Resolved To (Re)Marry

by Carole Buck

  Her gaze slammed into his. He watched a wave of color storm up her throat and into her face. She flushed to the roots of her tousled brown hair. Then the surge of hot blood reversed itself. It drained away, leaving her very pale. Violet-gray shadows showed starkly beneath her eyes, like dirty thumbprints on a sheet of ivory-colored vellum.

  “I never said you were a snob, Chris.”

  “Not in so many words,” he conceded, holding her eyes. “But you did think—maybe you still think—that I used to believe you were a blue-collar bimbo. And if that doesn’t imply snobbery on my part, I don’t know what would. You also seemed stunned when I told Tom, Dick and Butch about Falco’s Pizzeria and all the rest.”

  “Not...stunned.”

  “Surprised, then.”

  A strange series of emotions flickered across Lucy’s features. “You said yourself, my background is different than yours.”

  “Yes, I did. And yes, it is. But different isn’t a code word for inferior. Not to me. Especially not where you’re concerned. And whatever I did during the time we were together to make you think that it was...” He broke off, shaking his head. His throat was tight and dry. Finally he resumed. “I’m sorry, Lucy. From the bottom of my heart, for whatever it was...I am sorry.”

  His ex-wife bit her lower lip and blinked several times in rapid succession. Then she looked down, staring fixedly at her lap. After ten, maybe fifteen seconds, of silence, she said, “I know I wasn’t the kind of woman your family and friends expected you to marry.”

  Chris didn’t deny it. How could he? For better or worse—and the scales seemed to be tilting toward the latter at the moment—it was true.

  “I had the distinct impression that your hooking up with me shocked the hell out of most of your friends and relatives, too,” he countered bluntly.

  Lucy’s head came up. Her dark eyes were glistening. A splotch of reddish-pink had blossomed on each of her cheeks.

  “So?” Her voice was raw. “No matter how they reacted in the beginning, they all ended up liking you. You won them over to your side. Even my oldest brother, Vinnie. They thought you were terrific until...until...”

  Chris waited, muscles clenched, gut knotted.

  Lucy made an inarticulate sound and looked away. Her mouth was trembling, and her breath was coming in quick, shallow bursts.

  “They opened their arms to me,” Chris finally acknowledged, telling himself to be patient. The debacle he’d precipitated ten nights before their first wedding anniversary hadn’t just happened. It had been the culmination of months of mistakes and misunderstandings. The former had to be corrected and the latter clarified before there would be a prayer of undoing the real damage. “Not right away. Why should they have? Your father, brothers, uncles, cousins-all of your friends—knew how special you were. They needed to be sure the man you’d agreed to marry wasn’t totally unworthy of you. But whatever reservations they had, every single one of them made me feel welcome on our wedding day. I became a Falco as much as you became a Banks. Probably more so, in their eyes.”

  Lucy gave a jerky little nod, her throat working.

  “But you didn’t get the same treatment from my side of the aisle, did you?” The words were bitter on his tongue. “And to make things worse, I didn’t see it. I didn’t... realize.”

  She brought her eyes back to his. “I tried to fit in, Chris. To do what was ... expected. Your m-mother...”

  “Oh, yes. My mother. I can imagine.”

  Although his mother had been her coolly polite self during his marriage, she’d turned viciously critical about Lucy after the breakup. But the harshness of her comments had ended up boomeranging. The portrait she’d attempted to paint of her ex-daughter-in-law simply had not jibed with the woman Chris knew in his head and heart, his gut and groin. For every negative thing she’d said, a small voice deep within him had offered a contradiction. Her intent had been to make him say good riddance to his ex-wife. What she’d done instead was to drive him to the point where all he could think was Dear Lord, what have I done?

  “Elizabeth tried to help me,” Lucy asserted. “She gave me advice. Pointed out when I made mistakes. She wanted me to be... good...enough for you.”

  “Good enough for me? God, Lucy. You were much better than I deserved!”

  “You didn’t think that in the beginning.”

  “I fell for you like a ton of bricks the first time I laid eyes on you.”

  “But you weren’t sure about us.”

  Chris caught his breath, finally realizing what she must mean. Those weeks he’d spent trying to analyze his attraction to her—

  “I wasn’t sure about me, Lucy!” he burst out. “Not about you.”

  “I don’t...understand.”

  He took a few seconds to marshal his explanation. He wanted to get the words right. To make the truth of the matter very, very clear.

  “You used to joke a lot about the burden of being the only female Falco of your generation,” he began. “Well, I’m the only male Banks of mine. Which is—was—no laughing matter. I was brought up knowing that there were a great many things I was expected to do, and do superlatively. I was also taught there were lines I shouldn’t cross and ideas I shouldn’t challenge, because that wasn’t the Banks family way. I pretty much went along with the program for twenty-four years. Then...pow. I walked into a pizza place I’d never heard of to meet an old college buddy who ended up pulling a no-show and I saw you. King Kong doing a swan dive off the Empire State Building didn’t go down harder than I did. But what I felt toward you was so...different...from anything I’d ever felt, I had to question it. I started to worry that maybe I was going through some delayed form of adolescent rebellion. That I was using you to break out of the Banks mold.” He swallowed, remembering. “The possibility made me a little sick. Maybe even a little crazy. So I held back. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  There was a long silence. Chris watched Lucy, painfully aware of the ugly irony attached to his last sentence. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. Yet he had. Unintentionally at first, yes. But the pain he’d inflicted when he arranged for her to walk in on him and Irene Houghton ...

  God help him. That had been deliberate.

  “I never told you what my very first response to you was, did I?” Lucy finally asked. Her voice sounded strained. Her pallor had increased.

  Chris gave a humorless laugh. “You were ticked off because I was eyeballing your chest.”

  “It was more than that.” She gnawed her lower lip. Her eyes seemed unfocused, as though she were reliving the reaction she was about to describe. “In that second or two before you looked up and our eyes met, I decided you were some kind of stuck-up rich guy who was as out of place in my family’s restaurant as...as... Oh, Lord. I don’t know, exactly! Caviar on a cannoli, maybe. But I resented you, Chris. And I—I envied you. I was standing there sweating like a pig and worrying about how I was going to make up the difference between the scholarship money I’d won and another two semesters of college tuition and you came strolling in all cool and calm and classy, sporting a haircut that probably cost you fifty or sixty bucks....”

  “Lucy.” He was appalled. “Oh, Lucy.”

  “It’s taken me a long time to face up to this,” she went on doggedly. “Because I turned it all around. That thing I practically screamed at you earlier? About wanting you to know that I’m not a blue-collar bimbo anymore? Well, deep in my heart, I knew you never thought I was. Maybe your parents did. And still do. Maybe your friends, too, although some of them were genuinely nice to me while we were together. But when I dig down to the bottom line, I know the main person who believed I was a blue-collar bimbo was me. Different might not have been a code word for inferior to you, but it was to me. Only I couldn’t admit to that. I’d spent my whole life telling the world how proud I was of who I was and what I was. So I twisted things to fit my perceptions. I wasn’t the one who wanted to make me over into the perfect Mrs. Christopher Dodson Banks, it was yo
u. My insecurities about fitting into what you called ‘your side of the aisle’ weren’t my fault. How could they be? Everyone who knew me would tell you I had confidence coming out of my ears! It was you who made me feel unsure. And when I saw myself pretending to be someone I wasn’t, when I felt my sense of identity slipping away—when it seemed to me that Ms. Stand-Up-for-Herself Falco was turning into a spineless dishrag—I blamed you. ”

  It took Chris nearly a minute to find his voice. The guilt he felt was crushing. He was also humbled by his ex-wife’s insistence on exposing what she saw to be her own faults. She had no reason to mitigate his culpability in their marriage.

  No reason save that she was a woman of implacable personal integrity, as well as hard-earned professional accomplishment.

  “I never knew,” he finally said, cringing inwardly at the inadequacy of the admission.

  She looked him square in the eyes for several seconds, then averted her gaze. “I never said.”

  “Oh, Lucy.” Chris shook his head, regret searing through him like acid. “You shouldn’t have had to.”

  From outside the storage room door came the sound of hammering.

  Ask him, Lucy prodded herself. Yes, it’ll be ten years and a divorce decree late. But ask him!

  She couldn’t.

  Not yet.

  The question was fully formed. It had been fully formed for a long, long time. But she couldn’t force it out.

  If she asked and Chris answered yes, it would break her heart. She knew it.

  If she asked and he answered no...

  Lord.

  In a deep, dark corner of her soul, Lucia Annette Falco almost believed that would be worse.

  She inhaled on a shudder, her heart constricting as though it were being squeezed by a giant hand. Acutely aware that her ex-husband was watching her, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes as she’d done earlier.

  She felt exhausted. Wan. Weary. As fragile as a blown eggshell, emptied of substance and easy to crush.

  Finding her husband locked in an embrace with another woman would have been awful no matter who the woman was, Lucy reflected. But that it had been Irene Houghton...

  She’d known exactly who Irene was, thanks to Chris’s mother. But even had Elizabeth Banks neglected to allude to her son’s romantic history with the ex-debutante, Lucy would have recognized the elegantly beautiful blue-eyed blonde.

  Irene Houghton had been her nemesis. The embodiment of all the qualities that she, Lucia Annette Falco, had viewed herself as lacking.

  Had she been asked ten years ago to define in a single phrase her relationship with Chris, she probably would have said opposites attract. The phrase she would have offered had the equation been Chris and Irene was matched pair.

  Lucy bit her lip, once again trying to shove the past away. This time memory didn’t simply resist her efforts. It shoved back.

  No, she thought. Leave me alone.

  She’d wept those words over and over, the night she ran home to her family.

  Leave me...

  She was so tired. The New Year was only a few hours old and she felt as though she’d been slogging through it for a century.

  ...alone.

  So tired.

  So...tired.

  Eventually, Lucy slept. And as she slumbered, she dreamed. Not of the worst thing that had ever happened to her, but of one of the most wonderful.

  “Lucy... Chris uttered her name in a husky, half-suffocated voice. He managed to trap both her hands with one of his. He used the other to capture her chin and force her to look directly into his eyes. “Sweetheart. Please. Are you sure?”

  She gazed at him for several seconds, her body thrumming with expectation. Her cheeks felt flushed. Her lips a little swollen. The tips of her breasts ached. So did the delicately petaled flesh between her thighs.

  It was two months into their relationship. As delicious as the kissing and cuddling they’d done in the past had been, it was no longer enough. She wanted to belong to Chris in the fullest possible way. And she wanted this to be the night it came to pass.

  “Don’t you want to?” She infused the question with all the seductiveness at her virginal command. She heard him catch his breath. She watched desire detonate in a shower of topaz and emerald sparks in the depths of his eyes. A thrill of excitement raced through her.

  Chris gave a laugh that carried an edge of desperation. Perspiration sheened his brow. “If I wanted to any more, I’d be in pieces!”

  “Then let’s do it, Chris.” She pulled her hands free of his. Lifting her arms, she encircled his neck. Then she snuggled close. “Let’s make love.”

  Again he disengaged and eased her away from him. She was beginning to become more than a little frustrated. But the unsteadiness of his hands—to say nothing of the hard rod of flesh she’d pressed against a few moments ago—kept the emotion in check. The problem obviously was an attack of masculine nobility—something Tina Roberts had once warned could mess up a relationship in a major way, if a girl wasn’t extremely careful—rather than a dearth of sexual interest.

  “There’s only one first time, Lucy,” Chris said. “It’s not something you can undo afterward.”

  “I won’t want to undo anything afterward,” Lucy declared throatily. “I’ll only want to do it again.” Where these bold words had come from, she wasn’t certain. But she had no questions about the source of the next ones. They came straight from her heart. “I love you, Chris. I love you and I want to be with you.”

  He groaned, his sun-burnished skin pulling tight over his cheekbones. His hold on her altered in the space of a single hammering heartbeat. No longer was he trying to keep her at arm’s length. He now seemed to want to fuse their bodies together.

  “And I love you,” he said, a split second before he took her mouth.

  They kissed long and deep. She opened her lips to his tongue, welcoming its rough-velvet invasion. Her skin prickled. Her nipples puckered. A molten heat pooled between her thighs. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized that his clever fingers were busy undoing buttons and clasps.

  “Chris,” she whispered, clutching at the back of his head. “Oh, Chris.”

  “I need you,” he said, lavishing moist, openmouthed kisses up and down her throat. “I need you...so much.”

  They were on the sofa in the living room of his lakefront apartment. After a few more minutes of increasingly feverish foreplay, Chris muttered something that sounded like “Not here.”

  Although “here” seemed perfectly fine to Lucy, she didn’t protest when he swept her up and carried her into his bedroom. The sensation of being cradled in his arms was too entrancing.

  His clothing became a hateful barrier to her. She tried to do something to change the situation. Unfortunately, her hands were shaking so badly that she could scarcely pop the snap on the top of his jeans.

  “Oh, God,” Chris groaned as her knuckles grazed the denim-covered bulge of his arousal. “Sweetheart. You’re killing me. And if I die now...it’s going to be as a very unhappy man.”

  Evading her hands, he stripped himself. The process was fast, but imbued with a certain degree of finesse. Lucy trembled as she drank in the lithe, classically balanced lines of his physique. She also experienced a flash of uniquely feminine trepidation as she saw the potent proof of the need to which he’d admitted only a short time before.

  She lifted her eyes to his. His features were taut, like those of an endurance runner in the middle of a marathon. But his expression was the essence of tenderness.

  “Second thoughts?” he asked, clearly braced to call a halt if there were.

  “Y-yes,” she admitted tremulously, realizing it would do her no good to pretend otherwise. “And third and f-fourth and fifth ones.”

  “Lucy—”

  “But it’s the first thought that counts,” she went on. “I want us to make love, Chris. I want it with all my heart.”

  He opened his arms. She went to him withou
t hesitation. He lifted her up again and bore her to his bed. After laying her down on the mattress, he began to stroke her. Throat to hip. Hip to throat. She reached up, trying to pull him down into an embrace.

  Chris caught her hands and lifted them to his lips. “Wait,” he commanded, his warm breath eddying across her knuckles.

  But Lucy didn’t want to wait. Especially not when it seemed that the waiting meant she had to watch him turn away from her. She levered herself up on her elbows, a protest forming on the tip of her tongue.

  The protest dissolved, unspoken, when she saw him pull open the top drawer of a bedside chest and extract a small foil packet.

  “You don’t h-have to...” she began uncertainly. Earlier in the evening, she’d told him that she’d taken care of her contraceptive needs. Had he not believed her?

  “I want to,” he said simply. “Two kinds of protection are better than one, sweetheart.”

  The mattress gave slightly when he finally joined her on the bed. He stretched out beside her and gathered her into his arms. They kissed and caressed. Caressed and kissed.

  Lucy licked delicately at a bead of sweat that glistened like a tiny diamond in the hollow at the base of Chris’s throat. She breathed in his scent. She nosed his hair-whorled chest, nuzzling against one of his nipples.

  He skimmed the line of her collarbone with his lips, then dipped his head to claim the lushly curving flesh below it.

  Lucy’s breath jammed as her about-to-be lover pleasured her with teeth and tongue. She cried out when she felt his mouth settle over the tip of her right breast and begin to suck.

  She was eager. And awkward. And, undeniably, more than a little bit anxious. She tried to speed up the pace. Chris countered by slowing things down. His caresses became slow, searing explorations. His kisses were languid, loving tributes.

  “Easy, love,” he murmured against her ear. “Don’t rush. Don’t rush.”

  “Please...”

  “Let me feel your hands. Touch me, love.”

  Compelled by the need in his voice, she did. Tentatively at first, then with increasing confidence. Lucy wanted desperately to please Chris. His responses—the shattered gasps, the sudden shudders—assured her that she did.