All A Man Can Be

“You could have called.”

“And to bring you dessert.”

“You could have waited.”

“And to deliver your mail.”

She must have collected it from his mat when she let herself into his apartment.

He stuck out his palm. “Fine. Hand it over.”

She marched around him, scooped a sheaf of envelopes and circulars from the mess on the coffee table, and thrust it at him. “There. Special delivery.”

“Gee, thanks. But you shouldn’t have.” He started to thumb through the stack. “There’s nothing here that can’t—”

A heavy cream envelope with an embossed return address snagged his attention. Johnson, Neil and Younger. Since when did high-priced Gold Coast law firms troll for business in tiny Eden?

“What?” Tess said. “What is it?”

Mark slit the flap and unfolded the letter inside.

Dear Mr. Delucca, I am writing to you, blah blah, guardian ad litem— What the hell was that? —for Daniel Wainscott. More blah, inform you of the passing of Elizabeth Jane Wainscott—

His eye caught. His mind stumbled. Betsy? Betsy was dead?

—will suggested that you are Daniel’s father and requested that you become his guardian.

The news slammed his chest like a swinging boom. The air left his lungs. The room tilted.

“Mark? What’s the matter?”

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He could only read while his world capsized around him.

Phrases leaped off the page. The words were jumbled and his vision blurred, but the meaning seemed horribly clear.

…no legally binding effect.

Daniel’s grandparents, Robert and Helen Wainscott, have expressed interest in adopting Daniel and appear ready to pursue all legal avenues to do so.

…advise you……choose to prove paternity……seek custody of Daniel…

“Mark!” Tess touched his arm.

The letter in his grip quivered like the edge of a sail. Mark folded it and tucked it back into the stack. But the words still burned and swirled in his brain.

…possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father……act quickly to avoid losing your rights…

“It’s nothing,” he lied. “A mistake. Want a pastry?”

Chapter 2

She was pretty when she smiled.

Mark paused in the dark entryway. Behind the bar, chubby Joe Scholz was trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of the Blue Moon’s cash register to Nicole Reed. Her blond head was bowed. Her pink lips curved in a secret smile. And with the suddenness of a squall, swift, blind, animal lust took Mark by the throat and shook him at the root.

He sucked in his breath and waited in the dark, his blood roaring, until his eyes adjusted fully to the dim room and his body recovered from the impact of that smile.

Nicole glanced toward the entrance and saw him. Just for a second, surprise and relief shone in those blue eyes. And then her slim shoulders squared, and her smile disappeared as if it had never been.

Mark took another breath. Good.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said in her precise, private school voice.

He forced himself to move forward; summoned a shrug. “Then I guess you didn’t look at the work schedule.”

Her lips firmed. “I looked.”

“Then you should have known I was on at four.”

“I thought you hadn’t decided yet whether you would continue to work here.”

He liked the way she took the battle to him, instead of dithering around. But he couldn’t afford to like her too much. He couldn’t afford to say too much, either.

The problem was, he hadn’t decided what to do yet. Nobody in town would believe it—the Delucca men weren’t exactly known for sticking around—but Mark’s pride wouldn’t let him walk away without at least giving notice.

Not to mention that as long as there was the slightest chance there was a kid out there somewhere with the Wainscott name and Delucca genes, this could be a really bad time for Mark to find himself unemployed.

Mark’s jaw tightened. No, he wouldn’t mention that.

He wouldn’t even think about it.

Much.

He lifted up a section of the counter and slid behind the bar. “You need a bartender.”

Nicole slipped out of his way, watching him with her too-cool, too-perceptive blue eyes. In the cigarette-and-beer-tinged air, her scent lingered, expensive and out of place. “Joe is here.”

Joe was doing his best to fade into the bottles behind the bar. “Joe’s off now.”

“I would have managed.”

“They teach you how to mix drinks in business school?”

“No,” she admitted. “But I pour a mean glass of chardonnay.”

Mark stopped inventorying the glassware for the evening rush to stare at her. Little Miss Michigan Avenue wasn’t actually poking fun at herself, was she?

She offered him a small smile. It didn’t transform her face the way the other one did, but it was still very, very nice. “Thank you for coming in,” she said. Like she meant it.

He lifted one shoulder. “Don’t thank me. That’s what you pay me for.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Uh-oh. Another minute, and he might start liking this chick. And that would be as big a mistake as mixing beer and brandy.

“Try staying out of my way,” he suggested, not caring if he sounded like a jerk. Hell, hoping he sounded like a jerk, like somebody she wouldn’t in a million years want to get to know better. The last thing he needed was another sweet-smelling, spoiled blonde complicating his life.

…need to consider the possibility that you are, indeed, Daniel’s father.

Damn.

A couple of regulars dragged in—the eight-to-four shift was ending at the nearby paper plant—and Mark greeted them with smiles and relief.

“Hey, Tom, Ed. How’s it going?” He moved smoothly to pull a beer and pour a whiskey, comfortable with the demands of his job, easy in the world he’d created.

A world where he knew almost everybody by name and could give them what they wanted without having to think about it too much.

Okay, he was good, Nicole admitted several hours into Mark’s shift.

Good to look at, too, she thought as he turned to set a drink at the other end of the bar and she had the chance to admire his hard, lean back and the fit of his Rough Rider jeans.

Not that his appearance mattered, she reminded herself. She was here to evaluate his job performance, not his butt. She stole another surreptitious glance. Although at the moment she had no complaint with either one.

He didn’t spin or flip or juggle bottles. Unlike Joe, who had kept up an unthreatening stream of jokes and small talk through the afternoon, he didn’t try to entertain the customers. Surely he could offer them more than, “What can I get you?” and “Be with you in a sec.”

But he never got an order wrong, Nicole noticed. He never asked a customer to repeat one, either. His memory—and his patience—astounded her.

It wavered only once, when an older man in a well-cut suit and ill-fitting hairpiece gulped half his drink and then demanded a new one.

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Can I ask you what’s wrong with what you’ve got?”

The older man scowled. “I ordered a Manhattan, damn it. I can’t even taste the scotch in this.”

Mark whisked the offending drink away. “Let me take care of that for you.”

Nicole shifted on her stool at the other end of the bar. Maybe the University of Chicago didn’t offer courses in mixology, but…

“What’s in a Manhattan?” she asked as Mark approached her perch.

“Vermouth, bourbon. Bitters.” He barely glanced at her. His eyes and hands were busy on his bottles. Below his turned-back sleeves, he had long, lean hands and muscled forearms and—heavens, was that a tattoo riding the curve of his biceps, peeking below the cuff? “But our guy doesn’t want that,” he continued. “He wants a Rob Roy.”

Nicole tore her attention from his arm. Liquor was expensive. She wasn’t giving away free drinks because Mr. Hairpiece didn’t know his ingredients. “I’m sure if you explained to him that he ordered the wrong drink—”

“—I’d be wasting my breath.” Mark added a twist of lemon peel to the fresh drink. “The customer’s always right, boss. I’m surprised they didn’t teach you that in business school,” he added over his shoulder.

Cocky, conceited, know-it-all jerk. Nicole twisted her rings in her lap.

“Well, hel-lo, pretty lady.” A warm, male, lookee-what-we-got-here voice swam up on her other side. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

Nicole squeezed her eyes briefly shut. She was a loser magnet, that’s what she was. She took a quick peek through her lashes at the man crowding her bar stool. Not quite young, not exactly good-looking, and married. She would bet on it. She sighed.

“That’s because I haven’t been here before.”

He laughed as if she’d said something funny. “Guess it’s up to me to make you feel welcome, then.”

“No, thank you, I—”

He leaned into her, his stomach nudging the back of her arm, his face earnest and too close. “What’ll you have?”

“Miss Reed doesn’t need you to buy her a drink, Carl.” Mark DeLucca’s voice was edged with amusement and something else. “She owns the bar.”

The pressure on her arm eased as the man—Carl—took a step back. “This bar?”

“This very one. And if you want to come back, I suggest you take your beer and go join your pals.”

“Well, excuse me,” Carl blustered.

“You bet,” Mark said.

Nicole was grateful. Embarrassed. Defensive. The author of Losing the Losers in Your Life was adamant that a successful life plan did not include waiting for rescue.

As soon as her new admirer was out of earshot, Nicole snapped, “I could have handled him.”

Mark removed a couple of glasses from the bar and gave the surface a quick wipe down. “Old Carl would have liked that.”

Her face flamed. “I meant, I can look after myself.”

Mark paused in the act of emptying an ashtray. He gave her a quick, black, unreadable look that scanned her from the top of her smooth blond head to the glittering rings on her fingers and nodded once. “Yeah, I can see that. My mistake.”

And after that he pretty much treated her as if she wasn’t there.

Nicole squirmed on her wooden bar stool. Well, she squirmed on the inside. On the outside, she sat with perfect poise, her spine straight, her knees crossed, typing her observations into the slim-line laptop she’d set up on the bar.

Men and women on their way home from work were replaced by young people out to have a good time. Couples pressed together in the booths in the back. Singles hooked up at tables or swayed by the jukebox. Nicole sipped her Diet Pepsi and let it all wash over her, the raucous music and the flickering TV, the drifts of cigarette smoke, the bursts of laughter. It was louder, looser, more exciting than she’d imagined.

Thrilling, because now it was hers.

She typed a note about the music. The jukebox selection needed updating. She couldn’t imagine her clientele playing “Takin’ Care of Business” that often if they had an adequate choice.

Mark greeted most of his customers—her customers—by name, took their orders, poured their drinks. No one had to wait more than forty-five seconds. No one was neglected.

Well, except for Nicole. Mark kept her supplied with Pepsi and otherwise ignored her.

He did a good job for the previous owner.

Maybe. He certainly collected his fair share of tips, Nicole thought, with an eye on the beer mug beside the register. And more than his fair share of interested glances.

A sultry brunette in big hoop earrings leaned her cleavage on the bar. A giggling group of teenage girls, shrink-wrapped in skinny tops and hip-hugging jeans, bumped and nudged each other by the pool table.

Nicole watched as Mark filled their drinks and returned their smiles. The brunette licked salt from the rim of her glass. The gum-snapping cocktail waitress—Diana? Debbie?—unloaded a tray of diet sodas by the giggling girls.

Nicole’s shoulders relaxed slightly. At least her liquor license was safe for another night. Her investment was safe. Everything was going to be fine. She hadn’t made another monumental life mistake, the way her mother said and her father feared.

Nicole glanced again from the hair-flipping teenagers to the brunette laying it all out on the bar. Right. Everything was fine. Unless, of course, a fight broke out over her bartender.

Or he stole from the till.

Nicole watched Mark DeLucca unload a stack of bills from the cash register and start riffling through them. It was late. She consulted her Givenchy watch. After midnight. The front lights were out, the front door was locked, and she was alone with a man who made every tiny hair on her body stand at attention.

“What are you doing?” She hated the way her voice sounded, sharp with suspicion.

He barely glanced at her. “Daily register report.”

That sounded reassuring. He was the bar manager, she reminded herself. He had a responsibility to count the cash and figure the day’s net sales.

Correction. Had had the responsibility.

She shifted on her perch. “I can do that. Since I’m here.”

His lean back stiffened. And then he shrugged and moved away easily from the register. So easily she wondered if she’d imagined that moment of resistance.

“Be my guest,” he said.

She wasn’t his guest. She was his employer, a fact she didn’t need to remind him of. Or apologize for.

Nicole raised her chin and slid off her bar stool.

At least he could take orders, she thought, as she checked his total for the day. And he could add. Apparently he wasn’t dipping into the cash register, either. There was no reason for her to feel so gosh darn uncomfortable around the man.

No reason except he looked like an invitation to be bad.

She watched him prowl around the room, collecting glasses, emptying ashtrays. Maybe it was the hard, long body, the jet-black hair, the take-no-prisoners face. Maybe it was the wicked dark brows over those I’ve-got-a-secret eyes. Maybe it was—

—her problem. She rubbed the space between her eyebrows, as if she could massage her tension away. Her fault. The man couldn’t help the way he looked, for goodness’s sake.

He swung a chair up onto a table, the muscles flexing in his back and arms, and her stomach actually fluttered.

She frowned.

“You want to lock up, too?” Mark asked, his voice flat.

Oh, dear. She didn’t want him to think she didn’t trust him.

Although that had been one of Zack’s favorite ploys, pretending injury at her lack of trust. Don’t you trust me? he’d demanded, making her feel horrible, while he boinked every film student and wannabe actress who would lie down for his camera.

She swallowed hard. That was personal, she told herself. This was business.

She looked at Mark’s hard, expressionless face.

“You can do it,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as strained as she felt. “I’ll see you in the morning, and we can talk about procedures then. Eight o’clock.”

“Nine,” he said. At least he didn’t make a crack about her being late. “Let me walk you to your car.”

“That’s not necessary, thanks.”

He strolled closer. Her pulse jumped. She made an effort not to retreat. “Because you can take care of yourself.”

“I can, you know.” Suddenly it was important that he see her as a competent, confident individual, and not another bar bunny. “I’ve taken self-defense classes.”

“Great. So you don’t need an escort. Maybe I need to see you to your car anyway.”

That was clever of him, Nicole decided. And rather sweet. As they walked to the entrance, she tried to find a way to say so that wouldn’t sound like a come-on.

“I appreciate your concern for security.”

He slanted a look at her as he opened the door. “Security, hell. I can’t afford to let anything happen to you.”

She was immediately flattered. And suspicious. “Why not?”

“Didn’t you ever ask why the owners were in such a hurry to sell?”

The parking lot was very dark. And isolated. The wind rustled the trees and ruffled the water. High overhead, the pale moon rode the cloudy sky. At this hour all the other Front Street businesses were closed. The other buildings were dark and faraway. The only light came from a bait-and-convenience store at the far end of the marina.

Nicole took a deep breath. She would have to investigate the cost of more lights. “I—no. Kathy never said.”

“Never mind, then.”

She dug her heels into the gravel of the parking lot. “Tell me.”

He shrugged. “Last spring three women were followed or attacked after leaving the Blue Moon. One of them was murdered. The police chief, Denko, finally figured it was the owner who did it. Tim Brown. He was convicted, and his wife put the bar up for sale.”

Nicole was shaken. “That’s terrible. But if the man who did it is locked up—”

“Yeah, if. Some folks still think the police got the wrong guy.”

He slouched beside her car. She couldn’t read his expression in the dark. There was just this general impression of black hair, broad shoulders and male menace.

Her heart pounded. “Who do they think did it?”

His smile gleamed like a knife in the shadows. “Me.”

Chapter 3

He had pulled some boneheaded, shortsighted stunts in the past, Mark thought as he polished off the last Palermo’s crescent for breakfast. School fights. Petty vandalism.

He snagged a quart of milk from the fridge, sniffed and drank from the carton.

Scaring his new boss in the parking lot didn’t rank up there with the time he’d liberated a powerboat to go joyriding at the age of twenty or his career-ending screwup in punching out an officer. But it was still dumb.

He’d be lucky if Blondie didn’t fire him.

Unless… He lowered the milk carton. Unless that had been his aim all along. Piss her off enough, and he wouldn’t even have to take responsibility for quitting.

Self-sabotage, his sister would call it, with the authority of a woman who had gotten her start editing the “Ask Irma” column in the Eden Town Gazette. Mark didn’t believe in that psychobabble self-help bull. He replaced the empty carton in the fridge and closed the door. Anyway, he took responsibility.

When he had to.

Which, admittedly, wasn’t very often.

He shuffled through the bright stack of advertising flyers until he uncovered the cream-colored letterhead from the lawyer.

“Jane Gilbert” was typed below the nearly illegible signature. The phone number was printed above. His gut tightened.

He glanced at his watch. Eight-twenty. He wasn’t due to meet Blondie at the bar for another forty minutes. Plenty of time to call this Gilbert broad and find out what the hell she expected him to do about the bombshell she’d lobbed into his life.

Hell. He picked up the phone.

She had let him intimidate her, Nicole thought grimly, meeting her own serious blue gaze in the bathroom mirror. She knew it.

And she knew better.

It was all covered in chapter six of Losing the Losers in Your Life. You couldn’t always control the people around you, but you could control your reactions to them. And her pulse-pounding, breath-catching reaction to Mark DeLucca—which had to be apprehension, it would just be too awful it if were lust—well, anyway, that would have to stop.

She nodded decisively at her reflection and got an encouraging nod in reply. Yanking open the bathroom door, she marched into the hall and collided with her exquisitely turned-out roommate.

“Ouch,” the redhead said. “You’re in a hurry this morning.”

Nicole felt the hot sweep of blood in her cheeks. She didn’t care what the author of Losers said, it was impossible to control a blush. “Sorry. I don’t want to be late.”

Kathy lifted a penciled eyebrow. “Got a hot date with Delicious DeLucca?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. I don’t want to be at a disadvantage when I see him again.”

“Sweetie, a guy that gorgeous puts every woman at a disadvantage.” Kathy peered past her at the mirror, tweaking at her hair. “Well, almost every woman. The man’s a menace.”

“Yes,” Nicole said dryly. “So I heard.”

Kathy’s hand froze. “Who told you?”

“He did.” Nicole swallowed the lump of betrayal that burned in her windpipe. “You should have said something.”

Her roommate continued to fuss at her reflection in the mirror, still not quite meeting Nicole’s eyes. “What was I supposed to say? It happened months ago. Before I came to town. Besides, the paper said he didn’t do it.”

“I know.” She had checked the on-line archives of the McHenry County papers last night. “I also noticed that at least two of the articles were written by someone named DeLucca. Any relation, would you guess?”

“His sister,” Kathy said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the guy is innocent.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because they locked up somebody else.”

Nicole drew a deep breath. She hated confrontation. Which was one of the reasons her boyfriends had a tendency to wipe their feet on her before they walked away. But all that was changing now. She was changing. “That’s another thing. Why didn’t you tell me the former owner of the bar was convicted of murder?”

“Why should I? His wife was handling the sale.”

Okay. Still…

“You should have told me,” Nicole said stubbornly. “I might have been interested to learn that I was buying the business of a convicted killer and employing the other main suspect in the case.”

“See? That’s exactly why I didn’t say anything. I knew you’d blow things out of proportion. This was a good deal, Nicole.”

Kathy’s voice awoke the echo of other voices, other accusations. Her mother’s. Charles’s. Kevin’s.

Don’t make a fuss, Nicole.

I only kissed her. You’re overreacting.

Why do you always have to make such a big deal out of everything?

“A good deal for you,” Nicole said.

Kathy rolled her eyes. “Well, sure. This was my first big commercial property sale on the new job. What do you want me to say? I appreciate your business?”

Nicole was shaken. “No. I just—”

“Fine. Because I do. And thank you. But you were the one who couldn’t wait to get out of Chicago.”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “You’re right.”

But Kathy was on a roll. “You were the one who lost your job.”

“The owner sold the company,” Nicole corrected her.

“After he broke up with you.”

Nicole flinched. “Yes.”

“And didn’t you say you wanted to move further away from your parents?”

Nicole felt herself visibly shrinking, like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole, drinking from a bottle she never should have opened. “You’re right,” she said again. “I’m sorry.”

Kathy shrugged. “I just don’t like you thinking you’re doing me any favors. You were as eager to clinch that sale as I was. An established business in a great location with available living space doesn’t come along every day.”

“It’s a wonderful property,” Nicole said truthfully.

And wondered, as she drove carefully to work along unfamiliar streets, how soon she could renovate the upstairs apartment and move in.

With a sigh, she saw that Mark DeLucca had managed to get to the Blue Moon before her. His black Jeep Cherokee occupied the parking space closest to the entrance.

Nicole wasn’t upset. Really. It wasn’t like the space had a big sign on it that read Owner.

She tugged on the door. Locked.

Well, of course he would lock it while he was alone inside. Hadn’t she told him last night that she appreciated his concern for security?

She fished in her bag for her new keys, trying not to twitch with irritation. Her hand closed on her keyring just as the door opened, and Mark DeLucca stood framed against the shadows, every bit as lean, dark and dangerous as he’d looked last night.