She had a suspicion he read her shame and anxiety as if her face were the open screen of his laptop.
“Real life, remember?”
“Yes. All right.” She was taking a risk in baring her life for his scrutiny. In court, he could use her poverty against her. But he could have done that anyway, she reminded herself. It wasn’t any secret.
And she was beginning to believe, to hope, that he wouldn’t. If she was wrong, heaven help her.
“I’d better go check on Shelly.” She picked up her silverware and glass. “Unless you need help cleaning up…”
Adam crossed the kitchen and took them from her, his fingers bumping hers. “Don’t be ridiculous. Go.”
Foolish that her pulse bumped in sync.
“Thank you, Adam. For listening.”
His eyes softened. “We should have talked sooner.”
“No one said this would be easy.”
“Has anyone else ever had to figure it out?” He released a breath. “Good night, Lynn. Make yourself at home if you wake up before I do in the morning.”
She edged backward. “Right.” At home. “Sure.”
“I left Rose’s shampoo in the shower. I’ll put out clean towels.”
“Thank you.” Why was she still standing here? Why was she wondering, hoping, at the way his eyes seemed to darken, at the step he took forward?
“Rose needs a mother’s touch.”
Rose. Not him. Of course not him.
She was being foolish. He looked at her oddly sometimes because of her resemblance to his Rosebud. Not because she was a woman and he was a man.
This new plan wouldn’t work, either, if she started suffering delusions. So don’t, Lynn told herself sharply.
With a cool nod and another good-night, she went.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ADAM TRIED TO ROLL OVER and had to muffle a groan. The damned couch was not only a foot too short for his big frame, but it was about as comfortable as squatting against a driftwood log on a rocky beach: okay for a while when the sun was hot and the beat of the surf steady and lulling, but nowhere you’d want to snooze for eight hours.
Lynn had offered, four or five times, to sleep out here and let him have her bedroom. Offered, hell, she’d tried to insist. But, no, he was too chivalrous to accept.
He still didn’t regret his refusal, and not just because he liked to think he was a gentleman. It would have made sense for her to sleep on the couch instead of him. She probably could have stretched out. She might have even rested more easily on the lumps and bumps. Along with being a good ten inches shorter than he was, she must weight fifty pounds less.
What Adam hadn’t liked was the idea of invading her private space. Of being surrounded by her scent and her most intimate possessions. Oh, she’d have cleaned up for him. No sexy bras would be draped across the Lincoln rocker he’d glimpsed from the hall, and she wouldn’t leave a diary open to yesterday’s entry, but her makeup decorated a dresser, her books covered a bedside table, the prints on the walls were her favorites, the contents of her drawers…well, he’d bet homemade bags of dried lavender and rose petals perfumed her lingerie.
That one glimpse into her sanctum was enough, thank you. The bed was an old-fashioned double with a mahogany spooled head and footboard. It was heaped with pillows in lacy cases and covered by a fluffy chenille spread the color of butter. The makeup was arranged on embroidered linen darkened to old ivory. Late roses spilled languorously from a cream-colored stoneware pitcher.
The room was utterly feminine and graceful. Pretty, but in a womanly way rather than a girlish one. The fact that Lynn Chanak was a woman, and a sexy one at that, was something he tried hard not to think about.
He’d become good at blocking out that kind of awareness. Living like a monk, a man had to build some defenses.
Oh, he’d tried dating after the first year of mourning. Rhonda McIntyre, a commodities broker, had cornered him in the elevator and flirted with so little subtlety even he’d noticed. Why not? he’d figured.
The evening was a flop. She made plain her disinterest in children. They talked trading and the bull market for lack of any other topic. He kissed her on her doorstep and declined her invitation to go in.
A couple of months later, he’d dated another woman a few times—a single mother he’d met at the preschool. She was struggling to make ends meet as a secretary, and she had a hungry, desperate quality that scared him. She wanted marriage, and she wanted it soon.
Since then, he hadn’t bothered. Now and again, a woman would turn his head on the street. Maybe her leggy stride, or the lush curve of a bottom in a tight miniskirt. A cleavage, or the smooth line of a stranger’s throat as she laughed.
He was tempted sometimes to call Rhonda or another woman like her, just because his body ached for release. He’d never imagined being celibate for over three years. Nights, Adam stayed up later than he should, because climbing into bed alone was when he felt the loss. Jenny came to him most readily then, with an airy laugh or a teasing tickle of her fingers, and he would almost roll to gather her into his arms when he’d remember with a painful stab that she was gone for good.
Her death had come so damned fast. No time to prepare, to say goodbye.
The afternoon it happened, he’d talked to her quickly from the office, half his attention on the notes he’d been making on a new software company. He had dropped his car off for new brakes that morning, and the mechanic had let him know they had to wait for a part. “No problem,” Jenny had declared. They chose one of their favorite restaurants in downtown Portland and arranged to meet there. He’d walk over, they’d go home together.
“If you’re sure you don’t mind being seen with a woman shaped like a gray whale,” she’d said, so blithely he could smile into the telephone knowing she was only fishing for a compliment. She was well aware of her beauty, body swollen with his child, her breasts heavier in his hands at night, the mystery making her gaze remote often enough to tantalize any man. Jennifer had never lacked in confidence, during her pregnancy least of all.
Grinning, the last thing he said to her was, “Just make sure they seat you before I arrive,” and she’d told him he was a rat.
Neither of them said goodbye or “I love you.”
He was ten minutes late. Jenny wasn’t there, hadn’t been seated. He had a drink while he waited. Punctuality never had been one of her virtues. When she was half an hour late, he tried her at home. No answer. She had a way of forgetting to turn on her cell phone, but he tried it, too.
A police officer had answered, told him his wife had been hit head-on by a drunk driver. She had been transported to the hospital with a potential head injury.
She was already gone, his Jenny. Dead in every way that mattered, except that the beat of her heart and the soft machine-induced breaths sustained their baby. For lack of a brake cylinder in stock at the garage.
But cursing fate didn’t change a thing.
From that day forward, he looked at other women, and he saw Jenny. He couldn’t bed one and close his eyes. She would move wrong, sigh wrong, be too patient.
So he stayed celibate even when his body protested.
Like tonight.
Thinking about Lynn Chanak’s bed had more to do with his restlessness than the lumpy cushions did. Hell, maybe he’d have been better off between her sheets than imagining her there.
At bedtime she’d used the bathroom first. Thinking he’d heard her door shut, Adam went down the hall with his toothbrush just in time to meet her face-to-face outside the bathroom. Her faded flannel bathrobe gaped enough to expose a fine white cotton nightgown edged with lace as pretty as that on her sheets. Brushed until it crackled with energy, her hair tumbled over her shoulders and breasts. She smelled like soap and woman, her cheeks pink from scrubbing.
God help him, he’d looked down to see her bare feet peeking out beneath the ragged hem of her robe. Her toes, curled on the cold floorboards, were a hell of a lot sexier th
an Rhonda McIntyre’s musk-scented cleavage as she deliberately bent to pick something up right in front of him.
Blushing, murmuring that the bathroom was all his, Lynn had fled, leaving him with an ache that kept him awake with a vengeance.
His sexual fantasies these days weren’t specific. He imagined burying himself in a woman’s body without thinking too much about her voice or her face or her cold feet sneaking to warm themselves against him in bed. Now, being tormented on Lynn Chanak’s ancient couch, every time he closed his eyes, he saw himself tangling his fingers in that mass of glorious hair. He imagined her pretty, virginal nightgown. The smell of her soap and the lavender and roses drifting from her bureau.
She was the mother of his daughter. Her body had once swelled with another man’s seed, but it was his Rosebud she’d carried. Knowing that muddled his thoughts. When he tried to see his Jenny pregnant, he imagined Lynn instead.
It didn’t help to tell himself that she’d be horrified if she knew he was lying out here on her couch lusting after her.
What if he acted on it? What if he kissed her? What if she didn’t slap him?
Would he long for Jenny when he bedded Lynn?
Swearing, Adam rolled over again and stared up at the dark ceiling.
Even if he didn’t think about Jenny, what he felt wasn’t love. It was celibacy butting up against involuntary intimacy with a woman. It was encountering her barefooted in her nightie with her teeth freshly brushed and her cheeks rosy. It was seeing her as his child’s mother.
And it could not be. The inevitable hurt feelings and anger would destroy any hope of sharing their daughters.
Grimly Adam tried to shut off the show his imagination was directing. Obviously, it was time—past time—he found a woman with whom he could laugh and enjoy sex, if nothing else.
Any woman but Lynn Chanak.
OF COURSE, BY MONDAY morning, rain dripped dismally from a gray sky, killing his hope of taking the girls to the beach. The kitchen table didn’t seat four, so Adam sat wedged between Rose and Shelly while Lynn munched toast and served them.
“No movie theater in town,” he remembered.
“Nope. Lincoln City is the closest. And I don’t think anything is playing that they’d enjoy.”
“Any ideas?” he asked without hope.
“We could hang around here.” Whisking back and forth between stove and table, she barely glanced at him. “The girls’ll be happy playing. You can do whatever it is brokers do. Use your laptop to check what prices are going up or down. That terrorist bombing in Rome probably panicked a few stockholders.”
He didn’t give a damn whether Intel had dropped a point and a half because some zealot had blown up himself and half an office building just outside the Vatican. He didn’t want to spend the day with her. But he’d had the girls yesterday. Today was, in a sense, her turn. He couldn’t decide to leave until mid-afternoon at least.
“Sure,” he said without enthusiasm. “Sounds good.”
“You girls could dress up,” Lynn suggested. “I’ll get the box down if you want.”
“Dress up?” Rose brightened. “We could have a parade. Like we do at preschool.”
“Yeah!” Shelly bounced. “And maybe sing!”
“And dance.”
“You could put on a performance for us.” Lynn set more bacon on the table.
“Let’s go practice.” The girls were gone in a flurry, Lynn behind them to get down “the box.”
Adam usually avoided cholesterol-laden foods like bacon, but he gloomily began crunching a strip. When Lynn reappeared, he asked, “What’s in the box?”
“Oh…” She smiled and took a tea bag from a canister. “Dress-up clothes. I’m always adding new stuff from the thrift store. I have feather boas and gaudy jewelry and high heels and scarves. Lots of sequins. You’ll see.” Pouring hot water into her mug, she added over her shoulder, “But what makes it magic is, I only let Shelly into it every once in a while. On a day when she’s really bored. Or like today, when she and a friend can put on a production.”
Magic. Adam guessed he did okay as a parent, but he didn’t know how to make magic. This woman did.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Surprising himself, he told her.
“Nonsense.” She joined him at the table. “A dress-up box is a girl thing. Why would you think of it?”
Jennifer would have, he knew.
“That doesn’t mean you don’t come up with your own ideas. Or at least provide Rose with the opportunity to find them elsewhere.”
“Preschool.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“If she loved it there, she wouldn’t hate going.”
Lynn lifted out the tea bag, squeezed it and set it on the edge of a breakfast plate. The rich scent of orange and cinnamon overrode the greasier flavor of bacon.
“I don’t know about that,” she said calmly. “Just because Rose cries when she has to say goodbye to you doesn’t mean she has a terrible time. Doesn’t she tell you about her day?”
“Sure she does.” He ate another strip of bacon, simply because it was there. “They’re teaching the kids sign language. She shows me new signs every day. The goat tries to eat her hair, which means we have to wash it that night. I catch her sometimes giggling with a bunch of other girls when I get there early.”
“I rest my case.”
He took a last swallow of coffee and tried not to notice that her knees were bumping his under the small table. “Since you’re so wise, tell me this—why do I worry constantly about whether I’m screwing up, while you know instinctively what to do? Is it the difference between a woman and a man?”
That difference was exactly what he didn’t want to think about. So why throw it out on the table for discussion?
Because it was on his mind, he concluded.
“I know women who are terrible with their kids and men who are great. No.” She shook her head, and her braid flopped over her shoulder. “I suspect it has more to do with the fact that my mother was an affectionate woman and yours wasn’t. Parenting is a learned skill. Maybe it is easier to learn as a child, like a second language. You’re having to work a little harder. That’s all.”
How simple. He felt like an idiot to be so comforted by an answer as obvious as this one.
“What would you normally do today?” he asked, more abruptly than was polite.
“Clean the kitchen.” Lynn nodded toward the sink. “Do a little housework. Pay bills. Thumb through publishers’ catalogs.”
“Don’t let me distract you.”
Her clear-eyed gaze saw right through him. He wanted them not to spend the day together.
“Sure,” she said agreeably. “The phone is here. Do you want to spread out on the table? I’ll have it cleared in a minute.”
“Let me help.”
She’d already pushed back her chair. “This is a one-cook kitchen. We’d be tripping over each other.”
Instead of going to the living room for his briefcase and laptop computer, Adam watched as she ran hot water into the sink. No dishwasher. He’d vaguely thought everybody had one.
In the past twenty-four hours, he had become shockingly aware of how near to the bone Lynn Chanak must live. The furniture was all secondhand. No, third-or fourth-hand. The linoleum in the bathroom and kitchen were both worn to the point where the pattern had become a memory and seams were peeling. She and Shelly had two bedrooms—if you could call Shelly’s eight-by-eight feet with a slanting ceiling a room. Crummy bathroom. Creaky plumbing. A small eating space in the kitchen and a living room no bigger than his den. Woodwork and floors needed stripping or replacing, windows were single pane, and he wondered about the building’s wiring.
It appalled him to think about the reaction of Jennifer’s parents, if they could see where their granddaughter was growing up.
Funny thing was, the only uncomfortable part of this apartment was the couch. The place was tiny, too small fo
r two adults and two children, but probably fine for just a mom and toddler. With the same imagination she’d used in creating the dress-up box, Lynn had managed to give the old house charm on a shoestring.
She’d rag-rolled paint on plaster walls to subtle effect and used bright enamel on wood furniture. Posters of far-off places and wreaths of dried flowers brightened bare spots. The tiny hall was hung with family photos. He’d lingered that morning to study them. Bright pillows were probably hand-sewn rather than bought; he’d bet she had crocheted the afghan, as well. She had an eye for color, he thought, an ability to bring cheer to the drabbest room.
His own house could use a little.
“I’m done,” she said briskly, whisking a dishcloth across the table. “It’s all yours.”
“Thanks.”
He tried to concentrate after that, but it was hard when the girls kept popping out for an opinion on the latest ensemble or to ask the words to a song. And he remained conscious of Lynn, who murmured apologetically when she slipped into the kitchen for stamps or a cold drink, who eventually heated soup and made sandwiches for everyone. When the girls at last teetered through their dances in gowns worthy of Vanna White and heels high enough to do a swan dive from, it was Lynn he noticed most. Her delight was so genuine, her laughs in the right place, her clapping endearingly enthusiastic.
She had that magical ability to see through a child’s eyes. In that, she reminded him of Jenny, who had never seemed quite grown-up to him.
But unlike Jenny, who had never worked, Lynn successfully ran a small business and coped with a young child. On the way to the bathroom this morning, he’d seen her worry as she wrote checks, sighed, laid an envelope aside, then changed her mind and opened it again. She must have nothing put away. What kind of health insurance did she carry? he wondered, when he should have been thinking about the alarming, precipitate drop in the price per share of a small software company that had recently gone public and which he’d recommended to his clients.
Whose Baby? Page 10
