All or Nothing (5 page)

The hair on the back of Lucas’s neck rose as he watched the display. “You say it like there’s something wrong with her.”

“Aside from the fact she’d hand me my teeth
and
my nuts if I so much as laid a hand on her? Or that
you
would?”

Lucas could only hope his look was as baleful as he felt.

Kyle leaned over his plate on the kitchen island. “There’s plenty wrong with her. She’s hung up on
you
. That alone indicates deep-seated psychological problems I don’t want to deal with. It’s bad enough I’ve had to put up with Mom and how much
she
likes you, insisting we keep you fed and housed and inviting you to holiday dinners. I’m a saint, if you ask me, but do I get an ounce of appreciation? Nope, not a drop. And now here you are, asking for more.” He sighed, nearly a groan, and picked up his fork to eat.

Lucas stared while Kyle seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that they hadn’t finished talking. He just chewed, swallowed and took another bite, looking forward blankly. Then he repeated.

“Kyle!” Lucas snapped, ready to do him in all over again.

His brother’s head came up and his gaze focused as if he’d been awakened. “What?”

“What about Belinda?”

More confusion. Did he have no short-term memory at all? “What about her?”

“Are you going to ask her out?” Lucas asked, gritting his teeth to crunching again. They were going to be nubs at this rate.

Kyle narrowed an eye at him, still chewing at the large lump warping his cheek. “Tell you what—”

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. The last time we had an ‘I tell you what’, we both got an earful from irate women.”

“Women we both know we want to see again.”

Lucas chewed the inside of his own cheek, positive any response was going to dig him in deeper.

“How about this? I’m going to find a way to get Jessica to talk to me—” Kyle raised a hand to point Lucas into silence when he overrode his own teeth to argue. “In the meantime, you find out once and for all what’s between you and Belinda.”

“
You
are,” Lucas snapped, patience completely drained. “I already told you. Every day, every night, every hour for twenty-five years,
you
have been between us. How blind and deaf are you to keep missing that?”

Kyle shrugged. “So take me out of the equation.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have. Often.” Kyle rolled his eyes when Lucas didn’t bother to look amused. “You’re the mathematician. You have to do the numbers
inside
the parenthesis before you can solve the entire equation. You plus Belinda. See what happens with me subtracted first.”

Logic? From
Kyle
? Lucas pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sleep deprived. I must be. You’re almost making sense.”

Kyle nodded, a full-faced grin breaking out. “While I’m trying to make things right with Jessica, why don’t you go out there and give things with Belinda a real effort?”

The chafed skin on his knees and the small of his back could attest only to his fake efforts, apparently. “I’ve tried that.”

“More details you won’t tell me?”

Lucas nodded, unable to face thinking of them himself. Especially not with Kyle present to inspect and make fun of something so…incredible.

“Try again. Stop hiding behind what she thinks she feels about me and for the love of God, take a risk.”

Was that what Kyle thought? “I haven’t risked anything?”

“Nothing you valued much. Break out of the mold, Lucas.
Talk
to her. Ask her questions instead of assuming you know the answers. Find out what it is about you that scares her so much. Even you with your limited socialization skills should be able to pinpoint it without much trouble. Broaden her horizons. Broaden
yours
beyond that inch and a half you swear is all you need. Try something different. You might get through to her for once.”

Lucas scowled so deep he wondered if he bent his facial bones. “You mean
be
someone different.”

“Being
you
sure as hell isn’t working. Show her you’re capable of being more than the guy who breaks her heart.”

“I’ve never—” Lucas turned and glared sharply at his brother. For the first time, Kyle didn’t look simple. In fact, he looked like he knew something Lucas couldn’t figure out and he was enjoying the hell out of it. “What are you talking about?”

“Just because I never asked you about it doesn’t mean I don’t know what happened at prom, dufus. And don’t think no one else has put together how you two started fighting after that and haven’t quit. Or that Belinda started turning herself into the dark queen of the undead afterwards, either.”

“You think it’s
my
fault?” Hadn’t he wondered himself? He’d cast it off because those vast changes—her hair, her clothes, her attitude—would have implied he meant something to her. Implied their one night meant something to her, though she explicitly told him it didn’t. Not that she was above lying, but more to the point, he never once doubted the fervency with which she said it.

“Work it out with Belinda,” Kyle continued in his hypnotizing way. “And hey, if it doesn’t work for either of us and we all know for sure you and she don’t want to be together, then I’ll take her off your hands.”

How could Kyle make agreeing to Lucas’s own plan sound like a good enough reason to throttle him? “She’s not a baseball card, you moron. We can’t trade her back and forth.”

“Believe me, if this plan works—and when have my plans ever failed?—there won’t be any trading going on at all.”

Smug schmuck. Unfortunately, Kyle was right about his plans. He had yet to set his mind to something and not achieve it. Despite its obvious disasters in the morning, even last night’s date swap had succeeded. Too well. Like a dark cloud, Lucas’s own well-executed plan to spend the night exorcising Belinda sprang to mind.

“I can’t.” Regret closed his eyes. His last words to her welled in his chest with all the burning agony he’d felt when he’d said them;
I’m done with you.
“She probably hates me.”

“She should have hated you years ago. Have a little faith. I’m sure you’ve been shittier in the past.”

Lucas lifted his lids enough to glare, but hope started to throb and grow inside him. “You really think she might—”

He didn’t even know what to ask. Might want more than passion from him? Might want to share a life with him? Might…
love
him?

“You never know until you try. But whatever you do,” Kyle advised darkly, “this time, stop taking her fake
no
s for an answer.”

Lucas swallowed. Belinda’s favorite word was
no
, especially when she was talking to him. The only time she said yes was in bed. Or, he remembered with body-hardening clarity, whenever she was wrapped around him.

“How do you know the fake no from the real one?”

Kyle shrugged. “You just do. Something in the way she might be looking at you that doesn’t match what she’s saying. Or what she’s doing. You know her, Lucas. You know when she’s trying to put up a front to everyone else. Just start applying your insight to when she’s using one on you.”

Not his forte. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“If you really want something—or someone—it never is.”

But it would be worth it. To be loved by her. He’d already gone through hell for her. What worse could there be?

He flexed his hands together. Talk to Belinda, try to convince her to give a relationship a real try, don’t get killed and don’t let her say no until she had a reason for it other than wanting to be with Kyle.

Thinking about it, about the extremes he would need to go to—all of them risky or flat-out stupid—for her to give him the time of day, he faced a grim truth.

Hell was probably the easy part.

Chapter Four

Being
you
sure as hell isn’t working…

Kyle’s advice rang through Lucas’s mind long after his brother disappeared to wherever it was troublemakers went for fun. Before he’d gone, they’d worked out un-Lucas-like behaviors for Lucas to try. Kyle claimed gifts and apologies would get Belinda’s door open. Lucas called it groveling.

Unfortunately…he wasn’t above groveling.

Flowers seemed the best place to start. He’d only ever given them to one woman before and it was Belinda. On prom night. He sighed. She’d probably kill him for referring to that night with a set of fully blooming orchids. Roses were probably the best place to start. Rose petals were exactly what her skin felt like. But not red ones. Those were too loud and brash for her. Red roses were what she pretended to be. He wanted something subtle. Something graceful.

Popping open his laptop, Lucas ran a search and came up with roughly a thousand types of roses. Not always a lot of help, the Internet. Most of them looked the same as the others: red, yellow, red
and
yellow, white, pink, purple…
purple
.

The dewed bud of the lavender rose in the picture screamed Belinda. Strong, willowy, beautiful and soft. The tiny, needly thorns fit pretty well, too.

It took him a while to figure out which website to order from, but within an hour, he had a delivery scheduled, the card simply stating, “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t the down-on-your knees approach most women probably would expect, but Belinda knew that kind of thing was never going to come from him. Still, as apologies went, he had to admit writing one was much easier than breaking your teeth on the words.

Yes, this could work. It could definitely work.

Four hours later, there was a knock on his door. When he opened it, there was an acrid scent, a long, gold-foiled box on the floor and the sound of someone scampering down his building’s stairs. Lucas frowned down at the box, nudging it with his toe. The smell was definitely coming from in there.

Dropping to his haunches, he lifted the lid and found what he expected. Strong, willowy, beautiful long stems…that led to blackened tips where the blooms used to be.

Apparently, she’d used a blowtorch.

The top stem, the one with the bent head and virtually no evidence of its petals left, was probably the one used to write—in ash, no less; definite points for creativity—“So what?” on the back of his printed card.

Okay, Kyle had been right about women not liking impersonal things. Maybe those ten extra minutes in the womb had paid off.

Lucas had to admit as well, from a mathematical standpoint, the odds against gaining a positive response on the first try were astronomical. All this was was a challenge. If he put his mind to it, eventually he’d hit on the thing she couldn’t resist. Preferably something she couldn’t put a torch to. It was just a matter of time and attempts.

It took him most of the day to come up with another bid, thinking back to their childhood. The Riggs family had to stretch things pretty tightly to cover seven children—the other six of which tended to follow Belinda like goslings—but they always had room for a dog or two. No one loved those dogs like Belinda did, no matter what kind of funny-looking mutt it was. She liked dogs but hadn’t had one since she’d moved out on her own.

She wouldn’t appreciate one of those little ankle biters, though. She needed something sturdy. He rushed out to the pet store and decided to pick up the first good-sized dog that wasn’t going to get lost in her metal works and could maybe double as a guard dog. He came out with a panting, lick-happy, peanut-butter-fudge-rippled boxer puppy, complete with carrier, kibble and leash.

She’d never be able to say no to it.

But, of course, that was exactly what she did.

He’d left the dog in his carrier on her back porch. He woke up the next morning to the sound of barking and a wet, unpleasant present on his newspaper. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he heard laughter echoing in the stairwell, but he couldn’t say for sure.

Usually, he did his exercise on the treadmill in his apartment, but since the energetic puppy had no large, fenced junk pile to peruse, several jogs a day were required to get him to settle down. Besides, this was more to gain perspective. Few things helped him to think better than a nice long run. Belinda, knowing how disruptive a puppy could be to his peace of mind, probably thought she was getting back at him. Would she appreciate that running freed his mind to figure a way past his mistakes? Because obviously he needed to think harder on this. So, despite the pleasant company of the running partner, even mathematical statistics couldn’t take the sting out of a second failure.

What would she
really
like? Flowers were out. The dog was a mistake. An unnamed mistake. What would appeal to the private woman he wanted to reach? The one who kept her apartment in soft white and cream, who personalized every little inch with hand-painted frames and carefully placed lace?

He stopped running. Someone bumped into him because of the unexpected stop and the pup yelped on the sudden lack of motion, but Lucas didn’t nod at the mumbled apology or the yank on the leash.

Would she like
fine
lace? He had the strongest urge to imagine her wearing only webbed pieces of the delicate constructions, but such dangerous fantasies would completely destroy his ability to think clearly. The lace would mean a lot to her and she’d see he wasn’t blind to who she really was. She’d see he
wanted
who she really was.

But where was he going to find something like that?

Spinning around as quickly as he stopped, he whistled to the pup and made his way back to his apartment to research. This time, he didn’t bother with the Internet. He grabbed the yellow pages and looked up “lace”. To his dismay, there were roughly thirty or forty places that carried the stuff in his area alone. Someday, he reminded himself, she was going to be extremely grateful for all the time and social niceties he was putting into this.

Phone call after phone call meant talking to new strangers, being polite and worst of all, explaining himself.

Very,
very
grateful.

Somewhere around the ninth call, by which time he was rifling through his kitchen cabinets for something to chew on other than their throats, he talked to what had to be a gift from God: Earl Kanby, general manager of CraftWorld.

“You need a specialty boutique,” Earl informed him without ceremony. There were no supposedly subtle questions as to why he was so grudgingly looking for lace. Quite frankly, Earl didn’t give a rat’s ass what he was up to. “They’re called man-tee-yas. Nobody’s better with lace than Lucy and that’s a fact.”

“Give me the address.” Ten minutes later, Lucas was driving down Broadway and scanning for a
boutique
—girl-speak for extremely small, difficult to find and deeply expensive. Typically,
Lucy’s Lacery
was on the corner…next to a hydrant…without parking for two blocks.

Belle had better be
damn
grateful.

By the time he got in there, Lucas already felt like crawling out of his skin. Standing inside the tiny store stuffed at every angle with lace and potpourri and God knew what else, he had to stoop because his hair was brushing the ceiling.

“Hello!” someone in the back chimed. A voice to lure innocent shoppers deeper into the maze.

The air had a close, almost aged, scent to it, making him want to sneeze and call his grandmother at the same time. He inched his way past standing racks of lace on little round wheels. The ends dropped past the racks at uneven levels, some coiling, some with their ends knotted. He saw satiny flowers of ribbons and old-looking beige knots with tassels hanging from everywhere without order or care. The window had a mannequin in a wedding dress with a veil that reached to her feet. There was a lace curtain behind her, and inside the store, he saw a hanging rack displaying several more bridal explosions.

He’d found it. The eighth ring of Hell. This had to be where the unorganized came to die. He had to get out.

“What can I do—oh, wow, you’re tall.”

Lucas looked down at the petite blonde coming out of the back room, a colored ball-headed pin between her lips and what looked like the bleached remains of a sheep sprinkled all over her dark T-shirt.

“Not really.” She was just small. He felt like the damn Jolly Green Giant trying to fit in Thumbelina’s tower. “I need lace.”

He gave her credit. She didn’t laugh at him. “Big, small or custom made?”

His eyebrows rose. “You do that?”

She grinned, her eyes taking on a saucier look. “I do lots of things. But something tells me a man like you wouldn’t be in a place like this unless some woman was making him. So what’ll it be?”

“Big. My reference said I need a mant—” Lucas sighed. Earl couldn’t have been saying it right.

She nodded, walking from behind the counter and leading the way to a few tables where pieces were laid out. “I have
mantillas
.” She pulled a few boxes out, but the densely clotted lace wasn’t what he wanted. Most of them had thick roses, looking somewhat ordinary.

“I want something…special.” Great, back to the word of helplessness. He picked up something that looked like a curtain sheer, rubbing the gossamer through his fingers. “Do you have anything with…butterflies?”

If she noticed his voice was hoarse on that last word, she wisely didn’t say anything. He waited while she chewed her lip, looking around, absently plucking loose threads off her shirt. The woman needed a Dustbuster. Badly.

“I have something, but it’s not a
mantilla
.”

Lucas stared down at her until she patted his arm and moved past him. Then she turned on a switch next to a shelf and a lighted shadowbox on the wall caught his eye. Inside was a miracle. All in white, gathered at one point and draping downward, was a piece of fabric the likes of which he’d never seen. The sheer was clear, visible only where the folds overlapped in pleats. The edges were cut in large scallops, edged into the shape of butterfly wings. Inside the borders, white butterflies flitted and rested on beds of tiny white flowers. In his mind’s eye, he could already picture Belinda draped in it…and nothing else.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” But he wanted to. See her, touch her, believe for a second that those fairy wings were real.

Lucy smiled proudly. “No one has. My mother made it thirty years ago.”

Lucas’s heart sank and the vision faded. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t part with it.”

“Not for anything less than fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Fif—what?”

“That’s handmade vintage work there, mister. Even if I made it myself, I couldn’t charge less than twelve. Normally, it’s twenty-five, but you look like you might need it more than my wall does.”

Fifteen hundred dollars for a piece of fabric? It was insane. It was utterly stupid. Even Kyle would tell him to find something else.

Lucas closed his eyes. “Pack it. Quick.”

He didn’t open them again until it was time to sign. He left the Lacery with the box under his arm, his wallet bleeding in his back pocket and strangely enough, a grin on his face. She would like
this
. This would at least get her talking to him again. That alone was worth all the money he owned.

Yes, this would definitely work.

“I hate that man,” Belinda said to herself over coffee. She sat at the table in her workshop, still wearing her heavy apron, glaring at the white box and bow.

Usually, Lucas’s best feature was he made up his mind and nothing could change it. She could rely on that. Once she talked him into something, it got done. So why wasn’t he leaving her alone? What happened to being
done
with her? What the hell could have changed his mind in less than one day? Now, the fourth day since their little morning
tête-à-tête
, and she was stuck with yet another attempted apology.

She glared harder at the box. In her hand was the blowtorch, all set to play a little game of catch. In her heart, though, was an unhealthy dose of curiosity.

The flowers had been surprising. She’d loved them. She’d even run one over her lips before she toasted it and took it back to him. The dog damn near got her, with his whole little body wriggling while he tried to sit in one place. She’d relented enough for a few face licks and to feed him, but that was it.

For all his intelligence, Lucas was probably more oblivious than the average man. He really thought she’d be pleased that he knew her so well. As if she’d consider it a good thing.

He’d known she’d love those roses. Most of the guys she’d met and dated over the years had gotten her something appropriate, black fallen petals or dried carnations. Things that matched her blasé take on life and death. Not a single one of them would have thought of real flowers or a live puppy. They’d completely missed the mark on who she was and that generally kept the relationship going a little while longer.

Not Lucas, the moron. He had to go and be thoughtful. Find her something alive, beautiful and loving. Or something feminine and unique. Because he knew her.
Knew
her.

It was enough to make her kick something. She didn’t like being obvious to anyone and he didn’t seem to get that. Her own mother didn’t understand her, complaining regularly that Belinda should settle down and have kids like her siblings had. There were now nearly enough Riggses to fill their own classroom. The next generation would probably fill a school.