Chapter Fifteen
My home, my woman, bread and garlic, my life.
—Italian proverb
Jules grabbed her gym bag and headed for the door. Her phone chirped, and then she chirped because he was calling. Her lover.
She really shouldn’t answer. It had been two weeks since she had actually attended the gym, as in physically instead of pretending to. She wouldn’t put it past Cara to casually walk Jules to a scale the next time she picked up Evan. Jules could hear the tutting and tsking already. Do I need to come with you to make sure you’re doing it right?
If Cara knew exactly what Jules was doing, she might be tempted to point out what she was doing wrong there, too. She was having a hot affair with her best friend and she was enjoying every minute of it. Quickies in the office at the bar, glorious nooners at his place, afternoon delight wherever they could find it.
“Lady Penelope’s Love Shack. No request too weird,” she answered.
“Why aren’t you here?”
“Who is this?”
Tad’s laugh enveloped her like a warm, sexy blanket and sent her pulse soaring. “You know very well who it is.”
“No, I don’t. In a feminist pique, I switched out all the male non-relatives on my phone for something more generic. You’re showing up as Stud Number 4. It could apply to any anonymous chunk of man flesh.”
He sighed patiently. “You need to get your sweet ass over here. The pizza oven guy is in the kitchen, so I had to go home before I lost my shit on him. Now I’m all tense.”
“Go for a run. When I get tense, that’s what I do.” So that was an out and out lie.
She heard a disgruntled noise. “Jules, I know you have a couple of hours set aside for gym time.”
“Exactly. Gym time. I’m turning into a giant gnocchi with each passing day.”
“The singular is gnoccho.”
“The end result is the same. A pillowy blob with feet.”
He chuckled. “Come over here and burn some calories with me, baby.”
“Lines. Terrible.” Baby. How did he get away with it?
“You know I’ll take care of you.”
That’s how. Her body melted like hot butter in a pan and Bad Girl Jules came out to play.
* * *
Tad pulled her inside and smothered her with a kiss, sending her shopping bags to the floor in a thud. She loved his way of saying hello. She was sure going to miss his special greetings when all this was done.
A warm ache bloomed in her chest.
With strong, clever hands, he tore at her clothes. The zipper of her workout top got stuck but that didn’t stop him. He just peeled it off roughly, almost taking her head with it.
She should have swapped out her cotton-practical and plain bra for something sexy, but it felt as if they’d moved on from that. They knew each other too well. The foibles and quirks. The lickable parts and the imperfections (hers, not his. The man had zero). They didn’t need to gussy it up with sexy lingerie or high heels. Not that she didn’t love the idea of turning him on like that, but knowing Tad as well as she did was a whole other level of intimacy.
That ache in her chest expanded. The closeness she felt with this beautiful man was unlike anything she had ever felt with another person. It was bound to happen with their friendship such as it was. She tried to suppress those wormy niggles of doubt about what the hell she was doing here.
It’s just a release. Just friends with a platinum benefits package. Just—
Her sweatpants were pushed a few inches south. Rip, there went another pair of panties and—ah, yes. All that hot, hard perfection slid deep and smooth inside her, the assault all the sweeter because she was knee-cuffed by the sweats and her thighs kept the passage narrow.
She thrust her fingers in his dark, mussed hair and mussed it some more. Held his face close to hers so she could look into those fathomless blue pools. She wanted to remember this moment when he had wanted her so much he skipped the pleasantries. When she was the unstinting focus of his world.
Inside her, he moved in long, fluid strokes, each one more far-reaching and punishing than the last. His hands framed her bum and held her in place for his pleasure. In his eyes, she saw a haze of feral desire, all aimed at her. Being the object of this man’s passion was intoxicating.
The moment when that look changed shot through her like a lance. Still a blaze of heat, but tempered with something else.
He stopped.
The tosser stopped and stared with… tenderness.
“Tad.” It carried a tone of warning. She didn’t want him to look at her this way, not now, not when she felt so dangerously unmoored.
He angled his head to feed kisses down her neck to the pulse at the base of her throat. He teased her with swipes of his tongue and nibbling, soft sucks. His lips nuzzled a sweet trail along her collarbone, punctuating with a nip of her shoulder.
Branding her. Tenderly.
Slowly, he started to move inside her again with an incremental tempo that heated her center to sizzle point. A perfect blend of strength and mastery that built her up again until, with a final thrust, they went over the edge together.
Moments passed as they stood in the hall of his house, still connected in a gnarly embrace. He slid out of her and pulled her sweats up, then his own. She loved how he always took care of her like that. His grin blazed wide, all the tenderness of minutes ago replaced by sexy mischievousness.
“Hi, there,” he said, dropping a soft kiss on her nose.
She giggled, feeling foolish for having read so much into those intense looks. “Hi, yourself.”
“Thanks for stopping by to let me sex you up.”
She looked at the imaginary watch on her wrist. “Hmm, less than five minutes. If I didn’t already have a previous Tad DeLuca experience, I would be severely disappointed in that performance.”
“I know you like it fast and raunchy sometimes, mia bella. Lie to me and say it wasn’t good.”
She was good at telling porkies, but not that good. “I’ll let Sylvia know you’re doing much better.”
Grinning, his gaze fell to the floor, where several of the packages she had brought lay strewn on the hallway rug.
“You brought gifts?”
She paused, thinking about what she wanted to say next. “I thought that maybe we could make lunch. Actually, I thought we could cook together.”
A curious look came over him, and she worried that she had made another one of her famous miscalculations. Cook together. Two small words that weighed a ton. Her heart expanded to fill her chest, pushing against her lungs so she could barely breathe.
“I’d love to cook with you,” he whispered.
* * *
“Make sure you don’t overfill it,” he said as she heaped a spoonful of cooked ground beef, ricotta and herbs in blobs about an inch apart on the rectangle of pasta dough. “Then fold it over and seal it up with the egg wash.”
“Like that?”
He moved in behind her and banded his thick, muscle-corded forearms beneath her breasts. The butterfly kisses he trailed down her neck made her shiver.
“Tight as a nun’s knickers. Perfect.”
Just like the whole afternoon. Hot sex with a guy she was crazy about, though even that had felt different. More powerful, more consuming. There had always been an underlying streak of want and determination in Tad’s lovemaking, and today when he held her while taking her to paradise, she had opened her eyes and seen it for the first time.
This guy was going to destroy her.
The blabbermouths on her shoulder had nothing.
“The other morning at your place,” he said softly against her ear. “I noticed you have Vivi’s cookbook.”
Her mind fumbled for a defense. “Frankie lent it to me. If you want it back—”
“Don’t need a book to remember those recipes. Know them all by heart.” His smile against the curve of her neck made her all tingly. “I love that you have it. Feels right. And I love that you’re here. That feels right as well.”
Forget the tingle; she was two seconds from liquefying in a puddle of want.
“Have you given any more thought to cooking professionally? I know you worry about how much time it takes you away from Evan.”
“Not really.”
“Hmm, I think you have, bella.”
She sighed. “I’d like to—well, it’s silly, really…”
He gave an encouraging squeeze with his sexy, hairy, thick-as-her-calf forearms. “Tell me.”
She gifted him a fatalist shrug, embarrassed by her homely ambitions. “I don’t have any special training or skills, but sometimes I think it would be nice to sell my dips and spreads in stores. You know, like Whole Foods.”
His silence made her as anxious as a kid on Christmas Day morning. God, she was so stupid to think she could be any more than a hobbyist at the food game.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said pitchily, thankful he was behind her and couldn’t see the panic on her face. “Jack and Shane have worked all their lives to get to where they are so it’s stupid to think I can just decide to do this.” But she had been deciding a lot of things lately. Taking what she needed and fighting for her and Evan’s future.
“You don’t have a clue how special you are, do you?” he rumbled in her ear.
Heat flared her cheeks and spread to her toes, and she tried to laugh it off. “Of course I do. Every day I do the daily affirmation thing in the mirror. I tell my reflection how much I like my nose or my ears today. That kind of thing.”
“Who’s your favorite Beatle, Jules?”
“What?”
“Your favorite Beatle. As in the mop tops from Liverpool, not the multi-legged scurrying kind.”
She gave it more consideration than it deserved. Men seemed to think questions like this were very, very important. “I don’t have one.”
“You have to have one. Everybody has one.”
“Okay, Ringo.”
“Except Ringo. No one picks Ringo.”
She sighed. “I suppose this is where I’m required to ask who your favorite is.”
His smile against the curve of her neck felt knowing. “George.”
She could feel an eye roll coming on but she suppressed it.
“I’ll bite. Why?”
“Well, for years he lived in the shadow of arguably the best songwriting duo ever, but when he finally got his chance, he outshone them both. On Abbey Road, name the two best songs.”
She thought about it for a moment. Jack had played that album constantly when she was pregnant because he wanted to infuse fetal Evan with a musical talent he had no hope of inheriting from his tone-deaf uncle.
“ ‘Here Comes the Sun?’ ” she offered, not wanting to disappoint him. She did love that song, though. Its breezy and optimistic feel, the idea of crawling out of a long, cold, lonely winter to embrace spring and rebirth.
“Correct, and the other one is ‘Something.’ Which Frank Sinatra said was the best love song of the twentieth century.” He raised an overly expressive eyebrow. “Frank Sinatra, Jules.”
“Well, if Frank said it…” Sylvia had pictures of the Pope and Frank Sinatra on her living room wall. These crazy Italians… oh, how she loved them all.
“Exactly. Both of those songs were written by George Harrison. Best album by the best band ever, and the best songs were by the quiet Beatle. Sure, he had written songs before that, but with Abbey Road, he came into his own. The late bloomer.”
Dawning realization crept up on her. In this scenario, her brothers were Lennon and McCartney, and she was the quiet Beatle. The one who took a while to find his stride but then went on to outdo them all.
“I’m not that talented,” she mumbled, close to tears. A tremor started up in her hand and she put down the knife she had been about to use to divide the ravioli into little parcels.
“You just don’t know it yet. But I do.”
Her heart exploded into a million fragments of light. Turning fast, she threw her arms around his neck and crushed her body to the chest that had always been there for her. Where she belonged.
Thank God he couldn’t see her lovesick, moony expression, now hidden in the warm crook of his neck. Ducking her head as she turned back to the ravioli, she focused on the backyard with its yellowing turf and unkempt grasses while she desperately tried to keep the tears at bay. Hints of lavender and wild mint wafted through the open window. The things she could do with this space. Tomatoes and peas on the south side, herbs near that back wall, room for a pig.
“Where did Ulysses hang his hat?”
He pointed to the north end near a dilapidated shed. “Over there. We had to keep him separate from the chickens.”
His voice washed over her with stories about Vivi and the errant chickens, half of which she didn’t hear because she was falling into a hole and scrabbling for purchase on the slippery, muddy slope.
A few minutes later, she scooted out of the danger in his embrace and pinned on a smile. “I should be getting back. This ravioli business took longer than I expected.”
He curled a hand to the back of her neck and tilted her head up to his. “You’re upset.”
“No, not at all.” It was completely illogical. He was talking about the bloody Beatles and chickens, for heaven’s sake, and now she had the jitters.
Her phone buzzed on the counter and her gaze flew to it on the wings of maternal instinct. At the sight of the number, her heart plummeted to her stomach. No, no, not now. She hit “ignore” and took a fortifying sip of the lovely, robust Barolo Tad had opened a half hour ago.
“I need to go.”
“So you said.” His brows dipped in a chevron as he digested the suddenly weird vibe between them.
The phone buzzed again, cutting loudly through the heavy silence and setting off a flap of panic in her chest. Fight or flight. Fight or flight. Fight or—
“Someone wants to get in touch with you badly.”
She touched the screen. Took a longer slug of the wine. “Just a telemarketer.”
“Answer it and tell them to take you off their list.”
She waved it away. “It’s easier to ignore it.”
The phone screamed again, and this time, Tad grabbed it.
“I’ll get rid of them for you—hello, you’ve reached Sex U Up Productions, how can I help you?”
“Tad, don’t!” She tried to grab the phone, but he arched out of her way. It was a good ten seconds before she wrested it from him and hung up on the tinny voice she knew as well as her own. She turned it off altogether.
Rage thundered in his eyes. With those thick forearms, he caged her against the sink and loomed over her, bristling with barely tethered tension.
“That was him, wasn’t it?”
Whatever he saw in her eyes confirmed his assumption.
“How long have you been talking to him?”
“He called me a couple of weeks ago. The night of the opening.”
Recognition crashed over his face. The night she said she needed him inside her and now the connection between the two was inextricable.
“Why didn’t you tell me he’d been in touch?”
Her throat felt rough and scratchy. “Because I’ve been handling it.”
“How? By ignoring his calls?”
Cowardice was a legitimate strategy, and it had been working for her every time Simon called over the last fortnight. She clamped her lips shut. Cowardly.
Fury had sharpened his features to make him almost unrecognizable from the Tad she knew. “What does he want? Is he trying to get back with you?”
“No—no. He wants to see Evan.”
“After all this time.” His disgust at Simon’s supposedly despicable behavior rolled through her. He held her gaze fiercely, all blue determination, before his face softened. “Lili said you won’t tell Jack anything about him. Talk to me, honey.”
Apparently realizing that his huge, imposing presence in a cross-examining stance might not be especially conducive to a cozy tête-à-tête, he took a couple of steps back and threaded his arms over that blockbuster chest.
Her fingers tensed around the wine glass on the counter. “I wanted him. He didn’t want me. Oldest story in the book.”
Those clipped words were meant to be conversation-ending, but the look on Tad’s face said, ah, ah.
“Christ, you are a stubborn pain in my ass. This is not the time to be stoic, Jules. Just let me the f*ck in.”
Suddenly weary, she sat at the kitchen table. Keeping it all inside for so long was just so bloody tiring. She looked into those deep blue eyes and rallied her strength.
“He’s a chef. He runs a very fine restaurant in London and I went there for an interview and left smitten.”
“So you worked for him?”
She let out a bitter laugh. “No. I wasn’t even good enough to get the job. I bungled the interview. Just one in a long line of interviews for servers or hostesses Jack was always setting me up with because he thought I was wasting my life away working in a pub. I’d blow them off or sabotage them by not making eye contact with the chef, who was usually a good friend of Jack’s and only talking to me as a favor to an important culinary genius like my brother. A handshake and a pitying smile later, I’d be out the door. Until Simon.”
“Simon,” he said, tasting the name and not liking it. He lowered his body to the opposite chair.
“Simon St. James, chef/owner at Lilac in Islington. The interview had gone terribly, just like I planned. On the way out, he asked me why I didn’t want the job and I said, don’t you mean why I want the job? He smiled and said, you know what I mean, and it was like we had this secret between us. That night, he showed up at the Red Lion, the pub where I worked. He wanted me and—”
She stopped, the humiliation and desperation of it hitting her hard.
“Baby, go on.”
She swiped at a ridiculous tear. “I wanted to be wanted. I found myself telling him things I’d told no one else. About my reading problems and Jack and how I felt like I existed on the edges, looking in on this world I couldn’t grab hold of. All my life I had been waiting for someone to notice me. My aunt and uncle, my teachers, my brother. And here was this man, pursuing me.”
Even now, the intoxicating memory thrilled through her blood. That night he had come to the bar, she had thought it was a coincidence. He was with friends, muckety muck types who brayed too loudly and got handsy with the dogsbody who collected the glasses because she was too terrified to try anything more challenging. She had spotted him at the end of the bar, watching her silently while the noise faded around them. One of those dream moments where time stands still, except it hadn’t really. It had just slowed to a pace she could finally reckon with.
He had come to see her. Not a coincidence at all.
She headed to the back, knowing he would follow. Through the alley exit, the sound of him echoed behind her, a slow motion chase that sent her blood soaring. He had sought her out and just knowing that he wanted her even when he knew she was an odd, broken duck had taken her over the edge. Within five seconds of the cool air hitting her face, his hot mouth and body slammed into hers and she gave it up to him without a word.
More surprising was the fact he wanted to see her again. He took her home to his flat, one of those fancy lofts on the South Bank overlooking the river. She had felt as if she had entered a closed-off world. Jack’s world.
Two months it lasted. Fish and chips on the way home from the pub, scrambled eggs and rashers in bed, mornings spent tangling up the sheets before he went to work. She was finally someone else’s Number One, the center of another person’s universe, the sun in this man’s world.
She swallowed hard and met Tad’s steel-eyed gaze. “A couple months later, I was pregnant and he was back with his wife. The one he had neglected to mention.”
Anger simmered below the surface, finally coming to a head when he violently shoved back the chair, the scrape like a scream. He stood over her, the tension in his body fighting every muscle.
“And he was a friend of Jack’s?”
She nodded up at him. “He was the best man at Simon’s wedding. Of course, I only found that juicy morsel out later. Jack would go nuts.”
“This f*cker took advantage of you. Of course he’s going to go nuts, but Jack’ll have to get in line and hope there’s something left when I’m done with him.”
Oh, he didn’t understand at all. There was so much wrong between her and Simon but she was done painting herself in victim colors. Standing, she placed a calming hand on Tad’s chest and took the measure of his overactive, macho Italian heart.
Emotion thickened like custard in her throat. “No one took advantage of me. In London, I was—I was a different person. I’ve slept with a lot of guys, Tad, but with every man I was with, I felt some measure of power. I played the bad girl, the girl who backed up every tease, and I enjoyed it. They used my body but I used them right back.”
Saying it aloud rang even more hollow than the mantra in her head. She had given it up easily, and while there were plenty who came back for more, she was under no illusions about what she did for them. Toward the end, even Simon got antsy the moment he had finished shagging her. Checking his phone (she knew why now), telling her he had to get up early to receive the deliveries at the restaurant, inching her to the door and kissing her into a cab.
She pretended it was exactly what she wanted. Intimacy had never appealed to her, or more accurately, she had never appealed for intimacy. That would require some measure of self-respect, some acknowledgment that she was deserving of that kind of human affection.
“Jules,” he whispered, and the way he said her name smashed her to the ground.
Tears came hot and fast. “Don’t look at me like I need to be hugged. I’m sick of people judging my situation and thinking I’m some victim that needs to be coddled. Jack, Shane, all of you. So my reading sucks, I had an unplanned pregnancy, my brother pays my rent. But I’m not some delicate flower. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been and I don’t need a man to be my savior.”
He pulled her into his arms and it was the best, best place she had ever visited.
“Tesoro, I get this guy hurt you and it’s okay to be pissed off about that. It doesn’t make you a victim, it makes you a survivor. Get angry, honey. Don’t hold back.”
The anger had passed a long time ago, but the lessons she had learned remained.
“I’m past all that. I was angry at first but not now. Simon hurt me when I found out he was married, but… he also did me a favor.”
“He gave you Evan?” He rubbed her back in tight, heated circles.
“Yes,” she whispered against the rough skin at his throat. “But he also helped me realize that I’m drawn to certain types of guys who are no good for me.”
Like him. She didn’t have to say it. The jerk of his body as he drew back told her he understood.
“Not all guys are a*sholes,” he bit out. “Not all guys will treat you with disrespect or break your heart without a second thought.”
“No, some may even be considerate while they do the heart-breaking. How many hearts have you broken, Tad DeLuca? All that charm and those gorgeous blue eyes, then you move on, leaving human rubble in your wake.” She tried to soften it with a winsome smile but she suspected she looked like a scarecrow. “The stories you told me made my toes curl. The Brazilian cousins, that bartender at O’Caseys, the hot air balloon. Will I just be another tawdry tale in a couple of months?”
His tone of voice echoed the horrified look on his face. “Jesus, I should never have told you anything. I thought I was cheering you up and yeah, it kind of turned me on to see your reaction. Maybe it was disrespectful to the women I’d been with but, damn it Jules, don’t compare this to what I had with anyone else because there is no comparison.”
Their friendship might have placed this in a different category but it didn’t change the fundamentals. He was the unrepentant bad boy and she was the reformed bad girl and they were supposed to screw each other out of their systems and move on. He back to anything in heels, she onto Mr. Right, Safe, and Boring.
But lately, she was seeing another side to him, or allowing herself to because it had always been there: kind, caring, her best guy, Tad. What was happening between them went above and beyond the hot and dirty playtime she had signed on for.
When he had taken her hard and fast the moment she walked through the door, he had looked at her like she mattered. The beautiful bastard was making her hope. She wanted to hurt him for that.
“I guess talking about Simon brought up some stuff I haven’t dealt with.” Crediting her upset to her shitty ex seemed best all around here. She had no more tears to shed for Simon St. James, but given a chance, she would have buckets at the ready for Tad DeLuca.
He glowered. Boy, he gave good glower.
“Don’t make me a scapegoat for what this guy did.” He backed her up against the table and wedged his hard body between her shaking thighs. With both hands, he cradled her face and delivered passionate kisses that burned through her disintegrating defenses.
“This a*shole treated you like crap, bella, and it’s okay to be angry about that. It’s okay to rant and rail and go nuts. Punch it out. Cry it out. Screw it out. If you need to deal with this by banging me until we’re both cross-eyed, then do it, but don’t compare me to him. I know you’re strong and you can kick my ass, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean on me, too. I’m here for you, Jules. You are my best girl. You are in my gut.”
Another kiss punctuated his declaration, more scorching than the last, melting her heart but not the tension in her fists.
She wanted to thump the living daylights out of something, but not because of Simon and the hurt she felt then, but because the sweet, funny, sexy guy in her arms had shown her how perfect it could be. She had owned her choices and come up with a plan to ensure she never made mistakes like that again. And then she met Tad. Dreamed about him. Acted on her greedy fantasy and now she was back to where she had come from. Wishing for things she couldn’t have.
“Punish me, Jules. Get it all out,” he urged between sucks on her lower lip and hot, open-mouthed kisses along her jawline. He ground his erection into the concave softness of her sex, ripping a heartfelt moan from her throat. Rough-hewn fingers delved below the waistband of her sweats and traced a well-worn path to her center. Oh, she planned to punish him thoroughly; not for the sins of her ex, but for the cardinal sin of making her fall for him.
Making women drop at his feet was part of Tad’s skill set, but really it was his kill set. He had murdered whatever miniscule chance she’d had of surviving this affair between friends. She didn’t want to feel this way. She had tried to be careful but her heart had been half-engaged going in and she was already playing from behind.
She had only gone and fallen arse-over-tit in love with her friend. What a disaster.
He rubbed his blunt fingers against her blooming sex and caught her moan in his mouth.
“You’re so ready for me. Like you’ve been waiting for me.”
All her life, she wanted to say. All her life, she’d been waiting for a man like this. She wished… no, she couldn’t make wishes for things to have gone differently. Bloody pointless.
But.
Checking out would have been the clever thing to do, but no one had ever called her clever. Besides, she had checked out of her life too many times already. So she told him how hot he made her, how good he felt inside her. She told him to touch her there, to take her harder. She told him everything she could to avoid telling him the one thing she couldn’t. She loved a man who could never be hers but she was going to enjoy this precious time if it broke her heart to do it. Another one of those great decisions she was owning.
Only when she had screamed to his satisfaction and come so many times that she almost passed out did she let her mind go back to that forbidden wish. Not that he could be hers for the future, but that he had been hers in the past.
She wished he was Evan’s father.