Barefoot in Lace (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 2) (27 page)

“No, it isn’t,” he ground out the words. “But when I’m with you, I keep thinking I can…clean up the mess later.” He punctuated that with a swift kiss, squeezing her so tight breathing wasn’t an option.

She wanted to push away, knew she should slow this pain train before it flattened her on the tracks, but then he eased her feet back to the floor so his hands traveled up her sides, over her breasts, under her throat, into her hair. His mouth burned kisses along her jaw, and he kept pushing her back until she hit the counter and he could really press himself into her.

Her skin sizzled like the onions in hot oil, his hands making every tender spot crackle with the fire of his touch.

She couldn’t stop, couldn’t fight the urgency that made her touch all the same places on his body, over his shoulders, down his abs, lower to get her hands on the rock-hard—

The door latch echoed through the whole apartment, jerking them apart.

“Oh, hi.” Alex walked in as they somehow let go of each other, all three of them blinking in surprise. “I…I…”

“Hi, Alex,” Tom managed. “You’re back early.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m…sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Gussie said quickly. “We’re just making”—
out
—“dinner.” She gave a tug to her T-shirt.

Great, just
great
. Some role model she was.

“Well, I’m not staying, if that’s okay. I’m going to spend the night with Lizzie and—”

“Spend the night?” Tom asked. “There’s a boy over there.”

Alex battled a little smile. “I don’t think he’s going to be in our room,” she said. “And Miss Annie is there, and she said it was fine. Isn’t it fine, Gussie?”

“Of course it’s…” Not her place to give permission, she remembered. She turned to Tom. “I think it’s fine,” she said. Better, even, since it left them alone in the apartment.

But that side benefit hadn’t even registered with Tom, who was still frowning with a parental-like concern. “You sure Anne is there?”

“Uh, yeah.” Alex shifted from one foot to the other. “Do you need to talk to her or anything?”

He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it’s okay.”

Alex looked from one to the other, no doubt taking in exactly what she saw. “You want me to call or text before I come home?”

Oh, Lord. “Absolutely not,” Gussie said quickly, not caring if it was her place to say or not. “You have a key, and you can come and go as you please, as long as we know where you are.”

We
. Why did she say that?

“Cool.” Alex headed back to her room, leaving them a few feet apart and a million miles away from where they had just been.

“Shit.” He picked up his wineglass and lifted it for a mock toast. “Here’s to ‘do as I say and not as I do,’ right?”

Gussie smiled and returned the toast with her own glass. “Told you all good things must come to an end.”

Over his glass, tapered blue eyes warned her loud and clear. The end wasn’t in sight…yet.

* * *

Maybe it was because Alex had unexpectedly popped in on them, but Tom managed to focus his attention on getting dinner on the table and quit trying to drag Gussie to bed. They were both a little gun-shy after the interruption, so they enjoyed the food, the view, the company and, in the back of his mind, the fact that they’d be alone overnight.

“I have to say something.” Gussie toyed with her last few bites, finally setting down the fork without taking one.

“Not sure I like the sound of that.”

“No, it’s a good thing. I mean, it’s an observation I’ve made about you. An incongruity in your character, if you will.”

“Nope, definitely not going to like this.” He stabbed a piece of chicken the way he’d like to stab any conversation about
incongruity in his character
, whatever the hell that could mean.

She ignored his comment, sipping ice water before making any pronouncements. “For a guy who is, you know, hell-bent for leather to stay completely free of any responsibilities, you sure take yours seriously.”

“What am I going to let her do? She’s my…” He shook his head and gave up on the last bit of chicken. “Look, I had to take care of my sister when she was a teenager. The first thing she did when she turned eighteen was hook up with an idiot and get pregnant. Can you blame me if I get a little nervous about history repeating itself?”

“But in the flower market today, when you thought someone was on our tail? You were as protective as a paid bodyguard.”

Hardly. “A good one would have taken that asshole down for getting pictures of you.”

“But we know why he was doing it. He’s probably on Instagram or Facebook.”

Tom thought about that, the echo of Suzette’s marketing stats still in his head. Ninety percent of the people who’d seen the shots were women. That guy had been kind of a bruiser, with muscles and a look of intensity on his face that still made Tom uneasy.

“You can admit it,” she urged. “You have a protective streak. I think, deep inside, there’s a man who wants to care for his loved ones and, you know, guard the cave.”

He looked skyward at the phrase. “Excuse me if I don’t grunt and drag you by the hair.” Then he winked at her. “Although, the idea has merit.”

“Scoff if you want,” she said. “But I think there’s hope for you,
panta monos
. You’ll have to find the right…situation. Then maybe you won’t have to stamp an expiration date on your other arm.”

She went for a teasing tone, but the words hit him hard anyway. “I don’t expire, Gussie… Other people do.” He felt the sensations well up, familiar and dark. He looked away, trying to manage them, but the view of a sun-streaked sky melting into twilight took him back to…

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that, for me, in my life, I’ve lost the people that I…” Damn it, his voice would crack if he said the word
love
.

“I’m sorry.” She shifted in her seat and started to reach out to him, but stopped as if the look on his face warned her not to touch him right then.

But he didn’t want to push her away. Not now. Not…ever. “Don’t apologize, Gussie. You’ve only been real and open with me.” He took her hand, threading their fingers together, already wanting her support for what he knew was about to come out.

“And you?” she asked, tracing her thumb over his knuckle, the touch sexy and intimate and better than any conversation. “Have you been completely open?”

Swallowing, he studied their joined hands, her long, tanned fingers and his blunt-tipped, stronger ones. Intertwined like lovers. But, of course, they couldn’t be lovers. Not yet. Not until he told her everything.

“I haven’t lied,” he finally said. “But there’s more.”

Her thumb stilled on his knuckle. “Really?”

“Really.”

They sat in silence for at least thirty seconds. Gussie didn’t move, patiently waiting for him to continue, but Tom couldn’t move, paralyzed by his thoughts and the memories that he liked to bury.

“I guess I am protective,” he finally said. “I don’t want to lose anyone else in my life.”

She nodded sympathetically. “You’ve lost both your parents and your sister. That’s more than a lot of people have to endure at such a young age, Tom.”

“But they aren’t all I’ve lost.”

He felt her fingers tense as she waited.

He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry and his stomach was tight and, son of a bitch, something hot was burning his eyelids.

“Who else have you lost?” She whispered the question, as if she really didn’t want to know the answer.

“My wife and son.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Gussie stared at him, all the blood draining from her head to land in a pool in her stomach. “You were married.” She barely breathed the words. “With a son?”

Taking a deep inhale, he held it in his lungs for a long time before letting it out in a long, tattered puff of sorrow.

“My wife, Sophia, had been six months pregnant when she hemorrhaged. Both she and our son died before she could get medical help.” He slipped his hand out of her grasp, pushing his chair back from the table slightly. “So, no, I haven’t always been alone.”

A rush of blood and sympathy and, whoa, understanding rolled through her. No wonder…no damn wonder he wanted to be alone.

“Tom, I’m so sorry.” Lame, hollow words. “Can you talk about it?”

“No,” he said with a mirthless laugh. “But I guess I’m about to.”

“Why have you never mentioned it?”

“Because it’s easier to pretend it never happened.”

Who would want to do that? Why? “Why has Alex never mentioned it?” Surely she knew her uncle had been married and had a baby on the way and then…oh, God, it was sad.

“Alex doesn’t know.”

“Did Ruthie?”

He nodded slowly. “Alex was only seven when Sophia…when it happened. I suspect Ruthie hadn’t told her, then never mentioned it after Sophia died. I’d been around to see my sister only sporadically before that, and she never met my wife.”

His
wife
. The very word sounded foreign on his lips.

If Alex had been seven, then this must have happened about five years ago.

“So that’s why I don’t do well with connections,” he explained. “When Ruthie died, it was like…” He made a guttural sound. “How many people does a person have to lose before they know it’s better not to have any…any…”

“Any family,” she supplied. “And yet Ruthie made sure that didn’t happen by leaving Alex with you.”

Another grunt of unexplained emotion. “Which was why when I found out and got to Florida, I was just a shithead from the word go.”

“No, you weren’t. You tried. You are still trying to reach her.”

“I didn’t want another family,” he ground out. “I was actually so angry at Ruthie, I didn’t mourn her properly. I still haven’t.”

But he was, in his own way.

“Anyway, that’s my story, and better you know before you get in any deeper.”

Too late. She was deep. “Can you tell me more? Tell me about her?”

He shrugged. “She was amazing. Awesome. One of a kind.”

Gussie was ashamed at the twinge of jealousy, tamping it down quickly. Of course he would marry someone like that…like himself. “I’m glad you found her, then.”

He shot her a look that said he wasn’t so glad at all. That it really wasn’t better to have loved and lost.

“We really wanted the baby,” he said, giving her a mental image of a young couple, blissfully expecting, which came with yet another twist of envy. He pushed away from the table completely. “He wasn’t planned, but…we were…”

He shook his head and walked out to the balcony, leaving his thought unfinished. But Gussie could already imagine what he and Sophia were—happy. Excited. Anticipating great things.

For a moment, Gussie stayed right where she was because running after him to demand to know more wasn’t going to help him at all. She could see his silhouette, leaning against the railing, head down as he worked to shovel his emotions back into wherever he stored them under lock and key.

She wondered how a person survived that kind of heartache. No, the question she was asking was, how would
she
survive that kind of heartache? It was clear how Tom had coped.

Always alone.

Well, not now, buddy. Not this time.

Taking a steadying breath, Gussie got up and joined him in the balmy evening air. Wordlessly, she put her hand on his back and turned him toward her, and then she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest.

He kissed the top of her head and fell a little closer into her, still silent.

She had so many questions, but the logistics of his sorrowful story didn’t seem as important as holding him right then and just letting him hurt against her.

They stood like that until darkness fell, and only then did Tom ease back and look at Gussie with gratitude in his blue eyes.

“She was a real estate agent in Athens,” he said. “I met her trying to buy a place to live, of all things.”

She almost smiled. “So you’re not really a man with no home or country.”

“I loved Greece and decided to get a place there when I got financially secure and stable. Then I met Sophia and started staying at her apartment, and before we knew it, she was pregnant.”

“Before you were married?”

He gave a dry laugh. “Now you sound like her dad, who did threaten to kill me. Or drown me in ouzo and whiskey.” His smile grew wider and his gaze distant with a memory. “Her family lived—
lives
—on an island in the middle of the southeast Aegean Sea, Karpathos. They’re farmers up north, in a village so old school that women run around in traditional dress. They live close to the earth, close to each other, close to God. But with so much life and love and wine and food and family, it was…unbelievable.”

Jealousy got its grip on Gussie’s heart.
Now
she ached with wanting something she didn’t have.

“We got married right there in the front of her farm, in a really small ceremony because she was already showing, so it was just her family.” His smile faded as quickly as it came. “But they couldn’t help her when she needed it the most.”

Even though part of her almost didn’t want to know, she asked anyway. “What happened?”

He turned toward the view, so she couldn’t see the pain etched on his features. “She was staying with them because the pregnancy hadn’t been easy. She had problems from the beginning and, as much as I wanted her to stay in Athens, near her doctor, when I was out of town, she insisted on going home. It was where she felt safer, being pregnant I guess, because her mother and sisters were there.”

Quiet for a minute, he stared straight ahead, and Gussie waited, bracing for a tough story.

“I had to go to London for a week-long shoot when she was pretty far along.” He closed his eyes as though a surge of guilt hit. “Apparently, it was all very fast, and they tried, but the village is notoriously remote, with one treacherous road an hour from the only real town on the island. And even there, all they have is a medical center, no hospital. She didn’t make it, and neither did the baby.”