Days Like This (16 page)

“So.  Since his first volley fell
short of its target, he tried a different tack.  He put on this somber,
mournful face, and told me he was afraid that someday, I was going to regret
settling.”

“Settling?”

“Yes.  That’s the exact word he
used.  He said I was too young, at thirty-three, to trap myself in a loveless
marriage with an old friend just because we were both alone and looking for
companionship.”

“He did
not
say that.”

“Oh, he said it.  And he was dead
serious.”

She could feel the laughter
rumbling up inside his chest before it spilled out, starting as a choked snort
and ending in a deep belly laugh.  He had the most amazing laugh.  “Oh, man,”
he said, wiping a tear from his eye, “where does he come up with this stuff?”

“I have no idea.  It seems he
thought I was recruiting a shuffleboard partner for my sunset years.”

He snorted again, made a choked
sound in the back of his throat.  “What did you tell him?”

“Oh, you know,” she said
offhandedly, as he spun her away and then back again, “I told him you were hung
like a racehorse and we were spending all our spare time having screaming sex
in every room of the house, and if he didn’t believe me, he was welcome to drop
by and check it out for himself.”

He froze for a split second
before the anticipated explosion came.  “Jesus H. Christ, Fiore!  Don’t do that
to me!”

And she grinned.  “Had you there
for a minute, didn’t I?”

“Who the hell are you, and what
have you done with my baby?”

“It’s all your fault.  You’ve
been a very naughty influence on me, MacKenzie.  And I did warn you about
payback.”

“You only had me for about half a
second.  Damn, woman.  That mouth on you is unbelievable.  Now that you’ve
taken ten years off my life, what did you really tell him?”

Etta James replaced Aretha,
telling her unfaithful lover that she’d rather go blind than watch him walk
away.  Casey closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to his chest, and while they
swayed in time to the steamy blues ballad, she said, “After I stopped laughing
hysterically, I told him he was way out in left field and couldn’t be more
wrong.  I said we’d been crazy about each other for years—”

“Emphasis on the plural?”

“Emphasis on the plural, just in
case there was any possibility he might miss the point.  And that we’d finally
decided to stop screwing around and do something about it before we both got so
old that neither one of us could remember how to insert tab A into slot B.  Or
why we’d even want to.”

“You said that to your brother? 
Those exact words?”

She looked up at him and batted
her lashes demurely.  “I did.”

“Oh, man, I can just picture his
face.  You’re thirty-five years old and you’ve been married twice, and Trav’s
still in denial about the fact that you gave up your virginity a long time
ago.  I bet that shut him up.”

“Let me put it this way:  That
was a year and a half ago, and he’s never said another word to me about it.”

He let out a soft, breathy laugh
and rested his cheek atop her head, and for a time there was just the two of
them and the music, weaving its magic spell in and around and through them.  “If
this song got any hotter,” she said, “I think we’d both go up in flames.”

“Congratulations, Fiore.  You
just figured out the method to my madness.  I know you.  I know the blues works
on you the way booze does on most women.  Gets you all hot and loose and
slutty.”

“Slutty?”

“You know what would make this
whole scenario even more fun?”

“I suppose if anybody knows
slutty, it would be you.  And the very thought of asking makes me feel faint.”

“It would be even more fun if we
ditched all the clothes.”

“And danced naked?”

“That would be the idea.”

“Do you have a clue how quickly
things would deteriorate if we did that, MacKenzie?”

“I suppose that would depend on
your definition of deteriorate.  Maybe we should just skip the dancing and get
right down to business.”

In response, she wound her ankle
around his and ran the sole of her bare foot across worn denim, up the calf of
his leg and back down again.  “I’d like to revisit that slutty thing. I could
use a little clarification.”

“If you’re in the mood for
show-and-tell,” he said, running his hands down her backside until they reached
her thighs, “I’d be happy to give you a little demonstration.  That might
clarify things for you.”

“Give me some time to think about
it.”

“Time’s up.”  Without any effort,
he boosted her up into his arms.  She tightened her arms around his neck, locked
her legs around his waist, found his mouth with hers and kissed him, slow and
hot and sexy, in rhythm with the music, until they both ran out of breath and
were in danger of passing out unless they took in some oxygen.  Lungs afire,
she pressed her face to his shoulder and listened to his attempt to regulate
his own breathing.  Etta was still singing and, locked together like a single
unit, they were still moving in slo-mo to that hot, seductive rhythm.  Casey
tangled both fists in his hair, kissed his neck, and took a hard little bite of
his earlobe. 

And said, “I vote for
show-and-tell.  Dancing is so overrated.”

They’d been playing together for
a year when, out of the blue, Trav’s kid sister, who had this idea in her head
that she wanted to be a songwriter, sent her brother a cassette tape of songs
she’d written.  Casey Bradley was just out of high school, barely eighteen
years old, living on the family farm in a one-stoplight town somewhere in the
wilds of western Maine, and she was a month away from tying the knot with some
guy she’d grown up with.  She had a strong, clear singing voice that sounded a
little like Carly Simon, and the songs were pretty good.  A little too pop-ish
for Rob’s taste, but Danny had gone gaga over them, and being Danny, he’d
badgered the living shit out of Travis to take him up there to talk to the kid
about using her material. 

Trav had finally caved, and the
two of them had driven the Chevy to Maine to talk to his kid sister.  Danny
had, of course, steamrolled right over her.  What eighteen-year-old girl could
say no to that face?  There’d been just one snag.  The girl couldn’t read
music.  She’d been doing it all by ear.  Because there was only one person they
knew who was any good at transcription, Travis and Danny had dragged her back
to Boston with them, to Rob, with this half-assed notion that the girl could
play the songs that were inside her head, and he could transcribe them onto
paper.

He’d taken one look at Trav’s kid
sister and thought,
whoa
.  She was gorgeous.  A little bit of a thing,
with big green eyes and long, black hair that fell all the way to her waist. 
But her beauty wasn’t all of it; there were any number of gorgeous girls out
there.  This girl really had something special.  She wasn’t like the chippies
who hung around the stage on a Friday night while he was packing away his
equipment, girls with short skirts and low-cut shirts and too much lipstick,
girls who made it clear they were available if he was interested.  It hadn’t
taken him any time at all to learn that if you put a guy up on stage and stuck
an electric guitar in his hands, even if he couldn’t play for shit, even if he
looked like Godzilla, he’d have no shortage of girls ready and willing to
spread their legs for him. 

Casey Bradley wasn’t that kind of
girl.  There was a purity about her, an innocence that shone like a beacon in
the night.  She was cool and self-assured and smart, with just enough naïveté
to sweeten the package.  She was, quite simply, a nice girl.  A girl who was
yet another victim of the infamous Fiore charm.

Rob tried to be philosophical
about it.  There was no way in hell a girl like that would look twice at a guy
like him, not with Danny Fiore in the picture.  The very idea was laughable,
and the chemistry she had with Fiore was so palpable it was scary.  Three days
after she arrived in Boston, Travis phoned him around nine-thirty in the morning,
dragging him out of bed, and barked, “Is my sister there?”

Rob yawned and raked the fingers
of one hand through his tangled mop of hair.  “She’s not here,” he said.  “She
left around midnight, with Danny.”

“Well, she’s not here, either. 
Her bed hasn’t been slept in.”

“Maybe she went home.”

“She didn’t go home.  Her stuff’s
still here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry.  If she’s
with Danny, I’m sure she’s fine.”

“What the hell would she be doing
with Danny?”

“Jesus Christ, Trav, what do you
think they’re doing?  I highly doubt they’re playing pinochle.”

There was absolute silence at the
other end of the phone.  And then Travis said, “If you’re implying what I think
you are—”

He rolled his eyes.  “Have you
seen the way she looks at him?”

“My sister’s not that kind of
girl.  She’s engaged, for Christ’s sake!   Besides, I warned her to stay away
from him.  I told her what kind of guy he is.”  Travis went silent for a few
seconds.  “You don’t really think—oh, man, he wouldn’t dare.  Would he?  I
swear to God, if that son of a bitch so much as lays a finger on her, I’ll cut
off his gonads and cram ‘em down his throat!”

This probably wasn’t the time to
divulge to Travis what Casey had confessed to him the night before, that she’d
thought she wanted to marry the fiancé back home, until she met Danny Fiore. 
She’d asked Rob for advice, and he’d told her to follow her heart.  In Rob
MacKenzie’s book, that was always the best policy.  Keep a cool head, and make
your choices in life based on what you really wanted, not on what other people
thought was best for you.  It was the way he lived his life, and he believed it
would be a much happier world if everybody followed that philosophy.

So he and Trav wandered over to
Avery Street and banged on the door of Danny’s crappy room, but the only answer
they got was from the guy across the hall, who cracked open his door, glared at
them, and said, “Nobody’s home.  Some people work at night, you know.  Get
lost!”

By this time, Travis was a
wreck.  “Should I call the cops?” he said.

“And tell them what?  That your
sister, who’s a grown woman, seems to have taken off with your buddy without
telling you?  Sure.  I think that’s a great idea.  Let’s go find a pay phone
right now.”

“Fuck you, MacKenzie.”

He patted Trav’s shoulder and
said, “They’ll show up, sooner or later.”

And they did.  Eighteen hours
later, the two of them were sitting in a huddle on the front stoop of Trav’s
Joy Street apartment building when they saw Danny’s Chevy chugging up the
hill.  In classic Boston driver style, Danny nosed the Bel Air to the curb in a
spot that would have nicely fit a Volkswagen Beetle, leaving the ass end
hanging out into the narrow street.  Danny stepped out of the car, drew Casey
out the driver’s door behind him, and closed the door.  Then he backed her up
against the car and laid one on her, right there in front of her brother and
anybody else who happened to be looking.  She took his face between her hands
and they proceeded to steam up Beacon Hill like it had never been steamed
before. 

Travis started to rise to his
feet, and in the hopes of preventing a homicide, Rob grabbed his arm and yanked
him back down onto the stoop.  Then, as casually as though they’d just come
back from a five-minute trip to the corner store, the two lovebirds strolled
hand-in-hand to the front stoop where Rob and Travis were sitting.

This time, he couldn’t hold
Travis back.  On his feet with both fists clenched, Trav said to Danny, “You
are a dead man.”

And Casey said quietly, “Trav.”

“Shut up,” her brother said without
looking at her.  “I’m not talking to you.  I’ll deal with you later.  After I
clean up the street with this motherf—”

More forcefully this time, she
said, “Travis!”

Her brother’s head turned in her
direction, and he scowled.  “What?”

And she and Danny held aloft
their left hands, sporting shiny new matching gold wedding bands.

The curtain fluttered at the
window, nudged by the same air that cooled the sweat from their skin.  She lay
on one hip, drowsy and sated, her head on his shoulder, an arm wrapped around
him, their legs tangled like limp strands of spaghetti.  From her vantage point,
she had an up-close-and-personal view of the entire lean length of him.  He had
a beautiful body.  Beautiful was probably a silly word to describe a man, but
it was the only word that fit.  Rob MacKenzie was built for speed.  Slender,
but nicely put together, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and that sexy
triangle of hair, shades darker than the hair on his head, that marched from
breastbone to pelvis.  A hard, flat belly, and muscles in all the right places. 

Farther south, he was generously
endowed, those slender hips of his born to fit between a woman’s thighs.  His long
legs were lanky but strong, knees and ankles still bony, no matter how much he’d
filled out over the years.  And there was something about his feet, those exquisitely
sculpted feet, that always made her mouth go dry.

If anybody had told her,
seventeen years ago, that one day they’d wind up here, she wouldn’t have
believed them.  Not that she hadn’t loved him right from the beginning, but she’d
loved him in a sweet, best-friends kind of way.  She’d certainly never thought
of him as husband material.  Not back then.  At twenty, Rob had been gaunt, scrawny,
all knees and elbows, still growing into his feet.  Cute as a button, with
those green eyes and that glorious mass of golden curls he hardly ever
remembered to comb, but he’d possessed a fashion sense that was nothing less
than abysmal.  Although he was always immaculately clean—and smelled heavenly—he
dressed as though he’d picked his clothes, blindfolded, from a Goodwill box.