His Unlikely Lover (Unwanted #3) (27 page)

Bobbi started monitoring her calls after that. After that football night, she hadn’t expected him to hear from again for a long time and that phone call to the shop had rattled her immensely. She had Craig on phone duties, knowing that he would be vigilant about not letting any calls from Gabe slip through the cracks. She ignored any calls to her cell phone from him and simply came home too late for him to call the house.

His messages started to pile up over the next few days. Voice mails clogged up her cell-phone inbox and handwritten notes from her father were left outside her bedroom door.

“Please call me.”

“I’m sorry I missed you. Please call.”

“I missed you again. Please call.”

“Call me.”

And on and on it went. The voice mails he left on her cell phone were more detailed:

“I know I hurt you. I just want a chance to make it right. I miss you. Please call me.”

“Bobbi, I miss you. Call me.”

“I wish you’d answer my calls.”

“I can’t do this
(he never elaborated on what “this” meant)
in a message. I need to speak with you. Let me know when it’ll be convenient for me to call you or see you.”

It was driving her crazy. At her previous girls’ night a few days before, each woman said she’d had at least one message from Gabe. They never urged her to call him though. They merely relayed the messages and then carried on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Nobody had forced her to
talk
about it. They respected her silence on the matter. And she was eternally grateful for that.

“Good. You’re home.” Her father met Bobbi at the door when she let herself in that evening. He looked flustered and annoyed.

“Dad? What’s wrong?” She stepped past her agitated father and tried to drop her messenger bag carelessly onto a side table in the foyer, as she usually did. A huge bouquet of white roses resting on the tiny table thwarted the automatic gesture. She frowned and glanced around, looking for a different table, but they were all covered in gorgeous bouquets of white roses.

“Oh,” she said blankly.

“Yes,
oh
,” her father groused. “They’re everywhere.”

“Where did they come from?” she asked, wondering if there had been some kind of planning mishap with the Valentine’s Day thing. She knew that their theme was red and white—
so
original—maybe they had miscalculated the number of white roses they needed?

“They’re for you,” he said pointedly, and her eyes widened.

“But . . .”

“Look, I know you and Gabe have had some kind of tiff and if this is any indication, he feels terrible about it.” Her father knew nothing about what had happened between Gabe and Bobbi. Thankfully Billy had kept his mouth shut about the incident at the football match, even though her brother had futilely tried—on numerous occasions—to open up a dialogue with Bobbi about it.

“They’re from Gabe?” She knew her voice sounded flat and if her father’s frown was any indication, he didn’t understand why she wasn’t more enthusiastic about the floral “apology.”

“They are . . .” He nodded. “Gabe called after the first delivery and asked me to grab the card out of one of the bouquets and to be sure that you received and read it.”

That sneaky rat!
He knew that if it had been up to her the card would have been tossed into the bin unread, but by involving her father, Gabe had made it impossible for her
not
to read it. She took the pretty cream card from her father and glanced down at it. Gabe’s bold handwriting slashed across the surface of the small square of paper, and it took her a second to decipher the elegant cursive script.

Did you know that white roses signify new beginnings? I was hoping you’d appreciate that sentiment. Please turn over for more . . .

She refused to smile at the polite instruction on the bottom of the tiny card. Anybody else would have been satisfied with an abbreviated
PTO,
but Gabe, of course, had to write a properly structured and well-mannered sentence. She turned over.

These roses are white

Most violets are blue (well they’re actually violet but for the purposes of this poem we’ll say blue)

Bobbi, my sweet

I really miss you

(I’m sorry. I’m really bad at poetry—G)

She covered her mouth with a hand as she tried to stifle the half laugh, half sob that threatened to bubble up from her throat. This was . . . what
was
this? She didn’t even know what he meant to achieve with this.

“I’m going up for a shower, I’ll see you at dinner,” she said, folding her hand around the card and feeling the expensive bond paper cut into her palm. Her father’s face fell when she made no mention of the card’s contents. After she reached her room, she put the card onto her dresser and meticulously smoothed the creases out of the stiff paper. She read the words one last time before tearing the card up into four squares and tossing them into her dresser drawer.

After a quick shower, she decided to call Chase. He answered his cell phone almost immediately.

“Tell him to
stop
this,” she said, seething, before he’d even had a chance say hello.

“What?” he asked in confusion.

“Chase, tell him to stop! I’m not amused.” She hung up and tossed the phone aside.

“So what’s going on?” Chase asked Gabe, who was sitting in the den, staring at the muted television.

“What do you mean?” Gabe asked, looking up from the dancing couple on the screen.

“What the hell are you watching?” Chase was momentarily diverted by the garish costumes and blindingly white smiles.

“Some competition about vaguely famous people learning ballroom dancing, I think.” Gabe shrugged listlessly.

“Why are you watching it with the sound turned down?”

“The music is
terrible
,” Gabe said before going back to Chase’s original subject. “What did you mean by that first question?”

Still staring at the screen in horrified fascination, Chase stumbled around the back of the sofa and sat down next to Gabe.

“Bobbi just called me.” That snagged Gabe’s interest and he sat up—wondering how pissed off she had been by his gesture. He knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have been happy, but it would have gotten her attention at least.

“She wants you to
stop
. She’s not amused.” Pretty much what Gabe had expected and he felt a reluctant smile tug at the corners of his mouth. He hadn’t felt like smiling in weeks, but one angry message from her and he felt like a drowning man who had been thrown a lifeline.

“What did you do?” Chase asked curiously—his eyes glued to the screen. The whirling couple had stopped dancing and now seemed to be standing in front of a panel of excitable judges.

“I sent her flowers,” Gabe said, and Chase choked before turning to stare at Gabe in complete disbelief.

“Uh . . .” His brother seemed at a loss for words.

“Roughly twelve dozen white roses. I imagine she’s pretty pissed off right now.”

“If you knew she’d be angry why did you send them?” Chase looked baffled.

“Because I knew that it would prompt a reaction from her,” Gabe said. “She’s been ignoring my calls.”

“Sending flowers was a pretty public thing to do,” Chase commented.

“I know.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“God, I hope so,” Gabe said fervently. Chase merely studied him for a beat before allowing another gaudily outfitted couple on TV to distract him as they took to the dance floor.

“Hey, I’ve seen that guy before,” he said, grabbing the remote control from the coffee table. “That’s the guy from that early nineties archery action movie. Remember? We loved that movie when we were kids. What was the title?”

Gabe squinted at the screen and snorted.

“Yeah, I remember. We begged Mum to enroll us in archery classes after that,” Gabe recalled.

“And she stuck us in bloody ballet classes instead.” They both winced at the memory. Thankfully the ballet classes had only lasted a couple of months; their mother had been forced to remove them after the instructor complained about the eleven-year-old twins’ obstructive behavior. They had spent more time ruffling tutus and switching up everybody’s toe shoes than they had paying attention to the lessons.

“What
was
the title of that movie?” Gabe wondered aloud. Bobbi would know—she was awesome at remembering movie trivia and she had loved the movie as much as they had. At six years old she had still been young enough to score a plastic bow and arrow set with sucker cups on the ends of the arrows. She had had a fabulous time pretending to be the lead in her own action movie, constantly ambushing them when they least expected it. Gabe smiled at the memory. God, he missed her so much.

“Damn, how much work has this guy had
done
?” Chase leaned forward to peer more closely at the C-list actor who had once been a hero to them. Gabe grimaced at the plasticky sheen to the man’s skin. Chase turned the sound up and they both recoiled at the terrible rendition of “Yesterday” that the live band was offering up as an accompaniment to a halfway-decent waltz.

“He’s not too bad.” Chase was completely riveted by the dancing on the screen and Gabe left him to it. The music was too distracting and Gabe wasn’t in the right frame of mind to sit and watch television.

He went up to change into his swim trunks and spent a couple of hours relentlessly swimming laps in the hopes that it would tire him out enough to sleep through the night. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since that last night with Bobbi and it was starting to wear him down.

On his way up to bed two hours later he passed the open door of the den and was surprised to see Chase still sitting there watching that same god-awful dancing show. It amused him enough to go into the room.

“Why are you still watching this?” he asked. Chase barely acknowledged him, keeping his eyes glued on the screen.

“It’s a marathon. Ssh,” he shushed urgently. “They’re leading up to a double elimination!” Rolling his eyes, Gabe turned and exited the room. The dramatic music reached a crescendo and the announcer’s voice rang out to be instantly followed by both boos and cheers.

“Oh my
God
, that’s crap. She was the better dancer out there!” Chase yelled, and followed that diatribe up with a string of colorful curses. Gabe left him to it and made his way upstairs, his mind back on Bobbi and his next plan of action.