Exclusively Yours

by Shannon Stacey

  Joe satisfied himself with crouching in front of her, his hands on her knees. “You’re going to have a lot of mixed-up feelings, Steph, and they’re all normal.”

  She shrugged again, but it was as though the weight of the world rested on her shoulders, making the gesture slow motion. “I love them both.”

  “And they both love you. You don’t ever have to choose sides.” He longed for the bygone days when a magic kiss could heal any boo-boo. “No matter how things turn out, it will get better. The emotional upheaval will settle and you’ll find a new normal.”

  When she sighed and managed a small smile, Joe stood again. He was getting too old to crouch down like that for long. “You sure pizza and ice cream won’t make you feel better?”

  “I just wanna hang out and enjoy time alone. Maybe I’ll get to go in the pool without any brats trying to drown me.”

  He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, then gave her hair a tousle. When she squealed and slapped at his hand, Joe laughed and went off in search of the brats.

  Twenty minutes later, he was driving north with four rambunctious boys and Keri.

  Keri, who smelled like soap and shampoo and the tropical flowers of her skin—and mosquito—friendly herbal insect repellent. No doubt she’d go for the DEET-heavy stuff within five minutes of getting back, but for now it was hard not to be distracted by the fresh, feminine scent wafting his way.

  Okay, time to get a grip, Kowalski. On himself, not her.

  She’d broken his heart. She was using him to get ahead at work. She lived as far away as possible without leaving the contiguous states.

  She laughed at something one of the boys said.

  Hot. Alone. Cabin.

  The pizza place wasn’t packed, so they were able to shove two tables together and seat all six. Then the fun began.

  One boy refused to eat pizza without pepperoni, and one refused to eat it. One wanted mushrooms, another gagged. No anchovies, two for sausage, one for hamburger, and a unanimous no to black olives. Joe let them carry on for a few minutes and then ordered a large pepperoni, a large cheese and a large half-mushroom, half-sausage.When Keri put her order in for a salad, five pairs of Kowalski eyes stared at her in disbelief.

  “Salad?” they echoed as one.

  “Vegetables are good for you.”

  Joe just shook his head and turned back to the counter. “We’ll also have a small Hawaiian pizza with half the sauce and twice the pineapple.”

  Keri’s mouth started watering and her tear ducts nearly followed suit. Did the fact a man she hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years knew her better than anyone else speak to her being a social hermit or had he really loved her that much?

  Tilting pinball machines kept the boys’ squabbling to a minimum and Joe went through enough quarters to buy a decent used car before their number was finally called. Between the two of them, they managed to get the boys seated and began dispensing slices.

  “Mine’s supposed to have pepperoni.”

  “Ew, a mushroom touched mine!”

  “You’re supposed to blow on it, not spit.”

  “Danny’s has more cheese than mine.”

  “Look at this.”

  “Oh, dude, that’s so gross!”

  As Keri finally bit into her first slice, she wondered how Lisa managed to get through each day with her sobriety intact. Even having just two of the boys would have driven Keri to drink. A lot. And their Uncle Joe wasn’t helping, with the hyperactivity of either the boys or her hormones.

  The way he kept looking at her, his eyes filled with humor, the occasional apology and a little something else when the boys weren’t looking, warmed her insides in a way the spicy sauce couldn’t touch.

  Is this what it would have been like if she hadn’t left? Joe and their kids sharing really bad knock-knock jokes over pizza, the promise of a private, late-night dessert in his eyes? Love, laughter and five pizza sauce-smeared pairs of jeans in the laundry?

  Or would she have resented every day of mopping up muddy floors and potty-training misfires until she couldn’t stand it—or him—anymore? Would their marriage have survived his name being splashed across bestseller lists while hers graced permission slips and the electric bill?

  “Be right back.” Joe pushed his chair back and stood.

  “What? Where are you going?” And why wasn’t he taking the kids with him?

  He laughed at her. “I’ll be right back. Promise.”

  He’d left her alone with them once and look what had happened—the destruction of a perfectly good book, among other things. She knew nothing about kids. Nobody in her life had children, or if they did, they were tucked away somewhere with high-priced au pairs or illegal nannies.

  “He’s probably going to check his messages or call his agent,” Danny told her.

  “Oh. From a pay phone?”

  “His cell.”

  “He told me there isn’t any reception up here.” Lying rat bastard.

  Brian laughed. “If you go behind the pizza place and stand up on top of the picnic table closest to the Dumpster and face east and the weather’s good, you can get two bars.”

  Which would be helpful if she hadn’t been forced to leave her cell phone at her parents’ house. As much as she wanted to see Joe standing on a picnic table to get reception and then cajole him into letting her climb up and access her voicemail remotely, she couldn’t risk leaving the kids alone. So far they seemed orderly enough, but God only knew what they’d do with no supervision.

  Bobby suddenly leaned forward and pinned her with an intense look. “Who’s better, Wolverine or the Incredible Hulk?”

  The other three boys stilled and Keri got the impression this ranked high on their list of very important questions. “Wonder Woman.”

  It was as if she’d set off a stink bomb in their midst. Eyes rolling. Groaning. Hands covering their faces. Gagging.

  “You should go on a date with Uncle Kevin,” Bobby said.

  It took her a second to realize he’d said Kevin and not Joe. “Why is that?”

  “He knows lots about Wonder Woman,” Joey explained. “He says girls like it when you think Wonder Woman’s cool and they’ll go on dates with you.”

  Keri laughed and it was at that moment Joe slid back into his seat. “What’s so funny?”

  Bobby clapped his hands. “Keri’s going on a date with Uncle Kevin!”

  Joe didn’t laugh.

  Chapter Seven

  Back at the campground, Terry watched with a sinking feeling in her stomach as Mike and Kevin rode out alone.

  Usually when somebody took the boys, the dust hadn’t even settled from their departure before Mike and Lisa snuck off for some alone time. But this time Lisa sat by herself under her awning, staring off into space, as her husband took off with his brother. Not good.Stephanie was floating, happily cousin-free, around the pool under her grandmother’s watchful eye, so Terry grabbed a soda and joined her sister-in-law in the shade. “I wonder if Keri’s developed a nervous tic yet.”

  Lisa laughed. “They’re a handful, that’s for sure. They love hanging with their Uncle Joe, though, so they shouldn’t get too rowdy.”

  “How come you didn’t go out with the guys?”

  “Didn’t feel like it. And Mike needed to blow off some steam, I think.”

  “Rough patch?” As if she didn’t already know.

  Lisa nodded, looking anywhere but at Terry. “Is it so wrong to want another baby?”

  Insane was probably a better word than wrong. The boys were well-behaved when required—at school, in public, etcetera—but all together they really were a handful. They dominated Mike and Lisa’s lives and, as parents, they were just starting to get a little breathing room.

  “What’s really going on with you, hon?” she asked. “A few months ago you were planning to throw a drunken bash the morning Bobby started first grade. Now you’re thinking about another one?”

  “I…I miss having a baby around
.”

  “I love you to death, but you are so lying.”

  Lisa looked for a second like she was going to lose her s’mores, but then she sighed and looked down at her feet. “Mike only married me because I was pregnant with Joey.”

  Terry opened her mouth to deny it, but closed it again. Empty denials of an unfortunate truth weren’t going to help her sister-in-law get through this. “It might have started out that way, but he loves you, Lisa.”

  “He’s never had a choice, has he? You know as well as I do he’d never put a little one through a divorce.”

  “So now that Bobby’s old enough to go to school and have a halfway intelligent conversation with, you think he’s going to leave you? That’s a shitty reason to have a baby.”

  “You have no idea how it feels to wonder every single day if your husband would have married you if you didn’t get pregnant.”

  “No, I don’t, but having another child isn’t the solution. It’s not like you can keep doing it. Eventually you’re going to run out of eggs, you know.”

  As intended, the comment made Lisa smile, but it didn’t last long. “Mike works out of his home office a couple days a week now, and we barely talk.”

  “Hate to state the obvious, but maybe he’s working.”

  “He takes breaks. Sometimes we even go out for breakfast after dropping Bobby at school and it’s hell trying to come up with something to talk about so we don’t look pathetic sitting there, staring over each other’s shoulders.”

  “Every parent goes through that. As their lives stop revolving around you and vice versa, there’s an empty spot. You guys need to find something to do together to fill it up.”

  “Is that what happened with you and Evan?”

  Smacked in the face by the marital advice boomerang. “You’d have to ask him.”

  She wished she knew. That whole sex on the kitchen table thing was just a symptom of a bigger issue, but that issue was almost impossible to wrap her head around.

  Did Evan really believe that, since Steph was old enough to hang at a friend’s house or go to a slumber party, Terry was free of responsibility? Whether Steph was home or not, she still had a job and a house to keep up, and all the things people asked of her because she worked from home and therefore was always available.

  She could do spontaneous if it meant catching a movie on an evening Steph was out. But if his idea of spontaneity was playing Discovery Channel on the same piece of furniture she served food on, he was welcome to not let the door hit him in the ass on his way out.

  Which it hadn’t, of course, because she’d stood there like an idiot, holding it open, while her brain tried to comprehend that, yes, he really was leaving her.

  “Mike hasn’t been happy since I mentioned having another baby,” Lisa said, drawing Terry’s attention back to her sister-in-law’s woes. “If I try to talk to him about it, he walks away.”

  “You can’t make him want another baby. And, let’s be honest, you don’t want another one either.”

  Lisa set her lips in a stubborn line. “No, I think I do. Maybe it’ll be a girl.”

  “You said that the last two times.”

  That was one of the shorter moments of self-awareness Terry had witnessed, except maybe Joe’s when it came to Keri Daniels. Lisa had practically admitted she only wanted another baby to keep Mike from divorcing her, but now she’d returned to making herself really believe her biological clock had a few ticks left in it.

  The irony was that Lisa was going to drive her husband away while trying to keep him. Unlike Terry, who had just driven hers away, period.

  “Let’s play adult Scrabble,” she said, ready for both of them to quit drowning in their sorrows for a few minutes.

  Lisa whooped and went for the board while Terry dragged the big cooler over to serve as a table. The rules were simple—standard Scrabble scoring, along with a bonus double word score for any word they couldn’t say in front of the kids. Any word they couldn’t even bring themselves to say aloud at all earned a bonus triple word score. Generally the less sober they were, the fewer triple word scores they bagged.

  Despite their lack of alcoholic intake, they were giggling like schoolgirls twenty minutes later when a nasty bit of slang cut across a four-letter verb and neither of them could spit out the words.

  It felt good, and Terry let all her worries melt away as she focused on hunting down a D to host the I, C and K in her rack.

  Joe managed to hold it in for the walk down to the ice cream stand. As each boy was handed a cone and sent off to the picnic table, he kept his mouth shut.

  But while they stood waiting for their banana splits, he couldn’t stop it. “A date with Kevin?”She smiled and he kicked himself for letting her know the idea of her and his brother maybe hooking up tied him in knots. “He’s a big Wonder Woman fan.”

  He couldn’t believe that was still working for Kevin, even when delivered by juvenile proxy. “I like Wonder Woman.”

  “Really?” Keri paused to take her sundae as it was passed through the window. “What’s her real name?”

  Joe choked, trying to run every comic book debate the kids had ever had through his mind on fast forward. “Uh…Anna Marie?”

  She laughed. “That’s Rogue, but nice try.”

  Dammit. He might have paid more attention if he’d known he’d have to pass a quiz in order to keep his girl.

  Not that Keri was his girl, but she had been once and that meant Kevin couldn’t have her. Ever. “My brother wouldn’t go on a date with you anyway. There’s a code.”

  She only gave him an enigmatic smile and walked away to join the boys. He wasn’t sure what that look was supposed to mean, but if she thought she was going on a date with any Kowalski but Joe, she had another think coming.

  Once he got his own banana split, he paused at the napkin dispenser for at least a dozen extra napkins, glancing over to the picnic table to estimate the clean-up.

  The older three boys were laughing as Bobby gave Keri a taste of his ice cream, managing to smear chocolate and jimmies on her chin. She laughed, too, and Joe’s heart fisted in his chest.

  They should have had kids.

  Keri was supposed to stay. They were supposed to go to UNH together. They were supposed to get married. Have babies. Their own kids to fight over pizza toppings and comic book heroes.

  Instead she’d transferred to Berkley and dumped him so abruptly he’d just stood there, wondering what the hell had just hit him.

  “Uncle Joe, you’re dripping!”

  He shook off the melancholy and joined the sticky crowd at the picnic table. The boys had left the bench across from Keri open, leaving him no choice but to sit there. Their feet touched. Legs brushed. Her tongue kept flicking out to catch stray whipped cream.

  It was brutal, but he forced himself to join the raging Marvel versus DC debate. “You sure know a lot about superheroes for a girl.”

  His nephews all agreed she did, but Keri shrugged. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Hollywood’s been having a bit of a love affair with comic books lately. There’s a lot of buzz. And…”

  “And?”

  “Superheroes are cool.” She smiled, and then the tip of her tongue dipped into the corner of her mouth after a tiny speck of hot fudge and he forgot what they were talking about. “I wonder how Kevin feels about Supergirl.”

  Oh, that’s right. Superheroes, which somehow equaled Keri going out with Kevin. Not gonna happen.

  Once the boys had all weighed in with their less-than-glowing opinions of Superman’s Kryptonian cousin, Joe sent them into the bathroom to clean up. “Wash your faces and do all the way to your elbows.”

  As they went, moaning and groaning the entire way, Joe mopped up the picnic table the best he could and discarded the mass of sticky napkins.

  All the while trying to ignore Keri sucking the tips of her fingers clean. The faint pops of suction as she pulled each fingertip from her mouth. The hot tingle creeping over h
is skin he wanted to attribute to an ice cream sugar rush.

  Ignoring it all.

  Until she let loose one of those deeply contented sighs that, in his experience, women gave after good chocolate or a better orgasm.

  After shoving the napkins in a trash can, Joe sat on the bench next to Keri, straddling it so he was facing her.

  “Kevin might know Wonder Woman,” he said, resting his hand on the small of her back, “but he doesn’t know you.”

  “Joe, that was just a—”

  “He doesn’t know how you like to be touched.” He trailed his fingers up her spine until he reached the base of her neck. “He doesn’t know to run his tongue over this spot right here and then blow on it.”

  She didn’t say anything, but he could feel the slight trembling in her body. No matter what might come out of her mouth, Joe knew her body remembered what sex had been like between them.

  Intense. Fun. Explosive. Hot. It had been everything he’d ever imagined or wanted.

  And then she’d left.

  He’d damn well better remember she was going to leave again, too. As soon as she’d gotten what she’d come here for.

  Joe almost fell off the bench when Keri put her hand on his leg, her fingers curling toward that sensitive spot at the back of his knee.

  “Don’t forget,” she whispered, “I know all your hot spots, too.”

  The top of his head was going to blow clean off. “I bet you’ve forgotten a few.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything about you.”

  Before he could gather his composure enough to dare her to prove it, his nephews and their impeccable sense of timing exploded out of the bathroom.

  “Uncle Joe,” Bobby yelled. “Brian got ice cream in his hair and then Danny and Joey said they were going to give him a swirly to wash it out and Brian tried to kick Joey in the pee-pee and—”

  Joe held up his hand for silence. His blood hadn’t yet made the return trip to above his waist and he couldn’t focus on sibling hi-jinks. “Did you leave a mess in the bathroom?”