They’d made love almost every night since that first unforgettable experience, but for her, the morning after was different this time. She didn’t want to talk about it—not about his words of love, not about everything last night had meant to her. But she felt as fragile as a naked newborn this morning. Not unhappy. Just…vulnerable. She’d recognized before how deeply she’d fallen in love with Gar, but not how powerfully different her emotions were for him than they’d been for any other man…and how different she was, with him.
She badly needed time to think about that, seriously and alone, but being with him on this house hunting outing was even better. This was just about fun, about being friends together, where she felt much more sure of him—and her.
The day was vibrantly cold and brilliant, the sun so bright it put a spun-sugar glaze on the fresh snowfall. Gar picked up the key from the real estate agent, and they drove up the west side of Lake Tahoe. The landscape grew wilder, less civilized, with striking peeks of the turquoise lake nestled between hilly woods. A winding private drive led to the house, and Abby was charmed at the first view. The house was stone, two stories, with an open deck wrapping around the second floor.
When Gar unlocked the door, she stepped inside and started inhaling the place. Dust motes smoked in the sunlit windows. The house and property both were as quiet as peace. “It’s undervalued,” Gar told her. “Russ said a doc owns it, but he took a job in a hospital in another city, so the family had to move quickly. Nice, huh?”
“It sure is.” She toured all of it, upstairs and down, poking in closets, hunching down to peer in cupboards, even freezing her nose to take a long, studying look at the unheated garage and man’s workshop built over it.
They met up again in the front hall. “So what do you think?” Gar asked.
“I think it’s a splendiferous place.” She came close enough to flick a speck of lint from his navy blue sweater. “But not for you, big guy.”
“Not for me? I like it. And there’s all this stuff I thought you’d love—a room for a private office, kind of soft colors, no black and whites, a great porch….”
“There’re lots of features I loved, but just too many things that wouldn’t work well for you.” She motioned toward the living room. “Great room. Terrific view. But there’s no place to fit a long couch in there, and you’re six-three—you need a long couch.”
She led him back to the entry way. “No place to hang up your jacket or put a pair of wet boots, which means you’re stuck tracking in dirt, and cleaning it up all the time.”
“Bad idea, huh?”
“A total nuisance” she agreed.
“The shop’s incredible.”
“Yeah, I know I’m no judge of that, but it did look terrific. But there just have to be other places where you could either build or find a ready-made workshop, Gar, that didn’t have so many disadvantages. There’s miles of wasted hall space. And I’m guessing you have tons of skis and sports stuff—all that kind of paraphernalia you guys seem to accumulate. There’s great storage upstairs, but almost none down. Nope,” she said firmly, “it’s just not convenient for you.”
“Well, that’s the last time I go house hunting by myself. I wouldn’t have noticed any of that.” Gar was chuckling as he locked the door behind them. When they climbed into his Cherokee, he peered through the windshield to take one last look at the place. “Abby?”
“Hmm?”
“What was your place like in Los Angeles?”
He slipped the question in so casually that she never hesitated before answering. “Wrong,” she said dryly.
“Wrong in what way?”
“It’s hard to explain. When I first rented the place, I thought it was perfect. And maybe it was, for what I wanted then. Right now, I’d just as soon never see it again…but, of course, I have to. I know I mentioned that I have to drive back there in a week or so. I left without making any arrangements or closing the place up.”
“You decided to leave there suddenly?”
“Yeah, I did,” she admitted.
Gar started the engine, but let it idle. Until that moment, for Abby, their whole morning had been an idyllic extension of the night before. She’d felt such a natural joy being with him that realities in the real world seemed back-seat-irrelevant—a dangerous illusion, Abby knew. And when Gar suddenly pushed on a pair of aviator dark shades, everything changed.
“So what happens after you sever your last ties in L.A.?” he asked bluntly.
Nerves clomped in her stomach with heavy feet. She’d have felt easier if she could have seen his eyes and had some clue how seriously he meant the question. “I don’t know. Down the pike, I need a job, but I don’t know where or what Although it must sound irresponsible, I’m trying not to let myself make any decisions until this break is over. Gar…” She hesitated. “I’m not deliberately being evasive with you. I’m just doing the best I can to cope with a mistake I made. I don’t want to go back to the life I was living in L.A. That’s all I’m sure of. I’d give you clearer answers if I had them.”
“Abby…” She heard the edge of frustration in his tone. “What do you think would happen if you tried trusting me? You think I’d turn tail and run if you confessed a problem?”
“No.” The sharpness in his voice somehow made her own turn softer. “I think you’re a hard-core white knight, Gar. You’d likely try to rescue me—or at least help.”
“Then, dammit, what are you afraid of?”
She didn’t have to dive deep for that answer. It was lying right on the tip of her heart. “I’m afraid of disappointing you.”
“Maybe you couldn’t.”
“Cameron, I disappointed me. Big-time. And I’m having enough trouble living with that.” Until that instant, she hadn’t put it in black ink in her mind.
Weeks ago, being fired had seemed the epitome of a personal failure. Ironically, it seemed like a good thing now. If she’d never lost the job, maybe she’d never have taken a serious, hard look at the shallow, superficial directions her life had taken. Being blind, lying to herself, was the failure that really mattered.
Abby was grappling every which way to redefine who she was as a woman, to get her pride back, her self-respect. But through all the mistakes she’d made, she’d never hurt anyone but herself.
Only now she’d fallen in love with the best man she’d ever known, ever dreamed of knowing. Gar’s respect mattered desperately to her. So did his love, even if she was afraid to admit it. She was trying her damnedest to face up to her own mistakes. But she simply couldn’t face…failing Gar.
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Chapter Thirteen
Abby initially intended to drive home. No different from a dozen other times, she turned left out of the lodge parking lot and aimed for her condo. When her Lexus zoomed past the turnoff road and kept going, she still had no real intention of leaving town.
It just seemed that her Lexus was rattled and riled up and all upset. She tried allowing the car to vent some of that high-strung energy on highway 80 out of Tahoe. Didn’t help. Hours later, it was still chewing up the road, even after a cop had stopped her for a speeding ticket, even after she hit the turnoff from 80 around Sacramento. Neither the pitch-black night nor the long, lonely miles of blacktop seemed to appease or soothe the darn car. She had to stop for gas and aspirin for an incessantly pounding headache. Or maybe it was a pounding heart she was suffering from.
Her Lexus didn’t seem to notice the difference. By the time the car merged on the Pasadena Freeway coming into Los Angeles, the sky was lightening from nightmare-black to pearl gray. She’d pitched her down jacket in the back seat long before then. The air was brisk, but certainly tons warmer than the February blizzards in the mountains. The smoggy fog and laddered superhighways made California seem like a separate planet from the high, dry, white-clean mountains and air in Tahoe.
Abby kept waiting for the sights and sounds and smells of L.A. to hit her as comforting. Every view
was familiar. She’d spent seven years inhaling the city and calling it her own.
And when she unlocked the door to her old apartment and stepped in, she told herself this was really a brilliant choice. Maybe the breakneck drive had been impulsive, but she’d planned to make this trip within a matter of days anyway. She’d left mail, bills, the whole business of her life, hanging when she took off for Tahoe, and something had to be done with her furnishings and belongings before her lease ran out. There was no crisis about it, but the job had to be done. And right now, a nice, mind-boggling and exhausting physical project struck her as the best idea in town.
More to the point, her Lexus had kindly put a solid eight hours and five-hundred-plus miles between herself and Gar. She certainly wasn’t running away, either from that anxiety-powered argument, or from him. As Abby saw it, she was removing a serious and unsolv-able problem from his sight.
Namely, herself.
She pushed off her boots and threw down her jacket and purse. There seemed to be an ominous lump in her throat the size of Georgia. All those long driving hours hadn’t cured the problem, but she’d hoped coming home would. Instead, the apartment smelled closed-up and musty. Alien. It was as if she were trespassing in a stranger’s place, and nothing here belonged to her.
Her throat was parched dry. She needed a drink of water, food, sleep. Sleep most of all—heaven knew, she was too dead beat to think about organizing and arranging and moving yet.
Yet she found herself wandering around, touching all the things that she had once picked out with such painstaking care. Both upstairs and down had been decorated in black and white. The kitchen had the “in” models of pasta machine and cappuccino maker. The wine rack had the correct age and brand of wines, the living room was set up with a bar for entertaining. The bedroom upstairs had nothing out of place, her closet filled with power suits and labels, the shoes predictably lined up like good soldiers.
She sank onto the bed, remembering clearly why the right address, the right place, had been so important to her. A female business executive already had a major strike against her. She’d known image was one of the battles she’d have to fight. At the time, there’d seemed nothing artificial or fake about her choices. Achievement mattered. So did success. She was a believer in self-determination, and working hard was part of that—but so was making no mistakes and leaving nothing to chance. Ambition had been everything to the Abby Stanford who picked out all the cool black-and-white furnishings.
And it was eerily frightening to realize that nothing in the place felt like hers. She no longer knew the woman who’d lived here. She’d always seen truths in black and white. She’d never doubted her judgment of right and wrong.
Gar’s face suddenly sneaked into her mind and made the lump in her throat thicken to the size of Alaska. Suddenly cold, she pulled the ebony-and-ivory comforter around her and curled up, thinking that leaving him was the only thing she’d done right in God knows when.
The man was dumb. Dumb enough to take on a woman who couldn’t fix a flat tire. So damned dumb that he was attracted to a woman who’d bungled up her life—even if he couldn’t see the similarity to his ex-wife. Gar was always going to attract a damsel in distress. He was strong. A natural rescuer. An uncur-able white knight
When a man was that dumb, the honorable thing for a woman to do was remove herself from his presence. He’d said it precisely right. He needed a mate, a wife, the whole shebang. Not just a lover. And for sure, not a woman who couldn’t find the right road for herself lately no matter how hard she tried. The only thing she’d excelled at, recently, was failure.
The room was spinning and blurring. She closed her eyes, knowing she was groggy-tired, goofy-tired. But not so tired that she regretted doing the honorable thing. She wasn’t failing Gar. He’d find a tough cookie, an equal, if the weak one just left the playing field. She felt good, she told herself.
But tears suddenly burned in her eyes. And her heart ached like a hollow drum as she curled up and tried to sleep.
Midafternoon, Abby pushed open a window to catch some fresh air, and absently noticed a red Taurus pulling up to the curb. She only glanced out for a few seconds.
The crisp air cooled her hot cheeks, but she had no time for a break. In a few short hours, she’d turned the place from pristine-perfect to total chaos. Thankfully, she’d found someone at her old office who wanted the blasted black-and-white furniture, so that albatross was taken care of—or would be, once they came to pick it up the next day. She’d taken care of mail, bills, set up a forwarding address and arranged through the landlord for the utilities to be shut off. Those nuisance chores were done—but then had come the scut work.
Her kitchen cupboards needed emptying. Food boxed up. Clothes sorted through and packed. Lamps and tables and paintings needed hauling to some kind of storage place until she knew where she’d be living next. But everywhere she looked, there was more. Dishes. Towels. Linens, vacuums and hair dryers and cotton balls…how one extremely efficient woman could accumulate so dratted many possessions in seven short years was beyond her.
She’d stopped once, feeling totally overwhelmed, unsure how she was going to tackle it all alone…and wishing it was worse. She couldn’t turn a corner without seeing Gar, couldn’t open a drawer without thinking of him.
And her mind was on him, not the cherry-red Taurus with rental plates parking in front of the apartment complex. It was unlikely her attention would ever have been distracted by the car, if two women hadn’t suddenly climbed out. Two incredibly familiar women.
If the sky started raining bags of gold, Abby couldn’t have been more startled. She flew for the door, barefoot, a rag still in her hand, and pelted outside.
“I thought I was hallucinating, for heaven’s sake! Are you two out of your minds? What are you doing here? For that matter, how did you even know I was in L.A.? And if I’ve ever seen a pair of bag ladies drag down the neighborhood.”
Damn her sisters. She hated crying worse than root canals. But Paige and Gwen descended on her with open arms and rib-crunching hugs and instant insults, and tears welled up in her eyes, big as puddles.
She looked Paige over first. The youngest in the family had always been the beauty, with her high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and the mane of incredible mink-brown hair. Typically, though, she was dressed in overalls and beat-up tennies, no makeup, her hands a mess of cuts and scrapes from her cameo-carving work. And Paige took the same two seconds to look her over—and immediately started scolding. “We came to help, you dimwit. And we’d have been here earlier if you’d just had brains enough to call us.”
“But you can’t be here. What about the baby—?”
“Well, I’m here courtesy of a breast pump. A little earlier than expected—we thought you were doing this next week, not this one. But that’s when I started the breast-pump routine, so the baby’s got three days of milk ahead, and anything beyond that Stefan will have to figure out. Trust me, he won’t mind. He’s so besotted with the baby, the man’s thrilled I’m gone. You look like hell,” Paige announced.
Gwen jabbed her in the ribs. “She looks a little tired—”
“She looks like total hell.”
Gwen, ever the tactful referee, stepped between the two—which gave Abby a better chance to really see her. She was wearing a simple raspberry T-shirt with jeans, her hair was short and sassy, and these days it seemed her gorgeous brown eyes were lit up from a sparkle within. Abby shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re here any more than Paige. Your honeymoon is barely over, Spense has to resent your coming—”
“Spense insisted I come. He’s cool with this, so not to worry. And since we started this marriage with his-and-hers kids, we both figured we’d need a bunch of honeymoons over the long haul. And in the meantime…” Gwen reached the front door first, stepped inside, and took a quick critical look around. “In the meantime, holy kamoly, are we gonna have fun! What a mess.”
“Wait, wait, wait.�
�� Abby knew her sisters. Both of them were capable of taking charge—and taking over—faster than the spin of a dime. “I still don’t understand. How did you even know I was here?”
“Garson,” Paige informed her. Wasting no time, she plopped down her tote bag and heeled off her shoes. “I didn’t know my Stefan had a jealous bone in his body…until this utterly adorable man with a rich, sexy baritone called in the middle of the night. Said he got my number from an address book in your condo. I take it that’s your Gar?”
“He’s not my Gar,” Abby said softly.
“Yeah, well.” Paige exchanged a glance with Gwen. “It seemed he’d misplaced you. He wanted to know if you were with either of us. Since you obviously weren’t, it came down to figuring out where you’d taken off to—and here was the obvious place. You know what?”
“What?” Her mind was still spinning that Gar had called her sisters. She’d never meant him to worry, but she also had never guessed he’d realize she was gone that quickly.
Gwen piped up from the kitchen doorway. “He offered to pay for our plane tickets.”
“I don’t understand.”
Paige answered. “He said you needed some help. Not man help. Sister-type help. I told him thank you, and we’d take care of you and our plane tickets both, not to worry. You’ve lost five pounds.”
“Have not.”
“Have, too, and I think it’s disgusting. You’re too skinny and you have big circles under your eyes, and somehow you still look put-together enough to interview the president. Gwen, dammit, how come I can never manage to look that cool?”
“Because you don’t give a damn how you look,” Gwen yelled back from the kitchen. “This is my room. You guys stay out. And for the record, I’ll take care of dinner. God knows I wouldn’t trust either of you near a spatula.”
The 200% Wife Page 8
