Chapter Ten
He who eats alone suffocates.
—Italian proverb
The knock on the office door was soft, yet ominous. How a soft tap could be ominous he had no idea. He braced against the onslaught of the people he didn’t want to see. Pretty much the lot of them except Jules.
“Your public awaits,” he heard in Francesca’s sweet soothe.
His public. All waiting to wish him well or tear him down. What in the hell had he been thinking opening his own business? So the myths of restaurant failure were exaggerated but it was still as high as twenty-five percent.
He raised his head from where he had been resting it between his legs while he willed blood to flow to his brain, but she was already inside, hunkered down with her hand on the back of his neck.
“Taddeo, are you unwell? Do you feel faint?”
“I feel like my stomach is going to swallow up my balls and give them an acid bath.” Hello, word vomit. “Sorry.”
Her lips widened into that puckish smile and he remembered how good she had always been to him. Even during that dark time after the accident when he didn’t deserve a kind word.
“Your parents would be very proud of you. It is quite an accomplishment for one so young.”
He didn’t feel young. He felt like the most beat-up, elderly twenty-nine-year-old who’d ever lived.
“Tony and Dad opened DeLuca’s when Dad was twenty-five.” Paul McCartney recorded Abbey Road when he was twenty-seven. George Harrison was only twenty-six. Besides, all he was doing was opening a wine bar. Not exactly changing lives here. The acid bath churned, threatening to corrode his throat and all the organs in between. “Dad wanted more for me, Frankie.”
“Yes, he did but he was hard on you. It is the way of all the DeLuca men.” His cousins had borne the brunt of Tony’s expectations but managed to come out strong and resilient. “Remember that you are your own man, Taddeo. Not your father’s or your uncle’s. You have the right to be happy.”
Happiness as a right? The pursuit of it, perhaps, or at minimum the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. Anything beyond that seemed greedy when his parents would never again feel the sun on their cheeks.
“This year, Taddeo… maybe it’s time to stop being so hard on yourself.”
In his aunt’s eyes he saw her worry that he was going to take all that shame and self-loathing and give it an extra twist. Francesca was the only one who knew how bad it got. Every year, he carved out a couple of days away: a friend’s cottage in the Upper Peninsula, a flea bag hotel in Cabo, anywhere he could lay low and drink himself to unconsciousness. She had tried to talk him through it, but she also realized he needed it to survive the rest of the year. Between them was an unspoken understanding that she keep it from the rest of the family. Doubtless, she was worried he’d take off on another round-the-world binge and he didn’t exactly discourage that conclusion. In the end, charming Tad emerged from his drunken cocoon and went back to his daily business.
Except this year he had an actual business to run and people who relied on him. He would have to find a way to manage the pain without it affecting anyone else.
His gaze locked with Frankie’s and he tried to draw from her strength for the hard times ahead. She had made cancer her bitch a couple of years back and he had never met a more tenacious woman. He opened his mouth to say that and a million other things but was interrupted by another knock on the door. Firm this time, but no less ominous.
“Tad,” Kennedy, his manager, called from the other side. “People are asking for you.”
“I’ll be right there,” he called back.
As he stood, Frankie moved up with him, choking the knot on his tie. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she started wiping non-existent smudges off his cheeks.
“I’ll give you a moment, but do not take too long.”
Five minutes and a shot of grappa later, he crossed the threshold from back to front of house and scanned the bar. His wine bar, his dream finally come to fruition. Frankie was right: it was an accomplishment. The wood gleamed, the glass shone, the wine flowed. Derry’s bacon-wrapped fig and thyme appetizers seemed to be a hit with the fashionable crowd.
No one had spotted him yet so he took a moment to soak and enjoy before he had to turn on Smiling Host Tad. Practically every DeLuca in the Chicago area was here to support him. Cara had done an excellent job organizing the opening and now she presided over Shane’s triple-tiered cupcake creation, shaped to look like a champagne fountain. Clever, clever. Off near the far end of the bar, Jack and Tony stood in companionable conversation. They’d had a rocky start, but Jack had insinuated himself into la famiglia remarkably quickly, becoming as good as a son to Tony. Tad couldn’t help the thread of jealousy that ran through him whenever he witnessed Tony’s easy relationship with his sons-in-law.
But tonight was not a night for petty jealousies. It was his night, the start of the rest of his life.
He stepped forward into the room, then stopped cold when his gaze crashed over a blond, green-eyed beauty—and her sharply dressed, very tall, clearly appreciative date.
* * *
“Nice speech,” Shane said with a smirk, when Tad finally wended his way back to Cara and Shane. He couldn’t remember much about it. Something about wine and coming together and making new friends. And then something else about wine.
“Thanks,” Tad muttered, trying to put a good-natured spin on it when really he was ready to punch something. Take a couple of deep breaths. Over at the bar, the sharp suit laid a hand oh-so-casually on Jules’s arm and Tad’s body went into a full-scale lockdown.
“Who’s that guy?” he asked Cara, who seemed to be running Operation Get Jules Bedded.
“Darian Fuentes.” She let out a breathy giggle. “Doctor Darian Fuentes, actually. He’s a friend of mine from Lurie Children’s Hospital.”
Cara did volunteer work at the kids’ hospital downtown and it put her in contact with all sorts, including guys that mothers wet-dreamed up for their daughters.
“Congratulations, man. Nice digs.” Tad turned to find Conor looking all spruced up in a spiffy suit.
They shook hands. “Thanks, Conor. Glad you could make it.”
“You serving beer at this joint?”
Tad snorted and turned back to Jules and Dr. Perfect.
“Just think, our Jules with a doctor.” Cara clutched her chest dramatically.
“Kind of jumping the gun, aren’t you, LT?” LT was Shane’s nickname for Cara, an abbreviation of Lemon Tart, which suited her perfectly.
Cara looked superior. “Well, they seem to be getting along, don’t they? He loves kids, is a bit of an Anglophile, has a thing for leggy blondes. I don’t think I’m being premature here in saying this is quite the coup. Maybe I should look at getting into this matchmaking business.”
Shane laughed and kissed his wife softly. “One more service from DeLuca Doyle Special Events.”
“From meet to altar and beyond,” Cara said, her eyes bright as sapphires. “Full service events from dating all the way to family planning.”
Tad cut in, irked with how this conversation had started and even more irked with where it was going. “What are you going to do? Stand over them on their honeymoon and tell him where to put it?” He could see Cara doing exactly that in some sex clinic somewhere. There, no, there. Probably how she treated Shane.
Unfazed by his snappishness, Cara curved her lips. “Some people need the extra push, don’t you think?”
As family, Tad was contractually obliged to love Cara, but sometimes he had a hard time liking her. She was so freaking bossy and too damn organized for her own good, and this latest example of interference took the champagne fountain-shaped cake. Since meeting Shane and getting knocked up, she had become even more insufferable. Like all happy people, she wore that air of smugness that made everyone who wasn’t in the same boat of puppies and unicorns want to strangle her.
“Big deal,” Tad said, getting back to Dr. Perfect. “So he hands out lollipops to kids after they give blood.”
Cara gave him the DeLuca stare down. “He’s a pediatric oncologist.”
“Guy treats kid cancer?” Two cents from Conor.
“Sure does, and he looks damn fine while doing it,” Cara said.
The guy who treats kid cancer was currently making Jules laugh so hard her breasts bounced. Tad didn’t have to be close to know what her laugh sounded like. She didn’t dole it out freely and he remembered every single one she’d gifted him with. Now every smile she gave to this jerk was stolen from the bank she had for him.
From this angle, her profile was all curves, which made him realize that Jules had rarely worn anything figure-hugging or revealing until she had started on this dating business. As if he had wished it, she turned and he got the full picture. More like the whole photo album. Dressed in an emerald green dress that draped over her hips and breasts just perfectly, she looked like a goddess.
From beneath scowling eyebrows, Tad watched her, trying to interpret her body language. At times like this he wished he didn’t know her so well. She was stepping away, just an inch or so at a time, but then Dr. Feelgood cupped her elbow and drew her back to him. A very calculated gesture that unfurled her body and eliminated any hesitancy that had existed before in her stance. Was she so starved for contact, so desperate for attention, that the simplest touch was enough to draw her in?
She was a freakin’ time bomb.
Her quiet strength and radiant luminosity drew people into her burning orbit. That she was owning her power swelled all sorts of things in him—his heart, his cock, the green lump of jealousy like a foreign object in his chest.
Not so foreign, he supposed. Since Jules had put herself out there, he had been jealous of every man she considered worthy of a first date. And it shamed him to admit it, but he was envious of her bravery. She had made a decision to take the next step and risk her heart; the mere idea scared him shitless.
Jules scared him shitless.
He bet there was a really long-ass German word for what he was feeling right now, but standing here sulking wasn’t going to get it done. He shoved a foot a few indignant inches in front of his rigid body, ready to make his move. Just as Jules and the doc parted.
Thank Christ.
She walked a few steps his way and then encountered… Tad turned to the empty space to his left, not quite believing his eyes. That Conor f*cker had slunk away and beelined for Jules.
Blood was in the water and the sharks were circling. Herb farmers, gruff chefs, cancer doctors, barmen firefighters… what next? The entire clergy at St. Jude’s?
“You okay, man?” came Shane’s soft Irish burr.
“Fine,” he gritted out. “I’m going to do the host bit.”
“You do that,” Shane said. As Tad stalked away with that acid bath traveling from his stomach to his throat, he could have sworn his so-called friend was humming Kiss’s “Calling Dr. Love.”
* * *
Dr. Darian gave her hand a squeeze before moving off to grab her another glass of wine. Her third.
Oh, dear.
They’d had a nice, innocuous chat about toddler antics and the latest Iron Man movie, and she hadn’t felt nearly as stupid as usual. Feeling a touch squiffy always helped. That he appreciated her in this dress, which revealed more than it covered, sent a thrill of pleasure through her that somehow managed to mitigate the smallness she felt in the presence of this clearly intelligent man.
Once she had figured out she was never going to win any awards in school, she had compensated by becoming popular with boys. Smile at her, flash a dimple, say her name in a low rumble, and she was a goner. Touch her gently, tell her she was pretty, murmur a kind word, and she was toast. All these things were fuel for her dangerously low self-esteem. Who needed to know she couldn’t read when conversations without words were eminently preferable? Who needed to know she wasn’t nearly as stupid as she appeared when she was safely cradled in the arms of a guy who didn’t care to ask the hard questions?
She suspected Dr. Darian had a decent set of forearms underneath that worsted wool. Probably not Tad DeLuca quality but she bet they would do just fine. She looked over to find the dishy doc chatting with Jack. Knowing her brother, he was giving him the third degree and angling for his social security number so he could run a background check.
A brush against her bare arm diverted her attention from the Gestapo interrogation. She turned to find Conor Garcia going in for the hug.
Jules had always liked him, and it was nice to see a friendly face, especially one so handsome. Half-Irish, half-Cuban, which was a pretty kick-ass genetic combination, he also had chocolate brown curls winging strong cheekbones. His cerulean blue eyes hinted at devilish depths.
He held onto her a couple of seconds longer than necessary, then gave an indolent dip of a gaze over her body. Promising, promising. If she’d had any doubts as to his interest, they were swept away with his words.
“Holy smokes, Jules, you are gorgeous!”
Unable to help herself, she loosed a giggle that smothered her nerves. She didn’t look half bad. The dress she wore was a touch tight around her doughy middle but it draped in all the (other) right places. Her Pour Le Victoire pumps fulfilled their function as sparkly foot props, lengthening her legs and making her feel sexy. All night, she’d had no shortage of appreciative looks.
She only wished someone else was paying her attention, but Tad had barely glanced at her. Busy schmoozing, he had made no effort to come her way. He cut circles around her, sometimes close to where she stood, but then he was off to talk to someone else.
And the wound got a nice salting with how fit and fine he looked in that suit, like Don Draper had time-traveled to the twenty-first century. The charcoal grey fabric stretched indecently across the tight arse and broad back she saw more and more of as the night wore on.
“So how’s tricks, Conor?” she asked, determined to enjoy this handsome man’s attention.
He grinned, cocksure as they come. “Not bad. I heard you’re on the market. You want to catch a drink some time?”
Blimey! Conor wasn’t one for small talk. “Well, I’m starting out low-key. Meeting for coffee, that kind of thing.”
“Mine’s black with two sugars. And I like my eggs over easy with two strips of bacon.” He winked, drawing her smile.
“Cheeky bugger.”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying. I’m serious about going out on a date, though.” He leaned in close, sending his aftershave wafting beneath her nostrils. Something expensive that summoned a flutter in her stomach.
Over at the bar, Tad stood in a cozy huddle with the Queen of the Night, aka the sloe-eyed critic who had been in his office a couple of weeks ago. Something she said made him laugh and his unsubtle eye lock on her hectare of boobage was the heifer’s reward. Sighing, Jules turned back to Conor, who had somehow managed to close the miniscule gap between them.
“I hear you have a complex points arrangement. How’m I doin’?”
She cocked her head. Ten points for looks, an extra five for that impish look in his eyes. Gainfully employed, owned his own business, hot damn, a firefighter. Ten, twenty, thirty points right there. Sense of humor and a quick wit added on another ten.
“You like kids?”
“They’re our future.”
“You nice to your mother?”
“Dinner every Sunday.” At her mouth twitch, he amended, “Every other Sunday.”
Hmm, what was wrong with him? She touched two fingers to her lips, seeking out flaws.
“Longest relationship?”
“Two years.” He gave a slight shrug. “She cheated.”
Her hand flew to his arm. “Oh, Conor, I’m so sorry.”
There was no missing the flash of hurt that crossed his brow, but he speedily dialed up a toothy grin. “It was a while ago. I’m long over it.”
Perhaps, but Jules couldn’t help feeling for him. Or awarding him extra points for sensitivity. Dr. D had competition.
“So what do you say we go somewhere a little more—?” Frowning, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, its buzz loud above the chatty crowd. “Looks like we’ll have to take a rain check. I’m on call at the firehouse. Five alarm on the south side.”
“Oh, okay. Be careful,” she said, concerned.
With a blink-or-you’d-miss-it incline of his head, he brushed his lips across hers. Warm and dry. No tingles, but not bad. “I’d like to take you out sometime, Jules. Can I give you a ring?”
“Sure,” she said, because if something was to happen to him on his call tonight, at least he went off thinking he might have a date in his future. But his viability as the future Mr. Juliet Kilroy had shrunk to a big fat zero. As much as she admired a man who did such important work, the thought of waiting around at home with her heart permanently in her mouth did not sit well.
There she went finding faults again.
With a big smile, he walked away, leaving her to ponder the curious problem of how her dating life had suddenly become very promising, yet she still felt ridiculously hollow inside.
Damn Tad DeLuca.
She didn’t need to look over her shoulder to know he was enjoying himself immensely with that food magazine journalist. Perhaps they were making arrangements for a special set of interviews later that involved a shirtless Tad. The woman was smart enough to undo shirt buttons and Jules bet she had graduated with a double first in pulling down zippers.
This should not bother her. He was her friend and yes, she had let her mind wander to wicked, wanton thoughts about her friend, but those were just fantasies. He had to kiss her, didn’t he? So what if she had kissed him first all those months ago. They had overcome that. The Incident. They had got the train back on track and were doing just fine until he had some sort of brain malfunction and made his offer.
That woman’s husky laugh reverberated off her skull, seizing Jules’s heart in a vise. Tad must be in fine form tonight. She couldn’t listen to him ply his Mediterranean charm on another woman. Not anymore.
She had to get out of here. Tottering like a toddler in her too-high heels, she threaded her way through the hip crowd with the restroom as her goal.
“Hey.” Cara lay a slender hand on her arm. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. Just need the little girl’s room.”
Cara zeroed those ice blue eyes in on her and moved the weapon—her baby bump—into a block. “You’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. Just TBS. Tiny bladder syndrome.”
Cara shot her a shadowy look.
“I’m fine,” Jules said with a strained patience, every cell poised for a meltdown that might relieve her throat, thick with tears.
Cara waddled aside. Okay, Jules wished she did. Rather, she sidestepped Jules with more grace than a woman with that much baggage should be allowed. Her superpower was to look radiant while carrying fifty extra pounds. Jules finally got to the restroom, crashed in, and locked the door once she had determined she was alone.
This thing with Tad had to stop. She could no longer allow herself the luxury of soul-sucking jealousy. Indulging in negative energy while she imagined him with other women, imagined him doing things to them that she wanted done to her. Time to snap out of it.
Dr. Darian was a viable option and how handy would that be to have a pediatrician in the house? She spent a couple of minutes practicing her game face in the mirror. She had found non-Tad and now she needed to reel him in.
As she left the Ladies, her phone chirped and she looked down, expecting to see Sylvia’s battle axe face with an Evan check-in but it was that strange number again. The one from London.
Him.
She couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Hello,” she said, trying to keep the shake from her voice. She could already feel his vibes through the phone line.
“Hi, Jules.”
A million memories rose to the surface, far too many for so short an acquaintance, but of course she had invented ones to fill the gaps. Desperate imaginings of what might have been. The timbre of his voice hadn’t changed; if anything, he sounded more lethally dangerous than ever. Needing air, she headed to the back door that exited onto the alley.
“Hiya, Simon,” she said in a singsong. She hadn’t lost her accent since moving to Chicago, though it had become tempered somewhat. Now, it came out of her mouth strong and clear. Rule Bloody Britannia.
She stepped into the alley and tried to catch her breath. The stench of rotting rubbish rose to sting her nostrils like a bad case of smelling salts.
“What do you want?”
“No small talk, Jules?” An ocean between them and he sounded like a gentle whisper in her ear.
“Never our forte, was it?”
“Suppose not. I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately,” he continued. “Wondering how you’ve been. I heard you moved to Chicago with Jack.”
“Yeah, a couple of years now.” What do you want?
“Things are going well here,” he said, though she hadn’t asked. “I’m on my third restaurant and I’ve got a chance at a pilot for a TV show on the BBC.”
During their time together, Simon had done a remarkably poor job masking his envy of Jack’s success. Even now, she could hear his voice lurching on the edge of bitterness, despite the fact he was doing well for himself. Some people are never satisfied.
If Jack knew who Evan’s father was, he would lose the plot in a major way. Knocked up by one of her brother’s closest friends back in London—she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready for the greyness that would descend over his face if he knew. He would blame Simon and he would paint Jules as the victim, when that wasn’t the case at all.
After all, she had more or less seduced him.
“Why are you calling after such a long time?”
“You were always a cynical one, Jules.”
Tears welled behind her eyelids at his accusation. That was so unfair. She might have a smart mouth and a jaded manner about certain things, but she had never been cynical about them.
“Maybe I miss you,” he said quietly into the pause, so soft that she almost believed him before the words registered fully. Qualifying it with “maybe” was a typical Simon move, especially in their final days together, when he’d parsed out the affection as if he were using a tincture dropper.
“I really need to go,” she said, knowing she would break down any moment now if she let him continue his devil whispers in her ear.
“I want to see my son, Jules. You can’t keep him from—”
She hung up and slammed the phone against the nearest Dumpster.