Finder's Keeper (17 page)

She shook hands with them, her nervous awkwardness multiplying by the second, and they all slid into the booth, Mia and Molly first, Chase and Brody taking up positions beside their respective dates. The pair across the table had the easy physical familiarity of a couple who’ve been together long enough that they don’t need to touch to be aware of one another. They sat close, elbows brushing, but it was a cozy, comfortable distance.

Chase, on the other hand, scooted right up to Mia’s side and dropped his arm across her shoulders. She stiffened, unable to check the reaction, and hoped his friends would just attribute her reaction to a discomfort with public displays of affection rather than a defensive reaction to her hypersensitivity to his pheromones.

“So Mia!” Brody leaned across the table eagerly. “Tell us all about yourself.”

“Well… I’m a scientist.”

“See?” Brody turned to Molly triumphantly. “I told you she was different.”

Molly rolled her eyes and shared a conspiratorial
Men
look with Mia. “What kind of science do you study?”

Mia opened her mouth, nervous about how much to say, how to say it. She was so used to the glazed look when she talked about her work, but Chase had been genuinely interested and his friends looked equally intrigued. So she just…talked. She didn’t filter and for once there were nods and smiles and intelligent questions. The knots in her shoulders slowly unraveled and she relaxed against Chase’s side.

Chase teased her, Brody laughed, Molly made wry cracks under her breath and the evening flew by, easy, light and
fun
. Mia couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed herself so much. Suddenly all the emphasis psychologists placed on social rituals made much more sense.

The only wrinkle in an otherwise seamless evening was the moment when Brody brought up real estate. It took Mia a moment to realize the houses in question belonged to Chase. It was the stiffness of his body against her side that tipped her off.

“Help me out, Mia,” Brody pleaded over his fourth beer. “Maybe you can convince him where I’ve failed.”

“I don’t know…” Mia hedged, when Brody clearly expected a response.

“I’m not selling them, Brody. Let it go.”

“The financial burden alone—”

“Brody,” Molly intervened as Chase’s expression darkened. “Maybe now isn’t the time to discuss it.”

Brody leaned close to his wife and the couple whispered to one another. Mia took advantage of their distraction to lean into Chase and mumble, “Am I supposed to know what’s going on?”

“My parents’ and my brother’s houses,” Chase said tersely. “I inherited them and Brody thinks it’s time I unloaded them.”

“You don’t live in them,” Brody protested, once again paying attention to their side of the table and pleading his case. “They’re just a financial and emotional burden…”

“Which it is my choice to bear.”

“I just think—”

“How about them Yankees?” Molly interrupted her husband and Chase took up the blatant attempt at a change of subject eagerly.

Mia, knowing nothing about baseball, just sat quietly, cuddled into Chase’s side, and thought about the revelations of the night. She was surprised by how much she wanted to be in a position to help Chase deal with his emotional and financial burdens, but she was still the fake date. No matter how real tonight felt. No matter how real he was to her now.

She couldn’t dismiss him anymore.

She didn’t realize exactly how badly she wanted their relationship to be real as well until they were back at her office, where he was dropping her off so she could collect her car. He opened the door for her and walked her the five feet to her car, waiting until she had unlocked it and opened the driver’s side door—all in an anticipatory silence.

She felt certain they were building up to something, to a good-night kiss, almost like a real date, but when she turned to face him, he’d already taken a step away from her and jammed his hands into his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

“So, your Nonna’s marinara thing is Sunday?”

“Two o’clock. Come prepared to be stuffed with pasta till you can barely stand. Shall I pick you up at your place?”

“No, we can meet at yours again. That worked well.” He wasn’t looking at her. He certainly wasn’t leaning in to score a kiss. Before she could work up the courage to try for one herself, Chase gave a businesslike nod and said, “Thank you for tonight, Mia. I appreciate it.”

Then he was walking away, back toward his car, without a backward glance or a good-night kiss. Tonight, Mia wanted one.

She started after him, her feet moving almost without direction, then stopped, hovering in the middle of the parking lot, reminded that she had no right to ask for kisses. She was the fake girlfriend.

Fake
. The word felt so wrong. This, whatever it was between them, was very real. Sexual attraction, companionship, a strange understanding—she wasn’t sure what they had, but they had a relationship. A real one. A very unconventional real one.

She couldn’t wrap her head around what they were and what they weren’t. Not quite a friend, certainly not someone just hired to do a job and nothing more, but a boyfriend? No, not that either. Chase was a gray area. An incomplete data set. And she hated not knowing how to fit him into her life. There was no easy compartment for a man like Chase Hunter.

But she wanted him to have a place in her life. She just had no idea how to go about assigning him one.

Mia lingered in the parking lot long after he’d driven off into the night, wondering how one went about keeping a finder.

Chapter Seventeen

Marinara Mercenaries

“Marry her now, Chase. I’m begging you. If her matrimonial future depends on her marinara, we all might as well give up hope, so please tie the knot before you taste that sauce.”

Mia glowered at her cousin Mario and elbowed him away from her pot. Trash talking was a time-honored part of the Corregianni Family Marinara Competition. As was trying to sneak unwanted ingredients into the pots of other competitors, so Mia knew better than to let Mario anywhere near her burner.

Not that she had any expectation of winning. Everyone knew Teresa’s sauce would reign undefeated until someone pried the recipe from her sister’s cold dead hands, but second place was still bragging rights and Mia wanted to show off for Chase.

She glanced across the few feet to where her date was chatting and back-slapping with the other manly men. Nonna’s competition meant Nonna’s rules and that meant only the ladies were allowed to touch the tomato sauce.

While she mixed and stirred, Chase was laughing easily with her family, showing none of the odd, guarded silence he’d had with her on the drive over this morning. Things between them had been strained since Thursday—she had no idea what to say, puzzled by her own muddled feelings and he seemed even less inclined to fill the silence—but at least her family hadn’t noticed.

Or so she thought, until her mother leaned across her own pot to hiss at Mia, “Something is off between you two, isn’t it? Did you do something? Whatever it is, you can tell your mama.”

Mia wasn’t sure what her mother expected her to have done, but she found herself protesting, “No, of course not, Mama. Everything’s great. Better than great, really,” before she remembered she was supposed to be laying the groundwork for a break-up, easing her family into the idea that Chase might not be their newest in-law. Just because she wanted something non-fake with Chase didn’t mean he was going to stick around.

He was suddenly at her side, reinforcing her lie with an arm looped around her waist. “Do I get to taste this sauce?”

“No!” all the women shouted at him in unison.

Mia smiled as he held up a hand to pacify the rabid females. “The women cook, the men judge, and tasting a sauce before the blind taste-test at dinner is sacrilege. And grounds for disqualification.”

“Damn. Mario said—”

“Just on general principle, don’t listen to anything Mario tells you. He’s trying to get me booted since I beat his wife last year.”

Chase rested his chin on her shoulder, taking a deep breath of the steam rising off her sauce. “Smells good.” He gave her waist a squeeze. “All this and she cooks too.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not. I just hadn’t pegged you for the domestic type.”

“Just because I rarely take the time to cook doesn’t mean I’m not good at it. Cooking is a science too.”

“I thought it was an art.”

“Science can be art.”

“Says the woman who will be scanning my brain with a massive scary machine tomorrow.”

She smiled just thinking about the scans. “It’s totally painless. You’ll barely even notice it.”

“That’s what they always say.” He leaned closer until his lips were brushing her earlobe, defying even her mother’s ability to eavesdrop. “Do you want me to try to find it again now?”

Mia went still, as much from the brush of his breath against her ear as the question. “That would probably be wise…” At that moment, she would have agreed to just about anything as long as he didn’t move.

“Concentrate,” he reminded her.

Mia tried. Oh Lord, did she ever try. But as his fingers circled her bare wrist, the thoughts racing through her head were not of watches. He pulled away quickly, shaking his hand as if she’d given him a static shock.

“How can you be so clear about what you want at work and so confused here?” he asked softly.

“Easy. My work is the one place where I know what I’m doing, and I know what I need.”

Chase inhaled against her neck and goose bumps broke out across Mia’s arms, but whatever he was taking a breath to say was lost when Nonna bellowed, “Time’s up!” and began ushering them to the judging table.

Fifteen minutes later all the contestants and their significant-other judges were crammed elbow-to-elbow around the banquet table in Nonna’s formal dining room, meant to hold twelve, not twenty-two. Ten bowls of mystery marinara lined the table, each marked with an identifying number and nothing else. Nonna reigned at the head of the table and went over the rules, for tradition’s sake and for Chase’s benefit as the only new face at this ritual.

“We’re going to have a fair fight, people, so let’s keep it clean,” Nonna said, cracking her knuckles and sounding eerily like a WWF ringmaster. “Bowls will be selected at random. Each dish is passed around once and only once. There will be no cheating and telling your fella which one is yours, ladies. Absolutely no signals allowed and any winking, coughing, nudging or ear-tugging will result in immediate disqualification. If he’s living with you and he can’t identify your marinara by taste, you might as well start divorce proceedings since he’s clearly stuffing his cannoli elsewhere.”

Mario snorted and Nonna reached over to smack him upside the head without losing her place in her speech.

“Notepads are by your napkins to make notes about your favorites, but ballots will not be passed out until all ten have been tasted. Good luck to all our competitors.” She nodded to the ladies around the table, giving Mia a little wink. “And now…let the games begin!”

Chase gave a whoop and the whole table laughed. Mia grinned at him as the first bowl began to make the rounds. Somehow this year the marinara competition felt less like an obligation and more like the game everyone else had always treated it as.

The first bowl elicited thoughtful murmurs and fierce scribbling as eyes darted around the table, speculating on who had gone in such an oregano-rich direction this year.

Bowl number two had Gina screeching and everyone reaching for their water glasses and dinner rolls in a desperate attempt to cleanse their palates after the overpowering, competing tastes of dill pickles and cayenne pepper.

“Dammit, Mario!” Gina complained as she chucked a roll at his head. “This was going to be my year.”

“Don’t blame me. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

Gina snorted. “Innocent, my a—”

“Gina.” Her mother gave her youngest a stern look as she passed around the third bowl.

The third was sweet and tangy, but it was the fourth that had everyone sighing and lobbying to send the bowl around for seconds. Teresa’s basil marinara was the stuff of legend. No one even pretended not to recognize her secret recipe.

Mario groaned appreciatively as he cleaned his plate. “God, cos, this gets better every year. You gotta tell us how you do it.”

Teresa smiled slyly, not bothering to deny the origin of the sauce. “I’ll take the recipe to my grave.”

“Nah, you’ll turn the recipe over to your daughter who will carry on kicking Corregianni asses for another fifty years.” Gina grinned as she said it, but Teresa went still.

“Actually…” Teresa reached blindly for her husband’s hand and he gripped hers tightly. “I…that is,
we
have some news.”

Her mother’s gasp cut her off. “You’re pregnant! Oh, Teresa!” She clasped her hands over her heart, tears already brimming in her eyes.

At the word
pregnant,
the table erupted. Chairs scraped back as the cousins leapt up, the wave of congratulations deafening as a round of haphazard hugging and backslapping began. Mia opened her mouth to add her felicitations, but then Chase’s fingers brushed her wrist and she followed his nod to the shuttered look on Teresa’s face.

Her sister looked like she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. Hardly the look of a glowing mommy-to-be. Mia’s stomach lurched sympathetically and the lingering taste of Teresa’s peerless marinara soured on her tongue as her sister’s lips formed the word, “No.”

She repeated it, louder, but still going unheard by the celebrating familia.

“I’ll get the champagne! Though none for you, Mama Teresa.” Mario shoved back his chair, moving toward the kitchen and a look of panic crashed across Teresa’s face.

“Wait!” Suddenly, sweet, I’d-rather-be-in-the-background Martin stood, raising his hands for quiet. He waved Mario back to his chair and cleared his throat in the restless, delighted hush that fell.

But before Martin could make his speech, whatever it would have been, Teresa spoke, her voice low and hoarse. “I’m not pregnant.”