Think About Love

by Vanessa Grant

  At first it thrilled her, proof of his love that he met her for lunch every day, brought her flowers several times a week. Until the morning she told him she was meeting Janice, and he began shouting at her. Stress, he said later, stress over upcoming exams, and he needed her to help him prep for his statistics exam.

  When she went to the library to work on her management term paper, he followed because he needed her at home. She barely slept through April, studied in the night when he slept because there never seemed to be time in the day. Having a relationship was work, in ways she hadn't expected. It would be better after exams, because the stress was telling on Howard.

  They had their first real fight over her application for graduate school. Looking back, she knew she'd given in on everything else he wanted, until that day. He'd interviewed for a job with Microsoft, and if he got it, she wasn't going to need a graduate degree. Howard Demmer's wife didn't need to work. He'd support her.

  She ran away from the shouting, walked the streets and knew it wasn't going to work, that she was drowning. But when she returned at one in the morning, she met a different Howard. He offered to help her fill out her application for graduate school, and even delivered it for her.

  A week later, when one of her professors called to ask if she'd decided not to take postgraduate studies, she discovered that Howard had never delivered the application. She should have known it was over then, but she'd struggled through another two weeks—lost a job that she'd been accepted for when he didn't deliver the message, lost the keys to the old car Wayne had bought for her to drive.

  Howard helped her search for the keys, without success, but when she lay in bed that night she couldn't stop the suspicion that filled her. Finally, she slipped out of the covers and walked to the chair where he'd draped his pants. In the left front pocket, she'd found her keys.

  She'd moved out the next day, packing her clothes, toiletries, and books while he was writing his last exam, driving to the restaurant where they always met for lunch with everything she owned in the back of her car. She'd told him over a chicken salad sandwich, had taken her apartment key off her ring, and put it on the table between them, adding her engagement ring.

  When she'd walked out, he'd followed her, shouting. Someone in the restaurant, a muscular student who looked like he was probably on a football scholarship, had blocked Howard's path and growled, "Leave the lady alone."

  The two men had still been arguing as Samantha drove away.

  Howard didn't give up easily. He phoned her, parked outside her new apartment, called her friends incessantly. And Samantha learned just how important it was to hold her own in a relationship. She learned that love wasn't worth the risks, not for her. She had her family, Dorothy, Sarah, and Wayne. She didn't need more.

  Last year, when Kippy's birth stirred her own maternal instincts, it hadn't been that hard to persuade herself that being an aunt was far better than getting lost on the turbulent seas of another male-female relationship, the price for having her own child.

  Cal had sneaked up on her from behind when she wasn't looking. He'd seduced her with a business deal in a weak moment, when she'd been overwhelmed with the changes Kippy was going to make in her life and uncertain she could handle it all. It had been too tempting to let him take some of the responsibility.

  But he'd taken more, much more. He'd taken her, and when she thought of him sitting across the table and telling her he loved her, she was tempted, heavens she was tempted. But she was drowning in alarm bells, too, because she'd heard the words I'm in love with you a few hundred times too many. Jeanette's words to a procession of men. Howard's intense vows of adoration.

  One way or another, the words I'm in love with you had always meant trouble for Samantha. With Jeanette it meant Samantha and her sister abandoned, sent to foster homes, or acclimating to a new dad. With Howard, it meant losing control of every goal, every dream, and every minute of her life, an inch at a time.

  With Cal—

  She should stop it now, leave him before it was too late.

  She felt the pain of loss as if it were physical, spearing into her chest.

  If she didn't end it, she needed to walk very carefully. She'd really lost it over the weekend, and she wouldn't do that again. The next time she felt her control slipping, she'd back off, get herself a breather. Cal wasn't Howard. He had his own life, and he didn't have Howard's ridiculous ego, but he did have a tendency to take over. She could hold her own, but only if she kept her head.

  If she was very careful, if she walked warily and kept control, could she let herself fall in love with Calin Tremaine?

  "Mum," shouted Kippy, and Samantha felt her heart lurch.

  "You scared me, Kippers." They were standing at the rail looking down on the boats below. A sailboat, a couple of under-construction workboat-looking vessels, half a dozen speedboats.

  Cal would phone tonight.

  She covered her belly with one hand, the other on Kippy's rump. It wasn't likely they'd made a baby. The timing was wrong, and besides, it wasn't a good idea. Too soon. Maybe it would always be too soon. She had a career she didn't want to lose, and Kippy needed all her maternal energy right now.

  She hadn't been all that sure she actually had maternal instincts, but they seemed to be strong and healthy inside her. Those biological urges, to nest, to breed children, must be undermining her good sense, enhancing the hormonal response she felt to Cal's lovemaking.

  "We've got to go back to work, Kippers."

  Kippy babbled agreement as Samantha turned and began the walk back toward Peterson, back to Dorothy's home on Crocker Road.

  Business, she thought desperately. She needed to focus on business. Tonight, on the phone, she'd talk to Cal about the problems with Jallison. Before he signed the phase-two contract she'd left in his in-basket, they should check out a few options.

  "We're going to do a couple of hours work now," she told Kippy as she climbed the hill. "You can play on the blanket and keep me company, or you can go to Diane's for a couple of hours. Your choice."

  Kippy chose the blanket and a noisy rattle she threw away every few minutes. Samantha picked it up and tickled Kippy's tummy between e-mail replies.

  Half an hour north of Seattle, Cal realized he'd forgotten the Jallison contract Sam had asked him to bring. She'd been stiff on the phone, worried about Jallison. It would have to wait now. If he encountered a lineup at the border crossing into Canada, he'd never make the eight-fifteen ferry to Vancouver Island. And if he missed it, he wouldn't be in Nanaimo until after midnight, too late for the final ferry onto Gabriola Island.

  He should have brought the helicopter, rented a car up in Canada to bring Sam and Kippy home, made some other arrangement to get the helicopter back to Seattle.

  "If you don't get the last ferry," Sam had said the night before, "we'll meet you in Nanaimo Wednesday morning before court."

  He disliked talking to her on the telephone these days. The conversations always seemed stilted, as if they were both choosing words too carefully. He wanted her to miss him, wanted to hear something in her voice other than efficiency.

  He damned well didn't need to hear her tell him it didn't matter whether he got back to her Tuesday or Wednesday or next year. After last weekend at the resort, he'd taken it for granted that things were okay. They'd been together, so close together that he could feel every beat of her heart. Maybe she needed a little time to get used to the words, but he'd seen love in her eyes. She'd been stiff when he left, but that was because of the car. She got prickly when he tried to protect her and he'd been trying to restrain himself, but just looking at that old rattletrap of Dorothy's made him uneasy. He wasn't going to lose either Sam or Kippy to a mechanically unsound car.

  A man looked after his own. She'd understand in time that it had nothing to do with control, with power, but that he couldn't bear the thought of her hurt, of losing her.

  Why was she so damned stilted on the telephone? After last weekend
....

  He floored the throttle and sent Sam's Honda roaring past a semitrailer hauling something too heavy to make the hill decently. The Honda didn't have the power of his Porsche, but it wasn't bad. If he could hit the border by seven-thirty, he'd be on that eight-fifteen, and he'd be with Sam tonight. When he saw her eyes, touched her, he'd be able to stop worrying.

  From everything Adrienne and his mother told him, this sort of worry about a relationship was women's territory. Women were welcome to it, he thought grumpily. He could do without it, and maybe he was being paranoid imagining that this new coolness meant she'd withdrawn from him again, hiding behind the M.B.A. mask.

  He expected too damned much, too soon. He wanted to tell her how much he missed her on the phone, but the time felt all wrong. She was stressed, looking after the baby with little help from him, because he seemed to be spending most of his time in transit. Of course she felt moody. Maybe he'd been moody, too, driving back from Haida Sunset, his mind occupied with reviewing plans for the development teams. It was important, crucially important, to do a terrific job developing Lloyd's e-commerce site. Cal had a bank of five servers on order, to handle their Internet presence, not to mention their intranet server. In a few months, once the e-commerce phase was implemented, the place would be crawling with SAP consultants and Lloyd's IT personnel. Maybe he'd been crazy, promising to get both internal and external servers in business within a year, but it was that promise that had got him the ASP contract.

  He shoved the throttle down again and left a camper and trailer in the dust, then passed a couple of dozen cars before the road emptied in front of him.

  Sam was doing a superhuman job of keeping things together by e-mail and phone, but he could feel the difference at Tremaine's. Tension in the people around him. Not the tension of excited urgency over the latest project, but the edge of chaos. It didn't help that the head of accounting had just asked Sam for a leave of absence.

  She would look after it. She'd find someone to replace the missing staff member, and she'd probably manage to get her day care established and stream all the new employees into the system while he was overseeing the development of Lloyd's e-commerce.

  Sam was damned good at keeping wildfires under control. He smiled, because there was one fire she didn't have under control at all—the fire that raged whenever they came together. One day, when he was deep inside her, she would look up into his eyes—or down into his eyes, depending—and she'd tell him.

  I love you, Cal.

  One step at a time. First he had to help her get her life back in control, because Sam might be a master of control, but a baby, a flood of new employees, and the expansion of their facilities were a bit much for anyone to handle all at once. No wonder she'd seemed stiff on the phone.

  "Adrienne phoned," she'd told him, "and I don't know what's going on. She said Dorothy is still undergoing tests, but I couldn’t talk to Dorothy herself. I'm worried about Dorothy, and Adrienne didn't really tell me anything."

  "I'll try to reach her," he'd promised, and he'd dialed his sister's cell phone four or five times through the day but didn't get through.

  Damn Adrienne! Dorothy was Sam's grandmother, and Sam had a right to know what was going on.

  At the Canadian border, Cal got stuck behind a massive motor home. The line hadn't been that long, about six cars, and it had been moving ahead every minute or so. But now, two vehicles back from the Canadian customs booth, it stopped with the motor home at the booth.

  Damn. He should have taken the other line.

  If he missed the eight-fifteen, he'd be on the ten forty-five and he'd end up spending the night in Nanaimo, separated from Sam by a harborful of water. Maybe he could find someone to run him across in a speedboat, but he'd be without at car, and he wasn't going to let Sam come for him in that junk heap of Dorothy's.

  The motor home rolled forward and into the containment area. Good, let them search the motor home, but if they pulled some sort of border check on Cal, he was going to—

  "Citizenship?" demanded the customs officer.

  "American."

  "Is this your car?"

  "It's my wife's." Damn. If they stopped him for some red-tape nonsense—

  "What's the purpose of your visit?"

  "Pleasure." Tomorrow morning in court wasn't exactly a pleasure trip, but tonight would be all pleasure. "I'm picking up my wife on Gabriola Island. We're coming back tomorrow."

  The officer gestured him on, the I5 turned into Canada's Highway 99 and Cal hit the Honda's accelerator with the word wife echoing in his mind.

  Sam was his wife, all his and he'd have the pleasure of saying it over and over through the years. My wife. He had a daughter, too—or a niece. He needed to get to know her, to learn her smiles and her cries. He'd held her a few times, but when it came down to it, he'd been more or less leaving Kippy to Sam. He'd change that tonight.

  He had forty-five minutes to get through the gates to the ferry at Tsawwassen terminal, and he was going to make it. Thankfully, the ferry terminal was south of the Vancouver traffic crush.

  He called Sam on his cell phone ten minutes after the ferry sailed. She told him Dorothy and Adrienne would meet them in Nanaimo Wednesday morning.

  "They're not back yet?" he demanded, irritated all over again with Adrienne.

  "Not yet."

  He could hear Kippy crying in the background. "I just left Tsawwassen. I think I'll be there about eleven-thirty. I'll get up for the baby tonight so you can get some sleep."

  "There's no need for you to do that."

  Damn, she was in M.B.A. mode. "We'll talk about it when I get there." When the baby was in bed and they were alone, he'd get past the executive to the woman.

  He spent the rest of the two-hour ferry trip checking all the team assignments for the developers. He was having doubts about Gary Neville, so ten minutes before the ferry docked he shuffled Gary's team with Hank's and put the new guy from Boulder under Gary. If Gary didn't make the grade, Cal would replace him before the end of May. By then he'd know if the new kid was up to leading a team under supervision.

  He arrived at the Gabriola ferry terminal with fifteen minutes to spare. He spent the wait and the short twenty minute ride to Gabriola reviewing the e-commerce specifications for probably the fiftieth time, looking for anything in the specs that he'd omitted to allocate to a team.

  It was past eleven-thirty when he got to Gabriola Island, almost twelve when he turned Sam's Honda into Dorothy's bumpy driveway. Would Dorothy ever live here again? It seemed unlikely, but she wasn't enthusiastic about coming to Seattle to live with them. She didn't want to go into the nursing home either, although her doctor had got her a bed in record time and she was supposed to have gone in yesterday.

  Adrienne, he assumed, had managed some sort of extension or leave. He knew she meant well but felt irritation at the way she'd simply taken Dorothy off and left Sam in the dark.

  The house was quiet. He rolled up the drive and parked Sam's Honda beside Dorothy's rattletrap. Had Sam been driving this thing? She'd promised him she would call a taxi if she went out.

  She must have gone to bed. He closed the car door quietly, left his computer and bag in the car, and stepped up onto the porch. He saw a light through the window, the television playing in the living room. He could see Sam now, watching television.

  She hadn't heard the car.

  He crossed the veranda and lifted his hand to knock, but something about her pose stopped him. She was asleep.

  He turned the knob and the door swung open. He shed his shoes and jacket, walked into the silence on stocking feet. On the television, Michael Douglas was dancing with Annette Bening at a formal White House dinner. Sam had muted the television, perhaps for a commercial. Or maybe she'd been sitting in the easy chair, watching their lips move without sounds.

  Did she like to watch old movies with the sound off? He'd always found it amusing to speculate on the dialogue spoken by actors on a muted TV. He want
ed to wake her, to ask if she shared his weird taste.

  He slipped into the baby's bedroom and found Kippy lying on her back, snoring softly, an angelic smile on her face. Last night, Sam had told him Kippy had been babbling all afternoon and evening, a whole new vocabulary of baby talk. Then she'd changed the subject abruptly and began talking about problems with Tremaine's developer.

  He felt a breeze blow in through the window and quietly moved to adjust it so the breeze wouldn't fall directly on the baby. Then he slipped out of the bedroom.

  He was going to carry Sam to bed very carefully, and with luck she wouldn't even wake. She needed her sleep, and he had no intention of waking her.

  She did wake, though, halfway up the stairs. He heard her gasp and looked down into her open eyes.

  "Cal, what are you doing?" She looked started and confused, pulled from sleep.

  "Go back to sleep, sweetheart. I'm just putting you to bed."

  "Put me down."

  "You're not heavy." Women were always worrying about their weight, but Sam had no cause. She was perfect, with real curves and her own slender beauty. "You're tired."

  "Cal!"

  It dawned on him that she was really upset and he finished climbing the stairs and stepped into her room, shut the door to keep their words from disturbing the baby's sleep downstairs. Then he set her on her feet and she immediately stepped back from him.

  "What are you doing?" She sounded panicked now, not sleepy.

  "You were sleeping. I was carrying you to bed."

  She shoved her hair back, but it had become tangled in her sleep and it promptly spilled back over her cheeks and shoulders.

  "I... you startled me."

  "I gathered."

  "I think I'll—I need to get to sleep."

  He could see the nerves sparking in her eyes. She wasn't sleepy. Not now. They could have been back on the beach on their wedding night, with Sam jumpy and him not knowing how the hell to soothe her.

  Everything should have changed. She'd walked naked in front of him, for heaven's sake, had seen his reaction and strutted, deliberately teasing him. She'd kneeled at his feet in the shower and made love to him with love flowing over in her eyes.