He was thirty-two years old now. Not twenty-two, or even twenty-seven. He was ready to be married to someone who was actually present in his life. And though some of the women his father turned up with were actually quite nice, he still hadn’t forgotten Ally.
And now Ally was back.
“She’s gorgeous,” Rosie said now.
“Yeah.”
In fact, gorgeous didn’t cover the half of it. Ally had always been amazing looking. He’d been struck by that the first time he’d seen her behind the counter at Benny’s taking orders.
The combined genes of her Japanese father and her Chinese-Hawaiian-Anglo mother had come together to make Alice Maruyama an absolute beauty with a porcelain complexion, high cheekbones beneath wide slightly tilted dark eyes, with the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen.
Her shining black hair had always been neatly tamed, nicely brushed, pinned down or pulled up.
Except for the night he’d made love to her. And then it had been a lavish black silk curtain, loose and lush, that begged him to thread it through his fingers, bury his face in it, rub his cheek against it.
The second she’d walked through the door this afternoon, his fingers had itched to undo that sleek librarian’s knot at the back of head, let down her hair and do all those things again.
Good thing he had a well-honed sense of self-preservation. Good thing he’d learned something from going to see her at her gallery opening wearing his heart on his sleeve. He’d been a fool for her once. He wasn’t doing it again.
But he wasn’t letting her walk blithely away, either.
There was still something between them. Electricity. Attraction. Unfinished business.
Had she ever spent a night like their wedding night with bloody Jon? His fingers balled into fists at the thought.
How could she just walk in here and toss divorce papers at him? Why should she want to marry another man?
What the hell was wrong with the one she had ?
And how could she be sure their marriage wouldn’t work if they’d never even tried?
“—wants you to call her.” Rosie’s voice cut through his irritated thoughts. “She called while your, um, wife was with you.”
PJ’s thoughts jerked back to the present. “Who? What?”
Rosie gave him a long-suffering look. “Cristina,” she repeated patiently. “Your sister?” she added when he didn’t respond. “She said Mark just got back from San Diego and wants to discuss that new powerboat line he’s been looking at so she wondered if you’d like to come to dinner.”
Dinner. Cristina. Mark.
PJ dragged his brain back to business, determinedly putting Ally on a sidebar long enough to make sense of what Rosie was telling him.
His twin sister Cristina’s husband, Mark, worked for Antonides Marine as well. They had a brownstone not far from his place in Park Slope and sometimes it was easier to talk business over the dinner table than in the office. It was, after all, a family business.
Ally wanted family. She’d said so. She didn’t just want it to be her and her father anymore. She’d said that, too.
Well, hell, PJ thought, cracking his knuckles. If Ally wanted family, he had more than enough to go around.
“Call Cristina back and tell her I can’t make it,” he instructed Rosie. “Tell her I’ll catch Mark in the office tomorrow.” He smiled a cat-who’d-eaten-the-canary smile. “Tell her I’m busy tonight. I’m fixing dinner for my wife.”
“So, did you get it?” Jon asked.
“Not yet,” Ally said, pacing around her hotel room. She hadn’t wanted to call without things being settled, but when they didn’t she knew she had to call anyway. She just hoped she didn’t have to listen to Jon say, I told you so. “I will,” she promised, but it didn’t forestall the discussion.
“Didn’t you go see him? I thought you knew where he was.”
“I do know where he is,” she said. “I saw him. And I will get it. I just didn’t…think it was right to waltz back into his life and fling divorce papers at him first thing.”
“I knew this was a bad idea.”
“It was not a bad idea,” Ally retorted. “He was surprised.”
“To see you or to get the papers?”
“Well, both, I guess. Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll sign them. PJ doesn’t react well to pressure.”
She should have remembered that. Should have recalled why he’d said he’d come to Hawaii in the first place: to get his family off his back.
She should have been less…pushy. She should have simply chatted with him, got him to talk, acted interested in what he was doing now, what had happened to him in the past ten years, how he’d come to be where he was and doing what he was doing.
The trouble was—and the very reason she didn’t do it was—that it wouldn’t have been an act.
She had gone to PJ’s office hoping that their encounter would be polite and perfunctory. In a best-case scenario she would have felt no more connection to him than she had to Jon’s brother, Ken.
She would certainly not have felt an instant stab of lust and longing. Her eyes would not have fastened on PJ’s well-dressed body and lingered, cataloguing every inch of it. And they would definitely not have mentally undressed that body while her brain wondered as they did so how the man in the suit would compare with the naked twenty-two-year-old she had spent her wedding night with.
Not something she should be contemplating now, either.
“So when?” Jon asked. “I’ll be having dinner with your dad tonight. He’ll want to know. I was hoping to be able to tell him it was a done deal and you were on your way home.”
“I won’t be home until the weekend. You both know that. I’m going to be visiting a gallery here, too, talking to Gabriela, the owner. This trip wasn’t all about PJ.”
“No. It’s about us,” Jon reminded her. “It’s about you finally putting the past behind you and moving on. You are moving on, aren’t you, Ally?”
“Of course I am.”
“Well, I’m only saying…your dad’s heart isn’t strong. It’s not going to hold out forever. And I know you—and I—wanted him to be at our wedding.”
Ally swallowed against the lump in her throat. Yes, she did know her father’s condition was delicate. And she knew how happy seeing her married to Jon would make him. And she did want him to be happy. She wanted them all to be happy.
“I’m working on it.”
“Good. I’ll tell him that. Then hurry up and get home. I miss you. I work twenty hours a day when you’re not here.”
Ally knew the feeling. “I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I’m getting another call. It might be Gabriela. I’d better take it.”
“Forget Gabriela. Forget the gallery. They aren’t that important. Not now. Get the papers signed.”
“Yes. Maybe this is PJ,” Ally suggested hopefully. “Maybe he’s already signed them and is telling me when to pick them up.”
“Let’s hope.” Jon sounded encouraged. “Talk to you tomorrow. I’ll tell your dad you’ve got everything under control.”
Ally hoped it was true. She punched the connect button on her phone. “This is Alice Maruyama.”