He’d hurt her. Badly. And he was going to do a little groveling before he parked his car in her garage again.
“Pretty drastic measures to get out of doing laundry,” she replied, making sure her voice didn’t reveal any of the hope that was fluttering in her heart like a moth against glass.
“It’s not that and you—” He broke off when their server appeared.
Terry ordered a coffee and the chicken alfredo special in a fog, not caring in the least what food was going to be set in front of her. What was important was why Evan suddenly wanted back in and whether or not she could risk opening that door. Lord knew she wanted to. But if he changed his mind and she had to stand there while he left her again, she wasn’t sure she could survive it. Being strong for her daughter—putting on a good face for the family—only stretched so far. She could only take so much pain.
They were both silent while the server went and poured their coffees. It wouldn’t take long and Terry doubted Evan would want to be interrupted again. She spent those few minutes steadying her nerves and trying to harden her heart against whatever proclamations and promises her husband was about to throw in her direction. Steph, she thought. She’d focus on just how devastating it would be for her daughter to have parents who separated and reunited, only to separate again. Heading into her teenage years, Stephanie didn’t need the emotional upheaval. She couldn’t take any more pain, either.
“If I hated doing laundry that much, I’d pay the laundry service downstairs,” Evan said when their coffees had been delivered and they were alone again. “You may not believe it, but there’s nothing I’m not capable of either doing for myself or paying somebody to do.”
“Well, gee, when you segue from your laundry woes to wanting to come home, what am I supposed to think?”
“I didn’t mean for it to pop out like that,” he said, and there was a hint of a blush on his cheeks. “I’m not very good at this, I guess. The whole date night thing, I mean.”
Probably because neither of them had dated in almost a decade and a half. That she knew of. “Have you been seeing anybody else?”
“No.” The way he said it, and the look on his face when he did, made her believe he was telling the truth. “I don’t want anybody else.”
But he hadn’t wanted her anymore, either. He’d made that pretty damn clear. “Nothing’s changed, Evan. Everything’s the same, so the stuff that made you unhappy enough to leave will just make you unhappy enough to leave again. I’m not putting myself—or our daughter—through that.”
“Everything has changed. The pretense is over and if we spend the rest of our lives together it’ll be because we both want to, not because neither of us had the guts to walk out the door.”
She ripped open a third packet of sugar and dumped it into her coffee just because she deserved it. “What if we both want to, but we still can’t make it work?”
“Do you love me?” The question came at her so fast, she nodded in reflex before she could think about whether she was ready to give him that much power. “Then we can make it work.”
“I loved you three months ago and it wasn’t enough.” Why couldn’t he understand that wasn’t as simple as deciding he was ready to come home? “And you just think it will magically be enough now?”
“Not magically. But now that we’ve dragged our baggage out from under the bed, we can start dealing with it. It’ll take time, but our marriage is worth it.”
He sounded sincere enough, but he lost her with that last bit. He’d gone straight from A to Z by walking out on her that morning with no warning. Now he wanted to go back and sort through B through Y? They could have tried rummaging through some of the baggage before he packed his.
When she didn’t say anything, Evan drank some of his coffee. Fidgeted with his silverware. Buttered and ate a slice of the bread that had arrived with their coffees. The silence stretched on long enough to grow awkward, but she still couldn’t find the right words to fill it.
“You don’t think so?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know.” She buttered a slice of the homemade bread herself, but then just stared at it. “Why didn’t you tell me you were so miserable you were thinking about leaving?”
“Because you’re a control freak and if you think something’s okay, it must be okay. I had to do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid, or you were going to keep telling yourself it was all in my head.”
She set the buttered bread on her napkin and pressed her fingertips to her eyes, trying to stem the tears. She was tired. She was sad and confused and angry and heartbroken and she didn’t want to be anymore. “I’m scared, Evan. It hurt. It still hurts.”
“I know you don’t believe me, but it hurt me too. It hurts a lot more, though, being without you.”
And that was the bottom line. It hurt so much when he left and the thought of risking that again hurt, too. But the thought of living the rest of her life without this man hurt in a way that tightened her throat and robbed her of rational thought.
“Not tonight,” she whispered. “I’m not ready yet.”
“But you’ll try?”
She nodded and he reached across the table for her hand. She let him hold it. “We need a little more time…to talk. But I want to work toward you coming home, too. See if we can be friends again.”
“I love you, Terry.”
Squeezing his fingers, she smiled at him through the sheen of tears. “I love you, too.”
In the first three days of her unemployed state, Keri let her voicemail collect four job offers. They were flattering, especially the call from Spotlight’s primary rival, but it was the numerous calls from Joe that had her wrist-deep in a bucket of chocolate gelato.
Answering the phone wasn’t an option. She didn’t have it in her to tell him she’d left him and broken both their hearts for a job she walked out on her first day back.But she also couldn’t say, “Hey, since I don’t have a job anymore, maybe I’m willing to give us a shot, even though I let you believe the job was more important.”
She was going to need more gelato.
Lazing around in yoga pants and a flannel shirt, plowing through frozen comfort foods for three days left plenty of time for two things—crying and reflection.
Of course, the common theme of her chocolate-fueled reflections was the shitty state of her life now and how it hadn’t been shitty before she boarded the plane in Boston.
The problem was, how much of the fortnight of non-shittiness was Joe and how much was being on what passed for her first real vacation since she’d started at Spotlight. Instead of wearing heels that made her feet throb and making sure everything, right down to her eyebrows, was impeccably groomed. Smartphone. Laptop. Bluetooth device stuck in her ear.
Even if she removed Joe from the equation, it’s no surprise she was happy in New Hampshire. S’mores. Volleyball. Tandem cannonballs of doom. What wasn’t to love?
But her gut didn’t ache at the thought of never playing volleyball again. Or trying to get melted marshmallow out of her hair. The thought of never seeing Joe again…
Another crying jag that left her emotionally wrung out, hiccupping and trying to lick the last drops of chocolate from the gelato bucket.
She couldn’t keep going on like this. The freezer was almost empty for one thing. And she’d dehydrate if she didn’t stop crying so damn much. It was time to decide where she’d be happy.
And there was only one way she could think of to do that.
Chapter Nineteen
After listening to Keri’s generic voicemail greeting for the umpteenth time of the umpteenth day, Joe dialed a different number and said the magic words.
“This is Joseph Kowalski, calling for Tina Deschanel.”He wasn’t on hold long enough to identify the music.
“Mr. Kowalski, what a pleasant surprise!”
He didn’t even like her voice. “Your reporter’s dodging my calls, Miss Deschanel.”
There was a rather heavy pause. �
�Keri Daniels is no longer with Spotlight Magazine, Mr. Kowalski, but I’ll be happy to take care of your needs personally.”
“Good. The first thing I need to know is why she’s no longer there.”
“I’m not in the habit of discussing—”
“Hey, Bob, you still have the number for that guy from People?” he called to the potted fern on his windowsill.
Joe had never heard anybody grind their teeth over the phone before. It echoed a little. “If you must know, Miss Daniels submitted an interview with you that didn’t contain the sort of in-depth details Spotlight readers have come to expect. When I asked her to rework the piece, she resigned.”
“You asked her to betray my trust and that of my family and she walked instead.”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“When?”
“She came into the office the morning after she flew in and she was gone two hours later.”
Joe sank back in his leather office chair, disbelief robbing him of coherent words. She’d quit the day after she left him but she still wouldn’t return his calls. Did she blame him?
“Mr. Kowalski, if I could just ask you a few follow-up ques—”
He hung up on her. Then he wished he hadn’t. Not only because it was incredibly rude, which he tried not to be as a rule, but because he should have asked her if she knew where Keri had gone.
It had been a week. A whole damn week since she walked out on what she claimed she’d wanted more than anything and he hadn’t even rated a phone call. An email. Hell, even a fax would’ve worked.
That pretty much told him everything he needed to know about where he stood with Keri Daniels.
He picked up a pencil just so he could tap it against the edge of his desk. A couple of phone calls and he could be in California in time for supper. The problem was finding her when he got there.
“Hey.”
Joe almost fell out of his chair, but he recovered well. “Hey, Kevin. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Probably the drum solo. I knocked but you never answer the door when you’re working. Or pretending to be working.”
“Keri quit her job the day after she flew back to California.”
Kevin walked over to the sofa and perched on the arm of it—something he did no matter how often Joe told him not to. “You found this out how?”
“I called the magazine.”
“Dude,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “I know you don’t have as much experience with the ladies as I do, but when a woman won’t return a week’s worth of phone calls, she’s not that into you.”
“She’s into me.” He didn’t know where she was or what she was doing or why she wouldn’t answer her goddamn phone, but he knew she was into him. “Go away. I need to call the airport.”
“You don’t wanna do that.”
“I’m thinking about moving to Los Angeles.” There. He’d said it.
“To be with a woman who doesn’t want to talk to you? Think about it.”
“I’ve done nothing but think about it all week. I’ll rack up some serious frequent flyer miles, so it’s not like you’ll never see me again.”
“The question is if she wants to see you again.” Kevin threw his leg over the arm of the couch and slid his butt down onto the cushion. “Have you told anybody else about this?”
“No. Now I need to call the airlines and pack a bag and figure out how to find her when I get there. So you can go now and tell the family you checked on me and I’m still sober.”
“I’m not here to check on you.”
Joe snorted. They’d been finding less-than-inconspicuous ways to check on him all week. It was like they had a rotation schedule of who was going to stop by or call when and what their excuses for needing to talk to him would be. “Whatever. Hey, do you have any contacts that could run a check on Keri through the system? Maybe get her home address for me?”
Kevin sighed and folded his arms across his chest. “Pop sent me over to tell you he got a call from the campground. She’s there.”
“Who’s there?” Joe started tapping the pencil again, anxious for his brother to leave so he could start making arrangements. He’d fly out and talk to her and, if all went well, he’d fly home to pack some stuff and get his house on the market.
“Keri.”
The pencil froze in mid-tap. “Keri’s where? At the campground?”
“Yeah, she’s been there a few days from what he said. Staying in the cabin.”
He heard the words coming out of Kevin’s mouth, but they didn’t make any sense. Why would Keri be back in New Hampshire? Not only back in the state, but back at the one place he would have thought she’d never want to see again. “Why?”
Kevin shrugged. “Nobody knows. He only called Pop because he said she seemed pretty sad. Thought something might be going on we should know about.”
“Why didn’t she call me?” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but his brother only shrugged, skipping the manly mocking of a less-than-manly question.
“For the last few days, she hasn’t had cell reception,” Kevin pointed out. “Before that…maybe she needed some space to figure out what she’s going to do. Or…”
“Or what?” When Kevin just shrugged and refused to finish the thought, Joe tossed the pencil onto the desk. “You think she blames me for losing her job, don’t you?”
“You said she quit.”
“She quit because Tina was going to fire her if she didn’t spill all our family secrets. So, quit or fired, my refusing to give her decent material to work with killed not only her promotion, but her whole freakin’ job.”
“She had plenty of material to work with,” Kevin said. “All she had to do was use it and then let Tina worry about your lawyer having a fit after the magazine published it.”
He had a point. If she’d had her fun and didn’t have any intention of seeing him or his family again, what did she care if Spotlight Magazine and Kowalski Inc. were embroiled in a legal rumble after the article was published and she had her new office?
“Look,” Kevin said, “there’s nothing you can—”
“I’m going up there.” The only way he was going to find out what was going through Keri’s head was to ask her, and it seemed the only way he was going to get to talk to her was to go up to the campground and find her.
“Let me remind you she’s given no sign she even wants to talk to you.”
“She’ll talk to me. She came back to New Hampshire for a reason, and I intend to find out what it is.”
Terry sucked in a deep breath as Evan walked through their back door and tossed his keys on the phone table as he had every weekday afternoon he lived in the house. The phone table was gone now, however, so the key ring skittered across the tile floor and came to rest in front of the dishwasher. He didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy staring at her.
She knew what he saw—a middle-aged woman with sad eyes, a few unshakeable extra pounds and a hopeful half-smile, perched on one of the most hideous pieces of furniture ever manufactured. The table was a thick slab of maple set on four posts as massive as elephant legs. Covering the surface was a beveled layer of faux-marble tiles. Not surprisingly, the set had been in the clearance barn, deeply discounted. Honestly, the thing was as big, brown and ugly as Joe’s first car.“Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” her prodigal husband said.
That gave some weight to the theory he’d left her because he was freaking crazy. “I don’t know about beautiful, but they said it would support…just about anything. And the top can be bleached. You know, for disinfecting.”
God, she sounded like an idiot. Her plan to be suggestive and sultry and subtle was misfiring badly.
“I meant you.”
Maybe it was the nightgown. She’d gone all the way to the mall for it, paying way too much for an above the knee-length drape of black satin held up by two spaghetti straps that precluded a bra. With her breasts in their natural, gravity-weary state and her
thighs too exposed for comfort, she didn’t feel quite as sexy as she had in the fitting room with the subtle lighting and lack of an audience.
Her audience didn’t seem to mind the bodily wear and tear, though, judging by the look on his face as he walked across the kitchen.
Take off your shoes. She started to open her mouth, then snapped it closed. So he had his shoes on. So what? It wasn’t raining and the path from the driveway to the door was paved, but…
Evan put a hand on each of her knees and pushed them apart so he could stand between her thighs.
He smelled different. It was subtle, but he didn’t smell like her Evan—the Evan who used the laundry detergent and the soap and the shampoo she kept in the house.
After hooking his finger under a spaghetti strap and sliding it over her shoulder, he leaned forward and kissed that spot on her collarbone halfway between her throat and shoulder. It was a spot that never failed to make her shiver.
Then he brushed her hair back so he could nuzzle his lips against her ear and whisper, “It’s killing you I didn’t take off my shoes, isn’t it?”
A burst of laughter surprised her and she couldn’t hold it back. At least he smiled with her.
“I heard your laugh before I ever saw your face,” he told her. “I heard you laugh and thought to myself I’d really love to spend some time with you—make you laugh some more.”
“As if I could ever forget all those godawful jokes you told while we were dating.”
“Most women would have dumped me, but you loved to laugh just as much as I loved hearing it.” He reached up and tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. “We used to laugh all the time, Terry. When did we stop? Why did we stop?”
Would’ve been nice if the sight of his wife in a slinky nightgown had robbed the man of the ability to form a coherent sentence, never mind the desire to stand around between her legs analyzing what went wrong with their marriage. “I laugh.”
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