For Now, for Always

by Lynn Turner

  For the moment Lacey ignored the challenge in those last words. She concentrated on controlling her temper and keeping her voice as level and emotionless as possible.

  “You have got to be the most selfish man I’ve ever known,”’ she said quietly. “The day you showed up here I told you I’d made a new life for myself, Neil. I don’t just live and work in this town—I have friends here, people whose good opinion I value, who know nothing about my marriage except that I was very young and it didn’t work out. I belong, Neil, in a way I never have before. And now you show up out of the blue determined to undermine the trust and respect it’s taken me six years to earn. How do you think I fell when I came in this morning and found Vi and Ellen sniggering about that arrogant phone call of yours”! I’ll tell you how I felt—humiliated and then furious! How dare you! What gives you the right to bulldoze over other people’s feelings that way7 I won’t stand for it, do you hear!”

  Her battle for control was lost sometime during the last few sentences, and now she was trembling with rage, angry tears threatening to spill over as she glared at him. Neil seemed to have turned to stone. Only his eyes showed that he was at all affected by her tirade. They glittered with a strange tight as they took in her agitated breathing and the tears shimmering in her hazel eyes.

  “I apologize,” he said quietly after a lengthy silence. “I swear, Lacey, I didn’t intend to embarrass you.” He sighed and stuck his hands into his pockets. “You’re right, I am selfish. I guess I figured that if word got around that we’re married, maybe some of those jocks you seem to collect might start to make themselves scarce,” he admitted, a self-mocking smile tilting his mouth at one corner.

  When Lacey just stared at him in angry disbelief, the smile spread, “Don’t faint,” he mocked with wry amusement. “I have occasionally been known to admit I’m wrong. Tell you what, from now on I won’t refer to you as my wife to anybody. I’ll leave it to you to tell the people you want to know. How’s that?”

  “Do you mean that?” she asked warily,

  Neil lifted his right hand, three fingers extended stiffly. “Scout’s honor. Now can we please call a truce, at least long enough to have lunch? I’m starved,”

  It would have been petty and childish to refuse, especially after he’d apologized so graciously. As he escorted her to his truck Lacey asked where they were going, and Neil flashed an almost boyish grin.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  He took her out to the farm he’d just bought, and after handing her down from the cab he removed a picnic basket and blanket from behind the seat.

  “First I’d like you to go through the house with me, give me some ideas about what needs to be done inside,” he said casually as he took her elbow to assist her across the overgrown lawn.

  Lacey glanced at him suspiciously from under her lashes. If he thought there was any chance he was going to get her out here to live with him, he could darned well think again I She had her own house, convenient to the boys’ school and her office. If this was part of his plan to convince her to take up married life again, it was doomed to failure from the start.

  But despite her suspicions, Neil kept the conversation impersonal as they wandered through the big old farmhouse. He asked about closet space, whether she thought he should add one bathroom or two, what kind of insulation she’d recommend and remarked that he’d have to see about upgrading the electric service, Lacey was both surprised and relieved that he didn’t drag her into the kitchen and demand to know how she’d remodel it if it was hers. By the time they went back outside she felt much more relaxed.

  Neil spread the blanket under a huge old maple tree and unpacked the basket himself. There was cold chicken, a container of marinated raw vegetables, French bread, cheese and a chilled bottle of white wine. Lacey was flattered that he’d remembered what foods she liked; even the wine was one they’d shared before.

  When the meal was finished she helped pack the things away, and then Neil settled himself against the trunk of the tree and drew her back against his chest, his arms around her in a loose embrace. Lulled into a relaxed contentment by the wine and his casual attitude, Lacey settled against him. She shifted a little to find a more comfortable position, then had to reach down and tug her skirt over her knees. The weather had been so warm lately, and her legs were so darkly tanned that she’d given up wearing panty hose for the summer.

  “Did you have to do that?” Neil complained lazily, and she smiled as she let her head find a resting place on his shoulder.

  “You were really serious about this courting business, weren’t you?” she murmured in amusement.

  “Absolutely. How do you like it so far?”

  “It’s a little soon to tell,” Lacey hedged. Actually, she liked it very much but was reluctant to admit it just yet.

  He slowly twined their fingers together in her lap, and his breath stirred the hair at her temple as he sighed.

  “Give it a chance. I’ll grow on you. Tell me about this new life you’ve made. For starters, how did you come to own a business called Meinert Realty and Insurance?”

  Lacey smiled again at the humor in his voice. “It’s named for Jessie Meinert, the previous owner. When I first came here she gave me a job, then sent me to school for my realtor’s license. She was a spinster with no family, and when she died she left the business to me.”

  “She must have thought a lot of you,” Neil commented quietly.

  “I thought a lot of her, too. She was almost like a mother to me, and—” Lacey caught herself up short. She’d been about to say, “and a grandmother to the boys.” Recovering quickly, she finished, “And we worked well together.”

  “You said you’d been here for six years. Where were you before that?”

  “St. Louis,” she replied tersely. St. Louis held bad memories, and she tried not even to think about the year and a half she’d spent there. She hoped Neil wouldn’t question her about it.

  “St. Louis!” he exclaimed in surprise. “Why the hell did you go there? We didn’t know a sou! in St. Louis.”

  “Exactly.” Though Lacey tried, she couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice. She knew he’d heard it when his arms tightened around her.

  “I see,” Neil murmured, then sighed again, “No wonder I couldn’t find you.”

  “So you did try,” Lacey said in a low, husky voice. There was a dull ache in her throat. He had come after her, then, and all her fears hadn’t been groundless. When Nei! released her hands to turn her roughly toward him she closed her eyes, not wanting him to see the power he still had to hurt her.

  “Of course I tried!” he said harshly. “I nearly went out of my mind with worry! I looked everywhere—I even went to the hospital emergency rooms and the county morgue!” His voice quavered on the last word and Lacey’s eyes flew open, her breath catching at the anguish she saw on his face.

  “Neil!” she whispered tremulously. “You were telling the truth, weren’t you? Last week, when you said you came back home that night ready to apologize?”

  “I said I was ready to go down on my knees,” he corrected grimly. “And yes, it was the truth. I’d do it now, if I thought it would help. Would it, Lacey? Could you forgive me if I begged?”

  She could only shake her head dazedly, overwhelmed by an avalanche of conflicting emotions. “Oh, Neil,” she said with a catch in her voice. “I don’t know what to say. Forgive you? Maybe I could—I’m not sure. I thought I’d put that night behind me, and then you showed up and brought it all back as if it happened yesterday. I just don’t know,” she repeated softly, almost to herself.

  Seeing the distress in her troubled eyes, Neil lifted a hand to tenderly stroke her cheek. His touch was strangely comforting, soothing.

  “I’m so mixed up,” Lacey whispered. “I don’t even know what I feel right now.”

  “Then let me tell you what I feel,” Neil offered. He pulled her head against his chest and bent to lay his cheek on her hair.


  “I love you, Lacey.” His deep, resonant voice throbbed with intensity, “I love you now, I loved you ten years ago, and I’ll love you just as much on my dying day, I need you and want you, but most of all I love you. I realize you probably can’t believe that, but I’ll keep on telling you until I make you believe. My life’s been like a desert the past eight years. I know I don’t deserve it, but I want another chance, I want it desperately. Now that I’ve found you, I don’t think I could survive losing you again.” At the end his voice became unsteady, and he crushed her to him, as if he was afraid she might disappear again if he didn’t hold on tight.

  Lacey s eyes were closed, but she heard his words and felt the warmth of his body, the hard strength of his arms. Still she felt she must be dreaming. This couldn’t be Neil, claiming that he loved her, had always loved herl Hot tears leaked from under her lashes and ran unchecked down her cheeks.

  For eight years she’d despised and feared him, and all that time he had existed in his own private hell of guilt and loneliness. But it was too late to make amends and start over, she thought miserably. There was too much of a gulf between them for things to ever be the same. She wasn’t a twenty-year-old girl anymore, she was a grown woman, a mother.. ..

  She had to tell him now, she saw that clearly. She lifted her head from his shoulder, praying for the words to do it without burdening him with still more guilt. But before she could, Neil saw her tears,

  “Not Oh, Lacey, no I” he groaned, and then he was kissing her, first her damp cheeks, then her eyes and finally her mouth. His lips were firm but gentle, soothing, healing, while his hands tenderly framed her face. Rational thought deserted her. She forgot everything but how incredibly gentle he could be. It had always surprised her, the way his lovemaking would shift without warning from wild, totally abandoned passion to an almost delicate gentleness and back again, with a swiftness that stole the breath from her body.

  Lacey was unconsciously waiting, anticipating the moment when his mouth would harden in possession and his hands would drop down her body, seeking and finding all the pleasure points he knew so well. But she waited in vain; this time the gentleness continued, until at last the tension had drained out of her and she lay limply in his arms.

  “Better?” he asked softly, and Lacey nodded as she nestled against his chest. Neil’s lips touched the slightly upturned tip of her nose. “Right now you don’t look a day older than the first time I saw you. You were wearing some short frilly white thing that showed off those nonstop legs, and you looked like a lamb who’d wandered into the middle of a pack of wolves. I took one look and knew my bachelor days were numbered. All that innocence was just irresistible.”

  “You were a randy old lecher,” Lacey teased with a smile.

  Neil smiled back, a tender, somewhat indulgent smile totally unlike his usual sardonic humor.

  “I still am,” he murmured, then bent to kiss her softly on the mouth. “As soon as I saw you I knew I had to have you, and once I had you I wanted to lock you up, keep you all to myself, I was scared to death some young buck would come along and take you away from me.”

  Lacey digested that in silence. He was only haif joking, she sensed, and she suddenly saw in a new light the days and nights she’d spent alone while he was busy with business meetings. He’d discouraged her friendships with people her own age, claiming she was a married woman now, and her responsibility was to her husband. At the time she’d considered his attitude arrogant and selfish, but might he really have been insecure, afraid he couldn’t compete with the younger men in the crowd she ran with before he came along?

  “For a while I thought you were ashamed of me,” Lacey said quietly, watching his face. “I started to think you’d only married me for my body, that you didn’t want me around your friends, the people you worked with, because you were afraid I’d make some terrible faux pas and embarrass you in front of them.”

  Neil shook his head in denial. “Ashamed of you?” he repeated roughly. “God, I felt like the luckiest man in the world. You’d married me—me—when you could have had your pick of a dozen young studs. But I’m seventeen years older than you, Lacey, and I’ve never been able to let my hair down and relax with other people. I lived in mortal fear that someday you’d look at me and see this dull, aging stuffed shirt and realize what a mistake you’d made.”

  Lacey marveled at the confession. She’d never even guessed that so much doubt and uncertainty was concealed behind the cool, self-assured exterior. If she’d only knownl

  “You were the only stud I ever wanted.” Though she smiled, the statement was delivered without a trace of humor. “I married you because I had to, Neil, because after I met you my life wouldn’t have been complete without you. I thought you knew that. All I ever wanted was for you to love me even half as much as I loved you, and to let me share your life, as an equal. You made me feel inferior, like some brainless child you only tolerated during the day because of what I couid give you at night.”

  Neil closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. “I wish to God we’d talked like this before,” he said with feeling. “I could see you weren’t happy, but I thought it was because I wasn’t what you’d expected, that you were already disappointed with marriage, with me. I drove myself like a fiend to make more money, build more security, thinking that if I got far enough ahead I could retire early and be with you all the time, like I wanted. But it seemed the harder I worked, the further apart we grew.”

  He stopped and pulled back to look at her.

  “That first year, I used to pray you’d get pregnant,” he said, and Lacey’s heart skipped a beat. This was the first time he’d ever mentioned wanting children, and a wild hope leaped in her breast. “I thought if I gave you a child, a part of me to love while I was trying to secure our future, it might keep us together until I could work things out. Now, of course, I’m glad we didn’t have a baby, but at the time I was grasping at straws.”

  The hope turned to cold, thick dread in Lacey’s throat. ‘But a baby might have helped,” she said tentatively. “I always wanted to have your children, Neil, even in the beginning. I didn’t think you wanted any.”

  “Oh, I did.” He sighed heavily, “But for all the wrong reasons. Looking back, I can see what a mistake it would have been to start a family when our marriage was already so shaky. About the only thing I’ve had to be thankful for in the past eight years was that we didn’t have a child.”

  Lacey didn’t contradict him, didn’t speak at all, in fact. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hide how much his words had hurt, each one carrying the force of a physical blow. Neil must have mistaken her silence as thoughtful reflection, because he didn’t question it or try to draw her out for several minutes. Finally he stirred and laid a light kiss on her forehead,

  “Do you have to go back in this afternoon?”

  “Yes,” Lacey murmured, not quite meeting his eyes. “I’ve got a couple of appointments, and some claims to approve.”

  “Okay, then I guess we’d better hit the road.” But he was obviously reluctant to end their time together, and on the way into town he remarked, rather sharply Lacey thought, “You need to increase your staff, hire more help than you’ve got now.”

  Lacey bit down on her resentment at his autocratic tone. “Usually I have more help. It’s just that the two women who sell for me part-time happened to take their vacations at the same time this year, and Rick Baker—he’s my fulltime salesman—is away for six weeks at summer school. He’s finishing up work on a B.B.A.”

  “Rick Baker—any relation to Gary Baker?”

  “His son. You know Gary?” Lacey asked in surprise.

  Neil shrugged. “We were in high school at the same time. What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s a vice-president at Farmer’s Bank and Trust,”

  Neil merely arched one brow in mild surprise. He accompanied Lacey into her office to complete the paperwork for the farm sale, then turned her desk
calendar toward him and ran an idle finger down the list of appointments for that day.

  “‘Seven-thirty, dinner, c.c.,’” he read aloud, then looked up and asked, “Chamber of Commerce dinner?”

  “No. A directors’ dinner meeting at the country club.”

  Neil didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “You’re a director?”

  Lacey felt another stab of resentment. She knew what he was getting at; it was unusual for women to hold memberships in country clubs under their own names. Usually they only gained entrance through their husbands’ or fathers’ memberships.

  “It just so happens that I was one of the original two hundred founding members,” she told him coolly. “The club’s only been in existence a little over three years, and we’re mostly a young group of business and professional people. It gives us a place to entertain clients and customers, and we use it as much for business meetings as for social functions. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

  His forehead creased in a frown, “Why so defensive all of a sudden?”

  Lacey shrugged uneasily. She couldn’t tell him the real reason she’d been tense and on edge ever since they left the farm, not now, not until she’d had some time to think.

  Neil sighed in impatience. “I wasn’t putting you down, Lacey. Believe it or not, the more I find out about how much you’ve accomplished on your own, the more proud of you lam. It’s just that it’s a little hard to take it all in. Eight years ago you couldn’t even balance a checkbook,” he reminded her.

  “That’s a pompous chauvinistic remark, Neil, and I resent it,” Lacey retorted. “How on earth would you know whether or not I could have balanced a checkbook. You didn’t even trust me to carry one!”

  “That’s not true!” he denied, looking surprised.

  “It is true! You gave me a walletful of plastic money so you could keep tabs on how much I spent and what I spent it on, but I couldn’t be trusted to write checks, and I nearly forgot whose picture was on a dollar bill! I didn’t even know how much it cost to run that ridiculous apartment. Four bedrooms and five baths, Neil, all for two people, plus a private sauna and a putting green on the roof you never had time to use! So much waste—it was obscene!”