Marriage, Bravo Style!

by Christine Rimmer

  She flinched. But she didn’t say she’d heard enough. “Go on.”

  “You don’t want to hear this.”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “All right. You asked for it.” He dropped back to his chair. “You should have told me, that first night we were together, that night at the very end of April, that you’d screwed up with the birth control pills. I had a right to have all the information you had.”

  She put a hand against her chest, as if her heart was doing scary things in there. But still, she held her ground. “Yeah. I get that. I do. I was wrong not to tell you. I…made all kinds of excuses for why I didn’t need to tell you. That it was only one pill. That I had the condoms and as long as we used them, we would be safe.”

  “I might have walked away that first night, if you’d told me.”

  Her soft mouth trembled. “Oh, God…”

  And he made himself confess, “It’s doubtful. Because I wanted you. Bad. And we did have the condoms. But still. You took that choice away from me.”

  “I know. Oh, Rogan. I see that.” She sucked in a trembling breath, glanced toward the open door longingly. But then she stiffened, and made herself meet his eyes again. “What else?”

  “You didn’t call me when you found out you were pregnant. You let months go by. I wouldn’t even have been there to see Michael born, if Caleb hadn’t taken action. As soon as you got pregnant, I was involved. I had a right to know. But you ignored my rights. You took away my choices. Again.”

  Her big eyes were shiny with tears now. She swallowed, convulsively. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I…screwed up. I always planned to tell you. And I would have. I swear it. But I told myself you didn’t need to know. Not yet. Not until the baby was born.”

  “I did need to know.”

  “I…I see that now. I do.” She swallowed again, blinked away the tears in her eyes. “What else?”

  “It’s enough.”

  “What else?”

  He waved a hand. “All right. One last thing. Back in May, before I left, I told you I wanted to keep seeing you. You turned me down.”

  She was shaking her head. “No.” Her chin had a mutinous tilt. “Don’t you get on me for that. It was the agreement we had. It was what you wanted. To be free. Don’t you dare try and tell me you don’t remember that you wanted to be free.”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Well, good then. My not telling you about the pill I missed, not telling you right away that I was pregnant… I was in the wrong on both counts. And I can understand why you’re having trouble getting past those things I didn’t do. But if you’re holding it against me that I gave you what you said you wanted—that I set you free, let you go—well, that’s not right. And you know it’s not.”

  “You could have just…let it happen, between us. You were too damn proud, Elena. You had to have it all locked up with us—an expiration date. Or forever.”

  Her mouth was trembling again. “No. That’s not true. All I wanted was a little hope that at some point you might see a future for us. You wouldn’t give me that hope. I saw no point in holding on.”

  “I saw it differently.”

  “Fine. What else?”

  “What else? Isn’t that enough for one day?”

  She pressed her lips together, tilted her chin high again. “One more thing.”

  “Sure. Hit me with it.”

  “Why wouldn’t you talk to me then, that night in the hospital, about all the ways you’re angry with me?”

  “Oh, come on. What for? What good would it have done? What good does it do now, except to make me feel like a jerk and to make you want to cry?”

  “We can’t just go around lying to each other. It’s not a healthy way to be. My mother lied to my dad for over twenty years. And when the truth finally came out, it almost destroyed both of them. And it wasn’t so great for me or my sister, either.”

  “My having a few resentments toward you is not the same as your mom sleeping with Davis Bravo behind your dad’s back.”

  “No, it’s not. But if you asked them how it could possibly have happened that my mother, who loved my dad more than her life, ended up betraying him with his worst enemy, I know they would tell you that it started with resentment and anger between them. Unresolved resentment. Anger that they didn’t deal with honestly.”

  “It’s not the same,” he said again. Maybe this time she would hear him.

  But she didn’t. “A lie is a lie,” she said. “And instead of your lying to me that night in the hospital, instead of your telling me you loved me when you didn’t in order to get me to agree to marry you, we should have been talking about the hard things, about the ways you were—and are—so very angry with me.”

  He really didn’t get why she refused to see the light on this. “You’d just had a baby. The last thing you needed was for me to unload all my garbage on you.”

  “Then we could have waited. Until I’d recovered a little.”

  “What do you mean, waited? We needed to be married.” His voice had way too much heat in it. He tamped the fury down. “Our son needed both of his parents. Waiting would have only given you more time to think of all the reasons we didn’t need to be married.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I think it is. I did what I had to do to make you my wife, to make a family for Michael.”

  Her eyes were dry now. And she looked across the distance between them without saying anything for the longest time. Finally, she came out with it. “You only said you loved me because Caleb told you that was the way to get me to marry you.”

  “Well. It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Rogan. You tricked me.”

  “I told you what you needed to hear to make you do the right thing.”

  “The right thing.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “How can such a smart man be so foolish?” She started toward him and she kept coming until she stood beside the desk, looking down at him. When she spoke, her voice was low and deliberate. “There is one thing I feared the most and it’s happened. That you would think I stole your chance at freedom from you and you would resent me for it. It was why I said no to you when you asked me to marry you the first time. Why I should have said no when you came back with the balloons and the flowers, the perfect ring and the tender words of love. And now, well, here we are. Married. And on the surface, everything has seemed so great. Everything has looked so wonderful. But underneath, Rogan. Underneath, a storm is brewing. Underneath, you hold your resentment close to your heart. And until you’re able to let it go, things can never be truly right between us.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nothing changed.

  They got through each day. Elena still had dinner waiting when Rogan came home at night. They slept together. They both took loving care of Michael.

  But everything was different.

  They didn’t make love. They each kept strictly to their own separate sides of the king-size bed. They spoke gently to each other when they had to—about errands that needed running, about obligations they had agreed to fulfill—gently, not tenderly. They were in the same room often, but they avoided eye contact.

  A deep silence had grown between them.

  Elena tried to tell herself that the silence was necessary. They had married when they probably shouldn’t have—too soon, certainly. But now they were married. And she believed in that, in the sanctity of the marriage vows. She knew that he did, too.

  There would be no divorce. Even if they never found their way to a true union as man and wife.

  The irony of the situation didn’t escape her. She and Rogan were starting to remind her of her parents. No, she hadn’t slept with her father’s enemy. Her baby was not another man’s child. But there was a yawning rift in her marriage, a deep wound between herself and her husband.

  She wasn’t sure how to bridge that rift, how to heal the wound. Sometimes she thought she ought to know w
hat to do. And sometimes she thought that it wasn’t her place to take the next shot at the problem. That she’d done more than enough on Sunday in his office.

  Way more than enough and not in a good way.

  She reminded herself that her parents had worked out their differences in the end, that now Javier and Luz Cabrera had a stronger marriage than before. That should have comforted her. Too bad it only reminded her that it had taken a three-year separation and her dad’s heart attack to make them see the light and reunite.

  Midweek, Irina called to say how much she and Caleb had enjoyed the weekend. Elena kept the conversation light and pleasant, not revealing the new emptiness in her heart and her life.

  She’d decided not to confront Caleb—not for a while, anyway. Not until she could talk to him without yelling at him, without wanting to strangle him.

  And then, wouldn’t you know? He called her.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said without so much as a hello. “Rogan won’t return my calls. What’s going on?”

  So she told him that she’d pushed Rogan until he confessed that Caleb had coached him on how to propose. “Then we had…words, Caleb. Very hard words. My husband and I aren’t getting along all that well right now.”

  Caleb said, “What can I do? Anything. Whatever you need. I want to help.”

  She wanted to shout at him to mind his own damn business. She wanted to call him a few very bad names. But she knew that he loved her and she did love him. So she spoke with slow care. “Listen to me, big brother. Do. Not. Help. Are we clear on that?”

  A silence. “You’re mad at me.”

  “Yes, I am. Very much so. I’ll get over it. Eventually. But before I do, I need your promise that you will never—ever—try to manipulate me again.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Stop. Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear it. Yes, you did manipulate me—or at least, you told my husband how to manipulate me. That was a rotten thing for you to do.”

  “I only wanted—”

  “No excuses, please. I know you meant well. You always do. But meaning well is not enough. Don’t do it again.”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I screwed up.”

  “Yeah. You did.”

  “And okay, you have my word. I will never in any way manipulate you again.”

  “Not even if you’re sure it’s the best thing you could do for me?” She piled on the sarcasm.

  He made a low grumbling sound, but then he finally agreed. “All right, all right. Not even then.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just felt so bad, like what happened with you and Rogan was all my fault, you know? If it hadn’t been for me, you never would’ve met him.”

  “Oh, please. You need to give that up. Yes, it’s possible that without you, Rogan and I would never have met. So what? The point is that no matter how we met, we would have been attracted to each other. Very strongly attracted. And nature would have probably ended up taking its course. It’s not about you. And it’s not your fault. So get over yourself.”

  On Wednesday evening, a week and a half after the disastrous discussion in Rogan’s office, Elena stood in that same doorway again.

  She waited for him to look up from his computer before she said, “My mom just called. She and my dad are hoping we can come down for Easter. It’s a big thing for them. Their first Easter together again…”

  Plus, well, she would always think of Easter as the beginning for her and Rogan. Last year, they’d been together at Bravo Ridge. They’d held hands.

  And he’d kissed her in Luke’s office.

  Should she remind him of that?

  Would he smile and say he remembered?

  Or just go on looking at her the way he was now, his eyes so cool, his expression way too composed. He sat back in his chair. “Why don’t you go ahead, you and Michael?”

  Tears rose, burning, in the back of her throat. She gulped them down and spoke evenly. “Please, Rogan. I would really like it if you would come with us.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Rogan, I…” What to say next? How to go on from there? He wasn’t helping. He was only waiting for her to finish and leave him alone. “I hate this. I really do. This…coolness between us. I wish we could just get past it, you know?” Get past it. She winced at her own words. Really, if she was going to try and reach out to him, she needed to come up with something better than Can’t we get past this?

  Too bad she had nothing. She’d pretty much said what she had to say to him a week and a half before. He either had to pick up the ball.

  Or not.

  So far, it was always not.

  He shrugged. “I think you should go to San Antonio for Easter. Go. And enjoy yourself.”

  Enjoy yourself. Sure.

  It was all wrong between them now. And he just didn’t want to deal with her.

  So all right. She would look on the bright side. Maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “I think I’ll just go ahead then, leave tomorrow. Drive down.”

  “Have a good time.” He turned back to his computer again.

  She was officially dismissed.

  Fine. She would go to San Antonio for Easter. And she would have a great time.

  Rogan came home the next evening and they were gone—his wife and his child. And he wanted them back there, with him.

  The house seemed empty without them.

  He wanted to get in his car or catch the next flight. And be down in San Antonio with Elena and Michael.

  But he did nothing to make that happen.

  She’d left him a message on the answering machine. “Hi. Just wanted to let you know I’m at my mom and dad’s. We had a safe trip.” A silence, as she must have debated whether or not to add, “Miss you. See you Monday.”

  Click. Dial tone. Gone.

  He erased the message and went about his evening: dinner, an hour in his office to pay a few bills, channel surfing for a while. A night of fitful sleep.

  Saturday went by. And Easter Sunday.

  She called Monday morning at seven, while he was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast.

  “Hi.” Her voice was carefully neutral. “How’re you doing?”

  “No problems,” he muttered.

  “I was thinking I might stay the week. Mercy invited me to spend some time out at Bravo Ridge. And then, Wednesday or Thursday, I thought I’d go over to the condo. I need to start clearing it out, deciding what to keep and what to sell.”

  A week without her. The days stretched ahead, empty. Lonely. But then again, how much better was it going to be when she got home? It wasn’t like he had all that much to say to her lately.

  He would miss Michael. But a week wasn’t forever.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “See you next week,” and hung up before she could say another word—before, he realized too late, she had a chance to tell him what day, exactly, she would be back.

  The day didn’t really matter, he told himself. Friday or next Monday. Or Saturday or Sunday. At the most, it was only seven days.

  Seven days when he wouldn’t see her face, wouldn’t watch that gorgeous dimple appear when she smiled…

  Not that she smiled all that much recently.

  He knew it was his fault. He knew he should do something about it.

  But he only seemed to be making it worse.

  He was angry at her. And he just couldn’t seem to get past that.

  That evening, he stopped at the Highland Park Whole Foods to pick up a few things.

  He was in the cereal aisle, reading the back of a granola box, when a woman said, “Rogan. How are you?”

  He set the box back on the shelf and turned. “Pauline. Hey. Doing great.”

  “Haven’t seen you in a couple of months.” Did she look hurt? He supposed that maybe she had a right to be. He’d dropped her off the night Michael was born and never called her again. “You…don’t come in the shop anymore.” She meant her coffee
bar, Perfect Brew. And she was right. He’d purposely avoided any opportunity to run into her.

  She was a good person. A nice woman. Attractive. But she had never been the woman for him. Even if he wasn’t married now, he wouldn’t be considering asking her out again.

  He said, “I got married.” And held up his ring finger with its thick platinum band.

  She blinked. “Oh. Well. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled.

  Her answering smile was way too bright. “Well. Better get moving.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” He rolled on by her, not glancing back.

  At home, the house seemed to echo, too big and too quiet. He turned on the kitchen flat-screen TV just to push back the silence as he put his groceries away.

  He kept thinking about Pauline. And about the other women he’d dated in the months after that magical week with Elena. Nothing much had gone on with any of them. Inevitably, he would end up comparing them to Elena.

  And every one of them fell short.

  Which was another reason, he saw now, that he was angry at his wife. After her, after those brief, shining days and nights with her, the freedom he’d waited a decade for had seemed gray and joyless. Down in the darkest part of his heart, he had blamed her for stealing his pleasure in being on his own.

  He had blamed her for so much, really, hadn’t he?

  Even though, in the end, he couldn’t see himself married to anyone but her. Even though she was absolutely right for him in all the ways that mattered. Even though when he imagined a life without her, it was an empty life.

  As joyless as his life right this moment.

  For some reason he didn’t understand in the least, he picked up the phone and he called his younger brother.

  Niall answered on the second ring. “Hey. Been meaning to call. How’s married life treating you?”

  “My wife is kind, smart and beautiful. And she can cook. My son is amazing.”

  “Well, there you go. You’re a happy man.”

  I could be. If I would only let myself be. “I have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How did you see me, after mom and dad died?”