head back and forth and clenched his jaws. If Henry got married again, then Nick was going to stick around to see his wife.
“You’re crazy,” Louie said with disgust and scooted backward, out of the buckbrush.
“Are you goin‘ fishing?”
“No, I’m goin‘ home, but first I gotta drain the lizard.”
Nick smiled. He liked it when his older brother said cool stuff like that. “Don’t tell Mom where I am.”
Louie unzipped his pants and sighed as he relieved himself on a Ponderosa. “Just don’t be gone so long she figures it out.”
“I won’t.” When Louie jumped on his bike and peddled away, Nick returned his gaze to the front of the house. He propped his chin in his hand and watched the front door. While he waited, he thought about Louie and about how lucky he was to have a brother who was going into the seventh grade. He could talk to him about anything and Louie never laughed. Louie had already seen the puberty film in school, and so Nick could ask him important questions, like when he was likely to get hair on his balls, stuff a guy just couldn’t come right out and ask his Catholic mother.
A wood ant crawled up Nick’s arm, and he was just about to smash it between his fingers when the front door opened and he froze. Henry walked out of the house and paused on the veranda to look over his shoulder. He motioned with his hand, and a little girl stepped through the doorway. A mass of blond curls framed her face and cascaded down her back. She placed her hand in Henry’s and the two of them walked across the porch and down the front steps. She wore a frilly white dress with lacy socks like girls wore to their First Communion, but it wasn’t even Sunday. Henry pointed in Nick’s general direction, and Nick held his breath, fearing he’d been detected.
“Right back there,” Henry said to the little girl as they moved across the lawn toward Nick’s hiding place. “There’s a great big tree that I’ve thought could use a treehouse in it.”
The little girl looked up at the towering man by her side and nodded. Her golden curls bounced like springs. The girl’s skin was a lot paler than Nick’s, and her big eyes were brown. Nick thought she looked like those little dolls his Tia Narcisa kept locked in a glass cabinet, away from clumsy boys with dirty hands. Nick had never been allowed to touch the pretty little dolls, but he’d never really wanted to anyway.
“Like Winnie the Pooh?” she asked.
“Would you like that?”
“Yes, Henry.”
Henry lowered to one knee and looked into the girl’s eyes. “I’m your father now. You can call me Daddy.”
Nick’s chest caved in and his heart pounded so hard he couldn’t breathe. He’d waited his whole life to hear those words, but Henry had said them to a pale-faced stupid girl who liked Winnie the Pooh. He must have made a sound because Henry and the girl looked right at his hiding spot.
“Who’s in there?” Henry demanded as he stood.
Slowly, with fear gripping his stomach, Nick rose to his feet and faced the man his mother had always said was his father. He stood straight with his shoulders back and stared into Henry’s light gray eyes. He wanted to run, but he didn’t move.
“What are you doing in there?” Henry demanded again.
Nick shoved his chin in the air but he didn’t answer.
“Who is he, Henry?” the girl asked.
“Nobody,” he answered and turned to Nick. “You go on home. Now get, and don’t come around here anymore.”
Standing in buckbrush up to his chest, with his knees shaking and his stomach hurting, Nick Allegrezza felt his hopes die. He hated Henry Shaw. “You’re a lizard-sucking son of a bitch,” he said, then lowered his gaze to the golden-haired girl. He hated her, too. With his eyes burning hatred and stinging with anger, he turned and walked from his hiding place. He never returned. He was finished waiting in the shadows. Waiting for things he would never have.
Footsteps pulled Nick from thoughts of his past, but he didn’t turn around.
“What do you think?” Gail moved behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. The thin material of her dress was the only thing separating her bare breasts from his back.
“About what?”
“About the new and improved me.”
He turned then and looked at her. She was bathed in darkness and he couldn’t see her very well. “You look fine,” he answered.
“Fine? I spent thousands on a boob job, and that’s the best you can do? ‘You look fine’?”
“What do you want me to say, that you would have been smarter to invest your money in real estate rather than saltwater?”
“I thought men liked big breasts,” she said with a pout in her voice.
Big or small didn’t matter as much as what a woman did with her body. He liked a woman who knew how to use what she had, who lost control in bed. A woman who could let go and get down and dirty with him. Gail was too worried about how she looked.
“I thought all men fantasize about big breasts,” she continued.
“Not all men.” Nick hadn’t fantasized about a woman in a very long time. In fact, he hadn’t fantasized since he’d been a kid, and all those fantasies had been the same.
Gail wrapped her arms around his neck and rose onto the balls of her feet. “You didn’t seem to mind a while ago.”
“I didn’t say I minded.”
She slid her hand down his chest to his stomach. “Then make love to me again.”
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “I don’t make love.”
“Then what did we just do half an hour ago?”
He thought about giving her a one-word answer, but he knew she wouldn’t appreciate his candor. He thought about taking her home, but she slid her hand to the front of his jeans, and he thought maybe he’d wait a while to see what she had on her mind. “That was sex,” he said. “One has nothing to do with the other.”
“You sound bitter.”
“Why, because I don’t confuse sex and love?” Nick didn’t consider himself bitter, just uninterested. As far as he was concerned, there was no payoff in love. Just a lot of wasted time and emotion.
“Maybe you’ve never been in love.” She pressed her hand into his fly. “Maybe you’ll fall in love with me.”
Nick chuckled deep within his chest. “Don’t count on it.”
Chapter Two
The morning after the funeral, Delaney slept late and narrowly escaped a meeting of the Charitable Society of Truly, the small town’s equivalent of the Junior League. She’d hoped to lie around the house all afternoon and spend some time with her mother before leaving that evening to meet her best friend from high school, Lisa Collins. The two had plans to meet at Mort’s Bar for a night of margaritas and gossip.
But Gwen had different plans for Delaney. “I’d like you to stay for the meeting,” Gwen said as soon as she walked into the kitchen, looking like a catalog model dressed in powder blue silk. A slight wrinkle furrowed her brow as she glanced at Delaney’s shoes. “We’re hoping to buy new playground equipment for Larkspur Park, and I think you could help us come up with creative ways to raise money.”
Delaney would rather chew on tinfoil than get sucked into attending one of her mother’s boring meetings. “I have plans,” she lied, and spread strawberry preserves onto a toasted bagel. She was twenty-nine but still couldn’t bring herself to purposely disappoint her mother.
“What plans?”
“I’m meeting a friend for lunch.” She leaned her behind against the cherrywood island and bit into her bagel.
Tiny creases settled in the corners of Gwen’s blue eyes. “You’re going into town looking like that?”
Delaney glanced down at her white sleeveless sweater, her black jean shorts, and the thin patent leather
