Chapter 8
EIGHT
San Diego
“Two silk shirts, three cotton sweaters, a cotton skirt, two pairs of jeans and a couple of sweat suits, one powder blue and the other hot pink. It’ll look great with your coloring,” Nicole said triumphantly, pulling clothes out of boxes.
“And…” She stretched the word out, reaching behind the sofa and pulling out a beige-and-pink bag.
“Voilà! La Perla,” Nicole breathed, more or less like one would say Voilà the Mona Lisa.
Ellen peered inside and blinked. Silk and lace and satin, in sherbert colors. Wow. Better than the Mona Lisa, oh yeah.
She pulled out a pale lilac silk bra and pantie set with lace inlays and held them up reverently. They were pure works of art. She was just about to hold the bra up against herself when she heard a choked sound and looked over.
The three men of RBK were seated on a sofa, happy and replete. They’d just consumed an unholy amount of food, all of it exquisite. Sam Reston and Mike Keillor were looking amused and interested.
Harry looked as if a nuclear explosion had just occurred inside his head, behind his eyes.
Ellen peered down at herself and realized that in her excitement and pleasure, she’d been a hair’s breadth from trying to fit on underwear in front of three strange men.
Well…Two strange men.
Harry didn’t feel like a stranger any more. Harry felt…wow. She didn’t know what Harry felt like, she didn’t have any personal experience with what he was making her feel, but ‘stranger’ wasn’t a part of it.
Maybe it was the fact that he’d spent days holding her hand. She didn’t remember much, but there had been a definite feeling of something powerful watching over her as she’d slept. A dragon guarding her while she slept. A knight defending her.
Nice feeling.
Right now, though, as she let the incredibly sexy and appealing underwear—so unlike her usual very plain white cotton bras and briefs—slip through her nerveless fingers, what Harry was making her feel wasn’t nice. It was hot.
Hot as in sex. Sex on a stick.
The three men sitting on the very long and very fashionable couch in Sam and Nicole’s very large and very elegant living room were all fit and good-looking, but Sam and Mike couldn’t hold a candle to Harry.
Harry was like a god. A golden god. Sam was darkly sun-tanned and underneath that he was swarthy. Mike had the light blue eyes, light skin and dark hair of the Irish. Harry had been painted by the hand of a greater god.
He was as tall as Sam Reston and as muscular, but where Sam was densely muscled, Harry’s muscles were tighter, leaner, extremely broad shoulders tapering down to that ridiculously small waist and lean hips.
His hair was golden, his skin was golden, his eyes were golden. He looked like an Incan god made flesh.
There was enough heat in his eyes right now to make them glow.
“I, ah…” Ellen didn’t know what to do with her empty hands.
They felt clumsy and tingly. She missed the silky feeling of the underwear that had flowed like multi-colored water through her fingers and it occurred to her in a rush of embarrassment that the only thing better than the feel of the silk and lace would be Harry’s skin.
Tracing the thick line of his ash-brown eyebrows, uptilted in the center as if he were perpetually skeptical, following the line of his whiskers down to his neck, where ash-brown chest hairs peeked out from his open-necked shirt.
She had to distract herself, do something.
First, manners.
She smiled at Nicole. “I can’t thank you enough for those clothes and for this.
” She swept her hand down at herself. Nicole had lent her a dark green linen shift that came to mid-calf.
On Nicole, who was tall and willowy, it probably came to just below the knee.
Ellen had nearly wept when Harry had shown up with the shift.
The shift made her feel female again. Womanly.
Particularly when she saw Harry’s eyes widen as she came out of the bathroom.
She hadn’t had much to work with, but she always carried picks in her purse and had put up her hair and put on some lipstick.
You’d think from his look that she was ready for the red carpet at Oscar time.
He’d actually held out his arm like some 19th century romance hero and they’d walked into Sam and Nicole’s huge apartment arm-in-arm.
The dinner had been fun, relaxed and relaxing. Sam and Nicole were a great couple, obviously deeply in love. Even though Nicole had an almost intimidating level of beauty, the kind that turned heads, she was so friendly that after five minutes Ellen almost forgot how gorgeous she was.
Her husband never did, though. His eyes were locked onto his wife and he rarely let go an opportunity to touch her, even if only a big hand on her shoulder or a quick caress to her cheek. Nicole was just as much in love as he was and smiled at him often.
It was new to Ellen, this degree of marital devotion. Her mother had specialized in either pathetic drunks or manipulating womanizers. Sometimes both at once. She’d had dozens of lovers throughout Ellen’s childhood and not once had a man ever looked at her mother with love.
Mike was much shorter than the other two but looked almost twice as broad. He was fun and had coaxed her into eating more than she wanted. He behaved like a big brother—light-hearted and teasing.
Only Harry had sat throughout dinner silent and brooding, his eyes never leaving her.
All of them had made a huge effort for her.
She turned to Nicole, who was folding the underwear, placing the pretty, delicate items back into the thin wrapping paper and putting them back in the elegant bag.
“Thanks so much, Nicole. Of course I’ll pay you back, just as soon as I can access my money.”
Nicole waved an elegant hand. “Absolutely not, my dear. I can’t tell you the fun I had this afternoon, shopping for you.
I’m getting out of the habit of nice underwear, unfortunately.
” She smiled and rubbed her belly. “I’m getting as big as a whale.
Pretty soon I’ll just dress in sheets. Who knows if I’ll remember what nice underwear is like after giving birth? ”
Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re not as big as a whale,” he growled.
“You’re pregnant. There’s a difference.” He lay his big hand over her belly, nearly covering it entirely.
“And you’re more beautiful than ever.” She smiled into his eyes and silence descended on the room.
Ellen could tell that she’d disappeared for Sam and Nicole.
They were wrapped up in their own world.
Mike broke the silence. “Whoa.” He held his broad, callused hands up in a time out sign. “Major mush alert. Cut it out, you two. Come back to earth.” He turned to Ellen. “Okay, Nicole doesn’t want your money, but I know how you can pay her back.”
Harry glared at him. “Mike…”
“Shut up.” He smiled at Ellen. “Sing for us.”
“What?”
“Sing for us. And you can play, right? There’s a piano in the library. You’re this big-shot singer, right? I don’t know anything about music, but Harry here listened to you for about 48 hours a day, day in day out. So you’ve got to be good.”
Ellen looked around at everyone except Harry. If she looked at him, she’d just drop right down into his golden gaze and never come up for air. “Nicole? Sam? Is that what you want?”
“Oh yeah.” Nicole smiled. “I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
It’s a good thing that Mike doesn’t know the meaning of the word embarrassment.
But now that he’s asked…yes. We have a piano in the library.
It was my mother’s and we had it tuned a couple of months ago.
I took lessons on that piano for 10 painful years and all I have to show for it is the ability to play a truly awful ‘Für Elise’ on it.
And I need a metronome to do it.” She beamed at Ellen, her smile lighting up the room.
“Please,” she said softly, glancing at her husband, at Mike and at Harry.
“We’d love it. Even Harry, who has forgotten how to talk.
” He switched his glare to her and she laughed.
You could cut a steak with Harry’s jawline.
“She’s been wounded,” he said tightly. “She’s just out of bed. I don’t think it’s fair to ask her—“
“I’d love to,” Ellen interrupted. She rolled her shoulder. She couldn’t even feel the stitches. “I’m a little stiff in the arm but my hands are okay. And presumably you guys are not going to throw me off the island for a missed note, right?”
These people had taken her in unquestioningly, Nicole had put herself out, shopped for her. Singing for them in return was nothing.
“Come on, then.” Nicole led the way into another huge room, this one lined with bookshelves. One thing for sure, this baby was going to grow up with room to play in. Sam was right by his wife’s side, followed by Mike. Harry walked in with her.
He bent down. “Are you up to this?” Tense and worried. As if she’d been asked to plow the back forty without benefit of mule instead of playing and singing, which she loved.
She smiled up at him. “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
He walked her to the piano and sat her down with as much formality as if she were about to sing at Carnagie Hall.
To her surprise, the piano wasn’t an old family upright, but a real grand piano. A Steinway, no less, and beautifully in tune she found as she tried a scale from C with her right hand.
Unlike Nicole, she hadn’t had formal piano lessons.
The only lessons she’d had had come from Buzz Longley, an old honky tonk guy who’d lived with them for about eight months when she’d been twelve.
He’d been an alcoholic and a skirt chaser and a deadbeat, but he knew his music.
He’d have been famous if he’d been able to organize himself enough to show up on time and sober for gigs, but he was never able to master the art of reliability, or sobriety.