She found him at the bench bent over their portable firefighting pump. The threadbare material of faded jeans strained over his buttocks. An oily rag hanging from the patch pocket draped over the masculine curve. Grease and dirt liberally smeared his skin and clothes and a dark V of sweat stained the tattered singlet where it stretched beneath his armpit. Still unshaven, the stubble on his profile gave him a tough, edgy look. Even dressed as he was, he oozed sex appeal and Liz couldn’t suppress the tide of warmth that raced through her system in response.
He lifted the hem of his top to wipe his forehead. The side view of his long, lean stomach above the low-slung jeans had her greeting stuttering to a halt.
‘Jack.’ The constriction in her throat made her voice sound strangled.
His hands lowered the fabric of the singlet over the disturbing torso as he turned to face her.
‘Liz.’ A slow smile lit his face and her heart lurched. God, she’d forgotten how special he could make her feel with just a look. ‘I didn’t hear you come home.’
She swallowed, tried to gather her thoughts. ‘You weren’t in the house.’
‘The fire pump’s overdue for a service.’ He focussed intently on her face. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Not…really. It’s just hormones.’ The choking lump started to swell again in her throat. ‘I saw the way you’d set the table.’
He tilted his head, eyes twinkling at her. ‘Cutlery wasn’t laid out right, huh?’
She chuckled, relieved to feel the need to cry recede. ‘Ah, should I have checked that?’ Her smile slipped and she looked at him seriously for a moment. ‘The table looks gorgeous…romantic.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Jack…we need to talk.’ She tried hard to make it sound non-threatening, persuasive. But the wary look glazing his eyes told her she hadn’t succeeded. Liz’s spirits plummeted again with the sudden loss of connection between them.
‘About?’ He picked up a ratchet and selected a socket. After studying it briefly, he put it back and chose another.
She suppressed a sigh. ‘Please tell me about your uncles.’
‘Uncle Ron?’ Dark blue eyes glanced her way then away again. ‘Haven’t seen him yet. How is he?’ Tool in hand, he slotted his arms into the machine.
‘He’s doing well. So is Aunty Peg. I saw them last week.’ She stepped closer, noticing the sheen of perspiration on his shoulder. ‘But I don’t mean Uncle Ron, Jack. And you know it.’
There was a short pause before his head swivelled back towards her. ‘So they know you’re pregnant.’
Heat swept up her throat into her cheeks. ‘They’ve only just found out. And I—I asked them not to tell you.’
‘Did you?’ A tinny scrape punctuated the sentence. Despite his flat, uninformative tone, she had the feeling he was upset.
Guilt stabbed at her. ‘I’m sorry, but it seemed like the most sensible thing to do at the time. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with you on the telephone.’ She studied his grim profile. ‘Anyway, stop changing the subject. We were talking about your uncles.’
‘My parents were only children.’ He was being deliberately obtuse.
‘This morning you said you didn’t want your child brought up by a parade of uncles. I wondered what you meant.’
The ratchet’s clackety-clack as he levered the handle energetically backwards and forwards effectively stopped communication. Though maybe it was Jack’s way of saying he wasn’t going to answer.
Liz stood her ground, unable to help herself from watching his perfectly toned biceps muscles flex and release with each pull. She didn’t need to notice things like that about him, damn it. Her teeth ground together as she waited until the noise stopped. ‘Well, Jack?’
‘Well, Liz?’ he mimicked, pulling an odd-shaped nut out of the machine’s innards.
Tension banded around her chest. She was fighting for her marriage and all her husband could do was parody her.
‘What are you afraid of? What’s so terrible about your past and your family that you can’t tell me?’ She kept her voice steady, calm, refusing to give in to her pain. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘That’s a bloody stupid conclusion to come to.’ He glared at her as he yanked the oily rag out of his back pocket. ‘I’d trust you with my life, you know that.’
‘But not with your secrets?’ she pressed.
He turned his attention back to the gadget in his hand and rubbed the cloth briskly across the metal. ‘I just don’t see the point of dredging up the past to try to excuse my behaviour in the present. It’s crap.’
Liz wanted to seize the rag and nut and toss them out the door. To grab Jack by his sexy singlet and shake him until he told her who he was, where he’d come from, what he was hiding. ‘Don’t you think it’s shaped the person you’ve become?’
He jammed the oily rag back into his pocket. ‘Getting all Freudian on me, babe?’
Liz realised he hadn’t called her that since she’d asked him not to. Perhaps he thought he could distract her by using the annoying endearment now.
‘No. Babe.’ She had the satisfaction of seeing him react, the tiniest flinch, quickly suppressed. ‘I’m trying to understand you.’
‘What’s to understand?’ He held the nut up to the light and squinted at it before blowing on it sharply. His face was hard when he looked at her again. ‘What you see is what you get.’
‘But that’s not true, is it? On the surface you seem like a patient, drop-dead gorgeous man with a responsible, demanding job. Someone with integrity, who can be relied on in a tight spot.’ She watched as he bent to place the nut back into the machine and used the ratchet in quick jerky motions. Again, she waited for the noise to cease. ‘Someone who would make a wonderful father. But you’re afraid and I think your past has made you that way. I can’t help you if you won’t tell me. We need to discuss things if we’re going to be parents, Jack.’
He snorted out a breath. ‘It seems to me we’ve had the most important discussion.’ His gaze slid down to her belly then back to fasten on her eyes. ‘You’re pregnant and I’m staying around. Ergo, we’re going to be parents.’ His mouth twisted derisively.
‘Yes, but what sort of parents are we going to be? That’s the point here.’
He swung to face her, hands on his hips. Six feet of irritated male wanting her out of his domain. ‘Look around you, Liz. Now’s not a great time for this discussion.’
‘No time is a good time for you, is it?’ Anger pulsed through tired muscles, giving Liz a much-needed energy boost. ‘And I’m sick of it, Jack. Do you realise that you’ve never really talked to me?’
He thrust his fingers though his hair, leaving spikes standing in their wake. ‘We talk.’
‘Never about the important stuff. Never. All I’ve had from you are edited snippets of your life. Carefully censored titbits so I don’t learn too much. So I can’t get too close to the real Jack Campbell.’
His face twisted as though he was in pain. Liz could feel her features screwing up in sympathy. ‘Not true. Hell, Liz. You are close to me. I love you.’ His voice was heart-breakingly hoarse. ‘You know that.’
She shook her head in sorrow, exhaustion suddenly swamping her. ‘Then that’s sad, Jack. Because you keep me at such a distance, it doesn’t say much for the other relationships in your life.’
He turned aside, braced his hands on the bench. Skin stretched taut and white across his knuckles, contrasting with his tan. She lifted her eyes to his profile. A muscle in his cheek flexed and then stilled.
‘Please talk to me. You said you wanted to save our marriage. Bottom line, Jack. Opening up, and I mean really opening up, is what it’s going to take.’ She could hear the desperation, the begging note in her voice. ‘Please.’
The silence lengthened.
‘Oh, God. You’re not going to, are you?’ Liz swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. Tears were perilously close and her heart splintered with the agony of them. ‘
You can’t do it. Not even with our marriage on the line.’
His face might have been carved from ash-coloured marble, cold and grey and frozen, for all the effect her words were having on him. She’d never felt so lonely, so empty. As though she’d made a desperate gamble and was learning the full calamity of her loss.
‘I’m going inside.’ The words rasped out, past the painful tightness in her throat. He didn’t move.
Her body quivered with spent emotion, but somehow she managed to turn and walk back towards the house. One foot in front of the other, mind carefully blank. She couldn’t break down in front of Jack. Not now.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIZ had gone. Taking her demands with her. Leaving blessed silence in her wake. Jack picked up a screwdriver and waited to feel the relief.
But it didn’t come. Instead, he felt…shame.
He’d hurt Liz. Pain had been raw in her voice. She’d begged. Begged. And, coward that he was, he still hadn’t found the courage to speak.
He threw the tool back on the bench in disgust. Frustration sent him pacing across the concrete towards the house. What the hell was he going to do? He halted, spun around and took the half a dozen steps back to the fire pump. Then stopped again.
He had to find the gumption to talk to Liz. Because of his silence their marriage was combusting, a conflagration that threatened to destroy everything that was good in his life. The only tools he had to save it were words, facts about the past. He took a deep breath.
He had to lay them out for Liz. Ugly as they were. Just give them to her. Trust that she would know what to do with them, with him, after they’d been spoken.
He didn’t know what he’d do if she found him less worthy once she knew the whole sordid story. The other important women in his life, his mother and his fiancée, hadn’t found anything about him worth staying around for.
But he had to take the chance. If he didn’t, he was going to lose her anyway.
Before he could change his mind, he strode out of the garage and crossed to the house. His romantic table setting mocked him as he walked through to the hallway.
The door to the main bedroom was closed. He lifted his hand to knock and saw the smears of grease and dirt on his skin. His fingers curling into his palm, he stepped back and huffed out a breath. Now that he’d made the decision, he was almost impatient to get on with the talking—half-afraid his courage would desert him. Still, he couldn’t go to Liz like this.
A few minutes later he’d stripped and stepped into the shower. The water jet played directly on the tense muscles of his neck, sluicing down over his shoulders to rinse away the suds as he soaped. If only he could wash away the grime in his past as efficiently as he rinsed the dirt off his body.
He’d always thought of himself as a straightforward sort of a person, someone who had put the past behind, moved on, not dwelled on old pain.
But now he had to face the fact that coping with his mother’s vagaries had left its mark, a deeply buried anger about the way she’d treated him and her negligence with her own daughter, his little sister.
Emma.
He squeezed his eyes shut as he remembered the way the two-year old used to toddle towards him, her chubby arms out wide, asking to be picked up. She’d always turned to him rather than Janet if he was around. It hadn’t taken her long to learn he was the one most likely to soothe her hurts, clean her up, feed her. That little life had depended on him and he hadn’t been there when it had really counted.
She’d been sick when he’d gone to school, but Janet had promised to take her to the doctor. She’d promised. By the time he’d got home his little sister had been gravely ill and their mother had been as high as a kite. He’d called an ambulance. The paramedics had given Janet an injection to reverse the effects of the drugs, much to her disgust. Jack had sat in the casualty department of the hospital. Breathing the sickly smell of antiseptic. Listening to his mother’s muttered curses behind the cubicle curtain. He’d prayed that the doctors could help his sister. But nothing had pulled little Emma back from the brink of death.
And then there was Kylie. Another memory he hadn’t dredged up for years. Teenage lover, mother-to-be, fiancée. She’d been right, or rather her mother had. They’d been way too young to marry and start a family.
Kylie’s angry words echoed down the years. She’d thrown her infidelity at him, taunted him with the fact that the baby she’d just miscarried hadn’t been his.
But he’d wanted that baby so much, been utterly stricken by its loss. And then he’d had to struggle with grief that didn’t go away just because he’d found out that his best friend was the father. One minute he’d nearly been a husband and father and the next…nothing.
For the first time he wondered if he’d been so determined to look after his pregnant fiancée as a way of atoning for not saving Emma.
Once Kylie had dumped him, he’d put it out of his mind, determined to move on.
No looking back.
Ever.
But now that was exactly what Liz wanted him to do. What he had to do to save his marriage.
God knew why people thought it helped to talk about the past. He was only contemplating talking to Liz and he felt sick to his stomach. If thinking about it made him feel this bad, how would actually speaking make him feel?
Facing a large going fire with nothing but his bare hands seemed an easier option. He turned off the water and reached for the towel.
Dressed and back at Liz’s door, Jack rapped lightly on the wood.
No answer. He hesitated a moment, then reached for the handle, pushed the door open. She was curled up on the bed, her back to him. The gentle curves of her body’s profile reminded him how he used to love running his hand over her smooth skin, across her ribs, down into the valley at her waist and up onto the bone of her hip.
He walked quietly around the bed, savouring the sight of his sleeping wife for a few precious moments.
The bump of her pregnant belly was only slightly less astounding than it had been that morning. Almost as though she’d been taken over and shaped by something alien. He smiled slightly, thinking that Liz might not appreciate the analogy. In a way, her body had been taken over…by his baby. His baby. He moved his tongue in a suddenly dry mouth.
Maybe if he’d been here from the beginning, it wouldn’t seem so strange. The changes, the growing, would have been gradual. Pregnancy obviously made her more tired. Napping like this, so easily and particularly when she was upset, was completely out of character.
He frowned. Was it just the pregnancy or should she be taking vitamins or something? Had she had all the proper prenatal checks? Did she have backache? Headaches? Swelling feet? Had she suffered with morning sickness? He didn’t like to think of her here alone struggling with the symptoms while he was away.
Not that he’d have been able to do anything useful. Janet had taught him that he wasn’t much good in a sickroom. His mother had turned into a semi-invalid during her pregnancy with Emma and his bumbling efforts to help her hadn’t been appreciated. Though he wasn’t completely useless because he’d often looked after his baby sister. But the toddler had been easy to please, a joy to care for.
His heart squeezed uncomfortably. The urge to cherish Liz, wrap her in cotton wool, protect her, was incredibly strong. But maybe the protection she needed most was from him, from his past and his latent anger about those distant events.
Moving closer, he could see she’d been crying. Lashes clumped in spikes by moisture. A couple of wadded tissues sat on the bedside table.
The coward in him was tempted to tiptoe out, leave her to sleep longer. Quashing the impulse, he crouched beside her, his gaze following the delicate line of her jaw. With the back of his knuckle, he stroked the soft skin of her cheek gently until her eyes opened.
She rolled her head to look at him.
‘Hey.’ His voice was husky.
‘Hey.’ She regarded him solemnly.
‘I’m sorry,
Liz.’ He took her hand, ran his thumb over the back of her long, slender fingers. ‘I don’t mean to hurt you.’
She sighed softly. ‘I know.’
Her uncomplicated acceptance of his apology was a boon. She seemed sad, but she wasn’t judging him. It was more than he deserved and her generosity freed him in an odd way. He traced the gold band of her wedding ring. ‘No one’s ever wanted to know about me, really know about me or my feelings, the way you do.’
‘What about your grandmother?’
‘Yeah, well, she did. In her way.’ He squeezed her hand then released it as he stood up. Preparing to talk like this made him want to move, to pace, but there was nowhere to go. Holding himself still was an effort. He ran his hand around the back of his neck. ‘Nanna was from a different generation. She was in her late seventies by the time I went to live with her permanently. By then I was thirteen with chips on both shoulders.’
‘Thirteen? But…I thought your grandmother brought you up.’ Her eyes were full of questions.
‘I let you.’ He rolled one shoulder, tilted his head, felt the tightness in his muscles. ‘Nanna did her best for me when she could. When Janet and I lived with her on and off.’
‘Janet?’
No wonder she sounded confused. He was making such a hash of this.
‘My mother.’ He turned, took a couple of steps to the window seat, subsided onto the cushion and pressed his fingers into the padded edge as he eyed Liz warily.
‘You called your mother Janet?’
‘She preferred it. I don’t think she thought of herself as a mother.’ He leaned forward, put his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands. ‘Maybe being called by her name made her feel less responsible.’ He clenched his jaw then continued, ‘I went to live with my grandmother after Janet died.’
There was a small silence. ‘And she died when you were thirteen?’
Bride on the Children's Ward / Marriage Reunited: Baby on the Way Page 22
