No More Mr. Nice Guy

by Jennifer Greene

  “No, Mr. Bartholomew. Honestly, I had no idea. I’m sorry they were disturbing you…”

  She returned to a tango. She tried to explain in sign language that as much as she loved their music, she wanted them to stop, but one of the men kept shaking his head, smiling at her, calling out about how romance and love and music were everything.

  Again the phone rang and, cheeks blotched red, Carroll rushed back inside. “Mrs. Roberts, I’m terribly sorry you were asleep. Yes, I know you work an early-morning shift even on Saturdays…”

  The serenaders left a half hour later. Carroll had barely locked the door and flicked off the light before she heard a rapid knock at the front door. She flew to answer it, expecting Alan and not at all sure what she was going to say to him.

  No pediatrician stood on her doorstep. The two strange men were dressed in blue, wore hip holsters and looked official. “Is this the place that had the outdoor music?” the steel-haired one demanded.

  “I…yes, but—”

  “We’ve had a complaint, miss.”

  Just about then, she wished she’d simply die and go to heaven. Or hell. It didn’t make much difference. The officers were mollified with promises it would never happen again. Actually, they were highly amused by the entire incident.

  Carroll wasn’t. She wanted to feel charmed, but this time it just wasn’t working. And it occurred to her that for weeks now, she’d only been trying to feel charmed by many of Alan’s romantic gestures. After all, what kind of woman got depressed over the gift of a ruby heart?

  Her kind of woman, she thought miserably. She’d never wanted rubies or serenades. Just Alan. The Alan she’d thought she had.

  She was sitting by the phone when he rang at midnight. His sober voice immediately squelched the first words she’d planned to say to him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner, Caro. It wasn’t another case of chicken pox. I’m with Randy’s parents at the hospital—he has hepatitis.”

  A dozen emotions were quickly shelved. “Oh, honey. He’ll be all right?”

  “In time, yes, and he’s resting now—but, Caro, I’m likely to be here for another hour. Just go to sleep, would you, kitten? And I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. And while she took a huge breath, there was a nervous cough on the other end of the line, then a second one. In the process of clearing his voice, Alan’s exhausted, grave tone was miraculously replaced by one of boyish shyness.

  “Anything…unusual…happen tonight?” he asked casually.

  She lifted the phone from her ear and stared at it. Alan, she thought wearily, enough really is…enough.

  Bone-tired, Alan pushed off the lights and climbed out of his car. Not a sound or movement disturbed the quiet street at this late hour. Jamming his hands in his pockets, head down against the cold, he aimed for his apartment door.

  His memory was being buffeted by the smells of antiseptics, and Carroll. Of the look of a little boy finally peacefully sleeping in a hospital bed, and Carroll. Of parents too frightened to be rational, and Carroll. And the last thing he expected to find on climbing the three steps up to his door was…Carroll, a scarf wrapped around her throat and a white angora hat pulled low over her forehead.

  He stopped dead, his heart pumping panic to every nerve ending. “Good Lord, what’s wrong? You haven’t been standing out here in this cold for lo—”

  “I had to talk to you, and it wouldn’t wait,” she said crisply. “The child’s all right, Alan?”

  “Randy—yes. I…” He fumbled with his apartment key, and then hustled her inside ahead of him. While he stood in the hallway removing his jacket, she moved inside, switching on lamps and tugging off her hat and scarf. But he couldn’t miss noting, when she perched on the edge of the couch, that she hadn’t taken off her coat.

  She didn’t intend to stay. Anxiety hit his gut with all the delicacy of a Mack truck. “What’s wrong?”

  “A great deal, I’m afraid,” she said quietly.

  He tried, fast, to find a light note. “They were flat?” he said wryly.

  “The serenaders were perfectly in tune, Alan. It’s you and I who don’t seem to be.” She added softly, “I know you’re tired. If you’d like me to make a pot of coffee—”

  “No.” Coffee wouldn’t help. In fact, the smoothest of liquids probably couldn’t push past the total dryness in his throat.

  He’d been so sure it was working…and he’d come as close to being a romantic hero as he could. He thought she liked the new Alan. He’d liked some parts of the new image himself, but there wasn’t a chance he could keep up the game for the next ninety years—even if he could stomach the food he’d been cooking, even if he could live with the impractical car, even if he could manage to stay up night after night and still do a decent day’s work the next day.

  Which left Carroll loving a man he wasn’t. Or not loving the man he was. Or in the worst possible scenario, the one twisting in his gut, Carroll not loving him at all.

  “Please sit down, would you?” He was just standing there, staring at her with those fathomless, gentle blue eyes of his. She sprang from the couch, as restless as a cat in a rainstorm and twice as miserable. She already knew she was going to make a mess of this. She could never say things well when she was upset, and she was unquestionably upset. Her stomach was in knots, and her palms were damp, and her heart was beating erratically…because anxiety always made her heart beat erratically.

  “Just say it, honey.” Alan’s voice was low.

  She waved her hand helplessly, as if that could help her get the words out. “I thought…I always thought…I could be honest with you. From the day I met you, I thought we were capable of a special kind of honesty between us. Even from the very beginning, we could talk to each other—”

  “We could and we can, Caro.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been lying to you and you’ve been lying to me and—”

  “I’ve never lied to you!” Alan said swiftly.

  “No?” Her eyes were suddenly smarting with tears. “Then will you answer a few questions for me—with total honesty?”

  His lungs released a sudden rush of air. She was at least talking—and not walking out. “Of course.”

  “They’re really very simple questions.” Sticking her hands in her coat pockets, she tried to smile, and almost did. “For a Sunday dinner,” she said softly, “would you rather have a rib roast or squid in tomato sauce?”

  Expecting the world to fall in, Alan wasn’t at all prepared for the irrelevant question. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Rib roast. Carroll. Dammit, if you didn’t like the serenade, just say so. I can see it was a stupid idea. Forget it and let’s just—”

  “Do you like dancing, Alan?”

  “I—sometimes.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her white face.

  “You promised to be honest.”

  “Sometimes I like dancing. Caro—”

  “And ballet? And nightclubs? And you really like sleeping on black satin sheets? You don’t find them…slippery? And the wild zebra spread, Alan, tell me how you picked that out because it suited you.”

  He felt cornered at the end of a long corridor. “Sweetheart,” he said in a low voice, “maybe I’m not quite so fond of those things as I let on, but—”

  “I think you hate all of them,” she said sadly. “And I finally figured out why you did all those things, Alan, why you’ve been lying to me.” She took a long breath. “You were tired of me, weren’t you? You wanted an affair, not marriage, not quiet evenings at home. The thing is, it would have been so much less painful if you’d just told me what you were feeling, that you really wanted and needed a very different kind of woman than I am. Because, Alan, I’m not—”

  Talking was proving to be a terrible idea. Holing up in a corner to lick her wounds was a better one, much less humiliating. She made the three swift steps to the door before Alan spr
ang in front of her, his face gray with pain and his voice impossibly gentle. “You are so dead wrong, kitten.”

  She shook her head wildly, refusing to look at him. “I don’t think so. Suddenly, we’re having this affair. Suddenly, it’s all different.” She swiped at her eyes impatiently. “I think you always knew I wanted kids more than serenades. SUV’s, not sportscars.. And even the barn, Alan. It could probably be a terrific home for someone, something unusual and unique and tremendously innovative and creative…but I never saw anything that wrong with a house in the suburbs. With a standard old white picket fence—I just can’t lie, Alan. I like white picket fences. I’ve always liked white—”

  “God, I love you.”

  That was a perfectly awful thing to say, because it made tears gush from her eyes as if a dike had suddenly become unplugged. And Alan took most unfair advantage of her tears by moving forward, talking as he untangled the scarf from her hands, talking as he brushed the tears from her cheeks, talking as he firmly, gently started unbuttoning her coat. “I love you…so much. And I did everything, Caro, everything because I was afraid of losing you. I was trying to be…the man you needed in your life. The best way I knew how.”

  She didn’t want to look at him, but his palms cupped her face, forcing her eyes to meet his. Even through a rainbow haze of tears, she could see the expression of the man she’d fallen in love with. A man she’d once believed would never lie to her…and whose sincerity was there now, in clear dark eyes, in a mouth rigid with anxiety, in the beat of the pulse in his temples. The fear in her heart eased, just a little. “But you were always that man. You never had to…make up things, or pretend, or…”

  “But I did, Caro.” He took her hand, led her to the couch and doused the light that was glaring in her eyes when she sank down. “Weeks ago,” he said gently, “I wanted to ask you to marry me. I didn’t because I was afraid you’d say no—and it’s your turn to be honest this time, kitten. You would have said no, wouldn’t you?”

  Her lips parted to instantly deny that…but then she couldn’t, not when she remembered back to the way she’d felt at the time. And before she could stop him, he reached up gently, soothingly, to brush the last of the tears from her cheeks.

  “If you’d had the right feelings,” he said softly, “you wouldn’t have held me off from sleeping with you. You felt warmth—a part of love. But not all I wanted from you, and not all I wanted for you.”

  She was suddenly staring at the wall, anywhere but at him. “But that was all a problem in me, Alan, not you,” she said painfully.

  “No,” Alan insisted. “I know better, and I think you do, too. Maybe I’d lived alone too long, and maybe anyone who lives alone gets set in his ways, used to habits, lazy about thinking of other people’s feelings. Those are the excuses, Caro, but the fact is that I was a die-hard fuddy-duddy in the making.”

  “Alan!” He heard the protest, and also caught the first hint of an unwilling smile on her lips. “You foolish man,” she scolded, “you were never—”

  “Oh, yes I was. Not a man who could keep your interest for the next ninety years and, just maybe, not someone I much wanted to be for the next ninety years, either.” His tone softened. “If I went too far, you have to understand that I was starting from scratch. A blank piece of paper. Because I’d never wanted a woman half as much as I wanted you.”

  “Oh, Alan.” She sank against his chest, felt his arms wrap around her as if she were coming home. “I had no idea how you felt. And I never loved you for the razzle-dazzle. I loved you for you. How could you think otherwise?”

  His lips pressed into her hair. “What I think,” he said honestly, “is that you needed the roses. That you were entitled to the roses. You wanted to feel loved, Caro, not just be loved. And I needed to feel that I could offer you something special. Not necessarily bizarre foods for dinner or canoe rides at midnight, but something you felt only when you were with me. The freedom to reach for your fantasies and make them real. Maybe just the freedom to be vulnerable. And honest. The freedom to express…” He ran out of words.

  Carroll wanted to say that she’d been haunted by the same fears, that for a long time she’d worried that she didn’t have anything special enough to offer him, that he was the one who had given her confidence in herself as a woman… In time she would tell him in elaborate detail, but perhaps not at the moment. Now it seemed the best of times to make sure, that he felt loved, too, exactly as he’d made her feel loved.

  “Freedom to be vulnerable,” she murmured, and leaned back, studying the love in his eyes, breathing it, savoring it, feeling her heart well with it. “You know what you did to me, don’t you, Alan?” she questioned gently. “You stole every inhibition I had, made me tell you every secret, made very sure I knew I was a passionate woman. You forced me to feel special, love…and I’m afraid you’ll have to pay the price now.”

  “The pr—”

  “No more talking,” she scolded. “You’re in a lot of trouble with me. You beguiled an awful lot of secrets out of me with your seductive tricks.” She cast him a suddenly critical glance. “You look exhausted. Actually, you look like hell.”

  “What?”

  The poor man looked dazed. She pressed a forefinger lightly against his chest, which shouldn’t have been enough to force him down, but he went down, spine flat against the couch cushions.

  “In the beginning,” she said firmly, “maybe we didn’t have the right kind of relationship. Maybe it took some changes to make it right. And maybe it still isn’t exactly right, Alan, because it takes two to really change. You can’t take credit for taking all the risks.” She smiled down at him lovingly. “You really look terrible.”

  “I really—am beginning to—feel fine.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t feel fine. You feel weak. And vulnerable.”

  “Do I?”

  “Or you will,” she said smoothly. Her fingers were busy for a moment, unbuttoning his shirt. She handled his belt like a pro and unhooked his slacks as though she’d had fairly recent practice. “Even now, you feel so weak,” she said thoughtfully, “that I think you’d better just put your hands over your head where you won’t be tempted to use them, Alan.”

  “Caro—”

  “Look, I’m too busy for any more talking. I’ve got this hero in my life, you see. Or a man who’s been thinking that he has to be a romantic hero…when he’s been one, all along. Which leaves me with one terrific problem, I can tell you. Because your average, sensible, normal-type woman might not be enough for a hero. Luckily, Alan, luckily for you, I’m a very special woman. Or so someone has made me believe.”

  She stood up and reached behind her for the zipper at the back of her dress. In seconds, the gown shimmered to the floor. Beneath it, she was wearing a pale pink garter belt and stockings, matching a pink lace bra that laid no claims to practicality. Alan was responsible for such frivolous purchases, of course. She leaned over to tug off his slacks and shorts and socks.

  “It could just be that I needed those roses, mind you,” she said absently. “Maybe I did need to know I was more than a comfortable habit with you. Could it possibly be that you needed to know the same thing, though, love? That you weren’t the only one who had to do a little changing?”

  She popped the snap on her bra, slipped out of it. Her hands went to the garter belt and then paused. She just looked at him, mischief flashing in her eyes. And love, and wanting, and need. “Ever been made love to by a woman in a garter belt and stockings, Alan?”

  His tongue was oddly thick, making speech difficult as he looked at her. “No.”

  “Good.” She started at his toes, using the lash of her tongue, the tickle of her teeth, the pressure of her lips to seduce him. Really, it was past time she did a little wooing of her own. If she didn’t know how, it was past time she learned.

  When she finished with his toes, she moved up to his ankles, and shortly thereafter slid her length against him, rubbing her stocking-cla
d legs against his while she nipped and kissed circles on his chest.

  She moved slowly, with infinite caution and care. Actually, she approached seducing him with a dogged, patient, methodical and unquestionably feminine instinct. She wanted the man vulnerable. She wanted him to exult in feeling vulnerable; she wanted him free to express that vulnerability with her, to feel sure that there was nothing he needed to hide from her ever again.

  As a man, he’d made her feel the full scope of womanhood. As a woman, she had every intention of making him feel powerfully male…rich in manhood, the best of heroes, the sexiest of lovers.

  And it was working. Without question, it was working. It wasn’t just the increased tightening of his muscles that told her that, or the sheen of moisture rapidly coating his skin. It was in his eyes, those gentle blue eyes of his. So much love.

  “You’re failing to keep your hands under control,” she remarked. “They’re supposed to stay over your head.”

  “I can’t help it. They won’t.”

  She shrugged. If her hands wouldn’t behave themselves, she could hardly blame his for being in the same mood. A woman in love had to be flexible.

  So did a man. Alan was open to torture and was well aware his lady was having fun. But he’d never imagined that the rub of her stockings would send him over the edge of a deliciously high mountain. She wanted him out of control. That was exactly what she got. “I couldn’t possibly love you more, Caro,” he whispered, and coaxed her legs around him. The breath rushed from his lungs when he felt himself joined to her.

  Both were suddenly, breathlessly anticipating the rhythm to come. That rhythm would happen, but the closeness for this moment was ecstasy, too. “I love you back,” Carroll murmured softly, and then, “When are we getting married, Alan?”

  “Yesterday.”