Valentine's Child

by Nancy Bush

  He’d never, never been in love.

  So, why was his heart thundering like a racehorse? Why did he feel so intensely conscious of the heat of the room, the noises of laughter and conversation, the smell of Sherry’s perfume, sweet as sugar — or was just another odor of the coffeehouse?

  He had the strangest desire to reach out and grab her by the hair and haul her to him, so that he could stare into her eyes and guess her secrets. I want to know, he thought desperately. Why? Why? Why did you leave?

  Instead, he heard his own voice say coldly, “I remember Sherry. She’s hard to forget.”

  The blush that raced across her pale cheeks surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to be sensitive. She’d reached epic proportions as an ogre in his mind, he realized.

  “Good to see you, too, J.J.,” she answered with an identical coolness, and he wondered if she’d used his initials deliberately, a tiny weapon.

  You’re cynical as hell, he told himself angrily.

  Roxanne leaped into the moment. “Oh, my gosh, maybe it isn’t Sterling anymore! Sherry, I forgot to ask. Are you married? Holy cow, you probably hitched up with a doctor and have six children and two vacation homes and an English sheepdog yourself.”

  Jake’s stomach clenched. It took every ounce of control he possessed not to react, but he kept his gaze trained on her face and witnessed the shadow of emotion that crossed her features. No husband. But something, he thought.

  “Well?” Roxanne asked.

  “Not married,” she said lightly.

  “How about children?”

  She actually flinched and then Matt moaned, “Rox,” again, as he often did. Jake wondered how they would ever stay married; their personalities were exact opposites.

  “What?” Roxanne demanded. “She could have children from a previous marriage, couldn’t she?” She turned to Sherry. “Right?”

  “No previous marriage, either,” Sherry said, clutching her purse. She drew a shaky breath and said, “I’d better get going. I’ve got a lot to do.”

  With that she scurried for the door, glancing back once, her lips parting as if she had something more to say. Jake realized she was looking at him, and he lifted his brows, aware she was struggling.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I …”

  Incredulously, he thought she was going to say, I love you. He could practically reach down her throat and grab out the words. Instead she closed her mouth and regarded him with an expression of anguish and fury.

  What the hell is going on? he wondered.

  Sherry could do nothing but stare. Words wouldn’t pass her lips, no matter how hard she tried. She couldn’t tell him right here, right now. Maybe she couldn’t tell him at all.

  Damn him, she thought half-hysterically. He looked too much the same. In that split second when his eyes met hers, Sherry recognized the turmoil in her breast for what it was: love. A love that would not die no matter how impossible and terrible it made her life. A love that defied reason and common sense. A love she wished she could kill, for it had brought her nothing but heartache and misery.

  She pulled her gaze from his, wishing she wasn’t so drawn in by him. She could smell his scent and when he moved, his black leather jacket hugged his frame appealingly. She couldn’t think. Her chest felt too tight inside her skin.

  How about children? Roxanne had asked.

  Just one … Just J.J.’s …

  “Sherry, for Pete’s sake, you can’t leave yet.” Roxanne waved at her to sit back down. “We don’t know anything about you. No children, no husband… Is there a ‘significant other’?”

  “Rox!” Matt was exasperated, but there was an element of love in the way he looked at his future wife, too. He could see the humor of her ways, Sherry realized. What would it be like to have that kind of relationship? That kind of trust?

  “I’m single and intend to remain that way,” Sherry told her. “I’m glad for you and Matt. I’ll try to make the wedding, but really, I’ve got to go.”

  J.J. seemed impervious to the conversation. His brows were drawn together, his jaw tense. Sherry wondered what he was thinking. He’d always been so incredibly insightful except in one area — her.

  “I saw Ryan Delmato last night,” she added as she pushed open the door.

  “At Bernie’s?” Roxanne asked, interested.

  Sherry nodded.

  “Looks the same, doesn’t it?” Remember when we used to all hang out there? Hard to believe so much time has passed. Grab a seat, Jake,” she finished, waving him to another unoccupied wooden chair.

  “I can’t stay. I just dropped by because I knew you were waiting for me.” The timbre of his voice did strange things to Sherry’s equilibrium.

  “Are you nuts? You’ve got to stay. This is my wedding, for Pete’s sake!”

  “I’ll get things straight with Jake,” Matt interrupted. “Later,” he said to his friend.

  Sherry practically bolted from the coffee shop, unwilling to have J.J. so close on her heels. This was not the time.

  On the street, rain fell in an unrelenting January drizzle, swept sideways by sudden rushes of wind off the ocean. Sherry hesitated a moment, angry with herself. The hell it wasn’t! What was she waiting for? A voice from heaven dictating her path? Here was a golden opportunity — away from Patrice Beckett, no less — and once again, all she could do was run.

  Closing her eyes, she willed up her courage from some deep well inside her soul. She’d come to tell him about Mandy. She had no choice. For her daughter — and for herself, she realized dimly — she needed this secret revealed. But a cowardly part of her kept saying, Don’t rush. It’s only the first day. You’ve got time. Give yourself an opportunity to adjust. You’ve had a lot of shocks. Be kind to yourself.

  Suddenly he was just behind her right shoulder. Sherry faced the parking lot, afraid to look at him. Belatedly, she realized she was standing right next to his black Jeep. He had to think she was waiting for him.

  “So, why did you stop by the house last night?” he asked, his breath tickling the nape of her neck.

  He’d thought that one over, she realized. She remembered that about him, too; his intensely analytical mind. He dissected everything, searching for its true meaning. She’d been afraid he would discern the secret of her pregnancy before she got away from him. Patrice had.

  “Just reacquainting myself with old friends.”

  “Try again,” he muttered.

  She was afraid to move. He was so close. Close enough to lean back and touch. “How like you to distrust me,” she answered with forced bitterness. “I guess it’s true what they say — some things never change.”

  “I never distrusted you.”

  “Oh, yes, you did.”

  “You mean, after you slept with Tim Delaney?”

  “I didn’t sleep with him, and you know it.”

  “I only know what you told me. And damn near everything out of your mouth was a lie.”

  He said it without heat. Matter-of-factly. As if it were a proven truth and she should agree with him completely.

  Steeling herself, Sherry twisted half-around, meeting his deep gray eyes and hostile face with a fury she hadn’t known she possessed. They studied each other for several long moments and then she said, “How many years has it been, J.J.? Over a decade. Closing in on fifteen. And the first thing that we have to talk about is whether I slept with Tim Delaney when I was a senior in high school?”

  He had the grace to look slightly ashamed, but it didn’t alter the belligerent slant of his jaw, or his battle-tense stance.

  “I didn’t lie,” she told him flatly.

  “You lied about Caroline.”

  A barb of truth hit home. She hadn’t actually lied about Caroline Newsmith, but she’d definitely done her part to let others know Caroline wasn’t the sweet thing everyone thought. “I didn’t like her much,” Sherry admitted. “She didn’t like me, either. We were always in a cold war over you.”


  That stopped him. His lips parted, as if he were about to refute her, but how could he? She and Caroline had been J.J. Beckett’s chosen women. Only Caroline had been the blonde angel and Sherry the dark-haired seductress. Or at least that was how Caroline told the story, and in the end, Caroline’s was the only tale to tell.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” he said, attempting to end the conversation. But now, perversely, Sherry wanted to keep going.

  “Oh, I don’t know. There’re a lot of unresolved things in our past, don’t ya think?”

  “Just high school stuff.”

  Sherry managed to taut a smile. Her high school experience had set the stage for the last unhappy fourteen years. She’d been acting by rote, just going through the motions. The events of her youth had stripped the rest of her life of color and meaning.

  Just high school stuff, indeed.

  “Caroline and I are engaged,” he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “It took us long enough.”

  “Roxanne told me.”

  He nodded.

  “But you didn’t want to get married Valentine’s Day.”

  His curt nod was her only answer as he stared over her head to some distant point she couldn’t see. She knew he was thinking of that last Valentine’s Day in their senior year, when she’d flirted so dismally with Tim, hoping to hold on to the last remnant of J.J.’s affection. She’d loved him with a desperate teenage love but he hadn’t cared for her the same way. And everything had backfired.

  “You’re really a slut,” Annie had whispered out of the side of her mouth, mean and hard, as Sherry walked out of school one disastrous afternoon in early February. “Everyone knows you’re doing it with Tim just to get J.J. back. Well, J.J. hates you. He had you and now Tim has, too!”

  “That is such a lie!”

  Annie’s cold glare dug into her soul. “Yeah? Everyone knows what a fucking slut you are. Thank God J.J. finally came to his senses after he had you, too.”

  Sarcasm was always been Sherry’s armor but she couldn’t think of a response terrible enough to hurl at Caroline’s mouthpiece. Stumbling down the front steps of the school, she’d fought back building tears. When Tim called her that night to ask her to dinner the following weekend on Valentine’s Day, she’d huddled beneath her covers and cried herself to sleep.

  What happened? She’d asked herself over and over again in the weeks following her night in the tree house. She’d given herself to him because she loved him and almost as soon as the deed was done, his ardor had cooled. Was he really that shallow and uncaring? She wouldn’t believe it. But regardless, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. She had no desire or intention of making the same one with Tim. She still loved J.J. so much.

  So she limped through until Valentine’s Day, accepting Tim’s invitation. But as soon as she and Tim arrived at one of Oceantides’ nicer restaurants, lo and behold, J.J. and Caroline were two tables over. Calling on acting skills she hadn’t known she possessed, Sherry brightened, pretending as if she were having the time of her life, but her performance was lost on J.J. He paid no attention. All he could see was Caroline.

  Or so she had thought.

  Later that night, sunk in misery, she’d finally found enough courage to call up J.J. To her surprise he was home. She’d expected him to still be out with Caroline, but he’d already returned and was cautiously willing to talk to her. She asked if they could see each other and he drove toward her home, picking her up as she was already walking to Bernies. They walked into the pizzeria together and shared a late-night heart-shaped pizza together.

  It wasn’t exactly a reunion but it was a coming-together that gave Sherry hope. He hadn’t liked seeing her with Tim; he didn’t say the words but his feelings were clear.

  When he dropped her home that night she turned her face toward his, heart thumping hard, praying that he would kiss her. But he didn’t so much as look her way. She could still remember his harsh profile and clenched hands around the wheel. Whatever he might feel, he refused to succumb, and Sherry left more depressed than ever. If she should have learned anything from that night, it was that J.J. Beckett didn’t care about her.

  But her miserable, loyal heart refused to see it.

  Now, with his stern visage directly in front of her and so much of the past hanging between them, she said the words she should have uttered long ago. “I was poor white trash to you, so you believed every ugly rumor about me. I loved you, and you used me. If I’d been Caroline Newsmith, you might have loved me back, but you couldn’t love Sherry Sterling.”

  J.J.’s eyes were riveted on her mouth, as if he couldn’t believe the words issuing from her lips. “That’s what you think? It was a helluva lot more complicated than that.”

  “Wow. Okay. At least you don’t deny it,” Sherry said, surprised. “I’m not sure how to feel about that.”

  “We were kids. And we weren’t right for each other for a lot of reasons I couldn’t have explained back then. I don’t think I can explain it now, either. I know I don’t want to,” he added as an afterthought.

  “You sound just like a Beckett,” Sherry said. “How sad.”

  He almost smiled. “I am a Beckett.” Drawing a long breath, he closed his eyes for a moment as if he were gathering strength. It was a curiously vulnerable gesture, and Sherry, reacting on pure emotion, actually reached forward to touch him, as if contact would assure her that he would handle the information about Mandy like a mature adult and father.

  But he expelled his breath before she could act. “So, is this why you came? To get back at me for all the shit I laid on you in high school?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “I’m not interested in a postmortem on a high school hook up.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “So what’s your game?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sherry’s temper was starting to rise.

  “Our whole senior year. Isn’t that what this is about? You with the smart remark and flirting with the whole damn team, and then a quick thing with me, and then Delaney, and God knows who else, then back to me. It was high school. No one cares anymore.”

  “It wasn’t a game.”

  “Come on, Sherry,” he said in disgust.

  “I had — problems.”

  “Then three weeks ‘til the end of school you just disappear. I thought we’d gotten past all the bullshit, but wow. That was a kick in the groin.”

  “I left because I loved you, and you didn’t feel the same way.”

  He almost laughed. “High school love isn’t the same as real love.”

  “Oh? Who says?” Sherry demanded.

  “You left Oceantides because you loved me?”

  “I left because you didn’t love me. And I needed you to love me.” She bit into her bottom lip. “I needed to know that what we shared had actually meant something to you.”

  “It meant something to me,” he said in exasperation. “But I was eighteen. What did you want? A proposal?”

  “I just didn’t want to be another notch in your belt. And you couldn’t admit you cared about me, even a little.”

  “This is the same argument we had the night before you left,” he said suddenly.

  “Yes. It is. It’s the same issue. I practically begged you to tell me you loved me, and you couldn’t do it.”

  “And that’s why you left town?” he asked in disbelief.

  “In essence, yes. I had family problems, too. It just was the right thing to do.”

  “So, why are you back now?”

  “I have something to say to you, and I’ve waited way too long to say it.”

  “Well, lay it on me.” J.J. was expansive, sweeping his arm out so that Sherry suddenly saw where they were standing — on a dreary, rain-drenched sidewalk in front of a coffee shop where people walked by every half–minute or so and stared in curiosity.

  “Could we go somewhere and talk?” she asked. “Somewhere private.”
<
br />   A huge drop of rain landed in his hair, then slid down his cheek. All the while Sherry watched the glittering water-diamond, J.J. watched her. “I don’t think so,” he finally said, after a drawn-out moment. “I’ve got a fiancée who doesn’t want me talking to you. If it’s psychological healing you’re looking for, go find it somewhere else. I’m not interested in raking up the past.”

  With that he pressed the remote to his Jeep, climbed inside and sketched a fatal, final goodbye.

  Silently swearing several pungent curse words, Sherry drove back to her motel room, intent on fleeing town and getting home to Dee and the safety of her other life. But then she thought of Mandy and knew she would never earn her daughter’s respect by being a coward.

  Unlocking the motel door and flinging on the light, Sherry gritted her teeth, marched over to the worn desk and began to scratch out a lengthy letter.

  VALENTINE’S CHILD — NANCY BUSH

  Chapter Six

  “Honey, you stay in Oceantides until you get this thing straightened out.” Dee’s voice rang strong and warm over her cell. “I’ve got that trip, comin’ this summer, and I’m going to be gone for three weeks. So, you take all the time you need, ‘cause it’s payback time come August.”

  “Thanks,” Sherry murmured, clutching the envelope in her hand.

  “If I could help, I would. Just take your time, and relax.”

  “Has Mandy called?”

  “Mmm-hmm. She’s kind of anxious, poor thing. But don’t worry. Kids that age think there’s a quick fix for everything. They don’t know how to wait.”

  “She doesn’t have a clue,” Sherry said.

  “Of course, she doesn’t. She’s thirteen! And don’t go blaming yourself. What is, is. You did the best you could. I told her you were explaining things to her daddy, and you’d let her know as soon as everything was arranged.” Dee hesitated. “Have you seen him?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Told him?”