Читать книгу Balancing Act - Lilian Darcy - Страница 10

Libby shifted her life to Ohio on a Thursday in late October with Colleen, after five weeks of making lists and telephone calls and announcements, of talking to Realtors and moving companies, of packing and sorting and giving away.

Brady had told her back in September that she could “wait until spring” to make the move, as if this was some sort of a concession from him, or as if he were giving her permission, but this was her own decision, and she saw it differently. She hadn’t wanted to wait. It was six months until spring, and that was a long time in a child’s life.

She found all the concerned and curious questioning from friends and co-workers stressful, too, and needed a definite date on which all that would stop.

Mom had been skeptical and discouraging about the move, and had asked Libby over the phone more than once, “Is it really that important to give Colleen a sister?”

“Brady and I both think so,” Libby had told her.

“But you always insisted on how self-sufficient and happy and well-adjusted you were going to be, just the two of you, even though I always thought it would be harder than you expected. Now you’re doing a complete about-face.”

Well, it wasn’t like that, Libby considered, but she didn’t say so.

Her emotional compass was pointing steadily in one direction—toward Ohio, where the girls could be sisters, where they’d have a chance to establish what could be the most enduring relationship of their lives, and where she wouldn’t ever have to just send her daughter off on a plane. She couldn’t predict in advance if the move would succeed or fail. She just had to jump in with both feet and do it.

To give Brady credit, he seemed to understand. “Send your stuff on ahead, and I’ll arrange to be there when it arrives. I’ll have your room ready for you. Let’s focus on the practical things. The rest can wait.”

She and Colleen took two days to make the drive from Minnesota, staying in a motel in Bloomington, Illinois, on Thursday night. Colleen awoke early the next morning, and Libby dressed her in the cute outfit she’d packed specially—a long-sleeved cotton knit dress in pink and white, high-waisted and full in the skirt, with matching leggings.

After a breakfast stop just outside Champaign, Colleen napped for three hours in the car and Libby was able to make good time. They hit Columbus midafternoon, with Miss Bright and Beautiful getting bored and fretful in her car seat after so long.

Libby could easily have fretted, also. Her legs were stiff, her head ached, her eyes felt as dry as ash. And she was nervous, with a sinking, queasy stomach and clammy hands.

Brady had given her clear directions to a neighborhood she discovered to be quiet and tree-filled. The day was smoky and cool—undeniably fall, with piles of leaves in rust and tan and orange and gold carpeting the grass beneath the bare trees. It was much milder here than it had been two days ago in St. Paul, however.

As Libby drove down Brady’s street, a middle-aged man worked a leaf blower, and a helmeted child clattered along the sidewalk on a purple bicycle. She was looking for number 1654, and here it was—a house of sand-colored Ohio stone, with pale blue ornamental shutters, a steep slate roof, a sweep of gently sloping lawn out front, shaded by a couple of big trees and a fenced rear yard.

She parked in front of one half of the double garage and walked to the front door at Colleen’s pace, holding her warm little hand. Almost as soon as she rang the bell, she could hear Brady’s heavy footsteps, and the door opened seconds later.

“Hi.” His eyes met hers for just a second, looking slate-blue and preoccupied, and he lifted a hand in greeting.

She was swamped with memories of the time they’d spent together in St. Paul, and didn’t know what to do with them. She’d forgotten the aura of strength that surrounded him, and the way her body responded to it.

He had a cell phone pressed to his ear, and he was reeling off what sounded like building specifications. Something like that. Figures and quantities and codes. He wore jeans, a black sweatshirt and a waterproof gray jacket, as if he’d just gotten home, or was about to go out. There was no sign of his daughter.

Libby felt cold after the heated car, and she was tired, prickly and ready to find fault. Capping the upheaval of the past six weeks, she’d wanted more than a “hi” and a glance, and she hadn’t wanted the powerful pull Brady seemed to exert on her body without even trying.

Now he was nodding, listening to the voice at the other end of the line, trying to get a word in. “Yes…yes, Nate. I got that. You tell me what you have, okay?”

Libby picked up Colleen.

Still listening and saying, “Yes,” every few seconds, Brady stepped back, reached around to flatten a hand between her shoulder blades, and pulled her inside.

He had big hands, and his touch was warm and heavy on her back. Her shoulder nudged the curve where his arm met his body and she remembered too many moments back in Minnesota when she’d felt this pull and this awareness.

He had that same earthy, resinous smell that she’d first noticed, like fresh-cut wood, and the same faint sheen of reddish beard just beginning to grow out against his rugged skin. As she passed him, moving ahead into the hall, she could easily have reached out and brushed her hand across that strong, square jaw.

She wasn’t usually so conscious of how her body shaped itself near a man’s, and of how the air moved between them. And she couldn’t remember when she’d last wanted to inhale a man’s scent like inhaling the fresh air of spring. But then, there weren’t many men in her life that she ever got this close to. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising if she felt jittery and hypersensitive.

He kicked the door shut behind him and said, as an aside from his phone conversation, “Stairs. Go on up, Libby. All the way to the end.” To her new, temporary room.

He followed her, still absorbed in his call, and he didn’t end it until they reached the room’s closed door, when his firm footsteps stopped just behind her.

“Sorry about that,” he said at last, flipping the phone shut and sliding it into his back pocket. “I took today off to get the house ready for you, but they can’t leave me alone. We have a big project that’s running behind schedule. It’s not important.”

“Sounds like it is.” She stepped sideways, with Colleen still in her arms, and angled herself so that Brady wasn’t looming over her shoulder.

He gave a rueful smile that crinkled the skin around his eyes and showed straight white teeth. “Well, it’s not important important.”

Libby smiled, too. “A subtle yet critical difference, I guess. Where’s Scarlett?” she added on a rush.

She felt a fluttery anticipation about seeing Colleen’s twin that she tried to dampen down. It didn’t feel safe to start to care so soon and so much.

“Mom has her on Fridays,” Brady answered.

He flattened a hand against his back pocket, as if to check that his cell phone was there. It was an unnecessary gesture, since he’d put it there just seconds ago. He was on edge, just as she was. His strong shoulders were held tight, and he curled his hands into fists then let them go again.

“She works Monday through Thursday,” he went on. “So on those days Scarlett’s in day care. You’re earlier than I was expecting. I was just about to go pick her up from Mom’s. Here…” He opened the door.

It was a big room, built over the whole area of the double garage, and it was lit by large windows on three sides. The white drapes looked new. Libby recognized her own queen-sized oak sleigh bed, with matching tallboy and dresser, her own delicately flower-sprigged sheet set, comforter and pillows, and the oak glider-rocker she’d bought last year, for sitting in to feed a bottle to Colleen.

Brady had angled the rocker so that it would get bathed in southern winter sun, and the matching oak crib was right next to it, made up with Colleen’s white broderie anglaise bed linen.

Finally, on top of the tallboy, sitting on a plastic place-mat, there was a pewter beer tankard stuffed—yes, you’d have to call it stuffed—with a big bunch of supermarket flowers, still swathed in their silver wrapping.

“Anything you want moved,” Brady offered, “just say so.”

“No, it looks good.” Apart from the supermarket sticker on the flowers.

The flowers said a lot. He must have remembered she liked to have them around the house. He’d taken the trouble to buy some. But he didn’t have a clue how to arrange them, and he didn’t even own a proper vase. The mix of thoughtfulness and clumsiness somehow softened her heart to a dangerous level.

They were both trying so hard.

So hard.

That had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

“It’s a great room,” she told him, meaning it.

“There’s a bathroom right next door that’s just for you.”

“You didn’t have to make the bed.”

He shrugged. “You moved your life seven-hundred-odd miles. I made a bed. Are we even yet?”

She laughed, and it eased a little of the awkwardness in the air. Colleen wriggled out of her arms, toddled forward and launched herself at the rocking chair. Her fat, diaper-wrapped bottom stuck out and she buried her face in the cushion seat. She was attached to this chair, and Libby was grateful for the presence of the familiar object. All of this had to be confusing for a young child. It was confusing enough for an adult!

“Let me help unload your car, then I’ll go get Scarlett,” Brady said, watching Lisa-Belle watch Colleen.

He felt that they needed both girls here, blatantly identical, to remind them of why they were putting themselves through this. It was awkward. No doubt about that. He’d had Nate badgering him in one ear when she arrived. He hadn’t known what to say to her.

Welcome to my life?

And the flowers were probably dumb.

“Are you hungry?” he said, his voice gruff. “I could fix you coffee and a snack and you and Colleen can eat while I unpack.”

“I’m fine. I’m not leaving all the unpacking to you.”

No, Libby, honey, you missed your cue.

He’d been trying to give them both an out, a way not to have to eyeball each other as they went back and forth with boxes and bags for the next ten minutes. She hadn’t taken it. He tried again. “Or take a shower if you want.”

“Tonight. Not now.” She was too wrapped inside her own tension to perceive her wide-open escape route. “We should unpack.”

Colleen followed her mommy back and forth, threatening a couple of times to trip Brady up as he came in the opposite direction. He had to watch out for her underfoot, and he had to be careful, but he knew Scarlett would have done the exact same thing in an unfamiliar situation. Both girls were a little clingy.

Libby distracted him. She was petite, but she didn’t play helpless. She did her share. As he approached the car for his second load, he saw her leaning into the back seat to pick up a box, her bottom taut and round beneath a floral skirt that somehow managed to be both soft and flowing and sexily clingy at the same time. His body stirred and his blood felt as heavy as lead.

Ah, hell! This again!

This attraction that he didn’t want. The mechanics of male anatomy were a damned nuisance, sometimes. What would she think if she knew he was looking at her this way? How was he going to handle it, having her sleeping under his roof, maybe for weeks?

It had become clear during the day and a half he’d spent in Minnesota that she wasn’t involved with anyone there, and it must be pretty obvious to her that he hadn’t dated since Stacey’s death. Physically, his needs tormented him at times, but emotionally he felt only reluctance about any kind of involvement, and so in that area he was very much alone.

On paper, therefore, they were both free to leap into bed with each other tonight, as soon as the girls were asleep.

Who would know?

Whose business would it be, anyhow?

But he didn’t believe you could put sex in its own little compartment that didn’t impinge on the rest of your life, even if that was a convenient theory for some men, and he was sure that Libby wouldn’t believe it, either.

Sex mattered. Even sharing a kitchen could matter.

They had the girls to consider. They had to create a workable, co-operative relationship that would survive the next twenty years, and if they stuffed it up with sex and domestic illusions and a short-lived affair right at the beginning, it would be their daughters who would suffer the most.

He should have given Libby the phone number of one of the motels along Olentangy River Road and left her to fend for herself, honor and duty be damned. It might have been a necessary protection for both of them.

The car was full. Several suitcases, those boxes, and what looked like a big styrofoam cooler that Libby carried through the house and into the kitchen at the back. Two of the boxes she wanted in the kitchen as well.

“What’s in these?” he asked.

“Pantry goods. I thought I might as well bring them rather than throwing them out.”

“And in the cooler?”

“Frozen casseroles. Chicken and mushroom. Burgundy beef. Irish stew.”

Brady’s mouth began to water. So she cooked. She actually cooked. Having tasted her baking the day they’d first met, he was in no doubt whatsoever that she would cook well, and he hadn’t eaten a woman’s home-cooked meal in so long he could hardly remember what it was like.

Mom used to slap together a few easy recipes several nights in the week when he was a kid, but she’d stopped altogether when Dad had died ten years ago. She ate strange little evening meals now, like cottage cheese and sliced banana on toast, or canned soup in a mug. She was a big fan of the drive-through window at the local fast-food chain, too. Now that Scarlett had outgrown jars of baby food, so was Brady.

Burgundy beef, on the other hand… Shoot, but that sounded good!

“We could have one of them tonight, if you don’t have anything planned,” Libby offered.

Uh, no, he didn’t have anything planned.

He told her so, while realizing that he should have planned a whole lot of things. So that they didn’t have to confront the weird reality of their new situation. If either of them made too many mistakes at the beginning, their commitment to putting their daughters’ relationship first might show up as impossibly naive and unworkable.

They could end up in court, hating each other. That guilty wish—Libby had admitted to it, as well—that his mom had never seen Colleen’s photo in that magazine might turn into a bitter, lifelong and reasoned regret.

“I’ll put two of these in the freezer and leave the third to thaw,” Libby said.

“Burgundy beef sounds good,” he suggested, a little embarrassed at the eagerness that immediately crept into his voice.

She smiled. “Burgundy beef it is, then.”

The sun struggled through a thin patch in the low, smoky cloud at that moment and the kitchen lit up, striking her blond hair, giving that melted-candy look to her pretty mouth. His blood slowed and his groin stirred again.

He was hungry. Not burgundy-beef hungry, but candy hungry, hungry for a woman’s sweet, melting mouth, hungry for her soft skin, for the touch of her fingers and the press of her breasts. Hungry for this woman. Just because she was here?

“I’ll go pick up Scarlett,” he said abruptly. Libby was staring at him, lips parted, eyes startled and swimming with heat. “Please make yourselves at home.” He grabbed his keys from a pocket, headed out the side door and let out a sigh of relief as soon as he reached the steps.