With Baby in Mind

by Arlene James

  He shook his head. “Nah, I won’t have worked up a really good appetite for another four or five hours. You’ve got time for a nap, anyway.”

  “Oh, you.” She pushed at him playfully, and they laughed together. When the laughter receded, there was nothing left to do but go to bed, separately. It was his night with Darla, so she went to the master suite, stripped off her clothes and tugged on a sleep shirt striped like a baseball uniform, thinking all the while how it had felt to be held in his arms and to be kissed by him. She washed her face and brushed her teeth, then let down her hair and ran her fingers through it, aching for him to come and hold her again, wishing she’d had the courage to ask him to stay with her.

  She didn’t want to sleep alone. She didn’t want to live alone. She didn’t want to get a divorce. She didn’t want to go to Africa. She only wanted him and Darla and home. She wanted the dream to be true, the marriage to be real, the love to grow. It could happen. He had changed, she told herself, or maybe he had only found what he had been looking for. Or maybe it was only the circumstances in which they found themselves, and when Darla was legally his he would again become the old Parker with his roving eye and exploding hormones. Maybe he really wouldn’t want her anymore and it would have to end.

  She couldn’t bear to think of it. She didn’t dare think of it. Instead, she wrapped herself in the memory of the dance, his arms about her, the music playing, the heat of his breath on her cheek, in her ear, the sway of their bodies, the rub of their legs as they moved. She promised herself she would dream of those moments. She would lose this ache in memory.

  She turned off the light, opening the door to the outer room at the same time. The soft, flickering light of flames greeted her. She stepped into the room, her gaze going to the fireplace built into the wall between the closet and the bath. He stood as she entered and turned to face her, backlit by the cheery fire he’d built upon the grate. Hope burst into bloom inside of her. She walked toward him, her heart hammering in her chest. She stopped before him and looked up into his eyes. His gaze skittered over her, coming to rest on her face. “I don’t want to sleep alone,” he said.

  She closed her eyes to stop the tears of joy. The dream was real after all. The dream was real.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I don’t want to sleep alone...on the living room couch with Dennis just in the other room,” he said. “If he got up before me, he’d surely wonder why we weren’t together. So...so maybe I could make a pallet in here, unless...” He let it hang there, feeling the fool for having come to her like this. She didn’t want him. It wouldn’t mean anything to her, and he didn’t think he could bear that, but neither could he bear to pass this night without her.

  He cleared his throat and tried again, wondering when he’d gotten so bad at this, when he’d lost his touch. Seduction used to be his thing, his gift, but that was before Darla, before Kendra. “The little Randle girl is in the bed in Darla’s room. I guess she slipped in there sometime after midnight. I—I remember we left the door open, and... I guess she couldn’t sleep with Dennis snoring on the couch in the family room.”

  He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She was so beautiful with her hair down and her face scrubbed clean that it hurt to look at her, but he couldn’t look away; neither could he look into those big green-gold eyes for fear of identifying some killing emotion there—pity or scorn or, worse yet, indifference. He closed his eyes, trying to dredge up his courage. It didn’t help.

  “I—I’ll make a pallet in the guest room,” he said roughly, then tried to lighten his tone. “We really ought to get some furniture in there. We might want to have the gang over again sometime, and...” Suddenly it came tumbling out of him. “I don’t want to sleep on the floor, Kendra. I want you. God, how I want you!”

  When she stepped up, slid her arms around him and laid her cheek in the hollow of his shoulder, he thought he might cry with relief, but one part of his mind was busy inventing disasters. He started trying to banish them, holding her tightly to him.

  “I didn’t mean what I said last time, Kendra, I swear I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” she whispered.

  He hurried on. “I was hurt. No man wants to hear that his lovemaking means nothing, that it’s unimportant.”

  “I didn’t mean it like it sounded,” she said.

  “I lashed out. I said stupid things that hurt me as much as you, more probably, because I’ve wanted you every moment since.”

  She lifted her head and impaled him with those large, glowing eyes. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, Parker. I don’t know what you want me to say now. We’re married, but we never intended to stay married. We agreed. We both agreed.”

  God help him, she was going to hold him to it. It hurt even worse than he had imagined. He felt broken inside, literally broken, but he had her now and that was something. It would have to do. He would make it memorable. He pulled her to him and covered her face with kisses from her forehead to her chin, speaking softly between them.

  “I don’t want to think about that now. I can’t think about that now. Just let me love you. Please, Kendra, no more nights alone. Don’t make me sleep alone anymore. Let me love you while I can.”

  “Yes.”

  She barely breathed the word, but it was enough for Parker. He took her mouth, pulling on it and thrusting his tongue inside to stroke her, fill her. From that point onward, he never took his hands off her. Even as he lowered her to the rug before the fire and stripped them both of their clothing, he loved her with his hands and mouth, kneading and caressing, pressing and tasting, lathing her with his tongue and filling her with his fingers until she writhed beneath him and begged him to come into her. But even then he held back, bringing her to the peak with his hands, glorying in her tremors and soft, gasping cries.

  He wanted her to think of no one and nothing but him. He wanted to engage her every sense, to provoke her every reaction, to consume her, to possess her. He wanted her to love him, wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, and he hadn’t the vaguest notion how to go about making it happen. In the past, he had avoided love and all its complications. Now he prayed for them, ached for them, and in his desperation he could do nothing other than pour his own love out on her. It was a unique experience, to actively love another, to desire another with love, to touch another with love. Oh, he had loved Nathan and Candace and, yes, he loved Darla, had done so from the moment of her birth but never more so than now. He had even imagined himself in love with other women for certain periods of time. But this love was unlike any other.

  He came to know in that moment before he joined his body with hers that he was incomplete without this woman. He could never be what he ought to be without her. When he lifted her legs and positioned her to accept him, he knew with the heaviest certainty that this was the only moment of pure joy that he had ever experienced—and it might never be his again. He might never again see that look of rapture on her face. He might never again feel the welcome in her arms, the wet, warm acceptance of her body. For that reason alone, he wanted to make it last, wanted it to go on and on and on, but too soon he lost control of his own body. He spilled his love into her with tears in his eyes, his face buried in the cloud of her hair so that she wouldn’t see.

  He didn’t lift his head again until he had mastered himself. She was lying beneath him with her eyes closed, her face serene, her lips curved into a delicate, dreamy smile. He wanted to weep, and he wanted to love her all over again. He levered his weight up onto his forearms and chose the words he could say.

  “You’re very beautiful.”

  Her smile grew. “You make me feel that way.”

  “Do I? I’m so very glad. Shall I tell you how you make me feel?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes. They were lustrous and gold in the firelight.

  “Lucky,” he said. “Blessed. Complete.”

  She looked at him, stared at him a long, silent time.
Then she lifted her arms and twined them about his neck, pulling him down to her. “No more nights alone,” she whispered. “No more nights alone.”

  No more nights alone—for now. His chest felt as if it would burst with the swell of gratitude he felt as he rolled her gently to her side and turned his face into the curve of her neck. I love you. The words burned his throat and tortured his tongue, but he couldn’t say them. He didn’t dare say them. He had too much to lose now: all those nights between this one and the end, all those nights to love her, to make her want to stay, all those days to take care of her, to share with her, to be her friend and her lover and her husband. If he told her, she might pull away, and even now she wasn’t close enough. She was only close enough when he was inside her. She was only close enough when their bodies were joined, and he set out once more to prove it to her in the only way he knew how. Once more. Please, he thought, always let there be once more.

  * * *

  Golden days. They were golden days. She woke in his arms and went to sleep in them again at night. They laughed together and loved together and made plans together, but never beyond the next day or the weekend or just the end of her shift. They took care of the baby together and went out to dinner with their friends and danced in the dark to the music on the radio. They fed each other popcorn and stood beneath the spray in the shower, soaping their bodies and tasting clean skin and making love. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and traded sections of the newspaper, their legs intertwined, Darla trapped between them and periodically shredding the newsprint as it passed over her head so that they had to tell each other what it had said. They dressed up on Sunday and went to church, hands clasped at their sides as they prayed. They teased, and they tickled, chasing each other through the house like children until they collapsed in a heap and made love like adults. It was wonderful, and it was awful, for every day was one day less to come.

  The new court date was set for the first week in February. Kate said it would provide adequate time for her to plan their strategy, but Kendra was as worried as Parker was confident, especially when Kate said she would be conferring closely with Edward.

  Parker missed him. It was obvious in the number of times he mentioned his name, in the many ways he proposed to mend the rift. Finally, at her urging, he called Edward on the phone and asked if they could talk. After some negotiating, they made a date for lunch. Kendra traded shifts with another nurse so that she could stay home with the baby. Parker left agitated and anxious for the meeting. He returned the same way and would say only that they had made a beginning, that they understood one another a little better, and that it would take time.

  Time. Time was the enemy. She could hardly bear to spend it in sleep. Workdays were eternal, off days but moments. It did not help that Darla was changing and growing by leaps and bounds, becoming more and more verbal and finding other ways to express herself with almost perfect understanding. Kendra wanted time to stand still. She wanted to freeze them all just as they were and lock out the rest of the world, but reality would intrude into the idyll, primarily in the guise of two particular persons, Sandra Pendleton and Kate Ridley.

  Sandra continued to show up with her headphones and flash cards. In general, Darla ignored Sandra as soon as she realized that she could not charm Sandra into doing whatever she wanted her to do. Sandra, however, was determined to capture Darla’s attention and direct it as she saw fit. Kendra had to hand it to her. The good doctor was nothing if not inventive. She employed in her campaign everything from hand puppets to colored lights, but if she occasionally won a battle, no one could doubt that she was, nevertheless, losing the war.

  As often as not, her sessions with Darla ended with screams of protest, which was not to say that Darla was learning nothing from Sandra. Quite the contrary. In fact, little Darla had perfected several techniques for displaying a rather formidable temper. First she would go limp as a dishrag and become sixteen pounds of dead weight, drool and crocodile tears. Later she would stiffen up like a poker and stubbornly refuse to be bent, holding her breath until her face turned red as a beet and and then she’d explode in a scream of sheer rage. Next she would buck and flail her tiny fists, sobbing with genuine frustration. Finally she would display total rejection by reaching for another person, pushing Sandra’s face away as she tried to speak, and turning her own face away, eyes closed, and wailing.

  Sandra’s own frustration was palpable. It was obvious, she said, that her theories concerning beginning a child’s education prebirth were right on the money. Darla, she insisted, was not accustomed to learning. Consequently, postbirth confusion was overwhelming her. She had no sense, poor little thing, of her own intellectual power.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Parker argued pleasantly, pointing out that Darla was the one to most often get her way.

  “That,” declared Sandra, “is because you’ve spoiled her shamelessly.”

  Parker just grinned. “I have, haven’t I?”

  “One day,” Kendra told him later, “that woman is going to smack you.”

  “Not,” he said, taking her in his arms, “with you to protect me. And you would protect me, wouldn’t you?”

  “I would,” she admitted, nuzzling the curve of his jaw. But would he do the same for her? She tried very hard to believe he would. If only he would speak of love, if only once in the height of passion he would declare that he loved her, she could relax and simply be happy, happier than she had ever dreamed possible, not that life wasn’t sweet just as it was.

  These were good times. On the days that Parker kept the car, he would come early to pick her up and bring the baby into the hospital so the other nurses could tell them how beautiful she was and how bright and how charming. Later, they would tell Kendra how lucky she was, and she didn’t dispute that assessment at all. But how long could her luck hold? Sometimes it seemed that these happy days would go on forever, but then Kate would call or stop by to discuss some aspect of the custody case.

  Kendra couldn’t help the depression that descended on her when Kate Ridley was around. She didn’t completely understand it herself, but whenever Kate showed up, she brought a serious case of the dismals with her. There seemed to be several reasons for it. One, even with things so greatly improved between herself and Parker, they were still playing a game and calling it marriage, and Kendra was never more aware of it than when in the savvy lawyer’s presence. Worse yet, something in the way Kate looked at them made Kendra wonder if she didn’t know the truth or at least suspect it. When she tried to talk to Parker about it, though, he first scoffed and then got angry.

  “Why do you have to keep bringing this up?” he demanded one evening after Kate had left them.

  “I just can’t help feeling that she’s on to us.”

  “In what way is she ‘on to us,’ Kendra?”

  “She knows we’re pretending.”

  The look he gave her was one she couldn’t completely fathom. It was anger, yes, but something else, too. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought she had hurt him.

  “Is that all this is to you, Kendra?” he asked roughly. “Is it just some silly little scam we’re pulling on the world?”

  “No, of course not,” she said, at once repentant and defensive. “I know this is important to Darla and to you.”

  “And what about you, Kendra? Isn’t this important to you in any way?”

  “You know it is,” she told him hesitantly, “for a lot of reasons. Mainly I just want what’s best for you and Darla.”

  “Why, Kendra?” he asked, his hands seizing her shoulders, his tone urgent. “Why do you want what’s best for me...and Darla?”

  She blinked at him. It was right on the tip of her tongue, and for a moment she wondered if he didn’t want her to say it, but then she reminded herself that Parker, though he had changed a great deal, was still—at bottom—Parker. He would never want the complications of a real marriage. For Parker, love was almost surely relegated to the be
droom and what happened between the sheets, and while that was undoubtedly incredible for the two of them, it was not enough for Kendra. She wanted all of it. She wanted everything love could be, though she wasn’t even sure what that was. Strangely, though, she had known instinctively that she could not have it with Edward, but she had to keep reminding herself that the same was true of Parker.

  She lifted her chin and put the best possible face on it. “If for no other reason,” she said, “because it’s what Nathan would have wanted.”

  His hands slid from her shoulders. “Nathan,” he said. “Yes, of course.” He turned away then, and a little while later he went out, saying he had errands to run. She didn’t ask what errands he could get done after ten at night, and he didn’t volunteer such information. The golden days, even the good days, it seemed, were on the wane.

  * * *

  Parker stood in the doorway of the dimly lit club and searched the room for a familiar face. One presented itself almost immediately.

  “Why, Mr. Sugarman,” said the manager, his hand outstretched, “we haven’t seen you in some time.”

  “Hello, Patrick. It has been quite a while.”

  “We heard about your brother—a terrible loss.”

  Parker nodded. “Yes, terrible.”

  “Our condolences.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We have heard, too, about your marriage. Allow me to congratulate you, and please, the drinks this evening are on the house.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Parker’s gaze again skimmed the room. “Ah, you wouldn’t know if Mr. White is here tonight, would you?”

  Patrick clapped him on the back. “I’m sure you know that I keep track of all our best customers. He’s in the back, Cathy’s station. If you’d like a bit of privacy, just send her to me.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Parker shrugged out of his overcoat and scarf as he wound his way through the candlelit tables. The young women serving drinks wore costumes consisting of black tuxedo coats with tails, silver gray vests, bow ties, short shorts, sheer black stockings and high heels. One of them, her blond hair twisted into a pile of frothy curls atop her head, waved at Parker and blew him a kiss as she carried a tray of drinks to a table surrounded by men obviously engaged in an informal business meeting. Briefcases were open, papers were strewn across the table, pens were scribbling, but the conversation was punctuated with relaxed laughter. Parker nodded at the woman, trying to remember her name, and slipped on by. As he drew near the rear of the building, the muted sounds of billiard balls being racked and knocked around a table could be heard, as well as the murmur of voices. Hopefully Edward would be sitting on a stool at a bar that wrapped around two walls of the room, eyeing a television suspended from the ceiling and waiting for an open table, a small rectangular case containing a collapsible cue stick at his feet. If Edward was already engaged in a game of pool, Parker knew his chances of having a meaningful conversation with him were nil.