Rhys's Redemption

by Anne McAllister

  She shoved that thought away.

  She wondered what color eyes the baby would have. Her own soft dove-gray or the ice-chip blue of the man who had stared at her so fiercely this morning?

  Her hand curved protectively against her abdomen as if she could shield her child from the anger and accusation in Rhys’s hard gaze.

  “You got a stomachache?” Tyler asked.

  Mariah made herself drop her hand and smile down at him. “No,” she said gently. “I’m just getting hungry. I was thinking an ice-cream cone would be good right now. What do you say?”

  Tyler grinned. “Me, too!”

  Rhys slept the clock around. And woke up feeling worse than when he’d gone to bed. For a moment he couldn’t remember why.

  Then he did.

  It didn’t seem real. Didn’t seem possible.

  He rolled over and groaned, then opened his eyes and recalled that the last time he’d slept here Mariah had been with him in the bed.

  The memory was so vivid, so intense, so compelling that even now his body hardened with desire. That wasn’t supposed to happen!

  He flung back the sheet and got out of bed.

  He stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the cold water, then dunked his head under the tap. He scrubbed his face. He brushed his teeth. He shaved. He dressed.

  He went out to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and chugged most of it down black.

  As he stood there with the coffee mug in his hands, he thought about how he’d come home the day before—apprehensive, nervous, wondering if he and Mariah could get past that one night.

  Now he knew, with a certain bitter irony, that they’d never get past it.

  So much for getting his friendship with Mariah back.

  It would be better, he thought, if he didn’t. If they had nothing more to do with each other. He would miss her, but everything had changed anyway.

  Maybe, he thought, buoyed by coffee and desperate hopes, she would move away. She didn’t have to live in the city for her work. Last summer she’d lived out in the Hamptons while her place was being renovated. Maybe she would move out there.

  Then they wouldn’t have to see each other any more at all.

  He could get her address and send a monthly check. Do his part. He didn’t think she would press him to do more.

  She hadn’t argued with him.

  She hadn’t said a word.

  She understood.

  He took a deep breath, felt his chest expand, felt the slightest easing of the weight that had been pressing on him since she’d said that fateful word: pregnant. He took another experimental breath, and then another.

  Yes, he did feel better.

  He flexed his shoulders. He felt slightly looser, steadier. More balanced. Like a fighter getting to his feet after a knockdown punch.

  He’d been down. But he wasn’t out.

  He could manage. He could cope. Exactly the way he’d always coped.

  Rhys finished his coffee. Then he picked up his duffel bag, carried it down to the basement and dumped everything he owned into the washing machine, exactly the way he did every time he got home.

  He concentrated on it now. Focused on every movement as he measured the soap, added the bleach. Always bleach. A lot of bleach.

  It made things clean again.

  He needed things clean again. Neat. Under control.

  He shut the lid, turned the knob and gave it a pull. The machine began to fill—the way it always did.

  He hummed tunelessly as he went back upstairs—the way he always did.

  He reached for the phone.

  And stopped.

  He’d been going to ring Mariah to see if she wanted to go grab a bite of lunch.

  So, all right, some things would change.

  But not the important ones, he reminded himself. He would still be on his own. Solitary. Untouched. Untouchable.

  Exactly the way he wanted it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mariah’s houseguests left on Saturday.

  “It was fabulous! We had a terrific time.” Erica turned from getting into the taxi that would take them to the airport and gave Mariah one last hug. “I can’t thank you enough for putting up with us.”

  “My pleasure,” Mariah assured her. And it had been— to a degree. Having Erica and Jeff and the kids there all week had kept her busy—and sane. It had kept her from wondering what Rhys was doing, if he was coming to terms with things, what was going on in his head.

  She hadn’t heard a word from him all week.

  She’d thought he would sulk, that he would be angry, that he might even pretend she wasn’t pregnant—for a while.

  But she didn’t think he would pretend she didn’t exist.

  They were friends, damn it! Friends didn’t drop each other. Friends didn’t turn their backs on each other. Friends didn’t ignore another friend’s very being.

  But Rhys was ignoring hers.

  She hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t heard from him. She excused him, telling herself that he didn’t want to come around to talk about things further while Erica and Jeff were there. She didn’t blame him. And she knew he had a lot of thinking to do.

  She didn’t expect it to be easy for him. She didn’t expect, even when he got things sorted out in his head, that he would dote the way Gibson did or the way her other friend Izzy’s husband, Finn, had when she’d been pregnant.

  She didn’t expect him to ask her to marry him. Not at once. Not yet.

  Though deep down she did dare hope.

  But at the very least she expected to see him again.

  She didn’t—not once all week.

  Finally, the night before Erica and Jeff were going to leave, she cooked dinner for everyone and invited her sister, Sierra, and some friends Jeff and Erica had met during the week—Finn and Izzy MacCauley and Gib and Chloe Walker and Sam and Josie Fletcher. Rhys knew them all. They’d wonder why he wasn’t there if she didn’t invite him.

  So she’d invited him. He wasn’t home, so she’d left a message on his answering machine. She wasn’t putting pressure on him, she assured herself. She was just being neighborly—being a friend.

  The next morning when she came back from the grocery store, she found a message he’d left in return.

  “Thank you for your invitation,” Rhys said in a voice so polite and distant she almost hadn’t recognized him. “But I’m afraid I have another commitment.”

  He was afraid he had another commitment?

  Whatever happened to his normal, cheerful, “Can’t make it for dinner. Sorry. I’ll drop in when I get back”?

  Mariah felt a trickle of worry skate down her spine.

  Everyone else had come to dinner. They all asked about Rhys.

  “He had another commitment,” Mariah said, very properly quoting his words and trying not to sound sarcastic.

  But Izzy and Finn’s eyebrows lifted. Chloe looked astonished. Sam said, “Not overseas, is he?”

  And Gib said, “What commitment is better than us?”

  “He’ll show up,” Sierra had predicted with cheerful optimism. “Probably had some sort of family thing he couldn’t get out of.”

  Maybe, but Mariah doubted it. She didn't think he did much except go fishing with his brothers.

  In any case, he never showed up.

  She felt empty. Worried. Vaguely lost. She told herself that it would take him time, that maybe he just didn’t want to deal with anything while her cousin and family were still there. She gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  Now, though, as she gave Erica one last hug, she saw the ornamental gate that led to his apartment open. Her heart kicked over. She gave Erica a squeeze. “Come back again. Soon.”

  “You come home,” Erica countered as she took Ashley from Jeff.

  “Sometime,” Mariah promised. She was aware of Rhys locking the gate behind her.

  “Oh, there’s Rhys! Hi, Rhys!” Erica said.

  Mariah turned to see a faint sm
ile flicker across Rhys’s face. The smile was directed at Erica. He nodded pleasantly.

  “We’re just leaving,” Erica said. “We missed you at dinner last night.”

  Rhys kept his polite smile. He didn’t reply. He was dressed to go jogging, and ordinarily Mariah knew he would loop an arm around her shoulder and say, “Go get some shorts on. I’ll wait for you.”

  Now he kept his distance. Didn’t even look her way.

  She wetted her lips and turned back to Erica, saying cheerfully, “Have a safe trip. Bye, Ty. Bye, Jeff.” She gave the baby a buss on her fat pink cheek, smiling as Ashley clapped her hands and drooled.

  Out of the corner of her eye Mariah saw Rhys come up the steps. He was four feet from her. Less, as he opened the waist-high wrought-iron gate that opened onto the sidewalk. And then more.

  He was moving away.

  He didn’t even stop. Didn’t even so much as glance her way. He went right out the gate and down the street.

  The taxi doors slammed, Mariah watched him go.

  “Bye! Goodbye! Bye, Mariah!” Erica and Jeff and Tyler all called.

  “Bye!” Mariah waved madly as the taxi drove off. Then her gaze shifted to the man striding away towards the park.

  “Goodbye,” she repeated softly.

  But she knew it wasn’t Erica, Jeff, Tyler or Ashley she was talking to.

  He stayed away.

  He flew out to Colorado and spent a few days with his photographer brother, Nathan. He went out to Montauk and spent a weekend fishing with his businessman brother, Dominic.

  And every time he came back he saw Mariah.

  She didn’t make any effort to avoid him. She smiled. She said, “Hi.” She looked at him with those big gray eyes that he remembered too well from the night he’d made love with her—and, in spite of himself, he wanted to do it all over again.

  But, more than that, he didn’t want to think about her at all.

  When he was home he saw her every day. She came out on her terrace to water the plants when he was down in his back garden. She sat on the stoop and talked to Mrs. Alvarez who lived upstairs. She hung out her laundry on that ridiculous little contraption that she used to dry what she called her “delicate items.”

  Panties, she meant. Bras.

  It drove him nuts.

  He might not talk to her anymore. He might not see her face to face. But he could hardly avoid seeing a whole row of her bras flapping in the breeze. And those colorful scraps of something or other flapping beside them—had she always hung her panties to dry in the sun?

  He’d never noticed before.

  His gaze locked on the pair of peach-colored ones he remembered peeling off her.

  He had half a mind to call her up and tell her to stop scandalizing the neighbors.

  Fortunately he came to his senses first.

  But he didn’t stay in the garden. It wasn’t that nice a day. He didn’t need to stand out there watering shrubs. Just because it was exactly the sort of thing he most longed to do when he was halfway across the world in some land where green was an unknown color, that didn’t mean he needed to do it now.

  There would be time later.

  When Mariah Kelly’s scandalous underwear was dry and folded and put away.

  He was avoiding her.

  There was no other word to describe it. Mariah was a writer; she made her living using the correct words.

  Avoiding. Yep, that was what he was doing. Not only wasn’t he calling her or dropping by her apartment, he was heading the other way if he saw her coming. He was ducking into shops to miss her. He was going out of his way to keep out of hers.

  She didn’t avoid him.

  Mariah had always faced life straight on. She did now. She kept right on walking when she saw him coming, and when he cut into the grocery store to avoid her she swallowed the hurt and walked on. She kept right on watering her plants or hanging out her clothes when he was in his garden. She even waved at him or called, “Hello.” And when he ignored her or pretended he didn’t hear she told herself he was still coming to terms.

  And she believed it.

  But she was getting tired of waiting.

  That was the trouble with working at home. She was there too much. It was too easy to be snubbed when it seemed that sitting around waiting to be snubbed was all you did all day—even if you were really writing articles.

  She needed to get out—get away—do another personality piece. She’d been skipping those assignments recently because she couldn’t predict how her stomach would behave. It was usually all right by late morning, but she couldn’t get up early and head off for an interview if she was going to be upchucking all the way.

  She didn’t know how much longer Stella, her boss, was going to tolerate her saying no, though. Stella didn’t know she was pregnant.

  No one knew—except Rhys.

  Soon she would have to tell everyone. But not yet. Every day she told herself, Not yet.

  The phone rang that evening at suppertime. She’d given up hoping it would be Rhys. Well, she’d almost given up. Her heart still beat faster every time the phone rang. But she didn’t snatch it up the way she had at first. Now she let it ring three times before she grabbed it.

  It was Stella. “Have I got an interview for you!”

  “Interview? When? Where? I don’t know if I can get away right now,” Mariah began cautiously.

  “You will for this one. It’s Sloan Gallagher.”

  “Sloan Gallagher? He doesn’t give interviews,” Mariah reminded her. No one had been granted an interview with the reclusive box office idol in years. No one even knew exactly where he lived. If they did, the world would be camping on his doorstep. As it was, Sloan Gallagher covered his tracks so well that the world didn’t know where his doorstep was.

  “Sand Gap, Montana,” Stella told her. “And he wants to talk to you!'’

  “Me? I never asked to interview him.”

  “No, but everyone else always is. And he wants to do his bit to promote this new picture of his—cares about it like he’s never cared about any of the others, apparently— so he’s agreed to an interview. With you.”

  “Why me?”

  “He says you’re fair. You’re sensible. He read the piece you did on Gavin McConnell and he was impressed, so he called.”

  Gavin McConnell, another of Hollywood’s more reluctant interviewees, had talked to Mariah last fall. The article had run last month.

  “He called you?”

  “Believe it or not.” Stella was clearly in awe. “He wants you to come to his ranch. To be there for the roundup… and the branding. To portray him as he really is, not the way Hollywood thinks he is.”

  “The round-up? The branding? Gallagher brands cattle? He really ranches?” There had been rumors to that effect, but Mariah had passed them off as just that—rumors.

  “Apparently. That’s what he’s invited you to come and find out. Figure on a week.”

  “A week?”

  “He’s offered a week. Surely you’re not going to want to do it in less?” Stella sounded as if she would doubt Mariah’s sanity if she did.

  Mariah wasn’t sure she was going to do it at all. What if she upchucked all over Sloan Gallagher’s ranch?

  But if she stayed home, what good would that do? She’d just sit here and fret about Rhys. And maybe, being on site, she could pick her moments, avoid having to be in interview mode when her nausea was at its worst.

  “All right,” she told Stella. “I’ll go.”

  * * * * *

  She was everywhere he looked.

  And then one day she wasn’t there.

  Rhys rejoiced. He watered his shrubs, smiling when he didn’t see her on her terrace. No underwear flapped in the breeze, either. Another plus.

  He went jogging in the park and didn’t catch a glimpse of her. He sat in his living room and read the Times and never saw her once go up or down the stairs. He even lingered on the stoop and talked to Mrs. Alvarez f
or half an hour or so that evening, and relished the fact that Mariah wasn’t there.

  She didn’t show her face the next day, either.

  He supposed she was out of town doing an interview. She was often gone a day or two. When her subjects didn’t live in the city, he knew she went to them.

  Sometimes she went to the Hamptons, sometimes to Greenwich or the Cape, sometimes to Martha’s Vineyard or to Bucks County or occasionally even farther afield.

  The magazine she wrote for had national coverage, but she tended to get the assignments that were based in the northeast. Ordinarily he would have known where she’d gone. She would have told him.

  Mrs. Alvarez would know. He should ask Mrs. Alvarez.

  Like hell!

  The thought brought him up short. He didn’t care where she was. It didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t as if he really wanted to know. And it wasn’t as if he had any vested interest in the answer.

  They had only been friends.

  Now they were… less.

  He went out to the new Thai place on Broadway for dinner by himself. Mariah loved Thai food. He wondered if she’d tried it.

  Then he did his best not to think of her again for the rest of the night.

  Maybe when he saw her tomorrow he’d ask her. Casually. No need to snub her completely, after all. He just needed to keep his distance, not let her depend on him emotionally. Not get involved.

  But Mariah wasn’t there the next day, either.

  Or the day after that.

  When he didn’t see her for the fifth straight day, he began to wonder. And that annoyed him, too, because he didn’t want to wonder.

  “Then ask,” he growled at himself.

  Mrs. Alvarez would tell him. She would give him a knowing look and say, “She’s in East Hampton interviewing that sexy leading man,” or, “She’s in Newport with that handsome sailor,” hoping to make him jealous.

  She always hoped that. She thought he and Mariah were “made for each other.”

  Of course that wasn’t true.

  Rhys was made for no one, and he was never jealous.