Well, damn.
“I need to be here.” She looked away from him, unsure why his words left her feeling so hollow. “But a week in Antigua once in a while wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
“You like Antigua?”
“I’ve never been,” she admitted. “I collect pictures of tropical places. Thailand, Bora-Bora, Mexico. I have a scrapbook that I keep them in. Sometimes when things are gloomy I take them out and look at them. I have this one picture of Antigua at sunset that pulls me every time I look at it.” She sighed. “It seems like the perfect place to be trapped with a hot naked man. Maybe I missed my calling. Maybe I should write romance novels that take place in tropical settings.”
Carter grinned at her again before he leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You’re very cute, Ms. Gordon.”
More warmth spread through her with his kiss. She wanted to live in that moment forever. They were talking. Not arguing. Not rehashing their failed past. They were talking for the first time. She realized that they could. That there could be more to them than passion and sex, and too much emotion.
Give him a chance.
Give yourself a chance to have what you always wanted.
But don’t rush. Just don’t rush.
“Is there a place you’ve always wanted to go, Carter?”
“Yeah, to the Poconos.”
“Say what?”
He laughed, his deep chuckle going through her. “You know, that place with the champagne-glass hot tubs. I’ve always wanted to go there. Take a pretty girl, put on some Barry White, play in the bubbles.”
“Carter, that is so cheesy! But kind of adorable. I thought you were going to say Zurich or Prague or some other place pretentious rich people like to go.”
“Hey, I’m not pretentious and I’ve been to Prague and Zurich when I was a teenager. I really would like to go to Disney World, though. I hear Epcot is damn near magical.”
“Disney World is magical. At least for me. Ellis hates it. I think it has more to do with waiting in line than anything, though. We could go—” She stopped herself, feeling a little bit of insecurity creep up.
But he already seemed to know what she was going to say. “I would like to go with you.” He kissed her softly on the bridge of her nose, and held her closer while they lay in silence for a few minutes. “Just let me know when you’re ready, Bell.”
She was starting to think about the future. Their future together. It scared her. She didn’t want to fail at love again.
“I don’t want to leave this bed, baby, but nature is calling my name.” He rolled away from her, getting out of bed, his beautiful naked body causing her hormones to act up again.
His phone buzzed from her nightstand.
“Can you grab the phone, Bell? It’s probably Ruby.”
He walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him as she reached for the phone. “Carter’s phone. Belinda speaking.”
“I wondered how long it would take before you got your hands on him again.”
For a moment Belinda was at a total loss for words. Carter’s mother. Bernadette, the only woman in the world who could make her feel worthless. She hated that she had given her the power to make her feel like shit. She refused to let that happen again.
“Well, hello to you, too, Mommy dearest.”
“He’s fixated on you. I don’t know why, but he is. That’s what this move was about, but I know my son. He doesn’t love you. He only thinks he does. Your relationship didn’t work then and it’s not going to work now. You are simply just not good enough for him. I’m not saying this to be unkind. I’m just telling you the truth.”
“And I’m telling you, you’re an uptight bitch and I simply don’t care what you think.”
Carter walked out of the bathroom then, naked as the day he was born. “What’s the matter?”
She handed him the phone and left her bed. Suddenly she felt damn vulnerable with no clothes on. “It’s your mother.” She found her discarded nightgown on the floor, near his underwear. She tossed his boxers at him.
“Bell?” Carter grabbed her hand. “What happened?”
“Talk to her. I’m sure she’ll tell you.”
“I’ll speak to you later.” He disconnected and pulled on his boxers. “What did she say to you?”
“You know. The usual. How I’m not good enough for you and that you’ll never love me.”
“Belinda.” He pulled her close. “I don’t care what she says. I’m going to have it out with her.”
“What’s the point? She’s never going to think I’m good enough.”
“She hurt you and by doing that she hurt me and she can’t get away with that. She has to understand that you’re it for me.”
“Pudge?”
“Bill Junior?”
“Oh, God, no.” She heard her parents’ voices. In her house. Uninvited. When there was a half-naked man in her bedroom.
“Are those your parents?” Carter’s eyes went wide, and he looked just as dumbfounded as she felt. “What are they doing here?”
“Hell if I know! You think you can climb out of my window without breaking your neck?”
“No!”
“Oh, come on! Well, how about the closet. Get in my closet.” She tried to pull herself away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. He kept his hand planted firmly on her waist.
“I’m not hiding. We’re married and you need to talk to your parents about boundaries.”
“Pudge?” Her mother poked her head in the door, her eyes going wider than Belinda had ever seen. “Oh. Oh! You have company.”
“She has company? This early? Is it her friend Apple Blossom?”
Her father burst into the room to see Carter standing there. Standing with her, with his hands on her body.
“It’s you,” he said grimly. “I’m going downstairs. I’ll be in the car.”
“Oh, but Bill…” Carmina called after him. He didn’t turn back and Belinda was infinitely grateful that her father didn’t want to be in the same room with her and her nearly naked kind-of husband.
But it appeared her mother wasn’t going anywhere. She was staring at them with open interest.
“Hello, Mamá. You remember Carter?”
“Of course.” Carmina studied him for a very long moment, her eyes traveling all over his cut body. “He is very handsome, Pudge,” she said almost approvingly.
“Yeah. He’s much better than those other dogs I’ve brought home.”
“You never brought him home,” she said sharply. For a flash of a second she saw her mother’s anger; then her face cleared and she looked like her normal self. “We came over because I got a call from Patrice last night. She said her boy came home very upset because you smacked him when you were out last night.”
“I did. He had it coming. He said some nasty things to me.”
“She said she knows and that you were right to smack him, but Theo told her that you disappeared last night with a strange man and you know how much I worry about you and I wanted to see if you were all right because if you went home with a strange man all types of things could have happened to you. You could have been taken by a serial killer and we would have found little pieces of you all over the county.”
“Mamá!”
“I’m glad to see that you went home with not such a strange man but your husband who you have been married to for a very long time but have never bothered to bring him home to meet me.”
Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.
“I—”
“How was the food at the restaurant last night? What did you eat? I hear they make excellent duck.”
“I—uh. Huh?” Her head spun as her mother changed topics with lightning speed.
“What did you eat last night?”
“I had a Cobb salad.”
“Are you eating salad?” Her mother nodded approvingly. “That’s good. I know your father has been taking you out to dinner after your classes. He came home smelling lik
e sausage two weeks ago. He had the nerve to be upset with me for frying candy bars when he fills you with enough cheese to start a dairy. Did you eat cucumbers on your salad last night, Pudge? You know you cannot eat cucumbers. They make you horribly gassy. You are like me that way. I can eat a bucket of chicken with no problem but you put a cucumber in front of me and I blow up like a hot-air balloon. Same with bananas. I belch and belch, which is sad because I really like bananas.”
“Mamá!”
“What?” She blinked at her. “Talking about one’s gas is unacceptable? Well, keeping your secret husband away from your mother is, too, so there.” She looked at Carter. “What upsets your stomach?”
Belinda opened her mouth to tell Carter that he didn’t have to answer that, but she wasn’t quick enough.
“Surprisingly grapefruit, which is okay because I don’t like grapefruit. My Ruby does, though. She likes me to peel them so she can eat them like oranges. I don’t know how she does it.”
Carmina nodded sympathetically. “It’s very acidic, but it can be good for you, too. But you can have oranges or lemons to get your vitamin C. I know!” Her eyes lit up. “We can go to the farmers’ market together. They have fruit the size of a small child’s head! The lady who sells them swears to me that there are no pesticides or chemicals in them but I’m just not sure. It seems unnatural for fruit to be so big. I keep hearing about these GMO things on the news. They make it seem like we are going to have zombie fruit walking around and killing our farm animals. Would you like that, Carter? We can go to the farmers’ market. They have it on the green every Wednesday and Saturday until one. We can go and get fruit for your Ruby. My husband doesn’t like fruit but he’ll eat it if I pack it in his lunch. He gets very hungry, you know. All that barking he does at the boys on his team. Thank goodness we didn’t have a son. We would have had to use half our savings just on food. It’s not that Belinda didn’t eat a lot as a child, but she was a girl and her body couldn’t handle as much. So we will go on Saturday morning? You have to go early or all the good fruit is gone.”
Belinda was having a hard time believing that this was happening. That her mother was standing in her bedroom talking about fruit with Carter when he wasn’t wearing any clothes.
“Ruby would like that. It’s okay if I bring her, right?”
“Of course you can bring her!” Carmina’s face lit. “Such a beautiful little girl.”
“Hey!” Belinda said. “Wait a minute.”
They both ignored her. “It’s a date,” Carter said.
“Lovely. I have to go. Your father is probably having a coronary in the car. I’ll have to make it up to him. He’s been asking me to make him egg salad but I hate making it.”
“Me, too,” Carter said as if they were old friends. “They stink up the house and I always end up with shells in my salad.”
“Yes! I’m excited for our date, Carter.” She leaned over to kiss both his cheeks and then she kissed Belinda’s. “I’ll see you later.” She left them alone.
“Did you just make a date with my mother? In your underwear?” She heard what had just taken place. She saw it with her own eyes, but had her mother just invited her estranged husband on a fruit-buying trip? Seriously?
“Yeah. I think she’s delightful.” He yanked her closer and kissed her mouth, like nothing had happened. “Come shower with me. I want to take you to breakfast before I have to get Ruby.”
She relented. Rather easily. Her parents knew what she had done. There was no going back. She might as well enjoy him today.
CHAPTER 17
Same song, different meaning …
Belinda lay on the floor of Cherri’s nursery with little Joey sleeping on her chest. She wasn’t sure why she’d come here after she had gotten her car back and she and Carter had parted. Her original plan had been to go back home, shower, nap, and ponder the direction her life had taken in these past few weeks, but after she got home she realized that she didn’t want to spend the day alone in her house—that her house felt kind of empty.
She kind of missed him and she didn’t want to.
“The lass looks good with a baby on her bosom, don’t she, lad?”
Belinda opened her eyes to see Colin, Cherri’s husband, and Magnus, her father-in-law, standing over her. It nearly hurt her eyes to stare at father and son. Both were well over six feet tall, burly, and ruggedly handsome with deep Irish brogues that made many women swoon.
“She does,” Colin said. “I’ve been sent to rescue you from my boy, but you seem to have charmed him. He’s been a hyper little bugger lately.”
“Yup, just like his father,” Magnus said, slapping his son’s back. “Just wait till he starts walking. I thought I was going to have to start putting a little bourbon in your bottle just to get you to settle at night. Lucky for me a little Guinness did the trick.”
Colin grinned at his father and shook his head. “Maybe we just need Belinda. What are you doing every night around seven?”
“It’s the boobs,” Cherri said, walking in. Colin wrapped his arm around his wife, tucking her close to him. “Men go gaga for them.”
“It’s true.” She rubbed the sleeping baby’s back. “It’s a gift.”
“You men want to head out and grab up some lunch?” Cherri asked.
“What do you want to eat, love?”
“What would you like, Belinda?”
“Cake or doughnuts. Or a cakey doughnut with chocolate. You know what? Just surprise me.”
“We’ll swing by the bakery on the way,” Magnus said. “Girl after my own heart. You know I’ve got my own little place downstairs, girlie. You could move in with me. I could even give you a baby if you want. We could make some beautiful kids together. Colin could use another sibling. Isn’t that right, lad?”
“No.” Colin kissed his wife’s forehead and gave his father a little shove out of the room. “You stay away from her, Pop. I have no urge to call Belinda mommy.”
The exchange between father and son made Belinda smile. She imagined that’s what her own father wanted, a son who looked and walked and talked just like he did. It was nice to see them together. She knew Colin and his father didn’t always get along so well. “So you really like having your father-in-law live with you?” She looked up at Cherri, who had a small smile on her face.
“I love having him here. Our family wasn’t complete without him.”
“I wish I could love my motherin-law like you love your father-in-law. I might still be happily married.” She shook her head. “That’s bullshit. Bernadette was a royal bitch but I can’t totally blame her for the failure of my marriage.”
She blamed herself for so many reasons. But the biggest reason today was allowing Bernadette Lancaster to plant that seed of doubt in her mind. She loved herself; after years of battling with her self-confidence, she had learned to love herself just the way she was. But it still bugged the hell out of her—no, it hurt her to hear Bernadette say that she would never be good enough for her son. It hurt her to know that somebody would always be betting against them.
Cherri sat down on the floor beside Belinda. “What brought this subject on?”
“I spoke to her on the phone this morning. Of course that was after I had hot sex with her son all night and before my parents barged in on us. She basically told me that I was never going to be good enough for her son and that our relationship will never work.”
Cherri shook her head, reeling from that information. “First of all, yay for hot sex! Second, what did you say to that? And third, what do you mean your parents walked in on you?”
“I called Carter’s mother a bitch. Which part of me feels bad about but most of me feels great about. I’ve always tried to play nice with her because I didn’t want to cause a strain between Carter and his mother, but now I don’t care. I’m too old and respect myself too damn much to let somebody bully me. And yes, my parents showed up this morning just after Carter pulled on his underwear. I don’t think they wer
e too pleased to see me shacking up with my estranged husband, but they said surprisingly little to me about it—which worries me. My mother did invite Carter to go to the farmers’ market with her on Saturday, though.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Oh.” Cherri blinked at her. “So I take it you and Carter got back together last night?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I love him, but I’m not sure if I can go back down that road with him. There’s still so much hurt between us.”
Cherri nodded. “There’s a lot you have to overcome. Maybe you should just have sex with him.”
She stared at Cherri for a moment, surprised. “You think so? You don’t think I should just forget the past and be with him?”
“I like him, Belinda. I don’t want to like him, because he lied to you. By not disclosing such a huge part of his past he lied to you. But I see him with his kid and I can’t help but like him. And if I’m so confused about him and I’m an outsider looking in, I can’t imagine how you must feel. So I say yeah, why not? Have sex with him. Date him. Learn what it’s like to be around the guy he is now and not the man you used to know. This is your time. Take it. Colin and I got married very quickly, too, so I know what it’s like to marry a man that you aren’t sure you know all that well, but we were friends first and you didn’t have that experience with Carter.” She grinned at her. “Just don’t do what I did and get pregnant.” Cherri gazed at her son and touched his dark curly hair. “Forget I said that. Getting pregnant was the best thing that ever happened to me. Get knocked up if you want to.”
“Don’t give that talk at high schools, honey.”
“I won’t.” She grinned at her. “But you’re old now and you’ll be a good mother. And I know you want to have babies. I can see it all over your face.”
“It’s your fault. I didn’t think about any of this stuff until you and Ellis both got married.”
“You’re lying to yourself, Belinda. You got married four years ago. You can’t tell me that having a family wasn’t always on your mind.”
Gentlemen Prefer Curves: A Perfect Fit Novel Page 23
