Working on a Full House

by Alyssa Kress

  "Uh, I wanted to take you somewhere special."

  She did look at Roy then, a sudden, piercing regard. But she didn't ask why he might have wanted to do that.

  Tense with all the mystery, Roy decided it was time to lay some cards on the table. "I get the feeling you're not happy about something."

  "Me? Not happy?" Valerie's eyelashes fluttered down. "Don't be ridiculous. What would I have to be unhappy about?"

  There's the fact we made love last night. Roy tried his best to unclench his teeth. "I can't guess what's wrong," he said very softly. "So why don't you just tell me?"

  She spent a full minute staring into the space past Roy's left shoulder while her bright smile faded. "You're right," she finally said. "You're right. I promised myself I was going to be truthful. A long time ago I promised myself that — not that I kept my promise." She emitted a small, unhappy laugh.

  "What are you talking about?" He wished she would stop talking in riddles.

  Valerie shifted to look straight at him. "The prices at this cute little French restaurant, I'll bet they're through the roof. But you don't have to worry about that. Probably didn't even occur to you. Right?"

  Roy just stared at her. She stared back. His insides slowly turned to lead. "You know," he finally said.

  "About all your millions of dollars? Oh, no, I don't know the exact amount. Only what's been estimated in the half-dozen books Peter was kind enough to lend me, books in every one of which your name was mentioned." Valerie looked to the side and let out a gusty breath. "You're famous."

  "I'm not famous." It wasn't his fault if authors of poker books chose to recount some game or other in which he'd made a decent play. Although he should have figured Valerie would come across one of those books, sooner or later. Dammit, if it had only been one day later!

  Still gazing off to the side, Valerie tapped one finger on the edge of the table. "You must have thought I was pretty funny."

  "I never thought you were funny."

  "Ha," laughed Valerie, non-humorously. "Ha."

  "I never thought you were funny. I simply...didn't think it mattered."

  Valerie's finger stilled on the edge of the tabletop. "It didn't matter," she repeated flatly. Her gaze shot up to his. "Who you really are wouldn't matter?"

  Roy's heart pounded heavily in his chest. Was there any way he could salvage this? "Come on, the money — that isn't me."

  "No?" Valerie's eyes widened. "Well, it's certainly something about you. Kind of a big thing, I would say!"

  "It's just money."

  "A whole heck of a lot of money. It puts you...in another sphere."

  "In another sphere?" Roy was completely lost.

  Valerie waved a hand. "Admittedly, you didn't try to buy me. Were you tickled you didn't even have to?"

  "What?" But Roy's face reddened because he knew what she meant. And, in a way, she was right. He had been pleased to win his way without reference to his bank account. "Okay, fine." He scrambled for high ground. "I left you in the dark. Temporarily. I was going to tell you about the money. I will tell you. I'm worth about thirty-five million, depending on the markets. Hell, I'll give you a copy of my portfolio."

  Valerie looked dumbstruck. "Thirty-five million, she whispered, then suddenly laughed. "That prenup! You must have been thrilled I insisted on doing exactly what you needed."

  "No." Roy's face heated more. About this she was wrong. He hadn't given a damn about a prenup because — even at the time — he'd never wanted a divorce. But how could he explain that now? She looked ready to fry him. All he could do was repeat firmly, "No."

  Valerie arched a brow. "No?" She sounded sarcastic. Setting her elbows on the table, she regarded him steadily. "What is really going on here, Roy?"

  What was really going on? It was a damn good question. They were already married — yet he had a diamond ring in his pocket. His thirty-five million should have been positive, but it had ended up alienating her. Things were spinning out of control. It was time to get back on track.

  "We have claims on each other," he said slowly.

  "Really." She gave him a contemptuous look. "What kind?"

  He met her eyes. "The kind that happened last night."

  Color rushed onto her cheekbones. "Last night...was a mistake."

  That was a punch to the gut, but Roy only gritted his teeth. "It was a pretty fabulous mistake."

  Her color deepened. "I don't even know why you — Doesn't matter. It shouldn't have happened."

  "I'm glad it did."

  Her gaze cut to him. "Truly? Because I don't understand." She paused, her brows diving. "What do you want from me?"

  What did he want from her?

  Roy felt like he couldn't get air into his lungs. He hadn't gotten things on track. She'd circled around, nipping at his fear. Because what he wanted from her was...none of her goddamn business. It was — too big, too significant to be revealing to the last person in the world he'd want to comprehend his utter vulnerability. She couldn't know how he needed her.

  Roy felt his face warm, felt anger start to pry off the fingers of his panic. "Like I said," he told her. "I enjoyed what we did last night, and — " He lifted one finger to cut off what looked to be a hot reply from her direction. "And I think it makes sense for us to live together, as husband and wife." It flitted through his mind that this was definitely not the proposal he'd planned, nor judging by Valerie's thin lips, was it going to go over the way he'd hoped.

  But Roy had always been good at recalculating odds in a fluid situation. If he couldn't persuade her with sweet words, then he'd do so with hard ones. Whatever it took to make this happen. "It makes sense for us to continue our lives together, married," Roy went on, lowering his finger. "For the sake of the baby."

  There. That was his A-bomb. More than the bait of his thirty-five million, the baby was the trick that would persuade Valerie to act the way Roy wanted her to. It had always worked.

  "For the sake of the baby," she now repeated, in a whisper.

  "That's right. No matter what, Valerie, we are both its parents. It behooves us to...be a family." Roy shifted in his seat. This was skirting very close to his secret truth.

  Valerie simply looked at him. As she did, Roy could feel fear begin to beat back through his anger.

  "Let me see if I have this straight," she said. "You, the multi-millionaire, want us to live together, as if we're really married — for the baby. That's what you want from me?"

  Yes...and no. But the gist was there: he wanted them to be together. "I think we owe that to our child," Roy said, concentrating on his strong card.

  Valerie looked at him for a long moment more before her lips thinned and she shook her head. "No," she said. "No."

  Roy went cold inside. "What? Why not?"

  She heaved a sigh. "Maybe we do owe our child a family — but we can't give it to him that way."

  He had to make himself breathe. "What are you talking about?"

  She closed her eyes. "For me to be married, there would have to be love." She opened her eyes again. Her gaze was unnervingly direct. "Do you love me?"

  Roy stared at her. Did he love her? The question was like a gun leveled at him point blank. His heart beat heavily in his chest.

  The honest truth was he didn't know. He simply, positively did not know. What was love, anyway? Was it this gnawing, enervating need? Was it this gut-clenching fear? And if it were, why would she ask for something so destroying from him? Was that love?

  Then he wanted no part of it. He'd been a fool to put that ring in his pocket, a fool to have returned to Palmwood at all after he'd realized how needy he was growing.

  And he was most definitely a fool to be sitting here even contemplating answering her in the affirmative. Handing her all his chips, letting her hold his very life in her hands.

  As he gazed at her, everything inside him began to pull inward, away from the surface. Anesthetizing. It felt eerily familiar...and powerful. This was how he'd made sure
his father never got through to him. He never cared. His father could rant, he could criticize, he could scowl — but he'd never been able to hurt Roy, not after Roy had learned how to crawl inside himself.

  "Love," he said, startling himself with the way, despite his in-crawling, his voice had cracked. He cleared his throat and gave Valerie a cool stare. "That's your condition? I have to love you?"

  Valerie looked back at him with dark, utterly ungiving eyes. "Yes," she answered. "That is my condition."

  Roy sucked his lips in and nodded. He'd crawled inside. This didn't even hurt. "Then I'll start back for Las Vegas as soon as we've eaten lunch."

  Valerie made a small sound, but when Roy looked over, her face was calm and composed. "Fine," she said, and cleared her own throat. "That's just fine."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  This tournament was for the birds. Kenny'd had the worst luck with hands, and the blind structure didn't lend itself to bluffing. He peered down at his latest draw and saw a two-seven, unsuited. The worst possible combination.

  With a sigh, he looked across the table. Roy sat with his hands clasped loosely on the table, his eyes like steel ball bearings.

  If only Kenny could catch Roy's gaze to see if he'd like to quit this joke and get a bite to eat. But Roy had gone into the deep, competitive place where there'd be no reaching him. In point of fact, there'd been no reaching Roy for about a week, ever since the same Friday Cherise had kicked Kenny out of her life. Roy had been cold, hard, and impenetrable.

  Kenny wondered if, for some reason, Roy were as miserable as he was.

  "All in," Kenny announced, when the bet came around to him. He pushed his measly pile of chips across the line, hoping it would be enough to steal the blinds.

  But three players called his bet, every one of them destined to collect Kenny's bluff. At the end of the hand, Kenny smiled at the round of well wishes from the remaining players — all actually delighted to see a competitor leave — and went in search of a late dinner.

  He shouldn't have even tried this tournament. Usually it was good fun, but the chance of ending in the money was lousy. He should have found a serious cash game so he could have won enough to make his mortgage in two days.

  Kenny wandered down the luxurious hall of the casino to find a café, the sort of place where he wouldn't feel conspicuous sitting down by himself. He hated to eat by himself, so it was a mystery why he'd been doing so much of it lately.

  Well, perhaps it wasn't so much of a mystery, Kenny thought. Roy wouldn't talk — to anybody. And Kenny wouldn't talk to Isaac — at least not yet.

  As Kenny walked into an all-night café, he saw a waitress on her way into the kitchen.

  "Sit wherever you like," she called. The place was half empty.

  "I bet you say that to all the men," Kenny called back. He heard her laugh as she pushed through the kitchen doors.

  Yeah, that was his specialty, making people laugh. The class clown. Kenny's own smile dimmed as he found a seat at a square, fake marble table. He shouldn't be remembering his last conversation with Cherise, the words she'd hurled at him. You don't take anything seriously, most of all yourself.

  Was that true? For a week now, Kenny had been chewing over the question, like a dog with a bone.

  He plucked a sugar packet out of the little holder on the table. The waitress sailed by, her hands full of a plate of pancakes and scrambled eggs with hash browns — the kind of food people seemed to like to eat late at night. "You want coffee?" she asked, glancing toward Kenny as she sailed.

  "If you're bringing it," Kenny replied, with a wink.

  She smiled back in a way that was not merely polite. They were flirting. Of course they were. Did Kenny ever meet a member of the opposite sex, of any age, and not flirt? Was he never serious?

  Kenny twisted the sugar packet in his fingers. He supposed he'd always been careful to be jocular, the guy you could have fun with. Everybody liked to have fun. Not taking things seriously made it easy to make friends, and when you changed schools every few years, it was important to have a quick and foolproof way to make new friends.

  Not taking things seriously made it easier to leave behind the friends he'd already made when he had to move on.

  "Coffee, black, coming up." The waitress, a tall woman with dark, upswept hair, smiled warmly at Kenny as she placed a ceramic mug of coffee on the table in front of him. "Cream?"

  "Cream would be great."

  She placed a bowl of packaged creamers on the table. "Are you ready to order?"

  "Uh..." Though he'd been hungry, Kenny hadn't looked at the menu yet. "You have something with eggs and potatoes and toast?"

  "There's the Farmer's Special or the Dieter's Delight. Which would you like?"

  Kenny grinned up at her. "Something tells me the Farmer's Special is more fun."

  The waitress laughed. "Oh, definitely."

  "That's the one, then."

  With a promising smile, the waitress jotted Kenny's order down and sashayed off.

  He was getting the Farmer's Special because it sounded 'more fun.' Typical. It was rather like his marriage proposal to Cherise. She was right in accusing him of not being serious about it. Surely he couldn't have imagined she'd actually say yes to quitting her job and traipsing around Europe with no visible means of support.

  So why had he done it? Why had he asked her that way? Had he wanted her to say no?

  The shiny black surface of his coffee mesmerized Kenny. Yes, he decided, he had wanted her to say no. He'd counted on it.

  Because it was better she reject him now than that she do it a year or two down the road, after he might have come to depend on her, when he might have allowed himself to believe she might stick.

  Kenny stared into his coffee, dumbstruck. He'd wanted Cherise to say no, because he hadn't wanted to let her become too important. He'd been afraid of that. In fact, he was afraid to let anyone become important.

  More accurately, he was afraid he would not become important back.

  Kenny blinked and reached for a packaged creamer. With trembling fingers, he opened it and poured cream into his coffee. Trembling more, he poured in a second package. Oh, perhaps he'd let a few people become important, he mused. Roy came to mind, and Isaac. But neither of them really counted. Roy, the loner, couldn't afford to toss away a friend. No matter how he'd been behaving recently, Roy needed Kenny. And Isaac had way too much moral integrity to abandon anybody, even Kenny.

  But Cherise — ? Why would she ever consider Kenny important? Oh, sure, he was good for her, brought out the playfulness in her, helped her connect to her inner passions, but she didn't really need that. She'd been going along perfectly fine without playfulness or connection to her passions. She didn't need Kenny.

  Not the way he could easily come to need her.

  "One Farmer's Special, at your door." The waitress stood by the table, bending to place in front of Kenny a large plate of scrambled eggs with cheese-covered vegetables, along with crispy home fries, and buttered toast. "Coffee okay?"

  "Hm? Oh. Yes, the coffee's great." He hadn't even taken a sip. Automatically, Kenny smiled up at the waitress. "But I knew as long as you brought it, it would solve all my problems."

  The waitress's smile broadened. "You are too funny."

  Somehow, Kenny kept his smile. "Oh, yeah. I'm a barrel of laughs."

  She hesitated, just long enough for Kenny to realize she wouldn't reject a request for a phone number. Then, with a friendly tap on the table, she was off. She didn't take him seriously, Kenny thought. She would not take him seriously even if he had asked for her phone number, even if they'd proceeded on to a torrid affair, and if he'd ended up proposing marriage. Because he didn't take himself seriously. He didn't care if he made his mortgage payment in two days, he didn't care if he couldn't afford a car, or if he didn't have a bank account.

  He didn't care that he was a train wreck.

  But most of all, he didn't care that Cherise had rejected him. O
h, no. Of course he didn't.

  Kenny's mouth twisted. Ha. If that wasn't the biggest joke of all.

  Pulling out enough cash to cover the breakfast and a generous tip, Kenny got up. He left the café without taking a sip of his coffee or a bite of his meal. He was no longer the slightest bit hungry.

  He had some thinking to do. About what was important, and what wasn't. Seriously.

  ~~~

  "I think I'm getting better." Cherise pronounced this declaration on a Wednesday night in May. She was sprawled in one of the visitor chairs in Valerie's office, her eyes closed and her shoes kicked off after a long day of work.

  "I didn't know you were admitting anything was wrong." Valerie glanced across her desk and over the chart she was trying to finish before she and Cherise could go out to dinner.

  Cherise ignored this remark. Instead she put one hand over the sleekly-cut cotton dress covering her stomach. "At least I found out today I'm not pregnant."

  Valerie looked up from the medical chart so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. "You thought you might be pregnant?" In the past two weeks, ever since Cherise had confessed she'd had a brief affair with Roy's friend, Kenny, she had not divulged this significant piece of information.

  With her eyes still closed, Cherise lifted one shoulder. "But I'm not, so it doesn't matter."

  Silently, Valerie begged to disagree. She believed it would benefit Cherise immensely to admit what had really happened between herself and Kenny Doubletree. It had been so out of character for Cherise to indulge in a passionate affair in the first place, and if she'd allowed herself to slip up to the point she might have gotten pregnant — ? Well, the whole thing had obviously been a lot more significant than Cherise was acknowledging.

  "How about you?" Cherise half-opened her eyes to look at Valerie. "You getting better?"

  Valerie was better enough that she could answer the question with a smile. "I'm hungry again." After the blow-up with Roy, her appetite had gone back on vacation. She'd come home from work on the day of their awful lunch at the French restaurant to find all trace of him gone. No laptop briefcase was resting against the lower kitchen cabinets, no male jacket was tossed over a dining room chair. Not even his scent, a blend of woodsy aftershave and man, had been left behind. That day Valerie had felt bereft, empty, ripped up inside...and nauseous again.