by Meg Maxwell
He leaned his head back against the couch, the strong column of his neck drawing her gaze. Down his dark green T-shirt along his muscular chest and taut stomach to his old faded jeans. She lingered on his bare feet, then finally remembered to take a bite of her own sandwich. Suddenly her craving for PB&J had morphed into a craving of another kind, of Nick’s hands on her skin, his hard mouth against her lips. She’d fantasize but she’d not let it happen again. She’d learned her lesson and then some.
Mr. Whiskers jumped up on the couch and sniffed Nick’s stomach, then sat down and stared at him with his amber eyes. Nick reached out a hand to pet him and Mr. Whiskers brushed against fingers. Huh. Just when the cat was starting to warm up to Nick, Avery would be taking him with her.
“Nick, I—” she began.
“Let’s change the subject,” he said, giving Mr. Whiskers a scratch behind the ears. “Is Timmy sleeping?”
She blinked herself out of her little fantasy. “He was when I put him down. And I don’t hear a peep.”
He finished his sandwich and leaned back again. “I’m sorry about what I said.” He glanced at her. “The brick-wall thing. You’re hardly that.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. Talking things out is good. You’re going to get frustrated. That’s part of life. You just have to work through it.”
“I’m frustrated now,” he said, holding her gaze. “Frustrated as hell because I want you so damned much and feel like I’d better leave you alone. You don’t want a repeat of last night. Well, after last night, I mean.” She noticed his gaze drop along her own body, lingering on her breasts under the white tank top, on where her flippy cotton skirt ended just above her knees.
Georgia took a deep breath, afraid where this was going to go. Sometimes a brick wall was comforting. Nothing was said. Nothing explained. You had to speculate and conjecture. There was always room for hope there.
Now there might not be.
“And last night was a problem because...” she prompted.
He sat up straight and looked at her, his dark eyes intense on her, conflicted. “Because I don’t know what I’m doing, Georgia. I don’t want to be a father. I don’t want to live in Blue Gulch. That’s what I know. But I am going to be a father and there’s no way in hell I’ll let you or our son down. I won’t do it. If that means staying in Blue Gulch, so be it.”
So he’d be here but miserable? Was that better? What if he never changed? What if he couldn’t? What if he looked at their son and felt absolutely nothing except obligation?
Tears stung her eyes, so she closed them, willing herself not to cry. Danged hormones again.
Danged Nick Slater was more like it.
She felt his hand close over hers. Then he was pulling her to him, and the tears flowed down her cheeks.
“Don’t cry, Georgia. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She wiped at her eyes and let him hold her. What was she supposed to say? I’m sorry you feel the way you do? I’m sorry you’re the brick wall? It’s okay? It wasn’t okay, because she was madly in love with him and desperately wanted to form a family with this man, the three of them together, learning and growing and changing with the passing days, weeks, months, years.
How had she gone from being determined to focus on impending motherhood to yearning for a future with Nick?
She gasped, realizing what this meant.
She trusted him. She trusted Nick Slater because she loved him.
“You’ve surprised me constantly these past few days, Nick,” Georgia said. “I’m sure you’ve surprised yourself too.”
“I do what needs to be done. I believe in responsibility, in fulfilling my obligations.”
The brick wall was back.
He still held her hand, the warmth and strength of it a comfort. “I want to do right by you, Georgia. You deserve that. Especially after all you’ve been through.”
She bristled and pulled her hand away. Obligation again. “I don’t need your pity, Nick.” She bolted up with her half-eaten sandwich, her appetite gone.
“Georgia, that’s not what I meant.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. She hurried into the kitchen and threw the rest of her sandwich away, quickly washed her plate, then turned to leave, her gaze catching on the photograph of Nick and his sister.
Their time together was coming to an end very soon. Timmy’s mother would return on Saturday—Georgia felt sure of it. She would move out of Nick’s guest room and into an empty bedroom on the second floor of Hurley’s, the one with the lovely fireplace and L-shape, perfect for a nursery. Everything would be okay.
She didn’t look at Nick as she headed from the kitchen down the short hall to the guest room. She closed the door behind her, walking up to the bureau and staring at her belly in the big round mirror above it. She stood sideways. She definitely looked pregnant.
No matter what, we’ll be fine, she told her belly.
There was a knock on her door. She could pretend she was sleeping. Anything to avoid hearing him say what she didn’t want to hear.
“Come in,” she said without meaning to.
He opened the door and stared at her, his expression so...tortured she wanted to rush into his arms and assure him that she was okay, that she’d be okay, with or without him.
She wouldn’t be so okay without him, though. She was deeply in love with Nick Slater.
He stepped in a bit closer. “I just wanted to say good-night. My mother used to tell me we should never go to bed angry with each other. Not that I was ever really angry at her. Just the situation. Anyway, she was right. Going to bed angry just makes you fester. I know.”
“I’m not angry, Nick,” she said. “I just think it stinks that you’ve given up on yourself.”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve given up on yourself. You don’t think you can be a good father. Just like you don’t think Avery can make it in Nashville. You have no faith in yourself or anyone else.”
The stony expression she knew so well returned. “I’m not having this conversation,” he said, backing out of the room and shutting the door.
Georgia closed her eyes, wondering how much of this she could take before her heart split in two.
Chapter Eleven
Faith, schmaith, Nick tried to tell himself for the hundredth time, but he felt like hell even in the morning. He lay on his bed, hands behind his head, staring up at the white ceiling. He’d hated the look on Georgia’s face last night, hated that he was disappointing her. But what was he supposed to have faith in? Burglars and murderers and vandals and pissed-off husbands who keyed vehicles belonging to the men their wives flirted with?
Himself? Ha. That was a scream.
Yeah, he’d gotten Bentley the greyhound back for Harriet Culver. He’d been nice to an eleven-year-old dognapper. He was a cop. His job was to do right by the people of Blue Gulch.
He belonged back in Houston. There his cases were more about danger and murder and armed robbery than about dealing with people. Sure, he interviewed and interrogated, but his job in Houston was evidence based, sizing people up. Here in Blue Gulch, it was too much about the community, too people focused, people he’d come to know. He missed the anonymity of Houston.
Avery had graduated from high school. Whether she went back to college or did go to Nashville with Quentin Says, she wasn’t living in Blue Gulch anymore. He was free. He could leave.
Except for his son.
And Georgia.
Was Houston really anonymous, anyway? Neighborhoods had a way of feeling like communities no matter how big the city. And he’d been emotionally invested in one of his last cases there—Eleanor Patterson, a widowed mother in her midforties with a teenage son.
The Pattersons were on his list
of people to look into for a connection to Timmy, but they were on the Houston list, which he hadn’t planned to start on until he’d exhausted possibilities in Blue Gulch. He almost had. And he and Georgia had walked around town so much with Timmy that someone would have come to him with information about Timmy’s mother if someone had any to share. Still, Houston was a long drive from Blue Gulch—three hours. And he’d been gone from the Houston police force for two years now. But maybe someone remembered him and made the three-hour drive to drop Timmy off with him. It seemed unlikely, but anything was possible. That much he knew.
Nick sat up and reached for the top box of case files from Houston—it had long been Nick’s habit to copy his own police reports for home records—onto his bed and dug out the Patterson file. Forty-three-year-old Hank Patterson had been found drowned in a river, having fallen out of his boat while intoxicated. Patterson had been known to police for several cases of assault around town and four domestic violence calls to his home, which he shared with his wife and then-fifteen-year-old son. The son had called each time; the mother had not pressed charges, status quo, unfortunately, until his death. The Pattersons had reminded Nick so much of his own past that every time he left their company he’d be in knots.
Hank’s wife, Eleanor, had been forty-four then. She’d be forty-six now. Possible, but unlikely as Timmy’s mother. He’d spent a lot of time with the Pattersons those first few weeks after Hank’s death. Trying to help Eleanor and her son Dylan deal with paperwork and forms, getting Eleanor a job at a veterinarian clinic, checking in on Dylan and dropping off gifts here and there, a basketball, a pair of headphones. They thought of Nick as a trusted friend...someone close to Eleanor Patterson might very well trust Nick with her newborn.
When Nick had come by to tell them he was moving to Blue Gulch, Eleanor looked peaceful and Dylan was shooting hoops with a friend. They looked okay, settled. And Nick had moved on to a new life, to raise his teenage sister in his hometown.
Maybe taking a ride out to Houston today would be good for him, to see if it gave him that old rush it once did when it now represented Team Not Blue Gulch in every way possible. He hadn’t been there since April, since the academy reunion and Georgia. Now Houston made him think of that night and suddenly he wasn’t sure if it was home anymore, anyway.
He heard a key in the door and headed into the living room, forcing himself to face Georgia and unresolved issues from last night when all he wanted to do was get in his car and drive away.
She parked the stroller by the front door and came in with Timmy cradled in her arms.
God, she was so beautiful. She looked so natural with an infant against her chest. She’d make a great mother. He hoped she’d learned that these past days of watching Timmy round-the-clock. He thought she had no faith in anyone? He had faith in her.
His voice wasn’t working, or maybe it was his brain that was defective at the moment. All his thoughts were jumbled in his head. He cleared his throat and glanced away, pretending to be absorbed in the Patterson police report in his hand. “I’m going to drive to Houston today and check out a possible connection to Timmy’s mother. I’ll be leaving in a half hour.”
She was silent for a moment, then said, “We’ll come with you.”
He stared at her, barely able to believe what he’d heard. “To Houston? I thought you said you never wanted to go back.”
“I know,” she said, lifting her chin. “But I think I should. The first step in taking back control is to go. I loved Houston for a long time until it began to feel like a prison. I’m not giving someone—someone’s memory and my own bad memories—the right to determine how I feel about a city. I do want to go.”
He winced. He was doing the same thing with Blue Gulch. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He had to hand it to her again.
* * *
Georgia found herself quiet on the three-hour drive to Houston. Timmy had slept the entire way in his rear-facing car seat, the champion napper giving her no break in her thoughts, no need to do something like hold him or change him or rock him. She thought she’d be fine, thought she could handle this, that it was no biggie, she’d just go back and face it and be done with it. Except from the moment she got in Nick’s silver SUV, strapping the seat belt over her torso, she felt claustrophobic, trapped, headed for certain doom. Maybe she wasn’t as strong as she thought she was.
And maybe Nick wasn’t as wrong as she hoped he was about how Blue Gulch made him feel. If even heading toward Houston could have dread snaking around her stomach, fear crawling up her spine, how must he feel every day in Blue Gulch—where he’d spent the past two years for his sister’s sake?
Suddenly, she felt like a heel for jumping to Avery and Quentin’s side over Nick’s. He had sacrificed quite a bit for his sister and now here Georgia was, discounting his feelings. But then again, it was Avery’s life. Nick had stayed in Blue Gulch for Avery because he loved her. And that was unconditional. He had to let her go.
Feeling a little better at having worked that out and realizing she was thinking about Nick’s situation with his sister to avoid thinking about her own feelings, her own past, she forced herself to look out the window. The rush of city life with its whirlwind of tall buildings and cars and people just made her wish she was back home.
“You okay?” Nick asked, glancing at her.
She had to be honest. “No. I thought I would be. But I’m not. I don’t want to be here.”
“I’ll turn the car right around and take you home,” he said, doing just that at the next light.
She put a hand on his arm. “No, Nick. I need to face what happened here. Like I said, I need to take Houston back for myself. Not let someone else dictate how I feel about a place I once loved.”
“You’re brave, Georgia. Braver than I am, that’s for sure.”
Ha. Georgia. Brave. She didn’t feel brave, but she liked hearing him say it.
“Do you want to avoid your old neighborhood?” he asked. “The Pattersons live ten minutes out from that direction, but I can bypass it.”
Did she want to see her condo? Where she’d lain awake every night for months worried sick and feeling trapped, racking her brain for how to get herself out from James Galvestan’s clutches?
Where she’d met Nick. Where they’d made love. Where she’d walked away from him.
But where she’d conceived their child.
“Let’s go past the condo,” she said. “I’m not sure how I’ll feel, but I think I need to see it.”
He nodded and they headed for the historic district. As he drove slowly down her old street, instead of seeing the place where she’d been so terrified, where someone had insinuated himself into her life with threats, all she could think about was Nick inside her condo, how he’d kissed her, touched her, how passionate and tender he’d been at the same time. How was that even possible?
Georgia hadn’t had that many boyfriends in her life. There was the high school beau who’d joined the navy and was now married with three kids and a fourth on the way, per his mother, whom Georgia had run into on the street a couple of days ago. Then there’d been a few men in Houston in years past, perfectly nice, attractive, interesting men, but not The One you always heard was possible, The One who made your knees weak, The One you couldn’t take your eyes off, The One you couldn’t stop thinking about. She’d begun to think that was just something in songs or that only lucky folks found, like her parents. But she’d recognized it the moment she opened her condo door and Nick was standing there.
She looked at his hands on the steering wheel, recalling them on her.
She’d fallen in love with Nick in a single night, then had to let him go the next morning—for four months. Now here he was, beside her—for the time being. There was a chance to help him open up the way he had done that night, when
there had been no expectations, when she hadn’t been pregnant with his child, when they lived three hours apart. If she could coax the tenderness back out of him, maybe there was a chance for them.
Nick pulled into a space across from her condo and lowered the windows. Georgia peered out at her pretty building with its flower boxes and stately red door. Nick, she thought. All I’m thinking about is Nick.
Because how I feel about him is more powerful than how powerless James made me feel. Which meant, she realized, her heart twisting, that Nick didn’t feel the same way about her. Everything Blue Gulch represented for Nick was stronger than whatever it was Georgia meant to him.
“Shut up, you old fool!” a woman’s gravelly voice barked.
Georgia turned to see where the voice was coming from. A gray-haired couple, in their eighties, was slowly walking across the street, the woman using a cane and the man pulling a cart containing two bags of groceries.
“You shut up!” the man said. “You can’t even cook a decent steak!”
The woman lifted her cane and poked it in his side. “Well, you can make your own steak tonight!”
“But you make it better than I do,” the man whined. “I’m hungry!”
“Fine,” the woman said, her voice softening. “I’ll make you creamed spinach to go with it.”
The man kissed her cheek and the woman half scowled, half smiled as they continued up the street.
Nick shook his head, looking from the couple to the steering wheel. “God, count me out.”
“Of?” Georgia asked.
“Growing old with someone. Talking to them like that. Getting poked with a cane.”
Georgia couldn’t help smiling. “But they made up. He kissed her cheek. She’s making him his favorite creamed spinach.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, because he wants his steak.”
“Or that’s their dynamic and it works.”
“Why not just be loving?” he asked. “Why not be respectful? Why treat each other like that at all? ‘Shut up’? Why talk to your spouse that way?”
