Blackie. Those little surf rats could have caused a major problem. Think of all the wool and stuff in the shop that might burn. My evil stepmother’s sisters should have thanked me.”

  Okay, maybe looking for gratitude was too high an expectation. Marlys might be unabashedly selfish, but she was a realist, too. Nobody liked their secrets revealed, and it was true that she’d spoon-fed information to a tabloid stringer of her acquaintance a few times. When her father’s wife, the too-good Juliet, had been at a spa during her husband’s final hours on earth, Marlys had made sure the info got out.

  Yeah, it was true that Juliet couldn’t have known Marlys’s terminally ill father would die that day. And it had come to light that General Wayne Weston himself had arranged it so that neither Juliet nor Marlys took on deathbed watch. But still!

  “I admit it, Blackie,” she told her dog. “I have a few issues. I’m not exactly rational when it comes to men leaving me.”

  The dog looked over at her.

  She met his big brown eyes. You couldn’t lie to a dog. “When it comes to men. Period.”

  On automatic pilot, she took a right-hand turn, beginning the climb into the hills that separated the Malibu beaches from the rest of Los Angeles. Still stewing over the suspicion she’d encountered at the yarn shop, it wasn’t until she’d driven past a familiar driveway and spotted a familiar vehicle parked in it that she became aware of where she’d driven.

  It was a harsh wake-up. Her stomach leaped, slamming into her plunging heart. Somewhere in her torso the two met with the pounding power of elk antlers. Truly. It felt like a moment you’d see documented on a TV network—one that was a weird hybrid of Animal Planet and Discovery Health. No wonder her foot stomped on the brake pedal as she jerked to the curb outside Juliet and Noah’s house.

  The couple was on their honeymoon! There was no good explanation for why there was a motorcycle parked in the driveway.

  A cold sweat rolled over her skin even as her flesh flushed hot. Especially that motorcycle. The one that belonged to Dean Long.

  He’d left months ago.

  He was a soldier, on tour in Afghanistan.

  He was the man she’d thought she’d loved.

  Blackie looked over at her again.

  “All right, yes,” she admitted to her pet. Dean was also the man she’d betrayed. And it was thoughts of him that kept sending her back to wander Malibu where they’d met.

  No way was he here though, she thought, even if he was on leave from the army. After what she’d done to him, surely he’d crossed the entire state of California off his mental world map.

  Blackie whined. Thanks to the man who’d had a motorcycle very much like the one in the driveway—really, it just couldn’t be the same one in that driveway—the dog had once experienced a drastic behavior change. Her canine terror had turned into a tame pussycat.

  Blackie whined again. “Sorry for the metaphor, dude,” she said. “But facts are facts.” The dog had gone back to his old, look-out-for-number-one ways the minute Dean had left town. And Dean was still gone . . . wasn’t he?

  When her pet emitted another high-pitched noise, she finally figured out what he wanted. Obviously Blackie had some pressing doggie business that would be best addressed at the empty lot across the street. But Marlys had learned a thing or two since she’d last been in this vicinity. Reaching behind her, she snagged Blackie’s leash and clipped it to the ring on his collar.

  She cracked open the driver’s-side door, and undisciplined Blackie, intent on his me-first agenda, pawed across her lap and then leaped onto the street. Marlys’s fingers snatched for the fluttering end of the leash, but things hadn’t gone her way since she was twelve years old.

  Her animal dashed away, apparently intent on relieving himself on Juliet and Noah’s flowering front shrubs instead of on the weeds across the street. Bad dog.

  She followed him, not letting her gaze linger on the motorcycle.

  Blackie didn’t linger at the flowering bushes.

  Instead, he raced for the side gate and nosed it open, just like those working dogs they’d seen on that National Geographic special Friday night. “We’ve been watching too much television, Blackie,” she called out, hurrying after him. Oxygen wasn’t making it into her lungs, but that was because she was jogging after the dog, she told herself. Anxiety, anticipation, plain old fear, none of those had anything to do with that tight feeling in her chest.

  Because surely Dean wasn’t in Malibu.

  Because surely Dean wasn’t staying in the guesthouse on the other side of Juliet and Noah’s pool.

  Because surely that couldn’t be him standing in the doorway of the aforementioned guesthouse, staring down at her dog in bemusement. Then, the-person-who-couldn’t-be-Dean looked up. Marlys tripped. She stumbled forward, almost pitching herself into the pool.

  “Are you all right?” the-man-who-wasn’t-Dean asked.

  At the voice—his voice—she stumbled again. Her right foot missed the cement deck, found air, found water, then landed on the first plaster pool step. She gasped.

  And there he was—Dean—reaching for her. “Ma’am . . .”

  Ma’am? Her head jerked up even as she yanked her foot from the pool to jolt away from his big hand. “Don’t touch me!”

  His long arm dropped. Marlys backed up another step, her drenched shoe squelching, the very sound she figured her leaking heart was making inside her chest with each hard beat. Her gaze couldn’t leave his face, and she noted that his chiseled features looked leaner, his tan shades lighter than it had been in November. His silver eyes were the same, so piercing she was certain they were boring inside her and finding her every weakness.

  Her only weakness.

  Him.

  “What . . .” She had to swallow, her mouth as dry as her Adidas running shoe was wet. “What are you doing here?”

  “Noah said I could use the guesthouse while he’s on his honeymoon.”

  Marlys retreated another foot as Blackie pranced between them. Could it . . . Could it really be Dean?

  The big man looked down at the dancing dog. “Sit,” he ordered.

  Blackie did.

  That clinched it. “It’s really you,” she said.

  His head tilted. A lock of his straight black hair fell away from his forehead, revealing an ugly, half-healed wound at his hairline. She couldn’t breathe again.

  “What happened?” It came out as a whisper so she gestured at the scar. “How were you hurt?”

  He gave a little shrug. “Soldier stuff.”

  Soldier stuff. He’d always been a man of few words, damn him. But it was the potential for “soldier stuff” like that injury that had made her push him away last autumn. Her hand stole up to her chest and she pre
ssed her palm against the silver tear pendant containing her father’s ashes that she’d worn every day since Dean had left. With her notion of hell being the long—and maybe unending—wait for a man to come back from war, she’d tried to save herself the pain of it by driving Dean away.

  But now he was back. And she couldn’t read from his cool expression why.

  Or how he felt about her.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she asked, eyeing the scar again.

  He shrugged again. “I am okay.”

  Pretty hard to disagree with that. He was six two to Marlys’s five one. The scales would give him a hundred pounds on her, all of that muscle. No one was saying he wasn’t a beautiful man and if anyone besides him knew what she’d done to kick him out of her life, they’d say she was nuts.

  Right now she felt a little crazy. Staring down at her wet shoe, she tried to pull her whirling thoughts into some semblance of order. What now? What should she do? Why was he just standing there, when by rights he should be giving her the cold shoulder or turning his back or—

  “I’m completely okay,” he said, “with the exception of a little memory loss.”

  Her gaze jumped to his. “Memory loss?” she repeated, her voice squeaking.

  “Yeah. The explosion in Afghanistan’s a blank page. And before that . . .”

  “You don’t remember . . .”

  “Other stuff. I lost a chunk of time. Nobody knows whether it’s for good or not.”

  Marlys swallowed. “And Malibu?”

  “Well, I remember being on my way here. To visit my friend Noah.”

  And then? A voice inside her screamed. What do you remember after that? But she couldn’t bring herself to ask the questions, not when he was unsettling her with that intense regard. Was he recalling that flare of attraction they’d had at their first meeting?

  The air had crackled with sparks from the instant their eyes had met. And when he’d touched her palm the sensation had seared her to her elbow. “Wow,” he’d said, and something had told her to run. She had, but then she’d found herself coming back to him. Too bad she hadn’t listened to that sensible inner voice.

  Marlys wiped her right palm against her jeans as if she could rub away the memory of that burning touch, aware that Dean continued to stare at her. She stole a glance at him through her lashes.

  His expression remained unreadable. She supposed he was reliving their last moments together. That night, at her front door, her ex, Phil, had spilled the beans about how she’d been leaking gossip to his tabloid-stringer little brother. Dean had appeared pretty disgusted by that.

  But what he’d learned moments before had been oh-so-much worse. She wiped both palms on her thighs now, because it made her feel dirty just thinking about it. Suppressing a shudder, she glanced over at silent Dean again. Her gaze caught on his left hand. She stared, watching him worry a worn-looking business card. He turned it over and over between his long fingers.

  He must have noticed her intense regard. His hand stilled and he cleared his throat. “My good luck charm. Strange, huh? Lots of the guys have them, though. On each and every mission they bring their granddad’s old dog tags or their baby’s ultrasound image or their local library card. I know a soldier whose talisman is a receipt from Gordo’s Taco Stop in Texarkana, Texas, showing he consumed sixteen bean burritos in one sitting.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to share his barracks that night.”

  Dean laughed. “Now this,” he said, waving the business card that advertised the Ms. M boutique in Santa Monica, “is mine. My buddies tell me I carried it with me all the time in Afghanistan. It was beside me in the hospital, too. Every day. Every hour. Call me superstitious—or maybe it’s my Cherokee forefathers telling me something—but I’m still carrying it.”

  Now she understood. “Though you don’t recall how it came into your possession, do you?” Because he couldn’t possibly remember her and their time together. If he did know that it was a card from her boutique, if he did know that she was Ms. M, then he wouldn’t still be calling it a good luck charm. The likely reason he’d been carting it all over Afghanistan was to find some godforsaken place to burn the thing. She looked up to meet his eyes. “And you don’t know me.”

  “Uh.” He hesitated. “No.”

  At the confirmation, Marlys went light-headed. She actually swayed on her feet and he stepped forward, catching her elbow to steady her.

  This time, the electric burn zipped down to her fingertips and then up again, crackling from the top of her head to the filed edges of her French pedicure. It was heat and sweet and so damn scary that tears pricked the corners of her eyes.

  “How could I have forgotten this?” he murmured, staring down at her.

  How indeed. But it had happened. Dean Long had lost months of his life, meaning he didn’t remember that ugly, dirty, desperate night when she’d ruthlessly arranged for him to find her post-coital with some other man.

  For a person who’d spent more than his fair share of time playing kissy-face with beer-stained and grime-gummed barroom floors, Gabe figured going through garbage wouldn’t cause him a quiver. And he was right; it was nothing to delve through the little bag of trash that Cassandra left in a can inside the single-sized carport attached to her house. Fact was, because Cassandra put her vegetable parings and fruit scraps in a compost heap and separated for recycling her plastic, glass, paper, and aluminum, what she actually threw away was little more than a flattened tube of toothpaste.

  There wasn’t any sign of a condom. Not the thing itself. Not the foil wrapper either. Could you recycle those? Shit.

  Headlights appeared at the end of the lane, bobbing a little as the old Mercedes hit the ruts in the blacktop. They caught him in their yellow-white gaze, but he didn’t flinch or fade away into the shadows. Instead, he twisted the end of the bag to tie it off and waited while Cassandra stopped her car.

  She didn’t seem surprised to see him either. Part of their deal was that he took care of trash disposal. They didn’t get garbage service out here in the secluded canyon and so he drove their bags into town once a week and deposited them in the big commercial bins behind his fish market.

  No, he didn’t have a real reason to feel bad about being caught with her garbage, not at all. As a matter of fact, he’d planned to be found right here, right now, just in case he didn’t discover the reassuring evidence of a rubber among Cassandra’s detritus.

  “Good evening,” he called to her, smiling as she stepped out of the car.

  In the glow from the security lights he’d installed along the eaves of the narrow carport he saw her send him a startled look. “Hi,” she answered, and ducked into the car to pull out a couple of her reusable grocery sacks, both filled with foodstuff.

  Perfect. He dropped the bag he held and hurried over. “Let me take those for you.”

  Gripping them tighter against her body, she drew back a little as if surprised. “I’ve got them.”

  Gabe tried to figure out the cause of her odd reactions. Did he never smile at her? When he found her with groceries, did he never offer to ease her load?

  Apparently he didn’t.

  A moment from his past reared up. Lynn, that funny, triangular smile of hers tugging up the corners of her mouth. He’d been playing tea party with Maddie, bowing over her hand and kissing her fingers before settling cross-legged on the floor behind the dainty teacups and pretend petit fours she’d set out. “You’re such a gentleman, Gabe,” his wife had said. “Be careful, you’ll spoil our daughter and make her unprepared for the men who’ll come along and break her heart.”

  It turned out that Maddie had never lived to have her heart broken.

  It turned out that Gabe was a piss-poor gentleman.

  He stomped toward Cassandra and slid his arms under the grocery bags. “Give me those, damn it,” he said, his voice brusque. “What kind of asshole do you think I am?”

  She resisted for a moment, allowing him time to breat
he in that incredible Cassandra scent and for the back of his hands to register the warmth of her skin radiating through the soft knit of her sweater. Then he wrenched the groceries from her grasp and marched up her porch steps to her front door.

  This had been the second part of his plan, after all—that if he didn’t find evidence in the garbage, then he’d get into her house and do a little sleuthing around. If he discovered an opened box of condoms or packet of birth control pills, he could breathe easy again.

  Such a gentleman, Gabe.

  Okay, fine, now he truly felt like a slimy Dumpster diver. Because, of course, “sleuthing” was just a euphemism for “snooping.” Still, he just couldn’t see himself confessing to his neighborly nun/sister/friend that he didn’t recall boink ing her and oh, since it was so unmemorable, could she please assure him they’d actually taken steps to prevent a pregnancy? Which meant looking around on the sly was necessary, damn it.

  He shuffled aside to let her unlock her front door. She slipped inside the house first, then barred the way, holding out her arms for the bags. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Astonished, he stared at her. She seemed to be guarding her gate. Cassandra never guarded her gate. Cassandra was open and generous and she was always trying to coax him inside so she could cook a meal for him. Except not tonight.

  “I’m . . . hungry,” he said, frowning at her.

  “It’s that time of day,” she responded. “Let me have the groceries.”

  It was his turn to tighten his grip. “Do you . . . Do you have a date or something?” What was the name of that asshat for whom she’d donned the slinky dress and new perfume? “Are you seeing, uh . . . Darryl again?”

  “Dante.”