Together Again: Book 3 in the Second Chances series (Crimson Romance) (8 page)

“Yeah, we’re okay. Thanks. Or I’m sorry. Maybe both.”

He kissed the inside of her wrist. “I love the perfume you wear. What’s it called?”

She untangled her hand from his, picked up her glass and drained the last of the Scotch from it. “It’s one of those embarrassing names.”

“If it’s ‘Seduce Me Tonight,’ I’d be happy to oblige.”

She couldn’t tell if he was flirting or making fun of her. “It’s something like that, yes.” After a brief hesitation, she replied, “It’s called ‘Beautiful’.”

“A man gave it to you, I bet. And he was right. You are.”

Tony’s apartment was in a high rise a few blocks from the Bellevue. After they discreetly checked her out of the hotel, they moved her rental car to his parking garage.

He led her to his apartment on the fifteenth floor and opened the door to a living room with dove gray walls and blonde hardwood floors. Minimal furnishings with a masculine style graced the living room: a black leather modular couch on two walls with a low glass table in front of it. In the dining area, a small table on a white and black area rug with two chairs.

She was immediately drawn to the far side of the room where a sliding glass door opened onto a balcony that stretched across the entire length of the apartment’s outside wall with a tiny bit of the statue of Billy Penn on top of City Hall visible from one corner. Coming back into the room she said, “This is wonderful. It feels, I don’t know, serene, peaceful, almost Zen-like.”

“That’s what Mary Ellen said I needed.”

“I forgot, she’s an interior designer, isn’t she? She did a great job.”

“I’ll tell her you liked it.” Gesturing toward a short hallway, he said, “Here, I’ll give you the thirty-second tour of the rest.”

He pointed out a half-bath and a small room furnished with a desk, computer and file cabinet as well as a weight machine. Then he took her suitcase into his bedroom and put it on an armless rocking chair Margo remembered from his mother’s house. A king-size bed with half a dozen pillows and a comforter with thin stripes in shades of gray, black and white and a long double dresser half-covered in family photos with a mirror over it were the only other pieces of furniture in the room.

With her back to him, she opened her bag and tried to decide what she should do next. It’s not like she had a ton of experience spending weekends in men’s apartments. Did you unpack? Wait for instructions? What? She picked up her toiletries bag, feeling awkward.

He seemed to read her thoughts. “Why don’t you put that in the bathroom? You can share with me or you can have the little one to yourself, although the only shower’s in here.”

“Sharing’s fine, thanks.”

In the master bath, she saw that he had not only cleared space on the vanity for her but had put out an extra glass and clean towels. That and the smell of clean linen in the bedroom, as if he’d changed the sheets, too, calmed her.

Before she could decide what to do next, he took her in his arms saying, “You’ve been a major distraction today. I kept looking at my watch, wanting the day to be over so I could see you, hoping I had a chance to do this again.” The kiss went from zero-to-sixty in two seconds flat, picking up where they left off the night before as though it was only minutes ago. It took her breath away and turned her insides all soft and wet.

“You were pretty distracting today, too,” she said when she could breathe again.

“Good distracting like this,” he said as he surfed his hands down her back, moving her close against him and covering her neck with kisses. “Or bad distracting like worried I was about to ditch you.”

“Some of both. Well, maybe mostly the latter. I thought maybe you’d say it would be better to go back to the way we were before.”

He drew her hands up onto his shoulders. “There’s no going back, sugar.”

She started to kiss him again then stopped. “Why do you call me that? I mean, I love it but it’s so Southern and South Philly hardly counts as Southern.”

He gently kissed her lips. “You’ve always tasted sweet when I kissed you. I thought it was some kind of lip-stuff you wore until last night.” He began to unbuckle her belt. “Now I know you taste sweet everyplace.”

She smiled at him, knowing in advance the answer to the question she was about to ask. “What exactly are you doing, Tony?”

Dropping the belt on the bed, he unzipped her linen pants. “It’s hot in here. Don’t you think you have too many clothes on?”

A while later, he came out of the bathroom dressed only in a pair of cutoff jeans that rode on his hips and cupped his butt almost as closely as she had recently done with her hands. She was in a T-shirt and bikini panties hanging up her suit.

As he walked past, she waylaid him with a smile. “This guy I used to go down the shore with wore cutoffs like that. I always thought he was trying to show off his body.”

“Maybe he thought it would put the idea in your head to show off yours.”

“I was in a bikini. What more could he want?”

He fake-leered at her. “By now you’ve figured it out, I assume.”

She combed her fingers through the cloud of dark fur on his chest and down the line of hair to his navel, which she tickled before hooking her fingers under the waistband of his cutoffs.

Dropping a kiss on her head, he took both her hands in his. “If you want dinner you better not go any further. You’re distracting me. Seriously.”

She squinted at him, as if thinking hard. “And it smells wonderful, like I remember your mother’s kitchen smelled. But you offer me a difficult choice. Do I want to eat pasta cooked by a good Italian cook or do I want to distract a hunky guy. I can’t decide. I want both.”

“You can have both, but first I think I should feed you. You get cranky when you’re hungry. And is that how you describe me to your friends? A hunky guy?”

“No, I say you’re an old friend.”

“I like hunky guy better.”

“I’ll think about it. Although all they’d have to do is see you like this and words wouldn’t be necessary.”

He looked behind her, diverted by something. “You don’t wear this under those lawyer suits of yours, do you?” He reached around and came back with a black lace demi-bra dangling from one finger.

She snatched it back from him. “Yes, sometimes.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry I know that. If I was ever a witness for you in court, I wouldn’t be able to get my testimony straight thinking about what you had on underneath your jacket.”

“No one in their right mind would let me prosecute a case you were involved in, detective. Not after this weekend. I think you’re safe.”

“Thank God.” He pulled on a T-shirt and started for the kitchen. “Ten minutes to dinner. You might want to put some clothes on.” And he disappeared from the bedroom.

After she donned jeans, she followed and was assigned the job of finding music to accompany their meal. She perused his CD collection finding the Springsteen, U2 and Italian opera she expected and some of the same jazz she had, but it was Andrea Bocelli she put on. He approved, but took the fifth when she asked if it was the music he used to seduce women.

After a dinner of pasta with his mother’s marinara sauce, a tossed salad and bread, they moved to the couch. They sat for several hours finishing up a bottle of Chianti Classico talking comfortably, like Tony and Margo, the friends of a thousand years, not awkwardly like lovers of only one day.

Until he said, “Okay, there’s something else I need to say to you,” and she felt tension return to her shoulders. He must have seen it because he said, “It’s nothing bad. It’s more like a confession.”

“Doesn’t that require a priest?”

“If I started with a priest tonight, I might still be with him the next time you came back to Philly. No, this is something I have to confess to you.” He took a sip of wine. “It … ah … wasn’t your mom’s idea to sign you up for the reunion. It was mine.”

“Yours? Why?”

“Mary Ellen’s wedding reception. Our unfinished business.”

She looked down into the wine glass. “I half expected you to call or email me after that.”

“When I went back to the room and you weren’t there, I figured you’d changed your mind. I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear from me. I decided I’d start over the next time you were in town, maybe cook dinner for you, like tonight. But I was in D.C. when you were here in April. Then the announcement about the reunion arrived. I told Dolores about it and she said … ”

“She always wants me to do something other than take care of things for her when I come to Philly but I never do.”

“Heard that before, have you? Anyway, she signed you up. Told me when you’d be at her house and suggested I ‘accidently’ run into you and ask you to go with me.”

“So you ran a con on me with my mother’s help? Or was it vice versa?”

“I’m not really sure. Whatever her plan was, mine was to get you here after the reunion dinner, which was where I was headed before my nephew interrupted us at the reception.”

“But we were slow dancing at the reception — well, before you danced me down the hall to that little dark room. And you didn’t want to slow dance at the reunion.”

“Do you remember what song we were dancing to at the wedding?”

“No, do you?”

“It was ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ and I’d asked the DJ to play it at the reunion. But the plan sort of went south because you wouldn’t wait until the right song was playing.”

“I can’t believe you remembered something like that.” She reached over and touched his hand. “But I’d say the pager going off was more to blame for the plan blowing up than my insisting we dance to the wrong song.”

He laced his fingers through hers. “Yeah, the damn pager even fucked up Plan B.”

“Plan B?”

“Sunday. My goddamn pager goes off when I’m in the middle of kissing an almost-naked woman thinking my luck was holding.”

“So last night was Plan C. I thought maybe it was because we were both, you know, happy about how well the presentation had gone. Or that we’d had too much to drink.”

“I very carefully had only two drinks before we got to your hotel, which is hardly too much alcohol. And I’m not in the habit of bedding the nearest beautiful woman when I’ve had a good day.”

“Not that you couldn’t if you wanted to.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Beth said that you were … ” She pulled her hand away and covered her mouth. “Oh, God, never mind. I think I’ve had too much wine tonight. Go back to what you were saying.”

“No, I’m finished with my confession. Sounds like you have one to make, too.” He settled back into the couch and half-smiled. “What’d Beth say?”

“Do I have to?”

He nodded.

She sighed. “All right. She said you were a person of interest, I guess would be a good description, with the women in the DA’s office and the police department.” She was twirling her wine glass by the stem, not looking him in the eye.

“And … ?”

“She said something about a virus.”

That made him sit bolt upright. “Oh, for chrissake, she didn’t tell you about that.”

“You know about the Alessandro virus?”

“Yeah, a couple guys I work with found out about it and made sure they told me. In front of a whole lot of other guys I work with. It was fun.” His expression said otherwise.

“She told me I looked like I had a bad case of it. Said I looked at you like you were dessert. I told her we were old friends but I don’t think she believed me. Neither did Danny, for that matter.”

“We are old friends. Now, we’re more than that. Is that bad?”

“No, Tony. It’s good.”

He stood up and held out his hand. “So, now that we’ve both gotten our confessions out of the way, I’m ready to be distracted. How about dessert?”

“I think I’ll pass, if you don’t mind. I ate too much pasta.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I thought Beth said you looked at me … ”

“Oh,
that
kind of dessert.”

• • •

Somewhere in the middle of the night she woke, unsure where she was for a few minutes until she saw Tony sleeping next to her. She tried to go back to sleep but she couldn’t get her mind to turn off. It was like having a head full of possessed hamsters running around on squeaky wheels, pestering her with questions.

She eased her way out of bed, grabbed the first piece of clothing she found and went out to the darkened living room wearing Tony’s T-shirt. She flicked on a small lamp and looked for something to read that might quiet the damned hamsters. But nothing among his criminal justice textbooks, sports biographies and paperback thrillers looked interesting enough to divert the little devils.

The view from the balcony caught her attention. She turned out the lamp and stood at the sliding glass door mesmerized by the lights of the city and lost in thought until she felt him slide his arms around her waist and nuzzle her neck.

“Here you are. You okay?”

She leaned back against his bare chest. “I’m fine, but I woke up and the hamsters in my head won’t quiet down so I came out here. The city looks beautiful at night, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, assuming you can forget there are dozens and dozens of burglaries, assaults, domestic violence incidents, drive-by shootings and who knows how many murders going on.”

“You’re killing the romance, Alessandro.”

“And you and your hamsters aren’t out here doing the same?”

“I wasn’t thinking about murder and domestic violence, no.”

“But if I know you — and I do — you’re running those hamsters around trying to figure out something like what happens when we’re old enough for Social Security — if there still is Social Security — and have to live on our pensions and support our aged mothers while we finish sending the last kid to graduate school.”

“I’m not sure I love it or hate it that you know me that well.”

“I love it that I do. Does that count?”

She turned and faced him, putting her hands on his chest. “I know I love … I’ve loved being with you this week.”

He held her close. “Me, too. And, Margo, I don’t know any more than you do what this means for next week or thirty years from now. I do know we can’t figure it out tonight. I’m willing to take a chance we can in time. Are you?”