hapter Twenty

For two weeks, Cal stayed away from Heartache Mountain. During the first week, he got drunk three times and took a swing at Kevin, who’d refused his demand to get the hell out of Dodge. During the second week, he started to go after her half a dozen times, but his pride wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t the one who’d run away! He wasn’t the one who’d screwed everything up with unreasonable demands.

He also had to face the fact that he wasn’t absolutely sure any of those stubborn women would let him in the house. Apparently the only men welcome there were Ethan, who didn’t count because he was Ethan, and Kevin Tucker, who sure as helldid count. Cal seethed as he thought of Tucker driving up to Heartache Mountain whenever he pleased, getting fed and fussed over, of Tucker, who somehow or

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another seemed to have moved into Cal’s own house!

The first night Cal had gotten drunk at the Mountaineer, Tucker had swiped his keys, as if Cal weren’t smart enough to have already figured out he wasn’t in any condition to drive. It was the same night Cal had swung at him, but his heart hadn’t been in it, and he’d missed. Next thing he knew, he was slumped in the passenger seat of Tucker’s seventy-thousand-dollar Mitsubishi Spyder while Kevin drove him home, and he hadn’t been able to get rid of the kid since.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t told Kevin he could stay. As a matter of fact, he distinctly remembered ordering him out of his house. But Kevin had stuck around like a damned watchdog, even though he had a perfectly good rental house, not to mention Sally Terryman. The next thing Cal knew, the two of them were watching game films and he was showing Kevin how he always went to his first option instead of being patient, reading the defense, and finding the open man.

At least watching films with Kevin kept his mind off the fact that he missed the Professor so bad his teeth ached, which didn’t mean he was any closer to figuring out what to do about it. He wasn’t ready to be married forever and ever, not when he needed all his energy focused on playing ball, and not when he had no other life’s work waiting for him. But he also wasn’t nearly ready to lose Jane. Why couldn’t she have left things as they were instead of making demands?

Crawling on his hands and knees up Heartache Mountain so he could beg her to come back was unthinkable. He didn’t crawl for anybody. What he needed was a reason to go up there, but he couldn’t think of a single one he wanted to admit out loud.

He still didn’t understand why she’d stayed around instead of flying back to Chicago, but he was glad it had happened, since it was giving her time to come to her senses. She’d said she loved him, and she wouldn’t have said those words if she didn’t mean them. Maybe today was the day she’d be woman enough to admit her mistake and come back to him.

The door chimes sounded, but he wasn’t in the mood for company, and he ignored them. He hadn’t been sleeping too well or eating much more than an occasional bologna sandwich. Even Lucky Charms had lost their appeal—they held too many painful memories—so he’d been substituting coffee for breakfast. He rubbed a hand over his stubbly jaw and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d shaved; but he didn’t feel like shaving. He didn’t feel like doing anything except watching game films and yelling at Kevin.

The door chimes rang again, and he frowned. It couldn’t be Tucker because somehow the sonovabitch had gotten a house key of his own. Maybe it was—

His heart made a queer jolt in his chest, and he banged his elbow on the doorframe as he made a dash for the foyer. But when he yanked the door open, he saw his father standing on the other side instead of the Professor.

Jim stormed in waving a supermarket tabloid folded open to an article. “Have you seen this? Maggie Lowell shoved it at me, right after I gave her a Pap. By God, if I were you, I’d sue that wife of yours for every penny she has, and if you don’t do it, I will! I don’t care what you say about her. I had that woman’s number from the beginning, and you’re too blind to see the truth.” His tirade abruptly ended as he took in Cal’s appearance. “What the hell have you done with yourself? You look terrible.”

Cal snatched the tabloid out of his father’s hand. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself and the Professor that had been snapped at O’Hare the morning they’d left for North Carolina. He looked

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grim; she, dazed. But it wasn’t the photograph that made his stomach drop to the bottom of his feet. It was the headline below it.

I Trapped the NFL’s Best (And Dumbest) Quarterback into Marriageby Dr. Jane Darlington Bonner.

“Shit.”

“You’ll have a lot more to say than that when you read this piece of crap!” Jim exclaimed. “I don’t care if she’s pregnant or not—the woman’s a compulsive liar! She says in here that she posed as a hooker and pretended to be yourbirthday present so she could get herself pregnant. How did you ever get tangled up with her?”

“It’s like I told you, Dad. We had a fling, and she got pregnant. It was just one of those things.”

“Well, apparently the truth wasn’t exciting enough, so she had to go and invent this outlandish story. And you know what? The people who read this rag are going to believe it’s the truth. They’re actually going to believe that’s the way it happened.”

Cal crumpled the tabloid in his fist. He’d wanted a good excuse to go see his wife, and now he had it.

It was blissful, this life without men, or so they told themselves. Jane and Lynn lazed like cats in the sun and didn’t comb their hair until noon. In the evening, they fed Annie her meat and potatoes, then smeared cottage cheese on ripe pears for themselves and called it supper. They stopped answering the phone, stopped wearing bras, and Lynn tacked a poster of a muscular young man in a Speedo to the kitchen wall. When Rod Stewart came on the radio, they danced with each other. Jane forgot her inhibitions, and her feet flew like dove’s wings over the carpet.

To Jane, the rickety old house was everything a home should be. She snapped beans and filled the rooms with wildflowers. She put them in carnival glass tumblers, china bud vases, and a Bagels 2 Go commuter mug Lynn found on the top shelf. She didn’t know exactly how she and Lynn had developed such an attachment to each other; maybe it was because their husbands were so much alike, and they didn’t need any words of explanation to understand the other’s pain.

They allowed Kevin into their women’s house because he entertained them. He made them laugh and feel desirable even with pear juice trickling down their chins and seedpods caught in their hair. They let Ethan in, too, because they didn’t have the heart to turn him away; but they were glad when he left since he couldn’t hide his worry.

Lynn gave up her women’s club meetings and coordinated outfits. She forgot to color her hair or do her nails, which grew ragged at the cuticle. Jane’s computer stayed in the trunk of her Escort. Instead of trying to unlock the Theory of Everything, she spent most of her hours lying on an old wicker chaise that sat in the corner of the front porch, where she did nothing but let her baby grow.

They were blissfully happy. They told each other so every day. But then the sun would set and their conversation would begin to lag. One of them would sigh while the other stared out at the gathering dusk.

Along with the night, loneliness settled over the rickety old house on Heartache Mountain. They found themselves yearning for a heavier tread, a deeper voice. During the day, they remembered that they had been betrayed by the men they’d loved too well, but at night their house of women no longer seemed quite so blissful. They got into the habit of going to bed early to make the nights shorter and then rising at dawn.

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Their days developed a pattern, and there was nothing to separate that particular morning two weeks after Jane had come to stay on Heartache Mountain from any of the others. She fed Annie her breakfast, did some chores, and took a walk. Just after she got back, a particularly bouncy tune from Mariah Carey came on VH-1, and she made Lynn stop ironing the curtains she’d washed so they could dance. Then she relaxed on the porch. By the time the lunch dishes were put away, she was ready to work in the garden.

The muscles in her arms ached as she tilled the soil between the garden rows, using a hoe to uproot the weeds that threatened her precious bean plants. The day was warm, and it would have been smarter to do this in the morning, but schedules had lost their allure for her. In the morning she had been too busy lying on the chaise growing her baby.

She straightened to rest her back and propped her palm on the handle of the hoe. The breeze caught the skirt of the old-fashioned calico print housedress she wore and whipped it against her knees. It was soft and threadbare from many washings. Annie said it had once been her favorite.

Maybe she’d get Ethan or Kevin to unload her computer if either came to visit today. Or maybe she wouldn’t. What if she started to work and Rod Stewart came on the radio? She might miss a chance to dance. Or what if, while she lost herself in equations, a new crop of weeds grew up near her bean plants and threatened them with suffocation?

No. Work was not a good idea, even though Jerry Miles was almost certainly plotting behind the scenes to finish off her career. Work was definitely not a good idea when she had beans to weed, a baby to grow. Although the Theory of Everything beckoned her, she’d lost the stomach for bureaucracy. Instead, she gazed at the mountain sky and pretended it marked the boundary of her life.

That was how Cal found her. In the garden, with her palm curled over the handle of a hoe and her face lifted to the sky.

His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her standing against the sun in a faded calico housedress. Her French braid was coming undone so that blond wisps formed a corona about her head. She looked as if she were part of the sky and the earth, a joining of the elements.

Sweat and the breeze had molded the dress to her body, displaying, as clearly as if she were naked, the shape of her breasts and the hard round belly where his baby grew. She’d unfastened two of the buttons at the top of the dress’s scoopy neck, and the sides fell apart in a V over a damp, dusty chest.

She was brown as a berry: her arms and legs, her dirt-smudged face, that moist V of skin that pointed to her breasts. She looked like a mountain woman, one of those strong, stoic creatures who had eked a living out of this unforgiving soil during the depression.

With her face still lifted to the sky, she wiped the back of her arm across her forehead, leaving a dirty streak in its place. His mouth went dry as the fabric stretched tight over those small high breasts and caught just beneath her rounding belly. She had never been so beautiful to him as she was at that moment, standing without any cosmetics in his grandmother’s garden and looking every one of her thirty-four years.

The tabloid newspaper rustled against his thigh, and Annie’s voice rang out from behind him. “You get off my land, Calvin. Nobody invited you here!”

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Jane’s eyes flew open, and she dropped the hoe.

He turned in time to see his father charging around the side of the house. “Put that shotgun down, you crazy old coot!”

His mother appeared on the back porch and stopped behind Annie. “Well, now, aren’t we just a picture ofPsychology Today ’s Family of the Year.”

His mother. Although he’d spoken to her over the phone, she’d ducked his dinner invitations, and he hadn’t seen her in weeks. What had happened to her? She never used sarcasm, but her voice fairly dripped with it. Shocked, he took in the other changes.

Instead of one of her expensive casual outfits, she wore a pair of black jeans unevenly cut off at mid-thigh, along with a green knit top that he seemed to remember having last seen on his wife, although there hadn’t been a dirt smudge on it at the time. Like Jane, she wore no makeup. Her hair was longer than he’d ever seen it, and untidy, with threads of gray showing up that he hadn’t known were there.

He felt a flash of panic. She looked like an earth mother, not likehis mother.

Jane, in the meantime, had dropped the hoe and marched across the yard toward the steps. Her bare feet were tucked into dirty white Keds with slits in the sides and no shoelaces. As he watched, she silently took her place on the porch with the other women.

Annie remained in the middle with the shotgun still aimed at his gut, his mother stood on one side of her, Jane on the other. Despite the fact that none of them were exceptionally large, he felt as if he were staring at a trio of Amazons.

Annie had drawn her eyebrows on crooked that morning, giving her a decidedly malevolent look. “You want this girl back, Calvin, you’re gonna have to set yourself to a serious courtship.”

“He doesn’t want her back,” Jim snapped. “Look what she’s done.” He snatched the newspaper from Cal’s hand and shoved it toward the women.

Jane moved down onto the top step, took it from him, and bent her head to study the page.

Cal had never heard his father sound so bitter. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he snarled at Jane. “You set out to ruin his life, and you’ve done a damn good job of it.”

Jane had taken in the gist of the article, and her gaze flew up to meet Cal’s. He felt the impact in his chest and had to tear his eyes away. “Jane didn’t have anything to do with that newspaper story, Dad.”

“Her name’s on the damn by-line! When are you going to stop protecting her?”

“Jane’s capable of a lot of things, including being stubborn and unreasonable”—he shot her a hard-eyed look— “but she wouldn’t do that.”

He saw that she wasn’t surprised by the way he’d come to her defense, and that pleased him. At least she trusted him a little. He watched her clutch the tabloid to her chest as if she could hide its words from the world, and he made up his mind Jodie Pulanski would pay for the pain she was causing her.

His father continued to look thunderous, and he realized he was going to have to give him at least part of

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the truth. He’d never tell him what Jane had done—that was nobody’s business but his—but he could at least explain her behavior toward his family.

He took a protective step forward as his father closed in on her. “Are you getting regular prenatal care, or have you been too busy with your damn career to see a doctor?”

She met the old man square in the eye. “I’ve been seeing a doctor named Vogler.”

His father gave a begrudging nod. “She’s good. You just make sure you do what she tells you.”

Annie’s arm was starting to shake, and Cal could see the shotgun was getting too heavy for her. He caught his mother’s eye. She reached out and took it away. “If anybody’s going to shoot either one of them, Annie, I’ll do it.”

Great! His mother had turned crazy, too.

“If you don’t mind,” he said tightly, “I’d like to speak with my wife alone.”

“That’s up to her.” His mother looked at Jane, who shook her head. That really pissed him off.

“Anybody home?”

The female triumvirate turned in one body, and all of them began to smile like sunbeams as his backup quarterback came strolling around the corner of the house like he owned the place.

Just when he’d thought things couldn’t get worse…

Kevin took in the women on the porch, the two Bonner men standing below, and the shotgun. He arched his eyebrow at Cal, nodded at Jim, then moved up on the porch to join the women.

“You beautiful ladies told me I could stop by for some of that fried chicken, so I took you at your word.” He leaned against the post Cal had painted only a month earlier. “How’s the little guy doing today?” With a familiarity that indicated he’d done it before, he reached out and patted Jane’s belly.

Cal had him off the porch and flat on the ground within seconds.

The shotgun blast nearly knocked out his eardrums. Bits of dirt flew into his face and stung his bare arms. Between the noise and the fact that the dirt had temporarily blinded him, he didn’t have time to land his punch, and Kevin managed to roll out from beneath him.

“Damn, Bomber, you’ve done more damage to me this spring than happened all last season.”

Cal swabbed the dirt from his eyes and lurched to his feet. “Keep your hands off her.”

Kevin looked peeved and turned to Jane. “If he acted this way to you, it’s no wonder you left him.”

Cal gritted his teeth. “Jane, I’d like to talk to you. Now!”

His mother—his sweet, reasonable mother—stepped in front of her as if Jane were her kid instead of him! And his old man wasn’t helping any. He just stood there looking at his mom as if he didn’t understand anything.

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“What are your intentions toward Jane, Cal?”

“That’s between the two of us.”

“Not exactly. Jane has family now to look after her.”

“You’re damn right she does! I’m her family.”

“You didn’t want her, so right now Annie and I are her family. That means we’re the ones looking out for her best interests.”

He saw that Jane’s eyes were glued to his mother’s face, and he took in her stunned, happy expression. He remembered the cold sonovabitch who’d raised her, and in spite of everything—the shotgun, his mother’s desertion, even Kevin Tucker—he couldn’t help but feel glad that she’d finally found herself a decent parent. If only she hadn’t foundhis decent parent.

But his warmth cooled as his mother gave him the same I-mean-business look that, twenty years earlier, had meant turning over his car keys.

“Are you going to honor those wedding vows you made to Jane, or are you still planning to get rid of her after the baby’s born?”

“Stop making it sound like I’ve got a contract out on her!” He jabbed his thumb at Tucker. “And could we discuss this in private, without Bozo here listening in?”

“He stays,” Annie interjected. “I like him. And he cares about you, Calvin. Don’t you, Kevin?”

“I sure do, Mrs. Glide. I care a lot.” Tucker shot him a Jack Nicholson smirk, then turned to Lynn. “Besides, if he doesn’t want Jane, I do.”

Jane had the gall to smile.

But his mother had always been single-minded when she needed to be. “You can’t have it both ways, Cal. Either Jane’s your wife, or she’s not. What’s it going to be?”

He’d reached the end of his rope, and his temper snapped. “All right! No divorce. We’ll stay goddamned married!” He glared at the three women. “There! Are you finally satisfied? Now I want to talk to my wife!”

His mother flinched. Annie shook her head and clucked her tongue. Jane gave him a look of utter contempt and swept into the house, taking the tabloid newspaper with her.

The screen door slammed, and Kevin let out a low whistle. “Damn, Bomber, maybe instead of watching all those game films, you should have been reading a few books on female psychology.”

He knew he’d blown it, but he also knew he’d been pushed past the point of reason. They’d publicly humiliated him, making him look like a clown in front of his wife. With a furious glare at all of them, he spun on his heel and stalked away.

Lynn wanted to cry as she watched him disappear. Her heart went out to him, this stubborn oldest son

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who’d also been her play companion. He was furious with her, and she could only hope she was doing the right thing and that someday he would understand.

She expected Jim to rush after Cal. Instead, he walked the rest of the way to the porch, but he turned to Annie instead of her. Knowing his feelings about her mother, she waited for his customary display of belligerence, only to be surprised.

“Mrs. Glide, I’d like permission to take your daughter for a walk.”

She caught her breath. This was the first time Jim had come to the house since that night two weeks ago when she’d turned him down. In the days that followed, she’d known she’d done the right thing, but at night when her defenses were down, she’d wished it could have been different. Never had she expected him to swallow his pride enough to repeat his performance as the polite suitor.

Annie, however, didn’t seem to find anything odd about it. “You stay in sight of the house,” she warned him.

A muscle ticked in his jaw, but he gave her a stiff nod.

“All right, then.” Her mother’s bony knuckles dug into the small of her back. “You go on now, Amber Lynn; Jim asked you nice and proper. And you be polite, not snippy like you’ve been with me lately.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lynn moved down off the step, wanting to laugh even as she felt her eyes tear.

Jim’s hand curled around her own. He gazed down at her, and the warm golden flecks in his hazel eyes suddenly reminded her how tender he’d been through her three pregnancies. When she was at her fattest, he’d kissed her belly and told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. As her hand nestled like a small bird in his larger one, she thought how quick she was to forget the good and remember the bad.

He led her toward the path that curved into the woods. Despite her mother’s words, they were soon out of sight of the house.

“Pretty day,” he said. “A little warm for May.”

“Yes.”

“It’s quiet up here.”

It astonished her that he was still willing to address her as if they’d just met. She rushed to join him in this new place where neither had ever hurt the other. “It’s quiet, but I love it.”

“You ever get lonely?”

“There’s a lot to do.”

“What?”

He turned to gaze at her, and she was struck by the intensity in his expression. He wanted to know how she spent her day! He wanted to listen to her! With a sense of delight, she told him.

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“All of us get up early. I like to walk in the woods as soon as the sun’s up, and when I get back, my daughter-in-law—” She faltered, then glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “Her name is Jane.”

He frowned, but said nothing. They moved deeper into the woods where rhododendron and mountain laurel stretched on each side of the path, along with clusters of violets, trillium, and a burgundy carpet of galax. A pair of dogwood celebrated with a splash of white blossoms their escape from the fungus that had destroyed so many of the species in the Carolina mountains. Lynn inhaled the rich, moist scent of earth that smelled new.

“Jane has breakfast ready when I’m done walking,” she went on. “My mother wants bacon and eggs, but Jane fixes whole grain pancakes or oatmeal with a little fresh fruit, so Annie is generally trying to pick a fight with her as I’m coming into the kitchen. Jane’s wily, though, and she does a better job of getting her way with Annie than anyone else in my family. When breakfast is over, I listen to music and clean up the kitchen.”

“What kind of music?”

He knew exactly what kind. Over the years he’d switched their various car radios from her classical stations to his country and western hundreds of times. “I love Mozart and Vivaldi, Chopin, Rachmaninoff. My daughter-in-law likes classic rock. Sometimes we dance.”

“You and… Jane?”

“She’s developed a passion for Rod Stewart.” Lynn laughed. “If he comes on the radio, she makes me stop whatever I’m doing and dance with her. She’s like that with some of the newer groups, too—ones you’ve never even heard of. Sometimes she has to dance. I don’t think she did much of it when she was growing up.”

“But she— I heard she’s a scientist,” he said cautiously.

“She is. But mostly now she says she just wants to grow her baby.”

Time ticked by as he took that in. “She sounds like an unusual person.”

“She’s wonderful.” And then, impulsively, “Would you like to come back for supper tonight so you can get to know her better?”

“Are you inviting me?” His face registered both surprise and pleasure.

“Yes. Yes, I think I am.”

“All right, then. I’d like that.”

They walked for a while without speaking. The path narrowed, and she moved off it, leading him toward the creek. They’d come here dozens of times when they were kids and sat side by side on an old log that had long since rotted away. Sometimes they’d simply watched the water rush over the mossy rocks, but most of the time, they’d made out. Cal had been conceived not far from here.

He cleared his throat and lowered himself onto the trunk of a yellow buckeye that had fallen along the edge of the creek bed in some forgotten storm. “You were pretty tough on my son back there.”

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“I know.” She sat next to him, but not quite touching. “I have a grandchild to protect.”

“I see.”

But she could tell he didn’t see at all. Just weeks ago, his uncertainty might have made him snap at her, but now he seemed more contemplative than irritated. Was he beginning to trust her?

“Do you remember that I told you my marriage was breaking up?”

She felt herself tensing. “I remember.”

“It’s my fault. I just want you to know that if you’re thinking about… seeing me.”

“All your fault?”

“Ninety-nine percent. I blamed her for my own shortcomings and didn’t even realize it.” He braced his forearms on his knees and gazed at the rushing water. “For years I let myself believe I’d have become a world-famous epidemiologist if I hadn’t been forced to marry so young, but it wasn’t until after she left me that I figured out I was kidding myself.” He clasped his hands together, those strong, healing hands that had served as the gateway for both birth and death in this county. “I would never have been happy away from these mountains. I like being a country doctor.”

She was touched by the depth of emotion she heard in his voice and thought he might finally have rediscovered a part of himself that he’d lost. “What about her one percent?”

“What?” He turned his head.

“You said you were 99 percent to blame. What about her one percent?”

“Even that wasn’t really her fault.” She didn’t know if it were a trick of the light or a reflection from the water, but his eyes seemed full of compassion. “She didn’t have many advantages when she was growing up, and she never had much formal education. She says I always looked down on her because of it, and she’s probably right—she is about most things—but I think now she might have made it easy for me to look down on her because, even though she’s accomplished more than most people could in two lifetimes, she’s never thought much of herself.”

Her mouth snapped open, but then she shut it. How could she refute what was so patently true?

For a moment she let herself contemplate how far she had come in her life. She saw all the hard work and self-discipline that had been necessary for her to become the woman she’d wanted to be. As if from a distance, she viewed who she was and found she liked what she saw. Why had it taken her so long to accept herself? Jim was right. How could she have expected him to respect her when she didn’t? In her mind that accounted for more than one percent of the blame, and she told Jim so.

He shrugged. “I guess I don’t much care what the number is.” He picked up her hand, which rested on her thigh, and ran his thumb along the ragged edge of one of her fingernails, then up over the ridge of her wedding band. He didn’t look at her, and his voice held a soft, gravelly note that was filled with emotion. “My wife is so much a part of me, she’s like the breath coming into my body. I love her very much.”

His simple, emotion-filled statement shook her, and her words snagged in her throat. “She’s very lucky.”

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He lifted his head and gazed at her. She recognized the moisture gathering in the corners of his eyes as tears. In thirty-seven years, she had never once seen her husband cry, not even the day they’d buried Cherry and Jamie.

“Jim…” She slipped into his arms and found that old familiar place that God had created just for her out of Jim’s bone and muscle and flesh. Feelings she couldn’t express choked her, making her brain fuzzy, so that the next words she spoke weren’t what she’d intended at all. “You should know I don’t sleep with men on the first date.”

“Is that so?” His voice was husky.

“It’s because I started having sex when I was too young.” She drew away from him, looked down into her lap. “I didn’t want to, but I loved him so much that I didn’t know how to say no.”

She glanced up to see how he’d taken her statement. She didn’t want to throw more guilt in his face; she merely needed him to understand how it had been.

His smile held a hint of sadness, and he brushed the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “Did it turn you against sex for life?”

“Oh, no. I was blessed with a wonderful lover. Maybe a little clumsy when he got started, but it didn’t take him long to get it right.” She smiled.

“I’m glad to hear that.” His thumb trailed over her bottom lip. “You should know right now that I don’t have a lot of sexual experience. I’ve only been with one woman.”

“That’s nice.”

He pushed her hair back from her face on one side with his fingers. “Did anybody ever tell you you’re beautiful? A lot messier than my wife but still a traffic-stopper.”

She laughed. “I couldn’t stop traffic if I had a red light in the middle of my forehead.”

“That just goes to show what you know.” He took her hand and drew her to her feet. As his head dipped, she realized he was going to kiss her.

The brush of his lips was gentle and familiar. He kept his body away from hers so only their mouths touched, along with their hands, which were linked at their sides. Their kiss quickly lost its gentleness and grew urgent with passion. It had been so long for them, and there was so much they needed to express that lay beyond words. But she loved his courtship and wanted more time.

He drew back as if he understood and regarded her with glazed eyes. “I—I have to get back to my office. I’m already going to be late for my afternoon appointments. And when we make love, I don’t want to be rushed.”

She felt heavy-limbed and wobbly with anticipation. She tucked her hand in his as they moved back to the path.

“When you come over for dinner, maybe we’ll have some time to talk, and you can tell me about your work.”

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A smile of pure pleasure lit his face. “I’d like that.”

She realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked him anything beyond a cursory, “How was your day?” This business of listening to each other was going to have to go both ways.

His smile faded, and his forehead creased. “I don’t suppose I could bring my son along when I come to dinner?”

She hesitated for only a moment before she shook her head. “I’m sorry. My mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“Aren’t you a little old to be taking orders from your mother?”

“Sometimes she has a feeling about how things should go. Right now, she has feelings about who should come to the house and who shouldn’t.”

“And my son isn’t welcome?”

She regarded him unhappily. “I’m afraid not. I hope… soon. It’s really in his hands, not Annie’s.”

His jaw set in its familiar stubborn line. “It’s hard to believe you’re letting an old woman who’s half-crazy make decisions about something so important.”

She drew him to a stop and pressed a kiss to the corner of that stubborn jaw. “Maybe she’s not as crazy as you think. After all, she was the one who told me I had to take this walk with you.”

“You wouldn’t have done it otherwise?”

“I don’t know. I have a lot at stake in my life right now, and I don’t want to make a mistake. Sometimes mothers know what’s best for their daughters.” She regarded him levelly. “And their sons.”

He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped in resignation. “All right. I guess I know when I’m in over my head.”

She smiled and had to restrain herself from kissing him again. “We eat early. Six o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”