Exclusively Yours

by Shannon Stacey

  “I hid it at Ma’s,” Mike told Lisa, a little winded and sounding nervous as hell. “It’s your birthday present.”

  “My birthday’s not for two months.”

  “I know. But I’m giving it to you early.”

  Bobby dropped his marshmallow into the coals, nearly tumbling in after it in his rush to get to his father. “Can I have mine early, too? Is it a Wii? Can I have it now?”

  “No, not telling, and no. Open it, Lisa.”

  Keri couldn’t help inching closer as Lisa painstakingly untied the pink ribbon. Being a paper tearer by nature, she itched to reach over and yank hard on the wrapping paper. But she didn’t let herself get close enough because it was, after all, a family moment.

  Finally, just about the time Keri was starting to twitch, Lisa sliced through the last piece of tape and ever so carefully folded back the paper and lifted the lid. By standing on her tip-toes and craning her neck, Keri could make out another gaily wrapped and beribboned box, identical to the first, only smaller.

  Three boxes later, Bobby had a fresh marshmallow dangling about three feet too high over the fire, Kevin was nodding off in his chair, and Lisa’s smile wasn’t nearly as bright.

  “This was a lot funnier in my head,” Mike mumbled.

  It only took another two boxes before Lisa started snapping ribbons and shredding paper, much to Keri’s relief. By the time she got down to one the size of a shirt box, Lisa had to stop and have a drink.

  Inside that box was a navy blue folder with gold embossed script on the front. Keri edged forward, trying to make it out in the increasingly dim light.

  “A travel agency?” Lisa opened the folder, then pressed her hand to her mouth.

  “A two week Caribbean cruise,” Mike told everybody who’d managed to hang in there through the unwrapping. Lisa was still speechless, slowly turning the pages. “Our honeymoon. Finally.”

  Lisa stopped about halfway through the packet and pulled out a sheet of creamy beige paper. “What does this mean?”

  “It’s a reservation for a sunset wedding ceremony on the cruise ship. I thought we could get married again, just the two of us. No kids—in utero or otherwise. I’ve been saving money for three years for this and waiting for Bobby to start first grade so taking the kids for two weeks wouldn’t be too much of a burden on Terry and Ma. That’s…that’s why I’ve been so freaked out by you wanting another baby.”

  “Getting married again? But why?”

  “Because I want to. Not because I have to or because it’s expected of me. Just because I want to.”

  Almost totally unsupervised at this point, the kids were making monster s’mores and melted marshmallow was congealing on every surface for twenty feet, but Keri didn’t care. She was too busy looking for a tissue. It seemed Terry and Mary were hoarding them.

  “I wanted to do this a little more privately,” Mike continued, “in case you turned me down, but it seemed like the time had come.”

  Lisa paused in furiously wiping her face to keep her tears from wrecking the papers in her lap. “Turn you down? What are you talking about?”

  “Did you ever stop to think if I wondered if you’d only married me because you had to? Or if the only reason you’ve stayed with me is because it’s easier than being a single mother of four kids?”

  “I…no. I’ve always loved you, and I thought you knew that.”

  “And I thought you knew I’ve always loved you, too.”

  “Oh.” Lisa clutched the folder to her chest and smiled through her tears. “I’ll need a new dress.”

  Mike rolled his eyes as the guys in the crowd laughed. “Like I can afford one now.”

  Lisa launched herself into her husband’s arms and—while one of the boys made gagging sounds—everybody went back to what they were doing before Mike had rolled in.

  Except Keri. With everybody laughing at the melted marshmallow on Kevin’s ass and the smeared chocolate in Bobby’s hair, thankfully nobody noticed her step into the shadows and slip away to the cabin. If Joe wanted to claim she’d forfeited a question by leaving the campfire early, so be it.

  Without turning the lights on, she climbed into the bunk and pulled the covers up over her head.

  The envy was going to eat her alive. How crazy was that? Never for a second had Keri ever thought she’d be envious of a woman who was a bundle of insecurities—whose career consisted of laundry and carpooling, and who had given birth to four walking, talking weapons of mass destruction.

  Hell, right now she was even envious of Terry. Sure, her husband might have walked out on her, but for thirteen years she hadn’t slept alone at night. She hadn’t stood at her kitchen counter—alone—choking down frozen gourmet meals fresh from the microwave.

  Keri could have had all that with Joe. She’d given it all up to make something of herself. To build a career. She was successful, respected, financially comfortable, and this close to achieving her goal.

  It was all Joe’s fault. All that talk about love and children earlier had weakened the tick-dampening wall around her biological clock and now this?

  Closing her eyes in a wasted effort to keep the tears from leaking out, Keri hated questioning the path she’d taken, but she couldn’t help it. Maybe, when she’d been sitting there so confused in her white cap and gown with the tassel tickling her cheek, she’d made the wrong choice.

  Joe turned the dimmer switch down low before turning on the cabin’s overhead light. With the campground wrapped in darkness, his eyes were already adjusted, so he had no trouble picking out the lump of blanket on the bottom bunk.

  When Keri snuck away from the campfire, he’d thought about going after her. He could have teased her about bailing on a family activity, or tried to talk her into a short ride. But there had been something about the set of her shoulders and the way she held her head that told him she needed a little alone time.Not that he blamed her. He knew as well as anybody his family could be exhausting. He’d even gone so far, once or twice, as to manufacture a deadline or agent meeting just to get a couple of days to himself.

  “You awake?” he whispered. No answer, but she was faking. While Chinese water torture probably couldn’t make her admit it, she snored like a chainsaw sucking down its last drop of oil.

  She wasn’t snoring. She was sniffling.

  Shit. He replayed the evening in his mind, but couldn’t come up with a single incident that would cause Keri to cry. Things had actually taken a turn for the better, what with Mike and Lisa’s tension being swept away by an overpriced vacation his brother wouldn’t let him help pay for. Terry had been engrossed in the familial drama and hadn’t even spoken to Keri that he knew of.

  He stripped down to his boxers, then stood in the middle of the room feeling stupid. He couldn’t just crawl into his bed and go to sleep. But he couldn’t crawl in with her, either. Even if she hadn’t been crying, he wasn’t sure the bunk would support them.

  “Do you need to walk to the bathhouse?” he asked, wishing he’d thought to ask before he got undressed.

  “No,” she answered in a squeaky, quiet voice.

  “Okay.” At a loss, he flipped off the light and sat on the edge of his bed. “Hey, things were so hectic this morning, what with breakfast and Brian skinning his knee and everything, you forgot to ask me a question.”

  “So?”

  “We don’t want Tina’s winged monkeys reporting back you’re going soft.”

  She didn’t laugh. “I don’t care.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  Having reached a conversational dead end, Joe punched his pillow into shape and stretched out. To keep from dwelling on the uncommunicative woman lying a few feet from him, Joe turned his thoughts to his manuscript. He’d managed to drop his antagonist into the plot hole from hell, and he had no idea how to get him out. Considering the book was due in less than two months, he needed to start expending some energy in that direction.

  “Damn you!” The bun
k bed covers flew back to reveal a fully-clothed Keri. “I didn’t have to go until you brought it up.”

  Joe managed not to laugh at her, but it wasn’t easy. “Do you want me to walk with you?”

  “Yes, you have to walk with me. I think I saw a raccoon trying to hotwire a four-wheeler the other night.”

  “If I go with you and protect you from the raccoon gang that rules the campground, will you come back to my bed where you belong?”

  She snatched her sweatshirt off the back of the chair so viciously it fell over. “Just because we had a little fun under your covers doesn’t mean I belong there, Kowalski.”

  As he watched her pick up the chair and set it right with a thud, he decided to keep his mouth shut and just walk with her before he dug the hole any deeper.

  It wasn’t easy being a pushing-forty single in a big family group, and he guessed that’s what was eating at her. He knew how it felt. He slept alone and he ate alone. He watched television alone and when he was reading a book and came across an exceptionally good passage, he had nobody to share it with.

  Most of the time it was okay, but being around a family like Mike and Lisa and the kids had a way of driving the loneliness home like a poison-tipped drill bit.

  He waited outside the bathroom for her, noticing when she came out she’d given her face a good scrubbing. It was still obvious she’d shed a few tears, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Can I sleep in the big bed even if we don’t have sex?” she asked when they were almost back to the cabin.

  Maybe she could sleep in the big bed if they didn’t have sex, but he probably wouldn’t sleep all that well. “Sure. We’ll call it a rain check.”

  She didn’t laugh, but she did manage a small smile and a big eye roll. He had to turn his back while she changed into pajamas—the same kind as the ones he’d wrecked, but a different color—and then she climbed into his bed and curled on her side.

  He stripped back down to his boxer briefs and then, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped a pair of sweats over them. Just so she wouldn’t worry he was getting ideas. Not that he wasn’t getting them, but he wasn’t going to act on them.

  Fifteen minutes later, with Keri’s body limp and warm against his as she slept, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head and closed his eyes. Not sleeping alone, with or without the sex, was nice. So nice, in fact, he wondered how, when she went home, he’d ever sleep again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The day before it was time to pack up and leave, the family always took one last long ride to close out the vacation. By getting a later start, they could be out until just after dark. Not too late, but enough to give the kids a bit of night-riding thrill.

  As they cleaned up the remnants of their hibachi-grilled hot dog dinner, the mood among the adults was melancholy, as was the norm. Nobody wanted to go back to real life and ringing telephones and to-do lists.Joe was working his ass off putting on a happy face for the family, but inside he was as melancholy as the rest. Maybe more so. The past few days had been a whirl of laughter and lovemaking and enjoying time with the family, but it was almost at an end. Tomorrow Keri was going home to California.

  He felt a tightening as he watched her walking across the field, the sunset glinting on the pond behind her, and panicked. It wasn’t the same old tightening of the jeans around his crotch he’d come to accept as a constant state of being with Keri around.

  This was a tightening in his chest that made his heart beat faster and his breath catch in his throat. His palms got a little clammy and he turned to his machine so nobody could see his face. He probably had a dumbstruck expression he didn’t want to have to explain.

  He wanted to keep her. It was that simple. He’d stupidly thought he’d drag her up here and spend a couple of weeks together—some of it horizontal—for old time’s sake, then send her on her way with a kiss on the cheek and a slap on the ass.

  Instead he was getting slapped upside the head with the growing certainty he’d been right the night almost twenty years ago when he told his mother she was wrong—he’d never get over Keri Daniels.

  He’d tried to hide his pain when she dumped him and took off for California. With two pain-in-the-ass brothers, he couldn’t afford to be seen crying over a girl. But then Ma had snuck into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d rubbed his back like she had when he was little and he didn’t feel good, and somehow he’d wound up with his head in her lap, sobbing his sorry broken heart out.

  She’d told him he’d get over Keri and someday he’d meet the woman he was meant to spend the rest of his life with. That if he was truly destined to be with Keri forever, she wouldn’t have broken up with him and moved as far away as she could without getting her feet wet.

  So what did it say about destiny that almost twenty years later his work and her work had conspired to bring them back together? Nothing in his life had ever felt more right than sitting in front of the campfire, holding Keri’s hand. Talking to her. Sleeping with her.

  Instead of someday meeting the woman he was meant to spend the rest of his life with, maybe he’d simply met her again.

  “You gonna be okay?” His dad had snuck up behind him and he hadn’t even noticed.

  “Sure, Pop.”

  “You know your mother’s gonna call you every five minutes once we get home, right?”

  Joe sighed and nodded. “I know, and I’ll try not to take her head off after a couple days of it. But I’m not gonna drink, Pop.”

  His father wrapped his arm around Joe’s shoulders, which made him have to hunch down a little because he was taller than his father but he wanted the embrace. “You don’t think you are. But she’s still here, isn’t she? You might feel different when you’re alone in that monster house of yours tomorrow night.”

  It was a good point, and there was no sense in arguing with him. If there was one thing his twenties had taught him, it was that when you hurt your family as badly as he’d hurt his, the fear was always there he’d become that person again. There was a watchfulness when they knew he was stressed. Family members randomly stopping by for trumped up reasons. Constant phone calls asking stupid questions just so they could gauge his sobriety. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drink since the day he’d hit Kevin. They were afraid one beer would be his undoing.

  And while he knew alcohol wasn’t a demon he had to battle constantly, he understood where they were coming from.

  “If I think I want a beer—I won’t, but if I do—I’ll call. I promise.”

  Pop slapped him on the shoulder. “Or you could talk her into staying.”

  If only it was that simple. “She has to go back. She’s got a job and an apartment and a life there.”

  He’d come to terms with that. She was going to leave tomorrow. It was just that he really wanted the trip to California to be for the purpose of packing up and moving back.

  “If she loves you, son, she’ll come back.”

  He shrugged. Maybe that was true. But only if he asked her to stay. He hadn’t last time. Not because he hadn’t wanted her to stay, but because he’d been so stunned he hadn’t said much of anything at all.

  And it had bothered her, too. She’d even scribbled it in her notepad the night Mike stole his truck to save his marriage. Why didn’t you ask me to stay?

  Somehow he was going to have to find the courage to say the words out loud. And time was running out.

  In the fading light, Keri surreptitiously watched Joe through the corner of her eye having what looked like a private moment with his dad. Since she’d finished her assigned task of gathering the condiments and putting them back in the cooler, she’d taken a walk by the pond and now had time to kill waiting for Joe and Leo to rejoin the group.

  Time she didn’t want to spend thinking about going home tomorrow. Going home meant facing Tina with a possibly career-ending pile of not much. She’d asked him about his interaction with fans. No scandal there. She’d asked him about negative revie
ws and bloggers who didn’t think he lived up to the hype. No scandal there. Hell, Wednesday night she’d asked him straight out what the biggest scandal of his career was and…nothing.Beyond the lawsuit she couldn’t talk about and the alcohol, Joe didn’t have any bodies buried in the backyard and Tina only wanted the skeletons. Keri was screwed. But the last thing she wanted to do was ruin her last night with Joe, so she just kept telling herself she’d think about it tomorrow.

  With little else to distract her, she focused on Kevin, who was using bungee cords to strap the small grill back on Leo’s machine. Probably would have been easier if he wasn’t doing it one-handed because he wouldn’t put down his soda, but maybe it was a guy thing.

  He looked so damn well-adjusted for a man who’d lost his marriage and his career in one blow. Literally but for the fact that, knowing the Kowalski temper, there was a lot more than one blow exchanged.

  So he’d bought a sports bar in New Hampshire’s capital city and seemed pretty content. On the surface. There was something about him that made her journalistic senses tingle, even though she knew he was totally off-limits where her article was concerned.

  “He told you, didn’t he?”

  Keri blinked, belatedly realizing she’d been staring at him. “About what?”

  “My divorce.”

  “Oh.” She did her best not to look guilty. And to not answer his question directly. “I was looking at your nose. It’s been broken before, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his finger over the bump on the bridge of his nose. “Joe did that.”

  “Get a little carried away with the roughhousing?”

  “Something like that.” He gave her a grin that was a paler version of Joe’s, then knocked back a slug of soda.

  It was the look in his eyes, also a paler version of Joe’s, that gave him away. “You’re lying.”