Summer Reads Box Set, Books 4-6

by Freethy, Barbara

  "She's a little touchy where you're concerned." He paused. "Do you really think a divorce is in the works?"

  "That's what they both say. Are you that interested?"

  "Oh, I'm interested, all right."

  She sent him a wary look. "Because you want Alli or because you want me?"

  He turned sideways, putting his leg over the bench so he was straddling it, so he was facing her. "That's the first time you've ever admitted that you even noticed I want you."

  She swallowed uncomfortably. "You flirt with everyone, Jimmy. It's part of your DNA."

  "I'm not flirting with you now, I'm serious.”

  "How would I know that?"

  "Because you know me." He put one hand on the side of her face, his thumb caressing her cheekbone. "You know I want to kiss you right now."

  "That's the oysters talking."

  "That's me talking."

  "Jimmy, don't."

  "Don't what?"

  "I like our friendship."

  "I want more from you than friendship.”

  "I can't."

  "Because of me or because of Sam?"

  She wanted to look away, but his hand slipped into her hair and held her in place. "Maybe a little of both," she admitted.

  "Tessa." Jimmy shook his head, his eyes disappointed. "Where has he been all this time? If he wanted you..."

  "He's been with my sister. They have a little girl. She's the reason they got married, the reason they stayed married."

  "Until now?"

  "Until now," she agreed. "I don't know what happened. No one has said. But Alli seems to think that..." Tessa couldn't bring herself to say the words.

  "Seems to think what?"

  "That Sam still has feelings for me."

  "I see." His hand fell away from her hair, and he stood up. She felt suddenly chilled.

  "I have to talk to him, Jimmy. I have to understand what happened. That's why we're going sailing tomorrow. We need to have a conversation that we probably should have had nine years ago." She paused, feeling like she had to explain herself. "Sam was my first love, the guy I dreamed about marrying when I was twelve years old. I owe him—I owe myself at least this much."

  "First loves are tough to get over," Jimmy said, his voice cool and remote. "But I think you should be careful."

  "Why?"

  "Because you could get hurt again. Sam might have married your sister for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't negate the fact that they've spent the past nine years together."

  "If their marriage was good, they wouldn't be splitting up," she argued.

  "Maybe they didn't know how good it was.”

  "I'm not breaking them up. And by the way, you're not helping."

  "I'm not trying to. I want you to think with your brain instead of your heart."

  "I loved Sam," she told him, looking him straight in the eye. In fact, it felt strange to say the words out loud, strange but good. She'd been biting them back for a very long time. "And he loved me."

  "Then why did he sleep with your sister?"

  "Because I let him down," she cried, getting to her feet. "Because Alli was there, ready and waiting to take advantage of him. Because he was stupid. I don't know the answer. But it only happened the one time, and it changed everything."

  "Sex will do that."

  "I know it sounds silly to be carrying a torch for some guy who cheated on me, but Sam and I were inseparable from the time I was twelve years old until I was twenty. Eight years. He was the first one to get me to smile after my parents died. Sam saved me that winter. He listened to me for hours on end and helped me make friends here in town. Sam was my anchor, Jimmy. Through everything, he was the one who was there. I'll never forget what he did for me."

  "Tessa, that was a long time ago. People change. They grow up. Sam did a lot for you when you were a kid. But let me ask you this." His eyes bored into hers. "What does Sam do for you now?"

  She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.

  "Does Sam know anything about you?" Jimmy persisted. "Does he know that you sneak cream into your coffee when no one is looking? Does he know that you hate that moment when the plane takes off, that you pretend to be calm while you're gripping the armrest as if it were a lifesaver? Does he know you love those little apple tartlets at that bakery in Denmark? Does he know how you can work a camera, work a room with just your smile and the flick of your finger?" Jimmy grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. "Does Sam know what you think, what you care about, what you want out of your life?"

  She looked at him in amazement, caught by his uncanny assessment of her quirks. "How do you know all that about me?"

  "I've been there, paying attention, babe."

  His eyes were too intense, too personal, so she looked at the water, at the horizon that had once beckoned to her in a way she couldn't resist. "I don't know what to say."

  "You don't have to say anything. I can see right into your head when I take your picture."

  "You cannot," she said, but his words were disturbing. He knew her better than she'd realized. Somehow Jimmy had snuck in when she wasn't looking.

  "The eyes are the windows to the soul. Don't you ever look at your own photographs?"

  "I don't see anything but the makeup hiding the blemishes and the powder lightening my eyes and the hair spray holding my hair in perfect position."

  "What do you see when you look at your sister?"

  She stared at him for a long minute. "Alli? I don't know."

  "Come on, give it a shot, describe her to me."

  "You just spent the afternoon with her, and I saw you taking photographs of all of us, so I'm sure you can see her for yourself later on."

  "You don't look at her, do you? Funny, she doesn't look at you either."

  "We prefer it that way."

  "Weren't you ever close?"

  "Maybe a hundred years ago."

  "What happened?"

  "I told you."

  "Besides Sam—what else broke you apart?”

  "It wasn't any one thing."

  "Come on, Tessa, talk to me."

  She hesitated. "All right. The beauty pageants started the competition between us. My parents entered me first, because I was the oldest, and Alli, well, she wasn't the prettiest baby. I'm not saying that to be mean, she just wasn't. And she was cranky all the time. I knew to smile at the right moment. Alli usually picked that moment to pull down her socks or burst into tears. Pretty soon, my parents took me on my own and left Alli behind. But I never tried to make her feel bad."

  "She felt bad anyway."

  "I suppose. We didn't talk about it back then. And when our parents died, we were really close for a while. We shared a bedroom at Grams's house, and we'd talk for hours into the night. We felt like we only had each other."

  "Until Sam came along," Jimmy said somewhat dramatically.

  She made a face at him. "Yes. Sam lived next door. He was my age, and we were instant friends. Alli couldn't stand it. She did everything she could to make trouble for us."

  Tessa paused, lost in the memories.

  "Do you blame her for feeling left out?"

  "I guess not. But you can't make someone like you. Alli couldn't ever figure that out."

  Jimmy smiled to himself. "That's a tough concept to accept when you want someone badly enough. For what it's worth, I don't think Alli is so horrible."

  "You've only spent one day with her."

  "Yeah, but I looked at her, you didn't. I bet if you ever did, you'd be surprised by what you saw. In fact, while you're at it, you might want to take a good look at Sam, too."

  * * *

  "You just can't stop yourself, can you?" Sam said to Alli as the Ford Explorer sped down the highway, his foot heavy on the gas pedal. "You had to goad Tessa. Or was it me you were trying to get a reaction from?"

  Alli ran a brush through her hair, checking out her reflection in the mirror on the sun visor in front of her.

&nb
sp; "I was having a little fun. It was no big deal."

  "Just a little fun, yeah, right. You knew kissing Jimmy would hurt Tessa and you did it anyway." He glanced over at her and immediately wished he hadn't.

  Her eyes were sparkling with mischief, her cheeks a rosy pink, her hair a glorious tangle of reds and golds that reminded him of incredible sunsets over the ocean. He'd always thought Alli was pretty, but today she looked spectacular.

  He tried to regroup, to remember that he was mad at her. But he was so distracted he wanted to stop the car and run his hands through her hair, kiss her sunburned lips, unbutton the three pearls on the T-shirt that even now strained against her breasts and... Talk about straining, he adjusted his position, wishing he'd worn his looser jeans, because his body was at full alert.

  "Jimmy is a flirt," Alli said, flipping back the visor and slipping the brush into her purse. "I just played along. Tessa would have done the same thing if you hadn't been standing there. You were certainly cozy enough in the boat. What were you talking about?"

  "Oysters," he said shortly, irritated that she didn't seem to be at all affected by their closeness or the number of oysters they'd both eaten that day. He felt like Jimmy, wanting to demand a kiss to appease his libido.

  "Sure, oysters."

  He looked over at her and shook his head. "You drive me crazy."

  "Well, you'll be free soon enough." She turned her head toward the window, so he could no longer see her expression.

  Free. The word seemed too simple for the complicated emotions running through him. He'd always thought of himself as a straightforward man. He didn't lie. He didn't play games. He didn't cheat. But here he was feeling lust for one woman, at the same time wondering whether or not he still had feelings for her sister.

  A long time ago he'd thought of himself as a one-woman man, and Tessa had been that woman. Then Alli had come along and they'd married and shared so many days and nights together that she'd become a part of his existence. She had carved a place in his life, a place that now felt empty, more empty than he would have imagined.

  "Do you want to see Tessa again?" Alli asked quietly.

  A flash of guilt ran through him. "I'm taking her out on the boat tomorrow," he answered, because there couldn't be any more lies between them.

  She turned her head, her brown eyes pained. "On the boat?"

  "We need to talk."

  "Why can't you just have coffee like everyone else?"

  "Tessa can't blink without someone reporting it to the newspaper."

  "Well, you'll have all the privacy you want on the boat." Her expression was pure hurt.

  "Someday you might have to learn to trust me, Alli."

  "It doesn't matter if I trust you or not. I told you I wanted to set you free, and I meant it. If that means you go to Tessa, then that's what it means."

  He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, feeling more restless with each word. He saw a view point directly ahead and pulled into a parking spot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, because with the way he felt right now he was afraid he would drive them off a cliff if he didn't stop.

  "What are you doing?" Alli asked in surprise. "We have a soccer game to get to."

  "Oh, we'll get there, all right. But first you and I are going to have a very long-overdue conversation."

  Alli turned to face him. "What do you want to talk about?"

  "The box of photographs you found in my office.”

  "Why do you want to talk about that now?”

  "Because I do. Because we didn't really discuss it before."

  "There's nothing to discuss."

  "Of course there is. I didn't collect those clippings, Alli. Your grandmother did. And last year she brought them to me and asked me to keep them for Megan."

  Alli looked both surprised and hurt. "Grams wouldn't have done that. She never would have..." Alli's words faded away as he held her gaze and refused to let go. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  "I didn't want to break the bond between you and Phoebe. I knew you would see it as a betrayal, Phoebe choosing Tessa over you. So I kept the box. I suppose I could have insisted that Phoebe keep them at her house, but I guess there was a small part of me that enjoyed seeing what Tessa was up to."

  "So you were interested in the clippings after all?"

  He hated the shimmer of pain in her eyes, the trembling quality of her voice. "Was it so wrong to be interested in someone I grew up with, someone I once cared about?"

  "Yes. Yes, it was," she said passionately. "Do you know how I felt when I found that box? It was like seeing you in the arms of another woman. And the woman was Tessa. You can't imagine how awful I felt," she continued, the words pouring out in a rush. "It wasn't just the box itself, it was the secret you were keeping. You knew those photographs would hurt me. That's why you hid them away. Isn't it? Otherwise, you would have just set them on the table."

  He forced himself to swallow back an automatic denial. Maybe, just maybe, there was a shred of truth in what she was saying. "I never thought I was cheating on you by looking at photographs of Tessa. Half the world looks at photographs of Tessa."

  "Half the world isn't married to her sister." She took a deep breath. "You hurt me, Sam. I thought you were better than that."

  "Better than what? I'm a man, Alli. I'm human. I make mistakes. So do you. We're supposed to be able to forgive each other when we screw up."

  "I know that," she said wearily. "I told you before it wasn't just the box. That was the last straw, not the first. You've looked at our marriage as a jail sentence—a sentence that won't end until Megan grows up. That's what I can't live with anymore, Sam. I can't stay with someone who is never going to love me the way I deserve to be loved. I don't want to mark time for the next ten years. I want to live my life, and I think you want the same thing."

  "I've done everything I can to make you happy. If you want to call that marking time--”

  "You haven't done everything," she said, her voice rising again with the force of her emotions. "You haven't let go of Tessa, not deep in your heart where it counts."

  He shook his head, feeling frustrated and angry. "Maybe you're the one who won't let go of Tessa. Have you ever thought of that?"

  "I'm trying to let go. That's why I asked for the divorce. Because one person in love in a marriage isn't enough. We can't pretend anymore. We have to be honest with each other."

  "I haven't been pretending to care about you the last nine years. Hell, I've always cared about you, even when you made me nuts." He took a deep breath, knowing he had to tell her something he had only recently been able to admit to himself. "Do you really think I would have made love to you all those years ago if I hadn't felt something?"

  "You were a teenage boy. You didn't need to feel anything but horny." She sat back in her seat. "I think we have a soccer game to get to."

  "Oh, hell, Alli. Why do you have to make everything so damn difficult?" He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, wishing he'd never stopped in the first place. She was hardheaded and stubborn and she wanted too damn much from him. She always had.

  * * *

  The drive to the soccer field passed in stiff, painful silence. Alli wanted to break it, but she didn't know how. Sam kept confusing her with his words, with his actions. On one hand he seemed to be apologizing, but on the other, he still wouldn't ask her to come back to him. So they sat in their separate corners of the car and said nothing until he pulled into the parking lot by the soccer field and shut off the engine.

  "I don't want to fight in front of Megan," she said abruptly. "It isn't fair to her."

  "I don't want that either." He started to open the door, but she stopped him once again.

  "Wait," she said. She couldn't let things end this way. It was too awkward, too unsettled. Megan would pick up on the tension in a second.

  "What now?" he asked.

  "I want you to know that I think you're a good father in spite of everything else. Megan c
ouldn't have a better dad. She knows that, and so do I, in case you thought otherwise."

  His expression softened slightly. "And you're a good mother, Alli."

  Finally, some common ground they could share. She sent him a tentative olive branch of a smile. "Maybe I do ask too much of you, wanting you to give up all your memories, all your feelings for Tessa. But maybe you ask too much of me, too, expecting me to be able to forget her when you can't forget her. I'm glad she's here. Because you have to find out what you are to each other. Until you do that, we're just going to be circling around her the way we always have, unable to move forward, unable to go back. We can't keep running in place. We're not getting anywhere."

  "Have you considered the fact that Tessa has moved on? She came back for your grandmother, not for me."

  "But, she wants--” Alli stopped. She had no idea what Tessa wanted, not really. She seemed to want Sam, but then again, she had waited an awfully long time to come back.

  "You're trying to control it all, Alli. But you can't. I have a mind of my own and so does your sister."

  And on that note, they got out of the car and walked over to the field where Megan's team was warming up. Along the way, they stopped to say hello to some of the other parents, and they both smiled and acted like nothing was wrong—the way they always did.

  "I hate this," she muttered. "Everyone else seems to have the perfect happy family."

  "Don't kid yourself. We're not the only ones with problems."

  Megan waved to them from the field. "Hi, Mommy. Hi, Daddy," she yelled.

  Alli willed herself to relax as she waved and smiled to Megan, but her body was so tense it almost ached. Being with Sam but not really being with him was so difficult. He thought she made things hard, well, he made them even harder.

  "Take a deep breath," Sam said in her ear.

  She flung him a quick look. "I'm fine."

  "No, you're not, you're about ready to pop. We're not going to solve anything in the next five minutes, so try to relax."

  "I'm trying. I just feel so restless."

  "The oysters sure didn't help," he said dryly.