by Summer Devon
Stop it, she warned herself. Don’t think about it.
Chapter Seventeen
Toph and Janey lay naked on crisp sheets that she suspected had been ironed by a housekeeper and which were now hopelessly rumpled. They agreed their first experimentation with his bed, a king-sized number, had gone very well.
Her finger traced a gorgeous line on him, across the clavicle, down the flat nipple to the belly button. But she wasn’t going to avoid the subject any longer. She lay back on the pillows to watch his face as she asked, “Listen, I want to know. Will you, um, want to play around once we’re married?”
Toph narrowed his eyes. “What?”
She kept her voice almost Toph-calm, hoping she didn’t sound judgmental. “Well, I mean, it’s not a very unusual thing to do. Plenty of people are fine with the idea of whatsit. Polyamory. It’s just that I really don’t want to sleep with a man who goes to bed with other women. It would make me feel…”
Her voice trailed off. Rotten. It made her feel plain lousy. The thought of Toph with another woman grabbed at her guts. But she did not even want to go down that road—the big one that scared her.
She cleared her throat. “On the other hand, it’s not fair because, I mean, you weren’t planning on marrying and you might even be into threesomes, for all I know.” Oh barf, as Rachel would say. “I don’t know you that well. And I did hear that you had an affair…”
He pulled his arm out from under her, sat up and leaned over her for a kiss. She nuzzled his lips and tried not to resent the fact he hadn’t answered.
When he pulled away from their kiss, he opened his mouth and she remembered he tended to let time pass before he spoke. A careful man, that Dunham.
“I believe in marriage.” His voice was light, but she didn’t hear a hint of mockery. “No matter how impulsive I seem, I will not break my marriage vows. And furthermore, Janey Carmody, I would be a fool to think there was anyone out there I wanted more. I find you immeasurably sexy.”
That was almost like a declaration of love. Undying lust, anyway. She felt dizzy and realized she’d held her breath as he answered.
“Thank you,” she said weakly.
He smiled at her. “You’re welcome. I assume you wouldn’t be sleeping with anyone else either?”
“Nope. I don’t have a double standard.”
“Glad to hear it.” Toph lay back down. “So I’m guessing Ellen told you that we were seeing each other at one point. Did she mention that we broke up more than six months ago?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He made a disgusted noise. “Never occurred to me that she’d discuss her love life with a client.” Toph was done with that subject. Unlike Ellen, he wasn’t a sex-and-tell. “Did she find a house you like?”
“Thousands, I think.”
“Any you’d want to buy?”
Janey thought about the parade of houses she’d seen, each one lovelier than the one before. Except maybe the Olde English cottage which Ellen and she agreed was too twee.
Modern, old, well maintained or charmingly ramshackle, the other houses fit her childhood dreams of home.
She found her hair clip and tried to pile her hair on her head. “Ellen is very good at her job,” she remarked.
“That’s why I gave her your number. Is that a no, you didn’t find anything?”
“Yes. It’s a no. Toph.” She gave up on her hair and climbed carefully onto him. And wrapped herself around him. He made a deep crooning sound in his chest that vibrated pleasantly through her.
“Toph, I don’t know what I want. I mean, I know what I’m doing. We’re getting married. I’m getting used to that idea. But every time I think about buying a house with you, I panic.”
He started to answer.
“No. Don’t talk yet.” She found his broad hand, played with his fingers, and was silent herself for a time. “I can’t do it. I can’t live in one of those places. Yet. Too much, too soon. So maybe I was right and we shouldn’t live together.”
He hummed again, a contemplative sound this time. “Okay. How about I move in to your apartment?”
She almost tumbled off his large, solid body. “Hey? What?”
“When Cynthia comes over it would be crowded, but I think we could manage. And I don’t really need a pool. I’ll just join Mayer year round. I already have a winter membership.”
“Toph, stop it.”
“Bill wouldn’t mind if we turned that little room next to yours into a nursery. The girls can share a room when Cynthia’s here. What’s wrong with that?”
She thumped her forehead on his chest. “You’re serious.”
“I’m talking about something more important than a place to live.”
“You’re despicable,” she said at last.
He chuckled. “Maybe. But I’m not joking. I travel light. It would take less than a day to move me in and we’d have a few months to make a space for the baby.”
“It’s not fair to Cynthia. Or Rachel.”
He snorted. “They’ll be fine. Give Cynthia something real to whine about. And Rachel is such a happy person…”
True. He was right that Rachel would quickly get over the disappointment of not getting a new house, God bless her.
Janey wrapped her arms and legs around him, turning herself into a limpet, pushing out all the air between them. He gave an involuntary woof as she squeezed him.
“You know, at first I thought it was your money that made you so powerful,” she said at last. “But I think it’s more you. You and those torpedoes. Fully speeding ahead. You don’t let problems slow you down.”
“Problems? What problems?”
“Me, for instance.”
“Janey, haven’t I made it clear that you’re more like a solution?”
She inched up to his mouth then. And the housing issue was forgotten for the time being.
But Janey knew Toph well enough to know he wasn’t going to let go of the idea that they live together. Fine. He wanted to be part of her life? She’d show him what that meant.
On Wednesday she called him up and invited him for dinner, but when he showed up still dressed in work clothes, she breezily announced she’d changed her mind.
“Forget dinner. Or rather, let’s have dinner later—after dancing. I haven’t been for ages. And we used to go every week.”
“Dancing?” Toph pushed a couple of fingers into his collar to loosen it. “I haven’t gone dancing since college. Since I was very drunk in college,” he added.
She nodded. Somehow she suspected that he was a non-dancer. Way too cool to risk making a fool of himself.
“Rach!” she shouted. “Time to twinkle some toes. It’s boogie night!”
“’Bout time,” Rachel shouted from her room. “Trina said she’d come get me if we didn’t show up at the hall soon.”
“Now?” Toph sounded taken aback. “You want to go dancing on a Wednesday evening?”
“Uh huh,” Rachel answered happily as she slammed out the door of her room. She looked at her Dick Clark watch. “Started ten minutes ago.”
She had wrapped some sort of gauzy shawl thing over her velour top and her way-too-tight blue jeans. Janey bit back the urge to tell her to put on something that covered her stomach. But bared bellies were here to stay. The last time Janey had gone to the middle school to meet Rachel’s advisor, the young woman who rose to her feet to shake Janey’s hand had a strip of skin showing that displayed a navel ring that glinted in the office’s fluorescent light. If the teachers let it all hang out, Janey wasn’t going to push the issue.
Good gosh, she felt old, though. She’d changed into her favorite dancing skirt, flowing and flowery, and a plain black knit top. Not exactly sex kitten, but not bad either.
“Dancing,” Toph said again, as if it were a foreign concept. He undoubtedly felt old too. He held on to the door to the apartment as Janey and Rachel trooped past him.
Janey wiggled her brows at his frowning face as she passed.
“Yup. I’ll drive.”
This was perfect. He’d see what he was getting into with the Carmody girls and back off from this cohabitation thing.
Wednesday Free Dance was held at the practice hall, a place with squeaky wooden floors, windows that never opened wide enough and dreadful acoustics. Janey had discovered it back when she lived in the West End of the city.
One night after work, she’d gone for a walk and had heard music floating through the open windows of a partially rehabbed factory. When curiosity forced her to open the door, she’d found a room of people dancing to a live Irish band. Some performed expert traditional Irish steps a la Riverdance, but most people just moved their bodies, sometimes in beat to the music.
One of the dancers had invited her in. The next week when she wandered by, a Klezmer band played.
Bands had hired the empty hall for practice and people spontaneously showed up to listen and boogie.
Since then, the only times she purposefully missed Dance Wednesday was when the punk band played—just too much noise. She left early for the same reason when the bagpipe choir and The Fifty Saxes group used the space.
“Who’s playing tonight?” she asked Rachel as she pulled into the traffic heading into the city.
“I think it’s the Yassirs to start and then the Hardnosed Bleaters.”
Janey tapped out a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Oh good. The Yassirs are reggae. The Bleaters are fusion jazz. Hard to bop to.”
“Yeah, but the Yassirs drummer had a thing for you.”
“He had a thing for my biscotti.”
Toph, sitting next to her, had been quiet. He shifted and examined her. “Biscotti, huh?” he grunted unpleasantly.
Janey found the fact that he seemed to care…interesting. Not Toph’s breezy style at all. “Yeah. Sometimes I bring snacks.”
Toph’s mouth was a thin line. He folded his arms and looked out the window. “What sort of dancing are we talking about here? Folk dancing? I can’t see doing folk dancing.”
In the backseat, Rachel bobbed and bounced back and forth and snapped her fingers. “Any kind you like.”
“Except slam dancing,” Janey warned.
Rachel hooted. “That went out in the early Eighties, Janey.”
Janey parked at the perpetual construction site down the block from the old factory.
Rachel stopped Toph before he closed the car door. “Uh, you’re going to want to lose the tie and jacket though, Mr. Dunham.”
He frowned. “All right.”
He took off his tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “I’m keeping the jacket because I don’t want to freeze to death,” he grumbled.
An hour and a half later, Rachel was whining and Janey knew they’d had enough.
“That’s it,” Janey announced. “We need dinner.”
By the time Janey and Rachel dragged Toph off the dance floor, his jacket was long gone and his sleeves were rolled up, exposing his muscular forearms.
“God, that was fun,” he said at least five times as they walked to the small Bosnian restaurant near Janey’s old apartment. “I had no idea that would be so much fun. Let’s grab Cynthia next time.”
“Um, Mr. Dunham,” Rachel stopped walking. She twisted her fingers together, her sign of alarm. “I don’t think she’d like it. The Wednesday dance crowd isn’t real, you know, badass.”
Janey hadn’t heard her use that one before.
“Badass? You’re kidding,” said Toph.
“I mean it’s not cool.”
He snorted. “Cool is overrated.” He must have seen her panic at last. “Fine. We’ll come on our own then.”
At the restaurant, Janey watched him dazzle Mirza the waitress as he asked for menu translations. He’d dazzled the dance crowd too.
He’d crackled with lithe energy as he threw his heart into the sheer fun of moving to the music. She’d wanted to grab him, drag him into an abandoned part of the building and have her way with him. And it appeared most of the other female dancers and a couple of the males noticed him too. She’d spent the whole time moving with him or watching him, instead of losing herself in her favorite old-life activity.
Oh well, so much for her brilliant plan to show Toph their lifestyles wouldn’t mesh, thought Janey as she picked at her borek and sour cream. He hadn’t been driven off. Not even close.
She said good bye to him at the door of his car, outside her apartment.
He put his hands on her shoulders. A light touch, but enveloping. And confining. “So we’ll talk about where we’ll live next time, okay?” But it wasn’t a question.
“Toph, listen. We don’t have to hurry. We’ve got months to make these decisions.” She patted her belly. “I mean, we could wait until the girls are out of school, for instance. To think about all of this.” Get to know each other, she wanted to say.
He opened the BMW’s door, tossed his jacket over the passenger seat, turned to face her. As he rolled down his sleeves and expertly shoved the links into the cuffs, he watched her again.
“Hmm,” was all he said, but he wore that smile that spelled trouble.
She was tempted to taunt him, and tell him to bring it on. But then he would be even more out in the open about his pursuit. The man was pushy enough. He couldn’t get any more manipulative.
Chapter Eighteen
The real Victorian, built when the English queen was on the throne, was drafty, rambling, probably had enormous heating bills, had very few closets and no doubt needed a ridiculous amount of work.
Rachel sang as she danced through the rooms. Cynthia cooed over the lovely little “tower room”. Both girls thought they should get first dibs on it. They agreed that a coin flip might be the only way to settle the question.
“Don’t get too excited because we’re not buying it,” Janey called after them for the hundredth time.
“My God,” Ellen said under her breath for the thousandth time. “You should have told me you were marrying him, Janey. I had no idea. I would never in a million years.”
“Really, it’s okay,” Janey said. The poor woman still looked so mortified, Janey blurted out the truth. “It’s because I’m pregnant.”
“Ah. Yes that’s wonderful, hon.” Ellen nodded and grinned cheerfully at last. “You know, I gave some serious thought about doing that, but decided I’m not ready for children. And he was always so careful, if you know what I mean.”
Janey skipped mentioning she hadn’t planned to entrap the poor man, who, in her case, had never showed any sign of being careful.
She smiled at Ellen and wandered over to examine the carved mantelpiece, reflecting that no matter how much she liked Ellen, she would have to give the woman a firm kick in the butt if she kept talking about her former sex life with Toph.
From the kitchen came the faraway chirp of Toph’s cell phone. Only Nina, Bea, Cynthia and now Janey and Rachel had that number. The female members of his cult.
He strode into the front room where Janey and Ellen stood. He tapped his forefinger on his lower lip. Janey already recognized it as one of his characteristic signs. He was thinking of a way to say something bad.
Since he stared at her, her stomach clenched with apprehension. He had something horrible to tell her. Maybe he had just heard from the woman he actually loved and wanted to put off this marriage thing. She held her breath.
He rubbed at the back of his neck. “That was Nina. They think they’ve located Zack Blair,” adding, “Oh hell, are you okay?” as he rushed forward to catch Janey.
“Low blood sugar or something,” she murmured. He helped her down onto the bare parquet floor and gently pressed her head to her knees.
He knelt next to Janey, his warm, strong hand resting on her neck. “We have to go, Ellen. Thanks for showing us around.”
Ellen’s perfume wreathed them as she also knelt on the floor, heedless of her expensive floral dress. “Oh dear. No problem. Let me get some water for you, Janey.”
When she retu
rned with the glass, she delicately coughed. “Y’all, I hate to introduce business at a time like this, but when I checked my messages just now? I learned someone has already put in a bid on this house.”
Toph spoke up almost at once. “We’ll go up a bit on the asking price, but I’ll trust you to stay reasonable on it. Act like a buyer’s agent, okay, Ellen?”
“What do you mean?” Janey croaked. She sat up straight. His hand that had been stroking her back slipped to her waist.
“I like the place, the girls like it. And Janey, I saw your eyes when we toured it. You’ve got very expressive eyes.”
“But that’s ridiculous. What about inspections. And what about—”
“No big deal. This is when we get it inspected, and if it turns out it’s a mistake we’ll get out of the deal. But you look white as a sheet and I want to get some food into you.” He raised his voice, but not very much. “Girls, we’re going.”
They clattered down the stairs almost at once. How did he manage that? Janey wondered crossly. It took her several shouts, and some threats to get the girls to listen to her when they were excited.
He took her arm as they walked down the steps and murmured, “Shall we tell Rachel about Blair?”
“Let’s wait. At least until we have more news.” A reasonable answer, even though she only stalled because she hated bringing up the painful subject with her niece who happily chattered about plans to paint her new room pink and black.
Zack Blair. What would they do with him? All through lunch, Janey picked at her salad and watched her niece. Two parents in jail. Good Lord, what would that do to Rachel?
Did they have an option to let the bastard go?
No, as far as she was concerned, he defined menace to society, if only through sheer idiocy.
“What are you thinking about?” Toph spoke in an undertone.
“Zack.”
“And Rachel?”
“Yes. And Rachel.”
“I imagine Mickey’s firm can’t help him, because there’d be a conflict of interest. But Mickey’ll give us a name.”
