Charli faced him then, and caught her breath. His teasing grin transformed him completely, making him look as mischievous and carefree as a schoolboy. She had a glimpse of what he must have looked like as a youth.
Had he been mischievous and carefree? Somehow Charli knew the answer to that question, without asking.
Because the questions she had asked had gone unanswered. She'd never known anyone as secretive about his past. Briefly it had occurred to her that her husband might be hiding something really awful, like a criminal record. But if he'd been convicted of a crime, wouldn't he have had trouble becoming a lawyer? Certainly a stuffy firm like Farman, Van Cleave and Holm wouldn't have touched him.
No, it was something else, something so personally devastating that he felt the need to hide it even from his wife.
Not that she thought of herself as a wife. Glorified housekeeper was more like it. As far as Charli was concerned, she'd simply exchanged one caretaking job for another. She was expected to see to her husband's comfort, keep his home the way he liked it, and above all, avoid injecting her own preferences or, God forbid, her sense of style. In a hundred little ways, Grant made it clear that her opinions on matters of taste were not to be trusted. He wasn't mean about it, he always couched it in the most diplomatic of terms, but there was no escaping the message: leave all such decisions to him.
He'd given her an almost limitless housekeeping and personal allowance—all out of his own funds. Charli had assumed they'd pool their paychecks and have joint bank accounts like other couples. He'd quickly squelched that idea, assuring her that his income was more than adequate for all their expenses, and insisting she keep her money separate in her own name, to be spent on little extras for herself, or to simply accumulate. In Grant's eyes, her financial contribution didn't even rise to the level of "second income." It was entirely superfluous.
Charli wasn't accustomed to having her hard-earned paycheck, and by extension her career, trivialized by anyone, much less the one person she was supposed to be closer to than anyone in the world. She'd quickly come to realize that the spouse who wielded the checkbook also wielded the power. Not that Grant was a tyrant, but there was never a question of who was in charge, who made all the important decisions.
Mama and Moira attempted to mop up the frosting Val had smeared on herself and her high chair, but the baby was having none of it. She emitted earsplitting shrieks and arched her back as they struggled to pull her out of her chair.
First Jesse and Colin's squabble at the Kauffmans', and now this. If Grant had been at all inclined to change his mind about having kids, Charli thought, the recent displays he'd witnessed would certainly change it right back.
She berated herself for even entertaining this particular train of thought Grant was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor—in spirit if not in fact—with an entrenched lifestyle and an aversion to emotional entanglements. He'd never change his mind about having children, or about having the kind of relationship with his wife that would even make them possible. To him, marriage was a cold-blooded career move. No, not marriage, she silently corrected herself. It was an arrangement. A partnership. Wasn't that how he always referred to it?
While everyone partook of birthday cake and ice cream, the twins opened their presents—again with a little help from their older cousins. Afterward Charli and Grant migrated to the enclosed sunporch in back of the house, where a handful of her young nieces were playing with their Barbie dolls. Grant chased a pair of calico house cats off the bamboo love seat upholstered in a loud jungle print, and sat with Charli.
"We can leave anytime," she said quietly. "Don't feel like you have to spend all evening here."
"No problem. We'll stay a little longer—don't want to wolf down the cake and run."
Charli had the distinct impression Grant actually enjoyed hanging out with her family, as bizarre as that seemed. Not exactly the behavior of an entrenched bachelor. Perhaps he was pretending, for her sake.
Little Val charged into the room in a kind of toddling run, looking like a mechanical clown doll with her wispy orange hair and vivid color-block coveralls. She stopped short at the sight of Charli and Grant, upsetting her precarious balance and causing her to plop onto her thickly diapered butt.
"Val!" Moira rushed in after her, looking harried and exhausted. Swan snuggled against her mother's hip, sucking her fingers, her eyelids drooping.
Val bellowed angrily and swatted at Moira as she tried to scoop her up with her other arm. "Come on, peanut, it's bedtime." Moira turned her weary gaze on Charli and Grant. "Val started walking at ten and a half months." She sighed. "God help me."
Grant said, "Why don't you leave her with us for a bit?" Leaning over, he lifted the baby and perched her on his knee. "Something tells me this young lady's just hitting her stride."
Moira said, "Are you sure? She can be a handful."
"Oh, I think I can handle one little—" He broke off with a yelp as Val yanked a fistful of chest hair peeking over the open collar of his dove-gray polo shirt. Gently he disentangled her tiny fingers while she cackled like her great-great-grandma Rossi.
"Didn't you hear him?" Charli cast her nephew's wife an amused glance. "He can handle one little baby."
Moira smirked. "All right. Give her to John when you feel like flinging her out the window. I'm going to put Swan in her crib and make myself a drink."
Val didn't seem inclined to relinquish Grant's chest hair, so he buttoned up, thwarting her. "You're just a little devil, aren't you?" he asked the baby, his hazel eyes sparking with humor. "You've got the world all figured out, don't you?"
"Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!" Val crowed, tugging furiously on his shirt buttons.
"Definitely a litigator," he told Charli. "She's got an objection to everything."
Charli tried to absorb the remarkable spectacle of Grant Sterling dandling an infant on his knee, cuddling her, entertaining the little hellion!
Of course, this baby he could simply give back to her parents when she got to be a nuisance, without risk of those dreaded emotional entanglements he so abhorred. Still, Charli wouldn't have thought he had it in him.
"I really do appreciate your making time for this," she said. "Family get-togethers like this … well, it's just something that has to be done."
"I told you, I don't mind." Grant amused the baby with one of the Barbie dolls close at hand, this one wearing only a striped bikini top and a hank of matted platinum hair. Val gave it a good slobbery inspection. "I'll have to stay extra late at the office tomorrow, though, to make up for it."
"Oh. Well, sure." Grant worked late most evenings—at least, that was what he told Charli. She felt like the typical jealous wife, wondering if her husband was indeed working late on a case, or was instead engaging in a little extramarital sport. Of course, she had no right to feel jealous—according to the terms of their arrangement.
She knew that when he did see other women, he'd keep it to himself, not out of shame or secrecy but to avoid those awkward conversations he hated, and also because it was simply none of her business.
Her husband's sexual liaisons were none of her business.
Charli felt that sick twisting of her gut again, just as she did every time she thought about Grant kissing someone else, caressing someone else, making love with someone else.
Last Saturday he'd tossed his golf bag into the trunk of his car and disappeared for the entire day and part of the evening. "I won't be home for dinner," he'd told her, but by then she was already accustomed to dining alone in that big, empty house.
Had he really been playing golf? With whom? What had he done the rest of the day? Where had he eaten dinner?
And again, with whom?
Charli agonized over these questions, a fruitless exercise in self-torture. This was what married life would be for her, and she couldn't even share her misery with anyone. She didn't dare tell Raven or Amanda or Sunny about it—she was too ashamed. Her friends thought she'd found the happiness sh
e'd always craved. She was their second Wedding Ring success story, and they were deliriously happy for her. She just couldn't face them with the humiliating truth. And what good would it do anyway? They'd only tell her what she already knew: married or not, she was bound by the Wedding Ring pact and the three-month rule. She had to stick it out for that long at least.
The fact was, Charli knew she'd stick it out for the duration, till death did them part. Her pride wouldn't allow her to go crawling back to her parents' home and her old life. How could she admit to her family, her friends, the entire world, that plain, unlovable Charli Rossi Sterling couldn't even get her husband to share her bed?
No one watching Grant now, seated next to his wife and engaged in a lively game of peekaboo with her little grandniece, would see anything out of the ordinary.
Charli came to her feet. If she sat there any longer wondering who her husband was planning to "work late" with tomorrow night, she'd break down right here in front of the baby and Grant and her nieces and all those simpering, bosomy Barbies. "I'm going to see if they can use any help cleaning up," she mumbled, and slipped out of the room.
It had to be her imagination, but she thought he looked a little disappointed to see her go.
She passed through the dining room, where the men had congregated to talk baseball—"First place now, but wait till the all-star break!"—into the living room, where the women were vying for most unsavory childbirth story: "Nine pounds ten ounces, my God, that kid tore me from stem to stem!"
Charli doubled back along the stair-side hallway to the kitchen, where she found Grandma Rossi sitting alone at the dinette table, drying flatware.
"Nonni, you don't have to do that. All this'll air-dry in the dish drain."
"Spots." Nonni vigorously wiped a fork with a kitchen towel.
"Let Moira worry about spots."
"Eh, that girl, she gets no rest with those twins. That little redhead— Dio mio! Moira should use paper and plastic. Throw it away. Fffttt! No work."
Charli grabbed another towel and dropped into the chair across from her grandmother. She pulled a pile of wet spoons closer and started to work on them. "We can't stay too much longer. But I'm glad we got a chance to wish the girls a happy birthday."
Nonni gave her a significant look. "You take that man of yours home, Carlotta. That's where you two belong, married not even two weeks."
"Nonni…" Charli rolled her eyes as she dried a spoon. "Not you, too."
"I see the way he looks at you, your Grant—con passione." Her eyes got misty. "It's the same way my Sergio used to look at me."
I sincerely doubt that, Charli thought. She recalled how her grandpa used to look at her grandma, the adoration he never tried to conceal, spiked with just a hint of deviltry, even after six decades of marriage.
"That look, it gives you molto bambini." Grinning wickedly, Nonni waggled a fork at Charli. "I hope you got a lotta bedrooms in that big house of yours."
"You're wrong, Nonni. Not every husband feels that way about his wife. Grant … he doesn't look at me with … passione." After a few moments she dropped her eyes to the spoon in her hand, unable to hold Nonni's insightful gaze.
"You don't see it, the way your man looks at you." Nonni leaned toward Charli, speaking quietly. "Not all the time. Only when he thinks no one sees. That one, he thinks he's clever. Molto intelligente. Luisa Rossi—" she pointed to her own eye "—she sees."
"Oh, Nonni … if Grant is giving me any special looks, it's because he's too polite to tell me he wants to go home. And not so we can—" She broke off with a ragged sigh.
What would Charli's beloved grandmother and lifelong confidante say if she knew that Charli was still a virgin, that she would die a virgin, that there would be no bambini to fill the bedrooms of that big house on the Sound?
Nonni sat back in her chair, nodding sagely. "There are ways."
"Ways? What do you mean?"
"A clever woman, she knows how to bring out the passione in her man."
Unless her man is saving his passione for other women. Charli reached for another spoon. Her chin began to quiver. She didn't dare look into her grandmother's wise brown eyes.
Nonni continued. "You just gotta use your…" She muttered in Italian, searching for the word. "Feminine wiles!" she blurted triumphantly.
Charli gave in to a watery chuckle, treading a fine line now between hilarity and tears. Since when did plain, unlovable Charli Rossi Sterling possess feminine wiles? "Maybe I should just wave my magic wand. That would have a better chance of working."
"There are ways to keep a man's interest," Nonni said, with that astute expression Charli knew so well. "Like the look you give him. Or the look you don't give him. You ignore him. You tease him. It's the way you move, the things you wear, the things you say, the way you say them… Pretty soon you're all he can think about, an ossessione."
An obsession. Charli tried to imagine her husband obsessing about her, desiring her, watching her the way Nonni claimed he did.
It could never happen.
Could it?
Suddenly Charli was angry with herself for even entertaining the possibility, angry at her grandmother for planting the idea in her mind.
Nonni was watching her closely. She raised one iron-gray eyebrow, nodding with authority. "Feminine wiles."
"I don't have any feminine wiles, Nonni."
"Assurdità! You got lots of 'em, they're just a little rusty."
"Use 'em or lose 'em," Charli muttered.
"Sí! That's right! You ask those friends of yours for help. That Amanda. She'll tell you what to do."
"You and Amanda never agree about anything," Charli reminded her.
Nonni waved her hand dismissively. "That one, è con esperienza. She knows men."
"She ought to by now, she's been married and divorced twice."
Nonni muttered her disapproval.
"You ladies aren't gossiping in here, are you?" Grant asked from the doorway. From where Charli sat, he looked big and imposing and heartbreakingly handsome, wearing that tender little smile that always made something deep within her turn to slush.
The smile was nice, and always welcome, but it wasn't the kind of heated look Nonni had been talking about.
Look who I'm going to for advice on my love life, Charli thought. A ninety-three-year-old Italian widow who married the man her parents told her to and never went on a date in her life.
Charli rose. "Ready to go?" She noticed he'd divested himself of the redheaded terror.
"If you are." Grant leaned down and hugged Charli's grandmother. He kissed her lined cheek. "Nonni, we'll come visit you on the weekend. I'll bring you some of that special coffee you like."
There was a shop in Little Italy that sold imported espresso beans that sent the old woman into raptures.
"No, no, that caffè, è troppo costoso," Nonni protested, even as her faded brown eyes lit up at the thought. "Those thieves, the prices they charge—the beans should be made of gold!"
"Okay," Grant said, "I won't get any."
"Buy me five pounds," she said. "It stays good in the freezer."
He laughed. "I'll pick it up at lunchtime tomorrow."
Then it was Charli's turn to bend over and give her grandmother a warm hug. A prickle of awareness skated down her spine. She glanced behind her in time to see Grant's gaze dart away from her bottom. He quickly recovered his stolid expression, but for an instant there'd been something else going on behind those cool hazel eyes. Something that had nothing to do with "arrangements" or "partnerships" or anything platonic.
Yesterday she wouldn't have given a second thought to that kind of casual look. Indeed, yesterday she hadn't given it a second thought. Browsing her memory banks, she realized this wasn't the first time she'd intercepted such a look. She'd known then that it hadn't meant anything. And now…
Now she didn't know what was real and what was wishful thinking.
They said their goodbyes to the others and heade
d home. The nighttime drive from Queens to their exclusive neighborhood on the North Shore of the Island took just under an hour, during which time they listened to music and didn't talk much.
Charli found herself sneaking glances at Grant in the dim interior of the car, thinking about what her grandmother had said, thinking about how some women, like Amanda, seemed to have been born with a fully functional set of feminine wiles. Was Charli missing the requisite gene, or was she simply "rusty," as Nonni had suggested?
"What was that for?" Grant asked.
"What?"
"That sigh. It sounded … weighty." The glance he cast her was part amused, part concerned. "You want to talk about it?"
She shook her head. "It's nothing. I'm just a little tired."
"We'll be home soon."
Grant did care for her, Charli knew, in his way. She didn't doubt that his offer to talk about what was on her mind was sincere—as long as the topic wasn't too weighty. As long as it didn't provoke any of those strong feelings, those destructive passions, he was forever on guard against.
She thought about how she'd always lived her life, as the quiet and dutiful daughter, now the quiet and dutiful wife. She thought about the one recent occasion when she'd actually asserted herself: when she'd gathered her siblings together and forced them to live up to their responsibilities regarding their parents and grandmother.
For once, she'd put her own needs and desires first. And in the process she'd learned something that had eluded her for the first thirty years of her life: Her needs counted. Her desires counted. She deserved happiness.
She thought about the surreptitious look Grant had given in John and Moira's kitchen. And the other looks, the ones she'd dismissed because he couldn't possibly be looking at her that way. Thinking about her that way.
Maybe Nonni had learned a thing or two in her ninety-tree years.
And maybe Charli deserved a husband in her bed.
* * *
Chapter 9
«^»
Grant pulled his gray polo shirt over his head and tossed it onto his bed. They'd returned from the twins' birthday party a couple of hours earlier, and he and Charli had played a little—in his basement game room, as they often did in the evenings. She was surprisingly good at the game—a result of having tagged along as a child when her brothers visited the local pool hall. After she'd said good-night and gone up to bed, he'd continued to knock the balls around the green felt, but without someone else to play against and banter with, his interest had quickly faded.
I DO, BUT HERE'S THE CATCH Page 8
