Almost Like Love(51)

He could never get tired of watching her. But, as impossible as it had seemed at first, the desire for sleep finally stole over him.

He smoothed a palm over Kate’s curves one more time and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Then he closed his eyes and let himself drift.




He must have rolled over at some point, because when he woke up he was on his stomach and Kate’s hands were on his back.

He smiled into the pillow. “Hey,” he said, his voice rusty with sleep.

Her hands stilled for a moment before they started to move again.

“Hey, yourself,” she said softly. “I didn’t get a good look at this tattoo before. It’s beautiful.”

She meant the hawk that stretched across his back, its outstretched wings touching the tips of his shoulder blades.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice still muffled by the pillow. He could have rolled over, but her touch felt so good he didn’t want her to stop.

“So . . . can I hear the rest of the story now?” she asked.

“The rest of the story?”

“Yes. You only told me the first part that night on your terrace. Remember? You said I could hear part two some other time.”

Part two of his life history wasn’t anything he liked to talk about. But he had sort of promised, and there was something about the intimacy of being here with Kate—the soft quiet of the room, the lateness of the hour, the feel of her fingertips tracing over his skin—that made it seem almost natural to tell her things he never told anyone.

He rolled onto his side and rested his head on his bent arm. Kate lay down beside him and mirrored his position, smiling into his eyes.

He’d forgotten how beautiful hers were. He reached out a hand to stroke her hair, then brushed the back of his knuckles over her cheek.

“You’re sure you want to hear this?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, then. Well.” He thought about how to begin. “Right before I started high school, my mother was laid off. It had been hard to make ends meet even before that, and we had to leave our apartment in Brooklyn and move to a cheaper place in the Bronx. Mom started working two jobs, a call center during the day and waitressing at night.”

“I take it your father was out of the picture.”

“Yeah. He left when I was two, just after Tina was born. I don’t remember him, and Mom never talked about him. We didn’t have any other family, so it was just the three of us, and with my mom gone so much, it was my job to take care of my sister. We were living in a much rougher neighborhood than we’d grown up in, and I wanted to be sure I could protect her—not to mention myself. I’d gotten a lot bigger the year before, and I was a good athlete, which helped . . . but I also got in with a tough group of kids.”

“A gang?”

“No, but we got into plenty of trouble. Alcohol and fighting, mostly.”

“Is that when you got the tattoos?”

“Yeah.”

“They really are beautiful,” she said. “And they’re sort of Dungeons & Dragons–y, aren’t they? The swords and the hawk and the mythical creatures, and all the Celtic knot work.”

“Celtic tattoos were hot at the time, but yeah, it probably also reminded me of my Dungeons & Dragons days. And since the point of getting inked up was to make people think I was tough, it’s probably no accident that I chose warrior images.”

She reached out and touched the phoenix on his chest. “If I were a guy with tattoos this gorgeous, I’d walk around shirtless from May to October.”

That made him smile. “Not if you were a well-respected media executive.”

“Well, maybe not. But that reminds me—I’m still missing a piece of your story. How did you go from tattooed troublemaker to well-respected media executive?”

He picked up his narrative again.

“The kids I hung out with got into trouble, like I said—but we usually managed to stay on the right side of the law. Then I fell in love with my best friend’s older sister.”

“How old was she?”

“Nineteen. I was seventeen, so I didn’t think I had a chance. But she agreed to go out with me, and we started dating.” He paused. “What I didn’t realize was that she was using me as cover with her parents, who thought I was a nice boy in spite of my best efforts to be a badass. And compared with the guy she was actually dating, I was a nice boy.”

“She was dating somebody else?”

“Yeah. A drug dealer who ran an underground fight club. Paula introduced me to him one night—of course without mentioning the fact that they’d been together for two years. He got me into fighting by telling me I could make good money. I thought if I earned enough I could take care of myself and help out at home.”