Brick by Brick (3 page)

James landed in the recliner he’d had before I met him, and I took the opposite end of the sofa. I had a hard time wrapping my head around sitting on the couch with someone I’d seen in movies.

“My hotel’s nice, but there’s something about people’s houses. You never feel at home in a hotel. Thanks.”

“
Mi casa
, blah blah blah,” James said. “Meaning, kick off your shoes before you put your feet on the coffee table, but don’t be afraid to get comfortable.”

“Thanks. Does the fireplace work, or are the logs for show?”

“It works. Natalie and I built it ourselves.”

“Some of the rocks are from our honeymoon. Cape Cod. Should we have a fire?”

“You shouldn’t go to the trouble. It’s not that cold.”

“You’ve got a jacket and a long-sleeved shirt, pants, and shoes,” I said. “I’d like a fire.” I basked in the warmth of Gage’s gratitude, or perhaps just his eyes on my bare cleavage, arms, and legs, while James lit the kindling beneath the logs.

Red wines usually taste and smell like rosin and wet leaves to me, so I’d intended to sip at my wine politely, nothing more. This one slipped down easily. “I thought I didn’t like Bordeaux. Wrong.”

“You like it? Eighty-six Lafite-Rothschild. The eighty-eight is supposed to be better, but I’ve never had it. It’s kind of a show-off wine, because people have heard of it, and it’s expensive.” He shrugged.

“Fame and money don’t impress you?” I sipped again, appreciating the superb red wine money could buy.

“Not since I met so many rich and famous people.”

“I think it’s expensive because it’s good.” James held it to the light, then put his nose in the glass a bit and inhaled, like he’d seen his brother Daniel do.

“Yeah, isn’t it? Although I like the eighty-seven pretty well, and it costs a lot less.” Gage sipped, closed his eyes as he moved the wine around in his mouth, then opened them and smiled. “I was afraid Tucson was going to be a beer town because of the heat.”

“Thank the snowbirds,” I said. “Three or four months a year, there’s tourist money flowing, so we cater to tourist tastes, including the rich ones who retire here or buy a second home.”

“Yeah, this realtor told me housing prices are way up and it’s too bad I didn’t buy five years ago.”

“You’re buying a house here?” He wouldn’t be the first celebrity to have a desert palace he rarely visited.

“Maybe. Probably just a condo, so there’s nothing to take care of when I’m gone.”

“Are you from here?” It felt nosy, prying into a celebrity’s private life, but I’d asked Cynthia the same question. Why treat Gage Strickland any differently?

“No. I got arrested here.” He grinned. “For real. Speeding, late at night on an empty stretch of highway just past—Marana, is it? I would have just gotten a ticket, but I did something stupid.”

“You argue?” James had received a few late-night calls from the jail after police had stopped some of the hotheads from his work crew.

“Worse. I showed my license with a couple of folded hundreds sticking out behind it. In LA, that gets you a warning, unless you’re drunk or disrespectful.”

“Really? I thought that was only in books and movies.” That was the wine talking, I realized immediately. What did I know about how corrupt the police were in a city I’d never been to? I hid my face by getting up to rearrange the logs, brightening the flame.

“Art imitating life imitating art. I got handcuffed and everything. I used my one call on my lawyer in LA, and he’d gone to Stanford Law with Doug.”

“That’s handy,” James said.

“If he hadn’t known anybody, he’d have gotten some local attorney, but he figured someone he knows is better. Doug doesn’t do that kind of law, but he got out of bed and bailed me out, and wouldn’t take me to a hotel, because he heard the cops say something about TV crews waiting outside. We used a side door, and he brought me to his house.”

“When was this?” James raised his eyebrows and lifted the bottle, asking permission.

Gage Strickland nodded his consent. “Last spring.”

James poured himself a little more wine, then added some to Gage’s glass too. I shook my head no when he turned toward me.

“They’d only just moved in, like two weeks before, and there were still boxes and stuff, but they had a guest room. Next day, Cynthia drove me around, in town and out in the desert. I liked it. Liked her and Doug too. I could have gone back, but I stayed in town until the hearing. Not at their house, of course.”

“The Arizona Inn?” I guessed the most centrally located of the luxury hotels in town.

“What? No, just the Sheraton. Paid my fine, apologized, swore I’d never do it again. And I haven’t. So far.” He drank, again closing his dark eyes before swirling the wine in his mouth. His eyes opened slowly, as if from a dream. “Damn, this is good. Anyway, that’s why I’m here. How is it you live here, James?”

“My grandparents retired here from Minnesota. They loved the heat. When Grandma Lundgren had a stroke, Grandpa couldn’t take care of her. Mom packed up the station wagon and all of us kids—I’ve got three brothers and a sister—and moved us into their three-bedroom house.”

“Crowded,” Gage said.

“Yeah. My dad went nuts, but Mom wasn’t putting her mother in a nursing home, period. So he quit his job and came after us. He was totally pissed.”

“I can see his point.”

“He embraced pissed as a lifestyle,” James said, “and didn’t mellow until the boys were all out of the house. My baby sister can do no wrong. We were only just starting to get along.”

“He died last year,” I said

“Oh. Sorry to have brought it up. How about you, Natalie? Are you a Tucson native?”

“No, I grew up in Phoenix with my mom and an older sister.”

“Her dad died when she was a baby.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t remember him. I’m in Tucson because I picked the University of Arizona so I wouldn’t have to live at home in Phoenix while I went to Arizona State.”

“So you’re not close to your family?”

“My sister and I see each other a few times a year, always on her turf.”

“Phoenix is okay. Smoggy,” Gage said, “but not as bad as LA.”

“She lives in Casa Grande now. That’s between Phoenix and Tucson, but she won’t go to either one. She and Mom were baptized at this church that deemed them both godless cities.”

“Then your mom must’ve left Phoenix.”

“She left everything. She had MS and decided to deliver herself to the Lord.” Why was I telling him this? If the wine had been worse, I’d have drunk less and held my tongue.

“You mean she—” Gage looked to my husband for help.

“Pills,” he said. “If you’ve got any dead parents, now’s the time to trot them out.”

Gage’s eyes widened. He inhaled and started to speak. Nothing came out but a bray of laughter that continued until he’d used up his breath. He dabbed his eyes and caught his breath, started to say something, and lost his composure again, laughing helplessly.

When he recovered at last, he said, “Don’t know my dad. Mom’s still living. Let’s talk about something else before I wet my pants laughing. So, you like Tucson?”

I volunteered. “I stayed after college, doing office work. Boy, I was sure glad I’d studied something as practical as philosophy.”

Gage laughed. “What about you, James? You studied, ah, masonry?”

“No college—Natalie’s the brains. I worked for my Uncle Olin in St. Cloud every summer in high school, mainly to get out from under my dad’s thumb, and moved up there when I graduated. He had me running a crew at nineteen. I was twenty-two when I sent him and Aunt Lottie on their first summertime vacation ever, and when they got back, we had that serious talk about doing something with your life. The one your father’s supposed to have with you.”

James’s candor surprised me. The wine must be getting to him too. We’d dated for months before I knew there’d been so much father-son tension, and that they considered the antagonism I’d already seen a big improvement.

“Is that why you came back here, because of your dad?” Gage topped our glasses. The bottle was emptying fast.

“No. That’s why I almost stayed away.”

“I shouldn’t be asking all these personal questions. You follow any sports?”

James didn’t play along. “The Twins. I came back because I didn’t want to compete with Uncle Olin when I started my own company. What if I was better?”

Gage laughed. “Are you?”

“Hell, yeah. Now, anyway. Here, you can lay brick all year long if you can take the heat. The trick is to beat out the guys who hire illegals who’ve been laying brick since they were thirteen and are glad to get paid cash under the table. So I started doing as much custom design work as I could. Taught myself to do things Uncle Olin’s never even seen.” He gestured toward the flames. “The fireplace was to learn to set stone. I see things I’d do different.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “or I’ll never see it as just fine again.”

“So you do anything the owner or builder can think of?”

“And pay for,” I said. “He’s not competing with the regular bricklayers now.” When he could find a customer, anyway.

“It was hard to get to that point. For a while I worked twelve- and fourteen-hour days instead of paying overtime, and weekends I did some modeling and acting just so I could meet payroll.”

“You’re an actor too?” Gage sat straighter, his expression freshly attentive.

I rarely saw James flush with pride, not even when customers gushed about his artistic masonry. “Just TV ads.” He drank. “None lately.” He lifted himself from the recliner with a little groan, then added another log to the fire and prodded it to life.

“They still show his cotton ads,” I said. “Putting on a T-shirt. Taking a pair of jeans off the clothesline and smelling them, and the camera goes back and you can see there must be hundreds of pairs. Flopping onto this big bed and the sheets puff up around him. My sister thought that one was dirty, the expression on his face.”

Gage was a good audience, listening more than talking, laughing a lot when I blurted whatever was in my head without thinking first. Time glided past rapidly. Gage moved to refill my glass; I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. I asked James with my eyes if I was doing all right.

“Go ahead, Nat,” he said. I knew that lazy smile. He wasn’t drunk, just uninhibited, loose to the nth degree. Some of our best sex included that look—and some of James’s best TV ads did too. “It’s a party, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Gage filled my glass halfway before the bottle emptied. “A good party.”

“With only three, I think we have to call it an intimate gathering,” James said.

Gage’s smile dazzled. “Do I open the next one?”

What the hell. “If you like your gatherings really intimate,” I said.

“I think she wants you to stay,” James said, laughing. “Open it, already.”

The cork squeaked out. “See if you taste layers of fruit.” Gage sounded a little buzzed too.

James sipped, rolling the wine in his mouth with a frown of concentration.

“Taste it? Blackberries and raspberries? Kind of voluptuous and round. God, listen to me, one bottle and I turn into a pompous wine asshole. Anyway, it’s really ripe and full-bodied. Like Natalie.” He held his glass up, admiring the color.

Or toasting me? No. Ridiculous.

James raised his glass as well. “She’s something in that dress, isn’t she?” At Gage’s nod, he added, “You ought to see her out of it.”

“James!”

“She’d do it, I bet, if we did.” James loosened his tie and pulled it off, carefully folding the silk and placing it in his jacket pocket. “Come on.”

“Too bad I’m not wearing a tie. Guess I’m out of the running.”

“You could take off the jacket. You might even…unbutton your collar.” James peeled off his own jacket and unbuttoned his shirt fully. “Come on, do something.”

Laughing and shaking his head, Gage undid the tiny button closing the collar band at his throat.

James stroked my back lightly while Gage tossed his raw silk jacket aside and unbuttoned his shirt’s next two buttons.

My husband slipped his shirt off and let it drop to the floor. For the thousandth time I admired his broad shoulders, the golden down on his chest, the delicate pink nipples, the flat belly.

“Topless. Pretty wild.” James sipped his wine. “Come on, Gage. If we both do it, she will. What do you think?”

“I think,” Gage said, “I’d better call a cab.”

Chapter Five

“Don’t.” James picked up his shirt and threaded one meaty arm into a sleeve, then the other. “It’s just—I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?” His eyes narrowed to slits, Gage watched James with suspicion anyone could see.

James drained his glass in two gulps. “French courage,” he said. “Damn, that’s good. Ask you to join us. She’s—we’ve—talked about another person a lot, and this seemed perfect.” His face glowed pink. “I’m a little high, or I wouldn’t have done anything. Or maybe I would have, but more gracefully. In a Lafite-Rothschild kind of way.”

His crooked grin melted me, as usual. Gage’s expression softened too.

James poured himself a dollop of wine. “Excellent wine, really, too good to take the blame. It wasn’t the wine talking; it was me.” James shrugged. “I’m sorry. You can button your shirt. That’s the end of it.”

“You mean,” Gage said, addressing the wineglass he rotated in his paired hands, “that you both want to add another guy?” He turned his gaze on me. “You meant it about two men?”

“Daydream number 1A, useful during masturbation, subtitled films, and traffic jams,” I said.

Smiling, Gage turned to James, whose shirt still hung open. “And you don’t mind, another man with you and your wife?”

“I don’t number my daydreams,” James said, “but it’s up there. With real-world conditions.”

“Sure,” Gage said. “Safe sex. Time to talk travel and transfusions and every partner we ever had. God, I hate this part.”

We weren’t the risk. There must be millions of women who’d forget boyfriends or husbands to have sex with Gage Strickland. He could easily have had hundreds or thousands. Had he been safe every single time? “Married forever, faithful the whole time,” I said. “What about you?”