Falling for Fitz (4 page)

Fitz flicked a glance back to Melvin
who tore off a piece of bread with his teeth, chewing slowly as he
stared at Daisy with barely concealed menace. Was he bi-polar or
something? One minute he was making dumb jokes about proposing to
Daisy and the next he was scowling at her like a jealous lover.
Man, Fitz didn’t like this guy. She deserved better. Way better.
After what she’d been through, Daisy deserved the best.

“
Then I’d be happy to help
you. Any of us. Alex is a whiz with money. Weston’s about to take
the bar. Stratton can research real estate. And it’s well-known
that Barrett’s the “Shark” of
English
& Sons
.”

“
And you?” she asked, her
throaty voice sending darts of pleasure to his groin which flexed
and released, waking up to the almost-forgotten sound of Daisy
Edwards. Daisy, who’d had him under her spell, in a walking daze
from the very first moment they met.

“
Daze,” he said quietly,
picking up his wineglass again, and seizing her dark blue eyes over
the rim without smiling. “I’d do anything for you.”

I’d do anything for
you.

The words hung between them, thick and
heavy, as the world around them slipped away.

Daisy stared, her mouth and eyes soft,
her heart thumping with longing.

If it was possible, he was more
beautiful than he’d been that summer. He’d been super-hot at
twenty, but at thirty, he was a man. Tall and blond with those
amazing blue eyes and crazy beautiful cheekbones. His chest was
broader, but his waist was trim, and she remembered what his hips
looked like underneath his tux—a mouth-watering V of contoured
muscle pointing the way to heaven. And she still remembered what it
felt like to feel that hot, hard part of his body inside of
hers.

For years, Daisy had waited
for him to come to her—waited to hear from him again, for him to
tell her that it didn’t matter if she hated him, it didn’t even
matter that she didn’t want him—he still wanted
her,
and the strength of his love
was enough for both of them. But, the years had passed, and he
hadn’t come. And he’d certainly never told her that he loved
her.

After what had happened, her parents
insisted she needed a fresh start, and she’d been whisked out to
San Francisco to live with her mother and finish the rest of high
school there. After which she’d attended a culinary school in Napa
Valley. Following her tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed boyfriend,
Glenn, to Oregon, she’d started baking cookies to help pay the
rent. By the time Glenn skipped town with a friend from Daisy’s
acting group, saying he was finished playing the part of “stand in”
for whomever it was Daisy couldn’t get over, she was making a
decent income with the cookies. She kept baking, her only real
extracurricular pleasure the theater group that allowed her the
relief of being someone else for a few nights every year. It was a
balm to the loneliness of who she actually was.

When Emily called two
months ago with the news that she and Barrett English had finally
gotten together, Daisy’s brain had been flooded with memories of
the summer she’d spent at Haverford Park with her aunt, uncle, and
cousin as her parents worked out the details of their divorce. But
mostly her memories were of Fitz, and with those memories came the
realization that Glenn was right. In all of her fantasies, Fitz
English was still the leading man. Pathetically, despite Fitz’s
apparent disinterest in her, despite the years that had passed, she
wasn’t over him and she would never
be
over him unless she deliberately
took steps to get him out of her system. She just couldn’t figure
out how to do that from three thousand miles away.

When Daisy’s aging father had called
her a few weeks later to share that he was moving from New Jersey
to Haverford, PA to be closer to his brother Felix, he’d also
swallowed his pride and asked if Daisy had any plans to return
east. She’d decided then and there: it was time to go home. It was
time to stop running, to deal with her useless feelings of love for
a man who’d never loved her back. And hopefully, once she’d let go
of Fitz English once and for all, her heart would be free to find
someone else to fill the loneliness in her life. Because that was
what Daisy wanted most of all—to be loved and love someone in
return.

I’d do anything for
you...

She looked at his austere face that
showed no trace of affection for her, and she finished the sentence
for him in her head:

…
because I still feel so
damn guilty about my part in what happened.

Suddenly the spell was broken and she
heard the low buzz of the room again—conversations and laughter and
the tinkling of silverware and glasses.

She cleared her throat,
looking across the table at Josh, who licked his lips at her and
narrowed his eyes at Fitz. Daisy grimaced. He was taking this
Stanley Kowalski thing a little too seriously. Still, it was better
than “hale-thee-fair-fellow” dentist shtick. At least this way she
looked desirable to
someon
e on the face of the
earth.

“
When’s the happy day?”
asked Fitz, his voice dry with derision.

She turned from Josh to look into
Fitz’s dark aqua eyes. “We haven’t set a date yet.”

“
You’re not wearing a ring
either.”

“
He hasn’t given me one
yet.”

“
Has he asked you to marry
him
yet
?” asked
Fitz with a snort.

“
Yes, he has.” Her eyes
flashed. “And I said yes.”

Fitz’s eyes narrowed and he huffed,
crossing his arms over his chest and looking away. “Should’ve given
you a ring.”

“
This judgment from your
vast experience with proposing?”

She was trying to be sarcastic and
light, but his eyes cut to hers, quick and furious, and she
realized what she’d said a second too late.

“
I’ve only been engaged
once in my life, Daisy.”

Her cheeks flushed hot, and she could
feel the color creeping up her neck, into her face, until she was
sure she was beet red.

“
You know better than
anyone that it didn’t work out.”

She’d been holding her breath, but her
lungs ached, so she let it out slowly, letting the hot air blow
past her dry lips raggedly. Her plan certainly wasn’t going very
well.

Fitz, from whom she’d expected very
little tonight, was coming through for her with flying colors.
While he was utterly gorgeous, he was also terse, borderline
belligerent, and patently uncomfortable sitting beside her. He’d
probably gone to the bathroom for a moment only to come back and
groan that he’d been trapped into sitting next to her for
dinner.

And yet, for Daisy, their history felt
more alive than it had in a decade, swirling around her with the
conflicting feelings of sun-kissed summer lust, unforeseen disaster
and furious recrimination. Her attraction to him, it seemed, was
unchanged and just as charged, despite what had happened nine years
ago and despite the nine years that had lapsed without any contact.
Every time he shifted in his seat, she panted. When their skin
touched, long dormant muscles deep inside her body pulsed with
recognition and need. She wanted him just as much now as she had
that night by the pool; just as much as she had every time she
allowed herself to think about him since, which was pathetically
often. She took another sip of wine, unable to eat anything with a
million butterflies in her stomach.

And all he felt for her, as far as she
could tell, not counting the way his eyes had quickly checked out
her “cookies,” was some leftover, misguided sense of obligation.
Maybe if she could steer the conversation to safer waters she could
somehow reassure him that he didn’t owe her anything.

“
Let’s leave the past in
the past, shall we?” she finally said softly, swallowing the wine
over the lump in her throat.

“
Fine,” he said, sitting
back from the table as his untouched salad was cleared
away.

She might make him uncomfortable, but
they shared family in common—or would soon, thought Daisy, catching
a loving look between Emily and Barrett. They needed to get past
this awkwardness so that when they occasionally ran into one
another at events, like Emily and Barrett’s inevitable wedding or
when she was visiting her aunt and uncle at Haverford Park, their
past wouldn’t haunt them both. She was willing to offer as much
polite conversation as it took to get them there.

She fixed a bright smile on her face
and turned to face him. “So, what about you? What have you been up
to?”

“
I work at
English & Sons
,” he
said tersely.

“
You were pre-law the last
time I saw you.”

“
I got my J.D.,” he said,
indicating that he’d finished his legal studies. “I’m the Chief
Compliance Officer for the company now.”

“
So fancy,” she said,
trying to keep her tone light, despite the fact that he was
refusing to look at her.

“
Just making sure we don’t
go to jail.”

“
Would that be likely? What
kinds of illicit deals are you guys doing, anyway?”

He released a quick, surprised chuckle
and turned to her, looking so much like the Fitz she’d fallen in
love with, it broke her heart a little. His lips tilted up just a
touch, as they used to when she’d surprise him with some outlandish
idea, and they’d banter back and forth before he agreed to go along
with it.

“
Wouldn’t you like to
know?” he asked, searching her eyes like he was remembering
something from a long time ago.

“
Oh, I would,” she said, an
old rhythm coming easily to their conversation.

“
It’s
very
scintillating.”

She tried not to grin back, but
couldn’t help herself. “I’m all ears.”

“
We buy companies,” he
said, pressing a finger to his lips like he was sharing a
secret.

“
Companies! The mind reels.
Edgy stuff?”

“
Oh, very. Shocking,
even.”

“
Do tell!” she demanded,
trying not to giggle, but the happy, alive feeling bubbled up
inside of her anyway.

“
We may—or may not—dabble
in…
shipbuilding
.”

He said it conspiratorially, and she
put her hand over her heart, pretending to gasp. “Not shipbuilding!
Oh, the humanity!”

“
Yes. And sometimes?
Steel manufacturing
.”

“
Be still my beating heart!
The glamour, the…the excitement!”

He chuckled lightly, like he didn’t
enjoy himself very often, and this was the most fun he’d had in
ages. “And once in a while… Are you sitting down?”

“
I am.”

“
Hold onto your seat.” He
was trying not to laugh, and finally won the fight to take himself
very seriously. He looked grim and important as he announced,
over-enunciating every word, “Once in a while, we
buy…
human resource
software
.”

Emily put the back of her hand to her
forehead and pretended to faint against the back of her chair.
Fitz’s voice was soft in her ear a moment later.

“
Shall I get Dr. M. over
here to give you mouth-to-mouth?”

She turned her head toward his voice,
but didn’t give him a chance to lean away first and his lips
brushed softly across her cheek as she faced him. When she opened
her eyes, his mouth was inches from hers, and she could feel the
heat of his breath on her skin.

How about
you
give me
mouth-to-mouth instead?
she thought,
flicking her eyes to lips. She must have inadvertently telegraphed
her thoughts because he sucked in a breath as his eyes dilated and
darkened.

He leaned away from her sharply,
placing his hands on the table and staring at them as if he needed
to know exactly where they were to be sure they didn’t
misbehave.

She gulped softly, taking a deep
breath and sitting up straight in her chair.

“
You always were fun,” he
conceded quietly.

“
So were you,” she
answered, and without thinking, she placed her hand over
his.

She touched him because
their bantering had reminded her of the best parts of falling in
love with him. She touched him because he was her first love and
somewhere deep inside she
still
loved him. She touched him because not touching
him when he was finally so close to her after so long was almost
unbearable.

Almost immediately he flipped his hand
so they were palm to palm, flush against each other. As he laced
his fingers through hers, he looked up slowly to meet her
eyes.

He flinched at what he saw there.
“Daisy. Daisy, I’m so damned—”

“
I like
this
,” said Josh, who was suddenly
standing in the space between their chairs. He reached for Daisy’s
hand and jerked it away from Fitz’s, depositing it in her lap, then
shoved his face into hers until they were nose-to-nose. “Holding
hands with some other guy on the side, eh?”