Coming Home Page 4

  “Oh shit. Sorry,” he said with a laugh, taking his hands out of his pockets and reaching inside his jacket. He pulled out the tiny sandwich bag with the bracelet inside, holding it out to her, and she unfolded her arms, ripping her gloves off and tucking them under her elbow as she took it from him.

  She had the bracelet out in an instant, taking the sandwich bag between her teeth to free her hands as she held her forearm against her stomach, trying to close the clasp around her wrist.

  The wind was relentless, blowing the plastic bag and strands of her dark, wavy hair into her face, and every few seconds, she would flick her head to the side, trying to clear her vision while her numb fingers struggled with the tiny clasp.

  Danny pressed his lips together, fighting a smile as he watched her blow a raspberry with the bag still between her teeth, trying to get an errant strand out of her eyes. He reached down, taking the plastic between his fingers.

  She jolted as her eyes flashed to his, and he quirked his brow, giving the bag a little tug.

  Leah released it from between her teeth, and he crumpled the bag and shoved it back in his pocket. “Better?”

  She smiled self-consciously. “Yeah, thanks,” she said, her eyes dropping back to the task at hand.

  When she finally closed the clasp, Leah wrapped her hand around the bracelet, holding it against her skin and closing her eyes. She exhaled heavily as her entire body relaxed, almost as if she had just been relieved of some terrible pain.

  She looked so vulnerable standing there like that, and Danny suddenly had the ridiculous urge to pull her against his chest and wrap his arms around her.

  “Thank you,” she said as she put her gloves back on.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Okay, so,” she exhaled, starting to walk backward. “I’ll let you get back to your friend.”

  “Actually…he couldn’t make it.”

  What the hell are you doing?

  She stopped short, her shoulders dropping. “Oh. Well, now I feel bad.”

  “Why do you feel bad?”

  “Because you came up here for nothing.”

  “No I didn’t. I came up here to give you back your bracelet.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said with a huff, and Danny smiled.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I work near here. I was gonna stop in and check on some shit anyway.”

  Yeah. That sounded good.

  “Oh. Alright,” she said as she started to walk backward again. “Well, thanks again.”

  With every click of her heel against the pavement as she walked away from him, his unintended resolution became stronger.

  And when she turned her back to him, he couldn’t stop himself.

  “Hey, Leah?”

  She stopped, cocking her head over her shoulder.

  “Since we’re here, did you want to grab lunch?”

  Stupid. So fucking stupid.

  She turned to face him, but her expression was hesitant. Almost startled.

  “Oh. I, um…I don’t really…I mean…”

  “If you’re hungry,” he offered. “Since we both made the drive.”

  She started chewing on the corner of her lip, glancing around as if looking for a way out of the situation.

  Leave it alone, asshole.

  “So, are you hungry?” he asked, ignoring the voice in his head.

  She pressed her lips together as she shrugged slightly. “A little.”

  He took a step back and opened the door, gesturing for her to enter, and Leah looked at the entrance, still wavering.

  “Did you know they have tiramisu cheesecake here?”

  She swiped the hair out of her eyes, looking back at him.

  “Godiva too,” he said. “And Reese’s.”

  Her posture relaxed a bit as the corners of her mouth turned up slightly.

  “No dice?” he asked. “How about lemon-raspberry? Caramel apple? Just tell me what’s gonna get you in here.”

  She laughed then, looking down as she shook her head. Danny watched her shoulders rise as she took a deep breath, and then she lifted her head and walked toward him.

  “Just so you know, you had me at Godiva,” she said, continuing past him into the restaurant.

  Danny chuckled as he followed her inside and approached the hostess, and she led them to a small table up against the far window. He leaned over, pulling the chair out for Leah before he walked around to his side.

  “Thanks,” she said softly, removing her jacket and hanging it on the back of the chair.

  As Danny removed his own coat, his eyes instantly dropped to take her in. He felt like such a scumbag, but he couldn’t help it. Everything had happened so fast back at Gram’s that day, so he hadn’t really noticed—although looking at her now, he couldn’t understand how he’d overlooked it.

  She had one of the most incredible bodies he’d ever seen.

  She wore a fitted sweater that reached her hips with some type of stretchy black pants that emphasized the tone of her legs. Slim waist. Phenomenal chest. She was long and lean, with gorgeous, feminine curves in all the right places.

  And a pair of knee-high boots.

  Jesus.

  He forced his eyes back up to her face, realizing what a creep he must have looked like.

  Her eyes were on his chest before they flitted up to his face and then away, and he tried to hide his self-satisfied smirk as he sat across from her.

  A waitress approached their table before he could say anything, handing them a set of menus and taking their drink order. As soon as she left, Leah opened her menu and looked down, scanning the pages as she chewed on the side of her lip. He could see her body moving slightly as she tapped her foot restlessly under the table.

  She was uncomfortable.

  Danny would have chalked it up to his insensitive ogling, except he knew she hadn’t caught him. Besides, she’d seemed uneasy long before that, from the moment he asked her to join him.

  He had no business being there with her. It was an asinine decision, any way he looked at it. But the damage had already been done. So now, he wanted to make the best of it.

  Even if it would never go beyond this afternoon.

  “So,” Danny said, flipping open his menu, and Leah glanced up at him.

  “So,” she said with a tentative smile.

  They looked at each other until Leah started chewing on her lip again, dropping her eyes back to the menu.

  “Where were you driving home from?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Last night. You said you were driving home and trying to stay awake. Where were you coming from?”

  “Oh,” Leah said, looking up from the menu. “My dad’s house.”

  “Ah,” Danny nodded. “Big family gathering for the holiday?”

  “Not really,” she said. “What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Dinner with my sister and her boyfriend-of-the-minute. Stopped by Gram’s for a bit. Found your bracelet,” he said, nodding toward her wrist. “And then I hung out with my buddy at his job.”

  Leah made a face. “He had to work on Christmas?”

  “He’s a bartender. It got busier than they thought it would, so he got called in,” Danny said, turning a page of the menu.

  “On Christmas night? Where does he bartend?”

  “The Rabbit Hole.”

  “Here in White Plains? That’s only a few blocks from here.”

  Danny lifted his eyes, a slow smile curving his lips. “I know where it is.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head quickly as she mumbled, “Right. Duh.”

  “Have you been there?” he asked, watching the most attractive blush color her cheeks as she refocused on the menu.

  She nodded. “A while back.”

  “That means a lot to you, huh?”

  Leah looked up at him questioningly, and he pointed to her wrist, where she was carefully rolling the bracelet between her fingers.<
br />
  She dropped it like it burned her, looking somewhat embarrassed as she brought her hands under the table and gripped the side of her chair, shifting it slightly.

  “It was my mom’s,” she said, picking up the menu and studying it with renewed intensity.

  Danny watched her for a moment before lowering his eyes. There were a hundred reasons he could think of that might have caused her to use the past tense in that last sentence, and none of them were good.

  The waitress approached the table with their drinks then, and Leah visibly relaxed, looking like she wanted to jump up and hug her for the interruption.

  After they had placed their orders, Danny reached for Leah’s menu and handed them both to the waitress.

  “By the way,” he said. “I never got a chance to thank you.”

  “For?” she asked, leaning over to sip her iced tea.

  “For being so nice to Gram the other day.”

  Leah smiled the first genuine smile he’d seen since they entered the restaurant. “She’s so sweet.”

  “Yeah, a little too sweet. I don’t know what she was thinking, inviting a complete stranger who could have been a lunatic into her house.”

  Leah raised her eyebrows.

  “No offense to you or anything,” he added quickly. “It’s just that…well, you never know…you know?”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said with a laugh. “I totally understand you being protective of your grandmother.”

  “She’s not my grandmother.”

  Leah pulled her brow together. “She’s not? You call her Gram.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. Why the hell did he just tell her that? “It’s just…I grew up with her grandson. So we’re sort of like family.”

  Please just drop it, he prayed silently.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Wow? What’s wow?”

  “I don’t know,” Leah answered, stirring her drink with her straw. “It’s just, I thought it was really nice of you to do all that work around the house for her when I assumed she was family. But, now that I know she’s not…I don’t know. It’s even nicer of you, I guess.”

  Danny looked down, shredding his napkin with his fingers. “I guess.”

  Even if he wanted to talk about this, which he didn’t, there was no way he could ever explain why he did what he did for Gram. It had nothing to do with being nice. The truth was, he could work in her house every hour of every day for the rest of his life, and it would still never be enough.

  “So, you work near here?”

  Danny swept the remnants of his napkin into a neat pile before he looked up. She was looking at him with something that could only be described as empathy.

  Their first piece of common ground: prohibited topics of conversation.

  “Yeah, about fifteen minutes from here.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I own an auto repair shop. D&B Automotive.”

  “Really?” she asked, squeezing another lemon into her iced tea. “That’s interesting.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure.” She shrugged, and Danny smiled.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Well, it might not be interesting to me,” she said through a laugh. “But I’m sure it is to someone who’s into cars, which I’m assuming you are.”

  Danny smirked, resting his elbows on the table. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Really? That’s interesting.”

  She sat back against the seat, folding her arms.

  “I’m serious!” he said. “That really is interesting to me. I couldn’t do it. You must have the patience of a saint.”

  Leah shrugged. “There are good days and bad days, just like any other job. I’m sure there are days that try your patience at the shop, right?”

  “True,” he said. “But I’m allowed to curse at the cars.”

  She laughed before she shook her head at him. She had the prettiest laugh. It made him want to spend the rest of the afternoon finding ways to get her to do it again.

  “So, what do you teach?”

  “Tenth-grade English.”

  He scrunched up his face, and Leah rolled her eyes.

  “Clearly, your favorite subject.”

  “Is it anyone’s?” he asked, and she scoffed, throwing a sugar packet at him.

  “Jerk.”

  He grinned, picking up the packet and twirling it between his fingers. “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of master of the English language? I would’ve thought you could come up with a much better word for me than jerk.”

  “Believe me, I’m just getting warmed up.”

  Danny burst out laughing as the waitress approached the table with their appetizers. She placed the plates down in front of them, and Danny reached for the pepper, freezing when he saw Leah begin to work away at her salad with a knife and fork.

  “What are you doing?”

  She glanced up. “Cutting my lettuce.”

  “Cutting your lettuce,” he repeated.

  “Mm-hm. I always do.”

  He put the pepper down, watching her. “May I ask why?”

  Leah reached into her salad and held up a piece of lettuce that was the size of his palm. “You can’t really bite lettuce, so either I can attempt to cram this ridiculous thing into my mouth like a savage, or I can cut it into respectable, human-sized bites.”

  Danny reached over, taking the piece of lettuce out of her hand. He turned it over a few times as if examining it before he shoved the entire thing in his mouth.

  “Totally doable,” he mumbled incoherently.

  “Mmm. Not to mention extremely attractive,” Leah said, and he chewed his mouthful of food, smiling triumphantly.

  “You have dimples when you smile.”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” he laughed.

  When Leah didn’t respond, he said, “So, was there a point to that comment, or were you just stating the obvious?”

  She kept her eyes on her salad as she continued to cut. “Just stating the obvious, I guess.”

  He laughed softly before he leaned on the table with his forearms. “Dimples turn you on.”

  “What?” she scoffed.

  “Oh, sorry. I thought we were still stating the obvious.”

  “Oh my God,” she laughed, pointing at him with her fork. “You are cocky as hell.”

  “Nah, not really. I just like it when you blush.”

  “I’m not blushing,” she mumbled, pressing the backs of her fingers against her cheek.

  He smiled before he said, “So, what’s the deal? Gram said you used to live in her house?”

  Leah nodded. “We moved when I was twelve, though. It was so nice of her to let me see the inside. Up until that point, I still kind of felt like that house was mine.” She shrugged bashfully. “Silly, huh?”

  “Not at all,” he said sincerely.

  She took a deep breath, seeming to contemplate something before she said, “Like in the side yard. There was this block of concrete that cracked all the way through when my dad dropped his toolbox on it, so he had to remove all the broken pieces and re-pour it. And my sister and brother and I—we all put our hands in it while it was drying.” She smiled. “We were pretending we were movie stars. And so my mom came out and caught us, and we totally thought she was going to yell at us.” Leah shook her head as she said, “But instead she leaned down and put her hand in it too. And then we all wrote our initials underneath with a popsicle stick, and my mom wrote the date.”

  Leah looked down at a strand of her hair as she twirled it through her fingers. “Obviously you know it’s not there anymore. When I first saw that it was gone, I got really upset, but then I realized I’ll always remember that story, even if there’s no physical proof of it in that yard. Just like everything else that happened in that house.” She released her hair and looked up at him.

  It felt like his heart stopped beating.

 
Say something.

  “If you really think about it,” she said, “most of the memories you have from when you’re small aren’t actually yours. They’re given to you by other people, either from a picture, or a story, or a video. We’re told or shown that it happened to us, and it becomes one of our memories. But that day with the cement?” She shrugged. “That was the first memory that was actually mine.”

  He blinked at her, nearly choking on the words that were stuck in his throat.

  “Anyway,” she said with a wave of her hand. “It was just really nice of her to invite me in. It was the highlight of my day. Everything pretty much went to hell after that.”

  “Right,” he said distractedly. “You lost the bracelet.”

  “Well, that, and then the flat on I-95.”

  Danny ran his hand through his hair. “That’s a pretty shitty place to get a flat,” he said, trying to get his bearings. The further they got from the moment, the harder it became for him to say the words.

  “Tell me about it. It’s even worse in the middle of a snowstorm.”

  He pulled in a breath between his teeth, shaking his head. “I forgot it snowed that night. What did you end up doing?”

  “I called Triple A and waited over an hour for them to get there. I was starving. I was so tempted to eat the food I’d just bought for Christmas dinner. And I ended up peeing in a plastic bag.”

  The second the words left her mouth, she dropped her fork and covered her face with both hands.

  Danny’s eyes flashed up, his expression incredulous before he burst out laughing.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You did not need to know that.”

  He tried to rein in his laugh, but it was useless, and Leah shook her head, her face still hidden behind her hands.

  “Okay, now I’m blushing,” she mumbled. “Why do I have no filter when I’m talking to you?”

  “It’s okay,” Danny said, and she spread her fingers, peeking at him from in between them. “If you want, I can tell you some pissing-in-public stories that will blow yours out of the water.”

  “No thanks, I’m good,” she said with a laugh, dropping her hands from her face and picking up her fork.

  “You really should learn how to change a tire, though,” Danny said before taking a bite of his spring roll.