Finish What We Started Page 10

  Lee shrugged as he disappeared through open double doors. “Mark lived here with me for a while until he got married.”

  She hustled into the room to find a billiard table in the center and a long lacquered bar on the opposite end. So far it was the only room besides the kitchen and great room with any furniture. He peered behind club chairs. Apparently there was no cat, because he grunted in annoyance and led her to the next room.

  “Every room on this floor is empty except that one.”

  “Yep.”

  She stared at his back in confusion. Normally Lee chattered away like he hated silence and now all of a sudden he was stoic? What was the deal with this house? Why in the world did a single man live alone in this mansion? How much money was he making these days? When she’d known him, he hadn’t been the kind to squander his money.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Again with the mysterious shoulder rose and fell. It wasn’t an answer; it was an evasion.

  “No furniture is kinda weird,” she muttered under her breath.

  “Yeah, well, that’s part of the reason I’m concerned I can’t find the cat. There aren’t that many places for him to hide.”

  She was busy gawking over the balcony. “You’d be surprised about cats. You’ll lose a game of hide-and-seek with a cat every time.”

  She followed him up to the third floor. Instead of a series of doors along the arc that lead to more empty rooms, this one opened up to a wide landing that led to one set of double doors. She followed with her mouth agape. The one wall was still windows, but it didn’t stop there. The glass turned up into an L and continued up the roof. Not only could she see the entire city, but a huge swath of sky. At periodic intervals drapes were pulled open and gathered in long columns of fabric that pooled on the floor. Lee disappeared to the left, but she didn’t move to follow him. The city view was breathtaking, even in the morning. What must this panorama look like at night with the twinkling lights of the city below?

  “The last time I saw him was in here.” His voice came from deeper in the room.

  She turned slowly, taking it all in. The third floor of the house seemed to be one giant master suite. A foyer to the right led to bathrooms. There appeared to be two—genius! Past the bathrooms she found the biggest closet she had ever seen.

  Lee’s disembodied voice came from far away, so she back tracked until she found him. At the rear of the main room, through an arched passage, she took in the sleeping area of the suite. Another stone fireplace was tucked into a corner.

  The only furniture in the room was a bed sitting on a raised platform. It faced the glass wall.

  What a view to wake up to.

  He had his head stuck under the bed, which left his very fine butt in the air. She forced herself to look away. No point in coveting something she couldn’t have.

  “Is he under there?” Still, it was a mighty fine butt. Maybe a little coveting wasn’t totally without merit.

  His head emerged. “No. Damn it, Jose. Where the hell are you?”

  “So, this room has furniture.” Maybe if she kept pointing out the obvious he’d tell her what the deal was with this house.

  “Well, a man’s gotta sleep somewhere.” He put his hands on his hips and scanned the room for previously unconsidered kitty hiding places. He tried snapping his fingers, but that didn’t produce a cat either.

  “Yeah, but this is one hell of a nice somewhere.”

  He brought his attention back to focus on her. “I actually just moved up here from the second floor. I finally found the bed I was looking for to fit the space.”

  Fit the space? My God, you could have seven beds in here and still have room for a disco.

  “It’s a nice bed,” she conceded. The suitable bed was a massive thing, light wood that matched the flooring with carvings on the headboard and footboard. It was beautiful yet completely masculine. There wasn’t much in the house, but what furnishings it had were beautiful. “Who’s doing the decorating?”

  “I am.” He said. She detected a twinge of hurt feelings.

  “Wow. I’m impressed.” Who’d have known? She’d never have guessed the Lee she had known had such style. “The place is gorgeous. How long have you lived here?”

  He was pulling the drapes away from the wall to check for the cat. “Umm, going on four-and-a-half years, I guess. I spent the first year in a travel trailer until the construction was mostly finished. I did the rest while I lived downstairs.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you built this house?” She looked around the suite again with new eyes. The flooring was golden teak. Who could afford that? She remembered amber travertine in the dual bathrooms. And that ceiling—outrageous.

  He turned from his search with both hands on his hips. “Yep.”

  She was aghast. “You designed it and everything?”

  He raised his eyebrows and said, “Of course.”

  She didn’t know if she had a right to be proud of him after the way things had ended, but she was anyway. She had known the man was amazing. Maybe it was a delayed reaction following his fine ass up the stairs and the excellent view of it only moments before, but she also recalled how good he was with his hands. Very good, indeed.

  “This place is...God, I don’t even know, Lee. It’s amazing. Pays to own your own construction company, I guess.”

  Lee glanced around the room as if seeing it through someone else’s eyes for the first time. “Yeah, it’s coming together pretty well.”

  “Enough with the modesty already.” She gestured to the glass ceiling. “This is spectacular.”

  “It is, right? Rather inspired if I do say so.” He relaxed a bit and his face lit up with his famous grin when he flopped on the bed. “Laying in bed and watching a thunderstorm is the coolest thing.”

  “I’ll bet.” She couldn’t resist the silent invitation. She took the other side of the massive bed, then gazed up at the sky.

  “Cool, right?” He turned his head and smiled at her.

  Imagining lightning overhead and thunderheads and rain pounding on the clear ceiling kept her distracted from the nearness of the man next to her. “It would be amazing.”

  They stared up at the expanse of blue for several silent moments. Thoughts raced through her mind like a pack of cyclists racing cross country, all disjointed but packed together to maximize confusion. Zip, zip, zip. She was glad to see he was doing so well. Could she tell him that? Surely this house must be for a family he was planning? The relationship with the mysterious woman who owned Jose must be serious, even though she hadn’t moved in yet. Candace was satisfied that he seemed happy. Whatever old feelings being near him had brought up were just residual ones. They didn’t mean anything. Besides, after the way things ended, there was no way in the world she would be willing to entertain anything besides the most basic friendship with him, even if she had been fantasizing about hot, meaningless sex.

  Without looking at him next to her, she said, “I still hate how things ended, you know.”

  He didn’t answer right away. The silence was unnerving. She tilted her head to the side just enough to look at him out of the corner of her eye.

  She tried again. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  Her admission gave him the perfect invitation. “Yeah.” He turned to face her, then paused for a moment. “I’m sorry, too. I’m so ashamed of the horrible things I said. It makes me sick to remember. You didn’t deserve it, and I hope you know I didn’t really mean any of it.”

  She sighed deeply and nodded. She tore her gaze away and stared up at the sky.

  “I was so angry,” he said. And broken. And lost.

  She looked so beautiful in his house, lying near him on his bed. How many times over the years had he had this fantasy? He told her one of his secrets then, in a voice just a
bove a whisper. “That didn’t mean I didn’t think about you. I went to the airport when you left.” She turned back to face him. “Clay took you and you were crying, remember? For a couple of minutes I thought you wouldn’t go. I hoped you wouldn’t. But whatever Clay said did the trick and you disappeared into the crowd. I waited until the plane taxied away, but you didn’t get off.”

  And then he went back to the wreck that was his life.

  She blinked hard a couple of times and swallowed. He watched her throat and then her lips. He wanted to touch her, to smooth his finger down her cheek or maybe slide the pad of his thumb across her bottom lip. Maybe it was having his fantasy almost realized that made him temporarily insane.

  Her forehead wrinkled. “But you never talked to me again. You wouldn’t let me explain or try to work things out. Nothing. You were brutal.”

  He conceded her point. “I know.”

  A real low point had come six months after she left. His friends, filled with ridiculous macho advice, had assured him he could fuck the girl out of his head. That was the ticket.

  “Find another girl,” the plumber had suggested.

  “One that looks like her,” his right fielder had said. “Find a hot blonde and nail her, man. You’ll see. Pussy’s all the same.”

  No one looked like her. Still, the rapid fire advice had kept coming.

  Those guys had been idiots. But as the night wore on, and he’d gotten drunker...

  He’d been desperate and miserable and drunk as hell. The woman lived around the corner from the bar. He’d fucked her as instructed. And it had totally sucked. She was nothing like Candy and it had only made his ache worse.

  He bent one arm behind his head and glanced at her. “I did call you.”

  Candy gave a harsh laugh. “No, you drunk dialed me, what? Six months afterwards?”

  Recalling the events now was humiliating. Not even sure what his conquest’s name had been, he’d staggered from her apartment afterward. All he could think of was Candy. How much he’d missed her. How much he loved her. He wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten her on the phone, but there he’d been, standing in the middle of the street at three in the morning, so drunk he’d needed to lean on a sign post while he waited for her to pick up.

  “It was still a call. I’d hoped—”

  “You were drunk and horny. What did you think was going to happen in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away?”

  She started to get up but he reached over and grabbed her hand. “Don’t go. I’m trying to say I’m sorry now. I’ve always been sorry.”

  Her expression was confused but she didn’t leave.

  “Candy—” He stopped himself. “Candace, I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  She closed her eyes for a long heartbeat before she said, “Okay.” There was a tentative smile. He squeezed her hand with just the slightest pressure.

  His conscience felt better immediately. His ledger was clean.

  “I was a freaking disaster there for a while.” He chuckled to lessen the truth.

  “I know. God, I was miserable. I threw myself back into school. I didn’t come up for air for like three years.”

  While she’d had school to occupy her, he’d had his family. After a while, though, Sarah took her life back and Sidney, resilient as only children can be, continued to grow into the amazing little person he was. That left Lee with a hell of a lot of time on his hands.

  That’s when the real heartbreak had hit. Misery for his lost relationship had never been far away, but he could ignore it by ripping out Sarah’s bathroom to install a whole new handicap access shower or some other chore to make his sister’s life easier—or at least less horrible. Without all those tasks to take care of for other people, that gave him plenty of time to wallow.

  He nodded. “I built this house.”

  “About that—” she waved her hand in the air, “—this place is...is...I don’t know what to say about it, Lee. It’s incredible.”

  “It’s been a hell of a hobby,” he agreed.

  Mark and Sarah had gifted him their shares of a plot of land his father had left all three of them. Nothing had been done to it since his father had bought it twenty years before with the idea of building their dream home. Lee had figured he’d do the same thing. Hell, he had nothing but time anyway. Things went badly when he had time to think. Lee kept himself as busy, and therefore as exhausted, as possible, building what his mother and sister called the Palace of Misery.

  He told Candy he’d lived in a travel trailer on the lot for a while and that had been the truth. After the undergrounds went in and then the slab, he’d paid three thousand dollars for a beat-up old trailer and ran extension cords for electricity. He’d hired some of his construction buddies to come in on weekends and help him frame up the main skeleton, but even then he’d swung a hammer that whole time until he was too tired to think and fell into bed, worn out.

  Still, he worked on his house mostly alone. He moved into the downstairs as soon as it was habitable. First sleeping on a cot in the great room, eventually moving into a bedroom as it was drywalled, plastered and painted. Mark moved in and helped him design the kitchen. It was nice to have another guy around, but no matter how long his brother lived there, it was still Lee’s project.

  Through the meditative qualities of laying flooring and cutting tile, spreading plaster and painting, he sorted out his feelings. There was a lot to recommend the Zen of sanding a hardwood floor to figuring out where your life went wrong. Goals shifted. Points of view altered to give new perspective. Eventually, thoughts of Candy were no longer all consuming.

  “A hobby?” she asked in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? What are you going to do with it? Sell it?”

  “Hell no. I live here. Someday I’d like to have a wife and kids.” He’d always wanted it to be her. He’d never been able to picture any other woman in this house.

  Again, he looked at her lying near him and took in her blonde hair spread out on his comforter. The last couple of weeks had laid waste to all the construction therapy. She was back in his thoughts constantly. But this time, she’d forgiven him.

  If he concentrated on that and tried to forget that she’d left him at all, maybe they could be more than friends. The idea hung there, waiting for the slightest encouragement from her blue-eyed gaze. He still had a hold of her hand and gave it an almost imperceptible tug, but she pulled loose from his grasp. A deep rumbling carried up from the end of the bed. They simultaneously rose up on their elbows. Jose walked up the covers between them, purring loudly, then flopped on his side so that his body ran the length of Lee’s torso. The tension in the room disappeared as if he had imagined it in the first place.

  She flashed Lee a big toothy grin. “Hey look. I found your cat.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A day after Jose reappeared, Marisol came home from the eight-day spring training road trip with the Rockets baseball team. She called on her cell phone on the way home from the airport to find out how things went with the cat. Lee deflected the question and told her instead he’d meet her at her condo. He loaded Jose in the cat carrier and tossed all his kitty accessories into a grocery bag. He drove like a crazy person in an effort to get there first, but it basically amounted to a tie.

  He parked his truck at the same time a black SUV rolled to a stop in front of her place. She jumped out of the passenger seat and waved at him. He recognized the driver who hopped out of the SUV and grabbed her bag from the back. Lee watched with amusement when the man kissed her cheek before climbing back into the Cadillac and leaving.

  “Hey,” he said as she approached. “So when did the Rockets’ second baseman become a chauffeur?”

  She gave him a blank look that he wasn’t falling for and a shrug that didn’t convince him either. “He’s a good driver.”

  �
��I’ll bet,” he said as lecherously as possible.

  “Shut up, Lee.”

  He laughed. “And when did the Rockets’ second baseman start kissing you goodbye?”

  “It was on the cheek.” She was staring at the cat carrier.

  “The cheek is like a gateway body part. Pretty soon he’ll be kissing your neck, then your lips. Dear God, I hate to think where that man’s lips will end up.”

  Oh holy shit, she was blushing.

  “Why is my cat in there?”

  He let her have the conversational detour, but he wasn’t dropping this topic forever. Marisol rarely dated and certainly not jocks. Occupational suicide, she called it. This was a very interesting development.

  He led the way to her front door. “Come in the house, I’ll explain.”

  She didn’t freak out nearly as much as he thought she would. She even tried to reimburse him for the vet bills, but he wouldn’t let her. Now that Jose was home, he went right back to ignoring Lee. Ridiculously, he felt sort of affronted at Jose’s lack of loyalty.

  “Let me take you out to dinner, then,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothin’. Are you sure you don’t already have plans?” He waggled his eyebrows.

  “If you say the words ‘Rockets’ second baseman’ again, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  Chuckling, he kissed her other cheek, so as not to taint the one previously bussed by the Rockets’ second baseman.

  “Want me to pick you up? I’m calling Holly, too.” She cuddled her cat to her chest.

  “Nah, I’ll meet you there at eight.” There meant Infinity Blue, Mark’s restaurant. He was looking forward to dinner with friends. Since Candy’s return, he’d spent way too much time in his head. It was a damn good time for a diversion.

  * * *

  The man on the other side of the peephole looked like a model in an unnerving kind of way. Candace thought of the glossy magazine photos in Vogue of the girly male runway models. Her date—because who else could he be—was pretty, very pretty.