And it was time he did it.
Before he could curb the impulse, he dialed his office number. It was late on Sunday so he left a message that Erica would get in the morning.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I owe you.” He paused. “I owe you so much, Erica.” He did some quick math, figured out how many days work he had left.
“I’ll be back next Monday,” he said. “I promise. I know that might not mean much right now, and if you want to leave I don’t blame you, but I will be back in town in a week to clear things up.”
He shut his phone, wondering if he’d done the right thing. Stepping back into the land of the living was not something he could undo.
Giving himself a deadline to leave the Manor and Savannah was something he could not undo. He’d have to leave on Sunday to be in St. Louis on Monday.
Which gave him seven days.
Carter’s car started and drove away, spitting gravel as it went. Matt turned and there was Savannah, Katie scowling at her side.
Savannah’s eyes searched his face, just as he searched hers, trying to read her emotions on her skin.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You?”
She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes, and he wished there was something he could do. Something that would help.
Then she stepped up against him, her body flush to his and her arms slid around his back, her fingers lighting fires through his shirt, holding him close. Tight.
Breath left his body in a gust and his hands trailed up her back, to her shoulders, feeling the skin and muscle of her arms and neck. So strong, this woman.
He pressed his cheek to the top of her head, getting drunk on the smell of flowers and dried sweat in her hair.
Electricity fired through his body but he ignored it.
Ignored the snarling desire for more of her.
It was only a hug. Comfort.
Where he least expected it and wanted it most.
Seven days, he thought. And swore.
MONDAY MORNING, Savannah climbed the stone steps to the Bonne Terre Library and unlocked its heavy wooden doors. Inside, the cool, still air smelled like books, wood cleaner and damp from the basement that had never dried out from Hurricane Katrina.
“Lucy!” she said with her best Desi impression, “I’m home.”
She got to work, occupying herself with the piles of tasks that had accumulated in her absence. She was grateful for the distraction, but even with the work, Matt was there. Lingering in the corners of her mind, he was never far from any thought she had.
He was different. Changed. He might not be able to see it, but she could. She felt it in that hug last night—the way he’d let himself be touched.
She wished, stupidly, that his letting go of his grief and guilt might mean something for her.
Like he’d stick around.
But he wouldn’t. No one ever did.
By noon, the air conditioner was battling the humidity that pressed down from outside and the summer school kids were at the computers.
Including Garrett and Owen.
Looking at them, her blood literally boiled. Two weeks since the first break-in and there they were, as if nothing had ever happened. She had to drink a big glass of cold water to stop herself from incinerating.
She reconsidered her thoughts of revenge—maybe that letter to their parents? But it didn’t seem like enough. Nothing seemed like enough.
“Hot one today, huh?” Janice, her assistant, asked. They stood at the sink, Janice filling up the WeightWatchers water bottle she kept at her desk—along with the Fannie May sampler box she didn’t think anyone knew about.
“Hey,” Savannah said, turning sideways and resting her hip against the counter. “So what’s happening with the love triangle out there?”
“Well.” Janice nearly shook with sudden excitement and the cats on her pink T-shirt struggled to stay on her mountainous breasts. “I caught Garrett and The Cheerleader kissing down by the drinking fountains.”
“Does Owen know?”
“Not at all.” Janice shook her head, her eyes twinkling.
Savannah, as she had since the moment she’d hired Janice, felt like hugging the woman.
“Why?” Janice asked. “You suddenly interested in the love lives of summer school students?”
Savannah shrugged, heading to the front desk and the stacks of mail she needed to go through. “No reason.”
But Matt’s words hummed through her bloodstream.
Guilt deserves to be punished.
While she was convinced the adage no longer applied to Matt, it sure as hell applied to the two kids smirking at her over their computer screens.
She shrugged off the chains she kept around those O’Neill impulses and when she finally saw Owen’s girlfriend head for the bathroom, Garrett not far behind her, she strolled up to Owen.
“I need to do some maintenance on that computer,” she said. “Why don’t you take a bathroom break?”
“Whatever,” he said and took off for the stairs. And, Savannah could only hope, a very ugly surprise.
Savannah smirked.
“Savannah?” Janice said from the front desk, holding the phone. “It’s a man named Matt for you. He says he can’t find Katie.”
“DID YOU CHECK in the tree?” Savannah demanded as she came charging through the door. He’d expected her to come running, but the anger was a surprise.
“Of course,” he said. “When the water balloons didn’t come at noon that was the first place I checked.”
“Where’s Margot?” she snapped and threw her purse down on the kitchen counter. She was back in her prison warden outfit, all straight lines and buttons, but her hair was loose, pulled away from her face with a headband. A variation on her theme.
Her beauty and all those buttons totally wrecked him.
He coughed and stepped behind the counter so she wouldn’t notice his totally inappropriate erection.
“Right here,” Margot said, stepping into the kitchen wearing her robe.
“Good lord, Margot,” Savannah said. “It’s past noon and you’re just getting up?”
“So it would seem.” Margot’s eyes twinkled as she crossed to the coffeepot.
“Where have you been?”
“Anthony took me to New Orleans for the weekend. I got home late last night.” She filled a china teacup with coffee and sipped it black. “What’s got you in an uproar this morning?”
“Katie’s gone,” Matt said.
Margot blinked and turned to Savannah. “Gone?”
“No one’s seen her today. God, I hope she’s just hiding,” Savannah said. “This is what she usually does.” Turning back to Margot, she said, “I heard you come in last night, and I figured you’d keep an eye on her.”
“I’m sorry,” Margot said. “I forgot you went to work today. She just got—”
“Lost in the shuffle.” Savannah’s anger vanished and she looked so guilt-stricken it made Matt’s stomach do a flip. “She’s so mad at me right now. Did you check the rosebush or the kud—” She stopped and swore. “They’re all gone. All her hiding spots.”
She bent her head back so she could stare up at the ceiling and feel terrible about herself.
He wanted to hug her, ease that stress the way she’d eased his last night. The way she hugged him as if she cared, as if she saw right through to the bone and heart and blood that he was made up of, to the hard kernel that remained from the accident, like scar tissue.
“I’ll look upstairs,” Margot said, putting down her cup.
“I’ll check my office.”
The women were gone, leaving behind their individual scents, lemon and roses and the slightly acrid tang of regret and worry.
Matt didn’t know how he could help, or if his help would be accepted, but he wanted to do something. Wished he could do something. Anything. For her.
Savannah came barreling into the kitchen.
“No sign of her?” he asked.
“She’s not in the office,” Savannah said, grim and stony-faced. “Did you check the sleeping porch?”
“No,” he said. “Why do you think she’d go there?”
“She’s eight and she’s mad, Matt. Who knows why she’s doing anything?”
It was a good point and Matt stepped into her wake, following her to his room.
SAVANNAH OPENED the big wood-and-glass doors to the sleeping porch and listened for any signs of her runaway daughter.
“I know you’re in here,” she said, opening a closet in the corner. Nothing but a long forgotten winter coat and a dusty Christmas wreath.
Guilt was a stitch in her side as she scanned the nearly empty room. Only Matt’s neatly made bed and duffel bag. The terra cotta flowerpots, cracked and covered in dust, sat in the corner.
The smell of him—sunshine and hard work and something clean, something totally Matt—was everywhere.
She’d forgotten her daughter today. Forgotten her. And she wasn’t stupid. She knew, in part, it was because of Matt, because of this growing obsession she had with not only the Elements Building tragedy.
But with him.
Did good mothers forsake their attraction to men for their kids? Was that what was required of her right now?
Because she didn’t want to let go of it. Even though she knew Matt was leaving, she wanted something of the time he was here.
A taste of him.
Clearly, she was the worst mother in the world. But she wasn’t going to apologize. A few months ago, she would have, she would have turned her back on what she wanted, but she was different now.
Matt Woods stepping into her life had changed her.
“I know you’re mad,” she said to her daughter as if she could see her. She got down on her knees and looked under the bed. At first, nothing but dust bunnies the size of her head then, at the foot, her daughter’s defiant blue eyes.
“Katie.” She sighed, holding out her hands, reaching for her daughter’s outstretched palm.
“I’ve been here for like, three hours!” Katie yelled. “I’m stuck.”
Savannah smiled, though she felt like crying, and pulled Katie from where she was wedged on her side under the bed, her legs curled up to her pointy little chin.
“My legs don’t work right,” Katie muttered, sticking her face into Savannah’s neck. Savannah fell back on her butt and cradled her daughter close.
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Give them a few minutes.” She pulled dust bunnies and cobwebs from Katie’s hair and brushed the worst of the mess off the second set of Asian pajamas from Margot’s cruise. Ruined, of course.
“I’m really sorry about today,” she murmured into the pink shell of Katie’s ear.
Katie pulled back, her eyes accusing her of everything short of a third world war. “You just left.”
“I thought Margot was watching you.”
“You left me here with—” Katie’s eyes flickered over Savannah’s shoulder and went cold and hard “—that guy.”
Savannah felt Matt over her shoulder, a warm solid weight like a hand against her skin. She wanted to laugh at the thought of Matt as just that guy. Somehow, someway, in the past few weeks, he’d become far more than that.
What he was, however, she couldn’t be sure.
“Matt is not that guy,” Savannah said, trying to be patient.
“Then who is he?” Katie asked. She shook, her eyes direct, her hands in fists, and Savannah wondered if this was more than jealousy over the amount of time and attention she’d been giving to Matt.
Savannah darted a quick glance at Matt, who was as baffled as she was and as conflicted about her as she was about him. It was right there, easy to read in the set of his shoulders, the lines in the corner of his mouth. “He’s a friend,” she said, perhaps more to him than Katie.
“Is he my dad?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SAVANNAH STARED BLANKLY at Katie, her head trying to catch up with what just happened.
“Your dad?” she asked. “Why in the world would you think that?”
Katie’s little chin came up. “That day outside the library you and Margot were talking about my dad and then Matt said you guys were talking about him. And then he made you cry and you wouldn’t answer me when I asked if you had sex with him.”
All of that was true, Savannah thought, but it was like adding apples and oranges and getting elephants.
“Honey,” she breathed. “I had no idea you were thinking this.”
“You never tell me anything,” Katie said.
“I thought I was protecting you,” she said. The same way Carter always tried to protect her from the uglier aspects of Tyler or their mother.
She felt awful that she’d never seen the pain not talking about Eric was causing Katie. Other single mothers probably didn’t have this problem. They probably told their kids the truth from the beginning and—rubbing salt in her guilt—she imagined they were able to do it without calling the absent father a bastard.
“Marybeth, at school,” Katie said, “she doesn’t have a dad but her mom told her he lives in New Orleans with a hooker.”
Savannah swallowed her laughter—clearly there was a spectrum of bad single parenting.
“But she gets to go visit him,” Katie continued, getting worked up. “They eat beignets for dinner and I don’t even know where my dad is. And then when you came—” she looked at Matt then shrugged “—everybody got so weird.”
Matt stepped past Savannah and collapsed on the bed as though his knees had just been broken. “I’m not your father, Katie,” he whispered, his green eyes sincere and earnest in a million different ways.
“You’re not?” she asked, and he shook his head. “You’re sure?”
“Very sure. If I was your father, I would have been here your whole life,” he said. Katie’s chin dropped a notch, and Savannah’s whole body started to shake. “I never would have left you.”
Savannah could not look Matt in the eyes. Actually, she really could barely stand to be in the same room as him, the embodiment of everything she refused to want but wanted anyway.
Katie’s blue eyes pierced her, lanced her right through the throat, and every decision she’d made over the years to run from this conversation came home to roost.
Savannah took a deep breath and stepped right over the dark, bottomless, treacherous cavern that was the who is your father conversation. The conversation that she’d feared and dreaded and run away from. The conversation that she’d put off time and time again, thinking she’d get to it when Katie was older or when she asked.
That time was now. Actually the time was probably years ago.
“I’m going to let you guys talk,” Matt said. His gaze brushed Savannah’s then clung as time froze to a halt.
Funny how she’d thought she could fall in love with Matt Howe, but it was nothing compared to what she was capable of feeling for Matt Woods.
Matt cleared his throat and broke eye contact, crouching in front of Katie, his gaze serious. “Wherever your dad is,” he said, “he’s missing out on a great girl.”
He stood, his fingers brushing Savannah’s shoulder, sending flashes of heat and pulses of light through her entire body, as he left.
Savannah took a second to pull in all the ragged edges and loose ends and compose herself.
Here we go.
“Your father,” Savannah finally said, hugging her daughter close, “is a man named Eric Carlyse.”
THE TREES WERE PLANTED, the saplings’ tender branches and bright new green leaves swayed in the late afternoon breeze. Without much growth the pattern of the maze was pretty clear, but in a few years when the trees were mature…Matt smiled. Well, then it would perfect. Nooks and crannies. Dead ends. Hidey-holes. The maze, though small, had it all.
Matt couldn’t even begin to imagine all the trouble a girl like Katie could get into with this in her backyard.
&
nbsp; It would be something to see. Something he’d like to see.
Lifting his arm, he scratched at the worst of the grit and dirt that clung to his neck and face. He needed a shower and a change of clothes, but as far as he knew, Katie and Savannah were still planted in his room.
Man, what a weird day. He didn’t like seeing those girls so hurt, wished he knew a better way to help than to step aside and build a maze.
Katie needed a father. In fact, thinking about the falling apart O’Neill house of estrogen, and that hot and hungry look Savannah had in her eyes when she watched him working—to be totally caveman about it—a man was needed by all of them.
The door opened and shut and he turned to find Katie standing in the sparkly bright light that signaled the end of the day. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks flushed, but she wasn’t bristling with anger.
“Hi,” he said, cautiously.
“Hi.” She scratched at her knee, then her elbow. “I’m supposed to apologize for being mean to you.” Ah.
“Understandable,” he said, “considering who you thought I was.”
“I’m sorry about the water balloons.”
“Forgiven,” he said with a quick nod. “You okay?”
Katie pursed her lips as if she were weighing her answer. “Sure.” But she sighed and plunked her hands on her hips. “My dad is a jerk. He has a bunch of other kids in Chicago.”
“Wow.”
“He never told Mom and she never told me because she didn’t want me to get hurt.”
“Makes sense, I guess,” he said.
Matt sat on the step and pulled off his gloves. Katie jumped from the landing with both feet and sat beside him. “It’s his loss, you know,” Matt said and Katie looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I mean, I’m sure those other kids are fine, but they’re not you.”
Katie blinked down at her fingers, twisting them into knots as if playing some kind of game. Sadness dripped off her like bitter honey.
“I bet,” he said, “they don’t know card tricks. Or how to play poker. They probably can’t climb trees like you can. I’m sure they can’t hide as well as you can.”
The Temptation of Savannah O’Neill Page 16
