Falling for You

by Becky Wade

  “That last theory doesn’t explain why Stan disappeared on the same day as Josephine,” Charlotte said.

  “Not a bad observation,” Corbin said.

  “Thank you.”

  “For a puppy,” he added.

  Charlotte did one of her famous eye rolls. “What should we do next?” she asked Willow.

  “Yes, boss lady.” Corbin grinned. “Enlighten us.”

  “You’re a handful, Corbin. You know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “I’m wondering,” Willow said, “if the businessman who charged Stan Markum with extortion is still alive. If so, we could contact him.”

  “He’s dead,” Corbin said. “He died fifteen years ago.”

  “Bummer.” Charlotte pointed her pen at the computer. “What about these ladies? Are they dead?”

  “No,” Willow answered. “The first woman lives overseas now. But the second one, the nanny, still lives in Washington.”

  “What’s her name?” Charlotte asked.

  “Vickie Goff.”

  “Should we take Vickie out for coffee?” Corbin asked Willow.

  “I’m thinking I should take Vickie out for coffee,” Willow answered.

  “What about me?” Charlotte asked.

  “I really think I need to talk to Vickie alone,” Willow said. “If she agrees to see me at all, it’ll be because I’m coming alone and because I’m a fellow woman. Our conversation is going to be uncomfortable, no matter what. But less so if I go by myself.”

  Everyone other than Willow received a T-bone steak.

  When Corbin handed Willow her plate, several of the guests remarked on her gorgeously seared filet mignon. Willow tried to laugh it off while battling an inner attack of sheepishness.

  This filet marked her as the teacher’s pet of the evening. She’d never wanted to be the teacher’s pet, not in any class she’d ever been a part of. During her school years, she’d been a well-behaved A/B student. A good influence on classmates. However, she’d dreaded the attention and the dislike that came from the role of teacher’s pet, so she’d mostly attempted to fly under the radar.

  Tonight, maybe foolishly, she’d traded the chance to fly under the radar for six ounces of filet mignon.

  Carrying her plate down the length of the island in Corbin’s kitchen, she helped herself to the beautiful food. A bowl of green salad dotted with red tomatoes, cucumber, and feta. An urn of mashed potatoes. A platter of grilled asparagus, onion, carrots, and Brussels sprouts. There was even a pot of baked macaroni and cheese for the kids.

  Food of this caliber did her homemaker’s heart good. She tried to catch the eye of the caterer Corbin had hired, a plump woman with a severe ponytail. But the caterer—and the rest of the guests, for that matter—were preoccupied with Corbin. It seemed that Charlotte was the only person present carrying the flag of Team Willow.

  She settled at the dining table. Unlike some of the other rooms in Corbin’s barnhouse, the dining room was completely finished. It sat adjacent to the kitchen and, like the kitchen, boasted one wall mostly composed of windows. Outside, yard lights illuminated the trees. Inside, a modern trestle table large enough to seat twelve dominated the space. A card table covered with a white tablecloth had been set up in the room’s corner for the kids. When Jill instructed Charlotte to join her brothers there, the preteen girl responded as though she’d been riddled with buckshot.

  Corbin took his place at the head of the table and saved the seat beside him for his dad. As they ate, Corbin kept the conversation going by asking questions, joking, telling stories, and rising to refill glasses. He made dealing with a group of people, many of whom he didn’t know well, look incredibly easy.

  I’m not going to carry the flag of Team Corbin, Willow repeated over and over to herself while enjoying her amazing steak.

  Unfortunately for her, though, three different factors were working together to erode her resistance to Corbin on this particular night.

  One, his house. Willow couldn’t fathom how he’d stumbled upon a house so perfect for her. With her help, it could become an absolute gem.

  Two, Corbin’s treatment of his dad. She’d watched Corbin bring his dad out of his shell by easing the older man into discussions with various guests. He’d carried his dad’s drink and pulled out his dad’s chair. Corbin had quietly corrected his dad when his dad had gotten Zander’s name wrong. He’d slipped a few different medications onto his dad’s napkin. Looking out for his dad almost seemed to be something Corbin did unconsciously, like it was second nature.

  Which made her wonder . . . Just how long had Corbin been looking out for Joe? For the last few years since Joe had come to live with him? Since Corbin started playing for the NFL? Since Corbin’s teenage years? Since Corbin’s childhood?

  Three, Charlotte’s family was eroding Willow’s resistance. She’d spent a good part of her evening observing Jill and Mark with their kids. Mark had ginger coloring, stood a good five inches shorter than his cousin Corbin, and looked like a dad and an architect—and not at all like an NFL quarterback.

  In addition to Charlotte, Mark and Jill had two sons. Liam, who was ten, and Brady, seven. The Dixons weren’t a perfect family. For one thing, the boys appeared to have enough energy to power Seattle’s electrical grid. Earlier, Brady had climbed onto an ottoman in Corbin’s living room, taken a running jump off of it, landed in a karate roll, and come up with one sneaker against the wall, which had left a scuff mark. Jill had rushed to correct the boy, while Mark had obliviously continued his conversation with John.

  Liam had been coughing and sniffing all evening.

  And Charlotte had authority issues.

  So, no, they weren’t perfect. Their family was real and authentic and messy and close-knit. The Dixons were everything Willow had ever wanted for herself and never been able to achieve. She wanted a son who did karate rolls and a son who had a cough and a daughter with authority issues and an oblivious husband of her own.

  She always, always had.

  Yet she was now thirty-one years old. She’d grown leery of men. She’d started to doubt whether she’d been dreaming the right dream in the first place. She knew very well that her deep longing for a family of her own had the potential to become a weakness. She might be tempted to settle for the wrong guy again, like she had with Corbin. Or veer away from God’s plan for her if it turned out that His plan didn’t include a husband or a family. . . . But if His plan didn’t include a husband or a family, then why had He placed this particular desire in her heart in the first place?

  Maybe He hadn’t. Maybe it was her biological mom’s departure from her life that had created this desire.

  Willow took a bite of salad and looked up to see Zander watching Britt and Tristan while listening to something Nora was saying. Horizontal creases marred his forehead.

  Zander had never avoided any of Britt’s boyfriends. If he’d stayed away from Britt during each of her relationships, he hardly ever would’ve seen her. So he’d found a way to coexist with Britt’s boyfriends, which said a lot about Zander. It must have been torturous for him at times to befriend the guys who had caught the interest of the woman he loved. But he’d done it. Over and over.

  Willow had been hoping that Britt might come to her senses about Zander before his departure for London. But with time running out, that possibility looked unlikely.

  The guests finished dinner and reassembled in the great room to either watch, talk over, or ignore the Monday night game, depending on their interest in football.

  When Corbin asked Willow if she’d lend him a hand with dessert, she followed him to the kitchen. He lifted a dish of cut strawberries out of the refrigerator and set it next to a cake frosted with swirls of white frosting.

  “That looks incredible.” She rested a hand on her already-full stomach and mentally tried to gauge how much room she had left for cake. “How are you planning to serve it? Did you want everyone to come in here to fill their pla
tes? Or we can take it into the great room—”

  “I didn’t react well four years ago, when you told me you were afraid you were pregnant.” Corbin faced her, hip against the island, arms crossed.

  Heat rushed to her cheeks. What?

  Silence exploded around them.

  She’d been thinking about cake. . . . But now the words he’d just spoken had snatched the thought away. She fought to keep her balance, because the ground beneath her feet suddenly seemed as unstable as the deck of a ship in a storm. “Was dessert just a ruse to get me in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Corbin,” she chided.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about why we broke up.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  “But I do,” he said.

  Avoid! “You know what? I’ll just take this into the dining room—” She reached for the cake.

  He placed a hand on the cake stand to anchor it in place.

  Uncertainty stilled her. Great Scott, she did not want to talk about the conversation they’d had when she’d been in that hotel room in Germany or any of the rest of it. Should she turn and walk from the room?

  “I get that you hate this subject,” he said, his voice reasonable. “I get that.” Gone was the easygoing irreverence that so often characterized him. He gazed at her with utter seriousness. No smokescreen. No shield. “It’s important to me, though . . . really important to me that we talk about it. Every time I see you, what happened between us is the elephant in the room. I’m sick of it.”

  What was wrong with elephants? She had no problem with their elephant. In fact, she’d prefer to keep it between them as a buffer.

  “I’m asking for five minutes of your time,” he said. “Will you please talk to me about it for five minutes?”

  Her conscience pricked, reminding her of the passage in the Bible that instructed her to leave her gift on the altar if she remembered that another had an issue with her. To reconcile. And then to return and offer the gift. It was easy to agree with that instruction during a Sunday school lesson. Much harder to put it into practice.

  Her throat went tight. “Okay.”

  His big shoulders relaxed slightly. “Thank you.” He pressed his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans. The austerity of his simple charcoal sweater suited the clean angles of his face and the auburn brown of his short hair. “Like I was saying, I didn’t react well when you called to tell me you were afraid you were pregnant.”

  “That, I agree with,” she said stiffly. “You didn’t react well. You kept telling me I wasn’t pregnant.”

  He waited for her to say more.

  “I didn’t confide in you that day because I wanted to argue with you about whether or not I was pregnant,” she said. “I confided in you because I wanted you to comfort me.”

  “I hear you. I think . . .” His exhale held remorse. “I think I was trying to comfort us both the way that made sense to me in that moment, by telling you that you weren’t pregnant.”

  “Were you trying to comfort me when you said you weren’t ready? Because the last thing a woman who might be pregnant wants to hear from her boyfriend is that he’s not ready.”

  “I don’t have an excuse for anything I said during that conversation, Willow. Everything I said was just plain stupid.” His brows formed a straight line. “When you called, I was in the back of a limo on the way to a TV interview.”

  “Yes, but right when you picked up, I told you we could talk another time.”

  “I know. I should have taken you up on it. When you mentioned pregnancy, it came out of left field and it sort of knocked the wind out of me. I wish I’d taken time to think before I responded. I wish I’d asked you how you felt about it.”

  Up until that phone conversation, Willow had believed him to be someone she could trust. Despite his track record with women and the fact that her agent and one of her fellow model friends both had reservations about him, she’d been secure in his affection. His reaction over the phone that night had fractured a relationship that she’d perceived to be a solid rock.

  “I’m guessing the pregnancy scare knocked the wind out of you, too,” he said.

  “You have no idea how much. Before you came along, I was certain that I hadn’t inherited any of my mother’s wildness. I was self-righteous about it, even. Then we started dating, and I realized that I’d been wrong before. I was susceptible to all of her weaknesses. When my period was late, it was like history was repeating itself.”

  He waited.

  “My parents conceived me outside of marriage. And now I, of all people, had made the same mistake even though I’d spent my whole life wishing I wasn’t illegitimate. I couldn’t believe I’d been that foolish.”

  He studied her. “These would have been good things for me to know back then.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “No. And then I gave the interview. Which didn’t help matters.”

  “My memory is fuzzy. Is that when you denied being in a dating relationship?” she asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “And then said you’d consider settling down some day. When the right woman came along?”

  “Your memory doesn’t seem all that fuzzy to me,” he said wryly.

  “No,” she answered, the one word as sharp as an icicle.

  The second blow to their romance, the interview, had aired the day after their doomed phone call. By then, she’d traveled to Frankfurt International Airport and was sitting inside a restaurant within the terminal, awaiting her flight home. When she’d first started streaming the interview on her computer, she’d felt shaky and angry. However, as she’d watched the interview unfold and listened to Corbin’s voice through her earbuds, she’d begun to thaw. He answered the reporter’s questions with intelligence and humor, and he looked fabulous while doing so. The quarterback onscreen was her boyfriend and very likely her future husband, too. She started to tell herself that his bad response over the phone didn’t have to spell disaster.

  Then the interviewer had asked him about her point blank and, in response, he’d discarded their romance unequivocally.

  The difference between her own private hopes for their relationship and his public answers could not have been more pronounced. Sitting in that terminal—struggling to keep her body language neutral so the travelers surrounding her wouldn’t know her world was coming apart—she’d realized just how gullible she’d been.

  A dozen more fractures had run through the rock of their relationship—

  “Willow?”

  She let the memory of the Frankfurt airport and the computer screen and the disillusionment fall. Corbin, four years older now than when she’d loved him but with every bit of his magnetism intact, stood motionless before her. Old hurts and longings simmered between them.

  “In that interview, it appeared that you didn’t care about me at all,” she said.

  “I cared.”

  Over the thrum of her pulse in her ears, she registered the whir of the refrigerator and a cheer from those watching football in the den.

  “I’ve always tried to keep my private life private,” he said. “Especially when I was dating you. Especially with that reporter on that day.”

  She’d known he was private. He almost never said anything to reporters about his dad or his upbringing, for example. But that didn’t mean, when given an opportunity to validate their relationship, that he had the right to throw her under the bus. “The reporter already knew about us. He asked you about me specifically. It wasn’t as if keeping me secret was an option.”

  “I wanted you to be mine, Willow. Just mine.” Intensity rolled from him. “Reporters and cameras watched everything I did on the field, and I was fine with that. But I didn’t want to share you.”

  “That’s how you spun it when we talked after the interview. But I’ve never believed that’s the whole reason behind your interview answers. I think you denied dating me because when I told you I
might be pregnant, your instinctive reaction was to distance yourself from me.”

  He scowled.

  “Be honest,” Willow said. “You don’t have anything to lose or gain by telling me the truth at this point. How much of what you said in the interview was motivated by a desire to distance yourself from me?”

  “A little, maybe. Our phone call sent me reeling.”

  “Why? Why do you think it sent you reeling to the degree that it did?” She found she desperately wanted to know. Suddenly she understood why he’d insisted on dragging their past back out. He’d insisted because now that they were in each other’s lives again, so was all this mess. What had happened between them wasn’t gone. Here it still was—raw and tender and without closure.

  “I guess it sent me reeling because my own parents weren’t exactly . . . equipped to raise me,” he said. “I didn’t want to put a child through that.”

  She bristled. “I have a lot of flaws, but I’m not ill-equipped.”

  “No, you’re not. And neither am I. I would have loved and supported you and the baby.”

  Yes, and the three of them would have lived in a house made out of sugar cubes next to a river of maple syrup. “But what you actually did was get drunk at a nightclub.”

  Two days after the TV interview, Willow had woken in her own bed in LA heartsick and still racked with worry about the possibility of a pregnancy. By then, she’d been one week late, and she’d made up her mind to take a pregnancy test, no matter how much it scared her, and face the answer it gave.

  Since before she’d left Germany, Corbin had been calling and texting her to ask for an update on the possible pregnancy and to apologize and to explain. She’d taken a few of his phone calls and replied to a few of his texts. The rest she’d left unanswered.

  She’d been watching TV in her pajamas when the third blow to their relationship had been dealt. Her publicist had texted her a picture of Corbin exiting a Dallas nightclub.