Me And Mr. I.T. (Kupid's Cove Book 2) (21 page)

“What happens when you get a computer that’s completely and utterly messed up? Do you throw it away?”

He shook his head. “Why are you asking me this now?”

“Humor me,” I said and he shrugged, taking a drink of the champagne straight out of the bottle.

“I don’t throw it away,” he answered, wiping his mouth, “I figure out what’s wrong with it and fix it. Even if the hard drive is burnt out, I pull it out and put in a new one. That is if say, no one dropped it.” He winked at me and I smiled, my heart bouncing back that he could joke with me.

“Even if fixing it takes hours of frustrated searching, figuring, and adjusting?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so. That’s my job, after all. I even got that computer you dropped working again. I call it the “Ellie-nado.” He grinned and I punched him playfully on the arm.

I made a face at his joke. He was sort of right, I am a bit like a tornado when it comes to technology. I sighed and took his hand. “So what you’re saying is you have the patience to take apart, fix, and put back together again, something that most people would just toss out as garbage.”

“Like I said, that’s my job. I learned at an early age how to fix things, but I never could fix my father.”

I leaned in and kissed his lips, the alcohol stronger now, as I let it linger between us. “That’s because he couldn’t be fixed, he was inherently broken by life, babe. The fact that you kept trying, and trying, and trying, even going so far as putting yourself in a dangerous situation when you knew he was mad at you, tells me how hard you tried. Let me ask you one more question. What did you do when your father came at you that night in the shop? Did you punch him back? Did you try to kick him off you?”

He shook his head. “I had a propeller in my chest and he was pounding my head. All I could do was cover my face and scream for my mom.”

“You don’t see it, do you? You could have punched him back, even with a propeller in your chest, you could have swung your arms and knocked him off you, but you didn’t, because it never crossed your mind, did it?”

He paused for several seconds before sighing. “No, it never crossed my mind. I knew it was the alcohol making him combative. I wish he would have sought help before he ended up taking my mother from me, too.”

“How did your brother and father get along? You told me he left home to do something else too, right?”

He nodded. “He left when he turned twenty. Said he couldn’t deal with my father’s attitude anymore. They were constantly in knockdown drag out fights. It drove me nuts. Once, my brother even punched my mom in the nose because she tried to break up a fight.” He shook his head, anger making his hands clench mine tightly. “I’m so disgusted by their behavior. It’s embarrassing to even have to say they were my family.”

I ran my hand down his face and held his chin. “That’s why I know I never have to worry about you hurting me. You got the genes of a lover, not a fighter. Do you see that now?”

“I hope so, Ellie. I don’t want to give you up, but I don’t want to hurt you either. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I hurt you.”

I kissed him hard on the lips, my teeth pressing into his lips and my tongue actively seeking out every crevice of his mouth until neither of us could breathe. He held my head, his hands under my hair and his thumbs rubbing my face. “I didn’t know how much I loved you until just now, when you showed me I don’t have to be the kind of man they are. I can be myself and no longer have to worry about my family. You’ll love me even though my family is screwed up.”

I smiled, his words relieving my heart of the burden of sadness. “I don’t love you for your family. I love you for you. I fell in love with your smile, the way you popped your head into my office just to ask if everything was okay with my computer. When I said yes, you gave me a cheeky thumbs up before you jogged away. I fell in love with the consistency of your personality, that I could always depend on you for a laugh when I was feeling down. I may not want to admit it, but I fell in love with you months ago, when I was least able to express that to you, but when you somehow knew if you tried long enough, someday I would be yours. Though, I still say the fake marriage was an unfair play.”

He smiled, his dark, almost black, eyes shining in the darkness. “You’re right, it was an unfair play, but in the end, it was what we both needed.” He sighed and ran his hands over his face. “I had planned to bring you out here and make love to you under the moonlight. Now, I can thank my brother for ruining the mood.”

I leaned down until our lips were almost touching. “Who said the mood is ruined?”

He sat forward, melting his lips to mine and laying me back on the blanket, the sand soft and shifting under us as we lay. I shivered with anticipation, knowing I would soon be flying high again, feeling and thinking about nothing but the love I felt for this man. His hand managed to unhook my bra while he kissed me. He let it fall to the blanket and my breasts were free, yearning for his touch. He kissed his way down my neck to my chest, his thumb rubbing across one nipple while his mouth teased the other into a hardened bud. I moaned a little, squirming under him, wanting to be one with this man who I loved more than I could admit just a few months ago. His lips left my breast, causing me to cry out for him to come back, but he had moved on, hooking my panties in his teeth and tugging them down, then off and into the sand.

“You’re so beautiful,” he moaned, his still clothed body rubbing against my naked one. “You make me so happy, Ellie.” He kissed his way up the inside of my leg while his hands roamed toward the area that was aching for his touch. He knelt between my legs, using his to nudge mine open, while he stripped his shirt off. He unbuckled his belt, letting the zipper chatter down slowly, making me want him enough to beg him to hurry.

“You’re driving me crazy,” I moaned.

He grinned evilly, his pants now off and just his boxers left to go. I sat up, grabbing the waistband and pulling them down. He sucked in a breath as the cool air hit his bare skin, until my tongue warmed him again. He fisted my hair in his hands as I worked him into a frenzy, his moans bouncing around inside the grove of trees.

“Now,” I ordered, trying to lie back, but he kept hold of my arms, forcing me to follow him as he laid back. I straddled him, his lips on mine, and our cries of pleasure were barely audible over the backdrop of the crashing waves.

He rubbed himself against me a few times and when I wasn’t expecting it, he plunged deep inside me, making me cry out his name. I rocked a few times, trying to find the rhythm that would get us there the fastest, but he didn’t let me. He held me back, making me go slow, and experience the event as though it was the first, and last time, I would ever make love to him.

His hand caressed my face, as his body caressed the rest of me. “I love you so much, Ellie,” he moaned, his eyes closing as the euphoria overtook him.

I scooted farther back, taking everything he had like a drug I couldn’t live without. His lips on mine, he built the impending cliff dive until neither of us could stop the onslaught of pressure within us.

I shivered, my body reacting to the movements while my heart reacted to the emotions. “I love you,” I cried as we fell off the cliff, wrapped in each other’s arms to cushion the fall.

Chapter Seventeen

I waited in the cafe, sipping a cup of coffee and trying to remember what life was like in Maui before two weeks ago. Since we left there everything has changed, and it made me wonder if everything would change again, when we returned. He assures me it won’t. He promises that when we get back to Maui, one of us will give up our apartment, and live with the other, but I wonder. I wonder a lot of things, like how I can trust myself with him completely, without the fear that he will decide he can’t see past my issues. Maybe Bain poisoned my mind for so long because it kept me from investing my heart in anyone again, until the time was right.

This felt like the right time, even in the midst of the chaos that has become our work life. When we’re together, all of that slips away and we explore our love for each other, even when the honesty is almost too much to bear, much in the way it felt last night. I noticed the change in him immediately upon his return to the room. What made me feel secure, surprisingly, was his inability to keep it from me. He had to talk to me about it, even if he tried to do it in a self-destructive way. It felt good to be the one giving him reassurance about something, instead of the other way round.

I checked my watch and was surprised that Katie was already ten minutes late. That wasn’t her MO, but considering what we’ve already accomplished this morning in getting ready for the party, she was probably resting. Since daybreak, we’ve been putting the finishing touches on the room, wiring it for sound, because the officers would be listening for suspicious conversations between employees, and making sure that the food order was complete. I had a list of alcohol to go pick up in town with Katie when we went to speak with some possible sponsors for the law clinic event, and to record an interview for it as well.

“Sorry I’m late, Ellie,” Katie said and I looked up at her realizing I had been lost in thought.

“Aloha. No problem, I was having a cup of coffee and a rest break. Would you like one?”

She shook her head and slid into the chair across from me. “Wish I could, but the caffeine is too hard on the old ticker. Decaf is just…” she lifted one side of her nose and I laughed at the face.

“Truer words never spoken right there,” I agreed.

“Are you ready to go?” Katie asked, while I pushed in my chair and recycled my cup.

“I’m ready, but we aren’t going to take the transit bus. We can’t be toting alcohol back on it, and I want to make sure you’re comfortable and can rest if you get tired, so we’ll take one of the vans.” I thunked myself in the forehead. “I just remembered I can’t drive.”

She shook her head at me a little bit at me. “It’s fine, I can drive. We aren’t going that far.”

I hesitated. “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. You had surgery on that arm and probably shouldn’t be using it too much yet.”

“I’m fine, really. Besides, they went through my femoral artery in my leg, but the left not the right. Everyone needs to relax,” she said, pushing her chair in harder than necessary.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Everyone, as in Gideon?”

“He’s driving me batty, Ellie.” She laughed a little and I squeezed her shoulder.

“That may be, but he loves you, and it scares the hell out of him at the thought of losing you.”

“I suppose,” she agreed, “and that’s the only reason I don’t say anything. Anyway, I can drive the short distance we need to go. I’ll let the liquor store load the booze, just to make you feel better.”

I laughed and handed her a set of keys to the van I had already checked out, then we took the service door to the parking garage. Once inside the van, she rolled the windows down and put it in gear. “Where to first?” she asked.

“Our interview is in two hours, so we have plenty of time to talk about my idea for the event.”

She drove toward Waikiki and nodded. “You mentioned that you had an idea. With the party tonight, I forgot about it.”

I pointed out my right window. “Let’s park there and go discuss it on the beach.”

She did as I suggested and we climbed out, the sun warm on our backs and the breeze rustling our hair. We walked along the almost empty beach, watching the waves roll in. There were plenty of people about on Waikiki, but this particular edge of the beach was too rocky to enjoy so we were alone.

“Why can’t we talk about this in the van?” she asked.

My right leg gave out in the sand and I sank to the ground, the sand warm against my legs.

“Ellie! What the hell? Why do you keep falling? Are you sick?” she asked, sitting next to me.

I brushed my hands off and hugged my legs to my chest. “No, I’m not sick. You said Gideon told you my story, right?”

“He told me that you were adopted when you were four.”

“That’s it?” I asked surprised. I figured he would have told her the whole thing.

“There’s more?”

I laughed and punched the sand in front of me. “Oh, there is so much more. It’s why I needed an adoptive mother to start with.” I pulled up my dress to show her my legs, the right one obviously so much larger. “This is why I fall sometimes. I get off balance because the right is bigger than the left.”

She looked up at me, confusion in her eyes. “So you were abandoned because of your leg?”

I leaned back on my hands in the sand and watched the ocean. “Essentially, but mostly because I also had a cleft lip and palate, I’m blind in my right eye, and I’ve lost seventy percent of my hearing. I have a large port wine stain on my leg and the extra blood has caused increase growth in the tissue and bone.”

She was staring at me with her mouth open. “I had no idea.”

I smiled. “I hide it well. I’ve learned camouflage over the years. It has only been recently that I’ve learned how to talk about it.”

“Recently, as in since you met Maltrand?”

“I guess you could say that,” I answered, dropping my skirt over my legs. “My condition is what I thought Gideon was going to tell you about.”

She shook her head. “He just used you as an example of why adoption is a good idea.”

“Adoption is a good idea, at least in my opinion. I know I wouldn’t be sitting here today if my mom hadn’t found me when she did.”

“You’re right, I can’t argue with that,” she said, looking out across the blue green water. “What I can’t decide is if that will make Gideon happy, or if he just thinks it will.”

“So you’re afraid if you adopt a child he’ll eventually still long for a child with his genes.”

“Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, Gideon is wildly successful, handsome, smart, and virile. It’s very possible that he would want a child of his own.”

“I don’t think so,” I said and she turned to me, brushing her hair from her face.

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t want a child of his own. He wants a child, with you. He doesn’t care if that child is white, black, Indian, Pacific Islander, Japanese, red, orange, purple, or blue. If he gets to be a parent, with you, it is only then that he will be wildly successful, at least in his eyes.”

“So you’re saying that he really doesn’t care about the genes, as long as he can be a father.”

“That’s what he told me, but it’s the other part that he told me that tells me without a doubt he doesn’t care about a child with his genetic genes.”

“The part about him going through a surrogate for us to have a baby, and how hard that would be for me to accept?”

I shook my head. “No, the part where he told me he would never ask you to love a child that was only his. He would rather be childless than cause you pain by knowing he didn’t care enough about your feelings to take into consideration how difficult it would be for you. Here’s the thing about Gideon. He knows life isn’t black and white. He knows a lot of the time it’s what happens in the gray areas that really breaks a person’s heart and soul. Right now, he knows you’re struggling through the gray area. You’re feeling jealous, or resentful, that he can have a child, and you can’t. You want to say it’s okay and you want a child, so it might as well be his, even if it can’t be yours, but your heart keeps stopping you. Your mind keeps telling you you’re a failure at being a woman and you don’t deserve a guy like Gideon. Ultimately, this isn’t about a child, as much as it’s about being a burden to Gideon.”

She brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “You don’t know that,” she said angrily, refusing to look at me, though her profile showed me the quivering of her chin and the catch in her breath.

“Yes, I do, because I feel the same way, Katie. I feel the same way about what my syndrome will mean to Maltrand and me, if we want to start a family. We don’t know if Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome is genetic, but do I want to take the risk and make a child live through what I live through?” I asked aloud. She shook her head as an answer, even though it was a rhetorical question. “It’s not easy being a woman in our shoes, Katie, but here’s the most important part, are you listening?”

She looked toward me and nodded, a tear running down her cheek. I swiped it away and hugged her, wishing she didn’t feel so bad about all of this. “They didn’t marry us for our limitations. They married us for our unlimited potential. They married us because we stole their hearts, and they love us. All the turmoil, pain, feelings of loss, fear, anger, resentment, worry, and guilt we feel about not being able to give them a child is tenfold for them.”

“I don’t understand how that can be. How can they feel those things even more than we do, when they can have a child of their own?”

“Because they have to watch us suffer under the knowledge that we can’t,” I whispered.

I felt her deflate under my arm as though someone had stuck a pin in a balloon. The truth took all the fight, anger, and pain, and tossed them aside because they were no longer an argument. We had arrived at the real reason for her discord. She shook with tears as I hugged her, the pain she felt echoed in my own heart.

“I didn’t think of it that way,” she cried, “but you’re right. The way he looks at me sometimes is so painful. Like I’m causing so much pain for him and I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to be the cause of his pain.”

I laid my cheek on the top of her head. “I know, and so does he. My point is, you don’t have to shoulder these feelings alone. As far as Gideon is concerned, all he cares about is making you happy. Absolutely nothing else matters. So be honest with him. Tell him all the things you wish were different, but you know never will be. Let him share with you how he feels about the different options of starting a family, but listen closely, and take to heart what he’s saying. He watches you with Katie-Bug and he knows the amazing mother you’re going to be, not because you birthed the child in your arms, but because you birthed it in your heart. That’s all that matters to him. That your family begins and ends with the heart. Considering that it took Gideon coming into your life to find the real problems with yours, I would say he already fixed it, now you need to trust him with it.”

She laughed softly, wiping a hand under each eye. “I might think you were fifty-five instead of twenty-five with that kind of advice, Ellie.”

I smiled at her encouragingly. “My mom always taught me to speak from the heart, because that’s where the truth lies. No matter what your head is telling you, you should always follow your heart.”

“She sounds like a smart lady.”

“She’s a nurse. I think that’s why God kept me alive those four years, when by rights I should have been dead. Having a cleft lip and palate for that long leads to malnutrition, but somehow, I made it long enough for all the stars to line up right. They put me in the hospital the same time she started working there. Someone called in sick, and they asked my mom to take her place. The rest is history, but it was meant to be.”

Katie hugged her legs to her chest and laid her cheek on her knees. “Do you think I’ll know when it’s meant to be?”

I nodded, patting her back a few times. “I do, just like I believe it will be the same for me and Mr. I.T.”

She smiled. “I love that he wants people to call him that now. He used to be offended by it.”

“I told him I call him that not as an insult, but as a term of endearment. To me, he’s always going to be Mr. I.T., the guy who can fix anything, even my heart, and who has the best hard drive around.”

She shook with laughter at my pun, waving her hands until she could get a breath in again. “Sorry I asked,” she giggled. “I’m so happy for you two. Enough boo-hooing on my part. Tell me your idea for the event.”

“Right, well, to answer your question, I don’t want to talk in the van in case someone does have a listening device in there. I’m not telling secrets, but all the same. Until we know who’s behind this, I would rather not give them a heads up on any events we are planning, nor about Lei being named GM tonight.”

“Good thinking,” she agreed. “So your idea involves the hotel, obviously.”

“It does, and lots of help from Mr. I.T. We have this beautiful hotel and while the beach isn’t as secluded as Kupid’s Cove, we could still set up the luau event equipment on the beach.”

“You want to hold a luau during the fashion show?” she asked confused.

“Not exactly. What I had in mind was, we throw an exact replica of the party in Maui, but here. Same decorations for the ballroom, and have a big screen so both rooms can see the other, and people can talk to each other using headphones. Say for instance one guest sees another guest in the other room and wants to say hello, they can go to a designated area, grab a headset and call the other person over.”