Candace was silent as she sipped her coffee and stared out over the park across the street from her apartment building. Kids were running around and playing on the monkeybars and the rickety merry-go-round, challenging one another to swing the highest on the swingset. Brian could remember playing there with Evan and Gabby when he was little. The two of them had tortured him and kept him in tears. Now it was mostly the other way around.
He turned his gaze from the place of much of his childhood torment and watched the wind lift damp tendrils of Candace’s hair and cast them across her face. She reached up to smooth them back and tuck them behind her ear, her hands slender and graceful, each tapered finger ending in a French tip. His fantasies of watching those fingertips slide over her nether regions went full-blown.
Okay, if just seeing her make the most mundane gestures was getting to him, he was definitely in trouble. But he’d never minded trouble, and it always seemed to find him. It was practically an old friend, but it had never been as sweet as this.
There was that damn word again.
“What are you doing today?” she asked.
It might have been a subtle hint to get lost. He didn’t think he’d ever hung around for this long with a girl the morning after, and he felt awkward, conspicuous. He was so reluctant to leave her. “I imagine I’ll go to work in a few hours,” he said.
“You imagine?” She laughed. “Must be nice to be the boss.”
“I highly recommend it. And I like keeping them on their toes, not knowing when I’ll drop in.” He grinned at her. “What’s up with you today?”
He could have sworn her face darkened. “I have to get fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress. Crap. I never did call to…” She checked her watch and frowned.
“Who’s getting married?”
“Deanne and Tyler.”
“Finally, huh. Well, good for them. They deserve each other. Let’s just pray they don’t reproduce.”
Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped, and he got the biggest kick out of her split-second of dismay. Then she laughed. “That’s my cousin.”
He shook his head. “I feel sorry for you. I always did for Michelle, too, for ever having to live with her.” He would also pity Tyler, the poor schmuck, if the guy wasn’t such an a**hole himself. “I should go to the wedding. Jump up when the preacher asks for reasons the two should not be joined and yell, ‘Can’t you see? Their child will be the anti-Christ!’”
She was still laughing and looking rather distressed about it, covering her mouth and ducking her head so that her hair fell forward.
He reached across the small table and tugged the sleeve of her robe. “Come on, you have to agree with me. Admit it. I won’t tell.”
“You’re bad. That’s my family.”
“You won’t find me keeping quiet about mine. I have no qualms about telling them to their faces how I feel, either.”
She sobered, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Mine is…” Her cell phone suddenly chirped from its position on the table, and he wondered if she would have continued even without the interruption.
He’d forgotten about it until this moment, but Michelle had once told him she was concerned about Candace because of how stern and close-minded and positively medieval her parents were with her. According to his ex, they practically believed in arranged marriages. Candace’s older brother was no better, but Brian didn’t need to be told that. He’d gone to school with Jameson. If ever anyone deserved an ass-kicking more than Tyler, it was Jameson Andrews. If he bullied his baby sister like he did everyone else, it was no wonder she seemed so beat-down sometimes.
“Speak of the devil,” Candace mumbled. “It’s my mom.”
He fell silent and sipped his coffee as she answered the phone, watching her expression travel the spectrum from calm to alarmed to outright panicked as the conversation progressed. Even before she hung up, he had a feeling he knew exactly what she would say, and his heart sank.
Sure enough, as soon as she snapped the phone closed, she turned rounded blue eyes on him, sitting straight up in her seat. “She’s on her way to pick me up to go to lunch. She’ll be here in like two minutes.”
“Guess that’s my cue to disappear.” Grudgingly, he stood. She shot up beside him and ran through the open patio door as if a rabid dog was nipping at her heels. He followed her into the living room.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, but no, you can’t be here!” It was said as she rushed about, frantically grabbing empty beer bottles and the popcorn bowl from the night before off the coffee table. “Shitshitshit.”
It would have been cute to hear her curse like that under other circumstances. As it was, it seemed ridiculous. “Candace, you’re a grown woman. So what if you had a guy stay over? I can understand not wanting to rub your mom’s face in it, but Jesus, it’s not that big a deal. This is your place, not your upstairs bedroom back home.”
“You don’t understand,” she wailed, high-tailing it to the kitchen to bury the incriminating evidence as deep in her trash can as she could push it. How Joan-Crawford-Mommie-Dearest could her mother be?
“Nooo wiiiire hangerrrrrs!” he bellowed as he picked up his wallet and mobile phone from an end table, stuffing them both in his back pocket.
“Dammit, don’t joke about it, Brian!”
All right, he got it. He’d never met her mother personally, and she would take one look at him and faint. Some inked-up, pierced metal-head-looking dude corrupting her baby girl. He knew the drill. Hell, his own mom looked at him in utter exasperation most of the time. He’d seen the paternal head-shake more than once. Even his brother didn’t know what to make of him most of the time. And his sister? Forget it. But he’d never tried to hide who he was. He’d never been ashamed.
“I’m out,” he called harshly, striding toward her door.
“Brian?”
The doorknob was in his hand. He should turn it and walk out of her life. It wasn’t as if a f**king husband had pulled up to the curb outside, just her f**king mother. “What.”
Candace stopped her frantic clean-up efforts long enough to rush over to him. “Are you okay? I’m sorry. I had no idea she was coming—”
“You know,” he interrupted, and she stopped and retreated a step from the cold blast of his voice. “I don’t see how you possibly think we could work out, when you’re too embarrassed for your mother to see me here.”
“I’m not embarrassed, I—”
“You are. Would you be quite so freaked out if I was some Ivy League preppy fuck? I doubt it.”
“Please don’t think that’s what this is about. It isn’t, I promise.”
After all that begging for him to pop her cherry. What would it have really been for? A revenge fuck? A way to get back at Mommy and Daddy for sheltering her all her life? Because she damn sure wasn’t ready to parade him in front of them and introduce him as her man, and judging by her actions in the past few minutes, she never would be.
He shook his head. Opened the door. “You’re seriously deluding yourself if you think that.” And he was gone. He didn’t know if she made any move whatsoever to follow him, because he never looked back.
Sylvia Andrews swept into the apartment as if she owned it, not even bothering to knock. She eyed Candace sitting on the couch, staring off into space, and crossed her arms. “Candy, you’re not ready,” she said by way of greeting.
Candace turned blind eyes on her mom. “Hey. Sorry. Give me a minute, okay?”
She stood and padded across to her bedroom, wondering how she was going to keep it together for the next few hours under her family’s scrutiny. Brian hated her. She couldn’t forget that last look he’d given her before he walked out the door, as if she was scum of the earth.
She so was not ashamed of him. She’d be the proudest girl in the world if he were hers. But her parents had scared off more than one potential suitor, and she was so afraid of that happening now. Apparently, she’d already done it herself.
“Well, hurry up, dear,” her mom called. “I never thought for a minute you wouldn’t be dressed yet. They’re only holding our table for twenty minutes. Are you ill?”
He couldn’t understand. He hadn’t grown up in the environment she had. He was stronger than she was. Candace pulled her closet door open and stared listlessly at her wardrobe, wondering what she could wear that her mother wouldn’t eye too critically. Or outright criticize.
“Candy!”
“Ma’am?”
“I asked if you felt okay.”
“Fine, Mom. Sorry. I’ll hurry.”
She rushed through dressing and reentered the living room. Her mother’s gaze traveled up to her hair and she sighed. “Your hair is damp.”
“I’d just gotten out of the shower when you called. I didn’t have time to dry it.”
“Well, the top is down on the convertible. Maybe that will finish it off.”
Right. She would look like the bride of Frankenstein by the time they got there, while her mom would somehow look immaculate with nothing more than a quick pass of the brush. Right now she was flawless in her perfectly tailored peach pantsuit, carrying a Louis Vuitton the size of a briefcase. Candace ran to the kitchen to grab her own purse and headed toward the door. “I’m ready.” She held open the door for her mother, trying to turn her face away as Sylvia walked past. It was too late.
“Really, are you all right? You look on the verge of tears.”
She was. Right on the cusp, about to fall. And maybe there really wasn’t any reason to hide. Maybe her parents wouldn’t have any objection to Brian. He came from a wealthy family, surely had a sizable inheritance. A shame that it was really the only thing that mattered to her family, but that’s the way it was. If she could get their blessing, she could then go and see if she could get his forgiveness.
“I had a, um…I had a date last night that didn’t go so well.”
They were almost to the parking lot where her mom’s car sat, and the clack-clack-clack of Sylvia’s Blahniks ground to a halt. Candace stopped to face the music. “You told me you were with Macy.”
“I was, for a while. Then I ran into, um, this guy I know, and—”
“Who?” That one word was practically an inquisition.
Candace took a deep breath, praying, praying… Oh, crap, it was useless. Looking into her mother’s expectant, icy blue eyes, she couldn’t even say his name. “He’s one of Michelle’s exes.”
For a split second, Sylvia looked relieved. “Scott Chandler, maybe?”
“No.”
“For heaven’s sake, who, Candace?”
“Mom, promise you won’t get mad at me, okay?”
Just like that, the relief was gone and her mother blanched three shades whiter. Candace’s heart deflated. “Not Alexander’s boy. What are you thinking? What was Michelle thinking?”