Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) (28 page)

She leaned forward and poured another glass of wine she didn’t need in order to have something to do with her hands. He stared at the floor between his feet as she lifted it, shaking his head, his mouth working as if he didn’t like the words he was going to say, or he needed more wine to say them.

“I think we both owe Lindsay Webber a very big thank-you right now,” was what finally came out.

Of all the things she’d expected to hear, well, mentioning another woman when she’d pretty much just offered herself to him . . . “How so?”

“I told her I’d be back to get Addy at nine.”

It was nearly eight now. “Oh.”

“That cat’s going to need more than an hour.”

“Oh,” she said again, barely able to get the simple sound up her throat. Sweat trickled between her breasts, bloomed in the small of her back.

“Yeah . . . probably best if you just forget I said that.” He took a deep breath, blew it out in a whoosh, leaned his head against the doorjamb separating the two rooms. “After Sunday night at the loft, it’s pretty clear neither one of us is in any position for things to get heated.”

She gave him her go-to response, which was growing weaker with each use. “I don’t date—”

“I got it,” he said, scrubbing one hand over the stubble on his face. “We’re not dating.”

“Callum—”

“It’s okay.” He laughed. “Lainie once told me, after all the shit that went on with Cheryl, to keep it in my pants until I knew it was safe to let it out.”

If she hadn’t already been flustered, she was now, so she took the conversation in another direction. “Lainie. From the motorcycle club.”

“Right. Duke and Lainie Randall. The couple I lived with after Addy was born.”

“Was the club a social thing?” She thought about the fictional ones she’d seen on TV. “Or did it operate as a business?”

“Wolf Bane was registered as a business, though originally most of what the MC did was outside of the law. Duke played a big part in the club going legit, even if he was an outlaw at heart, and kept one foot in the off-the-books activities.”

She glanced to the wolf’s head tattoo on Callum’s inner wrist, the parchment scroll with the Tennyson quote he’d had inked to cover up the goriest of the details. “How did you get hooked up with them anyway?”

“The truth?” He snorted. “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. And before you ask, yeah. At eighteen? I really was that shallow. I shouldn’t have been, considering where my parents came from.”

She was more interested in where he’d come from, but rather than push, she asked, “Are they not from here?”

“I went to school in Dallas,” he said, coming back to join her on the couch. “They moved to Hope Springs after I’d graduated. My dad was transferred to Dallas thirty years ago. He’s an accountant. Telecommunications. Both he and my mom grew up in the Northeast. He went to MIT. She went to Boston College. I was born in Boston, but never went to school anywhere but Texas. And I only made it through high school. No higher education for me.”

“That doesn’t make you shallow,” she said, thinking about her own parents and their focus on academia, how she’d toed that line so exactly she’d never thought of anything else. Not sex or drugs or rock ’n roll.

“Maybe not. It does make me lazy and unappreciative. I could’ve gone to school anywhere. I had the grades. Or I did until my senior year.”

“What happened?”

“Girls and beer mostly. It was Texas, so the music was a lot of country. The drugs . . .” He stopped, scrubbed a hand over his jaw as if wiping the memory away. “Those came later. After I’d hooked up with the MC. I took off after graduation with some boys from school to work the oil fields in West Texas. Like I knew anything about oil. Or fields that weren’t chalked off every ten yards. The money wasn’t shabby, but the days were long, and all we did was work and drink and sleep. And not always in that order.”

She smiled to herself, picturing Callum as a restless and reckless teen. “I guess that didn’t go over so well with the boss.”

“It didn’t go over so well with my gut. Or my head,” he said, with a self-deprecating laugh. “I started needing something stronger than the hair of the dog to kick the hangovers. Found it with some bikers in a Midland bar. You think the boss wasn’t happy with the booze . . .”

“I can imagine,” she said, staring into her glass, thinking about the young man Callum had been, his whole future ahead of him and nearly throwing it away.

“I’m not sure you can. Looking back, I have a hard time believing I got out of there in one piece. I was a rich kid from an upscale Dallas suburb. I knew about beer and watering down decanters in parents’ liquor cabinets. I knew about pot. Boy, did I know about pot. I knew where to get my hands on coke and crystal, but I didn’t. Not then anyway. Later . . .”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t going to judge him now by what he’d done fifteen years ago. He wasn’t that person. She knew that because twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn Harvey was certainly not who she was now at thirty-seven.

“I’m not proud of those years,” he continued. “The things I did to get by. Some I knew were wrong. Some I didn’t ask about. Others . . .” He shook his head. “Sometimes it really is better to go in blind. I did what I was told to do. I took the money they paid me. And it was good money.”

“This was before you worked as a bartender?”

“And before I met Addy’s mom. She came with more benefits than warming my bed. She was Duke’s sister. She got me the job.”

How was that even possible? He’d lived with and worked for his daughter’s uncle? “I thought she told you in the hospital she wanted nothing to do with Addy.”

“She did.”

“What about Duke? Or their parents? They all just let you take Addy and go without promising to stay in touch?”

“Their parents had been dead a long time. And as far as Duke and Lainie . . .” He leaned forward and closed the top of the pizza box. “They knew I was getting out of club life, that I had a chance to make things better for me and Addy. And as much as they loved the idea of having a niece, they didn’t want to mess things up for her, so they bowed out.”

“Mess things up.” She had so many questions: How? Why? “Because of their relationship with her mother?”

He shook his head. He was out of wine, and frowned down at his glass but left it empty. “They didn’t have much of a relationship with her by then.”

Everything he said made her even more curious. And more confused. “Cheryl and Duke must’ve been on speaking terms for him to have given you the job originally.”

“A lot of shit went down between Cheryl getting pregnant and Addy being born. Honestly”—he sat forward, his elbows on his knees, and dragged both hands down his face—“I’m surprised that little pumpkin of mine was born with all her fingers and toes. I counted. It was the first thing I did.” He stopped, pulled in a breath that had even Brooklyn shaking.

She pictured him, this tattooed man, this Irish rogue, this long-haired chocolatier, holding a tiny baby in his big-boned hands.

Callum cleared his throat. “I thought if she’d made it through with her fingers and toes maybe the rest of her would be okay. It sounds so stupid now. And I knew it was stupid then. But Cheryl was a drunk and an addict. Not so bad at first, so maybe that had something to do with Addy turning out okay. But later? She was running with some pretty bad dudes then. Got into some seriously bad shit.”

Her mind went to the obvious. “But you know Addy’s yours?”

“No question. The timing was right, and Cheryl said as much. But I paid for a paternity test to be sure.”

“Do you think, if you’d found out she wasn’t, you would’ve loved her anyway?”

“The minute I picked her up from the hospital bassinet, she was mine. Yeah, I wanted to know, to be sure, but she had this tiny pink screwed-up nose, and these big bowed lips, and blond fuzz that was longer at her crown and looked all punk. I might’ve regretted that she didn’t have my blood, if the tests had showed that, but I’d been waiting to meet her for months, and I was a goner the minute I did. If anything, I wished then that she had a different mother. A mother who wanted her and gave a shit about her.

“It’s hard to believe, you know. That something so precious and so innocent, something so pure could come from someone who was nothing but—” He stopped, the words seeming to choke him. “Addy’s everything to me. I don’t want to even think about losing her.”

“Why would you?” she asked, her chest tight around the question. “You have custody.”

He shrugged. “Cheryl could always change her mind.”

“You had to have presented a strong case to win over the court.”

“Yeah. And I’ll be holding my breath until Addy turns eighteen that my
case
doesn’t fall apart.”

“Can it?”

“It’s doubtful,” he said, shaking his head. “But I never say never.”

She let that settle. He didn’t want to talk details, and really, that was fine. “Did you get a tattoo when she was born? Her name with the date or a baby rattle or something?”

He arched a brow. “A baby rattle? You think I’d wear a baby rattle?”

Ah, so he did have something sentimental. Too entirely cute. “Methinks the man doth protest too much.”

“You’re screwing up your
Hamlet
,” he said, reminding her again of their shared love of literature.

“Show me. What is it?” And
where
is it, because if showing her required him taking off his clothes . . .

His hands moved to the buttons of his shirt, and he turned toward her as he freed them from his throat to his sternum. He stopped there, pulling the fabric to the side, and twisting on the cushion beside her to give her a better view.

The tattoo was of an illustration she knew well, a favorite childhood storybook character, a yellow bear holding the hand of a tiny pink pig. Over their heads floated a balloon bearing Addy’s name and birth date, and another with a quote from the Milne book.

The sentiment brought a catch to Brooklyn’s heart. Because it was inked right over Callum’s.

“It’s the truth, you know,” he said, dropping his chin to glance down at his chest, his mouth pulled sideways in a goofy grin. “As soon as I saw her, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind a grand adventure would happen.” Then he looked up, the grin still goofy, his whole expression dopey, like a man so enthralled with the little girl who was his, it rendered him a fool.

She absolutely loved seeing this part of him, loved that he trusted her enough to be this vulnerable with her. Loved him. She loved him. “Has it been all you expected?”

“It’s been one insane ride, that’s for sure.”

“But you wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

“You got that right,” he said, smiling as he buttoned his shirt. “Not for a million bucks.”

TWO OWLS’ CRACKLE-TOP BROWNIES

½ cup all-purpose flour

⅛ teaspoon salt

6 ounces unsalted butter, cut into pieces, room temperature

6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, cut into pieces

1 cup sugar

3 large eggs

Preheat oven to 300 degrees (F).

Grease an 8 x 8-inch baking dish and line with parchment paper, coating with nonstick spray.

Whisk together the flour and the salt. Set aside.

In a double boiler, or in a bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water, slowly melt the chocolate. Remove the chocolate from the heat, and stir in the room-temperature butter until it melts.

Using an electric mixer or a stand mixer with a whisk attachment, beat the eggs and the sugar until thick. Add the chocolate and butter mixture, then fold in the dry ingredients by hand.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake 50–60 minutes, or until the top is crackled and a tester inserted into the center comes out with a bit of batter attached.

Transfer the pan to a rack and allow the brownies to cool completely before cutting.

Since eating pizza with Callum two weeks ago Friday night—their schedules refusing to mesh for more than a few phone calls in the meantime—Brooklyn had been thinking about his Winnie-the-Pooh tattoo. For years she’d kept a list of quotes she considered tat worthy, but she’d never thought seriously about sitting still for a needle long enough to have one done.

Until now.

Artie’s ink had been image-heavy, but just as meaningful to him as were the quotes Callum had chosen for himself. She loved how both men owned parts of their lives so strongly they’d paid permanent homage: Artie to his career, the brotherhood of firefighters he called family, Callum first to his club, then later to himself, his daughter, the life he needed to live for her.

Thinking about that commitment was what had finally convinced her to take the plunge. She was changing so many things, why not a tattoo? As many sayings as she had in her collection, she could’ve covered her entire body with suitable adages. The problem was finding an inkman to trust, though it wasn’t much of one: a phone call to Callum had solved it.

He’d even made the appointment for tonight, saying he wanted to talk to the artist first, then come along, rather than having her go in blind. Being seen with him in this case wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In fact, she mused, tugging up on the jeans she hadn’t worn in ages, being seen with him was exactly what she wanted. She was going to have as much fun as she could while in Callum’s world tonight. And she wasn’t going to think about her world at all.