Thoughts in an uproar, Alice bent over the dining room table slicing oranges for a fruit tray, trying to close her ears to the hubbub around her. She rolled her eyes heavenward to beg the ceiling for five minutes peace.
That’s all, please? Just enough to collect myself—
“Do you have family, Gabriel?” Edith asked.
Guiltily, Alice’s eyes detoured toward the sound of her sister’s voice, found Gabriel where he hadn’t been a second before
—
slouched against the kitchen doorjamb studying her. The orange she was about to slice spit juice into her face when she jammed the knife into it with more force than intended. Gabriel’s lips twitched. He winked wickedly at Alice. Alice dropped her gaze, embarrassed, then her natural ability to laugh at herself took control and she shrugged and grinned wryly back.
Gabriel lazily picked a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and blotted at the orange juice on Alice’s face. “I don’t have a family like this,” he told Edith.
“Nobody has a family like this.” Helen laughed. “It’s inflicted on you at birth.”
“Or by marriage,” George mumbled darkly, passing through.
Alice’s sisters sent one another secret grins and giggled. “Blame that on Grandma,” Twink called after him. She turned to Gabriel. “Ma always said Gram couldn’t abide children who were unChristian, unprincipled or boring.”
“Don’t you mean “or barren”?” Sam asked dryly.
“Sam!” Edith exclaimed in feigned shock.
“Edith!” Sam mimicked back.
“Don’t worry, Sam.” Helen slipped a theatrically comforting arm about Sam’s shoulders, then patted her sister’s still-flat belly. “Pregnant ladies are allowed aberrant comments and behavior. You’ll understand if we just ignore you for the next year or two, won’t you?”
“In a pig’s eye,” Sam stated flatly.
“Bravo!” Twink cheered and added most of a can of black olives to the salad.
Gabriel’s hands were warm on Alice’s hips when he tossed the napkin down and eased himself around her. His breath was a moist tickle in her ear. “Hi,” he whispered. “Long time no touch. How you doin’?”
“Mmm.” Caught off guard, Alice smiled and instinctively arched her neck and sank back into his arms as though they’d never had the conversation in the hall. He made it easy, within the security and presence of all this family, to forget who she was and how scattered she felt—or that, when she was alone with him, her involuntary naturalness with him frightened
her
to death.
Safety came in numbers for Gabriel, too. In front of all these people he was merely a performer doing a role he’d been born to play, opposite the costar he’d been born to play it with. And never mind what this particular costar did to his pulse. His hands grazed lightly up and down Alice’s sides. “I stuck the board under the mattress and changed the sheets for Kate and Delbert,” he murmured, nuzzling her neck. “Hospital comers and everything. Want to check
it out?”
“No.” Alice grinned at him. “I think I can trust you to do that on your own.”
“Less fun that way.”
“Safer, too.”
“You could be right.” The skin of her neck invited his inspection. His lips teased the column beneath her ear deliberately when he reached around her to swipe a piece of orange. “But I thrive on the danger.”
Alice’s breath stopped, sighed gently between her lips.
Don’t think
, she urged herself silently.
You’re safe here, so enjoy it. It’s a game, just a play, an act.
“You would...”
The buzz went on around them.
“Don’t they look cute together?” Aunt Kate gushed.
“He does sort of fit her, doesn’t he?” Meg agreed.
“When do you think the wedding will be?” Mamie asked. “I’ll need to schedule the time off work.”
“Should they be doing that in front of the kids?” Uncle Delbert’s arthritic hands knotted worriedly. “Kind of suggestive, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Uncle Del, he’s only biting her neck—”
“Hickey bait, hickey bait,” Mamie’s boys hooted....
“Ignore them,” Gabriel suggested when Alice stiffened and started to pull away. “Grin and enjoy it.”
“I am enjoying it,” Alice hissed back, blushing furiously. “Sort of.”
“Anything I can do to make it better?”
“No! Stop that!” Alice slapped at the hands that slipped around her waist and held her hostage. “Let me go. I hate being on display.” Face flaming, she ducked out of Gabriel’s grasp and around the table.
Helen lightly socked his arm. “Leave my sister alone, hey?” she ordered, grinning. “You’re makin’ her all blotchy.”
“I think she looks great blotchy,” Gabriel returned lightly, but his eyes on Alice were thoughtful and apologetic.
“So, Gabriel,” Twink said, changing the subject abruptly, “how long have you been in town?”
“How much family do you have?” Meg asked.
“And where are you from?” Edith added.
Ignoring the first question, Gabriel answered the second.
“Parents, maybe a couple of distant aunts, two or three cousins.” It was easier to tell them about himself than it was to tell Alice. He didn’t feel quite the same compunction to be as brutally honest with either them or himself. He could shave the finer points, couch them in terms that suited his needs without quite lying. Without quite facing himself the way he was compelled to do with Alice. What was it Churchill had said about war and truth?
In war the truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
He swiveled to Edith. “New York by way of Iowa and the South Pacific.”
“Oooh! Really?” The interest hummed from Alice’s sisters in unison. “Tell us...”
Still red, Alice whisked the fruit tray into the kitchen to finish filling it, thankful for, and jealous of, her sisters’ innate curiosity. God, they hadn’t had him cornered for ten minutes and already they knew as much about him as she’d learned in two intense days. Envy struck her an unexpected blow. How did they do it? And why couldn’t she?
She settled sliced orange on a plate and peeled a banana, studying her sisters. It was easier for them to ask Gabriel for information about himself than it was for her to do it—despite what she’d shared with him. It had always been like that where boys were concerned. Where they were loquacious, vivacious, flirtatious, Alice was ever tongue-tied, ever fourteen. How she and Matthew had ever managed to get together...
She swallowed and dropped her gaze from the sudden all-seeing glance Gabriel sent her that took her breath and made her senses buzz. She wasn’t in eighth grade anymore, dammit, and didn’t want to be. It was okay, even nice, to feel gawky and awkward, inexperienced and undeniably feminine, uncomfortably and completely adult. Electrified. To
feel,
period. Why couldn’t she seem to grasp that? And deal with it?
But then she supposed men were very much like pregnancy that way. There was never really a perfect time to experience either, but only, if you were lucky, a better time. And sweet St. Christopher, wasn’t
that
cynical!
“Got it figured out yet?” Gabriel asked.
“Not quite.” Alice shook her head, then glanced up at him, startled. How did he always seem to know, what she was thinking? And why did she always seem to answer him as if he did? “Do I have what figured out yet?”
Gabriel motioned at the kiwi fruit she’d been staring at. His eyes swept the line of her jaw, the tilt of her head in profile. He’d felt a gut recognition and attachment to her, felt protective, possessive. He had wanted to bed her for the past two days, without even
seeing
her...
The sweeping length of her eyelashes, the small vulnerable stubborn chin, the perfect line of her nose, the at once tentative and decided set of her mouth.
The eyes that could simultaneously make his chest ache with some unnamed emotion, make it swell with invincibility, laughter or pride.
He leaned into the cupboards watching her, losing his train of thought.
Alice studied the gold flecks in the countertop, uncomfortable and exhilarated under his scrutiny. “Gabriel?”
Gabriel roused himself with difficulty, trying to remember what he’d meant to say. Again he gestured inanely at the fruit in her hand. “The kiwi looks good. Do you know what you want to do with it?”
Alice self-consciously looked at the knife, the ripe fruit she’d forgotten she was holding. “Um, slice it?” She suited action to words and cut a chunk. The juice ran down her fingers when she offered the piece to Gabriel. “Want some?”
His eyes warmed, fingers closed around her wrist, held her hand still halfway to his mouth. “You trying to seduce me?”
“I’m not sure what I’m doing,” Alice breathed. “You look at me and I do things I never imagined I’d do. You know how it is for repressed schoolmarms when they get around handsome wounded desperadoes. They lose all sense of propriety.”
Jolted by her honesty, Gabriel relinquished her wrist. She had her own way of making him do things he’d never imagined he’d do. Or think of doing. Her assessment of their...relationship hurt. “Is that the way you think of us? Desperation and misplaced virtue? No matter what I tell you?”
“I guess I…don’t know. I can’t think… I... “ Alice’s voice trailed off and she dropped her chin, concentrating on cutting kiwi and arranging it on the plate, then edging around Gabriel in the crowded kitchen to rinse the knife and her hands. Her chest was tight; she felt culpable. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. Hadn’t thought she would.
She flicked the water from her fingers, turned to lay a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I guess I’m not sure what else to think. This… I’ve never…” She hesitated. “I’m such a plain old
insecure fuddy-duddy,” she said softly, “but you’re so… And you react to me. You make me forget myself, that I’m suddenly old enough to be somebody’s grandmother. You make me feel out of control, and I kind of like that, but it also makes me not quite trust you—or me. Do you see?”
Too clearly. Because he felt much the same way himself.
Her description fit. They
were
a schoolmarm and a wounded desperado stealing an unpredictable moment that couldn’t last.
He brushed her cheek with an open palm. “Alice…”
“Hey, you guys,” Sam interrupted impatiently, “get romantic someplace else and quit hogging the sink. I need to wash my hands.”
“So use the bathroom,” Alice snapped, rousing too suddenly from a place she didn’t want to be roused from. “We’re in the middle of some serious bonding here, if you don’t mind, and we’d rather not be interrupted.”
“Oooh, Alice, touchy, touchy,” Twink teased, coming in to collect the plate of fruit. “Serious bonding? What have you been reading lately? One of those magazines I gave you?”
“No, I’m merely parroting back at you the last conversation you had with Grace about Phil.”
Meg stuck her head into the group, eyes alight with interest—or a wicked facsimile thereof. “Would that be the conversation where Twink advised Grace that the best coupling—er, bonding—”
“Shut up,” Twink warned.
“—begins with—”
“Meg,” Twink said carefully, “we’re in mixed company. If you don’t shut up right now I will—”