“Together?” This time her laughter was bitter. Derisive. “We weren’t together earlier, when I was wondering whether it was my imagination that Jalen’s forehead felt hot, and then later, when I was wondering whether I should take him to the hospital or not. You were out drinking with your friends, and I was where I always am—alone and scared with a sick kid!”
Thomas stilled and stared at her, his face slowly hardening to stone.
She stared back, knowing her exhaustion was clouding her judgment, making her defiant and reckless, and the alcohol was only feeding the ugliness spewing out of her mouth, but she couldn’t rein herself in.
He spoke first, his voice deathly quiet.
“Is that why you haven’t let me touch you all night?”
She turned her head and said nothing.
“Is there some other issue we need to address, Lia?”
“No.”
His jaw tightened. “You sure?”
“Nope,” she said, shrugging with all the nonchalance she could fake. “Like I said—tonight, I got a wake-up call. Jalen will always have health issues, and I’ll always have just myself to rely on. End of story.”
“Who says?”
Great. Now she’d gone and made him feel guilty and defensive. Possibly he also felt sorry for her, and she couldn’t have that. “Look. I understand. It’s no big deal—”
“No big deal?”
“No. You’ve got your high-powered career and your friends, and you probably have all kinds of women on standby.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’re probably just waiting for your call, and the last thing I want is for you to feel tied to me because of Jalen. We don’t need a Jerry McGuire situation here.”
His mouth dropped open, but his words were on a five-second delay. “Jerry McGuire? What the hell does that have to do with us?”
Did she have to spell it out? Draw him a graph or a picture? What?
“I always thought that Jerry fell in love with the kid. He only took the mom because she was a package deal with the kid. Let’s not go down this road here, okay?”
Thomas recoiled, flinching as though he’d felt the splash of invisible but icy water on his face. Blinking, he looked away, and his profile was a collection of harsh lines and planes, except for his lips, which were twisted.
After a minute, he got up and took his time facing her. She stood, too.
“I’m leaving,” he told her.
Yeah. She’d expected as much, but it still felt like a blow. “Good idea.”
Despite the turbulence in his gaze, his voice was calm and even. “I can see that you’re overwrought and not thinking clearly.”
“Don’t you patronize me,” she warned in a low voice.
“Nothing I can say right now will get through to you. So it’s best if I leave before things get any worse.”
He headed for the door, which was what she thought she wanted. But the sight of him going made her chest tighten with fear, and it was all she could do to keep her lips pressed together and hold back the sobs that wanted to erupt.
With his hand on the knob, he turned back, and she found that she couldn’t make eye contact with him. It hurt too much. So she studied the far wall instead.
“But I’ll be back, Lia. Oh, and by the way? When I was drinking with my friends tonight, I wasn’t trying to escape or find another hookup or recapture my glorious bachelor days. I was wishing I was here with you and Jalen. You know—my family. Just in case you’re interested. So I’m not going to let your fear ruin things between us. Do you understand that?” His…family? Did he mean that?
Still reeling from the use of that precious word, Lia watched as he slipped out the door and into the night’s absolute blackness.
“I’ll be back,” he promised again as he disappeared down the porch steps.
Chapter 15
Rarely had a bike-riding lesson turned into such an unmitigated disaster.
“Jalen,” Thomas said, hanging on to his patience and his quiet voice by a fraying thread, “there’s no need to stop dead every time you realize you’re actually pedaling. I’m holding the seat. I won’t let you fall. Just keep going.”
“I can’t do it.” Jalen, who was straddling the bike on the sidewalk, crossed his arms over his chest and worked on his sulky expression. There went the pursed lips and stony jaw. He had the sullen-kid thing just about perfected, and all at the tender age of nine. “I told you I needed training wheels.”
They were out in front of Thomas’s house, where they’d been for a whopping ten minutes with little appreciable progress. The tri-generational bike-riding lesson had seemed like a good idea on paper, a fun way for him to spend a Saturday afternoon with both his father and his son, but Thomas had forgotten to take their personalities and his own black mood into account. The result? The bickering was outrunning the bike riding by a ratio of a hundred to one.
“You don’t need training wheels, boy.” The Admiral poked Jalen in the chest with his forefinger, a gesture that Thomas remembered well from his own childhood. His breastbone probably still had the divots to prove it. “You just need to stop whining and practice. Now get back up on that bike.”
“I need a break, sir,” Jalen insisted.
“Oh, no,” the Admiral said, shaking his head. “We barely just started up out here, and you haven’t earned a break. No grandson of mine is going to quit in the middle of a lesson.”
“Okay,” Thomas interceded. “Let’s try to focus—”
“I hate this stupid bike,” Jalen cried.
The Admiral’s jaw dropped. “Don’t you curse this bike! It’s not the bike’s fault that you’re a quitter.”
“I am not a quitter! I need to go in the house and get a drink.”
“Okay!” Thomas roared, abandoning all hopes of remaining civil. It was hot out here, he was tired, and these two clowns were driving him crazy with the sniping. “That’s it! This lesson is over! If you don’t want to learn to ride the bike, Jalen, then that’s fine. I’ll donate the thing to charity and be done with it. How’s that for a solution?”
Jalen and the Admiral exchanged raised-eyebrow looks, as though Thomas was the one with issues.
“What’s his problem?” the Admiral asked Jalen.
Jalen shrugged, reaching under his helmet to scratch his forehead. “I dunno. He and mom are in some big fight. They’re not talking to each other.”
The Admiral’s speculative gaze swung around to Thomas. “Really?”
To Thomas’s further irritation, he found himself flushing with embarrassment. “No,” he said, swiping at his sweaty forehead with the back of his arm. “We have a couple of issues, but we’re working them out. Not that that has anything to do with you two.”
Issues. Thomas gave a mental snort. Was it an issue when the woman in your life suddenly wanted nothing to do with you? What about when you thought of her every minute of every day, missing her with a hollow ache that made you wonder if your soul had been lost, and yet couldn’t get past your own fear long enough to reach out to her? Was that an issue? Or was it a big freaking disaster of epic proportions?
His money was on disaster.
Not that he knew what to do about it. Hell, he still wasn’t quite sure how they’d ended up at this point. All he knew was that he’d stopped being able to breathe three nights ago, after he’d left Lia’s, and hadn’t figured out a way to get back what he needed.
Which was not good for his mood.
The Admiral, much to Thomas’s surprise, turned to Jalen and pointed him toward the house. “Why don’t you hop down now? Take a little break. In fact, why don’t you scuttle on inside and bring us out some lemonade or something? Make yourself useful.”
“Yay!”
With no additional encouragement, Jalen dropped the bike to the grass, sprinted to the front door and disappeared inside with such glee that Thomas wondered if they’d ever see him again. And then he wondered why the Admiral was looking at him
like that.
“What?” Thomas demanded.
The Admiral’s eyes were narrowed and shrewd as he studied him but also, beneath that, kind. Maybe even a little sympathetic. “Lia’s a good woman, Thomas. She reminds me of your mama that way.”
Sudden emotion caught Thomas so tight around the throat that he didn’t dare risk answering. It hadn’t occurred to him to put Lia and Mama together, but now that the Admiral mentioned it… Yeah. They had that same steely core of strength, that same warmth. The Admiral was still waiting for a response, he realized, but he didn’t have one. The best he could do was nod.
“I was hoping she’d be around for a long time.”
Thomas cleared his throat. “You and me both.”
Both a little gruff now, the men stood side by side, shoved their hands in their pockets and watched a couple of cars as they passed.
After a while, the Admiral spoke again. “Well, one thing fixes up a world of hurt, son. You’d better remind her that you love her.”
Love?
Wait—what?
Love… Love… Love. The word echoed through Thomas’s brain like a cannon’s boom inside a cave. But…love?
Sudden clarity zinged him like a touch from a TASER.
Yeah, you dumb shit. Love. Of course.
Was that what he’d been afraid of these last few days? Putting a word to the feelings? Understanding the full implications of the way he felt? Telling her? Succumbing to it and riding the wave all the way to happiness? What the hell was his problem?
“Ah,” he stammered.
The Admiral gaped at him. “You have told her, haven’t you?”
“Well…”
“God almighty.” In a gesture of purest disgust, the Admiral smacked a palm to his own forehead. “I’ve raised a half-wit.”
Yeah, Thomas thought, running his hand over his head and wishing lightning would strike him down on the spot. That about covered it.
Just then, Jalen banged back through the screen door and bounded through the grass with three bottles of lemonade clutched to his chest. “Here you go, Admiral, sir. This one’s mine. Here’s yours, Thomas.”
The Admiral had already opened his and was taking a giant swig, but now he choked and stared down at Jalen. “Did I just hear you call your father Thomas?”
“Uh, yeah,” Jalen replied, looking wary.
“That’s your daddy, boy! You call him Dad. You hear me?”
Jalen, looking up at his grandfather with honest bewilderment, hit him with the kind of childish question that strips you bare and exposes you to raw truth, whether you’re ready for it or not.
“Why should I? Thomas doesn’t call you Dad.”
The Admiral blinked, his face undergoing a slow transformation to purple.
Thomas shuffled his feet, undone by this kid who was so much wiser than he was.
Jalen waited for his answer.
At last, the Admiral swiped at his nose with the back of his hand and cleared his throat. “You’re right about that, young man. Maybe if I work on being a better father, he’ll start to call me Dad. What do you think?”
Jalen shrugged, looking unsure, but hopeful. “You never know until you try.”
“That’s right.” The Admiral glanced across the top of Jalen’s head and winked at Thomas. “You never know until you try.”
“I think I could work on calling you…Dad,” Thomas said, not knowing where the words were coming from, even as he said them. But there was something deeply comforting about receiving advice in a timely manner from his father, something almost normal about it, and he wanted more of that. Hell, he’d been waiting his whole life for it. Anyway, wasn’t this a time for new beginnings in his life? “If you don’t mind, that is,” he added quickly, seeing the Admiral’s arrested expression.
The Admiral’s expression softened, and he looked almost touched. “I don’t mind,” he said gruffly, clapping a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.
Thomas swallowed hard, trying to master all these unruly emotions.
“You know, Thomas,” Jalen said, looking thoughtful with his chin cupped between his thumb and forefinger, “I’ve known you for a while now. You’re not a bad guy. Maybe I should start calling you…Papi.”
“Papi?”
“Well, that’s what my friend Emilio calls his dad,” Jalen explained, doing that shrinking-into-his-skin thing kids do when they think they’ve said the wrong thing. “It’s Spanish for daddy. I think it might be a nickname for padre or something. But if you don’t like it—”
“I like it,” Thomas said quickly, struggling against that lump in his throat again. “I like it a lot.”
“Okay, Papi!”
The Admiral, perhaps seeing that Thomas was about to lose it, decided to intercede. “Now let’s get you back up on this bike, young man, okay?”
Jalen heaved a martyred sigh and hefted the bike up off the grass. “Okay.”
“I’ll hold your seat this time. Your father needs to stand here and think about how he’s going to fix things with your mama.”
“That’s easy.” Jalen swung his leg over the seat and started to pedal. “He just needs to marry her. That always fixes things on TV. Then we’ll be, like, an official family with a license and everything.”
Grandfather and grandson took off down the sidewalk, leaving yet another word to reverberate inside Thomas’s overloaded brain, throwing his world off-kilter.
Marry… Marry… Marry.
Dr. Dudley intercepted Lia outside her office just as she was returning from the cafeteria with her lunch, forcing her to stifle a groan. It’d be just like him to manufacture an alleged hiccup in the new security system she’d designed and then force her to stick around for another month or so, troubleshooting nothing because the system was glitch free, but he surprised her.
“Last day at the hospital, eh, Lia?”
“Last day.”
“I owe you an apology, I think.”
“How’s that?”
The old man tapped a forefinger against his lips, looking thoughtful. “Well, you came to the hospital and worked hard. You built us a system that should keep everyone out, even you.”
She couldn’t stop a grin.
“You were a pleasure to work with, and I now understand why you did it in the first place. Because of your son. So, I apologize for being so hard on you your first day.”
“Thank you.” She said softly, feeling awkward and unaccountably touched. Everything got her choked up these days. She blamed Thomas—well, Thomas and herself—and the unfortunate scene the other night, when she drove him away.
Despite his vow, he hadn’t come back, and she couldn’t say she blamed him. Who wanted to come back to a woman who couldn’t handle a minor medical crisis or her liquor without lapsing into overwrought hysteria?
But Dr. Dudley was the issue right now, not Thomas.
God knew she wasn’t a fan of her temporary boss and hadn’t appreciated being under his thumb, but, on the other hand, she hadn’t expected him to be big enough to apologize for his harsh treatment of her that first day. “And you have to know. I’d never have done something like that if my son’s life didn’t depend on it.”
“I understand,” he said silkily, moving closer.
Uh-oh. Here it came, she thought, bracing herself.
“Why don’t we have a drink tonight? Celebrate the successful completion of your job here at the hospital? My treat. Maybe get a bite after.”
Wow. And to think this Rico Suave routine worked on Nurse Tsang. Lia gave him the cold eye, which she hated to do when she’d almost made a clean getaway.
“Dr. Dudley,” she said sweetly, “don’t make me threaten you with my Glock again.”
“Fair enough, Lia.” He laughed and waved as he headed off down the hall, proving he was a good sport even if he was a horny old goat. “Fair enough.”
“That was close,” Lia muttered, ducking into her office and closing the door. She just had time to gulp down her sa
lad and then—
Hang on. What was that on her desk?
Dumb question. She knew what it was, and her pulse was already galloping accordingly. Wrapped with a white satin ribbon and sitting in the middle of her neat desk on top of the blotter was a small, flat box of the eggshell blue that belonged, as every woman knew, to only one store in the world: Tiffany & Co.
Was it from Thomas? Or was this Dr. Dudley’s parting gambit for sex? She wouldn’t put it past the old bastard. Creeping closer, she put her salad down and reached for the box, afraid to get her hopes up. The ribbon took a while to undo, what with her shaking hands and all, and then she had it off and the box open, and her heart did a crazy flip of joy.
It was a necklace. At the end of a delicate chain dangled a glittering key pendant, and the top of the key was shaped like a heart. She’d spent enough time mooning over the Tiffany catalogs she periodically got in the mail to know that she was holding platinum and diamonds—a lot of them—in her hands, but that wasn’t what made the gift so precious to her. It was the accompanying card scrawled with Thomas’s handwriting that made her, quite simply, the happiest she’d ever been in her life:
Beautiful Lia:
Please take good care of this for me. It’s the key to my heart.
With love,
T
P.S. Dinner 7 p.m. tonight at my house. Don’t be late. The Admiral will watch Jalen.
Chapter 16
At six fifty-nine that night, Lia reached for the knocker on Thomas’s front door.
The door swung open, and there—oh, God—he was.
They both stilled. Lia couldn’t seem to get a handle on her breath, and the harsh rise and fall of his chest told her he wasn’t doing much better. There were things she’d come to tell him, but they were too big to fit into neat little sentences, even if she could get her voice to work. And he was burning her with that intense gaze again, urgently searching her face for something he shouldn’t have to wonder about or fight for. Not anymore.
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