He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, his feet bare. “It was my house, too.”
“Was, J.D. Was.”
“But Tommy is still my son, and I ought to have the right to spend time with him alone when I haven’t seen him in months.”
Annie could practically feel steam emanating from her skin. “And whose fault is that?”
He shrugged a J.D.-identifying shrug, a lift of one shoulder, a tilt of his head, and the message was the same as always: not his.
Annie tossed her purse on the couch, folded her arms across her chest. “I’d like for you to leave, J.D.”
“Be reasonable, Annie. It’s the middle of the night. Where would I go this late?”
“You can sleep in your car for all I care! You are not invited to spend the night in this house.”
He smiled. Smiled! As if he found this whole thing greatly amusing. Annie felt close to boiling.
“You look different, babe.”
“I let my hair grow, J.D. Now that we’ve established that change, please leave.”
He crossed the room, not stopping until he stood bare toes to the tips of her shoes. He reached out and wound a strand of her hair around his finger. “I like it. A lot.”
There had been a time when that look on his face, that suggestion in his voice, would have toppled Annie’s anger with him. She waited now, some part of her curious. Would it still be there? Did she still need his approval?
She stepped back.
He followed.
“I’ve missed you, Annie.”
“And what exactly brought that on, J.D.? Looking for a way to make your teenybopper girlfriend go away?”
“You didn’t used to be sarcastic.”
“No, but I used to be a lot of other things. Naive, for one.”
“So I’ve made you jaded. Is that it?”
“That would mean you have power over me, J.D. And you do not. You do not.”
“Really?” He stepped forward again, following her until she reached the wall behind her. His arms made brackets on either side of her. He leaned in until his face was inches from hers. “Like to prove it?”
Annie pulled back, turned her head away. “J.D., stop.”
“Annie, sweet Annie, I’ve missed you. And Tommy.”
“Stop,” she said and pushed him away.
It was not the response he’d been hoping for. His expression said so clearly. This was his hurt-little-boy face, the one he’d always pulled out whenever he thought he had a pretty good chance of changing her mind.
She had news for him: this time it wasn’t going to work.
“Please leave, J.D. You can come back in the morning, and we’ll talk.”
“Okay, I can understand you’re not going to forgive me so easily. I’m willing to work at it.”
“There’s nothing to work at. What do I have to say to make you understand that?”
He dropped into the leather chair by the fireplace. “If that’s how you want it, Annie, then here’s the deal. I want my son back. In my life every day. The choices are pretty clear. Either we get back together, and we both have him, or we don’t, and I’ll find a way to make a court see that he should be with me.”
* * *
ANNIE GAVE IN and let J.D. stay in the guest room. The night was half-over, anyway, and she was too shell-shocked by the ultimatum he’d just given her to put up much of an argument.
After checking on Tommy, she’d gone to her room—locking the door—washed her face and put on pajamas. She climbed into bed and sat with her back to the headboard, her heart throwing itself against the wall of her chest.
J.D. had lost his mind. That had to be it. There was no other explanation for what had just happened.
She waited to feel something, anything, but there was just this awful numbness inside her, leeching outward until even her fingers and toes felt brittle with it. Her thoughts chased one another in circles, leading nowhere.
What would she have said had he come back a year ago, six months ago? Would she have forgiven him? Wanted him back?
Be honest, Annie. Would you?
Probably. There, that was honest.
She couldn’t say for sure what her true motivation would have been—some leftover morsel of love for him, a desire to put their family back together again or maybe pride and simply that, unadmirable though it was.
But now, she felt none of those things. They just weren’t there anymore, like words on a blackboard, erased, gone.
And Jack. There was Jack. Jack, who made her laugh. Who asked her opinion as if the weighing of it were crucial in whatever decision he happened to be making. Who looked at her with eyes that reflected someone she had never imagined herself being to a man like Jack.
She had to believe he had come into her life for a reason. It was her nature to look at life’s plot that way, put logic to what might otherwise be seen as coincidental, circumstantial paths that appeared to veer off into confusing tangles having direction and destination all along. That did not mean she was presumptuous enough, confident enough, to assume there would be anything lasting in their temporary collision, of course.
But from it, she had already had her eyes opened to a few life-altering things. Yes, maybe a year ago she would have weakened to J.D.’s demand that they put their marriage back together. Come to the eventual conclusion that it would be best for Tommy, that maybe J.D. really would have changed this time. But not now. Now she was someone different from the woman he’d married, a young, starstruck, I’ll-make-him-happy wife who’d beaten her head against the wall of a doomed-from-the-start marriage until she’d come to see the resulting bruises as just part of her normal complexion.
A person didn’t have to live that way. Shouldn’t live that way. She hadn’t been a perfect wife. There was no such thing, she was sure, and she certainly would never have nominated herself for the title. But she had tried. Tried a thousand different ways to make J.D. see her as enough. Enough of a wife that maybe respect alone would keep him from straying. But he did. Always. And she knew now, if she had never accepted it before, that he always would.
Something else she knew now, too, though. This wasn’t her fault. She was enough for someone. Not J.D., maybe. But the reason for that she no longer laid at her own doorstep.
So maybe that was the reason Jack had been put in her path. To show her a reflection of herself she had not allowed herself to see before. She liked who she was with him. A woman who laughed and made laughter. A woman who flirted and was flirted with.
So what did all of this mean?
It meant that J.D. no longer had power over her. The only reason he ever had was that she had given it to him. Had allowed him to treat her as someone unworthy of respect and fidelity. The thought was freeing in that it was completely within her control to never allow it to happen again. Why was it that something so seemingly simple had remained elusive to her for the duration of her marriage?
The reason was simple. Because she had not wanted to see it. Had wanted, instead, to believe herself unworthy of those things.
She was a different woman now. Had proved to herself that she did not need J.D. to exist. That she was perfectly capable of making a life for Tommy and her that was full and fulfilling.
This time she would not bend. She was not giving up her son. Would fight J.D. like a tigress whose cub was being threatened. And she was not going to allow him to bully his way back into her life.
He had waged this particular battle with the advantage of surprise. Much as he had the end of their marriage. And while it was tempting to march down the hall, order him out of the house and out of her life, this was not a war she intended to lose, and for that she would need strategy. Strategy did not allow for the luxury of indignation.
The first thing she had to do was set things right with her sister. Now, like so many other times in her life, she was going to need her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JACK COULD N
OT SLEEP. Sleep had never been a problem for him. He could close his eyes in any airport, on any train, and be out in two minutes.
But not tonight.
Tonight, he couldn’t get his mind off Annie.
Restlessness paced through him, its footsteps too loud to ignore. So he got up and tried outpacing it, roaming room to room in the big old house. But it followed, and he finally ended up in his father’s study, with its now subtle clues of Joshua Corbin’s once-daily presence: the pipe he’d smoked in the evenings with its cherry-flavored tobacco, the shelves of books on one wall, the spines still bookstore-new, but the pages within dog-eared and well-read.
Jack reached up, pulled a book from the shelf, glanced at the title on the cover. It wasn’t something he’d ever heard of, but his father’s taste in books had run toward the adventuresome, tales of pioneer treks across unforgiving mountain ranges and the hurdles to be cleared before making a home on the other side.
He sat down in the leather chair by the window, flicked on the floor lamp beside it. He opened the book, met in the first paragraph the story’s young heroine, but his thoughts strayed, unfaithful, to another woman.
Annie.
He let the book drop forward and find a resting spot against his chest. He closed his eyes and replayed the night. Saw the two of them traipsing through the woods, Annie on his back, legs and arms wrapped around him as if he were the last safe haven in the path of a killer storm.
Annie struck chords never before played inside him. Made him feel things he’d never felt before.
Sitting there in his father’s study, Jack knew he had found the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life. Knew it in the farthest reaches of heart and soul, in that place where the deepest truths made themselves known.
Annie was the woman he’d never imagined meeting. Never imagined wanting in a way that told him his life was never going to be the same without her in it.
He could list a dozen reasons why it would never work. They didn’t live in the same place...he was supposed to start a new project in London as soon as he tied things up here...she’d been hurt by a man who had not appreciated her for the woman she was...
But Jack closed his mind to them all. Somehow, he knew there was no roadblock he couldn’t figure out how to get them around. He’d just take them on one by one and see where they led.
* * *
CLARICE CRACKED AN EYE at her alarm clock. Nearly nine. She’d overslept. No wonder, though, since it had been nearly four before she’d managed to fall asleep. She got up, flopped downstairs to make coffee in a posture her mother would have once called sulky. Clarice considered herself a big enough woman to admit her mother would have been right. For two days now, that was exactly what she’d been doing: sulking.
She scooped some beans out of the container in the freezer, put them in the coffee grinder. She’d spent all of last night simmering in front of the TV. Stoking her indignation like a campfire she refused to let go out, using, as kindling, her own well-justified arguments as to having voiced right up front her intentions where Jack Corbin was concerned.
The downside about being mad at her sister was that she was the one person Clarice would have liked to call up and complain to about it.
The doorbell rang. She swung back through the kitchen to answer it, not caring that she hadn’t yet brushed her hair or removed the mascara from beneath her eyes. On the front porch stood Annie, arms folded across her chest in a stance that said, Okay, let’s have it out.
“Annie,” Clarice said, eyes widening.
“Okay, let’s have it out,” Annie said and marched past her into the kitchen.
Whoa. Clarice trailed after her.
Annie went straight to the coffeepot, poured herself a cup and sipped at it, her eyes lasering in on Clarice over the rim. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. “Not taking my calls. Don’t you think it’s time we dealt with this?”
Clarice’s jaw went slack. Annie had never spoken to her this way. She was the one who ought to be in the driver’s seat. She was the one whose pride had been injured. With an indifference she didn’t quite feel at the moment, Clarice eased across the kitchen floor and poured herself a cup of coffee. “I never imagined you as capable of being underhanded.”
“Underhanded?”
“I think leading me to believe you weren’t interested in Jack when you really were seems a little underhanded.”
“Clarice, I wasn’t.”
“Aren’t?”
Annie looked down. “I didn’t mean to be.”
Clarice’s heart did a little dip. “So why couldn’t you just admit you wanted him?”
“Clarice.” Annie deflated, as if someone had stuck a pin in the dukes-in-the-air determination she’d sailed in on. The look on her face told Clarice everything she needed to know. No matter what Annie said from this point forward, Clarice knew her sister. She was in love with Jack. No question about it.
“So this is my payback for Craig Overby, huh?”
Annie glanced up, visibly surprised by the name. “You’ve never mentioned him once in all these years.”
“Maybe I was too ashamed. I was a bad sister. You had already staked that claim.”
“And you think I’ve been a bad sister now?”
Clearly, there were two roads Clarice could take from here. High or low. There were times when she had taken advantage of her sister’s dislike of conflict between them. Used it to come out the winner of whatever it was they were at odds over. She could have done it this time, as well. Annie was that loyal. Selfishness died an unwilling death inside her, sending out a last flare of reason: You wanted him, though!
True, she had.
But the truth had not changed. He wasn’t interested in her. He was interested in Annie. Painful as it was to admit. She sighed and said, “Oh, Annie, I’ve been horrible.”
Relief danced across Annie’s face like sunshine. “Well, maybe not quite that bad.”
“Close enough for comparison. So this makes us even on the whole Craig thing, right?”
Now Annie laughed. She crossed the kitchen floor, put her arms around Clarice and hugged her. “You know I think you walk on water.”
The words filled Clarice with warmth and gratitude. She was lucky to have a baby sister who simply loved her for who she was. She’d been foolish to take it for granted. “I’m sorry, Annie.”
“I’m sorry, Clar.”
They hugged each other for a long, grateful moment, and when they pulled back, Clarice swiped at a tear on her cheek. “I guess I’ve just started to feel a little desperate. Like I’m never going to meet anyone I could spend the rest of my life with. Have children with.”
“You will,” Annie said softly. “Don’t ask me how, but I just know it.”
And hearing her little sister say the words with such absolute conviction, Clarice believed them herself.
* * *
CLARICE WENT UPSTAIRS to get dressed. Annie put away the last of the dishes in her sister’s sink, grateful that the two of them had straightened things out. Clarice was such an important part of her life. Without her, everything felt out of balance, off center. Annie still felt the fissure that separated what had once been solid ground between them, but she was hopeful that if they both followed the edges of it, somewhere ahead it would merge back into one path again. Regardless of what happened between Jack and her.
Clarice reappeared in the kitchen doorway, now dressed in jeans and a light green blouse. “So are you going to tell me what else is bothering you?”
“J.D. wants Tommy,” Annie said.
Clarice blinked, her lips making an O of surprise. “He’s worse than San Francisco fault lines. Always trying to shake things up.”
“He’s serious this time, Clar. He was at my house last night when I got home. With an ultimatum. Either we get back together, or he’ll find a way to get sole custody of Tommy.”
Clarice looked as shocked as Annie had felt last night. “What happened to L.
A. and Cassie?”
Annie shrugged. “You know J.D. He has the attention span of a gnat.”
“So what’s behind all this?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said, her voice failing to hide the distress her heart felt. “He says he misses Tommy. And me.”
“I don’t doubt that for a minute, but with J.D., isn’t there always an agenda other than the immediately obvious?”
“He thinks he’s had some sort of epiphany. Realized what he’s thrown away. He wants another chance at being a good father, a good husband. Thinks he never really gave either his best effort because he was distracted with his career and then with his injury. He says he’s ready now to be a pro at both.”
Clarice chewed her bottom lip; her eyes widened with what looked like a moment of inspiration. “So then let him.”
Annie frowned; it was not the response she had expected from the sister who had practically stood at the county line waving good riddance to J.D. when he’d left Macon’s Point. “Clarice, there is no way I’m letting him back into my life.”
“Not permanently. Just temporarily. Just long enough to drown him in domesticity and all the things he’s convinced himself he now wants. To let him hang himself, as they say. He claims to want all of those things, so let him prove it.”
Annie pondered the suggestion, struck with the inspiration of it. J.D. was one of those people for whom revelations had to come from within. Unless it was his idea, his emotion, he didn’t trust it. “What if it doesn’t work, though?”
“Then you’ll have to fight it out in court. Which is where you’re headed right now, anyway.”
The thought of that made Annie’s stomach turn. She’d gotten a very large dose of just how ruthless that process could be during their divorce. She did not want to test the waters of the legal maneuverings involved in a custody battle. Dragging Tommy through that would be her worst nightmare.
So what did she have to lose in trying this route first?
* * *
JACK DROVE THROUGH town that morning with his thoughts all tied up in the meeting ahead. A couple of discreet phone calls had revealed that today was Early Gunter’s day off. Which made sense considering the late hour he’d undoubtedly arrived home last night.
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