She turned to look at him. “The book isn’t going well?”
“It’ll keep. I want to hear about you first.”
“So much has happened I don’t know where to begin.”
He held up his hand. “Wait. Before you say anything more, there’s something I think we need to get out of the way.” He put his hands on her arms and brought her to him. He took a minute to study her face, to note the sparkle lighting her eyes, her slightly parted mouth, before he came forward slowly and brushed his lips against hers. But one chaste, welcoming kiss wasn’t enough. It never would be for them. He kissed her again and then again.
She put her arms around his waist and with a sigh said, “Wow—just like I remembered.”
“I love you, Julia.” There it was, unplanned, unexpected, and impossible to take back. “I know it’s too soon, that we have a hundred things to learn about each other, and that the odds are against us. But nothing can change the way I feel about you, and I guess a part of me figured it was time you knew.”
“You’re right. It is too soon, and we do have a lot to learn about each other, but I’m pretty sure I love you, too. No, I’m very sure.” She tilted her head back to look at him. “How would you feel if I moved in next door for a couple of months? I think it would help if we were a little closer while we’re trying to work things out, don’t you?”
“I thought Peter told me you’d sold him the house.”
“I did, but he let me back out of the deal at the last minute. He said he didn’t need another house anyway. It seems Katherine is going to be staying at his place when she visits from now on.”
“What about work?”
“Mine?” she said innocently.
“Yes, Julia—yours.”
“That’s all taken care of, too. I put the company up for sale three weeks ago and sold it to the highest bidder two days later. There’s a ton of paperwork that still has to be done, but basically it’s a fait accompli.”
He was dumbfounded at the news. “I don’t understand. You were so worried about what would happen to the employees if you sold. How did that change?”
“Well, it didn’t actually. I just arranged things so it didn’t matter whether they lost their jobs or not.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How did you manage that?”
Her excitement spilled over into an ear-to-ear grin. “I gave them half the money from the sale. Now they can keep working or take a couple of years off or even take an early retirement. They have the same freedom I do.”
He couldn’t believe he’d heard her right. “You did what?”
She laughed. “It was so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
Eric hated bringing in a cloud to mar her brilliantly blue sky, but it had to be asked. “What about it being Ken’s business that you sold?”
“That’s absolutely amazing. You never met Ken and yet you talk about him with the same deference that everyone else does, as if he were still alive. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”
She was right, they did have things to work out. More than he realized. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I know what losing him meant to you. It was just my clumsy way of asking if you’d found peace with your feelings.”
“A part of me will always love Ken.” She fixed her gaze on the front of Eric’s shirt as she talked about the man she’d once believed she couldn’t live without. “Can you understand that? I guess what’s more important, can you live with it?”
“I learned a long time ago that love isn’t something you turn on and off, Julia. I know that Ken will always be an important part of your life.”
“There’s more.” She hesitated telling him what came next, then just plunged ahead. “Do you have any idea what you’re up against with my friends—with everyone who knew Ken?”
“If the hostility Peter has shown me since you and I became friends is any example, I have a pretty good idea.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Actually, Peter is beginning to show signs of coming around. He said he no longer thinks it’s impossible for me to find someone who could make me happy.”
“How kind of him.”
“His attitude is precisely the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s what you’ll be going up against with everyone who knew Ken. There isn’t one of his friends who thinks there’s anyone who can take his place. They might forgive my reaching out in my loneliness, but they’ll never forgive you for thinking you’re good enough for me.”
She wasn’t looking for an easy answer or casual reassurance. What they were facing was a real problem and had to be acknowledged. No matter how bigoted her friends might be toward him, they were the people who had stood by her and helped her through the most devastating period of her life. They were important to her; therefore they had to be important to him.
“I can take it, Julia. The people who know and love you—and that includes me—only want one thing, and that’s for you to be happy. When your friends see that happening, they’ll come around.”
“I really do love you,” she said as she touched the side of his face. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that again.”
“So, when will you be moving in?”
“My bags are in the car.”
The trust she’d put in him stole his breath. She’d walked away from the only life she knew, the only emotional security she had, to take a chance with him. “I promise that you’ll never look back and question what you did today.”
“I came here because loving you is something I want, not something I need.” She looked at him long and hard. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“That you love me with your mind as well as your heart?”
“Well put.” She snuggled closer. “But then you are the writer of the family.” Looking up, she added, “Now that we have that out of the way, I think we should do something to celebrate.”
“Make love?”
She smiled. “That, too.”
“But first?”
“It can be put off for second,” she said in a husky, inviting voice.
This time when they made love it was unhurried and tender. Eric slowly and purposefully explored Julia’s body, imprinting her feel and look in his hands and mind.
When he entered her she was warm and wet and eager, lifting her hips to match his thrusts, wrapping her legs around his waist, calling his name as he reached between them and brought her to an explosive climax.
Afterward, his hand resting on her belly, her head nestled on his shoulder, he asked, “I don’t want you to get the idea we’re through with this celebration,” he said, his lips touching her temple, his breath caressing her flushed skin. “But why don’t you tell me what you had in mind for us to do next.”
“I want to meet Jason and Susie—and Shelly. I was hoping she would let the kids stay with us a couple of weeks so we could get to know each other.”
He would have sworn nothing could make him happier that day. He’d been wrong. “Jason’s in a year-round school and has a break coming up next month, I’m sure we could work something out with Shelly to take them then.”
“Do you think they’ll like me?”
She wasn’t looking for an easy answer about this, either. “Susie will be easy. She loves everyone and sees no reason they shouldn’t love her back. Jason’s lost too many people in his short life. He’s slower to trust people. But he’ll come around. And when he does, the two of you will be terrific together.”
She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him. “I want us to have children, too, Eric. I’m tired of empty rooms in empty houses.”
“Was this a project you wanted to get started on right away?”
She laughed. “I think it can wait a while—but not too long.”
He put his hand on the back of her neck and brought her to him for a kiss. No matter how many books he wound up writing in his lifetime, he would never be able to come up with a better ending.
> But their story wasn’t an ending—it was a beginning.
An Excerpt from Carly’s Gift
One
Sixteen years was a long time to hate someone.
David Montgomery leaned against a dogwood tree and gazed at the large antebellum-style house across from him. He drew himself deeper into his cashmere overcoat in an attempt to ward off the late October cold. The soft fabric caressed the back of his neck, a gentle reminder of how far he’d come in the almost two decades since he’d called this inconsequential corner of the world home. Back then he’d faced the winters in coarse wool, faded blue jeans and long underwear from the JCPenney catalog. Now he thought nothing of paying what his father had earned in a month as a tractor mechanic for one shirt from his tailor on Savile Row.
Jesus, what idiot urge had brought him here? What could he have been thinking? What had he hoped to gain? He straightened and took a step to leave.
Peace of mind, an insistent inner voice answered, stopping him, rooting him with its teasing promise—to be rid of her once and for all, to bury her in his past, someone no more important than anything or anyone who’d come into his life during the eighteen years he’d lived in Baxter, Ohio.
Conflicting emotions had assailed him since he’d received word of his father’s accident. The woman on the other end of the line had insisted his father couldn’t last the night. David caught the first plane for Florida. Arriving twelve hours after the call, he’d expected to find his father gone already, with nothing left for him to do but make the funeral arrangements, but he hadn’t taken into consideration what a tough old bird his father was. It took Jim Montgomery two weeks before he finally let go of the difficult life he’d lived. Fourteen days of sitting at his father’s bedside had given David far too much time to think, to remember.
It wasn’t as if Carly still haunted him every hour of every day. After he’d settled in England and his career had taken off, there had been weeks, even months, when he hadn’t thought about her at all. Then, invariably, something would come along that triggered a memory—a song, a picture in a magazine—and thoughts of her would consume him.
The sound of a car drew his attention. He glanced down the narrow, tree-lined road and saw a maroon SUV approaching. There was a woman behind the wheel; on the passenger side a small dog had its nose pressed to the front window. David saw a flash of dark auburn hair before the car turned into the driveway of the house he’d been watching—her house. His eyes lighted in quick triumph. How wonderfully fitting—the woman who as a young girl had vowed she was going to set the New York art world on its ear not only still lived in the same small town where she’d always lived, but she also drove the ultimate, flagrant symbol of suburbia. But then, he reasoned with a stab of bitterness, she undoubtedly needed a car like that to ferry around the three kids she’d had with good old Ethan.
David shuddered at his thoughts. What made him still care? She was nothing to him. He’d done everything he’d ever dreamed. More. And she’d done nothing, gone nowhere.
So why was he the one standing out in the cold?
Carly Hargrove shifted the cocker spaniel she was carrying to her left hip and unlocked the kitchen door. When she was inside, she gently put the old dog on the floor by his food. “I’ll get your blanket out of the dryer, Muffin,” she said, running her hand over his head, then pausing to scratch his ear.
As soon as she’d arranged the dog’s bed, she went to the hall closet to hang up her coat. The long car ride she’d taken after dropping the kids off at school had managed to eat up a few hours, but it had done nothing to ease her restlessness.
She set her purse on the closet shelf, yanked off her knit hat and ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it back to its normal unruly volume. She really ought to do something to calm some of the frizz, if for no other reason than to please Ethan. He hadn’t actually said anything about her appearance, but he was quick to point out how attractive other women looked in sleek hairstyles.
At times her heart ached for the man she’d married, her pain wrapped in a ribbon of guilt. Mostly she just went on, letting one day merge into the next without conscious thought, reveling in the joy her children brought her, careful not to think about what her life would be like when they were grown and she and Ethan were alone.
And it had worked.
At least it had until three days ago when she’d run into Horace Manly at the PTA meeting and had been blindsided by the news that David was accompanying his father’s casket back to Baxter to arrange for a memorial service.
Carly drew in a deep breath and purposefully closed the closet door. Fear of the unknown had begun to insinuate itself into everything she did and thought and she was being dragged down by it. She started up the stairs to make the beds, seeking comfort in the familiar and mindless action.
Sixteen years was a long time, especially in the life of someone like David Montgomery. When he thought about her, it was undoubtedly with a sigh of relief that she hadn’t weighed him down when he’d reached for his star.
If he even remembered her.
She tossed king-sized pillows onto the chair beside the bed and smoothed the comforter. Did she really hope that he’d forgotten her?
The lives of everyone she loved depended on that very thing.
With mechanical movements, Carly finished tidying the master bedroom and moved on to her daughter’s room. Bending to pick up Andrea’s nightgown, she heard the front doorbell.
She jerked upright. It was probably only the mailman, she told herself, angry at how easily she could be shaken.
She started toward the stairs.
The instant her foot hit the landing and she saw the shadowed form of a man through the beveled glass of the front door, she knew. She considered slipping back upstairs but then thought how much more dangerous it would be to have David come back when Ethan or one of the kids were home. If she had to see him at all, it was better that she do it alone.
For days she had tried to imagine what it would be like to see him again. In her mind they’d already had a dozen conversations. He’d been the focus of her thinking when she drove the kids to school, when she stopped for groceries, and when she was lying beside Ethan at night listening to his breathing.
She opened the door wide, refusing to use it as a shield. She wasn’t prepared for the man who stood in front of her. There was no semblance of the boy Carly had known—the mouth that had once been so quick to smile was now hard and tight; the wonder and mischief that had shone from his eyes were gone, replaced with a chilling blue anger.
“Hello, David,” she said. “It’s been a long time,” she added, an overwhelming sorrow settling through her.
“Yes, it has,” he answered slowly, openly studying her.
“I’m sorry about your father. When he moved away, I missed seeing him.” More than anything she’d missed the tie, however tenuous, he’d given her to David. “I heard you were coming and I . . .”
A corner of his mouth raised in a mocking smile. “And you were wondering if I’d stop by to catch up on old times,” he finished for her.
“I admit it crossed my mind once or twice.”
“Did you think I could come back to my old home town and not look in on you and Ethan? Come on, Carly. Ethan was my best friend. You were . . .” He shrugged. “I seem to have forgotten just what you were to me, Carly.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Time will do that.”
“You seem to be doing all right for yourself.”
A too-bright smile preceeded her cheerful, “I’ve been lucky.”
“I doubt luck had anything to do with it.”
An awkward silence followed. “What do you want, David?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“You must have some idea or you wouldn’t have come.”
“Is that how you see things now? Every question has a simple answer?”
“I’m sorry,” she offered helplessly, knowing it wasn’t wha
t he wanted or needed but unable to stop herself. “I never meant to hurt—”
“Jesus Christ, Carly, after all the time we were together don’t you think I deserve a little more than that? Both then and now?”
She held her hands out in a pleading gesture. “That was sixteen years ago. If you came here hoping to find me wallowing in self-pity because I married Ethan and missed out on the opportunity to be the wife of a famous writer, you wasted your time, David. I may not cross oceans to spend my winters on a Greek island, but I’m happy. Can you say as much?”
David smiled wryly and rubbed his hand across his chin. “How is it you know so much about me?”
“Let it go, David,” she begged him.
“I wish to hell I could,” he admitted with a sigh. He stared at her for what seemed an interminable time as if searching for something more to say. Finally, wordlessly, he turned to leave.
Carly watched him walk away. Instead of setting him free all those years ago, she’d imprisoned him in the same tangled web of lies that she’d spun around herself. She’d made a hundred promises to David and then sent him a letter that broke every one. Now she had a chance to set things right.
“David?” she called, ignoring the terrible risk she was taking to settle her debt. He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder. The wind caught his hair, brushing it across his forehead, giving her a glimpse of the twenty-two-year-old boy she’d once loved and believed as necessary to her existence as the air she breathed.
“Yes?”
“Don’t go.” For the first time in years she would do something unplanned and uncalculated. Something for herself.
“What’s the point, Carly?” He retraced his steps.
She hesitated. “Why did you come, David?”
With an abrupt, angry movement, he grabbed her, his fingers digging into her arms. “To rid myself of you. I don’t want to think about you anymore.” He brought his face menacingly close to hers. “I don’t want to remember what it felt like to love you. I don’t want to care that you could throw away everything we had.” With a look of disgust, he released her and took a step backward. “God— I swore I wouldn’t let this happen.”
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