Something New (36 page)

From behind, already outside, Abby said, “You guys are so cute when you bicker.” Rodrigo could hear the smile in her tone. It lightened his heart and pulled a secret grin out of him.

Anything to keep her spirits lifted.

“You notice that he’s the common denominator with instigating the bickering”—Braden pointed at Rodrigo as Rodrigo locked his house up tight—“because he does the same cute pushy crap with you.”

Rodrigo pocketed his keys and moved in close to where Abby and Braden stood. “As long as you both think it’s cute” He put his hand on Braden’s hard stomach but leaned down to brush his lips across Abby’s upturned mouth, savoring the closeness with both of them.

With a poke to Rodrigo’s ribs, Braden started moving backward down the curved walkway. “I’ll tell you what’s cute,” he said, smiling at Rodrigo, “is this little
Bray
you started calling me this morning. It’s not exactly original,
Rigo
”—the twinkle in Braden’s eyes laughed for him—“but I’ll take it.”

Two big strides had Rodrigo within catching distance. He grabbed the front of Braden’s shirt, dragged the man right back to him, and yanked him down until their mouths were only an inch apart. “You’ll fucking take whatever I give you and like it.”

“Yeah?” Braden’s breath feathered over Rodrigo’s mouth, the warmth one hell of a foreplay move.

Rodrigo closed the distance between them. “Yeah.” He whispered the word past Braden’s parted lips and then took him with a slow, easy kiss. Rodrigo grazed and feathered his lips against Braden’s, feeling none of the frantic need to dominate he had from the moment this relationship between all three of them had taken its first intimate turn. Instead of pushing and claiming with force, Rodrigo relaxed his mouth and let Braden work his tongue inside; he just let himself enjoy Braden tasting him with inquisitive little licks that started pleasant sparks but didn’t erupt into a catastrophic inferno. Abby moved in at Rodrigo’s back and started pressing kisses against his nape, warming and protecting Rodrigo from behind while Braden kept his front covered and his mouth busy.

As much as Rodrigo would have thought the opposite, something in his taking Braden last night had actually settled much of the chaos within him about this odd three-person coupling. Rather than bring his sexuality into question, it eradicated any insecurities about Rodrigo’s place between this pair, where he stood, and whether a ménage relationship could work.

If it’s me with these two people, it can.

Just as Braden nipped Rodrigo’s lower lip and Rodrigo was about to drag Abby around to his front for a deeper taste—along with a suggestion that they go back inside and try the pool table out before heading to work—Abby squeezed him around the waist. Hard.

“Guys, guys.” Abby’s hissing tone and short fingernails digging into Rodrigo’s stomach cut through the haze of lust like a sword. “Rodrigo, you have company.”

Easing back from the kiss, Braden stepped to Rodrigo’s left, clearing the way to see the new car pulling up the drive. Or rather, the two people emerging from the car already parked in the drive.

Henry and Mary
. What in the hell was Rodrigo’s father doing here with his wife? Rodrigo stiffened to hard as granite.
Shit.

Henry rounded the front of the vehicle, his rough face a mask, with his chin tipped high. His green gaze barely swept over Rodrigo’s and definitely didn’t hold on him. The man also reached the foot of the walkway and stayed put, as if the break between the driveway and the walk couldn’t be breached.

A casing started to solidify around Rodrigo’s heart at Henry’s rebuff. Rodrigo felt Braden start to step away, so Rodrigo snatched his hand out to the left, grabbing Braden before he could move.

Mary approached on her own, a flowerpot in her hands and a wobbly smile on her glossy lips. “I noticed when we came for lunch last weekend that you didn’t have a hanging plant for the front of your house.” Her voice rose in accompaniment with her growing, clearly forced, grin. “Everyone should have one. It’s welcoming. We didn’t think you would be here. I was just going to hang it from one of the beams and slip the note in your mailbox.” She thrust the cascade of yellow and green out in front of her. “Here.”

Rodrigo couldn’t stop himself from staring over Mary’s shoulder to the imposing blond-haired man standing so stiffly at the foot of the walk. Everything in Rodrigo wanted to race down the walkway and bodily force Henry to look at him with more than a cursory glance. The ease of their conversation at the diner rang in Rodrigo’s head like the hollowest of laughs, mocking him for the chump he’d been to think he might actually have a real father one day.

After a couple of thick, tense heartbeats, Abby took the plant from Mary. “Thank you. It’s so pretty.”

“You’re welcome.” Mary glanced between Rodrigo and her husband, and her mouth pulled down at the edge. “Okay, well, I have to get to work. It was good to see you.” She lifted her hand only a few inches from her side in an abbreviated wave. “Bye.”

As Henry stepped back to open his wife’s door, his gaze slid Rodrigo’s way and finally did hold for that moment Rodrigo had thought he so desperately wanted. Piercing anger showed through during the split second of eye contact between them, and it screamed in Rodrigo’s ears louder than the ugliest epithets Henry could have shouted. Then it was gone. Henry slammed the passenger-side door and moved back around to the driver’s side of his car without ever speaking a word.

Oh, no fucking way
. Rodrigo flashed back to Braden’s uncertainty last night about Rodrigo welcoming a nickname between them in public, and it merged in his head with Abby’s uncensored confession of love as she drifted off to sleep, content and safe in her lovers’ arms.
You do not get to pretend you don’t see the people I love, you son of a bitch.

Rodrigo raced down the walkway and practically leaped over the car in his effort to get to Henry. He grabbed at Henry’s army jacket, jammed him up against the side of the car, and bit out each word through clenched teeth. “You don’t have to sully your precious, pure gaze by looking at me ever again, but you will damn well at least acknowledge that there are two other people standing here. Good people. Decent people. People worthy of respect. But you wouldn’t know that because you saw a woman hanging on my back while I was kissing another man and decided I wasn’t worth even saying hello to anymore.”

Chips of icy green stared back at Rodrigo at eye level, unblinking, and Rodrigo felt his face twist into an ugly distortion of himself.

“Nice to know where I stand with you before I wasted anymore of my time,” Rodrigo said with ruthless chill in his voice. “Have a fucking nice day.” With the taste of bile burning a hole in his throat, he shoved off and walked away.

Rodrigo didn’t get halfway around the front of the car when Henry grabbed him from behind, spun him around, and bowed Rodrigo back over the hood with a hand to Rodrigo’s chest and a finger pointed in his face. “Listen, you judgmental little bastard, because you do not get to walk away from this, making assumptions like you know
shit
about me.”

As Henry held Rodrigo down, his voice went low and deep, and possessed as abrasive a timbre as Rodrigo had ever heard in himself. “I step out of my car and see something that doesn’t make a shit-licking bit of sense to me, but whatever, you’re thirty-four years old, and it’s your life. Only there you are in the middle, looking fucking ready to cock your imaginary weapon and blow me to kingdom come before I even speak a word. You don’t say one goddamned word. What did you expect me to say or do when you didn’t even introduce me to your friends? You not only refuse my wife’s gift, but you’re outright rude enough to her to make me want to smack you in the mouth. And all that time, you’re staring at me waiting for me to spew some racist or sexist or I-don’t-the-fuck-know what kind of bullshit, waiting for me to fulfill every one of the nasty little expectations you apparently have of me.

“Oh yeah,” Henry added, craggy eyebrows shooting upward. “You think I couldn’t see you? I could. I was watching you out of the corner of my eye the whole fucking time, wondering what the hell I ever said or implied to you that would make you think I would call you names or turn you out for
anything
you do or want or are. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t say anything. I just did my best every time we were together to get to know my son.” He jammed both hands against Rodrigo’s chest. “It was
you
who decided I was gonna dismiss you, so you judged me first. Nice going. You successfully pissed me off. And generally speaking”—Henry pulled back and pointed as he moved away, snarling just as hard as Rodrigo had—“it’s not good for me to talk to people when I’m this fucking mad.”

Shit
. Grabbing his stomach, Rodrigo thought he might throw up as Henry’s tirade unfolded and was processed in his brain.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What did I do?

Rodrigo hauled himself off the car’s hood, panic making his feet clumsy. “Henry, wait!”

Without even looking up, Henry opened the driver’s-side door, and Rodrigo could only see the man driving out of his life forever.

No
. His chest heaved.
Don’t go.

“Dad!” Rodrigo’s voice went high with a croak as he used that word out loud for the first time in his entire life.

That one syllable jerked Henry to a halt and had him grabbing on to the open door of his car.

Reaching Henry’s side in three strides, with only the open car door between them, Rodrigo locked his legs so that he didn’t fall to his knees and beg. “I’m sorry.” He imagined this was how he might have felt if he’d had a father at ten years old and earned his disappointment for poor behavior. “You’re right. I did do all that. I started to care, and I didn’t want you to hurt me, so I set myself in a position where you couldn’t. I was wrong.” He notched his chin even higher, as if the angle might reverse the ridiculous threat of tears. “I apologize.”

Henry shut the car door, eliminating the barrier between them. “Rodrigo, I didn’t even know you existed for the first thirty-three years of your life.” He took Rodrigo’s face in his rough hands, creating the most wonderful prison. “That’s more than half
my
life that I lived every day without knowing you were around. Do you get how sorry I am about that? I think I know what I saw when I drove up, but I’m not sure. But even if I’m right and I don’t understand it, it’s not gonna be anything I’m gonna make a stand over and risk losing you. That’s just not going to happen. Even if I get angry and need to step away to breathe, I’ll still come back.” Henry’s gaze shimmered with too much brightness, not like a sheet of cold ice as Rodrigo had so recently assessed it. “I’m not walking away from this. Get used to it.”

Hating the flood he could feel coming on, Rodrigo buried his face in Henry’s shoulder but could not hide the ridiculous tremors in his shoulders. Henry simply cuffed his hand around Rodrigo’s neck and held him close, allowing Rodrigo a moment to get out some of the stuff he had bottled up so tightly inside himself.

Taking a breath, Rodrigo pulled his shit together and faced Henry again. “I want you to meet some people.” He hadn’t for one moment forgotten Abby and Braden, arm in arm across the drive, waiting for him. “I care about them more than I’ve ever cared about anybody, and for some reason that I’m not going to question, they feel the same. We’re doing an unusual kind of thing together, but it’s good, and it’s working, and I’m trying every day not to fuck it up.”

Henry chuckled and cuffed Rodrigo’s neck even harder. “That’s a good plan.”

“Abby, Braden”—Rodrigo beckoned them closer—“can you come here? I want you to meet someone.”

As they approached, Abby turned her head for a moment, but Rodrigo still caught her wiping her eyes. Braden was more subtle, but Rodrigo still heard the man clear his throat.

My man and my woman
. Rodrigo stood up straight, and his chest expanded with a burst of pride and love.
Hell, my very life.

“Henry, meet Abby Gaines and Braden Crenshaw. Guys, this is Henry Portman.” Rodrigo slid his arm loosely around Henry’s shoulders. “He’s my father.”

“Good to meet you, sir.” Braden stuck his hand out in greeting.

Henry clasped Braden’s hand and shook it. “Likewise.” He then shifted to Abby and exchanged a handshake too. “Abby, it’s nice to put a face to the name. Rodrigo has shared many wonderful things about you. Braden?” The man’s gaze suddenly narrowed. “You’re the detective, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Braden nodded.

“Then I’ve heard lots of good things about you too.”

Rodrigo left the three of them to their exchanges. He made his way around to the passenger side of Henry’s car and squatted so he could look in at the petite blonde who had shown him nothing but kindness from the moment they’d met.

“Mary”—Rodrigo’s voice went husky again—“I apologize for my rude behavior. It was sweet of you to bring me something for my house, and I do appreciate it very much.” He stood back up and wrapped his fingers around the door’s handle. “Will you let me introduce you to my friends?”

“I’d love that, Rodrigo.” Mary smiled up at him through the open window. “Thank you.”

I don’t deserve this much kindness.

Rodrigo opened the door anyway, took the woman’s hand, and helped her out of the car.

* * *

“You have got to be fucking kidding me, Captain!” Braden slammed his fist into the arm of his chair. “One week? You can’t do this. I’m turning up all kinds of new information that not one person even made note of in the case file before.”

“None of which seems relevant to the actual solving of these murders.” From behind his desk, Zanger shot back his reply with the grit of a rusty knife blade. “You don’t have a single solid lead about this phantom lover the Gaines wife supposedly had. And pretty much everything you do have is gleaned from the fuzzy memories of a traumatized eight-year-old girl.”

Righteous fire blazed through Braden and shot him to his feet. “That doesn’t mean they’re not real!”

Zanger didn’t move, but his stare narrowed so ferociously Braden had to fight the instinct to step back. He figured if the man’d had any hairs left on his shaved head, they would have stood on end and carried all the way down his back.