Maybe It's Real Page 4

  She scoffed. “I’ll believe that when I—mmph.”

  Owen caught her lips with his, and his world went bright.

  Slow, Owen thought. Gentle.

  Chloe’s arms came around his neck and she pushed closer to shift against him, seeking more pressure. Her mouth opened under his soft kiss, and then he felt the brush of her tongue against his.

  Owen’s fingers flexed on her hips. He broke away with a sharp pant to stare down at her dazed expression. In one smooth movement he lifted her, set her on the table and bent to kiss her again.

  He felt her smile, and lost himself in the explosive chemistry between them. He was running one hand along her smooth thigh under her skirt, unable to stop stroking the incredible softness of her skin, while the other hand cupped the back of her neck possessively, when the obnoxious sound of a ringtone blaring at full volume shattered the moment.

  Owen pulled back an inch and focused with difficulty on her flushed face. She looked around wildly, as if confused.

  “It’s me,” he said, voice a harsh rasp. “My phone.”

  She laughed. “I thought it was my smoke alarm. Come back down here. Things were just getting interesting.” She arched up to kiss him, her long hair sliding like silk over his forearm and making his gut tighten in a powerful, hard clench.

  “Mmm.” He indulged in another long kiss, then pulled back. “I have to check it. Could be work.”

  She dropped down to lean on her elbows and watched as he dug his cell phone out of his back pocket.

  By the time he’d extracted the phone, it had stopped ringing and the screen had gone dark. He put it down. “They’ll call back if it’s important,” he said, and caught her upper arms, lifting her off her elbows.

  Her balance gone, she shrieked and clutched at him.

  Owen grinned, moved both of her hands into one of his, and lowered her flat to her back until she was laid out before him, her chest rising and falling with quickened breaths. He leaned down, braced a hand either side of her shoulders and, starting with the vulnerable hollow under her ear, began dropping a line of light, teasing kisses down her neck.

  She gasped and turned her head to one side, giving him easier access. Owen was making his purposeful way lower and had gotten to the sweet spot right between her small breasts, one of which was filling his palm perfectly, when his phone blared again.

  “Fuck,” he said, and rested his forehead against her sternum.

  Chloe groaned, snatched up the phone, and thrust it at him.

  He glanced at the display. It showed a photo of a pretty older woman with dramatic silver and black hair, and underneath, the word Mom.

  Great timing.

  Chloe had already seen it, so he couldn’t pass it off as work.

  He and Chloe locked eyes as the phone continued to ring.

  Owen blew out a frustrated breath. “Hang on a minute. I have to take this real quick.”

  Chloe, who had been relaxed and pliant in his hold, stiffened as she popped back up to her elbows. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding. Just…just hang on.”

  Chloe glared at him, then said in a conversational tone, “Hey, d’you mind getting your hand off my boob before you talk to your mother in the middle of a date?”

  He released her with reluctance and straightened. “It’s not my mother—”

  “I know it’s your mother, Owen, I can read.”

  The phone kept ringing.

  “Okay, you saw the screen, but—”

  Chloe shoved at him. “Let me down. And either answer it or cancel it, I don’t care which, but please make that stop ringing. So loud.”

  Eyes on Chloe, Owen answered the phone. “Hi, Mom. Everything okay? Good. Can I call you back in a bit? I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Not anymore, you’re not,” Chloe muttered as she smoothed first her skirt then her hair. She was flushed, but he wasn’t fooling himself that this heat was from arousal.

  “Uh, no. Nothing important.” Owen winced even as he said it. He shook his head at Chloe. She glared. “Okay. Thanks. Bye.” He disconnected and stuffed the phone back in his pocket.

  “Want to tell me again that wasn’t your mother?” Chloe said.

  “It wasn’t my mother. My mother chooses not to label herself with a restrictive and monolithic role that fails to recognize her constantly evolving multiplicity as a woman. That’s a direct quote. I call my mother by her first name. Giselle.” Chloe blinked. “Mom is what I call my mother-in-law.”

  Chloe sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, my god. Get out.”

  “Why?” His brows twitched together. “No, it’s not—”

  “I don’t care. Owen, I do not care. Out.” She got behind him and started making flapping motions, like she was trying to herd him without touching him. “Out!”

  Owen wanted to defend himself, but this was Chloe’s apartment and she’d asked him in no uncertain terms to leave. He spun on his heel and stalked out of the kitchen.

  “This was a disaster from the start,” he heard her say behind him.

  At the door, he turned and demanded, “You mean from when you hissed at me in the bar?”

  “I did not hiss at you. Go!”

  He snatched the door open. “Don’t need to tell me twice.”

  “I know. I’ve told you three times.”

  Shit, she had. Damn it. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more sorry. I want to hear goodbye.”

  He stood on one side of the open door, and Chloe stood on the other. Owen laughed.

  “This is funny, is it?” she said.

  “Kinda.” He shook his head. “I never even wanted a date in the first place.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Chloe told him, and slammed the door in his face.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Chloe stepped out of her apartment the following morning, she almost tripped over the enormous bouquet of flowers someone had propped against her front door.

  She stared down at them. “What are these for?”

  She scooped them up and took them inside, looking for a card. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and she was leaving for work. Seven o’clock was early for deliveries, wasn’t it? She hadn’t heard the doorbell at any point.

  The suspicion hit that the flowers were from Owen, and the reason she hadn’t heard the doorbell was because he’d delivered them in person.

  They were beautiful.

  Far too beautiful for a date that had ended like last night’s.

  The bouquet was a gentle hazy explosion of soft greens, marshmallow pinks and purples, and billows of frothy white. There were roses and alstroemeria, lavender and—she raised it to her nose and inhaled, eyes fluttering closed—sweet mint. The bulk of it, though, was roses, and the lavish, luxuriant bunch was tied with a complicated cascade of lavender and blush-pink silk ribbons.

  Chloe caught sight of her reflection in the kitchen window, holding the bouquet in front of her, and swallowed.

  It looked very…bridal.

  She laid the flowers down on the table where Owen had laid her not twelve hours earlier, and hunted for a card.

  She found a glittery silver envelope, and stared at it for a good minute.

  Open it and read it. It’s not going to say anything scary like Owen + Chloe 4eva.

  She opened it.

  Chloe—

  Thanks for dinner.

  Best, Owen.

  Crammed at the bottom, clearly as an afterthought:

  I’m not married. Mom—Janet—is my ex-mother-in-law.

  Thank god.

  It had taken Chloe hours to fall asleep, kept awake by images of Owen going home to his wife.

  At least with Stephen she’d been one of a string of clueless women he rotated in and out of his bed, fitting them in around surgeries and golf.

  Chloe the laid-back hippie had been for easy Sundays, or so she’d heard him phrase it while bragging to his friends.

  Go
od for hanging out with, offering cheerful and undemanding company, albeit a tad smothering with the way she tried to care for him all the time.

  She’d overheard this delightful summary of herself as a romantic partner while in a crowded restaurant on Market on a Saturday.

  She was there for lunch with some girlfriends, including Anna, and hadn’t been paying any attention to the three men who were seated behind them. The restaurant was busy. It had been hard enough to hear what the people at her own table were saying, but some part of her must have tuned in to his familiar voice, because when she heard her name, she knew it was Stephen.

  “Chloe?” he said in that strong, in-control voice she used to love, especially in bed. “Hell, no. Chloe’s not a black-tie date. Business casual at a stretch. Chloe’s the girl I call to chill out on a beach with, or go to the farmer’s market.”

  “She’s the hippie, right?” one of his friends said.

  “Yeah. Although—” big laugh, “—she’ll get pissy with you if you say the h-word. Charlotte’s the woman I call for something like tonight’s benefit gala. Classy, elegant. Looks spectacular in Armani, so we match. If she’s not available, I call Ashley. But not Chloe. I can’t imagine Chloe dressed up. She doesn’t even wear heels. She’s a physical therapist, said she knew exactly what heels were doing to her feet and knees, and no amount of sexy was worth the damage.”

  Chloe had been stunned.

  Instead of confronting him, she’d sat there, cheeks burning, as she processed the fact that, far from being in the exclusive if not yet serious relationship she’d believed she was in, she was selected like an outfit when Stephen’s needs were business casual or less.

  She was still processing when Stephen and his friends had paid the bill and had gotten up to leave.

  If it hadn’t been for Simone trying to show Chloe pictures of her trip to Hawaii—“Chloe. Earth to Chloe. Chloe!”—then Stephen would never have known she’d overheard him and his awful friends. She could have ended the relationship in her own time, and in a way that offered her some dignity.

  As it was, he’d looked over his shoulder, met her mortified gaze and…shrugged. He walked away.

  It had been that simple.

  They’d met at a farmer’s market on a Sunday where, she had to assume, he’d been less interested in the apples and more interested in shopping for a hippie girlfriend to add to his harem.

  They’d seen each other whenever Stephen wasn’t swamped with the demands of being a neurosurgeon and a professional asshole.

  Since both jobs took up a lot of his time, this hadn’t amounted to many dates.

  All in all, she counted twelve. And after that day in the restaurant, he hadn’t even called to explain. Or apologize.

  Or attempt to schedule her for an easy Sunday.

  Chloe hadn’t called him, either.

  It took her a good six months to realize that, although their relationship hadn’t been serious, she’d still been deeply hurt.

  It wasn’t that she’d thought he was The One. She hadn’t. He was attractive and charming, successful and smooth, but he hadn’t set her heart on fire.

  It was more the realization that this attractive, charming, successful man thought it was acceptable to treat women the way that he’d treated her, and Ashley, and Charlotte, and who knows how many others.

  The breathtaking ease with which he’d done it, and had then dropped her without a word, as if she wasn’t even worth acknowledging, had left her feeling…bruised somehow.

  Bruised, wary, and disconnected from the possibility of opening herself up to romance.

  And then she ran into Detective Owen Vance, a man who made her uncomfortable, irritated, turned on, and finally furious.

  But not, thank god, the other woman.

  A man who, despite the fact he “never wanted a date in the first place,” had bought her expensive flowers as an apology for an evening gone wrong, and had the decency to give her an explanation before exiting her life.

  Chloe didn’t have a vase big enough for the bouquet, so she filled the bathroom sink with water. She stuffed the flowers in there, planning to deal with them when she got home, and ran out the door before she was any later.

  As she drove across town, she attempted to mentally compose a thank-you text. She was still coming up blank when she arrived at her client’s house.

  It didn’t matter.

  By then, she’d remembered that the first thing she’d done after she’d slammed the door on him was grab her phone and delete his contact details.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Owen let himself into the two-story townhouse in Noe Valley and called out, “Anyone home?” as he hung his jacket on the pegs by the front door.

  “Owen?” Bruce Spenser yelled from the living room. “That you?”

  “Hey, Dad.” Owen wandered in. “How’s it going?”

  “Great.” Bruce’s words were clear today and his color was good. He sat in his recliner, a small table placed alongside with the TV remote, an iPad, his cell phone, a jug of water and a glass lined up and within easy reach. “What brings you out here on a Saturday morning?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d stop by for coffee. Maybe take a look at the gutters while I’m here.”

  “Gutters.” Bruce rolled his eyes. “Janet called you?”

  Owen grinned.

  “The woman simply cannot not fuss. I told her I’d call someone next week. My ladder-climbing days might be behind me, but I am more than capable of hiring a guy to do these things. Look. Easy. I pick up the phone and—” He jerked and fumbled the phone, knocking it off the table to bounce on the carpet. “Shit.”

  Owen bent and swept it up.

  “That went well,” Bruce grumbled.

  “I don’t mind helping out. I want to.”

  “You should be doing other stuff on your weekends.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything other than cleaning out your in-laws’ gutters. Which, between you and me? I don’t think need cleaning. I think she’s looking for an excuse to get you here.”

  It did fit Janet’s MO. “Like I said, I don’t mind. My weekend is wide open.”

  Bruce frowned.

  Before he could start up with his usual fretting over how Owen worked too much—this from the man who’d worked sixteen-hour days until a stroke last year had put a brutally abrupt end to his career as a corporate lawyer—Owen said, “Mom in the kitchen?”

  “Yep. Baking cookies. Now I know why. They’re for you. Just saying, though, I never got cookies for cleaning the gutters. Not once in the last thirty-five years. That’s over a quarter of a century scraping shit out of gutters, Owen. No cookies.”

  “I’ll bring you a plate.”

  “You do that.”

  “Honey!” Janet called when Owen went through to the kitchen and stood, inhaling the delicious combined scent of chocolate and vanilla. “Perfect timing.” She straightened and set the sheet of cookies she’d taken out of the oven onto the countertop. She waved at them.

  “I’ve told you before, you don’t have to bribe me with baked goods to keep me coming here.”

  “Can’t hurt though, can it? And this isn’t bribery. It’s appreciation.”

  Owen didn’t need cookies to know Janet and Bruce appreciated him, either. They always had. They’d appreciated him for being a solid and steady boyfriend when May had first brought him home from college. They’d appreciated him when he’d graduated from boyfriend to fiancé, and then from fiancé to husband. They’d appreciated him as an excellent son-in-law through the ups and downs of his and May’s ten-year marriage, and when May died, they’d turned themselves inside out to let him know that he would never stop being their son, no matter what.

  A part of him couldn’t help wondering if they’d feel the same if he told them the truth about him and May.

  Owen went out to the garage for the ladder and the spare pair of work gloves he’d taken to leaving there. He spread a
tarp under the ladder and climbed up. He peered into the gutter that, according to Janet, overflowed every time it rained.

  “You sure this is the one?” he asked Janet. She was standing at the bottom of the ladder.

  “Absolutely.”

  Owen gazed down at her.

  She nodded encouragement.

  Okay. He scraped the meagre handful of leaves and debris within reach toward him, then dropped it onto the tarp. He climbed back down the ladder.

  “Was that it?” Janet asked.

  “Almost.”

  Owen slid the ladder along and ran up it again. By the time he’d cleaned the length of the gutter, there was, oh, maybe two whole handfuls of crap sitting on the large plastic sheet.

  To be thorough, he filled a bucket with water and slowly emptied it into the gutter, checking for leaks, but what do you know? No leaks.

  He tidied up and found Janet in the kitchen. She’d made a French press of coffee and had arranged the now-cooled cookies on a large plate. “All done?” she asked when he came in and washed up at the sink.

  “Yup.”

  “Thank you, Owen. Cookie?”

  Owen sat at the table and selected a cookie, biting into it with relish. Any minute now, she was going to tell him why she’d lured him here.

  “I have news,” Janet blurted.

  A crumb stuck in his throat, and Owen took a hasty gulp of coffee to wash it down.

  She continued, “I wanted to be the one to tell you. I thought it best we have this conversation face to face.”

  “Why?” Owen sat up. “What’s wrong? Is it Bruce? Is it you? You’re not sick, are you?”

  Janet’s face softened. “No, honey. It’s good news.”

  Owen’s shoulders slowly relaxed. “Maybe lead with that next time?”

  “Tyler and Greg are getting married!”

  “That’s great!”

  Owen already knew. Over the past week, Tyler had called him from San Diego a grand total of twenty-three times, struggling to get up the nerve to propose to his boyfriend.