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“I know I said it before,” mused Lili, “but hot damn, you clean up well.”
“I think you just have the magic touch with your camera.”
It had been yonks since Jules felt anywhere close to sexy and just slipping on that new dress had started something. Lili had applied her make-up, although she insisted she didn’t know what she was doing. But she did. Between the dress and the charcoal eyes, Jules looked hot. Possibly smokin’.
Or so she had thought until Tad threw in his piece. Five hours later and she was still furious.
Not once since she’d become pregnant with Evan had she felt like an attractive woman. She felt tired and worn and stupid and sometimes, horny, but never attractive. Until Lili had started clicking and talking in that soothing voice of hers, the one that drew out female power in all her subjects. She had felt it coursing through her as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, leaned forward to show her assets, leaned back to play it cool.
For a brief moment, when Tad said the photo was gorgeous, her heart had soared, then crashed and burned with his qualifying follow-up. Of course he was just being nice when he said it looked good. Tad was her friend and he didn’t think of her that way. So proven, time and time again.
“You don’t think it’s too much?” she asked Lili. Maybe it was a bit come-hither. It was the kind of aura she had given off in London, which was why Tad’s comment had struck so hard in her heart. It was all she had to offer, so she had played it to the hilt.
“Forget what Tad said,” Lili said, reading Jules’s mind. “He’s just doing his Italian macho thing. No woman of mine and all that.”
“What do you mean? I’m not his woman.”His woman.It gave her a sensuous thrill to say it.
“I mean the protective streak that all Italian guys feel about any woman in their immediate circle. Tad feels a responsibility to you as a friend and practical relative.” Lili considered her. “There was a time I thought…”
“You thought what?”
She shook her head, but Jules knew this trick. She’d seen her work it on Jack, this “oh, never mind, I must have been mistaken” thing, and before Jack knew it, he was confessing some misdemeanor or doing whatever the hell Lili had wanted him to do in the first place.
“What, Lili?”
“I always thought you guys would make a go of it. I know you said once it was a non-starter, but you never really explained why.”
Evan and Jack’s noisy laughter provided cover for their conversation, but Jules lowered her voice all the same.
“I made a pass at him and he turned me down.”
Lili’s DeLuca blue eyes widened. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. It was almost a year ago, just before you and Jack got married. I was feeling hormonal and lonely and before I knew it Tad was holding me through some ugly sobbing fit and I was laying one on him.”
“Yowza. And?”
“And, that’s all she wrote. He jumped off the sofa—uh, this sofa, actually—like I was diseased, said it was the worst idea in the history of ideas, and hightailed it out of here as if I had asked him what china pattern we should get for the wedding registry. Later, we talked and he told me that it was for the best, that we’re great as friends and he’d hate to ruin a good thing, yadda, yadda. And I agreed. It was a moment of lady weakness and it had been a long time since someone I wasn’t related to had held me. He smelled good and I had an attack of the crazies.”
Lili looked skeptical. “So how do you feel about him now?”
“He’s my friend. One of my closest friends and he was right. It would have been awful if we got together and it fizzled. We’d have to see each other all the time. It’s not like we can avoid it.” She couldn’t bear it if all their meetings were anywhere near as awkward as those first few had been after her smooch attack.
“But what if it hadn’t fizzled? What if the two of you are better as something more than friends?”
Too often, she had let her mind wander to how good it would be to have Tad in her life that way. Her lover, her partner, a father for Evan. But they were too entwined in each other’s lives with the practically incestuous natures of their respective relatives. The fallout from crossing the line and failing would be devastating.
“It’s better this way, but I don’t want to be a nun. I’m ready to get out there.”
Therewas a pretty scary place, but she had to do this. For herself, and for Evan, especially now that Simon was hovering on the edges ready to attack.
Lili opened her mouth to respond but luckily, Shane and Cara walked in from the kitchen, having just entered through the back door. After making sure Cara was sitting comfortably, Shane plucked Evan out of Jack’s hands and tickled him silly. Evan screamed “Chay”, which was what he called his uncle Shane.
Jules had been worried sick when he hadn’t spoken by the time he was fourteen months, but the pediatrician said he was at all the right developmental milestones otherwise and Jules shouldn’t be concerned. How could she not be? She knew that her dyslexia had nothing to do with her intelligence but there was still that nagging thought that she had passed on some intellectual deficiency to her son.
The relief when, a month later, he said his first word—Mummy—had been so overwhelming she had broken down. Jack found her sitting on this very floor, playing building bricks with her son while the tears streamed down her cheeks. Now at eighteen months, he jabbered constantly and she never got sick of hearing him.
“So how’s the profile looking?” Cara asked.
