by Arlene James
“No, wait!”
But she couldn’t. She just wanted this whole horrible night to end. “Good night, Edward!” She turned and ran as quickly as her squishy shoes would allow. He caught up with her at the bottom of the stairwell, his big hand closing around her upper arm. This was becoming a habit with him, a bad habit. “Take your hands off me!”
He released her instantly. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to…” He lifted one hand. “You forgot your purse.”
She snatched it away from him, snapped “Thank you” and backed up a step.
“Laurel,” he said, “I really am sorry.”
She turned her face away, too embarrassed to look at him. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I—I was a fool to think…” No, she wouldn’t get into that stupid marriage proposal. How could she have thought even for a moment that she could pull off something like a marriage of convenience with this man? She shook her head, wanting desperately to get away. Following sheer instinct, she hurried up the stairs.
He came after her. “Laurel, please can’t we talk about this? I—I didn’t mean to…That is, I don’t even know how it happened.”
“No!” she called down to him. It came out more of a question that she’d intended, a product of her confusion and embarrassment. She stopped and jerked around on the step to face him, intending to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that she didn’t blame him, that she just wanted him to go away.
He looked up at her and exclaimed, “Hell, you’re not even my type!”
Abject humiliation flooded her. Her heart dropped to the soles of her feet. Hurt unlike anything she’d ever felt before hit her, knocking the breath out of her, slapping tears into her eyes. She grabbed the handrail, mouth opening to release an exclamation that no sound could adequately communicate. She turned and began to run up the stairs again, only to break the heel off one shoe two steps later. Bawling in frustration, she yanked it off and threw it over her shoulder.
“Ow!”
She whirled awkwardly, nearly tumbling headfirst down the stairwell. He glared up at her, her destroyed shoe in his hand. She saw the anger in his eyes and welcomed it, her own leaping up to meet his. How dare he be angry? She was the one humiliated, insulted, manhandled! She yanked off the other shoe and threw it at him with all her might. It glanced off the top of his head. “Ow! Stop that!” He clamped a hand over the spot, glaring up at her, but she knew darned well that it hadn’t really hurt. A head that hard could take anything thrown at it!
“Drop dead, Edward White!”
She flung herself up those stairs, only the soles of her tights between her and the cement steps. Behind her he yelled, “You perverse little loon!”
“Shut up!”
“I will not, not until you calm down and listen to me!”
“Never! Not in a mil—” She broke off at the landing of her floor. Fancy was pacing there, bouncing a weakly wailing Barry on her hip.
“Thank God!” She rushed forward and practically threw Barry into Laurel’s arms. “You’ve got to help me. He won’t stop crying! I’ve tried everything I can think of, he just won’t hush! I didn’t know what else to do. I tried Mrs. Martinez, but she’s not home, and—” She was looking at Laurel’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”
Edward came bounding up behind her then, just in time to say, “I have them. She threw them at me.”
Fancy reeled back in surprise. “Threw them at you?” She glanced at Laurel’s flushed face, even though Laurel tried to hide it from her by bending her head and crooning to Barry, who snuggled against her, snuffling and rubbing his teary eyes wearily. Fancy immediately rounded on Ed. “What the hell’d you do to her?”
“Me?” he yelped defensively. “She’s the one who made a scene in the middle of the best supper club in town! And then she…she let…” His words seemed to dwindle away with his anger. He glanced guiltily at Laurel and, both her shoes held in the crook of one arm, pushed a hand through his hair. She stared accusingly at the top of his head. Exasperatedly, he combed it back into place with short, fierce tugs of his fingers, then glared at her as if to say, “There! Satisfied?”
Unwilling to allow the softening that was beginning in the vicinity of her heart, she turned her head away. Concentrating once more on the baby, she put a hand to his forehead. It was warm. “I think he has fever!” she said to Fancy.
“Oooh,” Fancy whined, “I was afraid of that, but it ain’t my fault! I’m just not mama material.”
Laurel shot a concerned look at Edward, saying, “It’s okay. We’ll, um, figure out what to do.” She targeted the door to her apartment and headed toward it, Barry rubbing his face against her shoulder as she fumbled in her purse for her keys. Fancy glared at Edward and followed. Laurel’s shoes in hand, he came right behind her.
“Listen,” he was saying, “if you need some help, I have a friend you could ask.”
“I think we can manage,” Laurel muttered, balancing Barry on her hip and getting the key into the lock.
“We can manage,” Fancy affirmed sharply.
“I’m just trying to help,” Edward pointed out entirely too mildly.
Laurel shoved the door open and turned on him. “I’m not incompetent, Edward! You think just because I haven’t given birth I can’t possibly know how to take care of a child?”
“I didn’t say that. As a matter of fact, Kendra’s little girl is adopted. It’s just that Kendra’s been at it quite a while, and on top of that, she’s a pediatric nurse. She knows what she’s doing.” He looked at Fancy, his implication clear. “She’s an excellent mother.”
“Well, bully for her,” Fancy said, bristling. “Laurel’s an—”
“Intelligent woman!” Laurel interjected quickly. “Intelligent enough to take care of a little fever, thank you very much.”
“Fine,” he said testily. “Like I said, I was just trying to help, and of all the mothers I know, Kendra Sugarman is not just the best, she’s the most helpful and—”
“Sugarman!” Laurel exclaimed. “Parker’s wife?”
He momentarily gaped at her, taken completely off guard, and then a shield came down behind his eyes. “That’s right.”
She was the one, the one Edward had wanted to marry, the one he had loved, maybe still did love. He certainly was not above bragging about her, and for some reason that hurt more than Laurel could fathom. Not his type. Not the type he could love and respect, just the type he could undress in the front seat of his car!
“Go away, Edward,” she said, her voice shaking despite her best effort at control. He stared at her dumbly, as if English was a foreign language or she was a creature from another planet. “Go away, Edward!” she screamed, helpless against the tears that rolled down her cheeks.
He stared a moment longer, and then he nodded and thrust her shoes at her, gaze averted in confusion. It was Fancy who took the shoes, Fancy who guided Laurel into the apartment and stood guard at the door, watching until he retreated into the stairwell, his quick footsteps echoing into the silence as curtains and blinds twitched back into place, and it was Fancy who pronounced the final, unprintable and most appropriate conclusion to the whole miserable episode.
Edward waited with his hands in his pockets, jiggling change and shifting his weight from foot to foot. It was after eleven, too late to be dropping by, but he didn’t know where else to go or what else to do. He felt as wound-up as an eight-day clock and as confused as a soap opera plot. He needed a sounding board and trustworthy advice. What he needed, he told himself, was the woman he couldn’t have and the friend he wouldn’t give up. He needed the pain with which he had learned to live, the friendship he had learned to treasure and the combined wisdom he couldn’t deny—and he needed it now.
By the time the door opened, he was in such a state that common little civilities like greetings were beyond him. He swept by Parker, ignoring the fact that his good friend wore nothing but partially zipped jeans, and got right to the point by exclaiming, “I must be out of m
y mind!” He threw up his hands. “What am I talking about? She’s the one out of her mind!”
“She?” Parker queried, half turning in order to do up his jeans and run a hand through his damp hair.
“Don’t play stupid,” Edward snapped. Pointing a finger at his best friend in all the world, he added, “You did this to me, you worm, insisting I take that…that loony-tune into my office.”
“Ah.” Parker folded his arms in satisfied understanding. “The delectable Ms. Heffington Miller.”
Edward’s brows furrowed and his eyes darkened tellingly at that. “Do I have to remind you that you’re a married man?”
Parker smiled smugly. “No. My wife was doing that rather nicely just before you leaned on the bell—in the tub, I might add. Kendra, that is, not you. Nice haircut, by the way.”
Edward grimaced. “Don’t talk to me about my hair.”
What was it with him? Parker was the most appearanceconscious, sex-addicted man he’d ever known, and he just never changed, not even after all this time being married to the sweetest little woman alive. He tried not to think about what Kendra might have been doing in the bathtub to remind her husband of something that he ought not to be able to forget. Disgusted, Ed turned and left the entry, tramping down the steps to the living room then crossing over and stoically trudging up more steps to the austere, spotless kitchen. After taking off his coat and loosening his tie, he pulled out a chair from beneath the small table there and sat down.
Parker skipped lightly up the steps and came to stand at the counter, the heels of his palms braced against the edge of the slate countertop. “To what do I owe the honor, old buddy? I haven’t seen you this worked up since you wandered in and caught me making love to my own wife in the living room.”
Edward glowered from sheer habit, but oddly enough the reminder of that particular past folly did not produce the same lurching pain as usual. He attributed it to his state of mind. Maybe he was losing it. God knew a female like Laurel Miller could drive a guy right over the edge. Now Kendra was a different case. Kendra was a quiet, restful kind of woman. You could almost forget that she was around. As if conjured from mere thought, the quiet female in question laid a welcoming hand on his shoulder.
“Hi, Ed. What’s up? Ooh, nice haircut.”
“Uh, don’t talk to him about his hair,” Parker quipped.
He glowered and smoothed his hair self-consciously as Kendra glided across the room to stand at her husband’s side. She wore a sensible flowered robe zipped all the way to the chin and had combed her long, wet hair straight back over a towel draped around her shoulders shawl fashion.
“What shall we talk about, then?” she asked brightly. Edward felt greatly mollified.
“It’s this case I’ve been working on,” he grumbled.
Kendra smiled knowingly at her husband, saying, “Why don’t I brew us up a pot of herbal tea while you tell us all about it?”
Parker looked at Ed and quietly added, “I’ll get the whiskey.”
Ed nodded agreement. Adding a strong dose of liquor was the only way he could get Kendra’s herbal tea down, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. Half an hour later he was sipping his second cup, feeling as mellow as it was possible to get in his state of mind, and doling out his story.
“Anyway, there wasn’t a chair to sit on, a table to eat from, not so much as a radio—just an air mattress on the floor and clothing everywhere. Clothing and shoes. She must have a hundred pairs lining the walls.” He shook his head.
“No furniture at all?” Kendra asked over the top of her cup.
He started to say no, then shrugged. “Well, there was a crib,” he allowed, “and like a little dresser thing.”
“A baby bed?” Parker queried, balancing himself on the back legs of his chair.
“Apparently, she baby-sits for this friend of hers, and let me tell you, this is one for the books. The dame must be fifty if she’s a day, dyed black hair, false eyelashes out to here, makeup for six. She’s some kind of reformed stripper. Name’s Fancy Bright.” He shook his head over the contrived name.
The front legs of Parker’s chair hit the floor. “No kidding? I mean, the Fancy Bright?”
Edward frowned. “Don’t tell me you know this broad.”
“Know her?” Parker hooted. “Hell, I spent my entire puberty sneaking in to see her. She’s a legend, man, an artist.”
“An artist!” Ed snorted. “She’s an old has-been stripper.”
“What I want to know,” Kendra interjected pragmatically, “is what she’s doing with a baby at her age.”
Ed rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, I wondered about that, too, but it’s Laurel who concerns me. Honest to God, I have to wonder if she’s playing with a full deck. Kennison says she’s not, and he’s got some pretty powerful ammunition. And after everything that’s happened…” He chugged tea and set the mug down with an audible crack. Kendra reached for the teapot while Parker uncapped the whiskey.
“Just what is everything, Ed?” Kendra asked. “I mean, those other things happened when she was a kid, right?”
“Yeah,” Parker put in, “what’s happened to get you all stirred up?”
Edward ran his fingertip around the edge of his mug, saying, “Well, for one thing, that very first day, the day you pushed me into a consultation with her, she asked me to marry her.”
“She what?” It came in chorus, but it was Parker who added the refrain of laughter, tipping his head back and howling so that Kendra scolded him, fearing he’d wake Darla, who was arguably the most remarkable three-year-old in history, thanks entirely, Edward was sure, to Kendra’s skills as a mother.
It was just those skills that had brought Parker and Kendra together in the first place. After the deaths of her parents, Parker’s brother and sister-in-law, Parker had needed Kendra to help him keep his niece with him. A custody battle waged by a sister of Darla’s mother had prompted Parker to find a wife quickly in order to cement his claims to Darla. A good friend and a pediatric nurse, Kendra had seemed the logical choice, especially since she had broken off her engagement to Edward some weeks earlier. Much to Edward’s dismay, what had begun as a marriage of convenience involving the two people closest to him had become a great romance and a marriage in truth. The pair had adopted Darla as their own and turned themselves into a real family, which meant, of course, that Kendra was lost to him forever, no matter that he never had and probably never would love another woman. Somehow, though, over time, he’d grown accustomed to the idea. It was something about which the three of them never spoke.
Predictably, Kendra was shocked by Laurel’s abrupt marriage proposal. Just as predictably, Parker was more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Actually,” he said, when the whole tale of the proposal had been told, “it’s a pretty sound solution to the problem.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Edward growled. “Who in his right mind would marry someone he wasn’t in love with and didn’t intend to stay married to?”
Parker grinned at Kendra. “Worked for me.”
Kendra smacked him lightly on the shoulder with the flat of her hand. “It did not. We were already in love, we just didn’t know it.”
“Look,” Edward cut in irritably, “it’s not just the marriage proposal. I took her to The Blue Plate tonight—”
Parker whistled.
“And she made a huge scene in front of everyone,” he went on, ignoring Parker pointedly.
Kendra frowned. “What do you mean?”
Edward grimaced. He really didn’t want to get into this, now that he thought about it. He waved a hand dismissively. “Aw, it was about this dress she was wearing.”
“What about it?” Parker wanted to know.
Ed tried to shrug it off. “It was too short and too tight.”
“Sounds perfect to me,” Parker quipped, winking at his wife.
Kendra rolled her eyes. “You would think so.”
“Oh, come on, you’re not as c
onservative anymore as you pretend.”
“I don’t pretend,” she replied mildly.
Parker smirked at Ed. “Yeah, right. Like she ever wears that Mother Hubbard robe except when you or her dad are around— and like you don’t know she’s stark naked beneath it”
Edward nearly swallowed his cup along with the tea he was sipping.
“Parker!” Kendra scolded, but the flame red of her face told Ed that Parker had spoken the truth, and the very idea of Kendra naked made him uncomfortable. It was kind of like picturing his mother naked; it just wasn’t respectful. But you got your face slapped for trying to strip Laurel naked in the front seat of your car, whispered a perverse little voice inside his head. Resolutely, Edward shoved both thoughts away, snapping, “Can we stick to the point here?”
Parker ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, poking lumps in both cheeks. “Right,” he said, “and the point is?”
“The point is, what am I going to do about Laurel? If Kennison’s right and she’s inherited her grandfather’s emotional instability, I don’t have a prayer of winning this case in court.”
“And if he’s wrong,” Parker mused, “and you drop the case for fear of losing in court, Laurel can kiss her inheritance goodbye.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Edward retorted. “Why do you think I’m asking for advice?”
Kendra shook herhead thoughtfully. “It’s not our opinions that you need,” she said. “What you need is a professional opinion.”
“A shrink, you mean?”
“A psychiatrist, yes.”
“Oh, swell, so I just tell her I won’t pursue the case unless some Freud clone gives her a passing grade in sanity? I can’t do that! You don’t know this woman and what she’s been through. I mean, her parents couldn’t be bothered with her, and her grandmother had all the warmth of an ice cube, and that’s putting it mildly. Her grandfather was a nut case. Her husband rips her off for several mil and the only home she’s ever known. She’s locked out of her chosen profession and reduced to waiting tables in a diner with a retired stripper for a running buddy, living in a shabby walk-up furnished with a pile of shoes and an air mattress, and on top of it all you want me to tell her she has to see a shrink and get his stamp of approval? I don’t think so.” He shook his head, firm but stymied. “God, what am I going to do?”
