Gabe had ended his share of relationships. Probably more than his share. More like his share, Alice’s share and probably Max’s share, too, since Max and Alice didn’t seem to believe in ending things when they needed to be ended.
Even so, with all that practice, with his “it’s not you it’s me” speech refined to an art form, spending Wednesday evening telling Daphne that he couldn’t see her anymore didn’t go quite as he had planned.
She braced herself on one of the posts in the gazebo and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I am. This is just—” She started to laugh again and Gabe crossed his arms over his chest and waited, impatiently, for Daphne to stop laughing.
“Oh, this is perfect. Just my luck, you know?” Daphne pulled a tissue from her dark blue barn jacket and wiped her eyes. “My first time back out in the dating scene and I get involved with a guy who isn’t over his ex-wife.”
“This has nothing to do with Alice,” he lied. Too many things right now were tied to Alice. Breaking up with Daphne, the success of his inn, his dreams, his thoughts. He felt a resentment churn into the feelings he still had for Alice, the desire he felt when she touched him, when he saw her bent over the chopping block, the sun in her hair. “We are only working together.”
Daphne tilted her head at him as though he were some misguided teenager. “Gabe, it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me the truth. I understand that. You and Alice have a right to your privacy, but you have to at least be honest with yourself.”
“I am,” he said, but he could tell she didn’t believe it, and frankly, neither did he. “It’s a proximity thing,” he finally admitted. “She’ll be gone in a month and my life will get back to normal. We just—” He kicked a rock on the worn path. “She’s got this gravitational pull that I get sucked into every time I’m around.”
“Then why fight it?” Daphne put her hand on his arm and with that touch and its total lack of electricity and heat he knew that even if Alice weren’t here it would never work with Daphne. “Gabe, if my ex came back, nothing in my life would change. Helen would probably be happier, but I don’t feel anything for him. I don’t hate him, I don’t still love him, nothing. He has no gravitational pull.”
“You’re lucky.”
“No.” Daphne’s voice had bite and she grabbed him to face her. “You idiot. You’re lucky and you don’t get it. What I felt for Jake is gone. Vanished. Because it wasn’t real. If you really love someone, really love them, those feelings may change but they don’t go away.”
The truth in her words rattled around in his head, stirred things up in his chest.
“We don’t work,” he whispered. “Outside of sex and the restaurant business, we’ve never worked.”
“Then you’re not trying,” she said, patting his cheek. “Start with the sex and work out from there.”
Through the window over the stove Alice surreptitiously watched Daphne leave.
“What are you doing?” Cameron asked, a sneak catching another sneak.
“I’m spying on Gabe,” she said as Gabe slammed the driver’s-side door of Daphne’s beat-up truck and she drove out of the parking area.
“Aren’t you an adult?” Cameron asked.
“Sometimes,” Alice answered, ducking out of the way when Gabe started walking toward the kitchen. “Keep going on those pots,” she said and Cameron scowled, hating his temporary job as dishwasher.
She whirled to the far work counter where she’d stacked the material she’d ordered for the Crimpson wedding, grabbed it and hit the door to the dining room running before Gabe entered the kitchen.
She was being a child, she knew that, spying on the guy and then leaving so she wouldn’t have to talk to him for fear of what she might say.
Their conversation four days ago haunted her. A thousand times since those moments of naked honesty she’d wanted to turn to him and ask him, Why now? Why couldn’t they have spoken that way while married? When they’d both so clearly needed it.
“Alice?”
Crap. He’d followed.
“Hi, Gabe,” she said, setting the bundles of blue silk on a nearby table. “What’s up?” She pretended to check the bundles, keeping her back to him, but his silence compelled her to turn. “Did Daphne—”
Looking at him, her words stopped, hung suspended in her throat. He was a man ravaged, dark eyed and stormy. Barely contained anger mixed with a desire they’d both been suppressing rolled off him like heat from a banked fire.
They’d been skirting this moment, pretending this heat between them wasn’t happening.
Apparently, Gabe was no longer pretending.
Her treacherous body longed for this reckoning.
“Drop off the spinach?” She finished the question, her voice weak.
He shook his head, coming farther into the room until he stood next to her. His silence was like another person in the room, a person sucking in all the air, taking up all the space.
“How did the tour with Joy go on Monday?” She asked, playing with the hemmed edge of silk like an inspector.
“Fine.” His voice was that low rumble of thunder, like a faraway storm gathering strength.
“You and Marcus sure seemed friendly,” he said, sounding like a jealous ex-husband. Alice lifted her head, aware of a sudden change. A rise in temperature.
“We dated.” His eyes flared. “It was brief,” she said, moving from stroking the edges of the cloth to unfolding it, as though more industry on her part would help her breathe, or would speed up this conversation, so she could see where it would go.
“When?”
“After the divorce before he got the full-time job and moved to the city.”
She handed him one edge of the material, the indigo edge that matched his eyes at this moment. “Take this,” she said, unable to stand next to him, feeling the heat of him, smelling the spicy and warm scent of him—that had nothing to do with soap or fabric softener and had everything to do with him—and talk of the other people in their lives.
She stepped away, holding the silver edge of the cloth and it unfurled into a watercolor banner six feet long and ranging from indigo to violet, to royal blue and down the radiant spectrum.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” she asked, to fill the room with some sound other than the odd pounding of her heart.
What do you want?
What are you doing here?
“Beautiful,” he said. Again the distant thunder and she looked up at him, caught his eye and knew it wasn’t the cloth he’d been talking about.
“Marcus asked me to meet him in the city for dinner some night,” she said, throwing it between them like a shield, but it landed like a gauntlet and his hands fisted the fragile fabric.
“Are you going to?”
She shrugged. “Depends.” These were the words she’d been scared of saying. These were the stupid steps toward ruin.
“On what?”
“On what Daphne was doing here.”
There. She’d said it. She couldn’t take the words back. They couldn’t pretend the pink elephant that breathed desire in the middle of the room wasn’t there.
“I broke it off.”
“Why?”
“Same reason you’re not going to dinner with Marcus.”
The air crackled and hissed and practically smelled of sex. Six feet away from him and she knew he was hard, just as he’d know she was wet.
Oh, I love it. She loved him this way. Loved and hated him.
“Why’s that?” she asked, cocking her head and playing her part, devastating though it would be.
He pulled on the fabric and stepped toward her, reeling her in and chasing her down, and she let it happen. She wanted it. Waited for it. Then there it was.
His lips, moist and hot against hers. This kiss wasn’t tentative or careful, it was pained and angry. It was the unleashing of a thousand repressed kisses, a hundred long nights and dozens of mornings wishing he was there.
He wrapped her up in his arms and the silk, held her so close she couldn’t move and she wouldn’t have if she could.
“You’re ruining my life,” he said against her mouth, before biting her lips aggressively, the way she loved. His words stung, particularly since he was such a part of the rebuilding efforts of her life. But thought dried up and blew away as the temperature between their bodies flared.
She arched her hips against his, felt the ridge of his sex beneath his jeans and her body turned to mercury against his.
“What are we doing?” she asked as he pushed her against the table. “What—”
“I don’t care,” he muttered against her throat, his hand sliding up her thigh to her hips. “I don’t want to stop.”
Yes. Right. No stopping. She opened her legs and he stepped between them, their dance as familiar as if they’d done this yesterday. His hands fisted in her hair and she sucked on the skin of his throat, used her teeth on his ear and every groan, every sigh and hiss from their lips threw gasoline on the fire between them.
The uncomfortable clearing of a throat behind Gabe didn’t stop them. Barely slowed them down.
“For God’s sake, son, you’re in the dining room!” Patrick’s hoarse bark doused them like ice water and Gabe stepped away, his hand on her elbow. She rose from the table and turned to pick up the banner, blushing like a sixteen-year-old, but she couldn’t move, thanks to being wrapped up in the silk. She struggled her way free.
“Hi…Dad.” Gabe said, smiling. They’d been caught making out by his father and Gabe was smiling.
Which, despite her general embarrassment and confusion, made her smile, then, oddly enough, laugh. Gabe watched her sideways and his lips twitched before he laughed, too. Patrick watched them as though he’d stumbled down the rabbit hole.
“You two are nuts!” Patrick said. “You always have been.”
“That explains a lot,” Gabe murmured, bending to help her pick up the material.
“You better know what you’re doing, Gabe,” Patrick said. “Because I remember what you were like the last time you guys wrecked each other, and I don’t want to see you that way again.” Patrick left, muttering and stomping his way to the kitchen.
That sobered Alice and she searched Gabe’s handsome face for some twitch of emotion. “What were you like?” she asked, their faces so close she felt his warm breath on her cheek.
“A mess,” he said and swallowed. “I loved you, Alice. I wanted to make it work.”
His words flayed her, paralyzed her. Tears trembled on her eyelashes and she wiped them away before they fell.
“I can’t…” He sighed. “I can’t go through that again. This—” his hand swirled between them “—whatever this is between us, it’s not a second chance. I can’t survive a second chance, not if it’s going to fail.”
“Me, neither,” she said.
Neither one of them asked why it would have to fail, though the words nearly leaped from her mouth.
“So?” His eyes bored into hers. “What was that?” he asked, referring to their kiss and near-tabletop lovemaking.
“It was good, Gabe.” She smiled and stroked his cheek. “Maybe it’s better to say goodbye this way, to end our relationship like this rather than the way we did five years ago.”
“You mean the plate fight?”
“We did some damage.” She nodded. “But I think what we had deserves better than that.” She got lost in the depths of Gabe’s eyes, lost there among the swirl of affection and memory of desire, just barely contained.
“I need—” He covered her hand with his, the rough skin on his palms sending sparks through her body.
Me.
Us.
To get naked. To kiss you. To love you.
“I need some time to think.”
She pulled her hand free of his. Part of her hurt knowing that she was so toxic, such a risk, that involvement—even only physical—was not something anyone took lightly. But part of her understood and appreciated the chance to think. “And I need time to hang these silks.”
The cool air blowing between them vanquished the last of the fire they’d built with their bodies.
“You need help?” he asked.
“I do, but that’s why your dad was here. He volunteered to help me get the lighting up and ready.”
“I’ll send him back in.” He tucked his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans and spoke louder in a near yell. “I’m sure he and Max are listening on the other side of the door.”
“We can barely hear you!” Max yelled through the kitchen door, confirming Gabe’s words. “You need to speak up!”
Alice felt emotion pulse through her body, longing and gratitude and regret that she no longer had a permanent place with these men.
“Bye,” she whispered with a smile she knew would seem sad, but she couldn’t pretend otherwise.
“Bye.” He nodded, turned and left her alone with silk the color of his eyes ruined with her tears.
She and Patrick stayed up late building frames for the material. He’d been persistent with his questions, which she knew were born of concern, but she dodged them as best she could.
“I don’t want to see you two hurt again,” he said.
“Me, neither.” She bent the thin light strips of pine in an effort to make the silk billow like waves. But all the wood did was crack. She swore and removed the splintered wood from the frame.
“Are you still in love?” he asked and Alice hung her head backward, examining the ceiling so she wouldn’t have to look at her ex-father-in-law’s knowing face.
“In love?” she asked the ceiling. “I don’t know. I still love him. I think he still loves me, but that doesn’t mean things will work,” she said. “We loved each other last time, too.”
Patrick grunted and hammered the finishing nails into the left corner of the six-foot structure. “I loved his mother,” he said.
She sighed in relief. Finally the heat was off her and Gabe.
“I loved her so much that when she left I hated her.”
“I know that feeling,” she said, having experienced it for a number of years.
“I loved her so much that I hated her and I wanted her punished.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“So when she asked to come back I said no.”
“That’s about—” She looked up at him, her stomach in her knees. “What?”
“She asked to come back, twice. Well, three times.”
“When?” she whispered.
“Three months after she left, then a year after that and now.”
Her head reeled, she sat hard on her butt. “Do the boys know?”
“They know she’s been in touch recently,” he said and shook his head. “But not about her earlier letters.”
“What?” She hardly knew what questions to ask, where to start. “Why?”
“Why?” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Because I was a fool. Because I was scared. Because I was angry. Because, the truth was, life got easier without her. With just us.”
I’m scared, her heart spoke. I’m scared of Gabe breaking me all over again. And she’d spent much of the last decade being angry.
God, I’ve wasted so much time.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“What can I do? She wants to see them and the boys will barely even talk about her.” He shrugged. “I don’t want anyone to be hurt.”
“What about you? What do you want?”
“I want my family together.” His voice cracked and he hammered at the frame as if it were an animal trying to eat him.
“You should do it. Tell her to come here,” she said, bold and gutsy because she’d be long gone. “Gabe and Max need to deal with what their mom did to them. They need to hash it out or forgive her or scream at her or whatever. But everyone pretending there’s not this giant mom-size hole in their lives is getting a little ridiculous.”
Patrick stared at her, then tipped his head back and laughed. “Right, and where will you be during World War Three?”
“Behind locked doors in Albany,” she said with a smile.
Patrick set down his hammer, pushing himself up with much groaning and creaking knees. “You know,” he said, “there are other holes in Gabe’s life. Watching the two of you pretend that you don’t still feel things for each other has been pretty ridiculous.”
“Well—” she felt a blush ignite in her neck “—obviously we’ve stopped pretending.”
“I’m not talking about sex.” Patrick helped her to her feet and patted her shoulder. “I’m talking about the love that’s running you two ragged.”
Emotion surfaced and bobbed in her throat and she busied herself stacking the lightweight frames and supplies along the west window. “It’s too hard,” she said. “It’s too hard to go back.”
Patrick’s eyes were liquid with compassion. Suddenly, she saw everything he hid behind his smiles and teasing. He was a man with a broken heart, living with one eye on the past.
“That’s what I said years ago when my wife wanted to come home,” he said, brushing his hands clean of sawdust and memories, “and I’ve never regretted anything more.”
Patrick’s words haunted Alice as she grabbed her flashlight and fleece jacket and headed back to her cabin. The heavy shadow of the Catskills made an already dark night even darker and not even the glimmer of a star broke up the ebony velvet of the sky. The moon was hidden behind trees and clouds.
Without the flashlight, Alice literally could not see her hand in front of her face.
She tripped over a tree root and barely caught herself before landing on her stomach in the dirt.
Such a difference from her illuminated and neon existence in the city and stranger still that she didn’t miss that life, her car or her house. She did miss Felix, but really that was all.
Which didn’t bode well for her return to it.
Her flashlight illuminated the front of her cottage, the closed door, the chair she’d placed on the small stoop.
Gabe sitting in that chair.
She stumbled again, her thumb hitting the button on the flashlight and the slice of light it provided vanished.
The night breathed.
“Gabe?” she whispered. He didn’t answer but she heard the scuff of his shoe against the concrete, could feel him a few feet away. “What are you doing here?”
“Thinking.”
Her heart tripped, and her skin, forgotten and cold, sang while it flooded with heat. Her eyes adjusted to the shadows and her body sensed his in the darkness.
“And?” she whispered, taking the small step up to stand near him.
“And I’m done thinking.”