He looked half-dead, she had to admit. In jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Gabe sat with his butt on the sticky floor, his back against the battered bar, his head down. Black hair obscured his face as a little man wearing stained khakis and a greasy-looking Dodgers cap swept around his long, outstretched legs.
The baseball fan looked up. “Closed,” he said, his Spanish accent thick.
She pointed her forefinger at the ragdoll figure. “I’m here for him.”
Another man bustled through a swinging door behind the bar. “That’s becoming a bad habit, Cassandra,” he said. His cap proclaimed him a Lakers devotee.
Shrugging, she smiled. “Hi, Mr. Mueller.” She’d gone to middle school with his daughter and he’d never failed to attend the annual father-daughter luncheon. In seventh grade, she’d been assigned the seat next to his and she’d pretended for forty-two blissful minutes that the potbellied man who smelled like Marlboros and deli pickles was her daddy.
Mr. Mueller wiped his hands on a dingy rag and then made his way around the bar to stand beside her. They both gazed down at Gabe.
“He showed up about eleven,” the older man said.
“You could have called me then,” she replied, frowning. “I would have—”
“He was with a woman.”
The quick breath she took hurt her lungs. “Oh.” Her face burned, and she pretended not to notice the sympathetic look he sent her. Malibu was like any other small town in the way that everyone thought they knew everyone else’s business.
Mr. Mueller grimaced. “If it helps any—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she interjected.
“—she looked like a two-bit . . .” His voice drifted off as the man on the floor stirred.
“I stink,” Gabe mumbled.
“His, uh, friend threw up on him,” the bar owner said to Cassandra. “After that, I called her a cab.” He reached down to grab Gabe’s arm. “Let’s go, buddy. Your ride’s here.”
“Don’ call her,” Gabe said, his head swinging up to pin the other man with bloodshot eyes. “Don’ wan’ her here.”
“It’s okay, fella,” Mr. Mueller said, helping him to his feet. “A taxi took your date away.”
Cassandra stepped forward to slide her arm around the drunk’s lean waist. “Gabe means me.”
To prove her true, he let out a long, low groan. “C’ssandra.” When he shook his head, he stirred the air around him, his disgusting smell wafting closer.
An odor she could blame on some other woman.
Gabe’s date.
She looked like a two-bit . . .
Cassandra suspected Gabe hadn’t had to pay his evening’s companion a thing. The dark spaces inside of him acted like a magnet for all kinds of women.
The wrong kind.
Even the smart kind.
Especially the kind who seemed to be lacking self-protective instincts.
“Let’s go,” she said, trying not to breathe through her nose as she led him outside the bar.
She spread an old beach towel she found in her trunk on the passenger seat then helped Mr. Mueller insert Gabe into the car. She buckled him in as his head lolled on the cushion and then blessed the donut-and-chow-mein scent that rose in the air as she started the motor. Gabe always gave her grief about the odor of the used vegetable oil she put in the gas tank of her converted 1980 Mercedes, but it smelled a heck of a lot better than he did.
She glanced over at him several times on the trip home. He’d passed out again, she decided, and that was a relief in its own way. After parking in the circular drive by his front entrance, she jogged around to open his door. Then it was up to her to search his pockets for his house keys. Better to get the front door open before trying to drag him up the steps and inside.
No need to instruct him to lift off the seat. Gabe carried his wallet and keys in his right front pocket. Leaning in, she inserted her fingers between layers of tight denim.
She shrieked when a hard hand clamped around her wrist. “Darlin’,” Gabe said, apparently conscious again. “We fin’ly gonna do it?”
Rolling her eyes, she yanked on her hand, but he wouldn’t release her. “Let go. Let go, you idiot.”
“Liked where you were head’n.”
Cassandra rolled her eyes again. There were twelve steps to self-recovery, so it shouldn’t surprise her that there were steps to self-destruction, too. For Gabe, those tended to go like this: 1) a short-to-long disappearance 2) followed by a scene of public drunkenness 3) ending with demands for sex with Cassandra.
He never remembered them after he sobered up.
He never seemed interested in her that way after he sobered up either.
She yanked again, freeing her hand, then patted his thigh to check out the pocket from the outside. It seemed empty. “Gabe, where are your keys?”
“Dunno.” Frowning, he managed to get his feet out of the car and then he stood, swaying as he held on to the open door. His hands searched all four of his pockets. “C’ssandra. Do you have m’keys?”
“No.” Thinking fast, she decided the best way to deal was to run to her house and get the spare set. She’d dash through his front yard to the steps leading to her back area. He’d be better off waiting here in the fresh air until she returned. “Stay,” she told him, then made for her place.
It was the big splash that told her he hadn’t followed orders. At her back door, she whipped around to discover he’d fallen into her small pool. So small that she could lean over the side and grab his arm and tow his body to the side. “What are you doing, you fool?”
“Can’t leave a girl ‘lone in the dark.” He grasped her waist to hoist himself up, lost his grip, then slipped back underwater. “Watchin’ after you,” he added wetly, as he broke the surface again. This time he dug his fingers into her hips and with her help managed to exit the pool. Standing up, he shook himself like a dog.
Dodging the spray, she decided that thanks to her good deeds there must be a cloud in heaven with her name already inscribed on it. And she hoped it was plenty fluffy, because handling Gabe was making her old before her time. She left him on her back patio and scurried for towels before he could get into any more trouble.
Scurry proved useless, however, because when she returned from the linen closet he was standing in her small living area, stark naked.
Cassandra focused on his face. “What are you doing now?” she demanded.
He lifted his arms away from his lean, muscled body. The benders didn’t seem to affect his fitness level. “Shortcut. I’m naked. Now you.”
She threw the towel at his chest, but his reflexes were off and it fell to the floor after briefly catching on the impressive erection he was sporting. “I thought too much booze made that impossible,” she muttered.
He looked down at himself, palmed the thick flesh, then sent her a grin. “Hung like ‘n elephant. Did I tell you that?”
“Only every time you’ve been drinking.” Except this was the first time she’d seen the evidence for herself. Oh, and he had a nice ass, too, she noticed, as he turned and headed down the short hallway that led to a half bath on the left and her bedroom on the right. She trailed his slow-moving figure, then had to yell out, “Left, left! You want to go left,” as he veered into her bedroom.
Oh, fine. There was an attached bathroom there, too, complete with a shower.
But he didn’t make it that far. Instead, he found her queen-sized mattress and fell on it, faceup. One of the cats tiptoed over and settled on the pillow around his head, just like a coonskin hat.
“My comatose Davy Crockett,” she said, aware he’d sunk into drunken dreamland again. Resigned to an unexpected overnight visitor, she reached for the covers to pull them over his nakedness. Her gaze snagged on a thin strip of fabric tied with a clumsy knot around his left wrist. Watery bloodstains marred the white material.
Her stomach flipped. A high whine rang in her ears and her spongy knees had her sinking to the mattress. She lifted his hand into her lap. His fingers were curled in relaxation, the skin warm, the callused palm scratchy under her thumbs. The bandage—
“Wha’?”
Her gaze jumped to Gabe’s face. He was awake again, and staring at her.
“Your wrist,” she said. “How did you get hurt?”
His gaze flicked down to the bandage and he looked at it, obviously bemused. Not alarmed. Alarmed was her.
“Accident.” It was the first nonslurred word he’d spoken that evening.
Her alarm level rose. “What kind of ‘accident’?” When he didn’t respond, she shook his hand. “What kind of accident, Gabe?”
The same kind of “accident” that had led her to find one of his cars with a garden hose trailing from tailpipe to window? The same kind of “accident” that had led him to take a hunk of rope and coil it into a noose that she’d caught him tying from a beam of his backyard gazebo? She swallowed.
“
What kind of accident
?”
He frowned, as if thinking back. “Box cutter.”
Box cutter.
Box cutter
.
“Gabe.” She wanted to shake him, slap him, scream for mercy, but all she could do was say his name and hold tight to his hand. “Gabe.”
He smiled, as charming as any angel seeking entrance into hell. It was obvious the discussion of the bandage and the box cutter was already forgotten. “Is so true, Froo’ Loop. I so want to do you.” Then he slipped his hand from hers so he could roll to his side and drop back into sleep.
Cassandra came to a hasty stand, then stepped back, putting space between herself and the man she’d been trying to save for the past two years.
I so don’t want to do this anymore
.
I so
can’t
do this anymore
. Because there was no longer a way to fool herself that there wouldn’t come a day when she couldn’t rescue him.
Backing up, she kept her eyes on his sleeping form sprawled across her bed. The cat at his head was snuggled against the nape of his neck now. The other two were draped across his limbs—one on his arm, one over his thigh—keeping him close like she’d always wanted to. Gabe was where she’d always imagined him in her deepest, darkest, most secret fantasies, but it was going to be a one-time, no-touch night.
It had taken her two years to grasp the truth, but now she knew that if she let him any closer to her heart his self-destructive bent was going to make her collateral damage.
Meaning it was past time for Cassandra Riley to rescue herself.
Two
The family you come from isn’t as important as the family you’re going to have.
The couch was lumpy and the cats disloyal, so Cassandra woke up early and alone. She suppressed the urge to call her sisters. Juliet was in Hawaii on her honeymoon with Noah and early in California was even earlier on the island of Kauai. Her other sister, Nikki, claimed she wasn’t a stay-in-bed person, but Cassandra imagined her snuggled next to her fiancé, Jay, at their Malibu beach house and decided against disturbing their morning.
She sat up, already fidgety. With her sisters happily happy-ever-aftering and with herself sworn off Gabe-detail, she lacked something to focus on. Someone.
Cassandra was the kind of person who needed a project.
From the basket beside the small coffee table, she picked up a sock she was knitting, but found herself staring at the four needles instead of manipulating them. With a sigh, she put the piece aside and headed for the kitchen, refusing to give in to instinct and check on the still-slumbering Gabe.
He was fine. And his status was no longer her concern anyway.
A steaming pot of herbal tea was on the countertop when the first of the bedroom’s occupants made an appearance. Gray-striped Moosewood.
Each of her cats had picked its own name. Moosewood, because that was the title of the vegetarian cookbook he’d settled on after she’d gotten him warm and dry. Breathe had found her spot on top of the reminder printed on Cassandra’s lavender-colored yoga mat. Ed had marched in circles then landed on one of the odd missives mailed to her from an ex-boyfriend, the once nice-enough yet now apparent deep-end-diver Edward Malcolm IV.
Cassandra opened the back door to let out the cat for a short, supervised wander. Warm air wafted across her face and she could already smell the sunshine in the air. It was going to be one of
those
days. May had its gray, June had its gloom, and April could be iffy in SoCal, but the rest of the year made up for it in summerish splendor.
December 25 was notorious for the kind of temperatures that made new sweaters and plush robes impossible to wear. And there were many other glorious moments in “winter” that could seduce anyone into swallowing whole the California dream. This March morning was clearly one of those.
Her phone rang. She crossed the room to snatch up the cordless receiver. The number on the display was unfamiliar. The voice calling out “Hello? Hello?” wasn’t.
“Judith!” Cassandra exclaimed, greeting her mother, who had always insisted on being called by her first name. Her mother, who though she might not be the warmest of parental units—despite the fact that she was Cassandra’s only parental unit—must today have tuned in to her maternal radar. “Judith, where are you?”
Static made several long syllables unrecognizable. “. . . on a sat phone,” Judith Riley concluded.
“Great,” Cassandra said, though the location could be somewhere in South America or in Somalia as far as she knew. The older woman had been bouncing around the world for over a year and there didn’t seem to be any particular logic to her route. “And you’re well?”
More static cut in again, obscuring her mother’s reply.
“Terrific.” Cassandra crossed to the sliding glass door to let the cat back in, hoping she hadn’t just expressed approval for an invasion of intestinal parasites or the appearance of a scaly rash. Her gaze caught on the wet clothes piled in a heap on the patio deck a few feet from the door.