My Fair Gentleman

by Jan Freed

  “Of course you couldn’t—”

  “I took a whole week off when Allie was born until Vicky got back on her feet. She loved the baby— you can ask my mother. Mom was with her for three weeks after I got back in the game schedule. When she left I thought Vicky could take care of the baby by herself no problem.” He shifted to the edge of his chair, positioned to spring up. “I mean, other women go back to office jobs after four weeks, don’t they?”

  “Joe—”

  “It’s not like Vicky had an eight-to-five job. All she had to do was take care of one little baby—”

  “Joe, stop.” Catherine’s stomach clenched in queasy anticipation. “Allie told me her mother died of complications after she was born. Exactly how did Vicky die?”

  The defensive gleam in his eyes vanished, replaced by staggering anguish and guilt. “She slit her wrists an hour after Mom left. I came home that night and found Allie squalling in her crib. Vicky was in the bathtub…” His large frame shuddered.

  Even though some part of her had guessed, Catherine’s breath whooshed out.

  “You once wanted to talk about my ‘aversion to marriage.’ Well, now you know the truth. I can’t handle being responsible for someone else’s happiness. When the pressure’s on, I don’t even step up to the plate, much less take a swing at the pitch. I killed my wife as sure as if I’d held the razor blade.”

  Catherine’s lungs inflated so fast she got dizzy. “That’s melodramatic nonsense! Did Dr. Whitmire warn you Vicky might have suicidal tendencies? Prepare you for handling postpartum depression? Call you when she didn’t schedule an appointment after the baby was born?”

  He shook his head warily.

  No wonder he had no respect for her profession. “A thorough evaluation and a conscientious counselor could have advised you to take preventive steps. But even then there’s no guarantee Vicky wouldn’t have taken her life.”

  “I wasn’t there for her,” he insisted.

  “Listen to me, Joe. If she’d waited to use that razor blade until right before you were due home, her attempt might have been the proverbial cry for help. But she didn’t wait. In fact, it sounds like she made damn sure she’d succeed.”

  He looked a bit stunned.

  She leaned forward and took his hands into her own. “Maybe you weren’t the most supportive husband. Maybe you could have been more sensitive, I don’t know. But I do know that each and every one of us is responsible for our own happiness—no one else can make us happy. If Vicky really wanted to kill herself, nothing short of twenty-four-hour observation or physical restraint would have kept her safe.” Her thumbs massaged his knuckles. “It’s not your fault, Joe. Let it go.”

  For an instant his beautiful brown eyes were free of all pretense, his fear a precious gift of trust. “It won’t change anything. I’ll still be a screwup.”

  She squeezed his hands. “No, you’ll be standing at the plate, swinging at every pitch. That’s all anybody expects. When it gets right down to it, that’s all any of us can do.”

  JOE GAZED at the deepening twilight and sipped his cabernet. Catherine had insisted on doing the dishes alone after their spontaneous meal of soup and sandwiches. The backyard patio provided needed distance and a chance to think.

  He rehashed their conversation at length, one phrase replaying over and over in his mind. It’s not your fault, Joe. Let it go. His rigid stance gradually relaxed. As if awakening from a dream, he grew aware of the beauty surrounding him.

  Crickets sawed a high-pitched tune. A warm breeze rustled the leaves in a towering pecan tree. Roses swayed seductively against the tall wooden fence. Within this patch of paradise, a measure of peace settled into his heart. Maybe in time he actually could let it go.

  He wandered toward the fence and breathed in the spicy-sweet fragrance of at least a hundred blooms. One perfect white blossom caught his attention. Reaching out, he touched the velvety petals and thought of Catherine’s skin.

  A swirl of emotions hit him harder than Carl’s punches. Lust, possessiveness, respect, wonder—a longing of the soul he’d scoffed at when playing the lead in Romeo and Juliet all those years ago. But the bard had known his stuff. Forbidden love tempted like the apple lured Eve.

  The back door opened and closed, drawing his gaze. Catherine walked toward him carrying the bottle of cabernet and a filled wineglass. The dark liquid remained level even when she stepped from Flagstone onto grass. He never tired of watching her move.

  She reached him and topped off his half-empty glass without asking for permission. “We might as well finish the bottle. You don’t have far to drive.” Her mischievous glance slanted up to the garage apartment.

  Smiling, he nodded at a wrought-iron bench sheltered under the spreading tree branches. “Want to sit for a while?”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure. I forget how lice it is out here once the sun goes down.”

  As if on cue, an ornate gas lantern installed belind the bench flared into life. They settled onto opposite ends and sipped their wine.

  Lamplight flickered over her arresting face and lighlighted details: the almost straight dark brows idding to an impression of serious intensity; the elegant thin nose that made him think of royalty; the prim little mouth that could prune up in displeasure or spread in a smile so dazzling he forgot his own name. Robert had cut her black hair into a youthful tousled cap. Mesmerized, he watched a blush rise up her graceful neck.

  “You’re staring,” she murmured.

  “I was wondering whether you look like your father,” he lied smoothly. “Will I recognize him at the party, or will he be the one holding a rose in his teeth?” Her floating laugh buoyed his spirits.

  “I’ll introduce Father to you. I don’t resemble him except for my nose. That’s the only Hamilton feature I inherited.”

  “Then your mother must’ve been very beautiful.”

  This time her blush reached her roots.

  He suddenly wanted to know everything about this confident, bashful woman. “You know, I’ve heard more than enough about the pretentious Hamiltons. What about your mother’s side of the family? Tell me about her.”

  Every line in her body grew taut. She took a small sip of wine.

  He frowned. “I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories. You said she died when you were young, so I thought…Oh hell, I guess I didn’t think, period.”

  “If s okay. I’m not used to talking about her, that’s all. Father never did, and he never answered my questions about her, so eventually I stopped asking.”

  Joe cocked his head. His own mother still talked about his father as if Big Joe might walk in any minute and pop open a beer. “You really don’t know anything about your mother?”

  Two spots of red stained her cheeks. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you said your father wouldn’t answer your questions. Does that mean you talked to one of your mother’s relatives?”

  She shook her head.

  “A friend, then, or someone she went to school with?”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Catherine, what’s the big mystery? Did you find her secret diary in the attic? Get an anonymous letter? Dig up her bones planting flowers in the yard—”

  “No, no, no. Would you please just drop the subject?” She was breathing hard and avoiding his eyes, her turmoil as genuine as it was baffling.

  A thought clenched his fists. “Has your father warned you not to talk about this, Catherine?”

  She choked on a laugh and groaned, “No-cko.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I can tickle it out of you. Two minutes with these babies—” he wiggled his fingers “—and you’ll sing like a canary.”

  Raising her wineglass, she drained the last sip and faced him with an expression of pained resignation. “Three years ago I hired a private investigator to crack down my mother.”

  “Track her down? You mean her family?”

  “No, I mean her. She isn’t dead, Joe. That’s so
mething my father made up to save face with his friends. I follow along because it’s…simpler.”

  It was his turn to drain his wine. Finished, he set both their glasses on the ground, slid across the bench and took her hands in his. Something told him she’d need his support now just as much as he’d needed hers earlier.

  “Okay, doll, give it to me from the top.”

  “It’s a boring story.”

  “Does it have anything to do with caviar, grammar, art, French cuffs or fruity bouquets?”

  She managed a small smile. “No.”

  “Then I won’t be bored. Go ahead. Shoot.”

  Her story didn’t bore him—it broke his heart. He tried to keep a neutral expression while she described a childhood devoid of love but filled with rules and codes of behavior. Every wrong utensil picked up from beside her plate, every musical note fumbled on the piano, every B, instead of an A, on her report card brought stern reprimands and comparisons to her mother’s inferior intelligence and breeding.

  Joe looked down at the delicate hands he held and felt a fierce urge to shield her from further pain. “So you knew your mother was alive?”

  “Not until I was sixteen. Before then, my mother was this secret part of Father’s past we didn’t talk about in public. I could tell some people felt sorry for me that my mother had died, but I was glad she was dead. I hated her for making Father ashamed of me.”

  “What happened when you were sixteen?”

  Her mouth thinned. “For years I’d buried myself in libraries during summer vacation to help Father with his research papers. Getting published in reputable journals was essential to his career. Anyway, it was pretty tedious work to track down the obscure information he wanted.”

  Remembering his own summer days of hot sunshine, sweaty baseball games and cold plunges into swimming pools, Joe asked, “How’d you stand being cooped up?”

  “I was still trying to please Father at that point. But the summer I was sixteen my two best friends applied for a job working the concession at a movie theater. Scooping popcorn and filling cups with ice sounded tike heaven to me. I took home an application for Father to sign and he went ballistic. Same song and dance, only worse than ever. I finally started screaming back, asking him why he’d married my mother in the first place if she was so trashy.” Her brows drew together.

  “And?” he prodded.

  “And then he told me the whole sordid truth.” She searched his eyes anxiously. “You sure I’m not boring you?”

  “I live for sordid truths. What did the pretentious bastard tell you?”

  The tension in her face relaxed. She seemed pitifully grateful for his outrage on her behalf. “Before Father met my mother, he was teaching psychology at a small college in Connecticut and living with his elderly mother. He was the last male in the Hamilton family—his own father had been dead for years—and he hadn’t produced a son or made his mark in the academic world. One Friday he got restless and drove to New York to get away from it all.

  “He met mother in a coffee shop on Fifty-seventh. She was an aspiring actress of course, waiting tables until her big break. Father blames the attraction on temporary insanity, and it must have been contagious, because by Sunday afternoon they were driving back to Connecticut as husband and wife. I was born exactly nine months later.”

  Joe watched the tension creep back into her face and braced himself for the sordid part.

  “He said he tried to make it work, but she was uneducated, unsophisticated…uncontrollable. She embarrassed him in front of his friends and colleagues and even made passes at the younger ones. When I was three, she took off with an actor performing at the local dinner theater and never looked back.”

  Pretty sorry tale, but he’d heard worse. “Your father never divorced her?”

  “About six months after she left, he traced her to New Orleans. She was alone by then and waiting tables. He offered her five hundred dollars to sign divorce papers giving him uncontested custody of me. She held out for a thousand.”

  Now the story was sordid. “And he told people she’d died?”

  Catherine pulled her hands abruptly from his grasp and hugged her stomach. “Terrible, isn’t it? But he moved from Connecticut heading south through a series of college professorships. It wasn’t likely he’d meet anyone who’d known my mother. Widowerhood was so much more…dignified than divorce. I think Father actually believed the story himself after awhile.”

  Catherine rose gracefully, walked a few steps, then stopped, her focus on something only she could see.

  “What did you find out about your mother, Catherine?” She was quiet for so long, at first he thought she wouldn’t answer.

  “She never remarried, so I don’t have stepbrothers or sisters. I used to wonder about that a lot. She manages a truck stop in Columbus. She was working there long before Father and I moved here from Alabama. Columbus is just fifty miles away, Joe, can you believe it?”

  Drawn by the longing in her voice, he stood up and moved to her side. “Maybe it’s fate.”

  Her startled gaze rejected the obvious.

  “Maybe you should go see your mother, talk to her, hear her side of the story.”

  She shook her head violently. “No! If she’d wanted to see me, she could have contacted me just once…” Her voice broke on the last word and her shoulders bowed.

  With a soft curse he pulled her into his arms and gathered her close, aching for the lonely girl who’d been abandoned to a cold son of a bitch for a thousand bucks. How had she turned into such a compassionate and loving woman? He struggled to keep the anger he felt for her parents out of his tone.

  “You don’t know the circumstances, honey. Maybe she thought you wouldn’t want to see her. Maybe she was embarrassed. Hell, there’s probably a real good reason she didn’t contact you. But even if there’s not, I think you should find that out, too.”

  Catherine burrowed her face deeper into his shoulder. “You think I should go see her?”

  He suppressed a smile at her muffled voice. “That’s what I think. Not knowing is eating you up inside, like Vicky’s suicide was doing to me. And a friend once told me that running away isn’t the solution. You’ve got to confront your fear in order to let-it go.”

  She stood quietly in his arms.

  He rubbed her back in lazy circles, letting her think about what he’d said. He wasn’t in any hurry. Her head was the perfect height on which to rest his chin, her body the perfect cushion for his harder angles and planes. Better than a brand-new mattress any day.

  She stirred against his chest and raised her face. “Your friend sounds exceptionally astute.” The sass was back in her eyes.

  He slid a playful finger down the slope of her nose. “Yeah. And she’s smart, too.”

  As they grinned at each other like fools, like friends, a strange warming pleasure unfurled in his chest. It took a full minute for him to identify the feeling as happiness.

  Her expression grew solemn, her bewitching green eyes huge. “Thank you for being my friend, Joe.”

  His senses leapt to attention. The smell of her citrus shampoo, the feel of her breasts sliding up his chest as she rose on tiptoe, the sight of her raised mouth—he experienced them all as exquisite torture. Then her lips brushed his in a petal-soft caress.

  Desire flooded hot and insistent and harder than a baseball bat. He closed his eyes and made himself picture Catherine at the altar in a wedding dress.

  She sank back down to flat feet. “I shouldn’t have done that, huh?”

  “No, no. It’s fine.” Like hell. The groom standing at the altar in the penguin suit wasn’t Carl, but Joe.

  She squirmed to get free and his eyes popped open. She looked delightfully flustered.

  “Please let me go.”

  He stared down at his hands clamped on her hips and willed them to move. A long minute later he met her embarrassed gaze. “I don’t seem able to do that.”

  Her brows slashed down. “Wha
t do you mean, you don’t seem able? Just lift your hands and let me go!”

  He shook his head and walked slowly forward, his hands steadying her hesitant steps backward. “I can’t let you go until I do something first.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” She stumbled and he discovered what a sweet little tush she had. “What do you have to do?”

  Her back hit the wide tree trunk. He braced a palm on each side of her head and met her shocked eyes.

  “This,” he muttered hoarsely, then lowered his head.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CATHERINE’S HEABT went into fibrillation as she realized Joe’s intent. She flattened her palms against his chest and pushed, but she might as well have tried moving her brick house for all the good it did her. His face came closer, his devil-dark eyes glittering, his hard mouth softening.

  She’d wondered for so long what it would be like to kiss him. Now she would finally know.

  TQting up her face, she closed her eyes and gasped as his lips brushed the skin beneath her ear. Warmth radiated from his busy mouth in shimmering circles. Whatever he was doing felt wonderful, an erotic combination of gentle suction and soothing tongue. Her head lolled back against the tree and she realized he was not so much kissing her as branding her.

  She might have protested if her vocal cords hadn’t gone limp—along with every other part of her body.

  He made a low velvety noise in his throat and lifted his head. “I’ve wanted to do that since you swigged a beer in The Pig’s Gut.”

  Her eyelids wouldn’t open all the way. She followed the line of his hard jaw and the satisfied curve of his mouth with her slumberous gaze.

  “When you look at me like that…” His head dipped under her chin and he nuzzled the base of her throat. “God, Catherine.” It was a groan. “Do you feel what you do to me?”

  She felt the rough bark against her shoulder blades and the steel curve of his thighs against her own. She felt the rasp of his whiskers on her throat and the pounding of his heart beneath her palms. She felt the rigid evidence of what she did to him pulse against her belly, and the answering surge of heat between her legs.