Unravel Me (33 page)

Juliet flipped a page of the magazine, staring unseeing at some glossy, frothy image. “I don’t want to discuss either one.”

“But that’s the downside of this sister thing,” Cassandra said gently. “You’re stuck with our noses in your business.”

They were ganging up on her. “I don’t want—”

“And if nagging won’t work, we’ll use guilt,” Nikki added. “Like, how could I possibly go forward with my wedding to Jay when you’re so obviously unhappy?”

“Unhappy?” Juliet’s hand froze, mid-page-turn. “I’m not unhappy. I’m
angry
.” And if she dwelled too much on it, her mood might set fire to something.

Her sisters exchanged glances. Cassandra opened her mouth. “All right. Want to expand on that?”

“No.” Juliet tossed the magazine to the table. “Can’t you just let this go?”

“I could,” Nikki responded. “But the granola girl here, she’s just a big pain in the ass.”

Cassandra huffed. “Snot.”

“Froot Loop.”

“Witch.”

Nikki smirked. “Lightweight. Try bi—”

“All right!” Juliet dropped her head to her hands. “All right. If just to shut the two of you up.”

“Hah.” Nikki smiled, all good humor again as she elbowed Cassandra. “We cracked her. You said it might take margaritas.”

“For God’s sake, Nikki, we don’t want to give away our plague-the-sister strategies,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me, Froot Loop—”

“Please stop calling me that.”

Nikki’s expression turned sly. “Why? Because it’s Gabe’s pet name for you?”

Juliet leaned forward, eager to nurture this new topic of conversation. “Yes, speaking of things a person is itching to find out . . .”

The two younger sisters stilled, then turned on her as one. “Nice try, but no banana,” Nikki said.

Cassandra flipped a handful of wavy hair behind her right shoulder and then nodded. “We just want to help, Juliet. At the book party, what Noah said, help us understand . . .”

Noah.
She tried pushing the man out of her mind, but it wasn’t working. Wayne was there, too, front and center. “I can’t believe they’d conspire to keep me away when my husband needed me most.” The words tumbled out.

She rose from the couch, her voice rising, too, but she couldn’t seem to modulate her tone. “It makes me furious to realize just exactly how frail they considered me to be.” She held out her arms. “Do I look like a puff of air would blow me over?”

Cassandra appeared to think about it. “Well, kind of. No! No! Don’t get all huffy. It’s just that you do have that ethereal blonde thing going on. It’s natural for people to respond to that in a certain way.”

“And I don’t think you’ve been eating enough,” Nikki added. “I should make you a big dish of enchiladas.”

Juliet dropped back to her seat, still frustrated. “Mexican food is not going to solve anything. As for people naturally responding to my kind of looks—these were two men who
knew
me. How could they have—What are you doing?”

She broke off as Nikki jumped from the couch to drag the oversized cutout of Wayne from the back room and over to the couches. Propped against the coffee table, all nine feet of him stared down at the three of them.

Nikki eyed the man right back, her arms crossed over her chest. “Just looking at him, he makes me want to enlist,” she said. “Either that or confess I cheated on my U.S. History midterm exam.”

Juliet could almost smile. “He had a way about him like that.”

“So you knew him then,” Nikki said.

“Of course.”

“Like you wished he’d known you.”

She narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “What are you getting at?”

“I hate to break big news, Juliet, but the man was old. Handsome and sexy, I’ll give you that, yet of an entirely different generation. And he was a military man. A commander.”

“But old,” Juliet said wryly. Her elegant silver fox.

“Well, if you’re aware of so much, can’t you see that he very likely thought—as a man of his generation and inclination—that it was his duty to protect you? Hadn’t he always tried to do that?”

“To a fault, yes, but he was
dying
, surely that meant—”

“I’ll tell you something I know about people and about dying. I watched my mother die, my father, too. Nothing changes about a person when they come to their last days. The funny ones still make jokes, and the private ones don’t suddenly reveal their souls.”

Cassandra slid down the couch to move closer to Juliet as Nikki continued.

“If you ask me, the choices your husband made at the end of his life tell us something about him—that he was a proud and caring man—but they don’t tell us anything about
you
.”

Cassandra picked up the thread. “Nikki’s right. They don’t say that you’re anything less than a woman loved with devotion by a well-intentioned, but perhaps pigheaded man.”

Juliet stared at Cassandra, then shifted her gaze to Nikki. Were they right, that this wasn’t about Juliet so much as it was about what Wayne needed to do for himself? And if so, how could her sisters possibly understand something so clearly that Juliet hadn’t realized on her own?

But wasn’t that what family did?
she mused, looking up at Wayne’s masterful—oh, yes, and macho-to-the-core—image. Family could offer up clarity because they cared. Her gaze drifted back to the two other women. She’d risked forging a bond with them to gain everything that was written across their faces at this moment: warmth, loyalty, caring.

Insight.

Her anger leached away as her gaze lifted once again to Wayne’s photograph.
Stubborn cuss. Pigheaded, stubborn cuss. But maybe I understand now,
she conceded. Okay, she did understand now.
I forgive you.
She could almost swear she saw his black-and-white lips turn up in a little smile.

And if she forgave him . . .

But she wasn’t extending that to the other man who was out of her life and who she was still trying so desperately to keep out of her mind. The one who—

The bells on the door to Malibu & Ewe clanged. Oomfaa came dashing through, her face flushed, her voice breathless. “Passed Jay on PCH. No cell reception. He said to tell you, come quick. Something about a man and a car crash.”

The one who—Juliet finished the thought as dread filled her chest—was Noah, the man she still loved.

 

When they found Jay in the parking lot of Malibu’s Surfrider beach, Juliet’s dread seeped away. Her sisters had warned her that Oomfaa was as known for her hyperbole as her tendency to gossip and this “emergency” didn’t look quite so dire and didn’t involve Noah at all, though there was a tow truck, a crashed car, and a man—Gabe Kincaid.

The three women hurried from Juliet’s sedan to join Jay, who was conferring with the tow truck driver underneath the propped-up hood of his vehicle. Apparently engine trouble had halted him in the process of towing a crumpled but classic Thunderbird convertible, complete with a drunken—and singing—man sprawled in its backseat.

“No matter where you go,” Gabe sang at the top of his lungs, and though it wasn’t top quality, Juliet thought she recognized the song.

“Beatles?” she asked the others.

Jay shook his head. “Badfinger. Common mistake, because McCartney wrote a big hit of theirs, ‘Come and Get It,’ and George Harrison produced one of their albums.”

“I told you before he’s a font of useless info,” Nikki remarked.

“Useless?” Her fiancé grabbed her around the waist to yank her close. “That’s not what you said last night when I showed you that technique to—”

“Can you guys stop playing around?” Cassandra interrupted, sounding strained. “Can’t you see this is serious?”

Her voice seemed to penetrate Gabe’s drunken fog. He pushed himself straighter on the backseat, cradling a tequila bottle close to his chest as he peered at their assembled group. “Hey, Froot Loop! Look, I found it!”

“Oh, Gabe.” Cassandra’s hand shook a little as she pushed her hair over her shoulder. “Surely this isn’t
it
.”

“Not
it
, it,” he said, with an overemphatic shake of his head. “But like it, it. Going to restore this it. Bring it all back.”

“Oh, Gabe,” she responded again, as if her heart was breaking. She turned away from the man.

Juliet stepped nearer to her sister. “What’s the matter? What’s he doing?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing. Maybe what I’ve been worrying about all along,” she said, her words nearly masked as Gabe renewed his loud cover of the Badfinger ballad.

“What’s that?” Nikki said, she and Jay crowding close as well.

“Going completely crazy.” Cassandra glanced back at the man, then wrapped her arms around herself as if there’d been a sudden temperature dive. “He had one of those cars before. A 1963 Thunderbird convertible. It was in an accident as well. A drunk driver T-boned it when his wife was driving. It killed her instantly, along with their five-year-old daughter.”

“God.” Nikki clutched Jay’s arm. “God.”

He cleared his throat. “We didn’t know.”

“Gabe doesn’t talk about it unless he’s drunk. Unless he’s very, very drunk.”

“Froot Loop!” Gabe interrupted his song to give a lusty yell. “Come over here.”

With a sigh, she turned, then walked toward the car, the others trailing behind her. “Gabe . . .”

He frowned. “Whaz the matter?”

“I don’t like this.” She gestured to the convertible. “I don’t like seeing you in there.”

Juliet knew what her sister wasn’t saying. It didn’t take a giant leap of genius to wonder—to worry—that Gabe was placing himself in that same car because he was wishing he’d been with his wife and daughter at the time of their accident. That he was going to restore this Thunderbird so he could re-create the very same scenario.

“Come in wi’ me,” Gabe said to Cassandra, lurching for the door handle so that tequila spilled from the bottle he clutched. “We could fuck—”

“Gabe!”

“ ’Scuse me,” he said, giving up on getting the door open and going back to his sprawl. “We could
make love
righ’ here. Big backseat.”

Cassandra groaned. “How can you—”

“Wha’?” He slapped the leather with his free hand. “Lynn . . . m’wife and me made Maddie righ’ here.”

“Gabe, I’m not—”

“Wha’?” He took a chug of tequila, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’ want my babies?”

It was hard to tell if Cassandra wanted to cry or crack Gabe on the head with that tequila bottle. “I don’t want you like this.”

He didn’t appear to hear her. “ ’S okay. I don’t want babies either,” he declared, then took another swig of liquor. “Proteshun. We’ll use con . . . con . . . con . . .”

“. . . doms,” Jay put in. “Condoms. So why don’t we get you out of that car, buddy, and I’ll drive you home. We can discuss your favorite brand and preferred size on the way.”

“Triple XL,” Gabe said, getting to his feet so he stood on the back cushions, swaying.

Jay took his tequila and handed it off to Nikki, then he helped maneuver Gabe from the car.

On the asphalt, the drunken man gave the group a serious look and pounded his chest. “Hung like ’n elephant.”

Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Dumbo, that’s what I’m going to call him from now on.”

“Hah.” Gabe staggered to her and slung his arm around her neck. “Funny. Funny Froo’ Loop. Still wanna do you, darlin’.”

“Yeah. I’m sure.” She started leading him in the direction of Jay’s Porsche.

“Really.” He looked over his shoulder, straight at Juliet. “Not like she said before. Any warm body won’ do.”

 

From what she could see of Juliet’s expression through her car windshield, Marlys figured that finding her waiting in her Miata outside the Malibu house was the capper on an already crappy day. Instead of pulling into the garage, Juliet turned off her car in the driveway. Poised for a quick getaway?

As she exited her seat, Marlys’s dog leaped out and ran for the driver’s side of Juliet’s where he hopped around like a pogo stick. When she emerged, Blackie threw himself against her.

Juliet shook her head as she made her way up the path to her front porch with seventy pounds of canine doing his unintentional best to trip her up. “Marlys, you need to put Blackie on a leash.”

“He was hoping you were someone else.”

Juliet’s progress hitched a little, and Marlys cursed herself for the slip. She didn’t want to think of Dean. She
really
didn’t want Juliet thinking she was thinking of Dean.

Marlys wasn’t weak like that. And she didn’t pine after something she’d deliberately sabotaged. Marlys wasn’t stupid like that either.

Tucking the box she carried under her arm, she followed the dog and Juliet into the house, then watched while the other woman turned on lights as she made her way through the shadowy interior. A routine she, too, was familiar with. Woman alone returns home to dark emptiness.

“Where’s Noah?” she asked.

Juliet tossed her purse onto the kitchen counter then glanced over with her freaky, two-colored eyes. “He lives elsewhere. Why are you here?”

Ouch. Marlys’s eyebrows rose. “Gloves are off?”

“What do you think? Dean told us what you’ve done. Seeding the scandal sheets—good God. And of course you’ve read the latest on the websites about the book party and the ugly accusation you made there.”

“Dean . . .” She wished she hadn’t said the name. It lingered on her tongue, sweet, like a Lifesaver, though she didn’t think its taste would ever melt away.

Juliet sighed. “Okay, I’m earning my heaven points by asking this, Marlys. Do you want to know how he’s doing? Maybe Jay—”

Marlys snatched at the name. “Jay Buchanan?”

The other woman’s face went watchful. Damn.