An Offer He Can't Refuse (11 page)

It hadn't happened in nine months and he didn't think it would happen in another nineteen, or twenty-nine, but he could hope.

He drew the last of his golf balls toward the rubber tee. Fine. As soon as he was done here, he'd drop by Téa's office, he decided. Unless a lightning bolt hit before he got out the words, he was going to tell her the design job was off.

He might never know the complete truth, but then she'd never find out that the man rumored to have rubbed out her father was his. And that the family who ordered the hit that killed Johnny's father in retaliation had been hers.

"Too Close for Comfort"

Johnny Mathis

Wonderful, Wonderful
(1957)

There was a tall and wide white box on Téa's office
doorstep. She dropped her briefcase and purse to pick it up, and the slick cardboard felt cool to the touch—proof that it had recently spent time in refrigeration. "Celebrity Florist" was embossed in silver across the lid.

Though the office was still locked up because Téa's assistant was coming in late that day, a delivery person wouldn't have just dumped the package on a doorstep, she thought, glancing around. Even at ten a.m., the morning was too warm to leave flowers unattended for long.

And who would have sent her flowers anyway? If "Caruso" hadn't been inked in tiny letters on one corner, she would have already been walking them toward the insurance company in the next office over. The receptionist there had caught the fancy of a seventy-something taxidermist from Indian Wells. Last week he'd sent her a bouquet of helium balloons anchored by a stuffed coyote. A real stuffed coyote.

Both she and Rachele had heard the young woman's screech of repulsion and come running.

But the only man Téa had had recent contact with was Johnny Magee.

Beneath her oatmeal-colored blouse and skirt her skin prickled, in every place it had no business prickling. Because no matter what had happened last night in her car, no matter what had been said—both real and imagined—he was supposed to be business. Just business.

Yet she could remember that light touch of his fingertips to her face as if they were still there. She could still taste him too, male and salty, on her tongue. Her mind flashed back to that lip-to-lipstick sip that Eve's latest had taken from her drink, and from there it was only a short mental hop to Johnny Magee's mouth. Wide, firm lips made only more masculine by their slight sandpaper edging of golden whiskers.

She wondered what those would taste like against her tongue and her skin reacted again with another round of unwelcome goose bumps.

If he had sent her flowers, then what?

Her fingers tightened on the chilled box. Until she found out for certain, of course, she couldn't make a decision. And though it was girlish and silly of her, she knew, her pulse thump-thumped-thumped in her ears as she used one fingernail to pry open the box's lid. It sprang free.

Cushioning white-and-glitter tissue paper. Glass bowl with an artful arrangement of a dozen apricot roses in water colored a matching hue. A clear plastic prong speared a white card bearing three simple words in distinctive, left-leaning handwriting.
Ritorni, per favore.

Please come back.

Her fingers went boneless. The box slid out of her grasp.

Glass shattered against the pavement at the same moment that she heard her name called from somewhere behind her.

"Téa?" Johnny's voice. "Jesus Christ, you look like you saw a ghost. Are you all right?"

A hard hand grabbed her elbow and swung her around. She continued to stare down at the ruined box, the broken glass, the scattered roses. The colored water had splashed across her shiny cream-colored pumps and over her stockinged ankles. Orangish droplets dotted the knee-length hemline of her straight skirt.

Johnny took hold of her chin and jerked it up so he could study her face. "What the hell's the matter?"

She wondered why it was that he kept catching her at her worst. Was it mere coincidence or some unique superpower—meet Johnny Magee, MakeHerMessy Man—of his own that destroyed the calm and controlled exterior she presented to the rest of the world?

"Téa? The way you dropped those flowers, I thought they were about to bite. What's going on?"

She hoped she managed a half-smile. "That ghost you mentioned, I guess."

Frowning, he glanced down at her feet. "Who are those from? Is some old boyfriend bothering you?"

"No." But he was going to think she was nuts if she didn't elaborate. "My father used to bring home apricot roses."

From the start of their marriage, her father bought her mother a dozen apricot roses every Friday afternoon. Week-in, week-out. Month-in, month-out. Year-in, year-out. As far as Téa knew, he'd brought roses even during the time he'd kept the mistress he couldn't deny once he'd brought home something else—the daughter he'd had with her. And for as long as Téa could remember, her father would slip one of those Friday roses free of its cellophane wrapping to press the thornless stem into her own small plump hand.

"
Una piccola ricompensa
," he'd say. A little reward.

A little reward for her little crimes.

Johnny was still looking down at her as if she was unhinged, she realized, and supposed her explanation left something to be desired. "My father's dead," she offered.

The grip of his hand loosened, but didn't go away. "I'm sorry."

"The roses…" and those words in Italian,
please come back
—her grandfather's words, as it was he who had sent the flowers, just more of that emotional pressure he was exerting—had reminded her too much of the prayers she'd broadcast in a fever of grief after her father's disappearance. Prayers she'd never stopped sending until her father's crew and then the FBI had turned their house upside down in a fruitless search for the book. "The roses reminded me of him."

Johnny's expression only hardened, making her wonder if she'd struck a nerve. Without thinking, she voiced the question. "Johnny? Is your father okay?"

"
My
father?" He dropped her arm, stepped back. Beneath his heel, glass crunched, but he didn't seem to notice.

"Is there…" she hesitated, trying to come up with a way to put it. "Is there an older Mr. Magee?"

The tension drained from his body and the beginnings of a smile nudged at the corners of his mouth. "Phineas Magee, head of the Physics Department at Central Washington University, doesn't care to think of himself as 'older.'"

"I see," she said, bending down to tend to me ruined flower arrangement. Wouldn't you know that Johnny Magee's Nautica-model good looks would come by way of a brainy prof named Phineas? Some people got more than their fair share of that AU-American normalcy she'd wished for most of her life. "He sounds like quite the father."

"Yeah."

From the pavement, Téa plucked a couple of roses in one hand and a large shard of the broken vase in the other.

"And what about yours?" Johnny continued. "Was he quite the father as well? Do you miss him?"

Do you miss him
? The question stabbed her and she sucked in a breath against the pain. Of course she missed him, she thought, her fingers tightening into a fist. Though Téa supposed every woman had a story about a man she'd loved and lost, it felt particularly devastating when the one that got away was her father.

"Jesus! Téa!" Johnny dropped to a crouch beside her and grabbed one of her hands in both of his. He drew it toward him and pried open her fingers.

In surprise, Téa noted the blood dripping between her knuckles. It splattered against his pants and crimson drops joined the orange dots on her skirt as he flicked away the piece of broken glass she'd inadvertently clutched. With one of his hands cradling her injured one, he pressed his handkerchief against the shallow cut on her palm and pressed hard.

She winced.

He glanced over, then frowned. "You're pale again." Without letting up the pressure on her wound, he slipped an arm around her shoulders and drew her back so they both could sit on the curb of the small planter box lining the short front walk to her office door.

"I'm okay," she protested.

He hitched her closer to him, and the brush of his hard, warm body against hers made her shudder.

"Yeah, right," he said. "You feel cold and you're shivering. You're just peachy."

What was she supposed to do, tell him it was the sensation of his body aligned with hers and not the blood loss that was causing her quivering skin? That wouldn't be businesslike now, would it?

Looking down at the stains on their clothes and the broken mess on the pavement, she groaned and dropped her fore-head to her free hand. "Though I'm fighting a losing battle with that good impression anyway, aren't I?"

"What?"

"I've not exactly been a model of poise the past couple of days." From the splash in the pond to the splashes of blood on his slacks, it had been one departure after another from her usual it's-all-under-control and appearances-are-everything self.

"You don't have to pretend with me."

She lifted her head to look at him. "You don't get it. I
don't
have to pretend to present an unruffled image. Usually, anyway. That's who I am, what I am. A calm, unruffled professional."

A smile entered Johnny's eyes like sunlight glinting on sea-blue waves. Heat sizzled through her again. He really had no right to be so beautiful—particularly her personal-hot-button beautiful that had always sent her scurrying for Pop-Tarts or peanut butter cups to subjugate her unrequited cravings.

She frowned at him, because she wasn't going to melt, by God. "You don't bring out the best in me, that's what I think."

Now his mouth smiled too. His fingers lifted from the handkerchief to run once again along her warm cheek. "I might beg to differ."

So she melted. So sue her. Because the living embodiment of her every teenage fantasy was looking at her like she used to look at packages of Entenmann's coffee cake.

"I like this you," Johnny said.

"You do?" It came out breathless, girly. Good Lord. But who would blame her when he was leaning closer and wrapping her in that scent of his that smelled like clean wind and letterman jackets?