Charlotte's Homecoming

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “It’s beautiful,” she murmured, walking straight through from the entry across the living room to the wall of glass that looked out over the river and valley below.

  He followed her, his hands in his pockets, and watched as she first drank in the view, then turned and began to explore his house with the same restless curiosity she’d displayed at his office. This level was almost entirely open, living and dining areas and kitchen defined by function but not walls. Only his office and the bathroom on this floor had walls and doors.

  She liked to touch—the modern, custom-made dining table, the river stones that made up the massive fireplace, the granite kitchen countertops. She peeked through the small-paned French door into his office, then paused at the top of the staircase that led down.

  “Do I get the grand tour?”

  “Sure.” He strolled over to join her, enjoying the way she caressed the cherry handrail where it curled to an end—like a cat napping in sunlight—atop the newel post, one of the small details he’d designed himself and that gave him pleasure. His fingers knotted into fists. He knew if he didn’t keep his hands in his pockets they’d be reaching for her, and it was too soon for that yet.

  The bedrooms were downstairs, not directly beneath but rather a step down the bluff, like terraced fields in Italy. The deck off the living room rested atop the bedrooms, which had their own decks. All three rooms had French doors leading outside. His was the largest, with a walk-in closet, sitting area and bathroom with a hot tub and separate shower. As with the upstairs, the floors were bamboo stained the color of cherry. Rugs he’d picked up over the years added warmth and color here and there. The furnishings were still somewhat sparse, because he added pieces when something caught his eye, and lately he’d been too busy to look.

  When Charlotte stepped into his bedroom, Gray tensed and stayed behind in the hall.

  Not yet.

  Her cheeks, he thought, were a little pink when she hastily retreated.

  For now, the last bedroom was for guests while the middle one served as his library and held a little-watched television. Two walls had floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The TV and DVD player were on another wall, and the fourth one was made up of windows and a French door. Charlotte walked fully into this room, turning slowly to take in the two oversize leather chairs, the walls of books, and the sunshine falling in through the south-facing windows.

  “Gray, your house is perfect.”

  He’d propped a shoulder against the door frame. “Thank you.”

  Interestingly, her voice had sounded husky, as if she was fighting off emotion. Gray hoped that was it. He liked thinking that she felt a surge of lust for his house. After all, it was an extension of him, more so than for most people.

  “You can wander around some more if you’d like,” he suggested. “I’ll go get started on dinner.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Nope. It’s simple.”

  She reappeared upstairs when he had the salad put together and the oven heated to broil the steaks that had been marinating all day. Gray wondered if she’d stolen another look into his bedroom, maybe even imagined herself in his bed.

  Yeah, he thought, she would definitely have done that, whether she was working at shoring up her resistance or not.

  And, damn, he’d been half-aroused since he picked her up. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  Charlotte settled on a stool across the counter from him and watched while he put the steaks in to broil and sautéed vegetables.

  “I had to rescue a couple from the maze today.” Her amusement was plain. “It was awful, because the man was so embarrassed and the woman so relieved. You know how hot it was.”

  After a week that had been cooler, culminating in a day with gray skies and drizzle, the mercury had shot up again. The bank thermometer had read ninety-eight when he’d driven by at midday.

  “They were both red-faced and I was afraid they’d get heatstroke if I left them in there too long. But I could tell I’d undercut his manhood. Never ask directions, you know.”

  He grinned at her. “That’s a stereotype. Some of us do ask directions.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” A smile quivered at the corners of her mouth. “Are you one of them?”

  “When necessary.” He raised his brows. “Since I have an excellent sense of direction, it’s rarely necessary.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who got us out of the corn maze?”

  “You did,” she admitted.

  “I’ll bet you know it by heart by now.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Does anybody just push their way through the damn corn and force their way out?”

  “Not since I’ve been the gatekeeper. You’d have to ask Faith that.”

  He’d set two places at the table with woven bamboo place mats and a vase of late summer roses he’d bought from a Vietnamese woman who sometimes sold cut flowers at a corner of the gas-station parking lot. He thought eventually he’d enjoy a perennial bed out front of the house, but he had no time for gardening right now, and was grateful that his master plan hadn’t included a lawn that required mowing, fertilizing and aerating.

  In unspoken agreement they kept conversation light while they ate. She told a couple more stories about customers and made him laugh at Faith’s dread upon finding that the Graves kid—notorious for temper tantrums thrown at the grocery store—had been assigned to her classroom. He talked about the eccentric residents of West Fork who’d made his job as mayor interesting, and sketched on his napkin to show Charlotte his ideas for a house he’d been commissioned to design. He told her that he was making a quick trip to Spokane to talk to the client and walk the site.

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” he said. “That’s one reason I wanted to spend this evening with you. I should be home Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  She nodded and the conversation moved on before Gray could tell whether she’d miss him at all.

  His one near misstep was when he nodded at her hair and asked, “Are you planning to go back to being blond?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m ambivalent. Do I want to go with the new me or the old me?”

  “Ah,” he said softly. “But which color is which?”

  Alarm flared on her face. After a minute she said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  He chose to let it go, asking if she’d like regular coffee or iced.

  The sun was still well above the horizon when they took their iced coffees out onto the deck. Charlotte, he noted, was looking more skittish now.

  Gray let her settle into an Adirondack chair while he remained standing, leaning back against the railing with his ankles crossed. Despite the casual pose, he was watching her closely when he said, “This seems like a good time to talk about why you stayed away from West Fork and never wanted to come back, don’t you think, Charlotte?”

  She sat in silence for a moment and then said, “Oh, fine. Why not? If I were to stay around, you’d have to know eventually, wouldn’t you?”

  His heart took a hard thump. It might still be if, but she was thinking about staying in West Fork. There was nothing she could tell him that would kill the exultation rising in him like a high tide.

  “So—” he took a sip of the coffee “—I’m waiting.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OH, LORD, CHARLOTTE THOUGHT IN PANIC. How had she let Gray back her into a corner like this? The last thing in the world she wanted to do was admit to him, of all people, how awful she’d been to Faith.

  She reminded herself that she might end up going back to California, anyway, coming home to West Fork for only occasional, brief visits in the future. If that was the choice she made, he’d surely start dating another woman, and before she knew it Faith would casually mention that he’d gotten married. Eventually, Faith might even have his children in her kindergarten classroom.

  Excruciating jealousy seized Charlotte. She’d never felt anything like it before. Images flipped through her mind: Gray smil
ing down at that other woman, smoothing her hair back from her face, laughing and hoisting a little boy who looked like a small version of him into his arms…

  She’d never given a lot of thought to whether she’d like to have children someday. Perhaps the idea had been too disquieting, given that she preferred not to think about her own childhood. All in all, it was a great time to discover that she hated the idea of Gray having kids that weren’t hers.

  But if she were to stay in West Fork and see what happened with Gray, sooner or later she’d have to tell him how she had felt about Faith, and about being a twin. So it might as well be now. If he despised her when she was done, well, that would help her make up her mind to concentrate on finding a job in the Bay Area and not up here.

  To buy herself a moment, she sipped her coffee and let her eyes rest on the green valley below and the bluffs beyond, where large, expensive homes built since she’d left town were half concealed by trees.

  She stole a glance at him, and felt an uncomfortable spasm. He was…oh, probably not the handsomest man she’d ever met, but close, with that untidy gold-streaked bronze hair, a face that was pure man and calm gray eyes that suggested not so much an easy temperament as utter control over himself. And those lovely shoulders, the long rangy body, the dusting of hair on strong forearms. Her eyes rested on his hands, long-fingered, broad across the palm, capable of such gentleness.

  A huge lump seemed to catch in her throat. I am painfully, idiotically in love with him, she admitted to herself for the first time. All of this self-reflection she’d been obliged to undergo had been for him. No, it was for Faith, too, and maybe herself, but it was because of Gray Van Dusen, part-time mayor, part-time architect. He had this way of looking at her as if she were the most beautiful, precious thing he’d ever seen.

  She couldn’t be imagining that. She couldn’t.

  Feeling a little as if she were suffocating, Charlotte took a deep breath.

  “My leaving the way I did really didn’t have anything to do with West Fork, although I did always hanker to find out what the big wide world was all about.”

  He nodded and took a swallow of his coffee.

  Oh, just get it over with, she thought in misery. Hurrying, she said, “It was being an identical twin. I hated seeing Faith every day and knowing I wasn’t distinct.”

  Gray went completely still. She didn’t know how she could tell the difference, but there was one. An instant before, he’d been intent on her but otherwise relaxed. Suddenly he wasn’t.

  She bent her head and focused on the pale froth of iced coffee to avoid seeing his expression. “I loved Faith, of course. But my earliest memory is of looking at her and seeing myself. I felt this…I don’t even know what to call it. Terror. As if I wasn’t real. How could I be, if there was another me?” She ran a fingertip around the rim of the mug, struggling to calm herself. “I threw temper tantrums every time Mom tried to dress us in the same outfits, and I was rude to anyone who gushed about how cute we were, looking exactly alike.”

  In a strangely neutral voice, he asked, “You didn’t feel any bond with her?”

  “Of course I did!” Distress was making her own voice high, thin. “Especially when we were little, we were best friends. But all the time, I felt like someone with major claustrophobia being buried alive. I had this desperate need to rip my way free. Even when I managed to hide it, though, Faith always knew.”

  “That must have hurt her,” he said, sounding hard.

  “Yes.” Charlotte realized she was rocking slightly, as if she were trying to comfort herself. She hoped Gray hadn’t noticed. “It got worse and worse,” she admitted. “Her being hurt, and me feeling guilty, which made me even more frantic to get away where no one knew I was a…a clone. I didn’t want anyone to be able to read my mind the way she could. Or me to be able to read anyone else’s. I wanted to be separate, alone, in the worst way.”

  “God.” Gray slammed his mug down on the railing, coffee sloshing. Stalking away, he didn’t notice. He swung back, took an incredulous look at her and paced the other way.

  He was furious, Charlotte was shocked to see. Not disappointed in her, not disgusted, but angry. Why? she wondered on one level, even as she scrambled to reassemble all the defenses he had spent the past weeks dismantling. This was going to be as bad as she’d feared. No, worse. Even as anguish swept over her, she told herself she had to pretend. She couldn’t let him see how much it hurt that he wasn’t even trying to understand what it had been like for her.

  He stopped at last, right in front of her, forcing her to look way up to meet the storm in his eyes. “There’s something I haven’t told you about myself. I’m a twin, too.” Muscles knotted in his jaw. “I was a twin. Until my brother died. We were ten years old.”

  “Oh, no,” Charlotte whispered.

  “We were riding our bikes. Racing down a hill in town. Gerrit was ahead. Just a few feet, but…” He stopped and scrubbed his hand over his face. “Neither of us noticed the car coming on the side street. Gerrit slammed right into it. I shot past the rear bumper. He suffered massive head trauma and went into a coma. He was dead two days later.”

  “Oh, Gray.” Pain for him swelled inside her until there was no room to breathe. “I’m so sorry. I suppose that’s why your parents…”

  “Yeah. They couldn’t get over it. I guess the only way to move on was to start fresh without the other person to remind them.”

  “But…they still had you.”

  “Yeah, they did.”

  Merciful heavens. Had he grown up knowing that just looking at him hurt both his parents?

  Yes, she thought in horror. He must have.

  Gray was staring at her, his expression stony. “I’ve spent the rest of my life missing my brother and everything I lost that day. The same kind of bond that you couldn’t stand and did your damndest to cut.”

  “Then you should be dating Faith instead of me!” Charlotte cried. “You’d be the perfect couple.”

  He swore, reached down to grab her arms and hauled her to her feet, where she collided against him. His mouth came down on hers with a ferocity that wasn’t anything like him. He tasted of anger and frustration, his fingers were biting painfully into her flesh, but despite everything Charlotte opened her mouth and kissed him back.

  A groan tore its way free from his chest. She felt the vibration of its passage. He quit kissing her long enough to mutter, “But it’s you I want. Goddamn it, it’s you.” The next second his mouth covered hers again, still hungry but more gentle this time. His tongue slid over hers, demanding but coaxing, too.

  Charlotte’s knees buckled and she flung her arms around his neck to hold on. Her whole body had gone soft. Melted, like the vanilla ice cream she’d watched his tongue slide over that day at Tastee’s. Sweet and irresistible and unstoppable. She wanted Gray like she’d never wanted anything or anybody in her whole life.

  Still kissing her, he lifted her into his arms and carried her inside. He strode across the living room, apparently not needing to look where he was going until he reached the top of the stairs. He took those slowly, licking and biting her throat and squeezing her breast in one large hand.

  She was whimpering, which embarrassed her, but she seemed to have zero self-control right now. She’d tangled her fingers in his hair, which had a texture like the heaviest of raw silk, and her body curled around him as if she were trying to meld with him.

  He didn’t so much lay her on his bed as he did fall with her. Neither of them seemed to want to allow even an inch of space between themselves.

  His mouth was more potent than any painkillers they’d given her at the hospital. He shoved his hand up under her camisole and massaged her breast, his palm rubbing her nipple until it was unbearably sensitive and she was arching off the bed and moaning.

  Gray rolled so that she was on top and he could wrench her camisole off. He wrestled with the button and zipper holding her skirt on, and then that was gone, too, her panties wi
th it. Once she was naked, his hands moved over her as if he were a blind man learning her shape, savoring what he found, wondering. Charlotte pressed her face to the juncture of his neck and shoulder and kissed him openmouthed, tasting him, licking the urgent beat of his pulse when she found it.

  The sound that came from him finally was almost inhuman. He flipped her over again, rising just far enough to tear his shirt over his head and unzip his jeans. She caught a glimpse of blue boxers, and then even those were gone and all she saw was him.

  Charlotte couldn’t help herself. She laid her hands on his chest and explored it with all the wonder she’d imagined him feeling earlier. His muscles jerked as her fingertips slid over them. The texture of his chest hair was fine, silky. His stomach was rock hard.

  As was his penis. She touched him tentatively, then more boldly when he knelt there on the bed looking down at her with hot, hungry eyes. When she stroked him, then squeezed, he groaned.

  “Charlotte, are you on birth control?” His voice was so rough, she wouldn’t have known it.

  “No.” Her eyes widened. They couldn’t possibly have come this far and have to stop. “Oh, no! You don’t have…”

  “Yeah. I do. Just…damn it. Give me a minute.” He left her long enough to open a drawer on his bedside stand. She heard the package rip, then watched as he sheathed himself. She wished he hadn’t had to. She wanted him bare inside her, sleek and smooth.

  It didn’t matter. Charlotte wanted him any way she could have him. She held her arms wide and he came to her.

  This kiss was desperate, deep and erotic. His tongue thrust and hers parried. The hand that wasn’t wrapped in her hair stroked over her belly and slid lower, where she was already slick and so ready, so very ready, her hips bucked at the feel of his fingers.

  He suckled her breasts, giving each a turn, the tug so strong she felt it down to her toes. And then he was parting her legs and pressing against her. She lifted her hips and he thrust, going so deep she had the dazed sense that he really was part of her now. Even though she wanted him to move, something like grief clutched at her when Gray started to pull back. Charlotte wrapped her legs around him tight, determined to hold him.