He bought a bouquet of daisy mums at the corner market on his way. It had never occurred to him, but these flowers reminded him of Sophy—they were fresh and bright, and just looking at them reminded him of the joy Sophy brought into his life.
Clutching them, he pounded up the steps to the brownstone. Gunnar was in the entry hall. Sophy and Lily weren’t there.
Well, fine. He’d go over to Elias and Tallie’s. If Tallie were home, she’d laugh at the sight of him with flowers. She might even think they were for her—and the baby. He’d buy her some if it made her happy, but these were for Sophy.
“Go on out,” he told the dog, opening the door to the back garden. Then, while Gunnar was outside, he went up to get Sophy and Lily clean clothes.
The closets were bare.
George stared at them. Shook his head. Felt it begin to pound at the same time that his stomach turned over.
Get hit by a truck? It was nothing compared to getting hit by this.
She’d left him. Turned away from him. Again.
She couldn’t do that, damn it! He’d let her do it once because he’d pushed her too fast, had wanted too much.
Now?
He kneaded the back of his neck, tried to ease the pain in his head. Nothing at all would ease the pain in his heart.
Only Sophy’s love could do that.
In her university days, Sophy had had one of those old posters on her wall that proclaimed splashily, Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
When she was in college that sort of thing had been inspiring. It had urged her to look forward, to see endless possibilities, to forget about the past, the failures, the shortcomings.
Nice work if you can get it.
And Sophy had been able to when she was at university because her past had been short, her failures relatively inconsequential and her shortcomings no big deal.
Now it was different. She was different.
Her past was long enough to include Ari and George and consequent disasters. Her failures in these relationships bordered on magnificent. Her shortcomings were obviously substantial.
All that she saw in the future was misery and all that she felt was pain.
And a stiff neck which came from spending much of the night in Lily’s bed with her daughter and Chloe to keep Lily from crying on and off the whole night long.
It was what she’d done all day.
Sophy didn’t blame her. The fault was hers. If it had been necessary to bring Lily out to New York, she should have made sure her daughter knew it was only temporary. Saying so after the fact didn’t have the same effect.
Lily just glared at her or said, “We didn’t have to leave without saying goodbye.”
And Sophy could only shrug and say, “Yes, we did. I needed to get back,” when what she really meant was “I needed to leave.” It was as simple as that.
And as selfish, she admitted. So she promised Lily that she could go back and spend time with her father soon. She didn’t doubt that George really cared for the little girl. It would be good for both of them.
Lily didn’t think that was much consolation. “I want Daddy,” she’d sobbed when she went to bed last night. “I want Gunnar.”
“You have Chloe, darling,” Sophy assured her.
Lily had flung Chloe across the room, then bounded out of bed, grabbed her, then threw herself on the bed, clutching Chloe and sobbing harder.
“She’ll get over it,” Natalie had said earlier in the evening. “Kids are resilient.”
She hadn’t asked what happened. She’d just picked Sophy and Lily up at the airport and given them both hugs. Sophy had been grateful for the understanding and the lack of questions. All night long, listening to Lily’s periodic sniffles, Sophy had hoped that Natalie was right.
Now she eased herself out of bed so as not to wake Lily, then flexed her shoulders and moved her neck. It hurt. Her eyes felt as if someone had thrown a pailful of sand into them.
“Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” she said to herself as she padded into the bathroom.
It did not sound promising.
She took a long hot shower and refused to think about the shower with George. She washed her hair, then put on a clean summer-weight T-shirt and a pair of shorts. It might be fall in New York, but it was nearly always summer in California.
She put on the coffee and then booted up her computer. Work was solace. Or it should have been. But thinking about renting wives was too close to home. She shut off her computer and stared into space—not a good place to be.
The knock on the door was a welcome jolt out of her self-pitying misery. It was barely seven-thirty. Hardly time for visitors. But maybe Natalie had come to see how she was doing on the way to the office. Natalie, after all, had come back from Brazil in a similar state some months ago.
She raked her fingers through still-damp hair and hoped that Natalie wouldn’t notice—or at least wouldn’t comment on the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. Then, pasting on her best “I’m doing fine” smile she opened the door.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” George strode past her into the room and wheeled on her, eyes flashing.
Sophy, stunned, stared at him. This was the first day of the rest of her life, damn it. George was not supposed to be here!
But he was—and he looked as bad as she felt. His hair was tousled, his jaw was stubbled. His eyes were bloodshot, too. He looked strained and pained and angry as hell.
She’d never seen George angry. She didn’t want to now.
“Go away,” she said, still holding the door open, making a sweeping gesture toward it, hoping he would do just that.
He ignored her, walked in and flung himself on her sofa. “I’m not going anywhere.” He looked up at her defiantly, then raised one dark brow. “Want to try to make me, Sophy?”
She ground her teeth, and shut the door, then set her hands on her hips. “I shouldn’t have to,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. Well, I do know, but there’s no reason.”
He stared at her, then frown lines creased his forehead. “You know, but you don’t think there’s a reason?”
“No, I don’t.” She folded her arms across her chest and met his gaze with a steely one of her own.
For a minute he didn’t say a word. She dared hope he would get up and walk out before she begged him to stay.
But then he said, “Why am I here?” in that quiet, measured very George-like tone. That was the tone she recognized, the one completely at odds with the one he’d used when he’d burst in here.
She could deal with that one. So she made herself shrug negligently. “Because you always do what you’re supposed to do. We talked about this yesterday.”
“We did not talk about it yesterday!” Calm, measured George vanished in an instant. He jumped up and began to pace around. “You brought it up as I was going out the door to a meeting,” he said. “I didn’t get to talk about it at all!”
“You said you married me because of Ari.” She wished he’d sit back down again. He made her already small room seem even smaller.
“Yes,” he said tightly. “I did.”
She nodded, justified. “I knew it.”
“Partly,” he added firmly.
She frowned. “What do you mean, partly?”
“I mean, you don’t know everything.” He hesitated, rolled his shoulders as if they were stiffening. His gaze flickered away, but then he brought it back to meet hers. “I married you because Ari left you…”
“Yes.”
“But mostly I married you because I wanted to. I wanted you.” He paused, looked straight at her unblinkingly. “I loved you.”
Sophy simply stared at him.
She wondered briefly if her stiff neck had affected her hearing. If it had brought on the sudden wobbliness of her knees. She reached out and grasped the back of the chair she was closest to. It was barely enough to keep her upright. She shook her head,
ran her tongue over her lips.
“No,” she said. “I don’t—” she began and trailed off, afraid.
“Believe it?” George finished for her bitterly. “No, I suppose you don’t. I couldn’t tell you then.”
“When?” she said stupidly.
“When we got married. You still loved Ari and—”
“I did not!”
Now it was his turn to stare. “You loved Ari,” he insisted. “You had his child. My child,” he corrected firmly.
“Your child,” she agreed with that much of what he said. “Ari’s genes. That’s all. But I didn’t love him. Not when I married you!”
“But—” George said a single word of protest, then stopped.
“I did think I loved him in the beginning,” she admitted. “He was a charmer.”
“He was that,” George agreed grimly. “No bigger one on earth.”
“And no less dependable man on earth, either,” Sophy said. She sighed. “I began to figure it out when he kept running off all the time. He was fun to be with when he was with me. But he never stayed. How could I love a man who didn’t care about me or our child?”
George just shook his head, dazed.
“I almost didn’t even go to his funeral,” Sophy confided. “But then I thought I should go—for Lily. She might want to know about it when she got older.” Sophy spread her hands. “I didn’t love Ari,” she said earnestly. “Truly. I might have thought I did once—but not later. And definitely not when we got married.”
George shook his head, still coming to terms. “But you cried.”
Sophy frowned. “Cried? About Ari?”
“I thought so. That first night…when we…made love.”
Oh, God. Yes, she remembered those tears. “I wasn’t crying for Ari. I wasn’t even thinking about Ari—except maybe briefly when I thought how unlike making love with Ari was. Making love with you was…beautiful.” Just like the last time they’d made love—at Tallie and Elias’s. She hesitated, and then thought she had nothing left to lose and gave him the words she had been afraid to say at the time. “And I loved you.”
George didn’t speak. His Adam’s apple moved convulsively in his throat. His fingers flexed, made fists, then opened again. He took a breath and let it out. “Then why were you so angry the next day? Why did you tell me to go?”
“I didn’t believe you loved me. I thought I was a duty—one of Ari’s messes you always had to clean up.”
George grimaced and said a rude word. “No! I never—”
“I heard you say so, George. You told your father you’d always cleaned up Ari’s messes and you were sick of doing it and that whatever it was he wanted you to do was the last one. I heard you, George, with my own ears.”
“When?”
“At the christening. Upstairs. You and your father were arguing. About a woman. One of Ari’s women.” She forced herself to be frank. “You said you wouldn’t clean up any more of his messes. And that at least he—your father—couldn’t expect you to marry this one!”
“Because I was married to you!”
“Because I was one of Ari’s messes!”
“No! You got it all wrong. I didn’t mean you—for God’s sake, how could you think it?”
“What else was I to think?”
“Not you! Not ever you! There was other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Most of my life I was cleaning up after Ari. He got in a car accident in college. His fault. He didn’t have insurance. His dad had died the year before. We paid the bills, compensation, that stuff. I took care of it. My father was busy. Theo was gone. And—” he shrugged “—so I did it. Ari was the closest to me in age. We grew up together. People sometimes thought we were the ones who were brothers because we looked the most alike. There were other things, too.”
“This woman?”
He shook his head. “She was claiming Ari owed her money. No, but before…there were other things…”
He was silent for so long that Sophy wondered if he would continue, but finally he did.
“He borrowed money from me when I was in grad school. He had a project that he was working on, he said. I believed him. I lent him the money. He was a smart guy, no reason why it couldn’t have been a good thing…”
“It wasn’t?” Sophy guessed.
George shook his head. “He’d got some girl pregnant.” His voice was low, hard to hear. He swallowed. “Paid for her to have an abortion.” He looked at her, his expression grim, his gaze grim. “When I found out you were pregnant, I was glad he was dead.”
Sophy hugged her arms across her body. “I would never—”
“I know. I knew then. But I didn’t want you to have the baby alone. I wanted to be there. Hell, from the first time I met you, I felt a connection, but how could I act on it? You were…his!”
Sophy came then and stood in front of him, looked up at him and met his gaze, stopped being afraid, stopped running. “I wasn’t ever his the way I’m yours.”
For a moment they just stared into each other’s eyes. Then hers brimmed with tears and spilled over as he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. She felt a tremor run through him, knew her own body trembled. Held him tight. Felt his arms crush her.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve loved you since the beginning. Our beginning. I didn’t say yes so you’d take care of me. I said it because I wanted you, thought I could build a life with you, a good one, with you and me and Lily. And when I thought that family duty was the only reason you were doing it, I knew I had to let you go so you could live the life you wanted.”
He drew her down onto the sofa with him and wrapped his arms around her again, kissed her cheek, shook his head. “Family duty has nothing to do with us. Never did. The life I wanted—the life I still want—is with you. Understand?”
But Sophy needed all the loose ends tied up. “What about…Uppsala? You didn’t even mention it.”
He shook his head. “Top secret multigovernment project. Once we got married there was no way I was going to do that. I told you that last week.”
“You didn’t tell me what it was,” she protested.
He grinned. “Because if I did I’d have to kill you.”
She grinned, too, but then her grin faded. “Are you still…?”
“No. Everything I’m doing now would bore the socks off you. But it’s what I want to do—if you’ll come home with me.” Deep green eyes bored into hers. “Will you?”
For just a moment Sophy paused to savor the moment, to breathe in the calm and the peace and the love she’d never hoped to win. It was hers. It always had been. She regretted for an instant the time they had lost, but then thought about all the time they had left that they might never have got if these past three weeks hadn’t happened.
Today was the first day of the rest of her life—and it was looking better and better.
She smiled and framed his face in her hands. “I will. Oh, George, yes, please. I will!”
They were kissing when the door opened and small footsteps came padding down the hall. “Daddy!” Lily’s joy echoed around the room.
She flung herself on them and they gathered her in.
And then George pulled back. “Hang on,” he said and got to his feet. Lily clung to him as he started for the door. “No,” he told her. “You wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Lily looked disgruntled, but reluctantly went back to Sophy and crawled into her arms. Her eyes were bloodshot, too, from all of last night’s crying. But her smile was real and brilliant. “I knew Daddy would come,” she said.
“You’re a smart girl,” Sophy told her. “You believed.”
Lily nodded. “You gotta.”
Then the door opened again and a large exuberant black dog bounded in and leapt onto the couch with them.
“Gunnar!” Lily shrieked and threw her arms around him.
“You brought Gunnar?” Sophy stared at George, amazed. “On the plane?”
“He
’s part of the family,” George said simply. Then he grinned and picked Lily up to find room on the sofa for all of them. “And I figured if you wouldn’t listen to me, Lily and Gunnar together couldn’t help but convince you.” He threaded his fingers in her damp, tousled hair, making her aware of what a wreck she must look.
She said so.
George shook his head. “You are beautiful—inside and out. And I am the luckiest man in the world.”
Sophy’s tears spilled again. “And I am the luckiest woman.”
“We are the luckiest family,” Lily said. “Aren’t we, Gunnar?”
Gunnar made his agreement noise and bumped Lily with his nose. She wrapped her arms around him and giggled. “Gunnar’s a good brother,” she said. “But I wouldn’t mind one like Digger. Could I please have a brother like Digger?” she asked her parents.
Sophy looked at George. George looked at Sophy. They put their arms around each other—and around Lily and Gunnar.
Then George kissed his wife and said, “You know, Lil, that’s a really good idea.” He smiled into Sophy’s eyes. “I think your mother and I will see what we can do about that.”
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
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Hired by Her Husband Page 17
