spoken to me since … since …”
“Since we kissed. I know. I was being cautious.”
“What changed?”
“I shot a basketball today. I haven’t wanted to do that in a very long time.”
“Great. Shall I pick you up at seven?”
“Sure.”
“Great,” he repeated, smiled down at her, then bent and brushed a quick, casual kiss against her lips. “See you then, teacher. Good night.”
He walked on, his hands shoved into his pockets. Only then did she realize that they’d been standing at the foot of her front walk.
Hope all but floated into her house. Roxy came running to greet her, and Hope bent to pick the dog up just as her cellphone rang. Distracted by the dog and the man, she didn’t check the caller’s number before she thumbed the green button. “Hello?”
“Hope,” a man’s voice said, his words slurring as he continued. “You know, you really should change your name. Hopeless. No, careless. That’s more appropriate, isn’t it?”
She closed her eyes. “Hello, Mark. Is there news?”
“Yes, there’s news.”
Her heart lurched and climbed to her throat, and she held her breath. She knew better,
And Mark Montgomery reveled in periodically crushing it.
“My mother says the scrapbook she gave us for Holly’s fourth Christmas is missing.”
Breath escaped from her. Her mother-in-law had given Mark a car that Christmas. The scrapbook had been her gift. It was on the shelf of her bedroom closet.
“Good-bye, Mark.” Hope ended the call.
Hope put Roxy back down onto the floor. She wasn’t aware of the tears rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t hear Roxy whining. She didn’t recognize that her feet had begun to move, to carry her toward her closet. Toward her memories. Toward heartache.
Toward Holly.
EIGHT
Lucca entered his house, his spirits lighter than they’d been in a long time. Who would have guessed that he would have had such a good time at a school carnival in a small mountain town? It was almost embarrassing. Musical chairs? What was next? Pin the Tail on the Donkey?
Spin the Bottle wouldn’t be so bad.
He smirked and headed to his kitchen. He was hungry. He’d been thinking about that cake, dammit. Opening the door to the fridge, he peered inside. Nothing worth consuming had magically appeared while he’d been gone. He really needed to go to the grocery store tomorrow. His gaze lingered on the gallon of milk. What he really wanted was Italian creme cake. That handyman played dirty.
He grabbed a beer and microwaved a bag of popcorn.
He carried his snack into the living room and sat down in front of the television. He kicked off his shoes, propped his feet up on his ottoman, and picked up the remote. The screen flickered on to the most recent channel. News. He wasn’t in the mood for news. Maybe he’d find a movie to watch. He pushed the channel button and began to surf.
Then, still buoyed by the evening’s good feelings, he made a stupid mistake. When he surfed to a classics sports channel and the 1985 Villanova versus Georgetown NCAA title game was showing, he took his finger off the channel button. Lucca began to watch. Soon, thoughts of musical chairs and his good mood were gone. Ten minutes into the game and lost in his memories, he went for the scotch.
March Madness.
How long he sat staring at the screen, he couldn’t say. Long enough for the alcohol level in the bottle to sink by two fingers more than a couple of times. The basketball game ended and a replay of the last four holes of the final round of the 1986 Masters came on. Lucca didn’t see Jack Nicklaus birdie the seventeenth hole. He was lost in his nightmare.
Damned ice. Damned dog. Damned preseason, meaningless game.
It had happened two years ago the following Wednesday.
At first he thought he imagined the ring of the doorbell, then the knock. Ignoring the noise, he took another sip of his drink. Then he heard her call his name. Through the fog, he heard pain. He heard the sound of heartbreak that echoed the hollowness inside of him.
Hope. Sounding hopeless.
Lucca went to his door and opened it. Cold air whooshed inside, little knives slicing through his shirt. She stood on his front porch, still wearing her red sweater and black slacks, but no coat. Something was obviously very wrong. “Hope, what happened? Are you okay?”
She stared up at him with swollen, tortured brown eyes, her cheeks tear streaked. “Lucca. I can’t be alone.”
Wordlessly, he opened the screen door. She stepped into his house, into his arms. She buried her face against his chest. She was so cold.
“I can’t be alone,” she repeated. “Not now. Not tonight. Please …” She lifted her face to his. “Make me forget?”
Whatever her problem, he understood the feeling. He knew it very well. Right now, after the evening he’d spent, he wanted oblivion, too. Holding a woman in his arms was so much better than booze.
What else could he do? Lucca kissed her, and he tasted pain and heartache. He would have wondered why, had he not been numbed by alcohol and caught in the grip of his own pain and heartache.
She’d asked him to make her forget.
He backed her up against the living room wall and kissed her, wanting, seeking, needing the escape. Their bodies melded together. She yanked and tugged and pulled at the buttons on his shirt until it hung open, and then her desperate hands streaked over his bare skin. Lucca sucked in a breath as her nails scraped across his nipples.
On the edge of sinking entirely into the moment, he was too responsible to ignore the faint chime of alarm bells, barely audible beneath the fog of alcohol and desire. He mumbled against her lips. “Hope? Are you sure about this?”
“Make me feel better, Lucca.”
He picked her up in his arms and carried her to his bed.
What took place there during the next few hours in the muted golden light of a single lamp was raw and physical and mindless. It wasn’t making love, but it was more than just sex.
Lucca immersed himself in his senses. He stripped her naked and feasted on the sight of those curves that had tantalized him since their very first meeting. He bent over her and inhaled her scent—feminine and fresh and hot with arousal. He stroked his calloused hands across her smooth, soft skin and learned her body, using his fingers to coax throaty moans and whispered gasps from lips swollen from the pressure of his mouth.
He tasted the salt of her tears and knew the echo of his own. They were kindred spirits, each running from something, trapped in the throes of a private, painful, anguished memory.
October Madness.
He nibbled his way down her neck, across the hard ridge of her collarbone to the soft, generous swell of her
