Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(46)

“Which of my grand gestures won you over? The going off route, buying a car you hate, or waiting until we were in a rainstorm in the dark to discover the windshield wipers don’t work?”

She gave a slightly loopy sideways grin, suddenly looking a little like Gabe when he was in a playful mood. “The rum.”

He leaned a little closer, the cracked leather seat back making an effective barrier between their bodies, but it was low enough to get face-to-face and mouth-to-mouth.

“You’re a little tipsy, Francesca,” he whispered.

“Not really…but we could play a drinking game.”

He laughed. “That won’t help things.”

“Might even them out and get you tipsy, too. Here’s the game,” she said. “Every time you say something that makes me like you, I’ll take a drink. And vice versa. And we’ll just…talk.”

“Or pass out.”

She reached for the bottle. “Okay, that was funny. Cute. Drink-worthy. Gimme.”

He watched her take a tiny sip, barely enough to wet her lips.

“So tell me about Door-Matt,” he said.

And she choked on that baby sip. “What?”

“I want to hear about this guy who broke your heart.”

“Mood killer,” she sang lightly.

Exactly. Because if one of them didn’t kill the mood, they were not going to make it to the hotel to start on their hopeless sex.

His approach worked, since she slid away from him to lean against one of the bags, essentially as far from him as she could get in this car. She stretched out her legs, dropped her head back, and closed her eyes.

And everything in Mal that made him a man ached to crawl over the seat and stretch right on top of her.

“He didn’t break my heart,” she finally said. “He just didn’t like my plan.”

“Which was?”


She tipped her head, as if to remember just what that plan had been. “Date for two years, get engaged, buy a house, get married, pop out a few kids, have noisy Sunday barbecues and sleepy Christmas mornings, bicker over meaningless things because what really matters is the two of us and we are solid until we get old and gray.”

He stared at her, trying like hell to process that, but failing miserably. “That’s your plan?”

She eyed him. “Too 1950s for your taste?”

“Not if you like your life the way you like your cars.” But that wasn’t what got to him. He couldn’t figure out what it was, but it wasn’t the old-fashionedness of her dreams. It was…the impossibility of them.

“Exactly how I like things,” she said, unaware that her statement had caused him any turmoil. “Classic, simple, pure, and maybe a little out of sync with the rest of the world. Yeah, I do.” She nodded as if she were only thinking about that for the first time. “I really do.”

“It’s not out of sync with the world, Chessie, since people live those lives all the time, but the whole picket fence thing is really out of sync with what I know about your family.”

“You’re only considering the family that craves danger and excitement. It’s also the family that is full of love and security and happiness. And lots of spaghetti. I want that, too. God, I would kill for Nino’s spaghetti carbonara right now. Kill.”

“You want permanence and security.” Nothing he could ever give a woman, not the way he lived.

“And carbonara.” She lifted her head, eyeing him as if his tone had just sunk in. “What? Is my plan too sweet and innocent for you?” she asked, scrutinizing his expression.

“Too far from…reality,” he said. His reality. He couldn’t even imagine a childhood like that.

“Reality is what you make it, big boy.”

“And it wasn’t the reality of this Matt character? He didn’t want the kids, fence, and Christmas dinners?”

“He checked off some boxes,” she said after a long pause.

“Loaded, hung, and…dreamy-looking?”

She snorted a laugh. “Yeah, a regular swoonfest.”

“Hey, I’m trying to speak 1950s to you so you’ll like me.”

Her lips curled up slowly as she shook her head and reached over the seat for the bottle leaning next to him. “You had me at dreamy.” She took the rum, leaned forward to take a sip, then handed it back to him. “Are you playing?”

“I already like you,” he admitted, taking the bottle back. “And one of us has to stay sober.”

“I’m sober,” she assured him. “And for the record, dreamy wasn’t one of the boxes he checked.”

Back to Matt.

“He was grounded, you know?”

Actually, Mal didn’t have a clue what grounded was, so he just listened to her talk.

“Good family, stable lifestyle, respectable job.”

If those were her boxes, he sure as hell came up empty. “And the Christmas mornings?” Mal did a shitty job of keeping the bitter out of his voice.

“Don’t knock Christmas. It’s big in my family. Well,” She laughed lightly. “I guess Christmas is big in every family, but—”

“No, it’s not.”

She looked up at him, frowning. “Assuming you celebrate it. Maybe you did Hanukkah or some other winter festivity.”