This Loving Feeling (A Mirror Lake Novel) (9 page)

Sam swallowed. The light pressure of his long fingers on the top of her hand was causing warm tingles to spread up her arm and to other places she’d rather not think about. That should have made her pull away like he was fire, but she didn’t. Couldn’t.

“Well.” She blew out a sigh. “That was a long time ago. In the past, I mean.” Duh. Could she babble any worse? What did she expect him to say, anyway? Something wild and dramatic like he’d never stopped loving her? Pu-lease.

A little smile slid across his beautiful face, forcing her to remember things best left forgotten. But he didn’t say anything. Maddening, this man was. How was she supposed to get any resolution here if he wouldn’t talk?

“I mean, defining our history as anything besides crisscrossed signals and bad timing would be completely wrong, right?” She hated herself for asking. For wanting to know. But she had to. For her own sake.

Frown lines appeared between his dark brows. The kind that made a woman itch to smooth them out. Lukas cleared his throat. More frowning. “Sam, I—”

“Good morning, good morning, and a beautiful one it is, yes? So, this is how the rich live.” Alethea was dressed in a bright red shift dress and a brimmed straw hat with a red ribbon. She looked toward the lake and squinted in the sun. “A beautiful spring day. Standing up here reminds me of standing on the hills of Santorini, looking out over the sparkling Aegean waiting for my Hercules to come home from the sea.” She waved an arm over the landscape in front of them—hardly the iconic hills and white dotted houses of her dreams—just a sunny day with a pure blue sky, the lake sparking like diamonds and peppered with multicolored boats that from here looked like a child’s Legos. “But he didn’t return to me. My waiting was in vain.”

“Oh, Alethea,” Sam said. “Did he die at sea?”

“Of course not. He left me for another girl with bigger boobs and blonde hair. But it changed my life—made me come here, to America. May I sit down? I take it young Stavros is still asleep? And are there any more eggs, dear?” She uncovered the plate she brought, exposing beautiful rows of perfectly formed spinach and cheese pies. “I brought
tiropites
and
spanakopites
. Have one.”

Lukas jumped up to pull out a chair for Alethea, snagged a
tiropita
for himself, and jogged into the house to fetch her a plate.

Alethea patted Sam’s hand, the same one Lukas had just touched, while she reached for a cheese pie. “How are you, my dear? You’ve done a kind thing for our Greek boys, but what will your Harris say?”

Sam took a swig of coffee. “I’m sure he’ll be okay with it. It’s only for a few days.” Harris would hate it, hands down. He would kill Lukas. Maybe her, too.

Alethea cocked her head toward the guesthouse. “That man looks at you like Psyche looked at Cupid.”

“Alethea, I swear, you should be teaching drama, not sitting on the committee to save the theater.”

“I just don’t want you to miss out on something.”

Sam raised her brows. “
Something
, Alethea?” She’d said it like it was dinner. Or those fabulous little pies she’d brought. “I’ve found the guy I love. He’s everything to me. Lukas is all . . . smoke and mirrors.”

“Smoking hot, you mean. Maybe he’s changed,
glikia mou.
Grown up. He certainly cares for Stavros. Perhaps you should give him a chance.”

Sam sighed. Alethea was a romantic, and that had gotten her in big trouble. Her Hercules was a real stinker, from what Effie had told Sam. “Lukas has had a chance, Alethea. Two of them, actually. You do realize the last time I heard from him was six years ago. It’s too late for more chances.”

“It’s not over till it’s over,” Alethea said, her painted black brows arching over her glasses.

Just then, Lukas came out of the house holding two plates and the door for Stevie, who was rubbing his eyes as he followed his uncle. Stevie’s hair was a tousled replica of Lukas’s. The little boy caught sight of Sam and a huge grin stole over his face.

“Hi Samantha,” he said, coming right up to her and accepting her hug. He was warm and cute as pie. He cast a wary glance at Mrs. Panagakos, who was pouring milk in her coffee.

“Don’t forget to say hi to Mrs. P.,” Lukas said.

Stevie complied, but not with enthusiasm. All in all, Sam was amazed at how well behaved he was, considering all he must have been through—an ill and dying mother, and a father incapable of properly caring for him.

“Stavros.
Kalimera
,” Mrs. Panagakos said. “Good morning. I brought you something.” She rummaged in her giant bag, pulled out a worn child’s book with curled edges, and placed it on the table in front of Stevie. “Greek myths. Do you know what those are?”

He shook his head.

“Ah, then, we’ll read all about them. They are stories from our Greek culture about brave heroes and heroines who slayed monsters and did impossible feats of bravery for the sake of love.”

“Are they fairy tales?” Stevie asked.

“Yes,
paidi mou
, they are.”

Stevie batted those irresistibly long lashes at Sam. “Will you read them with us?”

“I’ll have to take a rain check. My boyfriend Harris is coming over soon to give me a boating lesson.” She smiled at the little boy. “I’ll have to see about getting a life jacket so we can take you for a ride next time if that sounds like fun.”

Stevie looked more than eager but Lukas couldn’t help frowning. “He’s going to teach you how to drive a boat?”

“Yeah. His boat. He’ll be docking it right over there.” She pointed off in the distance to a wooden dock that ran from the edge of the grassy front lawn of the big house into the water.

“Fun way to spend a Sunday,” Lukas said. His eyes held hers again, and they seemed to ask a thousand questions.

Good.
Let him have the questions for once. God knows, he certainly hadn’t provided much of an answer to hers.

Sam told herself it didn’t really matter. Her life was on a set course, and she knew better than to believe in fairy tales. No matter how handsome the Greek god sitting across from her was.

CHAPTER 7

Lukas had known from that very first evening, when he’d stood up for Samantha against those ridiculous bullies, that he was going to have a hell of a time keeping his hands off of her.

He was twenty-one. Old enough to know better than to start something with an innocent eighteen-year-old girl still in high school. Yet the spark between them was undeniable. He balanced on a very thin wire, thinking a couple of dates would be enough, that they were such opposites it could never work, that he would soon become bored and break it off as he should.

But every date left him breathless and wanting more. She was beautiful and fascinating, angry and hurt and fragile in some ways but in others, tough as nails yet really kind. To animals and old people and kids. And him. She didn’t judge him, and she tended to see a version of him that was better than he was, which both pleased and frightened him. He was hopelessly hooked for the first time in his life and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

“Are you gay?” Samantha asked, leaning over closer to him across the table at PITS where they were eating burgers and shakes one night.

“What? No! Lower your voice. Geez.” He looked around the diner. It was ten o’clock on a January Friday, very cold, and it was pretty dead. But still.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you are.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Maybe it’s low testosterone. Or maybe I’m just not attractive enough.” She pushed out her bottom lip, all pouty-like, which made her even more irresistible.

She was killing him. Completely killing him.

“You haven’t asked me back up to your place since we started hanging out,” she persisted.

Of course he hadn’t. Because the second she walked through his door, he would simultaneously peel both their clothes off and have their underwear circling their ankles, no questions asked. She deserved better.

He’d never felt this way about a girl before. He’d fallen hard. He wanted to take her out, but what was there to do in the dead of winter? He was three years older than she was, and that was another problem. She hung with high school kids; he hung with some of the other mechanics, or his buddies from his band. Their worlds couldn’t be farther apart.

She told him she didn’t care, that she loved just being with him. Sometimes they’d go to the library and look up weird books. Other times she took him with her when she worked as an usher at live events at the theater. He ushered, too, and got to see the shows for free. He took her to meet Mrs. Ellis, who’d loved her at first sight and often invited her for dinner. But Sam never suggested bringing him to her house. It went without saying that her oldest brother would never approve of her dating someone like him.

They’d seen several film festivals at the Palace, one featuring horror movies and another on classics from the 1930s. They always had coffee afterward or a burger. He always met her somewhere but never picked her up at her house. Never even brought up the idea, knowing she had four older brothers, all of whom were capable of—and likely to—beat him to a pulp.

He’d never really had a girlfriend before. Oh, there were girls, but going out with one had usually entailed as much sex as he could get and as little talking as he could get away with.

He’d never told any girl about his childhood but for some reason, Sam made him want to spill his guts about his abusive, alcoholic parents, how he’d done his best to take care of his three younger brothers but failed because they all got taken away and split up into different homes. She had this way of looking at him like she just . . . got him, like she was interested and what he was feeling wasn’t so weird or different.
You were just a boy
, she’d told him.
It wasn’t your fault
. No one had ever told him that before and it brought him a kind of mercy he didn’t even know he needed.

The thing was, he loved talking to her
and
he thought constantly about having sex with her, something that had never happened before.

One night it was blizzarding so he dropped her off in front of her house, something he’d usually avoided. Their good-night kiss lingered and turned into a deep-throat make-out session that steamed the windows and had him struggling to touch her through seven layers of scarves, coats, and sweaters, and trying not to show how much pain he was in from the pressure in his jeans. The porch light flickered, signaling somebody had caught on to what they were doing, making them break apart, panting. Sam’s hair was tousled and her lips were swollen, her lip gloss smeared. She was the most gorgeous girl he’d ever seen and he couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear.

He walked her to the door. He wasn’t going to let her face whoever was in there by herself while he cowered in the shadows and besides, it was about time her family knew they were serious. To his chagrin, the door opened. Her oldest brother stood there, arms crossed across his big chest. Eyeballing him.

Lukas knew exactly what this guy saw. A kid with a nose piercing, earrings, tattoos.
Trouble
. Still, he persevered. “Um, hi, Mr. Rushford.” Lukas cringed. Did he really just call a guy who wasn’t even out of his twenties
Mister
? But he didn’t dare call him
Brad
. “I’m . . . Lukas.” He extended his hand. No gloves, even though it was practically below zero.

Brad barely nodded. He focused his attention on his sister. “You’re late. Curfew’s midnight.” Then he opened the screen for Sam and disappeared into the house. Sam looked back at Lukas, making a mimicking face that made him smile a little. Then she blew him a kiss and closed the door.

The brother hadn’t even given him a chance. Sam had acted like she didn’t care, but he knew better.

For Valentine’s Day he bought her a fine canary-yellow silk scarf and gave it to her in the car after they’d gone ice-skating at the ice rink a couple towns over.

“You should wear color,” he said.

She fingered the soft material between her thumbs. “
You
don’t wear color. You wear mostly black. I like black, too.” Her voice was teasing, and there was a glint of mischief in her eyes.

He tucked a silky lock of her hair behind her ear. The curls immediately sprang forward, doing as they willed. Like her.

“You weren’t meant to wear black. You weren’t meant to be an angry rebel.” She was still dressing all in black, still rimming her eyes with heavy liner. But at least she’d let her hair go back to its natural red color.

She rolled her eyes. “Who am I supposed to be then?”

“Just yourself. Which is pretty terrific.” He moved closer to her, to her warmth. She smelled like grapefruity shampoo and he inhaled the scent greedily. He felt on the edge of control. Things between them were barreling forward on an inevitable course, he could feel it. Decisions would have to be made that would change everything.

“Can I ask you something?” It had been on his mind for a long time. He worried that she wanted to have sex with him to get back at her brother, who’d kept an even tighter rein on her after the trouble at school.

He didn’t want their lovemaking to be about revenge. He wanted it to be about
them.
With a kind of terrible horror, he realized he wanted her to
love
him.

“Do you hang around with me to piss your brother off?” he blurted.

She turned toward him in the car. The streetlight shone on her cheek, glinted in her eyes. She ran a hand through his hair and gave him a gentle smile that he felt clear through his bones. “When I met you, I was ready to give up on everything. My friends all left me and my own brother didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. So to be honest, at the beginning, yeah, I was attracted to you being a badass. But Lukas, you’re really the worst badass I’ve ever met.”

He narrowed down his eyes. She was smiling. Smiling!

“I mean, you look the part, okay?” she said. “But you don’t drink, you don’t party, you don’t do drugs, and you don’t get into trouble. Really, from a rebel standpoint, you’re kind of a huge disappointment.”

Maybe so. But he’d seen firsthand how drinking could shatter a family, and he vowed never to be like his parents, who’d both been destroyed by alcohol. “Well,” he said, cupping her face in his hands, “since we’re being honest, you suck at being a rebel, too. So be who you are.” He wrapped the scarf around her neck and kissed her.

It went without saying she was a terrible rebel, and he often made fun of her for it. She volunteered at a nursing home, helped her grandmother with blood pressure screenings, and wherever they went, she said hi to everyone in town. She was simply too good-natured and loving to be disaffected for very long.

Her one sore point was college. They talked about art all the time but she refused to discuss applying to art school. She’d decided on business, she said. UConn, an hour away. The plan was her brother’s doing, he was sure of it.

Still he refused to bring her back to his apartment. He was too afraid, not so much of the temptation but for himself. Once he made love to her, their relationship would be different. His heart would break for sure when she left him, which he was certain would happen. She’d find someone better, smarter, a college guy.

He came home from work one afternoon in March on his birthday to find that she’d gotten the key from Mrs. Clinker and decorated his apartment with paper streamers. She’d cooked a pot of chili for him and even bought him a fancy cake from the bakery. Then she’d put a bow on her own head and begged him to take her to his bed. Samantha with a bow on. The perfect birthday gift. How could a hot-blooded male refuse that?

That night they’d gotten naked together for the first time and he’d made her cry out his name, just like all those times he’d dreamed it, and it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, but he would not have sex with her.

To get him back, she tortured him, grabbing his cock and demanding to know what he wanted her to do with it. She had this joyfulness for everything, a freshness he never tired of. Her touch was velvet, and what she lacked in experience, she made up for in enthusiasm, and he’d never felt so happy in his life.

A big part of him worried he was just a phase she was going through, that she’d be bored of him by the time college began.

In the spring, the Clubbers all got busted when Reggie turned in a recording of their latest cruel escapades in exchange for getting himself off the hook for some other trouble. Monique lost her Dartmouth admission. Sam seemed more than relieved to leave everything about high school behind in the rearview mirror.

In the fall, Lukas got promoted to head mechanic and Sam went off to school. He thought for sure she’d meet a college boy and forget about him forever. He tried to think of ways he could better himself. His garage band was getting more gigs, weddings, mostly, which was fine with him since Sam was gone most weekends now.

Over Christmas she brought him a skinny little tree and a box of ornaments from the dollar store. They tossed down a blanket and turned on the single string of lights and lay there in the dark in each other’s arms, staring at the multicolored reflections.

“I bought you a present, too,” he said, handing her a rectangular package he’d wrapped himself.

She didn’t need any encouragement to open it. She tore into it, finding an art tablet and a fine set of charcoal pastels.

“Wh . . . what’s this for?” She was tearing up. He hadn’t meant to upset her.

“Well, they’re like crayons. You draw with it on paper. Like this, see?” He picked one up and held it to the paper.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be funny.”

“It’s just that maybe it’s been long enough, you know? I thought maybe you missed doing art.” He shrugged. “If you give it up for them, they win.”

There was a long pause, and he worried he’d been too presumptuous. She hated being told what to do and maybe he’d crossed a line. But a second later, she leapt into his arms and threw her own arms around him, hugging him tightly. He was immediately inundated by the smell of her shampoo, that clean citrusy scent she favored that he couldn’t get enough of. “I love you, Lukas,” she whispered. “Make love to me now. Real love. Please.”

She looked at him with those big green eyes. They were full of excitement and happiness, a far cry from how she was months ago when he’d first met her. He threaded his hands through her hair, reveling in the abundance of thick silky curls. “Sam—” He started to talk, but she cut him off with a kiss. He’d never understood before what it was to be happy, but he was certain from how swollen and full his heart was and from the sheer pleasure of holding her in his arms that this was it.

He kissed her back with all he had, pressing his lips over hers. She wrapped herself around him, her hands roving through his hair and up and down his back. Their tongues tangled, their kisses grew deep and hungry. He wanted and needed her so badly and he simply couldn’t get enough.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I started the pill,” she said. “I’ve never been more sure.”

They made love under that skinny little tree, but it may as well have been the tree at Rockefeller Center for how awed he felt. He used condoms because he wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted to do right by her. He loved her.

The months that followed were happy ones. They were both busy with their own lives, but they made many trips back and forth to be together on weekends between where she went to school in Storrs and Mirror Lake.

Sam had lost her anger for good. Probably because she’d made a whole new set of friends, many of whom Lukas had met and liked. That spring he got another raise. They’d been dating for over a year. It was time he picked her up for a real date.

He bought flowers and a button-down shirt that was not black and showed up at her house. He even took out his nose stud. As he neared the door, he heard the sounds of two people arguing.

“What do you mean he’s coming here? I thought you’d stopped seeing him a long time ago. Haven’t you met any nice guys in college? And what kind of name is ‘Spike’ anyway?” Definitely her older brother Brad.

“His name is Spikonos,” Sam said, “but you can call him Lukas.”