He didn’t respond. Didn’t move at all.
“He’s a nice man, more than nice. I really like him. I want to help him. And you’re getting in the way, Joe.” This wasn’t going to work if she was going to call the elephant a horse. “Well, you aren’t, but my thoughts of you are.”
Or a cow.
“Not my thoughts of you,” she amended. “Okay, the truth is, for some inexplicable reason, I’m suddenly finding you irresistible. Sexually. As in everything you do turns me on and I can’t stand it. I’m losing my mind. I don’t want to have sex with you! Not that you’re asking, I understand that. Not that you’re the least bit interested. But even if you were, I don’t want that. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I like it that way. I need it that way. You’re my business partner, my career.”
She came to a halt only because she couldn’t think of anything else to add that wouldn’t just be repeating herself. The resulting silence was more humiliating, more painful than speaking had been.
At last she said, “I’m scared to death of ruining everything by having inappropriate feelings I can’t seem to help.”
He still hadn’t moved. Not even a finger. If he’d blinked, she hadn’t seen it.
“Like I said, I’m not asking you for anything,” she reiterated when she could stand the silence no longer. Had she already blown their relationship by bringing this up? Surely she and Joe as a team were strong enough to get beyond it. They’d faced some pretty steep challenges over the years and always surmounted them—together. Where one of them failed, the other succeeded. Where one had weakness the other had strength.
“This isn’t an invitation, or a come on or some kind of plea for you to take pity on me and put me out of my misery.”
She’d die first.
But what a death it would be. The foreign being that had possessed her body recently wouldn’t be quiet, even now. She’d known she was in serious trouble that morning when Adam had mentioned his sperm and she’d thought of a part of Joe’s body she’d had no business visiting, ever. Not even in her mind.
Had Joe fallen asleep?
More likely, he was angry. And she didn’t blame him. Dead elephants usually weren’t pleasant. Removing them wasn’t pleasant. But the end result made it worth the effort.
Even now, sitting here completely mortified and hating herself, she could feel the teasing of butterflies in her private places.
“Say something.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He didn’t sound angry. Was that pain in his voice? Or pity?
“Curse at me,” she offered. “Tell me I’m imagining it all. That you’ve never given me any reason to feel these things. Tell me you’re moving out. Just tell me something.”
“I don’t know what to say,” he repeated.
What good did it do to acknowledge a dead elephant if they were just going to leave it lying in the middle of the table?
“The truth would be good,” she finally said, cold and then hot and then cold again. “I’m being painfully honest here, Joe, in the hopes that we can handle the situation and then forget about it. We can’t leave it just hanging here between us. Not with both of us knowing about it.”
He turned, reached for the standing lamp beside him, clicked it on. “I need light.”
“Okay.” Elise blinked, squinting against the brightness, and forced herself to look at him. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, putting her face out there for him to see. She wondered if how small she felt showed.
“You want honesty, I’ll give it to you,” he finally said, the words more biting than kind. Yet his eyes weren’t glacial, as she’d seen them be when Joe was really angry about something. Like the time they’d seen a woman haul a two-year-old kid out of a restaurant by the arm for spilling his milk and slapping him repeatedly on the sidewalk just outside the door.
He’d reported the woman to child protective services.
His gaze was devouring every inch of Elise’s face. Her neck and throat. Then back to her eyes. The cords in his neck were so tight she could see them move with every breath he took.
Elise swallowed, scared to death. What had she done?
If only she could take it all back. Apologize. Wipe away the words she’d put in his mind, words that might have just killed a solid, fifteen-year relationship.
Elise wanted to run inside, to throw herself on her bed and cry until there were no more tears, but she was rooted to the white wicker swing beside him until she knew he was done with her.
“The truth is you aren’t alone.”
Of course she wasn’t, he was sitting right there. What did that have to do with…
Sweat soaked the back of her dress. “What do you mean?”
“Only for me it started two weeks ago at the clinic when I saw the skin on your stomach and wondered if it was as soft and satiny as it looked.”
She must not be hearing right. Or she’d taken leave of her senses. Elise tried to focus. To understand. She couldn’t pull her gaze away from him.
“There are some small scars on my sides, but you can’t tell unless you feel the skin there,” she said inanely. “It’s not completely smooth at the seams.”
“I wanted to kiss your belly button.”
Her crotch was on fire. This couldn’t be happening.
They couldn’t let it happen.
“What’s the matter with us?” she asked, at a total loss for one of the first times she could ever remember. “It would never work. We run a business together. We can’t afford the conflict of interest. I’m having four babies. You shudder at the thought of even one. We’ve been together for fifteen years and you’ve never turned me on before.”
“You have such a way with words.” Joe chuckled softly, deep in his throat, and Elise wanted to throw herself in his arms, get lost there in forgetfulness.
“Well,” she challenged instead, “have I ever turned you on before?”
“No.”
Not even a little bit? She was ashamed of the question that popped instantly to mind. She deserved better than that. And so did he. “I think what we have here that’s different from before,” he continued, his voice strained, but lighter, “is proximity. We’re two adults, a man and woman, living in close quarters and sharing a somewhat intimate situation—the birthing of your children. And for you, I suspect some of it’s hormonal. As soon as we get through this and I move back home, the feelings will disappear as though they never existed.”
The hope his words elicited made her light-headed. “Do you really think so?”
“We know each other too well for it to be anything else. If we were going to have the hots for each other, they’d have hit long before now.”
He sounded so sure. And he made sense.
“I’ll have the babies, go back to work, and you’ll just be the guy who stops by my office to give me problems to solve.”
“And to give you new clients to support you.”
“We just have to get through the next few months—which really shouldn’t be all that hard considering that I’m going to be as big as a house pretty soon and having sex won’t be an option.”
“This will all be over soon,” he said, almost as though the words were some kind of mantra.
He thought her stomach was sexy. The idea pleased her far too much, but that would pass, too.
“So we’re agreed that what we feel is circumstantial, we’ve acknowledged it, decided to take no action, understanding that it will dissipate on its own at the end of this current project.”
“Correct.”
She could live with that.
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO about Fallow?” Joe asked Monday night over the taco salad dinner she’d prepared. He’d had a frustrating day, putting out fires rather than making deals. And he was going on too little sleep, having spent the night fighting the knowledge that Elise wanted him. Fighting off mental images of her naked beneath him. On top of him. In the shower with him
.
And fighting his body’s response to the images.
“Nothing, for now.”
That wasn’t clear enough to satisfy his crankiness. “You’re telling him no.”
She should. Get the guy out of her life. They didn’t need any further complications.
Besides, Elise was vulnerable right now, hormonally horny. And perfectly safe with him. He couldn’t say the same for any other guy.
“I’m telling him that I’m not prepared to make a decision one way or the other. There’s no rush. It’s not like he’s ready to have children in the next month or two. Probably not even the next year or two. And if it turns out that Danny and Ellen and Grace and Thomas are his, it wouldn’t make a difference right now even if I ever did agree to allow him some rights.”
Joe had been spoiling for a fight. Now his mood was just plain sour. He thought the guy should be gone for good. Now. “He might want to be involved with their gestation, with the delivery. He might want to get to know you better.”
He should be shot for egging her on. For making any of this more difficult for her than it already was.
“I’m not responsible for his fate,” she said. “What I do about the future is going to have to wait until the future gets here and I can figure it all out.”
“Would you like me to meet him?”
She set down her fork, wiped her mouth. “Why would I?” She hadn’t met his eyes since they’d parted company on the porch the night before.
“I’m a pretty good judge of people.”
“I already know he’s a good guy, Joe. That doesn’t mean I want to share my family with him.”
Joe wasn’t all that hungry. “I think you should let me call my dad. Just in case. He might have some advice, something gleaned from thirty more years’ experience with living than either of us have.”
“Do your parents know I’m pregnant?”
“Not yet.”
“If it weren’t for asking your father’s advice, were you planning to tell them?”
He honestly hadn’t thought about it. “You’re my business partner,” he said now. “It would have come out eventually.”
Like the next Christmas dinner his parents invited her to share. She’d been there every Christmas he’d been married to Kelly.
“They’re live-and-let-live kind of people, Elise. You know that. They aren’t going to judge what you’re doing. My sisters and mother are going to be thrilled at the idea of four new babies in a room at once. No need to fight over who gets to hold and who has to watch.”
Elise’s frown softened and he was struck by how sensitive she really was, how well she’d hidden that part of herself all these years. And how dense he’d been not to figure it out anyway.
He was struck with a powerful urge to kiss her one more time.
He didn’t act on it.
“Would you mind if I was there when you spoke to your father?” Her question, her relatively easy acquiescence, took him by surprise.
“We could have them over here for dinner, if you’d like,” he offered. She was a homebody, too. Seemed more comfortable in her own space.
“I’d rather meet them out someplace neutral.”
Still amazed that this beautiful, self-possessed, sometimes bossy woman had admitted that she was turned on by him, Joe agreed to arrange something for later that week.
And was glad that his parents weren’t going to descend upon them here in the secret world he and Elise were sharing.
JOE’S SMELL WAS EVERYWHERE. Standing in the shower Tuesday morning, soaping herself, Elise closed her eyes, sniffed his aftershave and could almost imagine that it was Joe’s hand sliding across her stomach, her breasts. Joe’s fingers brushing her nipples.
They hardened instantly and she dropped the soap as her eyes flew open. What in hell was she doing?
Speaking silently to the children she’d not yet birthed, telling them about the home they were coming to, the life she hoped to give them, Elise finished her shower, sped through the kitchen to grab a banana and granola bar on her way out the door, and made it to work in record time.
It was only as she sat at her desk half an hour later that she remembered she forgot to fill Samantha and Darin’s dry-food bowl. They were going to be pissed as hell at her by the time she got home that night.
She didn’t blame them. She was pissed at herself, too.
“OF COURSE YOU HAVE no legal concern whatsoever.” Joe’s dad, shorter and broader and grayer than his son, looked exactly like Joe when he smiled. His eyes softened as Joe’s did, showing heart behind the testosterone. The man set his reading glasses on the table beside his ginger ale, handing her back the documentation Joe had sent to him earlier that day. “But that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”
Sitting at the white-linen-covered table at the elder Mr. Bennett’s favorite steak house on Thursday after work, waiting for dinner to be delivered, Elise shook her head. She’d dressed carefully for the meeting Joe had told her about the night before, choosing a pink tweed suit fitted with a stretch panel.
Joe’s parents had greeted her with hugs and kisses, delighted she’d had Joe share her news with them.
“It’s a tough situation,” Edward Bennett said, with a glance at his wife. “And maybe more up Clara’s alley.”
“What would you do?” Joe asked the plump, gray-haired woman sitting on the other side of him. He’d barely touched his beer.
“I don’t know, son.” The two exchanged a glance that was filled with affection—and something more. A sense of knowing each other deeply, maybe respecting each other. Clara reached for her purse, and Joe grabbed it from beneath her chair, handing it to her.
Elise wasn’t surprised at his attentiveness, but rather surprised that she’d never paid attention before to how helpful her partner was with everyone. Of course Joe was charming, she knew that, but she’d taken for granted the tiny things he did all the time to make life easier for everyone around him.
Of course, she’d taken his good looks for granted, too.
Clara pulled out a picture, handed it to Elise. She’d seen it before. A larger version of it was on the mantel in Joe’s parents’ house.
“Those seven kids are my life,” she told her. “Every memory I have, of any of them, is gold in my pocket. They are a part of me. But not because of biological science. They’re a part of me because I fed them and bathed them. I dried their tears and heard their first words. I laughed and played with them.”
She was describing Elise’s lifelong dream.
“And so did Edward,” Clara said, as though the words held specific significance. “A seed doesn’t make a father. And neither does marriage or proximity. The only thing that makes a father is the willingness to share a child’s experience of growing up. To teach and watch, to protect and provide—and also to allow. Parents must be willing to stand back and watch as their children find themselves, so that each child becomes the unique individual he or she was meant to be.”
Joe, unsmiling, was staring at his beer. And Elise recalled many of the stories he’d told of his years growing up in a too-small house with too many children. He’d never been able to sit and watch an entire program on television uninterrupted. What Clara called allowance, Joe had seen as chaos.
“I don’t believe that a parent,” Clara went on, “if he’s only with a child part-time, can know that child well enough to know when to stand back. I also don’t believe a child—any child—should suffer in order to make parents happy.”
Tears in her eyes, feeling some release inside, Elise nodded. “Adam Fallow is a good man with a heartbreaking story, but my job is to protect my children, to make certain that whatever decision I make is one that will make them happier—not anyone else.”
“That’s what I think,” Joe’s mom said. “But I’m just a housewife who worked part-time for the phone company to help make ends meet until Ed’s practice was firmly established.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Ed
chimed in. “Clara’s the smartest woman I’ve ever met.”
Joe’s continued silence bothered Elise. Was he seeing himself in his mother’s description? Joe Bennett, the man proximity couldn’t make into a father because the desire just wasn’t there? And if he was, didn’t he know that that was perfectly all right? He was a great human being, a loyal and true and dedicated friend, an honest businessman, a generous employer and an attentive son.
No wonder she’d stuck with him for more than fifteen years.
Or maybe he was just bored with the conversation…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THEIR STEAKS ARRIVED. Famished all of a sudden, Elise had a feeling she was going to eat every bite.
Clara wanted to know when the babies were due, what she was going to name them and whether she was going to hire someone to come in during the day or send them to day care.
“Joe’s oldest sister, Kate, is sending her youngest off to college this month,” Clara said, her eyes getting a familiar glint—one Elise had seen in Joe’s eyes often enough to know that it meant something was cooking. “She’s been a stay-at-home mom since she married at eighteen. Watching four babies all day would be the perfect antidote to empty-nest syndrome.”
“Kate’s only forty-one,” Joe said. “Maybe she wants some freedom for the first time in her life. She could go to college, have a career—”
“Joseph,” Clara interrupted, patting his hand, the only adornment on her fingers the wide gold band Edward had put there more than forty years earlier. “For such a smart man you do tend to miss the boat at times.”
“What do you mean?” Joe’s tone reflected his confusion. “You don’t think Kate’s looking forward to doing whatever she wants to do?”
“What your mother is trying to say is that all your oldest sister has ever wanted to do is be a mother.” Ed sawed off another piece of bacon-wrapped filet mignon. “From the time she was old enough to walk, the only toys she was interested in were dolls and bottles. Don’t you remember, when the last four of your brothers and sisters arrived, she couldn’t wait to get home from school to help take care of her babies? Your mom and I are extremely concerned that she’s going to sink into serious depression when Kyle leaves.”
Merry Christmas, Babies Page 13
