I decided that this girl was going to go and get it.
I wound my way over, stepping up to Tom and touching his arm. “Hey, good-looking. Can I get you anything?”
Tom, as expected, swung his arm around me, pulling me up beside him and practically leaning on me for support. If I got him anything, it would be a glass of water, that was for sure.
“Sage, you gotta meet this guy. This guy, he’s like my brother,” he said, pulling Vince in to his other side so that he was holding on to both of us.
I looked Vince in the eye. “I believe we’ve met.”
He nodded his head, the slightest of smiles coming to that perfect mouth of his, but whether he remembered me or not I couldn’t say.
“My brother, I tell you,” Tom slurred on, putting his other arm around Vince’s shoulders. “Do you know how long I’ve known this guy?”
“No, how long?” I said, still holding Vince’s gaze.
“Seventeen goddamned years!”
Vince broke eye contact with me, smiling up at his friend. “Goddamned years, is it?” he said.
Tom ignored him. “We started our first business together. Hell, we had our first marriages together.”
Alarm shot through me, and I glanced down at Vince’s left hand, feeling relief when I saw it was bare.
Tom yanked me closer. “And Sage, Sage here is my right arm. My right arm, I tell you!”
“I believe she’s your left at the moment,” Vince said.
When I looked up again, Vince was smiling in full, a flash of white teeth against dark skin.
Mmm-hmm, this was some man. “I think we might be his whole support system at the moment.” But the minute I said the words, Tom lifted away from both of us, lured off by someone shouting his name from the deck.
I smiled after him, watching as he weaved unsteadily through the crowd. Once he was through the sliding glass door, I turned to Vince. “So. I didn’t know you were a Fire Island junkie, too.”
His eyebrows drew together. “I wouldn’t say junkie.‘ I have a place over on Seabay, but I don’t get out as much as I should. And then there was all that time in China. And Italy…”
“Ah, Italy,” I said with a sigh.
He treated me to another one of those smiles, and my insides started to warm in a way that I couldn’t attribute to tequila.
“But now you’re back,” I said, studying his dark eyes as he gazed out through the sliding glass doors.
“Yes,” he said distractedly, “now I’m back. And just in time, I see,” he continued, his gaze narrowing on Tom as Tom leaned drunkenly against the sliding glass doors, talking to a petite blonde.
I followed his gaze. “He’s lonely,” I said, realizing for the first time that it was true, despite Tom’s somewhat desperate attempt to carry on as normal.
“Yes,” Vince said, his gaze still on Tom. “Tom needs someone to take care of him. He always did. He was lucky to have Maggie. And now…”
He looked at me, and I realized that he was, in fact, the first person to see through Tom’s facade of cheer.
Another point for Vince. He was sensitive. And that was something you didn’t often encounter in a man. Or at least the men I had known up until now. Maybe that came with age, I thought, studying the flecks of gray through his otherwise dark hair and wondering just how old he was.
Instead, I asked, “So you and Tom started a business together? I’m assuming it was garment industry, too—what line?”
Vince looked at me. “What line?” he said, his eyes widening. Then he chuckled. “I started up Luxe with him.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? And all this time I thought Luxe was Tom’s baby.”
He frowned. “Well, it is now. But I was there at the begin-
ning. Helping him set up. He was new to New York and I had the contacts, so…“ He shrugged. ”I’ve been in this industry since I could crawl. Even longer than Tom in some ways, since I started out running truck shipments as soon as I knew how to drive.“
And now he was the VP of manufacturing. A self-made man. I liked that, too.
But just when I was going to ask him more, I saw his eyes narrow on someone outside. “Would you excuse me?” he said. And with a brief nod, he disappeared into the crowd. I spotted him once again talking to one of the vendors we worked with at Edge.
Clearly, Vince hadn’t come here for pleasure, I thought, realizing that he hadn’t so much as flirted with me, though he was talking quite animatedly with the vendor over there. Maybe that was another thing that came with age in a man. Vince might be more motivated by the head between his shoulders than the one between his legs.
And as I watched him work his charms, I realized that I might prefer that kind of man for a change.
I went in search of Zoe, who had been MIA since her emotional outburst on the deck. Though once I found her, I kind of wished she’d stayed hidden away.
“What are you doing?” I asked when I spotted her, coasting through the living room, video camera in hand.
“What does it look like?” she said, panning the room.
“The question is, why are you doing it?” I asked.
She shrugged, still not lowering the camera, only pausing as she came upon Tom and the cluster of women he stood among. “Figured Tom might want some footage of his annual bash.”
“Zoe—”
“What?” she said, finally lowering the camera.“At last I’m getting into this whole Fourth of July thing and you’re still complaining?”
I glared at her. “I wouldn’t be complaining if the festivities were really your focus. I know what you’re up to, Zoe. The only time you have that camera in hand is when you’re gathering evidence.”
“Well put. I never thought of it that way.” Then
