Chapter 9
T he boys were still nagging about Quinn two days later, and Delilah couldn’t take it anymore. Her resolve broke and she called him.
“Quinn Monroe.”
His voice was deep and resonant, and Delilah felt it down to her toes. But she couldn’t get distracted by things like deep, resonant voices. She’d called for a reason.
“Uh … hi. This is Delilah. Ballard. Delilah Ballard.” She was babbling like an idiot, which she hadn’t done the last time she’d talked to him. There was something about calling a man on the phone that made her feel like she was back in high school asking Tony Martin to the Sadie Hawkins Dance. He’d said no, so there were scars.
“Oh. Hey.”
“I was just … I was wondering if you had some time to take us on a hike. Me and the boys. They’ve really … They’ve been asking. Nagging, honestly. Pestering. Driving me to near insanity, if you must know.”
He laughed, and that was deep and resonant, too.
“Any particular route in mind?” he asked.
“No. I’ll leave that up to you. Just something we can do in a couple of hours that’s not likely to result in one or more of my sons falling off a cliff.”
The laugh again. It made her stomach do odd things she absolutely did not need it doing right now.
“I’m sure I can come up with something that’ll work.”
“Great.”
They talked about his schedule and put something on the books for later that week.
“The kids are going to be really excited,” Delilah told him. It was an understatement.
“You know what?” he said. “I kind of am, too.”
Quinn got a kick out of the Ballard kids. Jesse had a bright and fiery personality, and Gavin seemed like a gentle soul—the kind of person you wanted to protect from the realities of the world.
The idea of hanging out with them wasn’t the worst thing he could think of. And, hell, he was man enough to admit that their hero worship fed his ego in a way that wasn’t at all unpleasant.
He found himself looking forward to Thursday, when he would lead them on an easy two-hour hike. He got on his computer and started researching routes. He knew most of the trails around here, but it paid to double-check for any hazards the boys might get into, given what had happened last time.
As he Googled and scrolled, he thought about Delilah.
She was funny—so there was that. She had a way of talking that wasn’t inclined toward comedy, exactly, but her wry delivery made him smile or even chuckle all the same.
He found himself wishing he’d met her under different circumstances. Before she’d gotten married and had kids, to be specific.
It wasn’t that he found mothers less attractive. Hell, a woman could have six kids and still be hot as hell, in his mind. But to him, the best kind of relationship was a casual one. No expectations, no responsibilities, just fun. Just two people enjoying each other’s company—and each other’s bodies.
But the whole no expectations, no responsibilities thing got shot to shit when you brought kids into the mix. When it was just two adults, you could put people’s feelings at risk. Adults knew what they were getting into and knew what was at stake. But kids? Breaking a kid’s heart just wasn’t okay.
And the only way you could be sure not to break children’s hearts was to avoid getting involved with their mothers.
If he’d met her when she was single? That could have been a hell of a lot of fun.
The other night, he’d told himself that spending time with an uncomplicated nine might be just the thing to get his head straight. So he’d called Jasmine, a woman from Morro Bay he’d dated a few times, and they were set to meet at Ted’s—Cambria’s dive bar—tonight.
Now, there was an uncomplicated woman.
If Jasmine couldn’t get his mind off Delilah, no one could.
Of course, it wasn’t enough for Roxanne to call Delilah and beg her to come home for Thanksgiving. When that didn’t work, their mother called, too.
Delilah was at the beach with the kids, sitting on a blanket and watching Jesse and Gavin chase each other with pieces of driftwood, when the call came in.
Earlier in the day when she’d talked to Quinn, the sky had been a clear blue. But now, a light fog had rolled in, shrouding the world in soft gray. Delilah was bundled up in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, but the boys were shirtless, romping around in shorts and bare feet, oblivious to the chill in a way only children could be.
Delilah held the cell phone to her ear and shaded her eyes with her hand as she watched her children play.
“No, Mom. I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving. I thought Roxanne would have told you that.”
“Well, she did. But I thought, that can’t be right. Surely you want to be with family right now. Delilah, honey, don’t you want—”
“What I want … what I need … is some time to myself to sort things out. Just me and the boys.”
“But, Delilah, we love you. We only want to support you. We only want what’s best for you.”
Delilah felt the swell of love and guilt—two things inextricably linked when related to her family—and let out a sigh. “I know that, Mom. I really do. But this is what’s best for me. And for the boys.”
“Oh, but the boys need their grandfather right now, especially. They need a man in their lives, sweetheart. They need a role model now that their father—”
“Can we maybe not talk about Mitch?” Delilah said.
Her mother was silent, but of course, that couldn’t last.
“Delilah, I’m worried about you.”
“Well, I’m worried about me, too.”
“That’s why you need to come home. Not only for Thanksgiving. If you and the boys could just stay here for a while, until you get back on your feet …”
“I’m on my feet, Mom. I’m standing. And I need to keep right on standing, for the kids’ sake and my own. Don’t you think I want to just be taken care of for a change? Don’t you think I’d love that? But …”
But if I let myself go, if I let myself just give in and fall apart, I’ll never be able to put myself back together again.
“You have your pride,” her mother said knowingly. “That’s what this is about.”
“Partly,” she admitted. “And partly it’s about the fact that I’m not broken, and I don’t need to be fixed.”
“Well.” Jeanette Ballard was hurt—Delilah could hear it in the single syllable. “I would think you would want to see us just because you love us, not because of whether you are or are not broken and in need of fixing.”
Delilah felt a surge of guilt for what she’d said and how she’d said it. “I do love you, Mom. I love all of you. So much. But I need some time to work things out on my own. You can see that, right?”
When Jeanette didn’t say anything for a while, Delilah was sure she was gearing up for further argument. Instead, she relented. “Of course I can, honey.”
Delilah felt so relieved she nearly collapsed onto the blanket as the pent-up tension within her eased. “Thank you.”
“We’ll miss you.”
Damn it, she was starting to get teary-eyed, and she hated when that happened. “I’ll miss you, too.”
“Call me. Not just when you feel obligated. I want to know what’s happening with you.”
“I will.” That was partly a lie. Delilah would call her mother when she had good things to report, but not when she was struggling. Not only didn’t she need her mother’s pity, she also didn’t want to lay the burden of her problems on her mother’s shoulders.
And the truth was, she was managing. She and the boys had enough money, finally; they had their health; they had this beautiful place to renew themselves and wait out the holidays.
Delilah took in a deep breath of ocean air and tried to be grateful.
Sometimes, it took a lot of trying.
When Quinn showed up at Ted’s that night, Jasmine was already there, seated at the bar and sipping something from a highball glass.
He took a moment to admire her before she noticed him. Tall with long, shiny blond hair in a cascade down her back. An athletic body encased in a dress as tight as an Ace bandage. Muscular calves leading down to feet nestled in four-inch heels. As he looked at her, she turned, saw him, and let a slow, predatory grin spread across her face.
At the sight of him, she plucked the cherry out of her drink by the stem, put it in her mouth, and bit down in a way that, somehow, seemed obscene.
“Quinn. Have a seat.” She pulled out the barstool next to her and patted it with her manicured hand.
Jasmine. God. He hadn’t seen her in a while, and she looked just as good as he remembered. Had he thought she was a nine? Right now, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember why he’d deducted the point.
As he sat down beside her, he reflected that she smelled exactly like her name.
“Hey, Jazz. How’ve you been?”
“Lonely. You?”
“Pretty much the same.” He gestured to Ted, the bar’s owner, for one of whatever she was having. Ted brought it over and smacked it down on the bar with a very Ted-like grunt.
Quinn took a sip. An old fashioned. He tried not to wince at the sweetness of the cocktail. He’d have preferred his whiskey straight up, but ordering the same as what she was having had seemed more smooth and flirtatious, somehow.
They made small talk—she asked about his work, and he asked about her brother, who was an acquaintance of Quinn’s. Somewhere during the conversation, he felt her hand on his thigh, which caused an immediate physical response higher up.
When she slid her hand along his leg and squeezed, giving him a grin that suggested far more interesting things to come, he reflected that the evening was working out very well, indeed.
He swallowed the rest of what was in his glass, put the glass down on the bar, laid some money next to it, and said, “So. You want to get out of here?”
They were barely in the door of his place before Jasmine started taking off his shirt. He pulled off her dress, and before they’d even gotten to the bedroom they were tangled up in one another, a jumble of arms and legs and hands and naked skin.
It was around then that he realized it was all going to hell.
Which was a puzzle, really. How could a situation like this, with Jasmine looking the way she did, possibly go wrong?
Delilah, that was how.
Her face kept popping into Quinn’s head at inopportune moments. Like the one when Jasmine put her hand down his pants.
It wasn’t that he imagined he was with Delilah instead of Jasmine. It wasn’t as if he thought Delilah would somehow disapprove or judge him—and it certainly wasn’t as if she had any right to do either of those things even if she were here, and even if she wanted to.
Instead, he kept thinking of her—that was all. Her face, her voice, the sound of her laugh kept popping into his mind like a snippet of music you couldn’t get out of your head.
Goddamn it.
“What’s wrong?” Jasmine paused and withdrew her hand, and it was only then that Quinn realized he’d uttered the curse out loud and hadn’t just thought it.
“Ah … nothing. Nothing. I just … I’ve got something on my mind that happened earlier, that’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“Oh. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, no. Just keep doing what you were doing, and I’m sure it’ll go away.”
She slid her hand inside the open fly of his pants again, an event that, under normal circumstances, would have caused his brain to shut off entirely. But now, it wasn’t working that way.
He just couldn’t get his head in the game.
Jasmine reclaimed her hand, stood back, and put her fists on her hips. She was standing there in just her bra, her panties, and the four-inch heels. God help him.
“Something’s really bothering you,” she said. “You know, Quinn, we could just talk. We could just discuss whatever it is that’s upsetting you. It doesn’t have to just be sex.”
But for him, it did just have to be sex. With Jasmine, that was all it could be or ever would be. They had zero in common except for their attraction to each other. But that didn’t mean she deserved to be treated like an object rather than a person. It didn’t mean she deserved to be with him while he was thinking about someone else.
“I’m sorry.” He raked a hand through his hair. “I guess I’m not in the right head space for this.”
“You think?” She raised one sculpted eyebrow.
She plucked her dress up off the floor and pulled it over her head, wiggling her hips a little as she slid it down into place.
“Look, it’s not you,” he said.
“Clearly.”
She picked up her purse, fished her car keys out of it, and went to the front door. As she let herself out, he said, “I’ll call you.”
She turned back and looked at him. “No, you won’t.”