by Lilian Darcy
“Waiting to see who the killer is, first.”
“The killer is the wife.”
“The wife is too obvious.”
“It’s a double bluff from the writers. They know we’ll think it’s too obvious.”
She was wrong. It wasn’t the wife. It was the girlfriend. Turned out Mac didn’t care either way. They had important things to discuss. “Whiteface was good,” he said slowly. “I have a job, if I want it, and a house to rent, if I want that.”
“And do you want them?” Lee snuggled against him, snaking her arm between his back and the couch and resting her head on his shoulder.
“The job, almost certainly. The house, I’m still thinking.”
“Is it nice?”
“From the photos, yes. Have to make up my mind pretty soon.” If he turned the rental opportunity down, there might not be anything else as workable for a while. He’d end up staying down here and driving a heck of a lot—four hours a day. But if that meant he had Lee in his bed every night so he could watch over her, maybe it was the best plan. “Not an easy decision, but important. We have to work out which options make sense, and which just don’t.”
Tempting way to think. Dangerous way to think. What was he planning, here? What did he want, and why did he want it?
“Yeah?” Her chin burrowed into his collarbone.
“We have to be careful about our decisions, both of us,” he repeated. She must be thinking along the same lines, surely. There was an elephant in the room, and it had a ring on its finger and was wearing a veil and a white dress. “We can’t paint ourselves into a corner.”
“How, a corner? I mean, I was thinking about corners myself, but tell me yours.”
“End up getting married, out of some feeling that we should.” This was the danger, as he saw it.
He’d surprised her. “Married?” She sat up, making a cool space between their bodies. He wanted her back. “Where did that come from?”
“You haven’t thought about it?”
She looked really shocked. “This is not how two people talk about getting married.” She was hugging her elbows, arms crossed over her front, pushing up those breasts he’d been thinking about with such eagerness a few minutes ago.
“I’m talking about not getting married, Lee.”
“You’re talking about it as if it’s on the table, one of our options, something we’re thinking about, the most appropriate thing to do.”
“No, I’m saying it shouldn’t be. I’m saying the opposite.” He started to sweat, regretting that his thoughts had traveled faster than his mouth, and it had all come out wrong. “That it would be disastrous. That we’d be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Don’t you think? People have a hard enough time staying married for the sake of their kids. Getting married for that reason in the first place would be...wrong. Really wrong. You have to see that.”
She was just looking at him. Eyes narrowed. Shock still on her face. Not happy. Not saying a word.
Finally, the silence between them grew so thick that he had to break it. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“C’mon, Lee! You’re just sitting there looking at me as if I’ve grown two new heads, and I’m not trying to be...I don’t even know what. Controversial? Hostile? I just think it would be a mistake for us to think about getting married.”
She spoke very slowly and patiently, green eyes blazing, and he hated it. “I...have never...ever...mentioned...the word marriage. You...are the one...who brought it up. And now you’re giving me this argument as if I’m trying to trap you and you have to scramble to get out of the trap, and that is so unfair, and then you’re surprised I went a bit speechless.”
“So you weren’t thinking about it?” Seemed he was very, very wrong about the elephant in the room.
“About getting married? No!”
“About not getting married, then.”
“Not that, either. I totally agree with you. Or I did. Before you went all ‘you have to see that, Lee’ on my ass.”
Wow. She was angry. For someone who hung around with extreme sports nuts a lot, she wasn’t prone to coarse language.
“Of course I freaking see it!” she added. Her eyes were still blazing, and he would have loved the fire in them if it hadn’t been directed squarely at him. He wanted to apologize, but didn’t quite know what to apologize for.
Sorry I made assumptions about the way women think.
She stood up and rubbed her hand against her breastbone, then muttered, “Ouch, I shouldn’t have eaten that pizza so fast.” She winced.
“What’s up?” he said stupidly.
“Don’t feel that great. Heartburn, and...” She headed for the bathroom.
“Wait... Wait!”
“Bad time, Mac.” She disappeared into it, and the door slammed behind her.
Hell!
He wasn’t that prone to coarse language, either, but there were times when it helped. This seemed to be one of them. He’d started this discussion all wrong. He hadn’t even known he was starting a discussion, although he had known they needed one. And now they couldn’t finish it. He let fly a few more choice words under his breath, then heard the faucet running hard into the sink. “You okay in there?” he called out.
“Not really. But give me a moment.”
“Want me to—?”
“Want you to go outside onto the porch so you don’t have to listen.”
Yeah, the bathroom door was pretty thin.
He took her seriously, grabbed his jacket and went to stand on the porch, which would be a very pleasant place to sit in a month or two. Now, it offered vistas of sleet falling in darkness, and black trees tossing in wind, and despite the jacket, he was shivering in seconds.
He felt helpless and stupid and slow and wrong. She was back there in the bathroom, bristling with independence, and he’d just treated her like the opposite of who she was. Who had he really been talking to? Himself? He was the one who kept thinking of the marriage idea and having to argue himself out of it.
Lee was...
Lee was scarily like Sloane in some ways, and it hadn’t mattered before, in Colorado, but it was starting to matter now. He knew what she would say if he accused her of it. “I am nothing like that!” She’d already said it, and probably she was right.
But still, there were a few things. Her independence. Her toughness. Her athleticism. He loved those things in a woman. Always had. Before Sloane, too, he’d gone for women like that. Since Sloane, he hadn’t gone for anyone very much until Lee. There’d been one woman who was different—feminine and kittenish and all about fashion and celebrity gossip—and that had been so wrong it had lasted all of a week before he came to his senses.
So he liked strong women, and he liked Lee.
But, yeah, she was scaring him. This whole situation was scaring him, and he didn’t know what to do. How did he protect his unborn child without damaging his relationship with its mother? How did he learn the difference between realistic caution and good sense, and illogical overreaction?
After a few more minutes, he let himself carefully back inside. The bathroom door was still closed, with Lee behind it. The faucet was still running.
“How are you doing now?” he asked, through the door. He leaned against it, waiting for her answer.
“Better,” she said, after a moment. “Out in a minute. Write a memo for me, could you? Pregnant women should not gulp pizza.”
“Don’t think I’ll need to write that one down, will I?”
“True. It’s engraved on my memory now, for all time.”
The door opened. She looked a bit green and she had a towel bunched in her hand the way a child would hug a teddy. As he watched, she brought it up to her face and wiped her mouth, clearly not
for the first time. He could smell toothpaste. For a strong woman, she looked pretty fragile right now, and he just wanted to hold her and soothe her. Rub her back. Bring her tea.
“You okay? Want me to get you something?” He hugged her for a moment, and the air seemed sweet between them. Sweet and magnetic and good. He brushed his lips against the air three inches above her forehead. She was warm and a little shaky, and he wanted to sweep the fallen strands of hair away from her face and kiss the top of her head and murmur, Shh, it’s okay now.
“Like what?” she said.
“Crackers? Tea?”
“Would you have to go to the store?”
“Yes.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“Can’t send you to the store this late,” she concluded.
“Yes, you can. Of course you can.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be okay.”
“Will you quit being so stubborn about this stuff? There’ll be a convenience store open.” He still had his jacket on, and the pickup keys were in the pocket. He let her go and took them out, and the fact that she didn’t keep arguing told him she was still feeling pretty bad. “So tell me what you need. Fruit? Soup?”
She sighed, as if she was letting go of something. “Just get everything.”
“Everything?”
“Crackers, tea—maybe some herbal and some regular. Bananas, grapes, cans of soup, really salty potato chips.”
“You don’t know what you want.”
“I don’t know what’s going to help. Haven’t had much of a problem with this kind of thing so far. Just a couple of mornings, if I let myself get really tired. Clearly haven’t been eating pizza often enough—or fast enough—to spot the correlation. So it’s been easy to manage. Thank you,” she added, more politely than she needed to. “Seriously. Thank you.”
“Sorry about before.” Sorry I scared you off. Sorry you’re doing this distancing thing now because of it, with the politeness and all. “About the marriage thing. You were right. I was arguing with myself. You never brought it up. So I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Mistake. It’s okay,” and he just went.
When he got back with a bulging grocery bag about twenty minutes later, she was curled up on the couch wearing one of his sweaters, a big, bulky gray thing with sleeves that reached past her fingertips. “You could have turned the heating up,” he told her gently.
“Not cold. Just needed the comfort.”
“Oh. Okay.” And she’d gotten the comfort from something of his. Once more, stronger than ever, he felt this crazy rush of tenderness and protectiveness that he didn’t dare admit to because of what it might trigger in her reaction. “So what do you want, out of this lot?” he said quickly.
“Um, tea? Regular tea. Weak. A splash of milk. Just something hot I can sip. And maybe crackers, if you got them.”
“I did. Water crackers. Very plain.”
“Perfect.”
“Tea is coming right up.” He put the bag down on the counter in the kitchen that was really just an extension of the living area.
With the TV running another crime show in the background, she watched him boil water, open the box of tea bags and find a mug. A very ugly mug.
“Could lend you some better than those,” she offered.
“Might take you up on that, if I sign a lease on— Hey, we haven’t really talked about this yet, and I need to, to make a decision. We got distracted.”
“We did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she said slowly. “It was both of us. It wasn’t just you. It probably wasn’t you at all. And you’re right, we haven’t really talked about the job or the house.”
“It’s not furnished. That’s the downside.”
“And the upside?” She snuggled deeper into the couch and kept watching him at work in the kitchen.
“Half an hour from the mountain, less expensive than I feared.”
“Apart from the expense of buying furniture.”
“There is that.”
“We don’t own a lot, either of us, do we?”
“Nope.”
They looked at each other. The kettle began to whistle. He poured water into the mug and waited for her to say the things he’d heard before—that you didn’t need a whole baby store full of gear, that the whole idea was just a marketing ploy, a trap for new parents.
“It’s not that we’re poor,” he said, because he wasn’t. He’d actually saved quite a lot.
She nodded. “Or that we’re channeling John Lennon and imagining no possessions. We just haven’t needed stuff, either of us, till now.”
“Till now?”
“Mac, I’m going to be honest with you.” She gave a sly, wicked smile, suddenly. “I’m planning to shop. Don’t want my baby...our baby...sleeping in a drawer.”
Sloane had said the exact opposite.
He laughed. Sheer relief, really.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.” He added very carefully, because he wasn’t sure how she’d take it. “Just feeling happy about all of this, that’s all.”
She grinned at him. “You know what? I am, too....”
It was a very nice night, in the end.
Chapter Twelve
On Friday, Lee drove north with Mac to look at the house available for rent. It was a plain little log cabin, but the bathroom and kitchen had both been updated, it had a pretty deck out back, and it had that indefinable good feeling about it that you couldn’t pick up on from an internet photo tour. The furniture currently in place belonged to the tenant who was moving out at the end of April, but Mac would probably acquire similar things—simple, comfortable, no clutter.
“Think I should take it?” he asked her. “Gotta make a decision today, because there’s someone else interested. The Realtor’s only holding it for me as a favor, because he’s the brother of the friend who put me in touch with him.”
Mac and Lee looked at each other, and it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. Scary and not safe, a kind of vertigo that made them dizzy. If he didn’t take it, where would he live instead? How much would the physical distance between them—or lack of it—dictate where their relationship went?
“Take it,” Lee said. Her heart was beating faster. “How long’s the lease?”
“Six months.”
Six months. Her due date was almost exactly six months away. Looked at from some angles, this seemed like a long time. Six months away was on the far side of summer, and they still weren’t really even into spring. At Spruce Bay, she and Daisy and Mary Jane had a whole season of resort guests and restaurant meals and pool cleaning to get through.
From another angle, six months was no time at all. It was only twice the time she’d known Mac. It was only about six weeks longer than an Aspen ski season. It was only the time it took for a baby to grow from three inches to twenty.
“Renewable,” Mac added, about the lease. “So that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Was he thinking about her due date, too? That he wouldn’t want to have to find a new place around then?
They’d been wonderfully at ease with each other since Wednesday night, after the blowup over the marriage idea. He shouldn’t have said it that way, as if marriage was a trap she was setting for him. But in response she’d reacted too strongly, so they were both at fault, and it seemed they were both clearer, now, on where they stood.
They didn’t want to get married.
Decision number one.
Which sort of suggested there was another decision to make, or more likely quite a few of them, but by unspoken agreement, neither of them was pushing on any of those. It felt like a relief, because she hated that the baby was creating all
this pressure. Even more, she hated that they might come to blame the baby for that.
The risk of doing such a thing to her innocent child really horrified her, because she didn’t need personal experience to know that something like that could haunt and warp a person for life.
“Take it,” Lee repeated. “And I’ll help you shop for furniture, if you want.”
“We could have fun with that. Testing mattresses.”
“And rugs.”
“And couches.”
They smiled at each other, and drove directly to the Realtor so that Mac could sign the lease. Lee thought it might be pretty nice to be driving up here all summer when they each had some time off. They could eat breakfast and barbecue out on the deck. Put towels down and bask in the sun. Sleep late.
If Mac drove south to see her, they could go boating on the lake, or take a picnic and go for a hike in the woods. Pick wild blueberries on Prospect Mountain. Go to her prenatal appointments.
Hmm. Why did that last one not seem to fit?
* * *
On Sunday afternoon, Daisy and Tucker were due back from their weeklong honeymoon in the Bahamas. Mac had gone up to Whiteface again today, with the intention of hopping on skis for a while and getting to know the place a little better. He was an incredible skier, fast and strong and clean, so fit that he never seemed to tire. He’d easily ski the whole mountain today. The season was due to end soon, and all the resorts up that way would get very quiet for a while.
Mary Jane and Lee were both busy with some early season guests at Spruce Bay who’d wanted two of the new picnic lunch hampers the resort was offering, with Daisy-designed menus, and who had then checked out, leaving a huge and still sopping red wine stain on the new carpet in their cabin’s living area.
“Don’t worry,” Mary Jane said with a sigh, after Lee reported it. “I’ve got this. Seen it before.” She seemed to be over whatever was bugging her the other day at lunch, when she’d gone all patient and wooden, with no explanation, before very firmly changing the subject.
“We don’t leave it to Angela and Piri?” Lee asked. These were their contract cleaners, who came in as needed.
